Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (14 page)

            When
he awoke, the Old Soldier had disappeared. Sitting on the floor next to his
coffin was another bag like the one from the night before. There was a ragged
hole in the side of the bag and when he looked inside, all he saw was the
intricately folded bottom of the wrinkled paper sack.

            There
had definitely been rats here. He could see droppings and rat sized disturbances
in the shabby carpet of the apartment. He could still hear the scrabbling of
the rats somewhere in the apartment, the sound of their little rat claws
searching for purchase on the linoleum of the little walk in kitchen.

            He
grabbed a piece of wood left over from the coffin building fiasco, a piece that
was about as wide as the space between the oven side of the kitchen and the
side with the sink and the cupboards. As he laid the piece of wood on the
floor, making it as wide as possible, three rats scurried out of the crack
between the refrigerator and the counter and onto the linoleum. He slowly
pushed it towards the wall of his apartment trapping the rats between his piece
of wood and the wall. He scooped the rats into the sink with his hand, tossing
them by their tails. He decided to let the rat mess go for the time being as he
was starving. He tossed the rats in the fridge.

            He
followed what was fast becoming his dinner time ritual. One by one,  he washed
the rats and cut their throats, slurping their blood from the precise cuts like
they were little more than juiceboxes, and he nothing more than a thirsty
elementary school kid come home from running outside all afternoon. He drank
and drank until he felt almost sick. Apparently, three rat-flavored juiceboxes
was his limit.

            He
sat back to look at the mess that the rats had made. He had no idea how long
the rats had been loose, but they had managed to make quite a mess of the
place. He grabbed a sponge and a washrag from underneath the sink and began
cleaning their mess. He scooped up their turd nuggets and deposited them in the
garbage can underneath the sink along with the remains of the desiccated rats.

            As
he scrubbed the stains from the carpet and the linoleum in the kitchen he
wondered about the Old Soldier. Where had he gone? He figured he should be here
by now; it was night after all.

            He
imagined the Old Soldier cutting through the night streets, not unlike a rat,
hunkered over with pilfered goods in his arms. Maybe he was finding some better
wood with which they could fix up his pitiful attempt at a coffin. Maybe he
needed another bottle of whiskey, and he was casing the liquor stores right now
looking for some way to slip a bottle into his oversized military jacket. Maybe
he was jerking off on the corner for money. Who knew?

            He
put the Old Soldier out of his mind and began to think about the path that lay
ahead of him. There was so much to do and so much time to do it in. For the
meantime he just wanted to get his coffin in order so that, if for some reason,
sunlight poured into his apartment, he wouldn't be cooked to a crisp. The
vampire books the Old Soldier had stolen disagreed on a substantial amount of
vampire lore, but the one thing that they all had in common was that if a
vampire got caught in the sun, they were dead. Some said that the vampire would
burst into flames and burn to death. Others claimed that a sun-caught vampire
would simply turn to ash and blow away on the wind. It all amounted to the same
thing: death.

            But
wasn’t that what he wanted?

            Just
as he was about to embark on his current line of thought, the Old Soldier burst
into the apartment carrying a couple more bags of goodies. He seemed to be
giddy with his latest haul.

            “Where
have you been,” he asked the Old Soldier.

            “I’ve
been out getting stuff… stuff we’re going to need.” The Old Soldier emptied his
bags onto the top of the closed coffin. The crash of heavy metal objects on
wood was startling in the silent apartment.

            The
Old Soldier went through his spiel like a used car salesman, holding up objects
and describing their usefulness and how he had obtained each item. There was,
of course, a bottle of grape flavored Mad Dog 20/20 that the old man had nicked
from the Plaid Pantry up the street, scraps of wood and a tube of caulk taken
from a construction site, and metal hinges, screws, a hand powered drill and a
red-handled screwdriver taken from a hardware store.

The prize of
the bunch, however, was a bowie knife that the old man had slipped into his
pocket while he was in an army surplus store. This was not your typical
Rambo-style knife. This knife had been made to kill people, not survive in the
jungle. The blade appeared to be razor sharp and the handle had a brass knuckle
shaped guard that could be used to protect your fingers or to bash open
someone’s face. The Old Soldier giggled and turned the knife in his hands as if
he were David Bowie in Labyrinth, playing with a crystal ball.

He told the
Old Soldier about the coffin’s flaws, and together they decided that the first
order of business was to vampire-proof the coffin. There was no point in even
having a coffin if even a pinprick of sunlight could get through.

They took
turns resting in the coffin and turning the lights off so that their eyes could
get adjusted to complete darkness. He could hear his own ragged breaths inside
the box and the thirsty gulps of the Old Soldier as he made his way through the
bottle of cheap wine. When the lights came on outside of the coffin, he clearly
identified four or five places where light was entering the coffin.

They used the
caulk to patch up the holes in the coffin’s defense and because they didn’t
have a caulk gun, they had to cut open the tube of caulk and spread it around
with their fingers. The bitter smell of the caulk and the turpentine-like aroma
of the wine combined to create a pleasant aroma in the moist heat of the
apartment. With caulk covering their fingers, they were like two bakers
frosting a large but inedible cake. He supposed that when he was inside the
coffin, he would feel like a stripper ready to burst out on her cue.

They spread
and covered, stood back and admired their work. Then one of them would get
inside of the box while the other turned off the lights. Then they started the
process all over again. When they were done, they took the hand drill and made
holes for the hinges so that the lid of the coffin wasn’t just resting on top
of the box. They worked in almost silence, as if they were building a cathedral
or digging a grave. The lid fit perfectly and opened and closed without any
noise.

When they were
finished, they both sat on the floor and let the heat of the apartment wash
over their sweating faces. The Old Soldier drank from his bottle as he smoked.
He reached the spittle-filled contents at the bottom of the bottle and he
retched for just a second before killing it and taking another drag off of one
of his beauties.

