Psalm of Vampires, Chapter 8

Understanding Evolution

This cover features the dearly beloved, and deceased, Princess Time Slut

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Not more than a minute passed after Charly’s odd and impossible disappearance when Owens’ phone blew up with messages. He ignored the first few vibration buzzes, but that became more difficult as they piled up. “Shit,” he said.

Eyes turned to him but then returned to Charly’s empty space at the table.

“Shit,” he said again after another buzz.

Eyes darted to Owens, then back to Charly’s missing spot.

“Mother fuck,” Owens said again. I wondered if he thought that he’d get the attention he was craving by escalating the curse level. “Son of a fucking bitch,” he added as if confirming my suspicion. “Four more killings,” he finally added. All the eyes at the table focused on him. “Frat boys at Georgia Tech. I gotta go.”

“You can’t go. We just lost a team member,” I said. “I mean, like, in thin air.”

“Shit — what the hell is going on?” said Owens.

“Poof,” I said. “Just fucking poof.”

“Evolution,” said Moreland.

“What?” I asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“They’ve evolved,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Shh. I can smell them. Or it. Maybe just one.”

“A Wurdulac?”

She nodded. “Mm-hmm.”

I looked at Daphne, whose eyes had already moved on from Owens back to Charly’s spot at the table. She seemed to be staring at his broken sandwich. “I don’t think I can do this,” she whispered to no one in particular.

“We all die sometime Daph,” I said. “I know it’s not much, but it’s all I got right now.”

“Even you? You die?” she asked quietly.

I nodded. “Eventually. Charly’s the oldest I’ve known. If he’s gone, he’s lived a good, long life.”

“How long? How long has he lived?” she asked timidly.

“Ten thousand years or so, I think.”

“Fuck this,” said Owens. “I’m getting tired of your stories. Your tall ass tales. I gotta go. Good luck finding your ten-thousand-year-old grandpappy vamp muthafucka.” He stood up, grabbed his phone, and tapped a speed dial. “Hey, Gare, what’s up?” He stood at the table as if poised to leave, listening to the person on the other end. I assumed it was his partner Garrison because I’ve seen a lot of cop shows, so I know they always call their partner first when something bad happens. That and he called him, “Gare.”

He tapped his phone again, looked at me, and said, “Same M.O. as the park killings. Slit throat, not clean. Fuck this shit.” He stormed out of the dining room and out of the house.

“Now what?” asked Daphne.

“I’m glad he’s gone. I can’t stand that guy,” I said.

“Shit, Jade, we need all the help we can get,” said Daphne.

“We need to call in the cavalry,” said Moreland.

“What cavalry?” I asked. Our meeting had not gone as well as I had hoped. My expectations had not been high to start with.

I hoped now that Moreland was right. That there were others who kept a low profile away from me that we could summon for help. But every added vampire to my circle was an added risk factor for Daphne.

“Stormcycle, Morgenthau, even Longtooth,” Moreland said. “Maybe a few others. Maybe every vampire on earth.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want Longtooth anywhere near this. Sometimes, I thought that Moreland could read my mind. “Okay,” she said, “not Longtooth. He’s as likely to try to pick off the police force for sport as he is to offer any help. But right now? We’re close to defenseless.”

One of the problems not discussed was that whoever was shredding throats in Midtown probably weren’t Wurdulacs. But one thing at a time.

“Is the Wurdulac still here? Do you even know?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Moreland answered. “But it took Charly. I don’t know how I know this. I just do.”

“If you’re right, you got no warning. Your mad skills at detecting Wurdulacs seem to be gone.”

That’s when we heard screaming from the foyer. I call it a foyer, but it’s a just big room at the front of the house where people gathered and partied a lot. The open bar of the living room was along the wall nearest the foyer.

I jumped up. So did Moreland. Daphne didn’t move from her seat. I extended my hand to her, she took it, and I ran for the living area, nearly knocking Daphne off her chair while I dragged her with me, Moreland trailing close behind. I heard glass breaking behind me, but I didn’t look back. I had a good idea what it was and wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself.

