The walls, where not covered by shelves of odds and ends, were crumbling plaster and full of flaking, patched holes. The floor was made of slick, pale yellow tile, with scrape marks where shelves and goods had been dragged through the shop. The items for sale throughout the shop ranged from the mundane to the extravagant and eccentric. Guitars lined the same wall as old swords. Video games and consoles dominated an entire case lining the opposite wall. Old books, some vintage clothes, and old jewelry filled various cases and racks throughout the store. Behind one counter was a large gun rack with every firearm I could imagine, and some I didn't recognize. I made my way through the towering shelves of second-hand goods and found my way to the back, and that's when I saw my uncle for the first time.
He was... large. And not in a fat way. He looked like the diabolical offspring of a geneticist using a professional wrestler and a giant to impregnate the female version of Rambo. He wore a tight fitting, black t-shirt—an x-ray skeleton design on the front, far too small to possibly be accurate—and a tattered pair of jeans that failed miserably to match the wool flat cap that sat atop his shaved bald head. He was reading a newspaper that looked more like a thin paperback novel in his gigantic hands while chewing the end of an unlit cigar as I walked up to the counter.
“Need help finding something?” He asked without looking from his paper. His voice was gruff, with a liberal dose of Northwestern gravel to it. I was willing to bet the cigars didn't help softening it.
“Was kind of hoping you'd be able to tell me.” I responded, unable to keep a frown from forming.
He looked up from his paper, and grinned with the cigar between his teeth. His eyes were the shade of gray that made you think of storm clouds. He set down the paper and took off his cap for a moment, running a hand over his shining scalp.
“Well I'll be damned. I didn't think you'd be up and at 'em so quick,” He said. “You got it strong, kid. I'll give you that.”
Before my brain could say “Hey, this guy is really big,” my right fist lashed out over the counter and carried my body along for the ride as it streaked towards his face. There was a smack of impact and a shot of stinging pain up my arm as my fist connected with his cheek. I snarled and shook my hand as I looked at him.
He blinked. That’s all he did. He didn’t rock back, or even hold his mouth. He blinked, and then his eyes sparkled briefly with amusement, then something else.
“Yeah, I guess I had that comin’. I’m sorry, bud. Real sorry.” He said as his grin settled slowly into a frown.
I just stared at him as my brain started its familiar gibbering while the thought “adamantium skeleton” ran through my mind and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. He stood up and went to the front of the shop, locking the door and flicking off the harsh neon “Open” sign. He then walked back to his counter, grabbed another cigar while spitting the chewed stub of his old one in a metal trash can, then walked to the door behind the counter and opened it.
“Come on in back, I'm sure you've got questions.” He said before ducking in through the door. I was struck by how truly imposing he looked while standing. The fact that he literally had to duck his head to pass through a doorway didn't distract from the way he moved with the grace and purpose of a man who knew how to handle himself, and had utilized that knowledge. I tucked that information away in my new mental “Don't mess with this guy” file.
I followed him into the back room—hoping fervently that I wasn't making some kind of horrible mistake—and found him standing to my right behind a small, stocked bar with three stools in the spacious back room, looking like a fusion between a living room and man cave. There was a long couch, a few chairs and a recliner spaced around the room with a large coffee table in the center. There was a not-quite-too-large old-school CRT television against the wall across from the couch. I noticed the walls were the same painted brick from the shop, though various pieces of artwork and artifacts lined the walls. There was even a ceiling-high block of heavy driftwood—each plank the size of a railroad tie—against the wall opposite of the shop. The floor was brownish, unlacquered hardwood, somewhat covered with several large and ancient-looking rugs. Not a bad place, it even felt kind of cozy.
He ducked down for a moment and pulled up a bottle of Pendleton whiskey and two Coronas. He popped the caps on the bottles and gestured at a stool, and I sat, gratefully accepting the beer.
“The locals won't even drink that piss, but I find that it chases a good whiskey rather well,” he said as he brought up two shot glasses and filled them. “Well then, where did you want to start?”
