Fright Squad

by Flint Maxwell

  I scrambled up, knowing my time before the vamp found that other way was short. It was then that I realized the stake had been knocked out of my hands. Go figure.

  The moon, which had been hanging plump and fat above us, was now hidden by a swarm of dark clouds, and I couldn’t see for shit. I looked like Velma from Scooby-Doo when she couldn’t find her glasses, patting around on the ground helplessly.

  When I found it, it was too late. The roof of the BMW ripped open, making the sound of a garbage masher. Then the vampire blasted through the opening. It flashed its yellow eyes at me.

  Right then the moon decided to stop being a dick and showed its powerful white light, but that didn’t matter much considering I had already found the stake and the vamp was getting away.

  The moon’s light also afforded me a better look at the she-vamp, which I could’ve done without. Seeing them transformed in films and textbooks at the Academy was one thing. Seeing them in person was just gross.

  Its claws were huge and as sharp as any stake I’d ever seen, so big at the end of its ropy-muscular arms. The beast’s mouth was covered in the blood of its victim, as if it had just finished winning a cherry pie eating contest.

  The thing screeched right in my direction. I caught a whiff of the coppery blood on its breath.

  Also gross.

  My chance to catch and slay it was slipping away. I rushed toward the car, ready to spring forward and tackle this thing right off of the roof.

  That was exactly what I did.

  Unsurprisingly, the vampire wasn’t having it, wasn’t waiting around to get killed. It batted its wings and lurched into the air. One of them hit me right in the face. Probably broke my nose. Still, I held on, able to snag the thing’s foot, which was equally cold and claw-y.

  “Abe!” Maddie shouted. I caught a glimpse of her. Her face was a mask of fear and anguish, but it was only momentary. In this business, you couldn’t be scared for long, not if you wanted to get things done.

  Maddie threw herself forward, snagging onto one of the vampire’s wings.

  The beast was too strong, and suddenly we were both up in the air, hovering above the BMW and Lover’s Pass. My legs kicked out for purchase, but the soles of my boots barely scraped the twisted, torn metal from the vampire’s exit. It was now or never. Drop to the roof and get out of this with a few injuries or hold on for dear life and probably die while trying to slay this bastard.

  The choice was easy.

  I held on and the she-vamp flew higher and higher.

  Toward that dick of a moon.

  3

  What Would You Like for Dinner? How About a Nice Stake?

  We were close to the tops of the trees now, or so it seemed, and since Lover’s Pass already overlooked the city, seeing those microscopic buildings beneath us wasn’t something I enjoyed.

  “Hold her! Hold her!” Zack was yelling, but he sounded very far away.

  “What the hell do you think I’m doing?” I shouted back.

  It was hold her or fall to the ground and break a bunch of bones with some good old fashion organ rearranging thrown in for the fun of it.

  The vampire veered to the left. My stomach flipped, did a barrel roll, and I was sure I’d vomit until I saw the reason the creature veered in the first place. Maddie’s grip had slipped. She was falling now.

  It seemed that I had an eternity to comprehend this new bit of information, when in reality, I probably had a millisecond to make up my mind and do what I did.

  Which was let go myself—well, one hand at least. Dangling by the terrible foot-claw, which still had ripped pieces of pink leather attached to it—once an expensive dress shoe, I’m sure—I snagged Maddie by her wrist. There was a slight snap beneath my fingers, a crack, but it was a lot better than hearing/seeing Maddie splatter on the parking lot below.

  Turned out that Maddie slipping from the wing probably saved her life. When I grabbed her, the vampire moved over the top of a few bushes.

  So when my grip slipped, she landed in them, which was much better than landing where she would’ve landed had the vampire not moved.

  With Maddie free from the vampire and the creature now off balance, fighting against gravity and my own solid hundred-and-sixty-pounds, Zack had his chance.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw he had perched on top of the PT Cruiser, crouched like an expert marksman, with one of the modified crossbows in his hands.