A semicircle was gathered in the foyer in front of the home’s entrance. The people in the formation were pointing down, some were crying. Raygun was there, recording whatever they were watching on his smartphone. Clutching Daphne’s hand, I made my way toward the semicircle and pushed through to see what they were looking at.

A human figure was curled on the floor in front of them that looked like it was getting its insides sucked into its interior, caving in on itself, its arms flailing like nerves without their brain, like a daddy long leg might after its oval body is crushed. Its clothes were gone. What was left of its body was unrecognizable and gray except for a sardonic grin etched onto its sunken skull. The body continued to shrivel, its head disappearing into its neck, its neck disappearing into its shoulders, its legs entering its torso as if that was where they had always belonged in the first place.

A blinding flash of light lit the room. All I could see was a throbbing blue and black ball floating in my eyes for a few moments, and then, a horrific, squealing scream conquered the sounds of the people, their cries and shouts of alarm, before it shot upstairs while my eyes returned to normal. When I rubbed my eyes for clarity with my one free hand, I could still hear the scream upstairs somewhere, fading, then dying.

I turned around and saw that Daphne was okay, then looked for Moreland, who had one hand raised and was holding the scimitar she must have broken out of its glass case in the living room while we were running to the fracas. It was bleeding from its curving blade. Like I said, sometimes I do love Moreland.

On the ground, covering the remains of whoever was getting his or her life force sucked out of them, was a massive, winged creature in its dying moments, one arm pushing its bleeding body off the body and forward out the open doorway. The being, twice as large as Charly, crawled through an ocean of blood, leaving a long red skid mark on the Calacatta floor before making its way outside. Furious, Moreland repeatedly hacked at the struggling creature with the scimitar, chopping it into dozens of pieces, starting with its yellowish head, which had long, floppy, pointed ears and what looked to me like a yellow mohawk haircut over a scaly head.

When Moreland was done, panting as if she had run a three-hundred-mile marathon, she looked at Daphne, then looked at her bloody project on the ground. “Now you’ve seen a Wurdulac,” she said to Daphne.

“Moreland?” I said, pointing toward the middle of the lawn. A hulking figure was stumbling around like it was blind, its hands outstretched as if making certain it wouldn’t run into a wall. The dark spot floating in my eye made it difficult to see it well.

“Charly!” I looked behind me to see the happy smile I loved so much return to Daphne’s face. She shook her hand free of mine and ran to Charly and hugged him like they had been friends for hundreds of years.

“Aww sweet sister, where you been?” he laughed in an otherworldly, big voice.

Daphne turned around to look at me while I approached. “It’s Charly!” she beamed as she jumped up and down like a kid. I turned around to look at Moreland, who was hacking again at the very dead creature. She really hated those things.

“What happened?” I asked Charly when I reached him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “One second, I was at the table, and now here with you. I dunno, but is that…?” He pointed to the doorway.

I nodded.

“She takin’ pretty good care of that sucker,” he said.

“Moreland never does anything halfway,” I said. I leaned my head into Daphne’s hair and kissed her temple. “You okay?”

“Ya. But I’m really, really freaked out. I won’t lie.”

“Me too. Charly, you disappeared into thin air. Lemme see your neck.” He leaned toward me. “Are you bit?”

“I don’t know, brother. I don’t think so. See anything?”

“I don’t see any wounds at all.”

“I guess I’ll know in a couple weeks.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. I grabbed his shoulders firmly. “Do not say that.”

“And the fuzz? Where he at?”

“Owens? Charly, this isn’t the 1960s.”

Charly laughed. “Yeah, Owens.”

Daphne looked toward Moreland.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“What, man?” asked Charly.

“Come on,” I said, heading back toward Moreland.

“Oh, no,” said Daphne.

“What? Someone tell me what’s going on?” implored Charly.

We negotiated our way through the fleshy gauntlet that Moreland had created near the front entrance of the house to the scene of whatever was left of the Wurdulac’s human victim.

“What’s that?” asked Charly.

“Who is it?” I corrected.

