by Ward Parker
Gazillions of Reptilians
Freaky Florida Book 7
Ward Parker
Mad Mangrove Media
Contents
1. The Dead Undead
2. Welcome to My Conspiracy Theory
3. Dragons Keep Grudges
4. How Are Your Kidneys?
5. The Parley
6. Freak Dishwasher Accident
7. Unwilling Donors
8. Witches per Square Mile
9. Playing Through
10. Reptile Revolt
11. Vampire Town, USA
12. Rescue Mission
13. A Big Disaster
14. Ronnie, Dragon King
15. Knock-Down-Dragon Fight
16. A Casual Offer
17. Staking Time
18. I’ll Have My Demon Call Yours
19. Jack Is Back
20. A Reputation of Integrity
21. Special Treatment
22. Vampires Don't Enjoy Sunrises
More
About the Author
1
The Dead Undead
On the night they found Marvin’s remains, Missy was removing plaque from a vampire’s fangs.
“I never knew you also did dental work,” Mrs. Kinkuddy said.
“Just the basics,” Missy said. “You’ll have to get a home health dentist here for an extraction or something serious. Open wider. How often do you brush your fangs?”
“Oh, I try to do it every morning before I go to bed.”
“Turn your head a bit more toward me. The good thing about being on a liquid diet is you don’t need to floss as often. But you do need to brush regularly, Mrs. Kinkuddy. You wouldn’t want to have a fang pulled, would you?”
“Uh-uhn,” her patient replied awkwardly as Missy scraped away plaque. Missy had to be careful with her fingers in the mouth of a vampire. The instinct to sink their fangs into flesh was hard for the creatures to resist.
Many of Missy’s patients no longer hunted, though. They fed upon bags of blood from the daily Blood Bus, donated by unsuspecting people who thought their blood was going to help some poor human in a hospital. Many of her patients still had dentures they had worn as humans before being turned into vampires. The long, sharp canine teeth came with their new condition. The rest of their teeth, or lack thereof, remained the same.
Missy was just finishing sharpening her patient’s fangs when a commotion arose in the hallway.
“Wonder wha at ith?” Mrs. Kinkuddy asked.
Loud knocks struck the door.
“Excuse me, dear,” Mrs. Kinkuddy said, racing to the door almost quicker than the eye, like a vampire decades younger.
A bunch of elderly Squid Tower vampires stood in the hall. All were agitated.
“Marvin’s dead!” said Bill, a member of Missy’s vampire writing group.
“Marvin Nutley?” Mrs. Kinkuddy asked.
“Yes! The only Marvin on our floor. He’s my next-door neighbor, and I hadn’t seen or heard him in two nights. So, I stuck my head around the wall of my balcony and saw him sitting out on his. Dead. Sun-torched.”
“Oh, my,” Missy and Mrs. Kinkuddy said at the same time.
“I think he fell asleep in his chair one night, and the rising sun got him.”
“Impossible,” an elderly vampire in the hall said. “The pain from the first exposure to the sun would have awakened him and allowed him to get inside before he was torched.”
“Has anyone called Agnes?” Missy asked about the HOA president and leader of the community.
“I did,” said Bill, who was also on the HOA board. He liked to pretend he’d been in the military, acting with dispassionate efficiency in everything he did. The truth was, he’d never worn a uniform in his life or afterlife, except as a costume when playing soldier with his extensive weapons collection.
“Agnes is here.” The words rippled through the crowd in the hallway. Missy and her patient joined them as they followed Agnes, striding with her quad cane, from the elevator to 409. The petite ninety-year-old (in body age), wore a grim expression as she unlocked the door with a spare key.
When she walked in, the crowd held back, despite their curiosity. Being a nurse, Missy decided she should follow Agnes. They walked through the sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment. Marvin was a notorious cheapskate who had claimed he needed to nurse his modest savings to last him for eternity. The rumor, though, was he was actually filthy rich. You wouldn’t know it from the thrift-store furnishings in his living room.
When they reached the sliding glass door to the balcony, Agnes yanked on the handle and gasped with surprise.
