Disclaimer: I own little within. This is usually the part where people start to scream.
Early in this chapter, I use a joke until it becomes like a flattened little joke pulp on the ground. My cowriter later does the same
"Fat, angry" part is my cowriter stepping in for a bit.
"This is so road trippy!" Claire screamed in sheer delight.
"Oh, it's trippy all right…" Joe mumbled.
"I feel like I'm on a tour with rock stars!" Claire's friend Braids agreed. She flipped one of her (what else but?) elaborate braids over her shoulder.
Andrew laughed. "Rock stars…"
Pete half-smiled. "Yeah, right. Imagine. Us. Winning MTV awards and stuff and doing tours for thousands of fans… pfft. As if."
Joe joined in. "Yeah. And Pete would be the teen-magazine pin-up boy!" Then he could no longer hold it in and cracked up at the very thought.
"Guys, can we please stop talking about stupid fantasies that will never, EVER happen?" Patrick interrupted. He was driving and all this ridiculous daydreaming was distracting him.
"Relax, Patrick. We've only been on the road again for like, five minutes." Joe responded.
"This is so much fun!" Claire yelled.
"Let's play games!" Braids added.
"GAMES!" Noodle (presumably a nickname), an Asian girl and the last girl of Claire's group, agreed.
"Truth or dare!" Claire shouted.
"No! Everyone loses in that game!" Andrew protested. "Pick something that's fun for a longer time, not just when someone's the victim."
Claire paused. She didn't scowl, though; it was against her nature. "Then…. SPIN THE BOTTLE!"
"NO!" Andrew answered.
"Well, then what are we supposed to do?" Claire crossed her arms and pouted (which is not quite scowling).
"TWIZZLER!" Shouted Noodle, her English questionable.
Patrick turned around and made a face. "Come on, you guys. Quit it with the games that would induce sexual feelings."
"Oh! How about 'Seven Minutes in Heaven'?" Braids eagerly suggested as the other two girls and Joe clapped their hands in hopeful glee.
"What did I just say?!" Patrick's patience was wearing thin.
"This hoodie smells like cheap cologne!" Out of nowhere, Claire put a hoodie on her bright blue tank top. It was solid black with a big, bright purple bat graphic on the bottom.
"HEY!" Pete jumped forward and lunged for the hoodie, making the younger girl bounce back. "TAKE THAT OFF! It's mine!"
Joe scratched his nose (for no particular reason other than there being an itch. Seriously.) "It fits her freakishly well, Pete. You should think about eating more."
"Or eating at all!" Andrew joked, helping himself to what must've been his third Mountain Dew that day.
"Yeah, you're going to have to develop regular eating patterns now that you're going to be human again," Patrick added. He stopped the RV for a moment to look over a map.
Claire's smile dropped in surprise. She cocked her head to the side in her usual way and stared at Pete, wide-eyed. "What? You're going to be human again?!" She played with the hood on the black hoodie.
"Yeah," Pete couldn't help but smile at the mention of his becoming human again, this meaning that he had clearly been waiting a long time for this (the moment he became a vampire, to be precise). However, this also clearly meant that he hadn't taken into account (or maybe just forgotten) how feasible the cure not working may be. "We found a cure for vampirism. And I'm going to take it!"
"Wowwww! That's coooooolll." Claire smiled for Pete. But when Patrick turned to look at her, he recognized a flash of something else in her eyes, not like anything he had seen in Claire's often naïve blue eyes. Jealousy, maybe?
"Sooo, how much longer?" Joe asked Patrick.
"Dunno. The nearest major town isn't that far away. Half an hour, maybe?"
"Okay. I have an idea!" Joe declared, turning to face Claire. "Hey, I have a game."
"Oh, goody! What is it?!" She yelled.
"The Silent Game. First one to talk loses! Startiiinnng… NOW!"
She jumped up and down in glee. "I LOOOOOOSE!"
"AAAAAGH!"
"You know, I thought when you were taking us to a major town, Patrick, by 'major' town, you meant developed," Pete growled, scowling out the window. In the night sky, the medium-sized settlement that the RV had stopped in front of looked like it was on its last legs. And they hadn't even ventured in.
A sign that had a good chunk taken out of it read 'Welcome to Stable, Population:' and the population number had been torn off. Behind it, only a few buildings were immediately visible. At first glance, the first thing to pop into your head when looking at what once was a strip mall with a post office, video store, and organic market would be the word 'ravaged', similar to the way the first thing to pop into your head when looking at a full-to-the-brim dumpster would be 'garbage'.