“Seriously?” asked Charly. All that was left was an ashen, slightly wet pile of unrecognizable remains.

“The Wurdulac got somebody before Moreland killed it. Moreland wouldn’t have been able to kill it if it hadn’t been feeding. It was fuckin’ invisible, Charly. We couldn’t see it. At all. Then, Moreland did her flashy strobe light thing and must have exposed it, then did her slashy sword thing and got lucky with a direct hit.”

“She’s a warrior, that girl. Think it’s Owens?” asked Charly.

The dark part of me, just a sliver, wished for a positive answer.

The influencers were still in their semicircle staring at the remains. Most of them were expressing their shock with blank stares, but some were talking. This was a tough crowd. Nobody was crying. Maybe because of shock, though.

“Who was this?” I asked loudly.

“Princess Time Slut,” someone said. “I think. I barely got a look at her before it happened.”

“It was Time Slut,” confirmed someone else. I didn’t know who Princess Time Slut was, but I liked her already for her name and wished she wasn’t gone.

Moreland, her spandex blue and orange warrior outfit covered in Wurdulac blood, strode into the foyer. The semicircle spread apart. Camera phones raised into the air like a dozen salutes. “No,” she said. “Don’t do that shit,” but it was too late. By now, the entire scene was probably spreading across the internet. Can you say trending?

I took my phone out of my trouser pocket. I had forgotten I had turned off my notifications so that I could concentrate on the meeting. After I turned them on, alerts started rolling in immediately like they had been stuck in a jar. The first one said, “Scary Halloween Stream #25: the beast is dead. Best Halloween scream stream ever.” Another said, “Check out warrior queen with the blade! Smashes her way to the win!”

Many more rolled in. It became obvious that the consensus was that the whole thing was a brilliantly conceived and executed Halloween act by Fang HQ. People loved it. That was the good news. The bad news was that dozens of people were saying they were going to pay a personal visit to Fang HQ to celebrate or see the streamers in person or just hang out.

It would take one chat with a stricken Fang HQ influencer for those visitors to discover that this was something more than a show. I quickly told Moreland and Daphne about the situation on the internet, showed them a few posts, and said that we’d need to act quickly if we wanted to keep the reality of the situation out of the public square.

“You said you needed a cavalry, right?” said Daphne.

I nodded. Moreland said, “Uh-huh.”

“And,” continued Daphne, “you need these witnesses to keep quiet about the truth of what happened, right?”

Two nods.

“They’re freaked out, just like me. But there’s your cavalry.” She waved her hand at the confused, terror-stricken crew surrounding us.

“Are you serious?” asked Moreland.

“These clowns?” I asked. I loved these people, but they weren’t soldiers or even soldiers in waiting.

“Ya,” said Daphne. “These clowns. They’ve lost two good friends to vampires. They won’t have a hard time believing your stories. And they’ll be more reliable than that cop Owens.”

“Well, technically, Wurdulacs aren’t vampires,” I complained.

“Well,” said Daphne, “They sorta are. But whatever. These people aren’t going to make a distinction. They’ll do what they are asked to do. The scaredy cats among them can just go screw themselves and leave. Nobody will listen to them if they try to say it’s all real. But I think most will stay and help. Maybe all of them.”

I was watching Daphne evolve in front of my eyes from a happy-go-lucky, fun, sometimes silly girl to an army commander. It was weird. I was inclined to listen to her. That is something that hasn’t evolved. It’s always been a static truth.

I looked at Moreland, who shrugged. “I’ve heard worse ideas,” she said.

“We need all the help we can get,” Daphne said again.

“Owens will come around,” I said. “He’ll see this livestream.”

Daphne nodded. “He can’t use his police resources, but he can use these guys,” she said, looking at the influencers, who were easing into new reactions. Some were on their phones; others were talking animatedly with one another. One had retrieved a blanket from somewhere to cover the remains of Princess Time Slut. A couple of people were sniffling a little, but overall, the mood had calmed.

“I’m sure Owens will be pleased,” I said sarcastically.

