The group sat sullen around the bar. Moe scratched his balding head and adjusted his black eye patch. Bob drained his martini and coughed.
"Another one, Hugh. European six parts gin to one part vermouth ratio, stirred, not shaken, with a twist of lemon."
"Right boss," the ruddy barkeep croaked.
Gina rubbed Bart's shoulder as he sobbed into the bar top, his head surround by emptied beer bottles. She tried to lift him up, and he threw his arms around her, nearly knocking her to the ground.
"A little help!"
Skinner and Father Sean took Bart by each arm and drug him out to Bart's car. Skinner took Bart's keys and drove off.
Skinner looked over at Bart. He was leaning up against the window, his eyes red and blurred. He frowned and cleared his throat.
"Bart."
"Eat my…," he started, but started to heave and vomited slightly on himself, "…shorts."
"Bart, I've known you for nearly twenty years. I've seen you grow up. And the boy who I thought would end up in a juvenile corrective facility…well, actually, you did end up in the penitentiary, I was right about that…but seeing you with a job and a modest criminal record of two DUI's, a drunk and disorderly and one assault charge, a honest job, religion, a focus in life, a beautiful girl, and courage rare even amongst hardened soldiers, makes me able to say that I am indeed proud of you."
"Gent bent, Skin-rash!"
Bart collapsed in his chair.
That boy. Not a boy anymore. A man. One of the men who'll inherit the earth when my generation is through, something that soon may be. How well have we raised these children, these bastards conceived in the midst of Beatles and cannabis-induced lovemaking. How well have we baby-boomers prepared these children, or, in our mad rush for revolution and reform, did we destroy the very things that have allowed man to survive as human beings, not just to survive. For I learned in 'Nam that not all homo sapiens are human beings, and not all male homo sapiens are men. I fear that we've crippled his and his younger siblings' generations, lead them astray turned them loose before we could see the error of our ways.
"The history of the human race has been marked by man's oscillations between extremes. Between freedom and security; between peace at the cost of stagnation and war at the cost of human life and beauty; and between hardship and morality to prosperity and corruption. Man will never find a solution, and all proposed solutions are but compromises that are doomed to expire, leaving mankind to once more cycle between the two poles, all at the cost of beauty, life, and human souls."
Brian said that. He's a smart young man. But even he's been touched by the evil the Revolution has wrought, and has to drown his woes in booze in the vain hope of dissolving his guilt in alcohol. He could have been a leader if he'd escaped, but he's been morally crippled by his encounters with sin. Bart, conversely, while hardly having lived a sinless life, has committed his sins out of whimsy and passion and rarely malice, never Brian's self-destructive desire to discover the nature of evil by embodying it. He has no long-lasting guilt, just goes to confession and then back to the party. But he's too willful, too anti-authoritarian, too-slacker to ever be a leader. He'd take up the sword and lead men into the fray, but after the dust had died, he'd never take up the scepter and instruct men on how to rebuild a better world. He shirks from responsibility when he senses that it's responsibility.
They arrived at Bart's house. Skinner got out with his 1911A1, and, after finding the cost clear, helped Bart up to his apartment.
"You sleep this off, Bart."
"Yeah, thanks Spanky."
Skinner flinched. His nickname given to him by his mother made him physically ill upon hearing it. Anything involving his mother ended the normal stream of rational thought in his mind, drowning his thoughts in an echoing shriek of 'Seymour!'.
He walked down to the car, and drove back to the Maison Derriere.
Inside, Bart groped for the light switch. He staggered into the living room and collapsed on the couch. He closed his eyes, waking dreams swimming through his mind. Life melted into crystallized dreams, the mummified remnants of events known as memories. "The price of remembering is the pain that each memory brings"
The doorbell rang. He heard it echoing and gurgling, as though underwater. He opened his eyes. The pale light of pre-morning shone through the shutters. He had no sense of how long he'd slept, but, after seeing the size of the pool of spittle he'd created in his sleep, he decided that he'd been out for several hours. He walked to the door and set his eye near the peephole. Gina stood outside.
