Monsters in the Midwest ( Book 1): Wisconsin Vamp

by Scott Burtness

  Wisconsin Vamp

  By Scott Burtness

  For Liz.

  It Had to Start Somewhere…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  The Final Chapter

  All places and characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual places or persons living, dead, or in Wisconsin is purely coincidental. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I did any research for this book…

  Also, reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. As in, don’t do it. It’s bad.

  OK. Now that we’ve covered the legally stuff, I really appreciate that you’re reading my book! Please consider posting a review when you finish, and telling your friends about “Wisconsin Vamp.” Reviews for writers are like applause for actors. We love ‘em!

  And now…

  It Had to Start Somewhere…

  Wings now dry, the newly hatched Culex tarsalis took her first flight up from the brackish water pooled on the alley’s cobblestones. Rising through the humid night air, she had no thoughts, no plans, no aspirations. Those were the burdens of more evolved creatures. For her, only one desire occupied the tiny ganglion of nerves that served as the mosquito’s brain. It was time to feed.

  ***

  Amber and Jill made their fifth left-turn. While persistence is usually a virtue to be admired, in this case it had simply made them lost. When looking at a map, the New Orleans French Quarter seems like an orderly arrangement of opposing forces. Burgundy and Bourbon Streets cross a multitude of saints; real ones like Louis, Ann, Peter, and Phillips, and hopeful impostors like Bienville, Governor Nicholls and the Ursulines. This incongruous grouping of vice and virtue makes navigation look easy. Vice gets you across town, while following religion brings you to water. What the maps don’t show is that buried deep inside this orderly arrangement of saints and sinners are winding alleys, by-ways, cul-de-sacs and cubbies that could confound the most savvy of French voyageurs. Rather than finding shrimp jambalaya and a good jazz club, Amber and Jill instead found themselves deep in the French Quarter’s uncharted bowels, stumbling through a dark, narrow alley.

  “Told you we should’ve turned left,” Jill deadpanned after a long drag on the mostly-smoked joint. The ensuing giggle-fit had them doubled over, tears streaming down their cheeks, when a deep, cultivated voice bled from the darkness.

  “Good evening, ladies. What, pray tell, could be the source of your most delightful mirth?”

  After yanking her heart straight up into her throat, the voice slid down Amber’s gullet, all spoiled milk and honey until it pooled in her gut, suffocating her laughter and curdling in her stomach. Jill merely yelped, burped, and laughed in rapid sequence, inducing a sudden and violent case of the hiccups.

  “Oh, um. Hic. We, ah, just hic… should’a turned left,” Jill choked out, laughing and trying to take a quick hit between hiccups. “Hey, weren’t you in that movie?”

  The stranger’s smile turned mean, stretched far enough to reveal two sharply-pointed, impossibly long incisors. His arm lashed out cobra-quick, fingers wrapping around Jill’s neck. Something between a hiccup and a scream barely made it past Jill’s lips as the stranger wrenched her head and snapped her neck.

  Amber froze in uncomprehending horror, watched her friend fall lifeless to the cobblestones. Her only lucid thought as the man turned and grasped her bare arms, fanged mouth moving toward her neck, was to wonder how his hands could be so cold. It was summer in New Orleans. Nothing could possibly be so cold.

  ***

  Moving erratically, the young mosquito descended upon the dark shapes below to where the blood was warmest, steaming upon a cool, smooth chin and running in rivulets down an alabaster neck.

  ***

  “You hear that?” Jerry interrupted. “That was a scream. A girl! C’mon, we gotta do something!”

  Walter LaBauve, New Orleans native and Jerry’s favorite client, shook his head, loosening a deep, gravelly chuckle.

  “You read too many scary books, mon ami. Is the French Quarter, no? People do all kinds of crazy here, and usually not in private. Laissez les bons temps rouler! You go looking, you gonna see more than you planned for and probably get charged twenty bucks,” he opined with a sage nod and sly wink.

