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free fiction issue #12...
WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
They found her face-down in one of her own blood vats. Her friends, her acolytes, her cohorts lifted her from the drained oaken barrel the size of an outside shit-house. It was like a scene out of a Laurel and Hardy film - you all know the one; Stan and Ollie are in their usual down-and-out role, Stan Laurel falls into a barrel of ice-cold water and the only way he can escape is to guzzle down the whole freezing barrel. He rolls out at the end, his stomach all distended, tears rolling down his face, a down cast look of shame from Oliver Hardy. Curtain closes, organ grinds.
What a party it had been, though, the night of the Oscars - the night of their great coming out. The glitz, the glamour, the final blood festival. That had made instant superstars of the pair, Vampyre and her leather-clad blood bitch Samantha Fishburn. The world had devoured the books of Anne Rice, Nancy Collins, Stephen King and Whitley Strieber; they were embedded in the vampire legend. But to have really found two of them live on National Television was a national phenomenon. They made the covers of all the usual glossy rags. The pair of them appeared on all the late-nite shows like Letterman and The Tonight Show (in the US), Parkinson and Eurotrash (in the EU) giggling like freshly depucelated debutants about their vampyric lives of soil-dwelling excess. When they finally appeared on Oprah and then on Springer (after their whistle-stop European tour) it spelled the end of their credibility.
Truth is, no-one believed their claims of immortality through blood feasting, despite the interest from the media - there was a very damning article in the State-sponsored ENQUIRER magazine which had for years ridiculed any paranormal activity with supposed sponsorship only to stab them all in the back with secret document releases from sister publications like JANE'S and PUNCH later on. Everyone said the pictures of the blood vats (where virgin menstruators squatted for days at a time each month dripping their disintegrating wombs into the vats until their thighs were like downhill skiers) were fakes. Despite their button-hole-hidden-camera feel, where you could actually see the young virgins fingering each others clitorises to take their minds off the acid-pain in their rigid posture of groinal libation, the drip-drip-drip of the ultimate blood aperitif. Even when a rival shock-horror group called Victims of the Reign of Blood captured Fishburn and released video of them brutally slitting her throat down to the spine (which miraculously healed in full sight of all present) before Fishburn tore the hearts from the lot of them, so angered was she by this gross prostitution of her talent.
The press, who had initially hailed them as the new Paris Hilton twins, soon turned on them as magicians and charlatans. The Police wanted to ask them a few questions, too and set up few all-day OBOs, constant Police harassment through the night shift didn't help the nerves either. Basically, for the last nine months they had been on public trial for no crime other than survival. That's what happens in societies though - crush the radical rather than embrace its specialist knowledge for the good of the community.
Put it this way, fame is ephemeral.
Infamy pointless.
Fast forward to nine months later and the remnants of the Vampyre clan are pulling a blood-fattened Vampyre from the blood vat of her own apparent suicide, her prehensile vag-mouth hanging out the back of her like the ultimate inverted Giger-dildo, it's usually-snapping teeth dormant, limp, rattling with each step so that you could hear the teeth creaking on the official police record of the discovery as they carried her over to the stretcher. Vampyre and her slutty cohort had been going downhill ever since the Oprah show. The Springer debacle where supposed RealVampires™ had gone on a stubborn campaign to denounced her as a publicity whore who knew nothing of the OTHERWORLD where their sort lived, knew nothing of the pain of eternity where all your loves die, where all your friends rot forever in soil-lined coffins sealed their fate. She knew nothing of how the Vampire race conducted their business on planet Earth, proclaimed they.
In all honesty, the claims of these supposed Vampires hailed from nothing more than a pack of rich-kid blood fetishists and dental fantasists, body enhancers and bleachers. Maybe one or two of them had a genetic excuse for their appearance and proclivities but none of them knew what it was to be a Vampyre. I'll fucking say it again in case you didn't hear it the first time, 'Hollywood doesn't know all there is to know about Vampyres.'
It's that simple.
