by Phil Wohl
Claire Vinson made contact with the group for the first time in a few days, even though she already sensed that the collective mood was in flux and another division within the ranks had materialized. She walked into the kitchen and toasted a bagel and then got some almond milk and a few packs of blood for Maxwell. She didn’t make eye contact with anyone and was about as far away from making eye contact as a pair of eyes and the floor could be. Her bagel popped out of the toaster, she placed it on a plate and then spread some vegetable cream cheese on the two open halves. She then smushed the two pieces together and walked out of the kitchen with the bagel, the blood and the almond milk without acknowledging all of the people around her. The truly strange part of the scene was that it didn’t really register in the minds of the people around Claire that she was anything but a person getting some food and leaving the kitchen. Once she left the area, any thoughts of her were erased and her significance as Samuel’s new girlfriend was basically a non-event.
As far as Samuel was concerned, his mind and body were in a holding pattern and he was incapable of accessing any of his powers. The key to Claire’s plan was to neutralize him long enough to eliminate Hartwell and then turn against young, naive Samuel and take him out of the picture. However, the one thing that Lowery’s daughter didn’t realize, because her father was not aware, was that Hartwell was not the key to vampire life or death anymore.
Once Hartwell reached his 100th death, he was then attacked by Cal as a mortal in order to complete wipe him from the earth. Everyone associated with Hartwell – except Daniel – had lost all of their powers and were living as mortals. Daniel sensed that Cal would probably make a run at Hartwell, so he devised a plan to both counteract the siege and renew Hartwell contract as a vampire. So, while Hartwell was still the key to ending all of the fights, it was Daniel’s death that had become the registry for the group in the race to 100 making it highly unlikely that Claire and Lowery’s plans would come to fruition.
Back in the kitchen area, the women started making a healthy breakfast consisting of egg whites, wheat toast and assorted fruit. The men were as hungry as they were depressed and paranoid, but their collective cooking skills on this morning would have barely added up to a box of cereal drowned in milk. Cal looked at the group of happy, perky women and all he could think about was drowning his sorrows in plates of breakfast items that he didn’t have to cook. Images of pancakes drenched in syrup, eggs, bacon, and waffles danced through his clouded mind. He looked around at his downtrodden brethren and said, “Anyone up for the diner?”
Hartwell replied, “Yeah.”
Daniel added, “Let’s drive, because I don’t feel like walking.”
“Yeah, my feet hurt,” Drew said.
“I’m really achy and I have a ringing in my ears,” Agent Blake stated.
“Can I drive?” Maxwell asked.
“Have you ever driven a car?” Aaron asked.
“No. Does anyone else want to drive?” Max asked.
A smattering of under-enthused “No’s” went around as Hartwell flipped the keys of the large SUV to Maxwell and all of the joy of a first-time driver drained from his face - courtesy of Claire - and he was a walking zombie like the rest of the group as they made their way from the main room to the door to the huge garage.
The men went to the Beach Haven Diner and barely moved from their large table the entire day. Breakfast turned into lunch, which then turned into dinner as the sun set. The head waitress Trixie had only seen one other person accomplish that feat, but he had died of a heart attack after eating a greasy lunch and nobody realized that he was dead until she brought him a chicken parmesan dinner and he didn’t ask for extra sauce, or “gravy,” as he put it.
Back at the house, the women were involved in a crafting bonanza, scrapbooking in between some early morning knitting of footies and a late session of shirt appliquéing. Kayla proudly displayed the first shirt to come off the assembly line that read, “TEAM FOOTIES.”
The men walked through the door and Maxwell flipped the keys to the gas-guzzling house on wheels on the counter and joked to the other guys, “What’s a footie? Is it like a steaming doodie?”
The men were now fueled up and much of the down thoughts and terrible body language had vanished along with plates of pancakes, burgers and prime rib dinners. Kayla did a quick count of the men and whispered to her tight group of sisters, “Seven on seven. We can definitely take them.”