  Mostly convinced, Jerry let the humidity push him back into his seat at the small sidewalk cafe. It was true that people behaved very differently in the Big Easy compared to the folks back home. Trappersville was as different from New Orleans as day-old cheese curds from fresh jambalaya. Nestled in northern Wisconsin, just outside the Nicolet National Forest and near the banks of the Wolf River, the tiny town was a tick-infested, cheese-infused, flannel-clad waiting room for the last train to boredom. He’d asked Pam a hundred times if they could pack up the girls and move. Before Katrina, she’d say things like, “Maybe when the girls are a bit older.” After Katrina, she’d just look at him until he sulked back to his Barca Lounger to watch cooking infomercials and dream of his next trip to the Crescent City.

  “Speaking of books,” said Jerry, picking up the dropped thread of their conversation. “I think she did justice to New Orleans. The books are good. You should just try one.”

  “Pah! Arrete toi. You just stop trying.” Walter held his meaty palms out in front of him, forbidding Jerry to say any more. “Them couyons could’na find their own bumbos with a torch. Vampires. Why you read that stuff, mo pa konmprann! What nonsense. N’awlins has enough real stories to last a lifetime and you read about vampires. Pah!” Walter rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Maybe I send you some good books to read on your next flight down. Speaking of, mon ami, you need to finish that drink and get to the airport. Red-eye leaving soon, ain’t it so?”

  Feeling the usual malaise that accompanied the end of his trips, Jerry opened his briefcase and shuffled some papers around, the idle busywork a thinly veiled excuse to delay his departure. Walter sat with a patient grin, fingers laced over his ample belly. It was a fine evening, and neither man was in a terrible hurry to have it end.

  ***

  The vampire reveled in the blood flowing down his throat, pooling in his gut, leeching into his body. Engrossed with trying to drink back the life he forfeit centuries ago, he didn’t feel the minuscule parody of his own dark thirst stab its proboscis into his flesh. He didn’t hear when it screamed a tiny mosquito scream, or notice as it wrenched away from his neck and reeled back into the night air. And though he’d sired countless fiends
since his turning, he did not recognize the beast as it died and was reborn undead while spiraling away, dizzy with a new hunger it could never slake.

  ***

  Had he not been so consumed with paper-shuffling stall tactics, Jerry might’ve noticed the peculiar speck of light zig-zagging down toward him, its bluish-grey glow contrasting eerily with the warm glow of the gas lamps. When the spark closed the final few inches to his face, it gave him such a start he near upended the table. Jerry grabbed a brochure from his briefcase and swung in sharp, annoyed jerks at the luminescent nuisance. Half-uttered swear words, waving arms and hopping legs waged a comical battle against the darting, gyrating glow until he finally connected, the force driving the bug clear out of sight. Jerry threw the brochure back in his briefcase, and snapped it shut with a victorious clack.

  “Laissez les bons temps rouler, indeed! Dat’s one nasty bugger, yah?” exclaimed Walter, clapping in appreciation. “Never seen firebugs get so riled at someone.”

  “Well, not quite the way I’d planned to end the night, but it’ll have to do,” panted Jerry as he pulled at his sweat-stained and twisted shirt, completely unaware of the minuscule demon seething with unnatural hunger between brochures and invoices in his briefcase.

  ***

  “Welcome to the General Mitchell International Airport and thank you for flying with us. Please remain seated until the plane has come to a complete stop and the fasten seat belt light is extinguished. It’s a balmy night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The temperature outside is a mellow 76 degrees, there’s a slight breeze from the south and zero chance of rain. All in all, a perfect summer evening. There will be an attendant at the ramp directing people with connecting flights to the appropriate gates and also to the luggage retrieval area. Once again, it’s been a pleasure serving you on our non-stop flight from New Orleans to Milwaukee.”

  Briefcase in hand, Jerry made his way through the terminal toward long-term parking. The red-eyes always took their toll, especially with the long drive from the airport to the middle of nowhere. At least his boss had agreed to let him work from home the next day. Leaving New Orleans always left him a little down. Hopefully he could convince Pam to take the girls and the dog to the park for a few hours. Then he could queue up some good jazz, make the Cajun-iest breakfast he could manage from the Get’n’Gobble’s generally bland offerings, and acclimate himself to another few of weeks of small-town drudgery.