"Bart?"
He opened the door.
"Hey Gina-"
She threw her arms around him, holding him tight.
It was three in the morning. The Maison Derriere was nearly empty. The band had packed up and gone home, and the shows were over. Only a few weary dancers remained, performing a striptease to an old cassette of "Heart of Glass" by Blondie.
In the bar, only the Hunters, a half-dozen drooling perverts, and two flamboyant pimps remained.
Francesca rubbed Bob's shoulder's comfortingly. Bob finished his fifth martini.
"No more, Hugh."
"Don't worry, I ain't got any. You and your freaky cousin sucked up all the vermouth."
Mel, who was seated a good distance away from his cousin, separated by three empty stool, perked up upon hearing the bartender insult him.
"I am not f…f-rrr-eakky! I am d-rrr-unk!" he slurred, swaying on the spot. Bob sighed and massaged his temple. His cellphone began to ring, and he took it from his pocket and answered.
"Falena. Oh, it's you Wulfe. What? Close to cracking? We'll be right over. No, Bart went home. Skinner drove him, and Gina went after them to stay with him. Yes, I'll call Skinner."
He closed his cellphone.
"Jessica is close to cracking. Let's get the troops together."
Nelson knocked on a backroom of the Maison Derriere. Lisa and Brian stood behind him, waiting impatiently.
"Millhouse," Lisa called, "Millhouse, it's time to leave!"
They heard only panting and a woman giggling. Nelson struck the door with his fist.
"Van Houten! Get your scumbag butt out here! Quite screwing that slut and let's go!"
There was silence, and then Millhouse answered.
"Just gimme a minute!"
Inside the room, Millhouse dressed himself hurriedly, while Mariko leaned back in the bed, arms behind her head.
"Thanks Mari," said windedly, kisses her quickly.
"No problem big guy. You go kick some ass."
"Thanks Mariko."
He pulled his shirt over his head and started to rush to the door.
"Ahem?"
He paused.
"Oh, right."
He pulled three hundred dollars from his wallet and set them on the table by the door. Mariko smiled and blew a kiss.
"Go get 'em tiger."
Millhouse stepped out into the hall. Lisa looked at him-his cheeks red, face sweaty, hair tousled, clothes disheveled-and sighed. She walked away, shaking her head in disgust. Millhouse grinned sheepishly.
"Come on, lucky stiff, let's go," Nelson said, handing Millhouse his carbine."
Professor Frink's Laboratory…
The professor lead them through his darkened lab and into an underground bomb shelter. In a giant gleaming cage lit by small spotlights was Jessica. Heinkel and Yumie sat outside the cage. Yumie was holding a bloody power drill and grinning evilly.
Bob opened the cage and walked inside. Jessica hung limply from her shackled wrists, head hanging to her chest. Bob advanced upon her, and with the speed of a cobra she flew forward. Bob froze, his face placid. Jessica's chains went taut, and her snapping maw stopped a mete millimeter from Bob's nose. She snarled, her once dark eyes now deep red. She sneered, then, with the same suddenness of her attack, her face shifted to a childish grin. She giggled.
"Pretty cool, ain'tcha Bob?"
Bob grinned softly.
"I figured that your chains were only two meters long."
She laughed. "Then why is your hand on your pistol, and your heart racing?"
Bob squinted. Though he had been fairly certain of his split-second judgment of the length of Jessica's chain, and although nearly a dozen armed men and women stood just outside the cage, his hand had instinctively flown to his Glock 10mm. Jessica was pacing now, like an impatient tiger in a zoo.
"I'm a vampire now, Bob. I can hear your heartbeat from across the room. It's strong heart for an old man. I can hear the blood coursing through your veins. When Homer was here I could hear the shrill straining of his blood as it forced itself through his clogged arteries. I can smell the stink of a woman's sweat and juices on Van Houten-"
She paused and leaned to the side, spying Millhouse through the cage's bars.