  Cringing, I said, “I swear to God and all things Holy, Zack—if you hit me—” then the twang of the crossbow reached my eardrums and before I knew it something bit me right in the ass.

  “Oh, shit!” Zack yelled. “Sorry!”

  Not a very good shot. I winced, felt a trickle of blood fall down the back of my leg.

  “Reloading!” Zack shouted. “Hold her still!”

  Probably afraid for her own butt despite being out of Zack’s line of fire, Maddie shouted, “NO!”

  So now I had to deal with a blood-crazed vampire and one of my best friends wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night shooting stakes at me. It was the thought of another piece of wood in my ass that motivated me to get a move on.

  I grabbed the stake jutting out of my backside, and yanked it free. The pain wasn’t all that bad, not at first. With the stake in one hand and the creature’s claw-foot in the other, I used the momentum of our movement to propel myself forward. I’m not the strongest guy in the world, but this was all I needed.

  The stake, dripping with my own blood, found the vampire’s leathery chest cavity. I don’t know the best way to describe what it’s like staking one of these sons-of-bitches, especially to someone who has never done it before, but I’ll try.

  It’s gross. That’s for sure. I mean, stabbing anything is gross. But stabbing a vamp is italicized gross.

  The burst of blood drenched my face. It was freezing cold from just sitting there, no longer pumping through the vamp’s veins, and once it settled into the shirt and jeans I was wearing, it felt like I weighed an extra fifty pounds.

  The vampire shrieked, the glinting-gold eyes looking down at me with pure hate—but something else, too. Something like gratefulness, like I’d freed the thing from its vampiric nightmare.

  That was all well and good and all, but the least the bastard could’ve done was land a little more softly. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what happened. Its wings stopped beating, eyes stopped glinting, and mouth full of fangs stopped snarling. I felt like I was going down a huge roller coaster without a seatbelt or lap bar, too afraid to let go of the sides of the cart like I was too afraid to let go of the she-vamp’s claw-foot.

  So down we went, falling for what felt like hours. Until—

  Boom!

  The gravel punched me in pretty much every vital organ and I gasped for breath, the cold flesh of the dead vampire half-pressed on my legs.

  “Well that sucked,” I said.

  Shadows came over me, blocking out the moonlight streaming down on Lover’s Pass. I was seeing little pinpricks floating around my head, stars that were not hanging high in the sky, like I was some sort of cartoon character just hit with an anvil. Through these stars, I saw Maddie and Zack. Zack was laughing, but Maddie’s face was blanched by worry. She kept muttering, asking me a million questions I couldn’t understand, let alone answer.

  “That was legendary,” Zack said.

  “Dude,” I replied, “you really need to work on your aim.”

  “Quit getting your ass in the way of my shots,” Zack said.

  I flipped him off like that punk high schooler had flipped us off earlier. At this point, I figured to hell with the mantra kill ‘em with kindness.

  I looked down at my feet and saw a dark-red stream of blood pulsing from the stake wound. The stake had broken upon landing, but it was still in there. Wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was the she-vamp.

  Vamps, once staked, unfortunately don’t disappear into a puff of dust or ashes or smoke like you might’ve seen in var
ious vampire-related media. You kill a vampire, you have to deal with the mess, and most likely, clean up that mess, too. As part of our jobs with BEAST, that’s exactly what we had to do.

  Maddie helped me up. For a long moment, we kind of just stood above the she-vamp’s twisted corpse and looked—I mean really looked.

  Then something happened, something we weren’t expecting.

  From the vampire’s glassy eyes, two neon green worms burst through, plopped on her chest and left a trail along her pink dress. They weren’t like any worms I had ever seen before.

  “What the heck is that?” Maddie asked.

  “I-I don’t know,” I answered.

  “Yuck,” Zack said, bringing a boot heel down on the worms, which screeched as he crushed them.

  I’ll admit I was stunned. A lot had happened in a short span of time.

  “Help me load it,” I said after the weird moment passed.

  Zack sighed. “I’d really rather not touch it.”