Vampyre watched this all from a third person viewpoint, removed from her remnant. She saw those thuggish brutes lift her bloated body from the blood vat where she had gorged herself all last night. Saw them giving her a few kicks to make sure she was dead. Saw the excess of blood she'd overdosed on pour from shattered surface blood vessels fat as slugs. The skin like craquelure on an old master. They didn't understand that she was a caterpillar becoming a moth. They didn't realise that when they buried her in the ground, she would crysallise and some number of years later she'd emerge afresh, stretch her wings, fly off into the night. They didn't understand the mechanism of blood overdose for a Vampyre and the heightened dimensional state the blood fugue put one in.
Of course they didn't bury her body on consecrated ground as she'd hoped. They took her straight down to the morgue and Y-sliced the fat fucking remnant open. Gallons of blood clot slopped out of her like greasy black fish from a catch net. She was a hibernator of blackness opened up to surgical inspection. Of course they found nothing inside the choked black innards. She was nothing more than a cracked and wrinkled shell stretched around a glistening black cancer - you wouldn't even wanna necro-fuck it were you that way inclined. There was nothing to fuck. The whole grotesque mountain of blood clot fell apart on the autopsy table. A black mass settled and squelched and farted onto the floor leaving behind a heavy thick skin of veins and yellow tendrils.
It was an act of mercy (in the authorities eyes) to simply burn the remains of that blood bitch in the oven. Nobody complained. Nobody came to the rescue of Vampyre at the eleventh hour. She was burned in the oven on double heat, double time, and her ashes were taken out in the middle of the night by armed members of a shadow cult and scattered in the estuary of the local river. They had gotten rid of another blot on their comfortable landscape and that, as far as they were concerned, was the end of that.
Vampyre went into hibernation. She didn't give a shit what they'd done to her most recent shell. She was not attached to it in the cosmetic sense, she didn't miss it - it was just another set of scruffy old clothes. However, she was connected to it in the dimensional sense. For two hundred years, Vampyre floated around the globe, in dimensional proximity to her floating ashes. It didn't matter how diffuse her ashes became, through how many fishes and whales and future inhabitants of planet Earth her ashes flowed. She was locked to every spec of her former shell. Because of this dimensional 'magic' she was always close by. And she could manifest herself down to a new host at any time. She waited until the brouhaha had died down and all memory of Vampyric daftness had been erased from the populist psyche. Two hundred years went by in the delightful blink of an eye, as was the way of a hibernating Vampyre. By the time she distilled her essential essence from that higher dimension and took physical form once more, adopted her new shell, the world was a very different place and her legacy of blood had survived to a far deeper extent than she could ever have imagined.
She resurrected herself one day in the middle of a worker's march, that's where the focus of her host was at the time - like a moth cracking out of a soft cocoon that had kept her safe and warm throughout the centuries. She opened her eyes. They were on the streets, damn-near fifty thousand workers. What were they complaining about? Who cared?
It was a world that Vampyre could never have expected, such was the tedious linearity of human existence from the death of Christ up to the Oscars, same old shit for thousands of years. Same old flesh. Same old repressive social structure designed by the strictest architects in the universe, the priests and judges - the law makers. Planners of arbitrary retribution for random acts of humanity. The body she now inhabited had totally unique abilities that no scientist at the time of her death would have been able to linearly project into the now.
Vampyre sensed the strange internal body clock of her new host getting read to switch every night. People (let's use the term 'individuals') didn't exist on planet Earth anymore. During her period of long hibernation, the human race had gone through something of an amazing metamorphosis. People no longer had jobs - it was easier to describe it thus, Jobs Had People, Corporations ruled the human race. People now seemed to have roles in life. These roles were unchangeable throughout one's life. It was part of your genetic make-up. You were born into a role which you carried out every day.