"Get lucky tonight, Milly? Did you have to pay her, or was she just blind, deaf, and drunk?"
She sat down, back against the cage, smirking.
"We came here because we were under the impression you had something to tell us. Where your master was hiding, perhaps?"
She laughed.
"Okay, first of, the Master is not hiding, cause he has no reason to be scared of a bunch of stupid shits like you. Second, he's not staying anywhere, 'cause he's too busy. He's always on the move, meeting people, making plans, shaking hands, you know. And finally, if I told you anything more, anything, no matter how big or helpful…it wouldn't make any difference. You're all gonna fucking die, and your stupid little country, your religion, your ideals of 'love', 'hope', 'truth, justice, and the American way', are gonna be wiped away. Wiped off like shit and flushed down the toilet of eternity, baby."
She stood, and, turning her back to Bob and the others, leaned against the cage. She sniffed the air like a dog.
"So, you guys have another traitor vampire working for you. Little girl one…"
Seras emerged from the shadows.
"Yes, I'm working with them, and I'm no little girl."
She marched over to Heinkel and Yumie. Yumie's hand flew to her katana, dropping the power drill she'd been torturing Jessica with. Seras snatched the device up and licked the blood dripping from the drill bit. Her pupils dilated. She closed her eyes, tilting her head side to side and growling. She opened her eyes.
"Oh bugger…!"
"What?" Lisa asked.
"We need to get Fr. O'Flaherty.
The group, including a drunk and disheveled Bart and a disheveled and rosy-cheeked Gina. Alucard sat in the back, cigarette hanging from his lips.
Why is he smoking that? Nicotine doesn't affect vampires, so it's not like he needs it.
Because he feels it makes him look cooler. Brian jumped slightly. He had heard Seras speaking in his mind.
He looked at her angrily. "Stay out of my mind, monster."
Fr. Sean called the meeting to order, banging the butt of his revolver on the coffee table.
"Seras, you said that you found out what the Master was doing. Fill us in, lass, if you please."
Seras sighed.
"The reason he wanted the Necronomicon was not to create the supervampires. He needed the spell in it to completely transform them, but that wasn't his primary reason. He's using a spell in it to create an army."
"How?"
"By raising the dead."
Many miles away, in the Shelbyville cemetery, legions of ghouls worked with shovels and pickaxes unearthing the coffins. On the crest of a small weeded hill, Camilla stood with the Necronomicon in hands, chanting. Mariya stood by her side, grinning proudly.
"Cull-En, Rayburn, Narz, Tr'bek! Zahbar, Kresge, Cal'dor, Walmart!"
A sickly green glow began to emnate from the graves. The coffins that had already been unearthed began to shake and move.
"Well?" Mariya yelled at the ghouls, "What are you waiting for? Let them out!"
The ghouls pried open the coffins, and animated corpses climbed out, moaning and wailing. The ghouls handed the ressurected dead shovels and picks, and the dead joined the Undead in digging up their kin.
One corpse hacked open an old wooden coffin, and a living skeleton crawled out.
"Welcome of the land of the living," the corpse rasped, "Now grab a shovel and start digging."
"Damnit. Just like old times," the skeleton answered, its voice a shrill echo from it's hollow skull.
"Can't we stop it?"
"It's already begun. Shelbyville tonight, Springfield tomorrow-with his ghouls and the dead, he'll have an army large enough to begin his next phase of his plan."
"What plan."
She looked down and sighed.
"To set into motion the events of the Book of Revelations."
The group was silent. Uter broke the silence with a gasp of "Gott in Himmel". Slowly, worried whispers broke out amongst the Hunters. Fr. Nell raised his arms and brought them to silence.
"Looks like we have to go the cemetery tomorrow night," he said wearily.