  “Oh, you big pansy.” Maddie broke away from our sides and grabbed one of the she-vamp’s limp legs, rolled it over so it was face-down.

  I followed. When I stepped, a spike of pain rippled through my ass and lower back. It was then that I remembered Zack had shot me with one of the stakes. The worms had taken my mind off of that particular injury, though I really don’t know how.

  My dirty hand pressed up against the wound, pulled it away. On my palm was blood. My blood.

  Zack saw me do this. “Oh, shit, man. Sorry about that. Really sorry.”

  “Is it deep?” I asked. “I can’t see it.” Which was true, but it certainly felt deep. Really, when I set out that night, I hadn’t expected getting staked in the backside.

  “Dude, I’m not getting that close to your ass.” Zack curled his lip up in a snarl and leaned away from me like I was the one suffering from vampirism.

  “You’re the one who shot me! Least you could do is let me know how bad it is,” I said.

  “Ask Maddie,” he hissed.

  “Dude,” I said. “You shot me.”

  Sighing and shaking his head, Zack took his cell phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight, then he bent down and looked.

  “Well?” I said.

  Meanwhile, Maddie strolled past us with a blue tarp she got from the trunk of the Cruiser. “You two are unbelievable,” she said.

  “I can’t really tell,” Zack answered me, ignoring Maddie.

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” Maddie now said. She held the folded up tarp under her arms. “You’ll live.”

  “Well, yeah…I hope so,” I answered. “But I think I’ve earned the right to sit this one out.” I glared at Zack, seeing the reflection of the moon in his glasses. “If I even can sit.”

  Zack waved his hand. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Get over it. It happened, like, ages ago.”

  I looked at a nonexistent watch on my wrist. “Try, like, two minutes ago.”

  With that, I hobbled back to the Cruiser. My whole body was aching, not just my backside. As it turned out, I couldn’t sit without a considerable amount of pain, so I elected to lay on my stomach in the back. I turned the headlights and the radio on and relaxed while Zack and Maddie wrapped the vampire’s body up in the tarp. Over the speakers, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper played. I reached over the middle console and turned the volume down low enough for neither of them to hear. I even sang along quietly to distract my mind from the pain in my butt.

  Just when Zack and Maddie had the vampire’s corpse wrapped up in the tarp, not as snugly as a burrito, I might add (you could still see a bit of leathery wing hanging out of the top and a claw-hand near the bottom, though how that was possible, I literally had no idea), the song changed from “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to “Rocket Man” by Elton John, to which I, too, sang softly under my breath.

  About five minutes later, Zack got in the Cruiser and backed up toward the wrapped up corpse of the vampire.

  As they loaded it into the back, Zack said that we were officially BEAST agents. Screw that patrol and surveillance stuff. Next stop was vet-level assignments.

  “We need a name,” he said, “like the Three Musketeers or something, but instead has to do with monster hunting. How about…Creature Crew?”

  Maddie and I looked at each other, made sour faces.

  “Nah,” I said.

  “Monster Mashers?” Zack continued.

  “Keep trying,” Maddie said, then she called the incident into NOD HQ (Northeastern Ohio Division Headquarters of BEAST). Octavius, our boss, said he’d send out a crew for cleanup.

  There was still a dead kid in the ruined BMW. We decided to leave him…just in case. Didn’t want to muck up a crime scene.

  We waited around for a while. Maddie and Zack set up a blockade at the entrance to Lover’s Pass and a few cars were turned away.

  I continued my karaoke.

  “That was pretty ballsy,” Zack said when we were all in the car, “dressing up like a human and going on a date. Almost unheard of.” He shook his head. “Never trust a horny vampire, I guess.”

  “The vampires never cease to amaze me,” Maddie said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t understand the worm-things, either.”

  “Eh,” Zack answered me, “vamps are gross. Wouldn’t surprise me if they all had weird worms eating away at their brains.” He trailed off, looked out at the full moon. “What about The Beast Brigade?”

  “Getting warmer, I think,” I said. “Needs to be more obvious, you know? How about Ghoul Gang?”