“How 'bout we start with you supposedly being my uncle, and me living in foster care?” I said, more than a hint of bitterness in my voice. His brow furrowed a bit as he tossed back a shot and chased it with the Corona.
“You're probably gonna be sore at me, I get it. But let's just say I'm your father’s older brother. We could go get a blood test if that would satisfy you.”
I shook my head and pushed my finger into his chest—which didn't budge a hair, much like his face. “I'd much rather know why I had to go from foster home to foster home for seventeen years, never knowing I had family out here.”
He sighed and looked at his shot glass for a moment before drinking it, ignoring my prodding. “I couldn't just take you. It would have been too risky for both of us.”
I slammed my fist down on the counter in frustration. “What would have been too risky? Did you not want the responsibility? Why do you want in my life now? Was someone holding a gun to your fucking head or something?” I yelled, shocked at myself for a moment. I hadn't meant to lose my cool twice in as many minutes, and slamming my fist down on the counter was a big mistake after trying to punch a guy who was, probably, made of granite.
He shook his head and set to refilling his shot glass before speaking. “Well I think you'll understand that a bit more if we discuss something more recent. How 'bout we start with your convoy getting torn to shit out there in the sandbox?”
I gritted my teeth. I'd been waking up from nightmares detailing that particular event for the last three weeks. I didn't feel like discussing it with a stranger just yet, even if he claimed to be a blood relative. I opened my mouth to speak but he held up a hand, silencing me.
“I already know what happened kiddo; you don't need to say anything. You woke my ass up out of a dead sleep when you used that power of yours—of ours, actually. I bet I wasn't the only one who felt it, neither. Here's your first question, since I know you're trying to find a way around it, ‘Was I attacked by vampires?’”
I couldn't really say anything to that, and instead veiled my surprise by throwing back the shot of whiskey and chasing it with a swig of beer.
“Well kid, the short answer is: yeah, you got jumped by a pack of blood suckers. The last ones in the Middle East, as far as I know. I'm guessing it was Eurus, real old sonnuva bitch. Around since near the rise of the Roman Empire as I recall.” He chuckled after that, filling my shot glass. I wanted to say that it was impossible, and that the official story was my convoy got hit by Taliban mortars and I was the only survivor. I shook my head and swallowed another shot, which was quickly refilled.
“I know what you're thinking, but it was real. What you saw, what you did, it was all real, John.” He was giving me a severe stare now, all hint of a smile gone. He threw back another shot and then lit his cigar with a long wooden match from under the counter, chewing the end mechanically while looking at me.
“How do you know all of this?” I asked as he blew smoke towards the ceiling. “I can't even believe what I saw, let alone that my long-lost uncle knows all about it. I don't even know your name.”
“Oh,” he responded. “Right. I think you can guess by now that having you here with me would have been too good a target for vampires to pass up. A hunter and a little kid hunter? Two birds with one stone, and all that. Now that you're of age, things will be more... simple. As far as my name goes...” He reached a mass
ive hand forward over the bar. His hand looked a lot like mine, mottled and covered in very faint scars. Thick blunted fingernails cut far enough back to expose cracking skin of his weathered fingertips—though the living flesh beneath seemed healthy and unmarred. I accepted his hand and he all but crushed mine in a grip that felt like he could effortlessly pop my head like a ripe tomato. He gave my hand a quick shake and released it, giving me the same grin as when I first saw him.
“Ignatius Johannes Magnus, at your service. You can call me Uncle Joe, Uncle Iggy, Uncle, Unc, or whatever the hell you want, buddy.” He chuckled and swallowed another shot of whiskey, the alcohol starting to lend his cheeks a ruddy hue.
I raised an eyebrow. “Really? That's your real name?”
“What, and you think Cornelius, your middle name, is normal? Our family is lousy with old crazy names,” he chuckled for a moment. “Especially when you’re old and crazy yourself.”