Almost on cue, a black SUV with darkened windows pulled up, followed by several other vehicles, then a few patrol cars. The SUV didn’t so much pull up as cut its speed from 60 to 0 in a half-second as if it hit a wall, screeching its tires while its rear end spun nearly onto the grass at the side of the road. Owens jumped out of the driver’s side and raced to the front of the house. Garrison emerged from the passenger side and lumbered to catch up. Several other cops exited their vehicles and positioned themselves with guns behind the newly formed wall of marked and unmarked police cars.

“We’re shutting this place down,” said Owens, sounding like a drill sergeant. I was wrong about Garrison being in shape. He was out of breath like he had just finished fighting Moreland in a cage match, even though all he had done was run out of Owens’ vehicle for the two hundred feet between their car and my home.

When Owens waved for additional officers, several came forward, guns drawn.

“Under whose authority, Owens?” I asked.

“His name is Glock,” he answered, pointing to his gun. He directed his officers toward the front door.

“You got that dumbass reply from a movie, didn’t you?” I said. He gave me a dirty look and started to go inside, but nearly tripped over the Wurdulac’s severed head. But he seemed not to really care about the remains of a dead, unearthly monster. Or maybe he believed the livestreamers’ consensus that this had all been an elaborate show. He had to have seen the livestream, or he wouldn’t have turned around from wherever he was going and called in a small support army. He stepped around the mess as if it were all just the spilled contents of a broken garbage bag.

“Owens!” Charly screamed. I had a feeling that Charly’s voice registered on the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake Richter scale. Owens wheeled around and looked at Charly, then threw up a hand and slapped it against his leg in frustration.

Owens headed toward Charly. When he reached him, Charly said, “You will not shut anything down,” bearing his fangs.

“You gonna stop me here, old man?” asked Owens. I just then noticed how thin Owens’ lips were. It was as if they had been drawn by a narrow, pink felt tip pen against brown skin. When he called Charly an old man, one corner of his lips curled upward.

“Everyone will think it’s staged,” I said. “So why not? I may just join him. Me and Charly, we’re a team, ain’t that so, Charles?”

“Like a tag team, brother. And I don’t mind the sloppy seconds.”

“Good God,” said Owens. “No wonder you people are in one endless extinction event.”

I took Owens’ elbow and cajoled him into walking away from the crowd. I whispered, “This isn’t a damn circus show. That is a Wurdulac you almost bounced your foot off. And these people aren’t going to forget what they saw. In about twenty minutes others will be here to check it out. It’s all over the internet.”

A helicopter started circling above. The Atlanta P.D. loves its helicopters, so it was only a matter of time.

“That’s why I gotta shut it down. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. I’m even doubting my old grandpops now. Your story about you being related to Alexander the Great? Holy shit is that preposterous. Next thing I know, you’ll tell me how you met Jesus or something.”

“Actually…” I began.

“Shut the fuck up. I don’t know what this show is. Real or not real. Or what part of it is real. But it’s my show now. If I don’t get the force involved, this thing spirals out of my control.” Just as he finished saying that an explosion rocked the sky above us. The helicopter was now a fireball spiraling into the neighborhood about a block away.

That triggered a massive reaction from the police, who scampered this way and that while talking into the radios on their vests. The influencers poured out of the house, most of them with phones in the air.

Charly lumbered over to us. “I don’t think I’ve seen this much action since ‘Nam,” he said.

Owens’ next words were an endless stream of curses and epithets directed mostly toward vampires. “Round ‘em up, get ‘em all outta the house,” he directed someone. Most of the influencers were out of the house by now, so that part would be easy. I needed a way to implement Daphne’s suggestion, which meant I needed to speak to them without Owens butting his nose into the conversation.

“Charly, we gotta shut Owens and his crew of Keystone cops down.”

“I’m right here, douche,” Owens said. I hadn’t cared if he heard me.

I also hadn’t noticed that Daphne had been tagging along the whole time until she asked, “What are keystone cops?”