Pete was the first to brave stepping out of the car. Then came Joe, then Claire (eager to lead her group), then the rest of Claire's clique pushing out before Andy and Patrick stepped out. The smell of something burning was all around, and the only sounds immediately audible were the sound of someone running by on desperate feet and another in hot pursuit.
"Well…" Pete broke up the nervous silence. "Let's head in."
"It looks kinda spooky!" Claire grabbed Pete's arm in one half real fear, one half fake fear, taking pleasure out of the fact that she just happened to be standing right next to him.
"Yeah!" Braids looked to her immediate left and saw Andy. She sprinted over a couple feet and reached Pete's other side, grabbing hold of it. "I'm SOOO SCARED!"
Pete ignored both the girls, not liking them enough to give them any words of comfort but maybe having a small fear deep within his subconscious mind like them, since he wasn't pushing them away.
Simply walking into the town proved to be the easiest way to get in, considering that there was no one there to ask for I.D., unlike the last town (pointed out by Patrick). As suspected, the first strip of shops was completely abandoned: half-destroyed or completely destroyed, windows broken or boarded up (or both), doors either hanging off the hinges or nonexistent. In front of the organic market was a pile of rotten fruit complete with flies buzzing around it, a few scattered pieces of money and a cloves of garlic, all strewn within a little five-foot spot, indicating that a thief had tried to steal something and was warded off. The next building was just an empty shed probably used for storage. 'NO MORE VAMPS' was spray-painted in huge, ugly, bright red letters across the side.
As they continued walking, they passed a large empty lot where a small group of people were gathered in a tight circle, their backs to the vigilantes and their company. Pete originally suspected they were doing some sort of illegal drug, they way they were so tightly packed, but upon taking a good hard look he realized each one of them was sucking blood out of their own little packets (they looked to be for an I.V. and were probably stolen from a hospital).
They also passed a small group of houses in a patch of mini-suburbia. The houses were not destroyed, but heavily boarded up, light seeping through cracks between wooden or metal panels. Other than that it looked like a nice little row of houses, and rock music with unimaginative guitar work was blasting out of one of the houses. When they reached the end of the street, the group stopped short when someone called out to them.
"Hey! Where are you going?" A teenage boy was looking out a first story window at the strange group. The window he had opened appeared to be padded, but still obviously could be pulled up and down like any other window (probably locked inside). The boy with a dark brown mop hairdo stared at them with a perplexed face, like they had just grabbed a handful of grass from his yard, put it in their hair, and did jazz dancing.
"Uh… to your town…" Joe answered.
More surprise. "What? WHY? Are you crazy?"
"No… we're hungry."
"…What, are you hobos or something?"
"We're not HOBOS! We're just coming in to do some grocery shopping."
"Well if you want raw meat, forget about it."
"Wait. Back up." Patrick interrupted. "Why are we crazy for going into your town?"
"Because the vampires will get to you!" He said in a 'duh' sort of way. "Didn't you know? Besides, it's way past local curfew. Not that anyone's out to enforce it anyway…"
"We can defend ourselves," Pete snapped. He continued walking. Claire and Braids continued to hang on to him, and Claire gave the boy a little wave when she left.
"Feh. I'll be there over your dead bodies to say 'I told you so' when we have to do city cleaning for volunteering credits at school."
"Aren't you pleasant."
Andrew lagged a bit to add, "Oh yeah, you may also want to try some other music, some older stuff maybe, because the stuff you're listening to isn't that good!"
"It's MY music! I MADE IT!" He yelled.
"Oh!" Andrew giggled. "Sorry!" But before he could finish, he heard the 'thump' of the window shutting.
Another lot or so further was another clump of buildings. It was a small town, but enough shops to separate housing and commercial buildings. When the group entered, they were greeted by screams, laughs and strange-looking people. One man about in his thirties was sitting on the stoop of a bookstore, looking perfectly calm, searching his pockets for something, wearing a T-shirt and khakis and a long bib-like collar made entirely out of cloves of garlic.
A teenage girl with two plastic shopping bags and soaking wet hair pushed through Pete's tightly wound clump. When she did, Pete, Claire, Noodle, and Braids all jumped back with a start.
"What?" Andy raised an eyebrow.
"That… that girl!" Pete pointed to her as she walked down the road towards the houses, not paying any attention to them. "Her… her hair!"
"What about it?"
"It's soaked in HOLY WATER!" He grimaced, and then spat as if the taste of it hung in his mouth.
