He looked up at me. “You know I went back to that truck for beer later. It’s cashed now.” Shaking his head, he continued. “The first gang struck St. Louis that afternoon. You think we’re bad.” He laughed. “Imagine twenty vampires, some with automatic weapons, some buck naked, running through the streets taking orders from no one, feeding rampantly. It was like one of those sharks shows on the Discovery channel. They literally just ran up and down the streets tackling people and ripping their throats out. The radio was blaring nothing but emergency broadcasts. ‘Gangs of terrorists have been sighted in the St. Louis area. They are armed and dangerous. Shelter indoors. Lock all doors and windows.’ The local news started calling us vampires for the first time. Vampires. I don’t know why we call ourselves that. Hell, I could eat garlic right now if I wanted to. That’s the kind of crap I heard on the radio as I sat in bumper to bumper traffic laying on the horn and trying to get home. Cars had already tried to drive up the medians and the sidewalks clogging up everything. People were abandoning their cars, so I got out and jogged home. I didn’t see any vampires, but I did see burning cars and corpses lying on the streets, some twitching and slobbering. When I got there, they were both dead. Well hell, Jenny was lying on the floor with a one hundr3ed and five-degree fever red as a beet and shivering when I arrived. She was barely breathing, and she wouldn’t answer. No one picked up when I called 911 and she died soon after, her head on my lap, my tears falling onto her face. I hope that they were cool. She was as hot as an oven. She didn’t turn though. A whole eternity with her curls, blue eyes, and red lips I could have handled, but I guess I should be thankful she didn’t come back as a thrall with no recollection of what we’d had. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t have liked this life; sometimes it’s more boring than the day in day out of family life.”
I didn’t feel much after that, I just wandered around in a daze thinking I might join my parents out in the countryside, but I never made it. Naïve as I was, I went back to find my car. That’s when I was caught by a skinny, raggedy haired female vampire with crazy eyes. I saw her in the side mirror of a mini-van bolting for me, her teeth bared and her ripped clothing and blood-stained hair flying back in the wind. I ran but she was so quick, flying across the ground like Superman. She knocked me to the ground with an elbow to my back and held my head against the pavement. Her hand was like a steel beam against the back of my skull, not budging against my desperate flailing. She drained me. Everything went flat as if it had been emptied out, and gray as if everything were covered with a thin layer of ash. I could hear several alarms going off to no effect. I lay there on the sidewalk and it rained on me as I shivered. Visions came and went, voices called and receded until I awoke, turned, transformed. I was still cold, but it felt natural, as if my body would be unable to hold any more heat. I was weak and thirsty. I had turned.”
I went back to the Bud factory. It was the only place I could think to go other than my home, where my wife and baby were lying on the floor dead. I drank a couple of beers and wandered around; my thirst not slackened. The lights were still on, but it was empty, just this giant, desolate warehouse filled with kegs and forklifts. That was how I spent my first night as a vampire.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, then you Drank and now everything is hunky dory, so shut up about it already,” the vampire at the tailgate interjected. “You think this guy wants to hear it.”
He went on, ignoring the outburst. “I could have gone to the Grand Canyon. Hell, I could have gone to Europe, but I just stayed in St. Louis like I always had.”
During his tale I’d slowly shifted a few times, stretching my legs, and then drawing them back up to my chest. Sweat poured down my face but dried in the wind just as quickly. The roadside was even more crowded with cars, their hoods thrown open, discarded parts rusting beside them, and all their gas tanks open. No trees had managed to take root in between them, only grass and some withered wildflowers. I settled with my feet flat on the bed of the truck watching the vampire as he’d told his story. His thin pale face and his blue eyes all moved as if in slow motion as if he were slowly digesting every word that he spoke. It all seemed out of sync with his identity as my captor, a vampire who no doubt wanted to drain me and throw my body out of the truck, who would