“Moreland!” I yelled. Moreland was involved in an argument with three cops who were pointing guns at her. “Put that sword down and get over here!” My confidence level was high that the cops would stop pointing guns at her if she put the sword down. When she threw the scimitar to the ground, one of the cops made a move to cuff her, but she threw him about thirty feet and kicked the other two out cold faster than they could react.

She calmly walked up to Owens, Charly, Daphne, and me. “What, Jade? Couldn’t you see I was busy?”

“Owens wants to shut us down.”

“That’s okay. We don’t need the place.” She was looking at the smoke from the downed helicopter. “Right?”

She had a point.

“Ya, let him sort out the mess,” said Daphne. “It’s not like he’s gonna say, ‘well, captain…’” She was using an adorable deep voice impersonating a man. “‘…We had a little problem getting the vampires under control.’”

“We need to bring everyone into the precinct, too,” said Owens, oblivious to the commentary. “This situation is ridiculous.” With that, Moreland opened her mouth so wide that it looked like a cave inside a face. With large fangs. She chomped on Owens’ neck and pushed him by the head to the ground.

The three cops she had been arguing with charged us, but she did her strobe light thing and was suddenly behind them. “Over here, officers,” she said. When they turned around, Charly and I ran up behind them and gave two of them a solid bite, and they were down before anyone knew what happened. The guy in the middle, who was being held by Charly while we bit, looked scared witless. I didn’t know where Garrison had gone off to.

Charly grinned widely, displaying his canines. “Tell your friends they’re going to need reinforcements,” he said, then pushed him so hard that he rolled all the way down the slightly angled hill of the lawn to the phalanx of officers crouching behind their vehicles. They were clueless about what to do next.

“We’ve got about twenty minutes before these fools wake up,” said Charly.

“We’ve got a lot less time than that,” I said. Sirens were blaring. Reinforcements were on their way. Helicopters crashing in trendy urban neighborhoods have that kind of effect. That’s when I noticed Wallace buzzing around above me. “Goddammit,” I said. “Raygun!” I yelled. “Turn that damn thing off!”

My phone had been vibrating in my front pocket so much that it was practically turning me on. I yanked it out of my trousers to turn off my notifications, but I saw a message from Raygun. “I have a bus in the back,” his message said.

I texted back. “A bus? Why would you have a bus?”

“You never know when you’ll need a bus,” he replied.

“That’s crazy,” I replied.

Smile emoji.

I called him. “Get that damn bus ready, we’ll meet you in back.”

“Bring the crew?” he asked, referring to the influencers wandering around the mayhem.

“Every last one of ‘em,” I said.

I surveyed the cops along the row of their parked cars. They didn’t seem to consider us an imminent threat, even though four of their officers were down. Then I realized they were waiting for further instructions. The sirens were closing in. It didn’t sound like a few more. It sounded like hundreds.

I told the others about Raygun’s bus.

“How are we gonna get a bus out of here before the SWAT team gets here?” asked Charly.

“SWAT teams, probably,” I said. “They probably think those cops are dead. They’ll be bringing the heavy artillery. Charly, grab Owens.” Charly hoisted Owens up as if he was lifting a light bag of groceries. I could see the influencers all disappearing into the front entrance, which meant that Raygun had already found a way to round them up toward his bus. “Let’s go.”

I looked behind and saw one cop begin to move toward us, but another held him back. They were afraid. But they were also being smart. I would later learn that their other three fallen comrades were fine, but for now, all I was hoping for was that their bite marks would be gone before the reinforcements arrived. But it didn’t much matter. They could report all they want on the bite marks. Nobody would be able to confirm them later after they healed.

“I wish we could get rid of that thing,” I said out loud to nobody, referring to the Wurdulac’s remains at the front of the house. Then, I said, “Fuck it. Daph, get on the bus with them, and don’t wait for me.”

“What?” she said. “No. I go where you go.”

“I can’t keep you safe if you don’t go with them. Please trust me.”

