Only At Night Chapter 2 (Patreon)

About twelve years ago, we found out that vampires existed. Or should I say, the rest of us found out vampires existed. They had been around all along and people had known about them all along, but that was in the Old World. There, they had wormed their way into power over countless centuries. Accumulating wealth, converting the rich and powerful into their kind, recruiting anyone who could be tempted by eternal youth. It was a pretty good racket. They never let themselves turn too many, just a cultivated elite, and they never risked exposure by going to the New World. Too many variables.

Then Second Death Disease hit. Vampire plague, spread through living humans. You’d never know it, but you might have blood that was toxic to a bloodsucker. It killed off vampires across Asia and Russia, and was headed for Europe when they decided to enact a quarantine. The healthy would go to the Americas, while travel for those with contaminated blood would be restricted. To do that, they needed a good explanation, so they decided to come out of the coffin, marketing themselves as just another minority group. 

They already had ties to white-collars all across America. They pushed through new legislation and came here in droves. Not everyone was happy to take them in, but plenty of ‘sanctuary cities’ appreciated the business. They cultivated nighttime economies to employ the vampires, who could work harder than humans ever could. Waves of lay-offs hit the living as vampires took over their jobs. To alleviate the sudden surge in unemployment, the government passed a bill guaranteeing universal basic income—a monthly payment for every man, woman, and child in America that let them lead a decent life. But there was a catch. To get the money, you had to be a blood donor.

You can guess where the blood went.

It was an uneasy peace on both sides. Plenty of people didn’t like the idea of vampires drinking their blood, and competed viciously for whatever jobs they could get to avoid going on the dole. Plenty more loved the idea, and even charged extra to let vampires drink directly from the source. And plenty of vampires went hungry, wanted a particular flavor that wasn’t in stock, wanted to hunt. 

In twelve years, it hadn’t settled down. Things were only getting more. More vampires, more people, more tension.

These vampires, I could tell, were recently turned. Sallow, antsy, not totally in control, not totally comfortable with the hunger. Vamps like these, they signed on, did some favor, maybe just looked cute—then they wound up all immortal with nowhere to go. No steady supply of blood. Kid vampires didn’t need much; it was the elder ones that needed to literally bathe in the stuff to keep their youthful good looks. So the kids went around at night, ‘recruiting’ passersby to give blood. On paper, they got their donors’ consent. On paper.

In point of fact, they were little more than muggers. Very little more.

I looked them over. They were definitely new vamps, as anyone could’ve guessed. Established vampires don’t do their feeding on the streets, and even if they were the Ted Nugents of the undead world, they didn’t feel the need to have strength in numbers. They had strength in strength. 

And they were dressed like they were still just in love with being vampires, like they were filming a commercial for kinky sex. Leather, fishnets, wild hair. One of them had on a punkish kilt. 

But even though they were vampires, that didn’t necessarily mean I was sunk. It all depended on how recently they had fed. Vampires could go a long time without drinking blood, but the longer they abstained, the weaker they got. A vampire that’s just fed is basically the Hulk. A vampire that fed a week ago is Captain America. From there, they keep sliding down the scale, all the way to Aunt May. The fact that they were out here hunting in the first place was a good indicator that they weren’t properly fed; it could be these guys were weak as kittens.

And I’m a big guy. Six-foot-three. I walk around a lot, do some heavy lifting on the job. Not enough to give me a six-pack or anything, but I could pass muster as an amateur wrestler. 

As for the face—as long as we’re on the subject—I’ll never be mistaken for pretty, but I’ve been able to grow a pretty good beard. A girl once told me I was ‘rudely handsome.’ Can’t put it much better than that.

In a fight with four human guys, I could at least make it not worth their while. With vampires, who knew? They could’ve been three blood cripples giving moral support to one breadwinner. Or they could’ve guzzled someone down last night and now they were just out for a tasty treat. Apparently blood tastes real good when you’re a vampire. Considering that my people serve cow tongues with olives, I have little room to talk.

