Stars and Other Monsters

by P. T. Phronk

  She flipped the visor back up, and they were off. “I can’t wait to get on the road again,” she sung with an artificially deep, southern-tinged voice.

  “You said west?”

  “Right.”

  “Turn right up here?”

  “No, I mean west is correct.” Somehow a smile flitted across his face.

  She tittered. “Oh.”

  Soon they were on the highway. Dalla floored the gas pedal, weaving in and out of traffic. Stan gripped the handle above the door so hard he could feel the seams in the plastic. He heard Bloody whining in the back seat.

  “It’s okay, girl,” he said, a quiver in his voice. “I—I think we’ll be okay?”

  “Settle down, Stanley boy. You know I have the reflexes of a kitty.”

  “Hard to believe that, given when I met you, your car was a flaming heap of scrap.”

  “Extenuating circumstances. I’m not so good with glares. Dang morning sunshine, you know?”

  “Right.”

  “Right up here?”

  “Very funny.”

  She smiled, that weird human smile. “So you gonna tell me where we’re going?”

  “That’s not our agreement,” he said. “Besides, I don’t know. Only she does.” He jabbed his thumb at the back seat. “We’ll have to stop later to figure out the next move.”

  Bloody had been stubborn at first. When Stan had held the signed T-shirt out to her, after dinner the previous night, the dog had refused to even look at it. Just like when he tried to find Bob. But he’d hunkered down and whispered in Bloody’s ear, hey, it’s either this or she kills both of us right now. Let’s buy ourselves some time, k?

  She’d given it a sniff, then watched as Stan pointed north. No response. South. No response. West. Bloody sighed, then barked.

  Heading west at a hundred miles per hour, the vampire suddenly shrieked.

  “What the hell?” growled Stan.

  “Oh, nothing Stanley. I’m just so excited. I know that Damien Fox is going to be so delicious.”

  9. Long Distance Relationship

  STAN CONCEIVED OF HIS FIRST escape attempt during the silent car ride west on I76, after stopping at a cheap motel for the first day of the trip.

  At first, he thought that stopping for the day, while the vampire slept, or hibernated, or whatever the hell she did, would be a chance to make his escape. However, she was thorough in restraining him, strapping him to the bed with so many handcuffs and ropes that he couldn’t move a muscle. Bloody whined from her crate while Stan struggled to loosen the ropes, then realized it was futile. He spent a sleepless day with his immobile muscles in agony. When she came back after dusk to untie him, moving his limbs for the first time in ten hours was a bittersweet mixture of relief and pain.

  She’d stood in front of the door while Stan released Bloody. She stepped out of her cage with her tail between her legs. She must have been so hungry, but Stan asked her to sniff the shirt again, then he pointed in every direction. Bloody perked up only slightly when he pointed west, but it was enough.

  “Could you be more specific than west?” asked Dalla.

  “No,” Stan lied. The truth was that they could find a few maps and pinpoint Fox’s location within one or two blocks. Of course, if Dalla had that information, then Stan and Bloody would no longer have value to her except as food. The countdown to dinner time was ticking, but he wanted to extend that deadline as long as possible.

  When the plan came to him, he was almost nodding off to sleep as the clock in the dashboard flipped 11:00 p.m. Dalla had allowed Bloody to stay out of her crate tonight—she was getting more lenient, and that was good—and the dog lay asleep on Stan’s lap. He glanced over at the vampire. She, too, had heavy eyelids. She rubbed at her face with one hand, and again he was struck by the uniquely human gesture.

  “Gosh, I’m exhausted,” she said. “It’s your fault, making me wake up at the crack of dusk.”

  She hit a button under the dashboard, then the convertible roof pulled back. The deafening sound of the wind rushing by certainly woke him up. The freezing late-November air against his face wasn’t conducive to sleep either. She, too, seemed to gain energy from the open night sky above them.

  The vampire clamped onto her flower-patterned hat to keep it from flying into the night. Ribbons tied around it fluttered behind her.