Moreland pulled her by her arm under protest and they all disappeared into the house. I hoped that if Moreland encountered Garrison, she’d go easy on him. I ran around the back of the house, remembering a new riding mower one of the influencers had happily purchased on a whim. I hoped it had a full tank of gas. When I opened the large metal shed, I nearly cheered out loud when I saw a five-gallon red plastic gas can on a shelf next to the mower. I grabbed it and fired the mower up.

I rode it around the house to the front entrance of the home while holding the full gas tank in one hand. Some of the sirens were loud now. At least a few of the vehicles were only a few blocks away. I reached the front yard, parked the mower on top of the Wurdulac’s remains, and opened the riding mower’s gas cap. Then I kicked the mower over and dumped gasoline from the gas can all over my new ad hoc science project.

A couple of cops at the parked cars started moving toward me, but I dashed inside the house. I realized I didn’t have a lighter. “Shit!” I said, looking around thoughtlessly. Two cops came into the house, looking around cautiously while trying to keep their eyes on me, too. “Stop what you’re doing,” one of them said in a voice that sounded about fourteen years old. He was pointing his gun at me, of course.

“Either of you got a lighter?” I asked. They looked at each other, which gave me time to lunge at one of them, delivering a blow to the chest that I regretted as he fell to the ground, his head bouncing violently off the stone floor. The other guy took a shot at me, but the bullet smashed into the broken case where the scimitar had been. I ripped into him hard, harder than I should have, nearly severing his carotid artery, but I was pissed that he shot at me.

There was a fireplace we never used on the opposite side of the living room near the entrance toward the kitchen area, but I didn’t know if there’d be a lighter nearby. I fumbled around the fireplace area but couldn’t find anything. Then I heard another explosion, this time next to the house out front. I ran toward the front entrance and saw Raygun holding a disposable lighter and smiling like an idiot, displaying the biggest front teeth I had ever seen in a creature not called a vampire. Big, wide, flat things that looked like you could use as a whiteboard to hold class with.

“Bus is ready,” he said through his grin. I shook my head, then turned to go back inside the house to check on the cop I probably killed. Raygun followed. Through the picture window’s translucent drapes, I could see flames in the front yard. I knelt quickly to check on the cop. He looked like he’d be okay – the wound was already healing, so I ran off with Raygun to the back of the house and we dashed to the bus.

“Still mad at Wallace?” asked Raygun as we ran through the estate toward the bus, which was a big brown tour bus like rock bands use.

“Hell no,” I said. The bus was perfect. The windows were blacked out, with metal shades that could be used to shut the world out. I sniffed. I love the smell of diesel. We climbed the stairs into the cramped bus. I didn’t recognize the driver.

“Alfredo,” said Raygun. “Just do your best.”

“You’ll want to hold on to something,” Raygun said to me. I mostly wanted to hold on to Daphne, who entered my mind again, but I didn’t see her. I looked through the thick crowd of people sitting and standing but still didn’t see her.

“Everyone is here?” I asked.

“I think so,” said Raygun.

If Daphne wasn’t on the bus, I knew she’d be okay long enough for me to find her later. We had to get out of there. “Alfredo is an open-wheel driver,” said Raygun as Alfredo hit the foot pedals of the bus and pushed a transmission lever.

“And that helps us how?” I asked, not knowing what an open-wheel driver was.

“Formula One,” Raygun answered.

I still wasn’t sure how that would help us on a bus, but I figured the bus was in better hands with Alfredo than me.

The tour bus lumbered slowly out the back, over the estate’s large back lawn, then bounced heavily over a curb as it made its way onto the street at the back side of the estate. Several police cars raced past us the opposite way. I realized they wouldn’t know we’d be on a damn bus. They had two conflagrations to deal with and would be desperate to be sure that the front lawn fire didn’t consume the house and threaten the rest of the neighborhood.

I sighed a little relief.

“I don’t exactly know where we should go,” I confessed to Raygun.

“I know a guy,” he said, smiling widely.

Notes

I’m not sure who Princess Time Slut is in this chapter. Is she cos-playing the character in this short story? The world is full of mystery, isn’t it?

Princess Time Slut Visits Costco