All over the now totally congested planet (current population 29 trillion) alarm bells sounded at the end of every working day. People, hearing this would swap identity. No person every occupied the same person twice. That was it. Their role in life always remained the same. The host she had chosen was a bit of a rebel no doubt but she was genetically marked to always be a personnel manager. Her social proclivities meant that was her assigned role. Her genetic proclivities ensured that she would swap to another body every night in sleep. Regular as clockwork. Every person was accounted for. Every death complimented with a factory grown birth. It was a Hellish mechanical global economy. Scent had become pre-dominant in Earth's society - she actually smelled like a personnel manager, no matter what sex or size or age she found herself from day to day.
The first time it happened, and Vampyre stood in front of her host's new form, a big balding gentleman in regulation personnel manager uniform of soft striped browns on yellow; dark slacks, she leapt around with burly glee. This was the perfect camouflage for one such as she/he one such as a Vampyre, let's say.
Vampyre concentrated on her bones a short while and made sure she could still articulate herself longer or shorter at will. Everything worked fine, she raised up a few feet so that her head banged on the ceiling and then scrunched down so that she could now only see the top of her head in the mirror. Her CuntMouth had gone though - these future people didn't have sexual organs, just a perforated area between the legs that exuded a pungent sweaty perfume as bodily effluent. Panty pads for males and females soaked up the stinking refuse and that too was swapped every night like the mortal shell. There was no chance of her gestating a partling inside her for a high-protein feast before a blood lust festival but she could still articulate her teeth into those legendary fangs of Vampyres through time immemorial - she just sighed out a green frost of horrid breath and the fangs dropped into position, a delicate greasy milk anaesthetic lubricated the stinging point sharp as any hypodermic from two hundred years ago. Things had changed for the worst. Things had changed for the better.
She went to work for the first few months (it didn't matter which company you entered every morning as long as there was a vacancy and you did your assigned function within society) and she went home to a new home every night. Nobody bothered her. Nobody suspected her Vampyric background. Then she took her first blood meal.
She couldn't have stopped herself if she'd tried - and she tried. She met her first meal in an elevator heading for the fiftieth floor of some corporation she had walked into that morning. That's what you did, you walked into a new company every morning as a new person to fill your assigned role. You were genetically printed to access all files from wherever you were. It was a great system (probably invented by insane psychologists to by-pass the boredom and depression of life in the corporate rabbit hutch) where everybody got as much variety as they could within their assigned boundary.
Vampyre towered over the girl. Vampyre had even forgotten to look and see who she was today. Nobody bothered to see who they were, the novelty of swap soon wore off - as it had for her weeks back. Vampyre could have been built like a 7 foot basketball player or like a squat old schoolteacher. Her Vampyre lust drove her head into the ceiling of the elevator and she put a wrinkled Vampyre hand to the mouth of the girl as she was about to scream. Grabbed the back of her head with another and twist/pull. The head came off, trailing a mess of ripping blood vessels and neck ligaments. You could actually hear the spinal cord rip (the sound was like cutting velvet with a pair of dressmaker's shears) an odd, dull sound amid the crunching of bone and the gasp of air that left her neckhole.
Vampyre's jaw distended over the gushing neckhole and she sucked so intensely that all that was left was a crisp casing which the clothes fell off in dizzy dregs. Vampyre had never known a feast so fresh, the blood was more alive than anything she had ever tasted in all her long years on this planet. She could literally taste all the millions of people who had occupied the roll of secretary in all that time since the start of her hibernation and the world wet Fascist in the Extreme. A sharp stabbing pain tore through her and she nearly fell to the floor such was the entire body orgasm she was experiencing. Time seemed to stand still as the entire Earth's population of secretaries unravelled like the flipping pages of a million gory history books.
It was like she sucked on the very source of what it was to be a secretary. As if, after her feeding, there could never be another pure secretarial breed on the planet. Vampyre sensed that she had tainted the perfect line and interrupted the genetic make-up of that aspect of this commercial planet. By biting into this secretary's juicy fucking neck and sucking down hard on her luscious secretarial source, Vampyre had inadvertently set off gene alarms all over planet Earth. A critical 'secretary' hole had appeared in the great gene mesh that surrounded the Earth like a protective shell of industrial drive. The corporate balloon had burst. This sort of thing happened every now and then when an accident happened to a worker. In fact it was a fairly normal thing to happen, all it meant was another worker was ordered from the egg hatchery and life (and society (and industry)) went on as if nothing had happened.
