Dead Clown Barbecue (21 page)

Everybody in the station came running back to see what had happened. "The vampire broke loose!" I shouted. I figured that Officers Barton and Pack would make some sort of sarcastic comment about how they already knew that, so I was pleasantly surprised when they didn't.

The vampire kept growing. He looked kind of freaked out by the whole experience, which I guess is only natural. It's easy to get into a mindset where you believe that creatures like vampires are used to pretty much any kind of bizarre phenomena, but suddenly growing to an unnatural height is going to be disturbing to anybody, undead or not.

When he reached fifty feet, I started to worry that he might
never
stop growing, and that he might weigh the earth down and knock it out of its orbit. I'm told that I have a tendency to see the more cynical side of many issues. But after growing another fifteen or so feet, the process stopped, and the vampire just stood there, being big.

We stared up at him, hoping that he didn't hold any grudges over the incarceration.

The vampire smiled (sort of a "heh heh I'm a great big vampire and you're a tiny little human" grin) and smashed his foot right through the top of the police station. I wasn't expecting that, because he'd grown right out of his shoes, and even if you're sixty-five feet tall, you don't necessarily want to slam your heel into a building without proper footwear. But it didn't seem to hurt him at all. When he raised his foot again, rookie Officer McGroom was stuck to the bottom.

Grisly stuff. Not why I got into the law enforcement business, I'll tell you that.

My immediate concern was that the vampire might try to stomp those of us who were responsible for him being locked up. And that's pretty much what happened. He slammed his foot down on Officer Barton, and though he only got him with his pinky toe, that pinky toe was substantial enough to crush my co-worker in a really nasty manner. I suppose I should've been happy about the situation, considering how Officer Barton treated me, but witnessing a gruesome death is never a pleasant experience, no matter how rude the victim.

Officer Pack, who I'll admit was being a bit more forward thinking than me at that particular moment, unholstered her revolver and fired several shots at the vampire. The vampire let out a great big hiss that sounded like a tornado, then stomped on her as well. Her body squeezed between his third and fourth toes, and believe me, it was a messy, sloppy sight.

I ran.

Nope, I'm not ashamed of it. You might not have done the same thing in my situation, but you'd be a sticky smear on the bottom of a vampire's foot if you hadn't, and that's no way to be. I may have even screamed while I ran; I don't remember for sure. I just know that by the time that vampire got done smashing the police station into soot, I was one of the few people in that area who wasn't dead.

"What are you doing?" a gothy-looking guy shouted at the vampire. I figured this was Lucian. "Why must you engage in such violent — ?"

Oops. No more Lucian.

I don't mean to take a casual attitude toward Lucian's demise, but if you'd been there, you'd probably see the humor. It's kind of hard to explain unless you actually saw it happen, but the timing was perfect, and Lucian's expression right before impact was priceless. Yeah, I wish he'd lived — after all, he was the kind of person who'd bail a friend out of jail — but I'd be an unreliable narrator if I tried to pretend that his death didn't have amusement value.

And I also realize that I'd said not too long ago in this narrative that witnessing a gruesome death is never a pleasant experience, but . . . trust me, you just had to be there.

I'm not sure when "destruction" officially becomes a "rampage," but when that vampire started kicking down the buildings next to the police station I decided that we had a good old fashioned rampage on our hands. He started smashing roofs, knocking down telephone poles, flinging new and used cars into the air — everything you can think of. I went the other way.

It wasn't long before news of the vampire's hijinks spread all over town. The now-defunct police station wasn't too far from City Hall, so that's where I went, figuring I could share important information, having been there from the beginning, and also that any evacuation plan would start with the bureaucrats.

I probably should've fibbed about the reason for the vampire's rapid growth, because they got off on a big tangent about whose fault it was, and all that stuff I alluded to when I started telling this tale. The thing is, whether it was nuclear radiation or a mad scientist or magic monkeys, the fact didn't change that we had a giant vampire on the loose, so why not focus on the problem?