I shrugged and found myself chuckling. Damn, I thought. Here I was determined to be pissed off at the guy, but he's turning out to be pretty decent. I couldn't help but feel that the conversation was going a bit slow, though.
“So let's say it was vampires that attacked me—and I don't know that for sure, but let's say I did. How have I never seen them before? What were they doing out in the desert? Why was I the only survivor? Wh—”
He held up a hand again and cut me off. “Alright, alright! Not so fast, dammit. We'll get to all that. I suppose I'll just tell you the whole story.” He chuckled and drained the rest of his beer, reaching down and pulling up two more frosted bottles from a fridge under the bar.
“Way, way back in the day when people ran in tribes and worshiped shit like the sun, monsters used to run around by the thousands,” he said. “Think of all the old stories you heard as a babe about dragons, trolls, werewolves, vampires, fairies, and shit like that. Well kiddo, they weren't much for imagination back then, using most of their time to farm and hunt and shit. Those stories were, at one point or another, a sort of oral history. A lot of those same monsters exist today, though I dare say you'll have a hard time looking for trolls under overpasses.”
He twisted the cap off his bottle and took a swig as he sat for a moment in thought, looking at me. “As long as there have been these evil creatures, there have been people who protect the rest of humanity from them. Normally it was tribes that went through multiple generations with the same kind of monster fighting them all the time. Our clan, for example, hunts all kinds of vampire because, from what my daddy told me, vampires almost wiped us out. We had to develop the weapons and skills to use against them, just to survive.”
I shook my head and looked at him sardonically. “You mean like, stakes through the heart, silver, crosses, stuff like that?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, something like that, though silver doesn't work better than any other metal. Stakes do, as long as they're made of oak or ash. Crosses? Sure, but not in a huge way, it's more of a symbol of a person’s faith that acts as a kind of barrier or protection. Some people have different religions, and even atheists have faith in something. Those dog tags you wore would be pretty handy against a little league vampire if he tried to sink his teeth into you, but I bet a heavy hitter would just rip them off of you.”
I remembered the dog tags of my friends and brothers in the Corps, sticking out of the mud. I felt my jaw clench as I started to relive the nightmare in my mind.
My uncle slapped his palm down on the bar top and I jerked in reaction. He was frowning at me. “You got that faraway look that people get when they start remembering shit they regret. You can't do that yet, I'm not finished with my story.” He refilled my shot glass and continued speaking.
“So, yeah, vampires have weaknesses just like in the movies. Stakes work, burning 'em up works pretty well—better on some than others. Garlic can work on a bunch of them, but not all. The sun burns up most vampires just like you'd think it would, though some kinds can walk in it without getting so much as a tan, and I'll cover that later. Some guns work, but you need to kind of adhere to a certain standard. If you got a semi-auto nine-mil, you might as well spit at them, but a shotgun to the face will normally take care of most of them. You've got to behead them, or completely obliterate the heart, it's a symbolic thing. It's what gives the act of putting a vampire down meaning; it's just one of the rules. Using wooden bullets won’t work for piss either, unless it's a fat-assed stake you launch at them. Arrows can hurt them, but won't really cut it for the coup de grâce; you'll want a sword for that.”
I nearly choked on my whiskey. “A sword? Why the hell would you use a sword?”
He produced a bowie knife seemingly from nowhere and plunged it down into the hard, polished wood of the bar. “There are a lot of good things to be said about a blade. For example, it'll never jam or run out of ammo. I'll take a machete over a Beretta any day of the week against a vamp.”
I looked at the blade which was plunged what I would guess would be three inches into a solid wood counter, and he did it with no visible effort. I saw his point. “Okay, so you said there were different kind of vampires—How do you know if someone is a vampire when they're not trying to rip your head off?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders and chewed the end of his cigar for a moment. “Well there's the problem, and part of the reason you're here now. The dominant clan at the moment here in San Diego are Thanatic vampires. Ugly sons of bitches. Picture that vampire from that old Nosferatu movie, and then make it uglier. They fancy themselves to represent the aspect of death, and it's not hard to see why; bunch of little grim reapers running around. Pretty easy to tell when one of them is looking you in the face, but a lot of other vampires have been popping up here as well, ones not so easy to spot. The tools you have to recognize them are instinct and training, pure and simple. Oh, and seeing their auras.”