"Ewww…" Claire hid behind Pete, stealing a glance at his butt.
"Whoa! Look at that!" Andrew pointed down a dark alley, where a fat, angry man stood with a titanium baseball bat, apparently beating three children in public. "What the hell?"
"Hey! What the fuck are you doing?!" Patrick yelled angrily as he ran over to the man.
"I'm getting rid of these three!" The fat, angry man replied angrily. "They're abominations!" Sure enough, the man was human, but the kids' pale complexions and the fact that their broken limbs were already beginning to heal back into place indicated vampirism.
"You're the only abomination I see here!" Patrick yelled. "They're just kids! They're victims in all this!"
The angry man opened his fat mouth to reply angrily and fatly, but before he could, Joe slammed his fist into the back of the man's fat, angry head, causing him to drop to the pavement like a mound of dazed and angry jelly. Andy and Joe then went to work untying the kids. "You guys get out of here," Andy said, slashing the ropes. The kids nodded fearfully and ran off, disappearing into the shadows in seconds.
"Hey, look! Mean… person!" Noodle pointed out as she led her friends over.
"Let's drink his blood!" Claire said. "I'm thirsty, and he's like a big angry tomato!"
"If you all drink from him, he might die of blood loss," Patrick warned.
"And this fact will haunt us for the rest of our lives," Braids replied.
"Where's Pete?" Joe asked.
"Over there," Braids said, waving in a general direction as Claire dug in. Joe nodded in understanding and walked in the opposite direction, soon leading Andy and Patrick to Pete.
"Here he is," Joe said, happy that he figured out how to procure directions from Braids. "Wassup, Pete?"
Pete was staring at a large, leafless oak tree. From the largest branch hung a coffin. The coffin had been roped to the tree, impaled several times with various silver objects, and spray-painted with the words 'SUKKERS GET OUT!' Next to it on the trunk of the tree itself, a dead body of a human woman was nailed to the tree. Graffiti on her chest spelled out the reply, 'I FOR AN I'. "Guys," Pete said, "This place is, like, at war with itself."
"Uh, yeah, Pete, thanks for pointing that out," Joe said, rolling his eyes.
"Maybe we shouldn't make it too visible that 4 out of 7 of us are vampires and another 4 are vampire hunters," Patrick muttered.
"Hey!" Claire yelled with enthusiasm dripping from her voice. "LOOK WHAT WE MADE!" Noodle handed her a big piece of white-painted cardboard, on which her and her friends had spray-painted 'WE'RE VAMPIRES!' in bright red all-caps. "We thought it would help to keep vampires from attacking us if they thought we were humans!"
"WHAT? You're vampires?" A young pale woman growled from behind, her oversized fangs poking out under a crazy-looking sneer. Her bright red, short cut hair contrasted greatly with the vivid blue bandana tied over it. "NO NO NO! GET OUT! GO AWAY! There are too many people here already! You're in our territory!"
Another girl about her age, with long, thick brown hair and a purple-and-green cap (equally as bright as the other's bandana), shouted back. "What is WRONG with you? It's NOT YOUR TERRITORY! It never was! You should leave, and so should they!" On the last note, she pointed an incriminating finger at the vigilantes and Claire's group.
"If you weren't wearing one of those gaudy garlic necklaces I would be feeding on you till you're effin' bones!"
"We should… make a quick getaway…" Patrick murmured to Pete.
"To where? Look at this place!" Pete was referring to how in every direction, people (dead and undead alike) were flocking. Most of the humans were wearing some manner of vampire protection, such as multiple silver or garlic necklaces or hair wet with holy water. A majority of the vampires looked skinny, sickly, and starving, probably due to a combination of all the protective methods the humans were taking against them and vampire overpopulation. People of all ages were yelling, all worked up. Shouts and gibes were loud, proud and many.
"Blow 'em up! That'll get 'em ta go away!"
"Oh, your sorry asses can't stand a chance against us!"
"OH YES WE CAN! You look like you've seen better days, eh?!"
"How am I supposed to get a 4.0 GPA with all this shit happening?!"
"I didn't want to be this!"
And then, just a couple comments later, the feel seemed to change...
"There are too many vampires here already!"
"Drive these goddamned visitors OUT! We don't need 'em!"
"They've come to ransack us for what we have left!"
"Then let's burn 'em!"
"Feed on 'em!"
"KILL THEM!"
"RUN!" Pete shouted, pushing the others through a slew people to emerge on another side.