Emily waked to the men and was flanked by Belinda and Carla on each side of her with the other four women in tight formation behind them.
“Midnight. Beach Haven High School football stadium. Be there or be…” she said as she changed into the only thing she could that would rhyme “bear,” and then snarled for the added affect.
The powers of the house members were starting to resurface, which either signaled a waning of Claire’s influence or a sick need for her to inflict additional damage on the inhabitants of the house by summoning more painful methods of inflicting pain.
While the action was heating up inside the house, it was also percolating outside of the friendly confines of the shore. The action was getting hot and heavy with Thaddeus, Gary and the Bernard twins, Ava and Theresa.
“We should take off to Vegas tomorrow and get married!” an enthusiastic Thaddeus said to the group as they rolled through the drive-thru at Beach Haven Burger.
Gary was on-board with anything that Thad suggested, especially if it involved more partying and anything his parents would get steamed up about.
“My parents are going to be so ticked off!” he exclaimed.
Fifty year-old divorcee Ava Bernard went along with just about every cool thing the boys suggested, but she needed a bit of clarity on this one, “Your parents are still alive?”
Gary thought about the question and it must have pierced a small hole in his subconscious, because he had a vision of first his father dying of a heart attack and then his mother dying of missing her father. His totally upbeat and radical demeanor downshifted and he replied, “No. They are both gone now.”
“Oh, we’re sorry to hear that,” widower Theresa Bernard said as she poked her seemingly insensitive sister in the ribs. “We would be happy to go to Vegas with you tomorrow,” trying to salvage a connection with the only two guys in town with both a heartbeat and money to burn.
FOURTEEN
With Thad and Gary less than 24 hours away from eloping in the devil’s playground, all of the energy in the town shifted to the football field at the high school for a seven-by-seven battle of the sexes. The men usually would have adopted a “ladies first” attitude and let the women leave first, but they were in no mood to be polite on this night. Hartwell led the group out of the front door ahead of the women, who were all wearing colorful footies over their shoes. Cal pointed at the women’s feet and sent out a mocking, cackling laugh that sent the rest of the men into teasing hysterics like a pack of vengeful hyenas.
Kayla put up her stop sign hand and said “Whatever!” to the boys as they looked back and then disappeared out of the front door and into the night.
Emily was always the defiant one, whether she was going head-to-head with Hartwell or scrambling for the last slice of pizza in an eight-slice pie.
“We’re going to kick some footie tonight!”
The other six women danced up and down on their knitted foot covering that wasn’t necessarily a sock or a slipper, but was more like an adult version of a baby bootie.
The men broke into their usual jog and then run on the way to the field, but the women walked most of the way making the men wait 25 minutes for their arrival. They grew so impatient that they almost started beating each other up and burning most of that testosterone-infused energy up.
“Here they come,” Agent Blake said to the group as they broke from their scrum in a rugby match simulation.
The women appeared to be fairly su
bdued on the outside, but they were anything but calm on the inside. The bad blood between the sides had come to a boil during the night and was about to spill all over the field. The seven women broke their casual walk and darting at the men without provocation or warning, catching the males’ off-guard and scrambling. There was no strategy other than “Footie Power!” that was being utilized, although the ladies were showing a very high level of teamwork as compared to the every man for himself credo of the club-draggers.
It was a strange sight to see two huge grizzly bears wearing rainbow-colored lower paw coverings, but Emily and Belinda looked right at home as they took turns pulverizing Agent Blake, who eventually snapped out of the surprise attack by changing into his Orca killer whale self and getting the women off him with a blow-hole full of sea water.
Cal was squared off with Nicole, who was beating him to a pulp as a human and then she switched to her dolphin form and swatted him across the face with her powerful tail. He used the slap as a wakeup call and changed into a ram and butted Nicole and sent her spinning half-way down the field.
Maggie went after Andrew and picked him up and slammed him to the turf four times, and then five and six times until Drew was almost unconscious. He turned into a pit bull, hoping that his alter ego would rev up his dulled senses, but all it