But this was no mere 'hiccup', this was total system failure of the global secretary line. And on top of that, a personnel manager had become a person, a fixed entity. Yup, when Vampyre fed on that secretary, the rush of genetically enhanced secretarial blood into her host fixed her in the mould of that host. Her hunger bones concertinaed her back to normal height. She saw in the blood spattered mirror wall at the back of the elevator that she was in fact a woman again (a stroke of luck) she saw how she'd smeared her lipstick in the rampant feasting and so ferociously had been her jaw's dislocation (it had after all been two hundred years since she fed) that her mouth was a little ripped at either side, two small trails of blood quickly dried to brown powder then fell away.
Vampyre looked at herself for the first time in months, in centuries. She was a brunette. Average height. Average build. Nothing special. She did realise, however, that her scent had changed AND NOW SHE STANK. The elevator door flipped open on the fiftieth floor and three employees stood there, all upper management. Vampyre turned around (she was still relocating her shoulders at the time and must have looked quite a bizarre sight) and the three upper managers all vomited at the same time such was her stench. One of them fainted before he could get it all out and the vomit bounced out of him like a stinky little orange and yellow confetti-ball as he hit the floor.
Vampyre pressed the DESCEND button but it wouldn't respond. The elevator knew it was in the presence of something quite hideous, something quite alien to these times and climes. An unwanted thing. It sent an electric shock through itself and both Vampyre and the dead shell of a woman jolted on the spot. It jolted them both again but by this time, Vampyre had staggered out into the corridor, her skunk-like stench preceding her. With that rash piece of Vampyre behaviour, she had once again exposed her rare kind to the harsh light of public scrutiny.
There was definitely no escape from the building. It went into self-imposed exile from the body of the global beast. Cut itself off from the global machine. People would die tonight when the usual chance to change bodies was denied by their not being allowed to 'clock off' and return to their homes for the night. Or would they? Would they die or would they just go mad, their function torn from them as if some evil torturer had physically torn off their limbs one by one then tore out their intestines then cut them into pieces until they were no more? Would they survive and feed her through the building's exile. That's what Vampyre was thinking. Food. She was surrounded by it. Well, it was fleeing from her as she staggered about in the corridor of the fiftieth floor trying to get her bearings. She was a marked woman too, so stealth would be out of the question. She didn't want to see what might happen later on after hours, so she grabbed the first thing that ran by her and was about to feed like a mother-fucker when she recognised something about the way it moved, the locomotion of its joints, the articulation of its the marrow like sharp cogs and gears beneath the ratcheted bones and expanding bony cylinders of her arms.
'Fishburn!' Vampyre pulled her to her chest, 'Samantha Fishburn!' she was beside herself with glee and though the girl struggled, Vampyre refused to let her go.
'I don't know who you're talking about lady but God you stink!' the girl did look like Samantha Fishburn but she sure didn't act like her.
Vampyre put her hand onto the girl's crotch, a slender finger breaching the soft panties and feeling only the gooseflesh of that odd pungent zone these mortals had for bodily effluent - she felt the statutory pad on the back of her fingers. This place was too much of a nightmare. She was about to push the Fishburn look-alike away from her, thought better of it, then pulled the neck of Fishburn onto her quickly extruding fangs. They burst through her flesh like hydraulic syringes and the girl screamed in Vampyre's ear fair-near deafening her. Vampyre sucked in the life blood but it tasted like battery acid. Quick realisation:- most if not all of the employees in this building would taste like shit.
Vampyre coughed up the nasty concoction and the body of Fishburn fell backwards, blood still pulsing from the severe trauma of her neck. Blood pulsed through the finger for a few minutes as Fishburn tried to hang onto her pathetic life of industrial identity. Then, with a good gallon or more swelling out in all directions, she passed away. This was how it would be. All the employees would be inedible. All would pass away like this as Vampyre tore through them looking for one nourishing meal. There'd be not enough blood to cause her to fall into a bloodlust coma as she had done at the start of this story and effected an easy escape from the Earth of that time.