He leaned his
head back against the wall as the Old Soldier across from him began to speak.

“Do you think
we got them all?”

He took a big
drag of the musty air before he replied, “Yeah, we got ‘em.”

“That’s good.”
He took another puff, “Then today you can test it out, see if the coffin really
works.”

“What do you
mean, ‘test it out?’ You’re crazy.”

“If it doesn’t
work, you’ll know it. I’ll be here, so don’t worry. If you start to feel
anything, just start bangin’ and hollerin’ and I’ll close the blind.”

“You make it
sound so simple; like I’m just dipping my toes into a swimming pool to see how
cold it is.”

The Old
Soldier looked him in the eyes and in an uncharacteristically mirthless voice
said, “You sure whine an awful lot for a person that wanted to kill themselves
just a couple of nights ago.”

He didn’t have
an argument that could compete with the Old Soldier’s logic so he just let it
be. With the few dull kitchen knives that he had, they started carving the
scraps of wood into stakes. This was also one of the few things that all of the
vampire books had agreed on: if you wanted to kill a vampire at night, you had
to drive a wooden stake through their heart. One of the books said that silver
would work too, but they didn’t figure that it was worth a chance, plus neither
of them was a blacksmith and stealing silver was a lot harder than procuring
wood from a construction sight.

They carved
out wooden stakes, which was a lot harder than it had seemed in the movies. It
turns out that dry, construction quality wood is not the type of wood that
makes a good stake, plus when they were finished they were kind of hard to grip
because of the fact that the handles were square.

As the night
began to lighten through the protective film of the window shade, he made
preparations to spend the day in his coffin. They put the knives away and
stacked their pitiful pile of wooden stakes in the corner. He arranged his
blanket so that it provided the most protection from the wooden splinters of
the plywood. The old man’s face disappeared with a final assurance that nothing
would happen as he closed the lid.

He felt like
he was forgetting something. It didn’t dawn on him until much later in the day.
He heard the rattling of the window shade being raised and a quick inspection
assured him that his stifling coffin was indeed light free. He closed his eyes
and went to sleep.

            He
awoke some time in the middle of the day. He had an urge. An urge to lift the
coffin lid and see exactly what would happen if he let the sunlight hit him. He
wondered if it had to be direct sunlight, in order to harm him. He wondered if
the reflected sunlight from the building across the way would be enough to
start him on fire or turn him to ash or make him transform into a swarm of
butterflies.

            He
stared into the darkness almost daring himself to open the lid. All he had to
do was open the lid and it would all be over. His hand reached up caressing the
splintery feel of the coffin lid. The snores of the old man could be heard
through the thin plywood walls of his coffin.

            Then
he felt a different urge. For the first time in a long time, he had to go the
bathroom. He clenched his buttcheeks together to prevent his brown bounty from
escaping.

            He
wondered what time it was. How long did he have until the sun went down? How
long did he have to hold his action until he could release it? The urge went
away and the turtle’s head retreated long enough for him to fall back asleep.
He didn’t hear the shuffling movements of the Old Soldier as he gathered his
things and left the apartment. Sometime during the night he had run out of his
beauties and despite his promise to the man inside of the coffin, he set out to
find a drum of cheap tobacco to slip inside of his coat.

            He
awoke again, half an hour later, even though he didn’t know exactly how long it
had been. The air in his coffin reeked. He must have been passing gas in his
sleep, a problem he had had since he had been a young boy. He had cut a loud
fart in Ms. Moore’s math class one time in middle school and been ridiculed for
most of what was left of that school year, about five months. Everywhere he
walked students made fart noises at him. He couldn’t bend over without someone
in class making machine gun like fart sounds at him, which would cause the rest
of the class to burst into raucous and rude laughter. He remembered the faces
that girls would make as they pointed or wrinkled their noses in disgust. Since
that time he had always held in his gaseous action in an attempt to save his
own insecurities from further attacks by whoever might be in his presence when
he let one slip.

            It
didn’t matter who was around, he just had a problem cutting loose with one of
life’s basic functions. He knew that everyone had gas at one time or another,
but that didn’t matter; they weren’t the one’s that had been made fun of.

He remembered
how his wife, after they had known each other for a sufficient length of time,
had become comfortable enough to pass gas in front of him. She would let one
rip and laugh. He would laugh too, because, yes, it was funny, even if it
smelled like rot and the sounds were sickeningly ass-rattling. No matter how
many times she did it, he was never able to overcome his embarrassment and join
in the fun.

            Consequently,
whenever he was around people, he held it all in. Occasionally, he would sneak
into a bathroom and sit on the toilet and let it all out, like some twisted
ass-musician playing the butt tuba, but most of the time he held it in until
his stomach and intestines filled with the offending gas and started rumbling.
After a while, the rumble of shifting gas in his intestines would end up being
as loud as farts, but thankfully, most people could tell the difference between
an ass eruption and intestinal rumblings.

            He
listened for any noise from the Old Soldier. He didn’t think that any smell
that he let loose in the coffin would reach the Old Soldier, but he just
couldn’t stand the thought of the dirty old veteran laughing and making fart
noises at him. It made no difference that he was a crusty old drunk with a
penchant for pilfering; it would still be embarrassing to him, so he listened.
He didn’t hear any noise, no snoring, no shifting, and no deep breathing.

            The
gas in his stomach had been building ever since he had woken up. He decided it
might be ok to let one go. It already reeked like ass in the coffin. One more
blast wouldn’t make that much of a difference. Besides, it was his own brand.
There was nothing like being trapped in a coffin to help you get over your
phobias. At least he wasn’t claustrophobic.