Chapter 10--September 19th, 1981

If staking my first vampire last week was anti-climatic, then staking my second and third vampires last night was a bit too climatic. I got the first vamp as he was rising out of a grave in a Detroit cemetery. We'd read in the newspaper about someone dying from a "neck puncture" and it was child's play to wait beside his grave for the rising and then dust him before he could even get his feet free. It may not have been sporting, but I'm not a big believer in taking chances.

The next two vamps came after me. And my friends. It all began in the football stadium as McKinley played the visiting Grosse Point High. Usually we wouldn't be caught dead at a school sporting event, but since Daniel, Ken, and Kim had gotten beaten up by those jerks from Lincoln last year, we'd all caught a little school spirit. Plus it would be fun to see those rich kids from Grosse Point get pounded on by our players.

And it was funny to see Neal do his Norsemen mascot routine. At first head cheerleader Vicki Appleby had been dead set against Neal donning the costume and big viking head again, but the principal, my dad, and several other prominent booster parents pressured her to take Neal back. They thought his performance at the Lincoln High basketball game last spring was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Bill even put a good word in with Vicki and finally she choose Neal as the mascot. Now he was playing air guitar and impaling himself with his plastic sword. I enjoyed it and didn't even mind too much when Neal did his routine next to me and sat on my lap, dipped my head, and made a kissing motion like some silent movie star. It looked like Neal was having a great time, but I knew he was hurting inside over his parent's recent divorce. It would be tough for him to only see his dad on Sundays.

McKinley was getting beat 28-7 at halftime, so we all decided to leave after seeing Amy play the tuba in the marching band's halftime show. We would get some beer and go to the clearing and hang out by the bonfire for awhile. There was this kinda good looking tall dark-haired kid smoking a joint and standing near Daniel's Trans-Am in the parking lot. He was listening to Ted Nugget on his car stereo and of course Ken and Nick got into a big conversation with the guy. Kim and I made small talk in her car for twenty minutes as the guys talked with the new guy. I knew Ken was recounting many of the forty-seven times he had seen Nugget play. Then Daniel came over and said we were heading for the store now and that the new guy would be following us.

So we got the beer and drove a few miles outside town to the clearing and then the guys went to gather some firewood while Kim and I got the ratty old lawn chairs from under the tarp beside the tree where we kept them. Ten minutes and a few squirts of lighter fluid later, we had a respectable fire going. We found out the new guy was named Martin Q. Blank, but he asked us to call him Marty. He was from Grosse Point, but turned out to be a cool person anyway, not some stuck-up rich kid.

We listened to some more Nugget on Daniel's car stereo and then some "Pink Floyd" and the obligatory "Led Zeppelin". Then Marty put in a cassette by this guy named Prince. The music was pretty good, but the singing and the lyrics would take some getting used to.

"Wow, this guy has a dirtier mind than me," Kim said.

"And that's saying a lot," Daniel said as he swigged his beer and then got punched in the shoulder by Kim.

"If you ask me, this guy's a sex maniac," Ken said.

"You have to listen to the meaning behind the words," Marty said. "He's just using sex a metaphor to talk about other things." "It sounds to me like he's using sex as a metaphor for more sex," I said.

"You know, I heard Tina Shields got it on with this guy the last time he played Detroit," Nick said.

"Tina Shields gets it on with at least one member of every band who plays around here," Kim said.

"That's true," Nick said. "I don't think this Prince guy is gonna go far."

"I have a feeling you are wrong," Marty said as he got in Daniel's car and put another cassette in. "But you're going to love this. A friend of mine got it from a guy who works at a radio station. It's a song by 'Queen' with guest vocals from David Bowie. Its called 'Under Pressure' and its not going to be released for another month or so."

We listened to the song and didn't say anything--it was like we were under a spell. It made me think of my duties as the Slayer. And somehow it made me feel better about them. Everyone was under some kind of pressure, no matter what they did. If others could deal with responsibility, then I could too. Life was scary sometimes, but you just had to deal with it the best you could.

The song ended and Nick immediately said, "Play that bad boy again!"

Marty rewound the cassette as a car came down the dirt road. He played the song again, this time with the volume turned down, as the car stopped and a man and a woman got out and walked towards the fire. They looked to be in their late teens or early twenties and were dressed in post-hippie clothes. Something about them gave me a bad vibe.

"Hola amigos," the man said. "Sorry to bust in, but we saw the fire from the highway. Can we join your party?"

