Cont'd from last update.
"My first love was named Josephine," I said, still trying to get comfortable on the rec room couch. "And it wasn't a stable relationship because it was barely a relationship at all.
"It wasn't long after the great war-decades, not centuries. People like you that could pass for basic humans were still pretty common. This was the year that they lynched the last high-ranking member of the U.S. Government for starting the war.
"I was living up on the East Coast, far from where the largest warheads landed in Georgia, Alabama and East Tennesee. Ironically, the Great Bloc had been aiming for the old capitol, D.C., which was only about seventy miles from where I was living. They missed by hundreds of miles and I, like, could never figure why.
"The town, whose name escapes me, was almost untouched. Sure, some mutants from the southern radiation zones would wander through, some would settle, and for the most part, the townsfolk were very accepting. Nobody much picked on me about my ears or my complexion. Fine by me, I was never embarassed of them anyways.
"It was a port town on the Chesapeake Bay that still ocasionally got ships from other places, so years later it was one of the East Coast targets when the Second Vampire Coalition seized control and imposed strict isolation on the continent. But for the time being it was a peaceful place.
"My adopted father had abandoned me about seventeen years before, and angsting about it was like my fucking ray-zawn daytruh or however you say that."
"The R is silent," Sue said.
I thought about it for a second. "Ay-zawn daytruh?"
"Oh, for the love of... you need a foreign language requirement, don't you?" Sue asked. "Take French. Raison d'etre. It's not hard to pronounce."
"I'm already taking German. Don't need it. Ray-zawn-dayt, got it," I said. I kept telling my story. "So I lived in a decent apartment that I got cheap, because the smell of fish from off the port kept the rent down in the area. One day she walked in looking for a sublet, and I, like, nearly shanked her.
"She was...Jo was a vampire. I'd seen vampires do some pretty horrible things... things I don't talk about.
"So we fought, fought to a standstill, and when we couldn't fight anymore we collapsed onto a couch, sorta like this one, and talked it out. She was a refugee from the alliance that eventually became those Coalition jackwads-she was running from one powerful vampire called the Empress in particular. I forgot about fighting her after that. I let her stay with me.
"We lived together six months. In that time we started a band with my cyclops buddy Chad, put a hit single on the Indie charts based on a Hart Crane poem, and eventually, on a very cold night after a very long and emotional gig, we made love.
"We never did again-I don't think we ever even talked about it again, but I was in love, in love with her cheekbones and the deathly pallor of her skin, in love with her personality, in love with her punctuation use, in love with her soul itself. How does that Leonard Cohen song go? 'I love your spirit and your body and your clothes...?'"
Sue shrugged.
I went on. "The next autumn, she walked into my room. She was framed for a second by the doorway, black against the lit hallway outside. Then she stepped in and light fell on one side of her face from the bare lightbulb hanging above my desk.
"Glob, Sue, I don't know how to fucking describe her in that moment. Jo was rail thin and a little taller than me. She was wonderfully handsome but not in a conventional way, without even a veneer of youth but without any age either. She had skin that was not bleached-out like mine but a sort of bloodless grey with light freckles that still gave the appearance of a living but anemic human woman. Her eyes were watery blue, but they got dark rings in them when she'd fed on blood. Ferrous sulfide, she said, and licked her lips.
"She had a high, aristocratic face with pronounced cheekbones, fangs less like any other vampire and more like George Harrison. When she smiled it was a one-sided, melancholic smile. She was the only woman I ever liked bobbed hair on, when it curled out and lost its shape and became organic. Glob, I'm not making her sound good, am I? What do you call it when all the elements are wrong but you add it all up and it's right?"
Sue didn't answer, so I went on. "When she stepped into the half-light that night, wearing all black, I thought I was watching one of those movies where every frame was planned meticulously in every detail. Have you ever seen 'Citizen Kane,' Sue?"
Sue bit her lip. "Umm... I don't know what any of those things are."
"What things?"
"Mo-vies? Citizen Kane? Any of it."
"It's not important. Fuck, it sorta is. Like a photograph that you spend forever staging, with the light and shadows just right?"
"Of course," Sue said. "Flash fill, diffused lighting, incident light metering... I took a course in photography."
"Yeah, exactly. The same idea. She looked like a staged photograph... she often looked like a staged photograph and I have no idea how you do that. But that's beside the point. She stepped in and looked perfect and she asked me if I would join her army.
"'Yeah,' I said, 'of course! Wait, what? What army?'
"'I'm collecting as many people as I can to join the rebellion against the Empress. The dark web has been astir for months, and I only just broke the codes the rebellion are using. Everyone who opposes the new alliance of the radical vampires is assembling in Indiana and Michigan in Mid-October to form one decisive alliance. I think we'll all die but at least we might kill enough of them to make a difference.'
"'Jo, why us?' I asked. 'We could go anywhere, we could get out before it's too late. What are we going to do that's going to make a difference?'
"'Thirty years ago, I gave up on ever having children, the same day I gave up walking in sunlight, smoking and eating solid food. I'm a vampire, and that means I am utterly without any ability to add life back into the world, and believe me, I've taken life, Marce. If I can take this life I have into my hands and make some slight net positive out of it, I have to. A single grain among thousands can tip the balance. And I... no. Never mind, I'll tell you later,' she said, and gave me this look. Glob, this look."
"What happened?" Sue asked.