Some gentleman in a suit and tie mentioned the obvious: A vampire perishes in sunlight, and there was no way this one could fashion a large enough coffin in time. So, technically, if we were all willing to just hang out and wait patiently until sunrise, our problem would be solved. Which sounded all right, except that we had a good six hours until the sun came up, and he'd most likely have stomped on the entire city by then. The gentleman in the suit and tie conceded that point, but asked everybody to keep it in mind as a back-up plan. The mayor blurted out that it wasn't an actual plan, it was just waiting for mother nature to take its course, and the gentleman in the suit and tie agreed with him but insisted that, if it did come down to the vampire being naturally dissolved by sunlight, he should get credit for the scheme. They finally moved on.

"How do you kill a vampire?" asked the mayor. "Let's all throw out some ideas."

"Sunlight," said the gentleman in the suit and tie, who was then escorted out of the room.

"Running water," said another man.

"What?"

"I heard something about running water."

The woman next to him nodded. "I seem to recall something like that, too."

"I've never heard anything about running water killing vampires," said the mayor. "Are you sure you aren't thinking of holy water?"

"No, I'm pretty sure I remember something about running water," said the man.

"Actually, now that you mention it, I may be thinking about running holy water," the woman admitted.

The mayor sighed. "Holy water kills them whether it's running or not! You people are wasting time!"

"Can we get a priest to bless a fire hose?" asked somebody else.

The major gave a "
What kind of dumb, pathetic, incompetent mouth-breathers do I have working for me
?" look, then seemed to reconsider. "That's not a bad idea. Look into it."

"Yes, sir."

"How else can vampires die?"

I raised my hand. "Wooden stake to the heart."

"Well, of course, that's the traditional method, but how would we get a stake that big?"

"Curly's Cigars has that big wooden Indian out front. I'm sure he'd let us file down the top to give it a pointy tip."

"You're right! He would! Curly loves innovative marketing! But . . . but . . . but having the stake isn't enough. We'd need a way to drive it into his heart."

"We could dangle it from a rope from a helicopter, and fly the stake right into him."

"That could work!" said the mayor. "It probably won't, but it could! Make it happen while we continue brainstorming."

It's not my intention to get bogged down with details here, so I'm not going to spend much time on the whole military intervention part of the story. The military and the National Guard did come in to help us out, but there were some communication issues, and I think pretty much everybody involved who survived (which wasn't many) will have negative memories of the experience.

Anyway, Curly's Cigars was in the same general vicinity and hadn't been flattened yet, so I hurried over there with an older man whose name escapes me, and we explained to Curly what we needed. I offered to dangle a sign with his store's address from the makeshift giant stake, and he said no, the lives he saved would be advertising enough.

Transforming a wooden cigar store Indian into a deadly stake is a lot more difficult than it seems. We got a couple of hacksaws and went to work, but I kept hearing crashes of buildings being destroyed and screams of populace being squashed and couldn't help but think this was all taking way too long. Still, a job's not worth doing if you don't do it right, and we managed to get that Indian's head to a point sharp enough to pop right through a vampire's chest.

The older man whose name escapes me asked if we couldn't have just taken a strip of broken wood from one of the destroyed homes and used that instead of taking the time to file the head of a wooden Indian. I asked him why he hadn't made that suggestion earlier. He said he wasn't sure. I said, okay, that was understandable, but I didn't really mean it.

Getting a helicopter was a pain, and hooking our giant stake to the helicopter was even more of a pain. We finally did, though. I rode along as we flew toward the monstrosity, stake hovering beneath us. The vampire was busy ripping the clock off the Main Street clock tower, but it turned to look at us as we flew right at it at top speed.

"Die, you blood-sucking fiend!" I shouted, even though I knew the vampire couldn't hear me over the roar of the engine or whirr of the helicopter blades or the wind.

The pilot looked frantic. "This isn't gonna work! This isn't gonna work!"

It occurred to me that he was right. This was a ridiculous plan. That vampire would knock us right out of the air and use our stake to pick his fangs.

So we turned around, landed safely, and apologized to Curly for ruining his wooden Indian for no good reason.