I puffed myself up, projecting some toughness and letting them know I’d seen my own blood before. I’d never be a UFC fighter, but I’d gotten into some real scraps growing up. I was a kid back when you used your fists in high school, not your dad’s gun.

The vampires looked me over. One laughed, a hyena delighted with its own insanity. Kilt-boy ran a hand over his grainy stubble. I faced them down. I was losing confidence by the second that it would do any good, but I was used to fatalism too. Begging and running and screaming for help wouldn’t work, so why try them? The less I let them make me do, the better.

It happened fast. Kilt-boy slid toward me, his legs such a blur I couldn’t see them move in the shadows. I threw out a good punch, snapped out from the muscles of my shoulder, balanced exactingly across my twisting hips and coiled legs. It slammed into his face like a wrecking ball hits a condemned building and it was like punching a statue. Pain shot up my arm and throbbed in my knuckles as insistently as a ringing phone. He went down, that was physics, but it was just physics. He didn’t seem to feel any pain or confusion as he sprung back up, now picking up the rear of the gang as they fell on me.

The fists flew, careening into me. After the first few explosions of pain, I was dead on my feet, just getting knocked around by the sandbags that were falling on me from all directions. Give them this, they were good at their business. They tenderized their meat well. No one likes their steak grabbing their fork away in the middle of a meal.

When I was well and truly under, they set in on me. That’s what woke me up, the hot pokers of fangs sinking in my neck, my arm, my leg, my back. I felt anger, shame, humiliation thrumming inside me, flashing up in turn like traffic lights.

I could feel the pain, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. I told myself, in a pained haze beyond consciousness, that eventually it had to end. I only had to wait it out. I floated in darkness for a thousand years, sore and aching. Finally, I blinked. It got a groan out of me. Dead men couldn’t hurt.

I was lying on the floor. The vampires had taken me back to my apartment. That was the considerate thing about vamps. Since I was supposed to be a blood donor, they had ever-so-kindly helped me back to my place after I’d ‘collapsed’ in the process of donating. If I said different, they would say that it was all a combination of short-term memory loss and vivid hallucination. And unless I ended up a dead body—something every vamp takes care to avoid—the cops would look the other way. Rich and powerful vampires didn’t do much for the fangs on the bottom of the food chain, but they didn’t like to see vamps behind bars except on their say-so. It was some kind of feudal overlord thing they were dragging into the twenty-first century with them.

My apartment was four hundred and fifty square feet. I pick up a decent salary from my work, my needs are few, so I splurge on a good apartment. And anyone with some excess change can make themselves a good set-up if they shop around a little. TV. Stereo system. Games. But I’d never be accused of room porn. I couldn’t think of anything to hang on the walls or furniture beyond what I need. I had three rooms. A twelve by thirteen living room that could’ve been a desert with an oasis of an easy chair and a home theater. At the back, past a bar, was the kitchen. I wasn’t any better at cooking than I was at interior decorating. Next to the open-air kitchen were two doors, bedroom and bath. The bathroom saw more action than the bedroom. At least I kept it clean. It took five points to un-gross the toilet or shower bath. Well worth it.

I felt like shit. The bite marks were bandaged, but they throbbed like bone-deep bruises. And, perilously low on blood, I felt lightheaded—like when you stand up too fast, only it didn’t go away, the sensation just started doing funny things like clouding my vision and making me hear like I was underwater.

I didn’t call a doctor. I was saving my money for a rainy day and I hated the thought of breaking my piggy bank just for the sake of some vampire assholes. Instead, I trudged my way to the bathroom. I had written down my vital statistics on a piece of paper taped to the medicine cabinet. Heartrate, blood pressure, everything when it was operating normally. Bringing up my power, I checked myself now. Things were out of whack, as you might expect, but nothing in the danger zone. I’d be able to sleep off the attack like I would a real blood donation.