"We joined the Last Rebellion against the Coalition. You've had ancient history classes, haven't you?"
"The Autumn Rebellion?"
"It was in the Autumn. I said October, didn't I? September, I mean. Mid-September."
"The Autumn Rebellion?" she asked again. "The war that no one on the side of the Rebellion survived?"
"Here I am. I did," I said, gesturing sadly to myself. "Jo, Chad and I were in a stolen tank that we were using to scout ahead of the main force. We rolled it into the burnt-out wreckage of Kansas City late one night, and Chad was up top using a night-vision goggle to look for hostiles. Suddenly there came a bright light and a sound like all the thunder ever, piled up into one moment. Chad jumped down through the hatch with tears streaming from his eye. In the weird light of the inside of the tank, he looked almost like a cartoon drawing of a cyclops.
"'Massive nuclear explosion maybe thirty, forty clicks due east,' he said, in an utterly defeated voice. 'They just bombed us. That's us. We're dead. The entire army would have been within the blast radius.'
"Jo checked the tank's external geigers. 'Seal the hatch,' she shouted all of the sudden. 'And turn on the air scrubbers and the recirc. That was a full-scale H-bomb set for high yield, and we were close. We're receiving direct radiation and the heavier fallout can't be far behind.'
"The cloud was bigger than my thumb, Jo,' Chad said. 'We're dead too.'
"'Not with this tank around us,' Jo said. 'It was built during the Cold War. We could have survived a lot closer to ground zero given fair warning. Also, you have womanly thumbs, Charles. We'll pull through.'
"But she was wrong about the tank, or we didn't seal it quick enough. We got these sores all over-mine and Chad's were all bloody. I guess that's radiation poisoning. Jo would heal hers with her vampire powers, and they'd come right back. Chad got it worst of all. He nearly wasted away and died, but we held it together and limped out of the radiation zone with whatever fuel and rations we had left. We were starving and still sick by the time Jo let us open the hatch, a week and a half and sixty miles later. I poked my head out and looked around. It was dusk and we were somewhere west of Kansas City, wrecked cars all around us on the cracked freeway.
"And suddenly I was being pulled out of the tank by, like, an occult hand."
"A what?"
"Sorry, I was having a flashback to my days as a gonzo journalist. It was as if this invisible force had grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me out of the hatch. I banged both my shins pretty badly on the way out. The next thing I knew, the force threw me away and I was hitting the pavement twenty feet from the tank. Thankfully I didn't bang my head, but I was pretty scraped up. Next came Chad, only our invisible friend threw him to the pavement too. Finally, we started to hear what sounded like a real catfght inside the tank, and not a dignified one like you and me could have, Sue.
"I mean it sounded like two women had suddenly become animals inside that tank. Slapping, smacking, scratching, accusations... and finally a strange female figure scrambled up out of the tank and, before I could get a look at her, she vanished-I mean she turned completely invisible in a split second."
"There's a spell for that. Sir Howell says it's cowardly and base, though," Sue said.
"I can do it, it just takes hella energy. Anyways, this woman jumps out of the tank and vanishes, and right after her comes Jo, who looked like hell. I'd kill that woman just for doing what she did to Jo's face, let alone what came next.
"Suddenly, those invisible hands grabed my shoulders again and this weird bitch appeared in front of me. She had, like, a weird hood over her eyes, with a ruby eye in it, and a snake wrapped around her neck. And the snake... I swear I'm sober, Sue."
"I wasn't thinking anything like that."
"And the snake pulls the hood up to show her real eyes. There were huge and they just drew your soul into them like some kind of vortex. And then she started chanting 'sell your soul to the skies; surrender to the Empress' Eyes.' And she had complete control over me. I don't know how, but I know this tranch could have told me anything and I would have done it, as soon as the last word of that spell was out of her mouth.
"Chad must have thought quickly, beause the next thing I know, he's up behind the Empress with a knife, and he stabs her in the back. The spell over me was broken instantly.
"She swung around and shouted 'Again with the stabbing me in the back! You'd think some of you donks would wise up to the fact that you can't kill a vampire by stabbing-'
"She trailed off. She realized that she had her hood up, meaning that Chad was already hypnotized and probably not even listening. So she says her dumb little rhyme again, and Chad is her willing slave. I'm trying to stop her this whole time, but she just ignored my attacks.
"Chad killed Jo. I can't describe it, but Chad killed Jo and I killed Chad and the Empress was nowhere to be found. The rebellion was over and North America was under the heel of the vampires.
"Later I found out that I could have snapped Chad out of it fairly easily, but Sue, I didn't know."
Sue sat there with her mouth open.
"I cradled Jo's body in my arms for hours, and sat there on rock bottom. Everything I had to live for was gone. My little town, the ersatz country I was a citizen of, my way of life, the love of my life... all gone."
"I killed my first vampire that day. Just a foot-soldier, but for a while, that was my purpose. Just killing... and killing. I lived to kill vampires. A vampire enslaved my adoptive father, and a vampire killed the woman I love; probably the same one."
"Whoa," Sue said. "I'm... so sorry."
"Some wounds heal, others don't," I said, trying and failing to sound happy-go-lucky. "I mostly live for music now, so there's that."
There was an awkward silence.
"You told me about your first love. Can I tell you about mine?"
"Of course," I said. It was now about ten o' clock, but I wasn't tired and she didn't seem drowsy either.
"My first love was a mighty warrior..." she said.
(To be continued)