by Phil Wohl
did was get him kicked through the visitor’s goal post and rolling out off the field.
And the trio of Carla, Kayla and Sharon formed a three-wide clothesline and took out the remaining men, Aaron, Daniel, Maxwell and Hartwell, who stood stiffly by while they were repeatedly hammered and fell to the ground. And now that the introductions between the two sides took place, in the form of a female-to-male beat-down, the real fight could officially begin.
Hartwell got up and got Carla in a headlock, while his son Daniel soared through the air with his expansive vampire wings unfurled and then crashed into her with great speed as Hartwell moved aside. Aaron was flipped into the air by Maxwell and then flattened Kayla as he came zooming down to the earth as a grizzly bear with incredible momentum. Then Daniel used his incredible speed and dexterity to wrap up Sharon and then furiously uncoil his arm to make her look like a spinning top headed for the chain-link fence between the field and the stands.
Sharon spun off the fence as Daniel yelled at his father-in-law Blake to take care of Sharon. The Former FBI agent switched from a whale back into cat and was propelled through the air by Hartwell, the breeze from his speed pushing his tabby hair back like a large fan. Just as Blake was over a dizzy Sharon, he made the transition back to the heaviest thing he could think of, which was his Orca whale self. He had thoughts about making the move to a hippo, but he waited to make that change until after he completed the squashing of Sharon. It was now seven on six, with the women down a body but definitely not out of the fight.
Emily quickly countered the loss by looking to even the sides. Blake got cocky when he changed into a hippo and then pranced around in his cat form before Emily tested the nine lives theory by jumping through the air and transitioning into a hawk and then a ram as she got closer to the track that surrounded the field. She angled her horns in such a way that she was able to spear Blake with her head down and then collect herself once her hooves touched down. She shook her head and the expired Blake the cat flew off her left horn and went flying through air, finally touching down under the home team stands on the left side of the field. It was now six on six.
Cal and Drew were confronted by Belinda and Maggie, as hunters surveyed the prospects of going against vampires. Cal and Drew were well-seasoned at combining their unnatural gifts and fighting in combination, just as Cal and his twin sister Emily were so adept at hunter teamwork. There were about 20 yards separating the two pairs, so Drew and Cal made up the gap by flying side-by-side as hawks, while the two vampires used wings of their own. It would have been an obvious mismatch between hawk and vampire, so the hunters participated in the game of chicken long enough to lure Belinda and Maggie into thinking that they had a decided advantage.
But instead of going through the hawk versions of Cal and Andrew, Belinda and Maggie pulled up at the last minute and extending their 20 fingernails as sword-like objects. Somewhere in between hawk and grizzly bear, the nails pierced through the two hunters effectively stopping the change and forcing them to revert back their mortal selves. The vampires floated back to the ground with their packages in toe and then released the holey men to expire on the stadium floor. Before Maggie and Belinda could move on to their next conquest, Hartwell and Daniel were returning the favor to the women - Hartwell using his deadly fingers to do in Belinda and Daniel doing the honors to his mother Maggie. Four on four.
Emily and Aaron were going at it, he as a grizzly bear and her using the experience and wherewithal to cycle through a series of changes that were intended to confuse him. He tried to keep up with her but when he couldn't keep up with her game of “match the hunter,” his put bull was easily bested by his grizzly bear with one death-producing swipe of her huge right paw. Four on three in favor of the women.
Maxwell evened the sides in a flash as he channeled all of his new-age powers and basically flashed through Emily and shut down all of her vital organs, reducing her to a pile of bones and skin at midfield. There were now three people left on each side, with Nicole, Carla and Kayla remaining for the women and the dynamic lineup of ancestral development that was Maxwell, Daniel and Hartwell. Three on three.
Perhaps the women had lost sight of the fact that the only had to kill one person out of the seven for the fight to be over. Perhaps they were so confident and self-assured that they were going to let the scenario play out before acting on the obvious strategy. Whatever the case was the sight of Hartwell being flanked by Daniel and Maxwell prompted the women to be immediately inflicted with a severe case of tunnel vision, where all they could see was the man in the middle, Hartwell.