  “No,” Maddie said, “that one sounds like we’re evil.”

  “Agreed,” Zack said.

  The crew Octavius sent arrived not long after this conversation. They grimaced at the high schooler’s corpse, then grimaced at the vamp’s in the Cruiser’s trunk.

  “Report to Octavius,” Agent Darren Campbell said. He had a gut like a sack full of bowling bowls, lumpy and sagging, and he was always snacking on something. Even now around all this blood and gore, he tipped back a carton of Milk Duds to his mouth. I liked him.

  The other agents—Lisa Ferdinand, Frank DeCapo, and May Stein—combed over the scene with black lights and gloved hands. I liked them, too.

  “Poor dude,” Campbell said as we watched the other agents lift the bloody body from the backseat. I was leaning up against the hood of the Cruiser when he looked over at me and said, “Milk Dud?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  After tonight, after seeing what the Academy had showed me on textbooks and film slides in the flesh, I didn’t know if I’d ever eat again.

  4

  Filling Holes—Not What It Sounds Like

  We drove out of Lover’s Pass and into the night. Each bump on the road sent a jolt of pain to my rear-end, which made me grit my teeth. After a while, I figured Zack was seeking out every pothole and speed bump on purpose.

  “I hate filling out reports,” he said. “Especially this late.”

  Zack was referring to our impending meeting in Octavius’s office.

  “At least we’re still alive to fill out reports,” Maddie said. “We could be dead.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Zack said.

  “It’s just because you can’t read,” I said, poking fun at him, “isn’t it?”

  “Hey, don’t make me kick your ass, Crowley,” Zack said.

  “Can’t do any worse than staking it,” I replied.

  After a while, Maddie spoke up. “I think something’s happening,” she said. “Something big.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, look at tonight. In all the times we’ve had to patrol Lover’s Pass, we never once caught a vampire in the act. They’re always close by, waiting to swoop in, but this one was already feeding,” Maddie answered.

  Zack got on to the highway now, heading into downtown Akron, the Cruiser’s engine wheezing as it struggled getting past fifty miles per hour.

  “You m
ight be right,” I said. “The vamp was out in the open, going to a dance.”

  That was big, actually. Vampires liked to stick to the shadows.

  Already, the Cruiser was slowing down as Zack got on the exit that guided us toward downtown.

  Maddie’s phone buzzed and Zack looked over at her. I’d say it was with jealousy, but I couldn’t see his eyes.

  A big grin spread on Maddie’s face.

  “Boyfriend?” Zack asked.

  Maddie didn’t have a boyfriend.

  “No,” she said and turned the phone in our direction. On the screen was a picture of a fluffy Golden Retriever puppy. “My mom just got a dog.”

  “Oh, nice,” Zack said. “What did they name it?”

  “Kevin,” she said.

  Of all the names for a puppy, Kevin wouldn’t be at the top of my list. But to each their own.

  Zack opened his mouth. I figured he was going to say something along the lines of what I was thinking or at least try to name the puppy himself, but Maddie cut him off by pointing to the red light at the end of the exit, which Zack seemed like he was keen on running.

  Once we got off the exit, we saw that not many cars were out and about. Zack stuck to the speed limit as he turned down Exchange Street. We passed a few homeless people shouting to themselves loud enough for us to hear them over the radio and the engine. We passed a few cop cars, too. If the cops had known what we had in the trunk of the car, not to mention all the weapons on the floor of the backseat, they would’ve probably shot us first and asked questions later. Unless they listened to us long enough to get Lieutenant Walker who knew about BEAST’s operation around here.

  Luckily, they didn’t pull us over. No reason to. On Friday nights, they just sat around the businesses, making sure no drunk college kids did anything too stupid.

  We passed the University on our right and kept going until we were nearly at the end of Exchange Street. There, Zack turned down an alley. Before I could visit the captain, I had to get my wound fixed up by BEAST’s resident witch doctor/voodoo priestess/overall weird woman named Valentine.