  About three hours later, Jerry pulled into his driveway, quickly killing the headlights so they didn’t shine into the kids’ bedroom window. He groaned his way out of the car, sore and tired from a long night of travel. Halfway up the front walk, his briefcase latches gave, spilling brochures, invoices, and his new Jimmy Buffet gig poster from the ‘99 “Will Play for Gumbo” tour onto the dew-soaked grass. Jerry stooped, muttering about rotten bosses and worthless anniversary gifts. “If my poster’s ruined, I’m gonna ram this dollar-store briefcase up his oversized behind like a greased petard,” he promised, gently picking up the poster. His world consumed by saving Buffet, Jerry didn’t notice the sickly glowing, gray-blue speck that buzzed past him into the pre-dawn sky. For its part, the tiny demon was so disoriented by its sudden release into the Wisconsin countryside that it completely disregarded the free lunch grumbling below and flew up, up, up, carried by a stiff warm breeze into the fading night sky.

  Chapter 1

  Herb’s alarm clock was a right bastard. A whiny, self-righteous twit. “Don’t get mad at me,” it buzzed. “You’re the one that set me. Is it my fault that I can do my job at the exact right time, day in and day out, without fail? Maybe you’re the one who’s lacking here.”

  He really wanted to come up with a truly devastating response. If the damn thing would just shut up, he’d think of a zinger that would put that bleating piece of plastic in its place. But no, the noisy little nuisance wouldn’t shut up. It just kept complaining and complaining and complaining...

  A hand fumbled out from under the covers, moved across the surface of a faux-wood nightstand, traversing bubbles and warps left in the veneer by countless glasses of water spilled while trying to silence the alarm. With past as prologue, Herb’s hand knocked over an orange Tupperware cup. The remains of its contents soaked the nightstand while the cup itself fell to the floor, rolled in a lazy circle and came to rest under the twin bed. A second, well-placed grope landed the hand directly on the clock/radio, fingers working to decipher the complex code of a snooze button. For a moment, there was quiet, followed by a snore.

  Know thyself, they say. No sooner had he silenced the monster on the nightstand than its dastardly twin started bleating in the living room. With an anguished groan, Herb rolled off the bed and stumbled to his well-used but seldom-cleaned living room, following the sound like a drunken moth to a whiskey flame. The second alarm clock perched between a daunting collection of 80’s one hit wonder-tapes and a Brett Favre bobble-head doll. Whacking Brett’s noggin in the process, Herb switched off the alarm, his groans suddenly and shockingly audible in the otherwise silent room. The groan trailed off to a sigh as his stubbled chin drooped toward his chest. Seconds before toppling over onto the couch, the kitchen alarm clock roared to electronic life.

  Head snapping up so fast he almost fell backward into his cassette tapes, Herb turned toward the noise. “Alright alright ALRIGHT! I’m up. Just stop! All of you, stop!” Herb worked his way around a battered coffee table and cracked leather recliner, past the front door and into the kitchen, to an old stove that the 1970’s rambler was probably built around. Perched on the back of the stove was offending alarm clock number three, which Herb dubbed the deal breaker. One last swat of the hand, and blessed silence returned to Herb’s humble home.

  Mornings were usually like this. Herb often wondered if someday he’d be able to kick the three-alarm habit. Unfortunately, on the days when he set only two, or god forbid, one... well, he’d had enough warnings from his boss to know that being late again would mean a new cook at Ronnie’s.

  Coffee came first. Until the pot was set to brew, the rest of the world could take a number and get in line. Waiting for the slow, brown trickle to fulfill its promise of normalcy, Herb gazed out the window above the sink. The trees had that shadowy quality only pre-dawn can create, when the usual colors of the Wisconsin woods were stripped down to their black and gray essence. Hovering on sleep again, he imagined a glistening spark zigging and zagging among the pines, winding in and out of the million shades of gray, while a strange gurgle tugged and pulled at his awareness.

