If a Twilight fanfic can get a movie, a Near Dark fanfic should get me a small third-world country (Patreon)

Wanna hear a joke? Severen used to be a cop. He wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover or anything. The town he lived in was small, three hundred people pinched into houses they couldn’t afford, camps they couldn’t live in. People drank to forget that and sometimes you needed a steady hand with a club to remind them that, everyone else aside, there was such a thing as law and order. Severen was a brawler and the son of a brawler. He took the job because it was a decent wage and his mother begged him to. She knew his love for roughhousing, knew what’d been passed over when he was a child would be held tight to the man, and thought Sheriff Hopper would be able to make a good’un out of his tendencies. His name wasn’t Van Sickle then either. His grandfather had rid himself of such an obviously foreign name at Ellis Island. He only told his wife after they were married, that that was her true, new name. When Severen was seven years old, his grandfather woke him in the night and told him the story. After that, he felt a frayed knot over his eyebrow whenever someone called him Smith, which they did. Severen was beyond the vocabulary of most in Millerville. (When he met Jesse Hooker, he’d introduce himself, S.V.S., but that was a long time to come.) We can skip over the days when he was awake, the nights when he slept. Severen does, thinking back. All he remembers—like it was going to school, losing his virginity, and ending his childhood all at once, is the Girl. It’s been a while. He can’t remember her name anymore. To him, she’s who she’s always been. The Girl. But her name was Evangeline. It was the time of year when the sun stuck to you, leaving you with an angry sweat that lasted halfway through the night, made you wake up damp, made you dry yourself off with a towel. The sun was just coming down, light raw gold, shadows pulled at like fraying threads. He mistook her for a shadow at first, in her black widow’s wear, her veil. She was walking down the planks of the sidewalk, not making a sound not matter how old and warped they were. It was a quiet sorta night. People had bad vapors, stayed home like the Spanish Lady Flu was going around again. The general store and the barber’s stayed open, but no one was walking in. Severen didn’t even know why he was out, letting his badge glint for the dying sun. He just got antsy sometimes. He followed the lady without quite meaning to, without not wanting to. The boards creaked under his feet. A steady reminder of how intrusive his presence was. The sunlight peeled off him in strips. He still felt far too warm. The wind had died. “Are you going to stop me from robbing the bank?” she asked. Her accent was from no part of the Union he could say, and he’d seen quite a few pass by, gone as far as Lexington joyriding in a friend’s Ford V-8. Severen burst out laughing. He had an easy laugh. So easy, people often were a bit intimidated by it. He tended to find things funnier that other people didn’t. “Lady, I’d like to see you try. We haven’t had a bank robbery in sixty years.” Evangeline smiled back at him, as if she’d told a joke. Which she had, as far as he was concerned. “Fifty-nine and a day,” she corrected him. She turned to leave. Left. He wondered if he should follow. He used to wonder about things like that, back in those days. While he was wondering, he watched her go into the bank. It was being closed up, this time of night, but no one looked too hard at a widow coming in just inside operating hours. One of the tellers, offering a ready, if slightly forced smile, put a pin in his bookkeeping and went to the window, where he was greeted by a .38 that just fit within the woman’s clutch. On her smile, he started building a little monument of stacked cash outside his window. The gun swayed and bobbed like Evangeline was conducting a sympathy with it. It ran over to the guards every so often, like she was checking the lock on their cage. Severen watched through the window. His hand clutched his baton. With the cash collected, she shuffled it into a canvas bag, shaking it a few times to get the thing settled, then turned on the rest of the bank. She shot the guards, the menfolk, turning and pivoting at the hip like she was dealing cards, hitting an arm, a leg, a stomach, but always hitting. Like cards, you never knew what you were getting. Then she simply dropped the gun and wandered outside. Not walked. Wandered. Out with Severen, it was crisp and cold, the razor of the setting sun in its sheath, like the darkness had fed on the noise of the gunshots and grown fat. She came right up to him; opened the canvas bag to him like she was flashing her thigh. “You didn’t stop me,” she said. Shook her head and her veil came off. She was beautiful, but there’d come a day in not so long when he doesn’t remember her face. “Hey, it’s not my money.” “Do you want me to come with you or do you want to come with me?” “Lady,” he shook his head, “what is the difference?” He didn’t and wouldn’t have words for why he walked after her on a pleasant stroll through the darkened streets, the hustle and bustle sweeping around them, Severen hiding his badge to keep from being bothered by anyone. There was a knotted feeling that hit his brow sometimes, when he hadn’t taken a punch in a while, when he was wholly sober, when his wallet was empty. It