  She giggled and glanced at Stan, those eyes momentarily childlike. He caught himself smiling back. The instant stuck in his mind: a photograph of the world’s most fucked up family on the world’s most fucked up road trip. The laughing woman holding onto her hat, her adoring man beside her, and the family dog with the wind blowing through her fur. The open road below and the twinkling sky above.

  That moment, that is when he got the idea for how to kill her.

  He took the first steps toward implementing the plan immediately. When the vampire appeared to be off in her own little world, keeping her eyes on the road and humming a tune he didn’t recognize, he studied the dashboard clock. There were buttons labeled clock, hour and minute beside it. Changing the time would probably be straightforward enough.

  The rest of it would be more difficult.

  The cold air was only refreshing for a minute, soon turning uncomfortably cold, but he didn’t dare complain. Besides, after long enough, he got so numb that he barely noticed. Like the fear, he became so accustomed to the cold that it was part of the background misery. Only then did the boredom and the silence begin to eat at him.

  Finally, with questions squirming in his head, he broke the silence. “Am I going to transform next full moon?” he asked over the roar of the wind.

  “Stanley! Whatever do you mean?”

  “You said you fed us werewolf meat. If being bitten by a werewolf, you know, makes you into one, then, you know, won’t eating its flesh have the same effect?”

  She giggled. “You’re silly, Stanley. You think I want to turn into a wolf at night? You think I want you to turn into a wolf at night? Of course not. You’d need to be almost dead for a wolfman’s saliva to work its magic, and besides, I remove the head before preparing the meat.”

  “Oh,” said Stan. “Okay.” That was one less thing to worry about.

  She was silent for a moment. Her eyes flicked to Stan, then back to the road. “Do you—do you have any more questions?” she asked.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Hun, I’m as—well, pardon the expression, but—I’m as bored stiff as you are. It’s been a long while since I’ve had to explain myself to a human, you see, and it’s quite delightful to see your reactions. Am I going to transform next full moon.” She giggled.

  “Can you be seen in mirrors?”

  She flipped the rearview mirror to the right. Where her reflection should have been was only a floating pair of earrings and a bizarre, ghostly face, like a translucent flesh-colored mask, red around the cheeks and blue around the eyes. It took a moment for him to realize that he was seeing her face makeup, minus the face.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “So your clothing doesn’t disappear. That never did make much sense in the movies. Why? Don’t you see the same thing?”

  Her gaze flicked to the mirror, then back to the road. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but Stan could have sworn that an expression of pain—or could it have been guilt?—flitted across her face.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  “Do you burn up in the sun?”

  “Pass,” she said immediately.

  Stan grunted. “Fine. Do vampires ever need to piss?”

  Her high-pitched giggle cut above the whistle of the wind. “Oh, Stanley. Pass.”

  Vampires did need to piss.

  It was almost two in the morning when she pulled into the parking lot of a rest stop just past Indianapolis. She watched him go to the edge of a patch of forest and piss on a tree while Bloody squatted behind the next tree over. They got back into the car, then she closed the door f
or him.

  “Stay,” she said, then headed for the grungy public washroom.

  When she was out of sight, he quietly opened the door and bolted.

  This was not his escape attempt.

  He managed to get a ways into the forest before he heard the restroom door squeak open again. He ducked behind a bush and waited. Bloody looked up at him and turned her head to the side. He scratched her between the ears.

  The vampire pushed lightly off the ground, then floated a foot above it, gaining speed every second until she crashed into the forest in a beeline to his location. She landed beside him, towering over his head.

  He looked up and grinned. “That answers another question I had.”

  She didn’t smile back.

  Suddenly his feet were dangling in the air, the rough bark of a tree digging into his back, and a hand digging into the raw, slightly-healed wound on his neck. Bloody growled at her.

  “No more questions. And you won’t try anything like that again. Do you understand?”

  He struggled, his breath leaving him, his tongue feeling too big in his throat.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Ya,” he managed to choke.