"We usually like to keep our parties private, thank you," Kim said.

"No need to get snippy," the woman said.

"Let's keep everything civil," Daniel said. "Do you guys have anything to add to our little gathering?"

"No, we just want to take what you have," the man said as his face got all bumpy. The woman's face did the same thing. They were vampires!

"Get behind me," I said as I jumped up from my chair and pulled a stake out of an army jacket pocket.

"Oh, we have a professional here," said the woman.

"Leave us alone, you don't know who your dealing with," I said in with the best menacing tone I could muster up.

"Yeah, a bunch of scarred kids," the man said as he punched me in the face.

"Leave Lindsay alone!" Nick said as he rushed the man and got a face full of knuckles for his trouble.

"Let me handle them," I said as I kicked the man and then followed through with a couple of punches. The woman grabbed me from behind and the man punched me a couple of times before Daniel and Ken pulled her off me.

From there the fight devolved in a general melee for a few minutes. I got shoved to the ground several times and lost my stake. Marty and Daniel were keeping the man busy, but Ken and Nick were left moaning on the ground and the woman was leaning over Kim, trying to bite her. I pulled a one inch thick branch from the fire and then drove the sharp end through the woman's chest. She cried out in pain, but didn't dust. Damm, it was hard to hit the heart through the back. I pulled the stick out and then kicked the woman over so she was lying on the ground on her back. Then I plunged the stick in again and she dusted this time.

I heard the man scream, "Noooo!" and when I turned around to face him, he grabbed Daniel and Marty's arms and swung them together so that their heads collided. They collapsed to the ground and the man came running after me. I stepped to one side and swung my knee up to hit him in the groin as he passed by.

The man recovered quickly and then slid into my legs in a soccer-style tackle and knocked me to the ground. He grabbed my neck from behind, lifted me off the ground, and started to choke me. I tried to trip or flip him, but I couldn't get any leverage. Then I heard a solid "thunk"and the man let go of me and said, "Why you little..." as he turned around and punched Marty. The kid from Grosse Point had driven my stake into the man's back. He couldn't hit the heart either.

I pulled the stake from the man's back and then gave him a kick, jab, kick combo that left him staggering. It was ridiculously easy to stake and dust him after that. As I was fighting off a sneeze from the vamp dust, I saw Marty sit up and look at me very intensely.

We all had some cuts and bruises, but fortunately nothing serious. Nothing a cover story about getting into a fight with some Grosse Point jerks wouldn't explain. But I did have to explain about the vampires and who I was. I didn't hold anything back. I owed my friends that much and more. I knew in my heart they wouldn't have encountered any vampires if I hadn't become the Slayer.

They took the news pretty well, considering. Daniel accepted the idea of vampires the easiest, but Ken acted like it would take him awhile to really believe it. Kim was mad at me for keeping secrets from her, but I knew she would get over it. Nick was just kind of generally flustered, but Marty was quiet, although he kept giving me these calculating looks.

It was his idea to dump the vampire's car in a pond to get rid of the evidence. When we looked in it, we found purses, wallets, and other personal items the vampires must have taken from other people. It seems they had roamed all across the upper midwest, killing young victims. I took all the driver's licenses and other ID I could find. I was going to give them to Todhunter and hope that he and the Watchers could somehow let the families of the victims know that the murderers had been taken care of.

Marty said he would keep quiet about everything. We invited him to come back and hang around with us again, but he didn't seem too enthusiastic about it. Looking into his eyes, somehow I knew this experience had deeply affected him. I hoped he would be able to put it past him, but realized it probably would take him a long time to do that. Before he left, Marty gave me the "Queen" cassette.

Kim and I listened to "Under Pressure" on her boombox on the way home. I felt bittersweet when I got out of the car at the end of my block and said goodbye to her. I was going to have to stop hanging out with my friends. The Slayer attracted trouble and I didn't want my friends to get hurt in the fallout. It was going to make my life a lot harder, but it was something I had to do.

&&&&

Author's Note: Martin "Marty" Q. Blank is the character John Cusak played in the movie "Grosse Pointe Blank" about an assassin attending his ten year high school reunion. I've moved him back from the class of 1986 to the class of 1984 to fit the story. It's also the proper class for people born in 1966 like John Cusak. In the film, Marty seems to have a moment of great insight as he listens to "Under Pressure" at his reunion dance.