had never felt further away. She took him to a Ford Model 48—in green—and he tried to get into the driver’s seat. She shoved him over, stronger than she looked. They drove out of town, the road carrying them to a cabin with smoke in the chimney and light in the windows. The Model 48 pulled to a stop and together, they came upon a dog-fighting ring. The dogs looked almost as bad as the five men around it. Evangeline dropped her bag. “Pick one,” she told Severen. He went with the terrier. “You’re not even going to count the money?” “Why? Do you count the blood in your veins?” Severen didn’t much watch the fight. Evangeline settled in behind him, her arms around his chest, chin on his shoulder. The dogs just fought; the men bayed. She tightened her grip on his ribs as the noise got louder. Until he pried at her hands. Until his bones cracked. “Le’ go, wouijda?” he wheezed, and she pinwheeled off him with a smile. He turned around, coughing blood, fists like boulders that rolled down from his chest, gathered big speed at his wrists. “Come on,” she said. He punched her. Her head canted back, but she didn’t otherwise move. Her eyes came back down, a level-wild gaze. “Again.” He swiped her face from side to side with big punches that could lay out horses, but she might as well have just been shaking her head no. The other fellas noticed. Took objection to it, maybe because he’d started before they’d placed their bets. One grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around—a Mexican, he broke the guy’s jaw with a quick jab. Relieved to see his fists were working right. Two more came. Other two laughed. He lunged in on the first pair, getting his mitts around one’s throat, the other jabbing him in his ribs, trying to make him let go. He held on like he had a rat in his jaws, even as the blood bubbled up his throat like bile, gummed up his teeth. Then Evangeline was there. She didn’t strike. She ran her fingertips over the jawline of the man punching Severen, the soft touch surprising him more than a punch ever could. He turned, confused, and died that way. Evangeline sunk her teeth into his neck hard enough to sever his spine inside his flesh. His head lolled back, vacant, as she drank him dry. Severen watched. The guy he was choking slipped out of his fingers—unconscious—and he stared. Stared at her true hunger, everything else just a pale reflection of it. Her drinking a man so much more than knocking him down, putting a gun to his head. She wasn’t just snuffing out his light, she was swiping it and adding it to her own. He coulda sworn she glowed. The two who had laughed weren’t laughing anymore. They stepped in, trying to stop her now that it was way too late. One Evangeline shoved aside, and he hauled through the air like he was being dragged away by a rope, the gritty ground breaking his fall, long from her hand. The other Severen stopped. He wanted to see more; he grabbed the man before he could get to Evangeline, whipped him around and threw him into the dog pit. The dogs had been at each other hard—they were happy for some variety. Severen felt himself grin, her just drinking and drinking and drinking until there was nothing left. She’d wiped him away. Shot him out of this life like a bullet from a gun. Finally, someone screamed. The man Evangeline had tossed aside was pulling himself up, arm hanging loose-knitted by his side. The break wasn’t what made him scream. It was what he saw. Even from there, Severen could see it in his eyes. He ran, then he ran faster. Severen picked up a rock and bent to run after him. “Leave him,” Evangeline said. She’d drunk her prey tidily. A handkerchief wiped the last of him off her chin. “No one will believe him anyway.” (Someday soon, someone would. They’d believe him or someone like him. They’d come after Severen and Evangeline, and that would be the end for them. It’d take months for Severen’s hand to grow back alright.) Severen stared at the body almost as hard as he’d stared at her. It looked days dead; skin waxen and white, bones razoring out of the flesh, clothes flamboyant compared to the unwrapped mummy presented inside. He looked like he’d taken such a beating—the kind of beating only Life could take out. Evangeline, she was Life’s bully boy. Going around, making an example of people. Showing the herd that they could stand around and chew cud all they liked, the slaughterhouse was still in operation. They drove through the night, their winnings in the back, Evangeline telling Severen old and secret things while he appreciated the look of her mouth. Backroads, mountain roads, smuggler’s roads. They pulled into a thicket, Evangeline got out. She undressed. Her pale body was what the moon would wear to walk around in. Then she opened up the trunk of the Ford. “I can’t have the daylight,” she said. “That’s the exchange.” “That’s the exchange?” Another thing he found funny while it wasn’t. “So why d’ya eat people’s throats then? For fun?” Her smile was coy. Her hand was running down his chest. Following his blood. “It’s not a price if you enjoy it. I don’t enjoy sleeping. The dreams catch up to you.” “I don’t never remember my dreams.” “You will.” She climbed into the trunk. Nodded for him to slam it shut and he put sweaty palms on the door. “Tell me what you want at sundown. I still have enough gas to drive you back.” He shut the trunk. The sun came up. He sat on the hood, sat and thought and smoked. He’d decided before noon.