by Matt Rogers
Chapter 13
Anyone who ‘s ever lived in Dallas will tell you there are two things by far the most memorable; the restaurants and the heat. Other parts of the country have their own flavor of the culinary delights they specialize in and I’m not about to disparage the wonderful Cajun spices of Louisiana or the bountiful seafood available on the upper east coast but for overall greatness one only has to visit Big D to enjoy the most mouth-watering meals this great Earth has to offer. Why, you ask, is Dallas such a great place for dining?
LOTS OF COWS?
Because no other place has incorporated another country’s cooking into their own recipes’ and made them unique. Texas has Tex-Mex food and it’s quite possibly the tastiest food there is. Meat, cheese, sauce and bread (tortillas if you want to get technical) are the mainstays for the Tex-Mex diet with rice and beans thrown in for gastric pleasure. Okay, I know not everyone agrees Tex-Mex food is greater than sliced bread but I should point out we don’t necessarily need sliced bread so the analogy is moot.
MOOT?
It means irrelevant, and the only reason I can think of for people choosing other foods over Tex-Mex is sometimes it can run to the spicy side of life. This isn’t because the chefs are trying to destroy one’s taste-buds, no, they are merely enhancing the flavor of the wonderfully quenching sweet-tea which has evolved alongside the great southern dish. But some people can’t seem to handle the exotic heat coming from the kitchen, which is perfectly alright, but if they think the food’s hot then they’ve really got a surprise coming when they encounter the outside temperature. Any time of day during six months of the year Texas is mind-blowingly hot; so hot the soles of shoes have been known to melt on sidewalks. This heat phenomenon is not unexpected to the great people of the Lone Star State, no, they have learned to adapt and overcome. You need to go to the store?
UM, NO?
Turn the truck on, crank the air-conditioner up and wait in the comfort of your living room until the vehicle cools down enough for life to survive. You need to go to the supermarket for food?
NO, WHY DO YOU KEEP ASKING?
Buy only enough to fit in the cab of the truck, a cab previously air-conditioned, never the bed of the truck. Why?
I HAVE NO IDEA.
Because…
“Oh my God, they’re cooking!” Phillip yelled.
“Crap! Get them out of there!”
“Alright, who didn’t see this one coming?”
Yep. We’d covered old Bob and Steve What’s-his-name with a tarp and sat them against the cab in the bed of the pickup but we forgot one small detail; metal conducts heat and we put nothing under the former salesmen.
“I thought they’d be okay. They just got off the bottom of the lake for crying out loud!”
“Dang it!”
“What?”
“His leg’s stuck. We need a spatula or something.”
“Johnny, do you have a spatula?”
“No, sorry.”
“How can you not have a spatula?”
“I don’t know, Phillip. I just don’t have one, okay”
“Well, okay, it’s kind of weird though. How do you cook hamburgers?”
“Like everyone else in the civilized world; I give people money to do it for me.”
“Yeah? Which one’s your favorite?”
“Well, I’m kind of partial to the double meat cheeseburger at…”
“Boys!” Trudy said.
“Yes, Mistress” we both responded.
“Rip them out of there and get them upstairs!”
“Yes, Mistress.”
Texas heat does have its advantages though, one of them being a complete lack of people outside during the hottest parts of the day which is why no one saw us lugging Bob and Steve What’s-his-name up three flights of stairs to the blissfully cool apartment of mine. It was cool because I was going missing so why would I turn off the air-conditioner?
GOOD POINT.
Thanks.
“Sit them on the couch” I said.
“Where’s the couch,?” replied George who had Bob over his right shoulder.
“Right there next to the window” I responded.
“What, you mean the pile of clothes there?”
“The couch is under the clothes, George.”
“Oh, man, you really need a maid.”
“I can’t afford laundry detergent; what makes you think I could hire a maid?”
“Johnny?”
“Yes, Phillip?”
“Do you have any towels around?”
“I think so. Why?”
“Because Stevie-boy here is leaking on your floor.”
I rounded up some towels, tossed my wardrobe back on the floor where it belonged and we sat Bob and Steve on the couch.
“Are they going to do something?” I asked.
“Not right away. They’ll need a little help before they give up what they know” said George.
“What do they know?”
“We’ll know after they tell us” he replied.
“Oh.”
“Johnny?”
“Yes, Vivian?”
“Why do you have a Victoria’s Secret catalogue?”
“Okay, everybody out. I need about fifteen minutes to clean up around here and I don’t want you around while I do it, okay?”