Vampyre realised with a sickening feeling of inevitability that this was the place where she would die. Another Fishburn look-alike, a man this time, ran past her, he was running at full tilt, 'Trust in me if you want to live.'
Vampyre looked around and everyone looked like Fishburn - how could this be? Another Fishburn look-alike, a woman running in the opposite direction screamed out, 'Run this way Vampyre, I'll lead you to safety.'
'Vampyre, pursue me to freedom!' cried an older Fishburn lookalike.
'Follow me alien!' cried another.
'Alien?' thought Vampyre. That one caught her attention. She saw her old adversary's wicked grin and could only hope that her mind hadn't split down the middle and left her like a brainless zombie. She clambered off after this final Fishburn look-alike. She trusted something about the way she winked as she scampered, something about the look of familiarity that only those who'd shared 'amour' (and each others' foetus babies) would know. She should have trusted her instincts and tried to make her escape some other way.
They had gassed her as soon as she rounded the corner. How fast their reactions were. Vampyre imagined they could react this quickly on any part of the planet. From this super swift reaction to her presence among them, she understood very quickly that they were a hive mentality and something very alien had happened to the human race during the course of her slow, slow hibernation. She wondered what these things were and what part of the galaxy they were from. She should have realised straight away that something so radical as the extermination of the human psyche in favour of a metamorphic work force specified by job role could never have been achieved in that short time span. Something like this went far beyond a chance discovery in a genetics lab or a lucky bit of materials technology.
She awoke on an island of ice out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. She had no idea where that might be or how she might have got here. She was spread-eagled on her back, her body was actually embedded in the ice island with just her face jutting out. A few quick contractions and extensions of her limbs soon got her out of that but then she realised the hopelessness of her situation. She had a hunger in her cells also, indicating that it had been indeed a few months, maybe a year, since they had captured her. She walked around her terrifyingly isolated and excruciatingly cold island prison. She was far from blood and far from answers.
Then they appeared, five limp humanoid bodies carried under the claws of owls. It was a major hallucination, Vampyre thought. These weird beings faded in as if from out of a fog. They were clearly projections of some sort because one could see the breeze fluttering through the flight feathers on top of the outstretched owl wings. But here there was only icy stillness. She tried to speak and her voice carried an infinite distance without reverberation. She knew then that she would never be allowed off this island - it was to be her home, and her grave. She looked at the faces of her five accusers but couldn't see a distinctive feature among them. Their faces literally moved all the time, like a soft photo-fit morphing from parts of identity to others, noses, eyes, mouths a nauseating blur of personality slaughtered.
'Our resident Blood Eater is on her feet.' one of the ever-morphing faces sneered.
'What brought you back from your hibernation, Blood Eater?' the one to her right asked.
'The blood, fool.' where did this cabal of idiots get off? Vampyre rumbled like a volcano.
'Yes, your race has spoken of us before. We are a dark legend among you Blood Eaters, surely you know of us?' the one to her left was curious.
'Yes, their memories are rotten with us - she refuses to see.' another said.
'Hive birds don't eat blood then?' Vampyre countered.
'She will die well this one.'
'I'm not dying any time soon.' Vampyre raised her voice, her jaw dislocating arrogantly. She thought 'well fuck all of this posturing, if I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go with a shiny fucking smile on my face'.
'Silence!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' the entire ice island shook beneath her. Ice spikes shot from the island of ice and pierced our heroine from all directions sending ribbons of oxygen-rich blood splattering out in all directions. Red on purest white.
Vampyre began to laugh. And the cabal of hive owls who had taken over the Earth joined her in the joke. This was gonna be an entertaining inquisition.
THE END.
the sequel to Red, Red Wine
(c) 2005 Mike Philbin (writing as Hertzan Chimera)