I gave him a quizzical look. “Instinct and training? Like, just a gut feeling? What kind of training are we talking about here? And what do you mean by ‘auras?’”
There was a knocking at the door to the shop and my uncle rose with a sigh and nodded. “Time for a little live-fire training. Gonna need you to turn around while I bring in a subject matter expert.”
I shook my head and set my beer down. “Look, I don't know why you think I'd want to do any of this. I never agreed to anything, and I still have a lot of questions—”
My uncle raised his hand in a silencing gesture yet again and looked down his nose at me. “I know there's a lot you want to know, but we need to get this out of the way first. Just in case.” With that he left the room and went out into the front of the shop. I heard his voice and a female voice going back and forth, but I couldn’t tell exactly what was said. I stifled my frustration for a moment and turned around, and after a moment the door opened and I heard a creaking as another door was opened and footsteps descended down some stairs. “Alright, you can turn back now.”
“So, what’s going on now?” I asked before noticing that a rug had been pulled aside in the middle of the room and a trapdoor had been opened, descending into darkness.
“Live-fire training, like I said. Follow me down, bud.” He said, and I humored him.
It was pitch black in the room, and I felt my way down the steps and stood at the bottom waiting for my eyes to adjust. Just when I thought I could start to discern shapes in the dark, a light flicked on overhead, bright and piercing. My eyes shut out of reflex and I winced briefly, blinking slowly as I reopened them. The room was tiny, like a small root cellar. A small refrigerator stood against one wall, a tool chest against another, and shelves took up the rest of the wall space, lined with clouded jars filled with unknown things. My uncle opened the fridge and pulled out what looked like a blood bag. Actually, it didn’t just look like a blood bag. It was definitely and without any doubt, a donor blood bag.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's the plan for that?” I asked, pointing at it.
He chuckled and upended it over a red plastic c
up, pouring the dark red blood into it. “Thirsty?”
I swallowed audibly, trying to figure out if he was joking or not. I was not at all thirsty for the stuff he just poured into a plastic cup like it was so much fruit punch. He finished pouring about half the bag and then put the remainder back in the refrigerator. He beckoned me over and I walked over to him, my eyes still on the cup of crimson fluid.
“Alright,” he said. “No matter what, do not leave my side. Understand?”
I looked at him for a moment, searching his face for clues to what I was about to see before nodding in understanding. He nodded back, turned off the light in the room plunging us into pitch darkness once more. I heard the door next to us open, and felt him guide me by the shoulder through it. Once on the other side, I heard a switch click and a small bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered pitifully to life. Then I saw her.
The most beautiful woman I'd ever seen stood against the wall opposite of us. Raven colored hair flowed down over her shoulders and breasts. Her ice blue eyes were looking at the floor, and I followed her gaze down noting the features of her face. Small but pointed nose, cute and girly. High cheekbones, slightly pink as if blushing. Her lips were full and scarlet, her chin slightly pointed and fae looking. Her body was curvaceous yet petite. Her breasts pushed against the fabric of her white shirt and I silently cursed her beautiful hair for obscuring them. Her slender waist ended in the abrupt curve of her hips, then drawing my eyes down to the exposed flesh of her smooth pale legs and her tiny bare feet. I looked back up to her face and her eyes rose to meet mine, her gaze piercing into me like a cold knife. Sparkling tears began to slide from them as her mouth whispered “Help me...” I saw the shackles then, biting into the flesh of her ankles and wrists, and I lurched forward to release them.
The Chronicles of a Vampire Hunter (Book 1): Red Ashes Page 4