  He fell hard. Bloody leapt between them, but the vampire’s back was already turned as she returned to the car. He took a deep breath, then followed.

  They rode in silence for a few more hours before stopping for the day. It was about four in the morning when they registered at a run-down motel in the sparse town of Pocahontas, Illinois, just before hitting Missouri. There were still a few hours of darkness left, but she needed time to tie him up, then go do whatever vampires did. He didn’t like to imagine what that was. Before she left, she turned on the television.

  It only picked up a few stations, but one of them was playing a re-run of the day’s entertainment news program. She tossed Bloody into her crate and fixed Stan to the bed with a pair of handcuffs. Then she sat at his feet on the edge of the room’s only bed, transfixed by the TV.

  “Nicholas Cage in trouble again,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never really enjoyed his movies.”

  A few minutes later: “Oh, I love M.J.’s music, but I’m just so sick of hearing about him.”

  She retched. “David Beckham. He’s cute, but who cares.” She gestured forcefully at the television.

  Stan refrained from saying anything, even though he wanted to. In the business he was in, he couldn’t help but develop opinions about the celebrities he stalked. But if he said the wrong thing, he was likely to end up with missing body parts, or worse.

  When an exclusive new trailer for Damien Fox’s upcoming romantic comedy was teased, Dalla shifted toward the TV until her little butt was about to fall off the edge of the bed. She sat still as the trailer played.

  Anyways, And Then was the story of a woman, played by one of those chicks from Grey’s Anatomy, and her tumultuous relationship with her boss, played by Damien Fox. The two seemed destined to be together, if it weren’t for a series of unlikely coincidences that constantly got in their way. The movie looked terrible.

  Stan couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. “You know she’s just going to end up with Fox in the end.”

  Her eyes burned. “Shut your mouth, Stanley. You don’t know how it ends. And anyways, that’s not the point.”

  “Anyways isn’t even a real word.”

  She stood up and put her fingers in her ears. “La la la, not listening to you. I’m going to get a bite to eat. After our discussion earlier, I trust you’ll be good while I’m gone.”

  She slammed the door behind her. Stan was left tied to the bed with only a pair of handcuffs. He could have broken the wooden bed post and slipped away, but she could track him down wherever he went, so what was the point? Besides, if his plan was going to work, he needed to gain some trust back.

  “Don’t worry, girl,” he said to his miserable-looking dog. “I’ve got a plan. We’re getting rid of the bitch. I’ll need you to be good later, okay? You remember your tricks, right?”

  He stretched over to the clock radio by the bed. The cuff dug into his wrist, but he was able to reach it and set the time one hour behind. He’d never seen her wear a watch, and she didn’t have a cell phone, so he just had to hope that she didn’t make a habit of checking clocks, and didn’t have a supernatural sense of time.

  Being less restrained and more comfortable, he was able to sleep through most of the day. He awoke a few hours after sundown to the sound of growling. He opened one eye slightly. Bloody was on the floor, sneering at Dalla, who stood over the dog with the signed Damien Fox T-shirt in one hand. She gestured in each direction, one after the other, pointing daintily. Bloody’s expression remained unchanged.

  The bitch was trying to train Bloody herself. So she wouldn’t need Stan any more.

  “It won’t work,” he said. “She’ll never trust you.”

  She looked startled. “We’ll see,” she said. She unlocked his handcuffs, then stuck the shirt in his arms. “But for now, do your thing.”

  He knelt beside Bloody and patted her head. “You’ve upset her. She’s going to need time before she can tell us anything. Time and food. We both need food or we’ll be of no use to you.”

  “You think I care if you’re hungry or not, honey?”

  “We can’t get going until we know where we’re going. I saw a McDonald’s just down the street …”

  She sighed, then glanced at the clock radio. “I supposed we have time. I thought I’d slept in; driving exhausts me.” She took a wad of cash out of her purse. It was spattered with flecks of red. “I’ll get your food. You calm your pooch down and figure out where we’re going. Dig it?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then he added, sincerely: “thank you.”