Nicole, Carla and her daughter Kayla went right at Hartwell like three cold-seeking missiles. They didn’t even bother to change their facades to disguise their mission, preferring task completion over form and style points. The combined force of their inertia and strength had the impact of literally splitting Hartwell into three disconnected sections, but now before Maxwell and Daniel used their finger swords to disconnect the women’s heads from their bodies. The women had affectively won the night’s battle but none of them survived to bask in the spoils of victory. Only Daniel and his son Maxwell remained to pick of the pieces of the evening and respectfully deposit the other family members in the sun room to prepare for another wacky day of confrontation courtesy of Claire Vinson and her father Alexander Lowery.
FIFTEEN
Daniel and Maxwell went to sleep in their separate bedrooms and were fast asleep by the time the sun came up the next morning. The vampires usually slept very little, at least in a full horizontal and traditional kind of way. These new-age vampires could float for hours during the night and experience a great deal more than any mortal transitioning through a standard dream sequence. Traveling the globe and learning new things were the norm when all was quiet, as the vampires minds took them on a journey that few could ever experience.
Maxwell is in Egypt scaling the outside of the pyramids and testing its composition in order to calculate an accurate dating scenario, and Daniel was in Maine cracking open a few lobsters and dipping one of New England’s favorite delicacies in clarified butter. Daniel always loved lobster as a teenager, and this fascination waned somewhat in the real world because of the creature’s lack of blood, but did little to dull the craving in his subconscious.
Since the collective mood of the tribe was established by Hartwell’s initial morning thoughts, the scene in the sun room would be indicative of which way the pendulum was swinging. The slate was wiped clean as various members of the family awoke from their peaceful slumber. That was, until Hartwell woke up and felt a little achy at first. It was obvious that the vampire was feeling his age on this day but really didn’t want to hear about it because he was in complete denial.
“What’s the matter old man, feeling your age today?” Daniel said to his father as he helped him stand up.
Of course the two of them could have just levitated to the position without actually physically using an appendage… but Hartwell pushed Daniel’s hand away signifying that he didn’t want or need his help in simply standing up.
“Did he just call you ‘old man’?” Maggie asked in support of her husband.
“I believe he did,” Hartwell replied.
“You’re all looking pretty ‘long in the tooth’ this morning,” Daniel’s wife Nicole stated. “If you don’t mind me using one of your old sayings?” she said to a group of eight elder statesmen and stateswomen that were now standing together with their backs to the foot-to-ceiling bank of windows. The group of younger people was now facing them, with Daniel, Nicole, Andrew, Carla, Maxwell and Kayla standing tall in the line of relative adolescents.
“Long in the tooth,” Cal restated, trying to come to grips with the ageist message. “Why, I haven’t heard that one since I was your age and didn’t have to shave.”
That elicited a chuckle out of the line of elders, which included Hartwell, Maggie, Emily, Aaron, Agent Blake, Sharon, Belin
da and the aforementioned Calvin Brewster.
The pull from Hartwell’s aging revelation was so strong that it awoke Thaddeus and Garrison from sound sleeps, as they were lying next to the women they were set to marry in Las Vegas later that day. Without any care for their new girlfriends, the men got up and threw on their clothes before hastily exited the premises without leaving a note of their whereabouts. What had been the only thing they thought about, besides how cool they were, was now buried in random thoughts behind defending the turf of the elder generation against a group of young upstarts trying to make a mockery of the separation.
“Maybe you want us to speak louder so you can hear what we’re saying,” Carla shouted at the top of her voice while trying to purposely over-annunciate what she was saying.
“She didn’t just act like we’re heard of hearing, did she?” a perturbed Emily said to her husband Aaron.
“I believe she did,” he replied.
It was early in the morning but that didn’t stop the neophytes from continue the all-out assault.
“I hear they have a good Early Bird Dinner Special at The Beach Haven Diner,” Andrew said and then motioned at the group, “You
