THE VAMPIRE’S SONG
The Vampires of Rock Series
Book One
By M.L. Bullock and Adrian E. Lee
Text copyright © 2021 Monica L. Bullock
All rights reserved.
Dedication
To the vampires of rock. We know you are out there.
Table of Contents
Chapter One – Levi Wallace
Chapter Two – The Bus
Chapter Three – The Street
Chapter Four –The Attack
Chapter Five –The Pancakes
Chapter Six – The Store
Chapter Seven – The Concert
Chapter Eight – The Phone Call
Chapter Nine – The Visit
Chapter Ten – The Morgue
Chapter Eleven – Charles Coleman
Chapter Twelve – Levi Wallace
Chapter Thirteen – The Dream
Chapter Fourteen – The Deli
Chapter Fifteen – Charles Coleman
Chapter Sixteen – Levi Wallace
Chapter Seventeen – Charles Coleman
Chapter Eighteen – Levi Wallace
Chapter Nineteen – Charles Coleman
Chapter Twenty – Levi Wallace
Chapter Twenty-One – Charles Coleman
Epilogue – Levi Wallace
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry—the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
Wallace Stevens, 1916, Domination of Black
Chapter One—Levi Wallace
1977
Sitting inside the smelly, sweaty Chevy Vega, I beat my hands against the steering wheel. It was an act of frustration that did not provide me with the relief I hoped for. Nope. Not even close. What I needed to do was deliver an ass-whipping to someone who deserved it, but who? The obvious candidate would be my dad, but since he had split, that wasn’t an option. There was a reckoning coming his way, though. No doubt about that. Yeah, punching him in the face just might do the trick. Another day, perhaps.
No way was I going to cry today. I let my hands and words fly. “Sonofabitch! Dammit!”
The fuzzy dice hanging from my rearview mirror bounced as the car shook. Unlike most guys my age, I did not swear all the time and I wasn’t great at it, but today had been exceptionally disappointing. No amount of swearing was going to erase this day or its disappointing events. And it was not just one thing—it was all the things. Every damn thing.
First, I worked for an asshole. Second, there wasn’t any food in the house except cereal and dry bread. And to top it all off, I’d just received word that I had been rejected by the Eureka Springs Community College. A damn community college wouldn’t accept me! Not rejected by a prestigious New York university but a backwards-ass community college. ESCC cited some ridiculous missing requirement, something about a credit, which I didn’t understand at all. I’d been out of high school for three years and as far as I knew had done everything I needed to. I mean, if I missed something, I wouldn’t have graduated. Right? I could read between the lines. People like me weren’t good enough for college. I was a nobody and always would be. For some reason, I could hear Coach Denton’s raspy voice in my ear.
You aren’t cut out for football, Wallace. You can’t run, you can’t catch. Just look at yourself! You’re off the team, Wallace. Get your gear and get out.
To add to the pressure, my hunk of junk needed major repairs and I was sure Junior, my neighbor and shade tree mechanic, was going to rip me off. You couldn’t appear desperate with guys like Junior. There was a recession, and everyone needed money. Including Junior and his growing brood of children. I hoped the fix would cost me less than two hundred bucks because I’d blown the rest of my savings on Melissa’s ring. I resisted the urge to take it out of my jacket pocket and stare at it. It was a simple band with an even simpler diamond, but I was pretty sure she would love it. If I gave it to her.
Come on, Levi. Don’t be a cheap sonofabitch. What else are you going to do? Return it and get your money back?
Well, Melissa would never know it if I did because she had no idea I was going to pop the question. I wasn’t sure I should do that now. Could I reasonably take care of one more person?
With the Old Man gone Splitsville—he took off like he didn’t have a wife and two kids—it was a daily struggle. Personally, I never liked the guy and it didn’t hurt my feelings one way or another, but to leave Debbie? My little sister idolized our parents even though neither one of them was worthy of her adoration. I’d been the one to attend her dopey school plays. I drove her to the homecoming dance and kept an eye on David, her boyfriend. Rotten little bastard. Yeah, I’d scared the hell out of that kid, but I had to give him credit. He still called Debbie every night and, as far as I knew, treated her like the Virgin Mary.
And I’d been the one to take her to the emergency room when she had the bike accident that drove her tooth through her bottom lip. Me. Yet she still fantasized that Virgil and Naomi Wallace were good people, that our parents loved her, and I didn’t have the heart to remind her otherwise. At least one of us was happy.
Since Dad was such a screw-up, I felt good about blaming him for my shit-filled day. Yeah, when the Old Man walked out, he did more than take his overnight bag and coin collection with him. It wasn’t that I missed seeing him sleeping in his easy chair every evening or hearing him gripe about his beer stash getting raided. When Virgil Wallace walked out on his family, he took my dreams with him because now everything was on me. Everything. We hadn’t gotten one red cent from him and he’d been gone for two months now. Naomi couldn’t or wouldn’t find a job, and she wasn’t one you could talk to at all. She hated it when I called her by her first name, but she’d stopped being “Mom” to me when I was ten and she took one too many pills and forgot to pick me up from soccer practice. I had to walk home. Imagine being ten and walking five miles home. And nobody even knew I was missing, except Debbie.