“Okay, but I don’t understand why you’d have a woman’s undergarment magazine around? Oh, were you thinking of buying something for a certain someone in your life?” the cute little blond blood-sucker asked.
“Yes, Vivian, that’s exactly what I was going to do. Now, you four get along and grab some lunch while I get to tidying up.”
“Okay, everybody, let’s give Johnny a little privacy. We need to run down to the pharmacy anyway and I think we could all use a little nourishment” said George.
The four of them left and I began my wild tornado clean-up which consisted of throwing everything not bolted down into one closet or another. Everything in the refrigerator I tossed in the garbage and I had the place looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself; except for the bathroom which I had never previously cleaned and, apparently, needed some sort of chiseling machine to remove the residue from the shower tiles and toilet bowl. How can water, the cleanest stuff on earth, possibly leave behind something impossible to remove?
IT DOES SEEM ODD.
Yes, it does.
I was working on the countertops of the kitchen when I glanced up and noticed my two previously living co-workers watching me from their perch on my previously un-slimed couch.
“Hey guys, how you holding up?”
No response…
“What’s wrong, cat got your tongue?”
… then a crawfish emerged from Bob’s mouth.
I was awakened to the beautiful face of Trudy standing over me with a worried expression gently asking if I was alright.
“Yeah, I’m alright, it’s just that I saw…”
And I was immediately on my feet because there was no way I was letting one of those nasty little lake-dwelling, tongue-eating crustaceans anywhere near my prone body. The thought of the freaky looking crab-cake having the opportunity to take a pinch out of me with his one-inch claws still gives me the creeps.
“Hey, Johnny, we brought you a double-meat cheeseburger; you hungry?” asked Phillip.
Surprisingly and unequivocally, yes.
“What did you get at the pharmacy?” I asked after wolfing down the burger in record time.
“A syringe and some other stuff” replied George.
“A syringe? They sell those?”
“No.”
“Then how did you…?”
And both Vampires disappeared into thin air except for their clothes which were still there, standing upright without a body to be seen.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot the whole vanishing thing. Hey, I bet it comes in real handy when you want anything at one of those boutiques, you know?”
They were looking at me
strangely.
“You know; just walk on in to one of those high-priced clothing stores and…”
They were still looking at me strangely.
“What?”
“That’s stealing” said Vivian.
“Well, yeah but, I mean, it’s not like they don’t rip off their own customers; you know? Come on! A four hundred dollar handbag? How’s that not ripping off your customers? Am I right? Huh? Come on, Phillip, a little help please.”
“That’s stealing” he replied.
“Oh, okay, you too. So I guess it’s okay to use people as some kind of pregnant feeding tube but you draw the line at stealing from a bunch of rich designers who employ malnourished children from third-world countries to make stilettos, huh?”
“It’s not the same” said Trudy.
“You’re dang tooting it’s not; stealing is much kinder.”
“No, that’s not what I mean” she said.
“Oh? What did you mean?”
“Stealing is taking from someone, something they would not otherwise give freely.”
“Yeah, so?”
“The people we use to feed our pregnant Vampires willingly do so.”
“They what?”
“They willingly give themselves up.”
Have you ever gotten yourself into an argument you really wanted to get out of?
WHENEVER I TALK TO YOU.
Shut up. You know you’re beat but can’t seem to find the way to admit defeat and give in. Now, my guess is we really didn’t want to be in the argument in the first place. Maybe we were just adding to the conversation or we thought the other person was joking and we’d say something absurd to make the joke even funnier only to find the other person was dead serious and had the facts to back up their point of view.
“What do you mean, Trudy?”
“The Humans we use today are willing participants in the blood giving process.”
“Why would they willingly give their blood?” I asked.
“Because most of them have nothing left to live for” she replied.
Most arguments, I believe, are merely mental battling devices used to determine if you can string together enough coherent statements as to make your side at least appear intelligent. It doesn’t matter if you actually believe in what you’re arguing for, it’s only the appearance of having thought out the process and having a good answer to support whatever side you happened to have chosen. Why do I believe this?
BECAUSE YOU’RE EXTREMELY CYNICAL.
Because an argument can only occur if there’s more than one possible answer to a question. No rational person is going to argue sand tastes good. Now, we both know you’ve met people who’ll argue the sun doesn’t really exist or there’s a justification in the hunting of whales but these people are just argue-addicts. They’ll pick the other side of an argument out of pure habit probably before their brains even realize what the subject matter is merely because they like to hear themselves talk and they’re usually good at it. Very, very frustrating people.
“They have nothing to live for?” I asked.
“Most of them don’t” she answered.