I pulled at my clothes. They were soaked through with blood where I’d been bitten, and that blood had dried and made my clothing crusty as old pizza. My sheets had probably gotten it too. I’d have to change them, but then, I was a bachelor. They’d needed changing anyway.

I peeled back the bandages, seeing what I expected—black varicose veins spreading out from the bites. Vampire venom, doing its work, trying to convert me. With luck, my immune system would overcome it like any bug. The last thing a vampire wanted was for a victim to die, turn, and then come back around for revenge. But there was no sense taking any chances. I reached into my medicine cabinet for the cure-all, a bottle of holy water, then stuffed a towel in my mouth. I poured a dollop over all of my wounds. The pain was intense, but I endured it stoically, grimacing and breathing hard but nothing more. And no one was around to say any different. 

I went to the kitchen. Thank God for bachelorhood—I had cold pizza in the fridge. I ate it without unduly troubling the microwave. As I did, I took out my phone and brought up the app for a local grocery store. I ordered cookies and orange juice, setting the delivery for eight hours from now.

By the time I’d completed the transaction and forced down four tasteless pizza slices, my body was on the verge of openly rebelling. I washed up at the kitchen sink, giving myself a hobo bath. Yawning, wanting nothing more than to sleep, I would be sleeping in my own filth instead of taking the time to change the sheets. But there was no reason it had to be a lot of filth. Then, on the verge of blanking out, I barely managed to take my shoes off before climbing under the covers, fully dressed. Sleep took me without any comfort. 

In my dream, I was walking with Carina. She didn’t have any skin. Neither did I. My bare flesh glistened with redness like an anatomical model, tendons jerking, muscles tensing, blood rushing through veins so visible that I could practically hear them humming with traffic. Carina was just as veined and ribbed and striated—moving like she usually did, but… no hair. That was what really struck me as weird. Everything else was a little recognizable as her, her shape, her gestures, but she looked so weird with an empty, hairless scalp.

“Here’s my question,” she was saying. “How come Judaism isn’t a big thing in porn?”

Carina was my best—i.e. only—friend at the office, the ‘work wife’ if that phrase hadn’t pinged anyone as insensitive or offensive yet. 

You see, I have an antipathy to a lot of socializing. It seems to me most people communicate with a needy, insincere subtext to their words that my subconscious takes one look at and replies “Fuck that.” In other words, I get irritated easily by bullshit. So much pleasant conversation is just the aural equivalent of those origin stories prefacing an online recipe, or a long-form version of “I’m screwing you over, but if you got mad about that, I’d have to examine my own morality, so please still be friends with me while I take you for everything you’re worth.”

Carina wasn’t like that. She was the most friendly, open, honest, sincere person I’d ever met—a throwback to Frank Capra movies, a Golden Retriever in human form. And she originally hailed from Hungary, though she’d come over even earlier than I had and had even less of an accent. Still, we could hold conversations in the mother tongue, provided we weren’t discussing Greek philosophy or anything.

“Judaism?” I asked her. “Like the… Woody Allen?”

I’d like to think the missing skin thing was why I was so awkward.

“Don’t knock it, apparently he had a bunch of threesomes.”

“With who?”

“It was one of those accusations. Some teenage girl said she and his girlfriend had a bunch of threesomes with him.”

“I don’t like to throw out the term ‘baseless accusation,’ but Woody Allen having a threesome is pretty up there.”

“Okay, okay, see, you can’t think of Jews as sexual beings. This is where Jew porn would be a big help,” Carina said. “No one has any problem sexualizing black people. There’s a ton of interracial black porn. Coincidence?”

“How would you know?” I asked.

“I’ve been on a kick lately.” She looked at me. All the muscles between me and her bones peeled out of the way so that I could see her teeth inside the gummy flesh of her face. “What? Guys watch incest porn and barely legal porn and animal porn—“

“Hey, no, that last one is an urban legend.”