All I ever wanted to do was leave this godforsaken town, leave Eugene Springs behind, watch it disappear in the rearview mirror and never be seen again, but now that was impossible. I felt like I was stuck in one of those old Twilight Zone episodes where the guy can’t get out of a building. Or
a town. Damn weird show.
No, I couldn’t leave Deb. Or Naomi, even though she didn’t seem to notice that Deb and I were around most of the time. She’d handled the Old Man’s departure like she handled most things—with the help of her bottle of little white pills. Naomi’s goal in life was to avoid feeling anything at all. For some strange reason, I thought of that stupid television jingle about laundry detergent. Only instead of hearing, “The fresh-smelling scoop that cleans it all,” my mind replaced the lyrics with, “The little white pill that numbs it all.” Maybe that’s what I needed, some of my mother’s pills. Maybe I would take all her pills, just swallow them down and go to sleep. Never wake up. That would be awesome. But Deb’s face sprang up into my mind and I shook the thought away. Did I really want that? Hell no, not really. I had Melissa to think about too. Still. It was just too much. Too much of everything. I was only twenty-two. I was a guy with a part-time job, not an accountant like the Old Man. I bet he spends three-quarters of his day just thinking about fractions. He made good money, but what he did with it I didn’t know.
He must have another woman on the side. That must be where all that dough is going because it sure isn’t coming here, rotten bastard.
The little white pill that numbs it all…
Hey, that’s proof that I’m perfect for writing jingles. If only I could get songwriting down. Nah, screw it. I’m not cut out for it. Can’t even get into a community college. I’ll be at Crazy Sanja’s Electronics Store for the rest of my life.
In that moment I made up my mind that tonight I would burn every one of my songbooks and all those old journals of sappy poems and stupid lyrics. Yeah, I was going to set them all on fire and be done with it. Maybe I’d throw my guitar in the fire for good measure.
Burn up those dreams, buddy, because you know where your future is taking you. Might as well walk up to the meat processing plant and apply now. At least you know Uncle Mitchell can get you a job there. You could take care of Deb and Melissa with that gig.
Melissa Dance was the only thing good happening for me right now. In my opinion, and in the opinion of a hundred other guys in Eugene Springs, she was the most beautiful girl in the world. Nobody said it to my face, but I could interpret their stares. Why was Melissa Dance, hot cheerleader, talented dancer, and the sexiest girl in the county, with me? I would never forget the night we kissed at the bonfire. That had been the only good thing about my senior year. Melissa never wanted to leave Eugene Springs, but I had the feeling that she would be content wherever she was. If I wanted to go, she’d be down with that too. I felt the ring box in my jacket but still didn’t take it out. No, I couldn’t think about popping the question right now. I had to figure all this out, and I wasn’t leaving this car until I did.
I brought my fists down hard once more on the steering wheel, perhaps I needed to cool down, the steering wheel looked really narrow and I didn’t want to break that as well. It had the word Vega written in the middle of it in the cheapest plastic faux metallic script. Not much in this car was real… like my life, it was cheap and pretending to be something it wasn’t. The stitching on the interior door panels was just the illusion of stitching with the pattern punched into the plastic. This car really summed up how I felt, as I looked around and acknowledged the things we had in common. We shared a collective set of failed intentions. The speedometer optimistically showed eighty miles per hour at the far end of its horizontal line—we both knew it was an aspiration that couldn’t be met. Our goals and ambitions were well-presented and advertised, but without any means of how to get there.
The dashboard color was a horrible butterscotch, and showed a safe decision made by the designer to not offend or cause issue. Despite the current vogue for the brightest purples and oranges, the carpet and trim presented the color tan… is tan even a color? Not that I could see the carpeting through the covering of burger cartons collected from the finest fast-food outlets in town. Soda cans, potato chips, and local newspapers added to the debris. I even remembered losing a couple of slices of garlic bread under the seat last year that I couldn’t be bothered to retrieve. The car was a food diary of my life and gave the interior a living organic skin of microbial bacteria. I wasn’t concerned though; this biological soup of an experiment would soon be destroyed. Every journey delivered the smell of gasoline and I saw a huge fireball in my near future. The life of a rock star has the romantic notion of living fast before burning up in a sea of drugs and alcohol.
I was living slowly with the potential of burning up in a Chevy Vega in a sea of trash—I ironically made the devil horns sign with my thumb and little finger extended.
I picked at the rust around the door window. It was hard to see how things could get any worse and I thumped the steering wheel again. Suddenly the stereo came on filling the space with music: Don't give up on us, baby. Don't make the wrong seem right, the future isn't just one night. It's written in the moonlight… painted on the stars… Okay I was wrong… fuck it! I bashed the dashboard and the stereo stopped—I now had a hands-free stereo and an electrical fault to add to the list.