“What does that mean?”
“It means most of them have terminal illnesses which have no chance of a cure or remission and they willingly give up their life-blood to help our species deliver our prodigy.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Some of them are in pain, some of them feel like a burden to their children and some of them wish to receive what we have to offer.”
“What do you have to offer?”
“A second chance” she said.
“A second chance?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to make me pull this out of you one question at a time, Trudy?”
“No, sorry, sometimes I forget you don’t know who you are.”
I chose not to respond to that cryptic sentence and instead waited for her to explain how in the world getting your blood sucked out of you to help a Vampire’s embryo cope with her oversensitive immune system would, in any way, lead to a second chance.
“Johnny, the blood the Humans give allows the unborn child to grow without needing to fight the Vampire’s immune system which views the child as an invader. We readily admit we previously took Humans unwillingly and used them for sustenance and we’re sorry, well, as sorry as we can be for using another organism to provide life for our next generation. Anyway, that was in the past and now we use willing subjects and in return we give them a taste of our blood.”
“A taste of your blood?”
“Yes, after the transfusion the Humans are afforded the opportunity to receive some of the pregnant Vampire’s blood in exchange for providing their own. It’s a win-win opportunity, something which very rarely happens in a person’s lifetime and we’re almost never rebuked with the offer.”
“What does Vampire blood do to Humans?”
“It allows them to hold off death for as long as the blood is viable. It eliminates all pain and suffering while it’s in circulation. It is, in fact, a second and last chance to do anything they wish and are physically capable of before the blood runs its course.”
“How the heck does it do that?”
“Well, death and life, pain and pleasure are all ruled at the molecular level. Cancer is a mutated cell unable to perform it’s necessary function. Heart disease is the result of damaged cells unable to contract and therefore unable to deliver the blood necessary for the survival of the other cells down the circulatory line. Vampire blood consists of cells and antibodies which stop any more growth and spread of the damaged or mutated cells.”
“So what, they heal the people?”
“No, they put the process of death or misery on hold.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as the Vampire blood remains in their circulation.”
“So they could technically stay alive forever?”
“Well, forever’s an impossibility, eventually the carbon you’re made with will decay but for the sake of argument, yes, they could technically stay alive for a very, very long time.”
“What’s the longest anyone’s ever stayed alive?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
“Huh?”
“Bob and Steve. If you’ve known them for three months then they’re definitely in the running for the longest surviving Zombies on record.”
The advance of medical science may very well be perceived as this generation’s greatest accomplishment if the information revolution doesn’t win instead. For as long as people have been around they’ve been looking for ways to do two things; stay alive and pain free. The medical revolution brought about these two desired resolutions and it changed the very fabric of society but not always in ways viewed as beneficial. It’s true people live much longer and can be kept relatively pain-free but there’s a catch; someone has to pay for it. It’d be nice if the medical sciences were abstract, cut off as it were from the other motivating factors which propel societies but, unfortunately, it’s not so. Medical science relies on the same thing all the occupations in the civilized world rely upon; money. Now, in a utopian society I’m sure there’d be plenty of people ready and willing to spend their entire lives looking for ways to benefit the medical community for a pittance and some of these angelic souls even exist today in the commercialized world but there are nowhere near enough of them to accomplish what the carrot did for the advancement of medicine in our generation. The carrot was money. The donkey chasing the carrot was scientists and doctors. The recipient of what the donkey carried was society as a whole. What the donkey carried was life prolonging, pain-eradicating drugs and surgical procedures the people have been clamoring for since they first learned a toothache is one of the most miserable experiences a person can go through and people, no matter what they say, really do want one more day.
“What are you doing with that needle, George?”
“Get
ting blood.”
“Why are you…? Vivian, what are you doing?”
“Rolling up my blouse sleeve.”
“Why are you…? Oh crap!”
Fainting at the sight of blood is a misnomer in my case. I have no problem with the sight of blood; it’s when it’s sucked out of a person’s arm using a needle where I have a problem. I think I’d make a horrible drug addict.
“Johnny?”
“Yes, Trudy?”
“Are you okay?”
“Is George still sucking blood from Vivian?”
“No, he’s done.”
“Then I’m okay” I said standing up and…
“Johnny?”
“Yes, Trudy?”
“Are you okay?”
“Is George still injecting Bob with Vivian’s blood?”
“No, he’s done.”
“Then I’m… hold on… is anyone getting any blood sucked or injected?”
“Oh, well, you might want to wait one more second then.”
“Thank you, Trudy.”
“You’re welcome, Johnny.”