A huge blast of water hit the vampire. They were drenching him with the fire hose! I let out a great big whoop of joy, ready for that vampire's skin to start burning and flaking off and floating to the ground like ashes.

"Die, you blood-sucking fiend!" I shouted.

But it wasn't doing anything. "The holy-to-water ratio isn't high enough!" the mayor shouted. "Get more priests!"

The mayor didn't last long after that. His death wasn't nearly as funny as Lucian's.

Upon some reflection, I started to think that maybe my "stake dangling from the helicopter" plan wasn't so bad after all, but I felt kind of sheepish about bringing it up again, and decided not to.

"Has anybody tried to reason with it?" some lady asked.

Those of us hiding behind a Dumpster admitted that, no, to the best of our knowledge, nobody had.

"Does anybody know his name?" She looked at me. "Aren't you the guy who locked him up?"

I nodded. "Yeah, but I don't remember his name."

"Well, maybe that's the whole problem!"

"Could be."

So we all started shouting at the vampire, asking personal questions to show that we cared about him, and offering a sympathetic ear if he wanted to discuss his troubles. Didn't do any good, though. I don't think he even heard us.

The vampire's rampage went long into the night. By the end, I don't think there were more than three or four structures that hadn't been demolished. (It's not that I don't know the difference between "three" and "four," it's that I'm not sure whether the damage to Sammy's Toy Emporium counts as demolished or not, since two of the walls were still standing.)

Then the sun began to rise. The vampire gasped and looked around, most likely seeking an oversized coffin. But there wasn't one, of course, and as soon as those rays of sunlight hit him, the vampire's skin started turning all black and crumbly. He started running, as if to outrun the sun, but any respectable scientist will tell you that you can't outrun the sun, and within a couple of minutes that vampire was just a big pile of bones. And then those bones were just a big pile of ashes.

"Who's gonna clean up those ashes?" somebody asked. I think they meant it ironically, considering how much destruction there was to clean up. And so those of us remaining were saved.

Here's the twist ending.

You see, I didn't lock that vampire up in his cell right away. I told him that immortality sounded pretty good to me, even with the downside of having to drink blood and fear daylight, so I asked him to bite me on the neck. And he did.

Yep, I was a vampire the whole time. Remember when we were discussing ways to kill vampires? They could've used those very same methods to kill me, although I don't think the running water one was accurate. I guess it makes me kind of a hypocrite to have tried to dispatch the vampire when I was one myself, but that's just something I'll have to learn to live with.

Anyway, when the sunlight got him, I was peeking through a little slit in the closed lid of the Dumpster, glad that I wasn't the specific vampire being fried in the light.

And when darkness falls once again, I'm going to walk right up to that nuclear power plant (which he didn't step on, probably figuring that it would burn his toes) and turn myself into an even bigger vampire. Because that rampage looked
fun
.

Okay, it's just occurred to me that the flaw in my plan is that if anybody opens the lid to this Dumpster before nighttime, I'm dead. Hmmmm. That could be problematic. Of course, with all the destruction around, what are the odds that somebody will open a Dumpster?

I hope nobody has to throw anything away.

Anyway, I'm going to go to sleep now, little Dumpster rat, but gnaw on my hand if you hear anybody coming.

SPECIMEN 313

Max, whose real name was Specimen 278, tried to be happy as he digested the arm. It had been a delicious meal for sure (he didn't get to eat humans very often, so it was always a special treat) but he felt somehow unsatisfied. Not
hungry
, necessarily, just sort of . . . unfulfilled.

He shifted in his dirt a bit. Almost watering time. Maybe that was the problem — his soil was too dry, and it was keeping him from enjoying his dinner.

Could be.

Probably not.

He'd actually felt this way for the past couple of days. Kind of bored. Kind of sad. There were plenty of things going on in the greenhouse laboratory for him to watch, including a minor rampage by Specimen 201 that ended with the unfortunate plant being clipped to shreds with a pair of garden shears, but none of them captured his interest the way they had in the past.