I reached down to my right and fiddled around behind the handbrake in a little hollow where I kept loose coins and empty blister packs of Vanquish pain reliever. I found a stick of gum and popped it in my mouth. The handbrake and gearstick were very long, skinny, pointed, and angular. I’d caught myself on them many times when making out with Melissa. If we became any more intimate, I’d have to marry the car.
Suddenly, the car door opened, and my skinny little sister climbed in beside me. Debbie was all long hair and long legs and had a mouth full of braces. Her strawberry blond hair was sweaty, and I could tell she’d been crying. She had haunted eyes, as our late Aunt Gina used to say. I think all that really meant was she had perpetual dark circles, a condition that made her look old and wise, like an owl. Owls were supposed to be wise, right?
Deb shuffled in the trash on the floor, and it clinked together as she searched for a place to rest her feet. She gave up and perched them on the handgrip above the glovebox in front of her. If this car was new, I would have admonished her for plopping her grubby Converse sneakers onto the dash, but those days had long gone. At least she kept them on. God help us all if she took her shoes off. When the first waft of her foot odor reached your nostrils, it was like smelling the remains from an ancient crypt. They normally stayed on the porch or on her outside bedroom windowsill… anywhere but inside the house.
It always seemed odd to me that Romeo and Juliet, the greatest lovers in the history of mankind, courted and played out their romance to the backdrop of a crypt. It was kind of like when Melissa and I made out on the sofa and Debs left her sneakers on the living room floor. Gag a maggot.
We sat in silence, I did not look directly at her, but I could see the light blond hairs on her bronze legs and the scab she was picking on her knee. She fastidiously chewed gum in a clicking fashion and popped it like the Vega backfiring.
“You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” she asked in an accusatory tone. She now drew her legs up and sat cross-legged on the sticky seat like she was protecting herself with armor
“No, Deb. I’m not leaving you. I’m just sitting here. You know, thinking. You should try it some time.”
Deb ignored my playful insult. “Thinking about leaving. I’m not stupid, Levi Wallace. I saw the envelope. I know you got the letter and you’re gonna be leaving me. Just like everyone always does.” My seventeen-year-old sister had a knack for embellishing the truth, and it was in her nature to be negative if given a choice—her star sign was cancer after all. Not everyone had left us. Not physically anyway. The only people we’d lost were Aunt Gina and the Old Man. Except he wasn’t dead, not yet, and according to him, he still wanted to “be in our lives.” Whatever the hell that meant. I guess technically we lost Naomi to her Valium, but we hadn’t lost anyone else. We just didn’t have a lot of people who cared about us to begin with. Except for each other.
“I’m
not going anywhere, Deb. Aren’t you supposed to be at band practice?” I adjusted the mirrors and avoided looking into her haunted eyes.
Her voice dropped, and she slung her hair over her shoulders. “I don’t have band anymore. I swapped it for chorus, remember? Geesh, I’m beginning to feel like nobody hears a word I say.”
“Yeah, I remember. I was just kidding. I picked up some hot dogs and put them in the fridge. Thought we’d have them for dinner. You always liked hot dogs.” Yeah, that’s right. I’d forgotten about that. Thank God it’s not cereal for dinner. Again.
“I like hot dogs from the ballpark. Not from the grocery store.” She scratched the seat with her fingernail and looked up at me. “When do you leave, Levi? Are you going to stay on campus?”
I shook my head and rolled the window down. It was getting as hot as hell in this garage. “It’s not that kind of college, Deb. They don’t have dorms. And besides, I’m not going. They don’t want me.”
She offered me a sad half-smile. “I’m kinda sorry and I’m kinda not. I’m sorry you aren’t getting what it is you want, but I’m glad you’re still gonna be here. Do you hate me, Levi? Do you blame me?” She was choking up. This wasn’t just her teenage hormones. This was a very real fear and a legitimate question. Did I hate her? No. Never. She couldn’t help this situation any more than I could. I loved her more than anyone, even Melissa.
“I could never hate you, Chipmunk Cheeks. You didn’t make the college reject me. And you’re not the reason why Dad left. I could never hate you, Deb.”
My sister punched my arm playfully and hugged me briefly. All sadness had vanished as she wiped her tears away and laughed. “I do not have chipmunk cheeks. Don’t call me that!”
“Okay, Chipmunk Cheeks.”
“Stop it, I mean it!”
“How does CC work for you?”
She tapped my arm again, and I scooped her up and hugged her tight. Just for that moment, everything was good. Everything was right, and she was happy. Having gotten my pledge to never leave her, to always stay, she was satisfied. Deb was one of the few people in this world who believed me completely and without question. I couldn’t—no, I wouldn’t—let her down. She got out and I tried to crank the car again, but to no avail. The battery was dead. I guessed I’d be taking the bus to work in the morning.
The Vampire's Song (Vampires of Rock Book 1) Page 1