  Herb’s reverie snapped like a broken bowstring. The smell of Folgers coffee wrapped him in its promise of better things to come and he rose to pour a cup. While always a bit rough to begin with, Herb still enjoyed mornings best of all the hours in the day, especially in the late summer. His peculiar routine might seem chaotic to some, but for Herb it was one he could no longer imagine doing without. Folgers in hand and clothed in his favorite terrycloth bathrobe, a threadbare, dingy swath of green and gold he lovingly called Scary Terry, Herb stepped onto his front stoop and looked out upon the woods.

  Thinning, rust-colored hair perpetually a few weeks past needing a cut, stubble smudged over round cheeks and a soft chin, glasses sliding down the bridge of a freckled and not-quite-bulbous nose, robe loosely tied below a gut more party ball than six-pack, and slippers decorated like cans of Milwaukee’s Best, Herb didn’t look well-suited to nature. Regardless, the serene north woods suited him. Like most of the homes in these parts, Herb’s rambler squatted deep in the trees. The main highway was a good 75 yards from his door, and was only used by the occasional traveler en route to a real road that led to a real destination. His nearest neighbors, Jerry and Pam, were about a half-mile away. On rare, still nights, he could sometimes hear the raspy bark of their little pug, but not much else penetrated the canopy of pine and maple. Not one for the hustle and bustle of the big cities like Madison or Milwaukee, Herb liked small-town, backwoods living just fine. Provided, o
f course that he could always have coffee in the morning and plenty of beer after.

  As he breathed the warm scents of tree and earth and cheap coffee, a tiny spark spiraled down to the back of his exposed neck. Digging into the flesh, it began to feed, feed, feed. Herb’s hand lazily reached up in a gesture familiar as whacking a snooze button and came down just hard enough to crush the pest without slapping the back of his neck. As Herb wiped the smooshed remains of the mosquito’s body on the cowl of Scary Terry, it fell unnoticed into his steaming mug. Floating on the brown liquid, the rolled up little lump of goo began to twitch and shift. Slowly, a crushed and torn wing unrolled, the shredded tissue restitching itself. A leg unfolded, then another, and another until six spindly limbs stuck out at jaunty angles from an abdomen that was inflating like a pigmy water balloon. Compound eyes sprouted and grew while a new proboscis unrolled and wavered around. As the minute demon worked its unholy way toward being whole, Herb took a healthy swig of Folgers, sighed contentedly and turned to walk back into the house. “Damn skeeters,” he observed softly, just like every other summer morning.

  A short while later, Herb’s Pinto, affectionately named The Pinto, motored down the highway, followed closely by a white cloud of oily exhaust. Inside the Pinto, portable Walkman speakers attempted to pit Fleetwood Mac against four poorly-tuned cylinders and a rusted manifold. Smiling to himself, Herb dubbed the ensuing noise Fleetwood Manifold. Since Ronnie wouldn’t allow music in the kitchen, Herb had to make the most of his commute so it could carry him through the day. Sadly, Stevie Nicks was a little harder to hear than normal since he was pushing the little hatchback to its 92-horsepower limit. Precious time had been lost this morning trying to find a bandage for his neck.

  Usually he wouldn’t have bothered. Herb was pretty thick-skinned about the whole bug thing. If you couldn’t handle a few gnats, mosquitoes, wasps, flies, spiders, chiggers, yellow jackets, ants, centipedes or wood ticks, you’d best move or resign yourself to going clinically insane. It was a rare day that he needed Calamine lotion or some such nonsense to get past a few bites. The telltale pink blotches were a sure sign of a city slicker on his first real trip to the woods. So when the mosquito bite on his neck started to burn, it took a while to find the Calamine. Picking away the scabby coating around the cap, he lathered some onto the bite and rummaged for a bandage to hide the pink splotch. Most folks wouldn’t give the Calamine a passing thought, but if Dallas happened by the truck-stop, he’d never let Herb live it down. Bad enough that trying to find the bandages had Herb running late for work, and running late for work meant barely being able to hear Stevie.