“But a girl watches a black guy rail a blonde, then you have a problem?”

“I just wouldn’t have thought you watched porn at all. Guys watch porn because they can’t get it. Every woman can get it.”

“Bullshit! I have so many friends who cannot find a guy—“

“They can find a guy. Every girl can find a guy. They can’t find a doctor who looks like Hugh Jackman and dresses like a gay guy.”

“So, they have standards,” Carina said. “That’s the problem with women?”

“Yeah.” I smirked. “It’s really inconvenient.”

She laughed. I could see every muscle it took to produce the sound, rippling and quaking through her whole body. “You’re one to talk!”

“Me? What’d I do?”

“You work a good job, you’re not bad to look at, you’re tall—it would take a lot of standards to disqualify you from a relationship.”

I shook my head. “Nah, no, I’m not what women look for in a relationship.”

“Oh no?” she insisted. “Why not?”

I wondered if I could still sweat without skin. “I’m not, you know, I don’t get all these little things about people. I don’t know when to get a woman flowers or how to tell when she’s had a bad day or… why she’s crying…”

“Okay, this may be new information to you, but women are pretty used to that.”

“And, you know, I’m no good at talking. I never know what to say. Women like talking. Men, there’s a reason we’ve been trying to get the strong, silent type over. Clint Eastwood movies, that’s the dream. Ride around on a horse, say nothing, shoot people who need shooting.”

“You’re bad at talking to girls?” Carina asked me incredulously. Her face tried to do something with eyebrows that weren’t there. “Are you twelve? What do you think we’re doing right now, smart guy, sending smoke signals?”

“Yeah, but you’re not like—a girl.”

“Oh?” She was getting so emotional that even I could register it. 

“I don’t mean it like a bad thing—“

“So it’s a good thing I’m not like a girl?”

“No, no—“

“Then it’s a bad thing.”

“No, I just mean I don’t think of you as this—big—woman—type!”

She pointed a finger at me—a fingernail topping a bone wrapped in meat. “I get it—you respect me because you don’t want to fuck me.”

“That is not true; where are you getting this?”

She turned around and started marching away from me. “If you saw a woman and you wanted to fuck her, you’d be worried about losing out on your shot. With me, you don’t care, so you just say whatever you want.”

I kept up with her, eating up the sidewalk with long strides of my skinless legs. “I do say what I want with you, but not because I don’t care what you think of me, because I know you get me!”

She stopped to turn back and face me. “I get you, but I’m totally off-base with this?”

“Okay, maybe not totally off-base…”

Her eyes rolled. “I knew it, I knew it…”

“I think of you as a friend and not as some conquest and that’s a problem? I don’t even think of other women as conquests! I’m not a conquesting guy!”

“You’d like to be. All you guys would like to be—“

“And you wouldn’t want to be a conquest? For a doctor who looks like Hugh Jackman and—“

“No,” she said bluntly, “not if I had—can we just forget it? I suppose I should appreciate having a guy who doesn’t look at me as a sex object…”

“Is that what you want?” I asked, confused. 

Carina looked at me, a piece of meat. “I said let’s drop it. I wanted to talk you about Jew porn and you brought up this whole thing about me not getting any.”

“I… brought up…?” I dropped it instead of finishing that sentence. I might not’ve been good with women, but I wasn’t retarded or anything.

She fixed me with a firm stare. “Kat Dennings. Jewish. Wouldn’t you watch a porno with her in it?”

We started walking again. “Yeah, sure, but if not if they made a big deal of the Judaism.”

“Oh, anti-Semite!” 

“No, but like, I’ve seen some of the interracial porn, I don’t mind when it’s just a black person and a white person having sex, but when they’re dropping the N-word and stuff, it feels weird, like it’s supposed to be this wrong fetish and I’m like what’s so wrong about it? It’s two or five people having consensual sex…”

“God, you’re a pussy,” Carina said with a meager laugh.