  She came back ten minutes later with five hamburgers. “I’ve forgotten how much food you require per day,” she said.

  “This is fine, thank you,” he said.

  “Do you know where we are going yet?”

  “No. She’s acting strange. We must be getting close.”

  She grumbled. “I gotta wash up,” she said. Indeed, she smelled like earthworms. “Get your dog in line or I’ll bring the line to her.”

  “I’m not sure what that mea—” he began, but she was already in the bathroom.

  While she showered, he savoured the hamburgers. He’d never known McDonald’s to taste so damn good. He broke off pieces as he ate, handing half to Bloody, who devoured each piece whole. She already looked skinnier than she was a few days ago.

  He’d made no attempt to divine which direction to go when Dalla stepped from the bathroom wearing only a towel. Her long, thin hair hung in wet strings over her bare shoulders, all flawless alabaster skin. He felt his cock shifting, just a bit.

  “So, where to?” she asked.

  “Dunno yet,” he said through a mouthful of burger.

  She slapped him hard across the face with the back of her hand. He spit pasty hamburger mush on the bedspread.

  “Figure it out. You can eat in the car, so stop wasting time. You don’t control when we leave, got it?”

  “Yes,” he said, staring at the ground. He grabbed the T-shirt, patted Bloody. His dog’s tail twitched slightly when he pointed west.

  “Looks like west again,” he said.

  She grabbed some clothes, got dressed in the bathroom, packed a suitcase, then ushered him out the door, Bloody in his arms. He sat in the passenger side, then immediately unwrapped the remaining hamburger. She got in the driver side, slammed the key in the ignition, and turned the car on.

  “Oh, shit, forgot Bloodhound’s crate,” he said.

  “Get it,” she said.

  He sighed, then splayed out his fingers, his palms covered in ketchup, and looked around for something to wipe them on. He made a cursory attempt to get Bloody to get off his lap so he could move. Dalla shot him an intense glare, those eyes like blue lasers, then she slammed the door and glided back to the motel room.


  The moment she left he turned his attention to the car’s clock. With his knuckle he pressed the clock button, then pressed the hour button. The number stayed the same. He held clock, then pressed hour at the same time. Nothing.

  He heard the motel door close. His heart pounded. He tried holding down the clock button for two seconds. That did it; the numbers started flashing. He pressed hour, but his shaking hands made it go two hours ahead. Fuck.

  The motel door opened again.

  He mashed the button until it was one hour behind the real time

  The car door opened.

  He pawed at the clock button before sitting upright. The numbers stopped flashing.

  “Why so sweaty, Stanley?”

  He frowned, refusing to look at her.

  “Oh, you must be hot.”

  She opened the convertible roof. As she screeched out of the parking lot, she sung under her breath. “Go west, life is peaceful there. Go west, in the open air.”

  Yep, vampires definitely needed to piss. Twice that night, in fact. And that was just fine with Stan, because it gave him time to implement the next phase of his escape.

  When she pissed the first time, at a gas station in Lebanon, Missouri, it gave him time to inspect the dashboard of the car. He identified the button he was looking for. Then he searched desperately; the glove compartment was locked. The cup holder had only a few dusty coins in it. He felt around on the floor, and all he found was a bobby pin.

  She returned a moment later.

  “Wowee. Nothing worse than driving on a full bladder. Am I right, guys?”

  Stan looked ahead silently.

  “Stanley, hun, you’re boring me lately. We can gab, you know. You can even ask me some more questions, if you’d like. I promise not to hit you again. Not tonight.”

  They pulled away. Stan patted Bloody, in his lap.

  “Don’t make me take a nibble just to entertain myself.”

  “Fine. Do you see other vampires?”

  She appeared to think about how to respond. Gears must have turned in her head, calculating a way he could use the information against her. He hoped some of those gears were faulty.