“It’s locked,” she said. “How could it be locked if he was out there?”
“Murder.”
Missy jumped in surprise. She hadn’t realized Mrs. Kinkuddy was standing right behind them.
“Someone locked Marvin out there and let him fry.”
“But surely, he would have called for help,” Agnes said. “You’re his neighbor, Bill. You didn’t hear anything?”
“No,” Bill replied. “I rarely go on my balcony unless I’m watching out for human-smugglers landing on the beach. I don’t think I’d hear him shouting if I was inside. The question is, did anyone else hear him and ignore it?”
“You mean, ignore it even while knowing the sunrise was coming?” Missy asked.
Bill shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
“Let’s not speak ill of the dead undead,” Agnes said. “I wish I hadn’t touched the handle. We’ll need to get a security firm to check it for fingerprints.”
Missy, still wearing her latex gloves from the dental exam, unlatched the door and slid it open. The three of them stepped hesitantly onto the balcony. There was no need to turn on the light, since Missy could see well enough in the moonlight, and the vampires could see even better. The space was small, with room for a glass-top table, two chairs, and a sun lounger.
Ironically, the sun lounger was where the black husk of what used to be Marvin Nutley lay. It looked like one of the volcanic-ash-preserved corpses from the ruins of Pompeii.
“He looks almost peaceful lying there,” Agnes said. “I want to believe he didn’t suffer too much.”
A gust of wind from the ocean hit Marvin’s blackened remains and blasted the ashes all over the three of them and onto nearby balconies. Nothing was left of Marvin but a small pile of ashes in the corner and a coating on the cushion of the sun lounger. Missy wiped ashes from her face.
“There goes my plan of filling an urn with what was left of Marvin,” Agnes said.
When you’re a vampire, your hive or greater community must be completely self-sufficient, because many of the services you need can’t be supplied by humans. Undead patients can’t go to human doctors, so they contract with home health agencies like Missy’s. In the rare event that one of you expires, you can’t turn to a funeral home.
And, in the case of crime, you have to investigate it yourself, except, perhaps, for simple burglaries or car thefts. You really don’t want the police involved in your affairs. You can’t take any risk of them finding out you’re vampires.
That is especially true in the event of vampicide, the killing of a vampire by another vampire or a human. Agnes and her associates would have to find the killer and mete out justice.
Missy was determined to help, though. She was the community’s most-trusted human, almost like an honorary vampire. The only other humans the community dealt with were those they hired to do landscaping, maintenance, guarding
the gate, and other daytime activities. The association’s attorney happened to be a werewolf, but he could work during the day, obviously.
“I’m calling an emergency meeting of the Board of Directors,” Agnes said. “Assuming no one is out and about hunting prey, we’ll meet downstairs in an hour.”
“Who cares who killed him?” asked Leonard Schwartz at the Squid Towers HOA Board of Directors emergency meeting.
The other four members gasped at his insensitivity. Missy, sitting in an empty row of folding chairs across from them, wisely kept her mouth shut.
“I know you don’t have a drop of compassion in your undead body,” Agnes said, “but the association bylaws forbid killing anyone on the property.”
“I thought that meant no feeding on humans.”
“It means humans, vampires, or any other sentient advanced creature. We are a self-governing community. If we don’t follow the rules, we’ll descend into anarchy.”
Schwartz snorted with derision.
“Don’t you snort at me,” Agnes said. “The only killing allowed in our community is when we must put a vampire to final death as punishment for serious offenses. Like killing a neighbor.”
“You executed a vampire years ago for putting unauthorized holiday decorations on her front door,” Kim said.
“Exactly. Serious offenses like that.”
“Agnes, you know as well as I do Marvin antagonized half the community with his crazy conspiracy theories,” Schwartz said.
“They’re not all crazy,” Bill said.
“Yeah, the ones you believe in, too, aren’t crazy,” Gloria said. “I get it.”
“All I’m saying is that finding and punishing whoever locked him out on his balcony will be very divisive for our community,” Schwartz said.
“You mean it’s permissible to murder unpopular residents?” Agnes asked. “If that’s the case, you’d better watch your back.”
Schwartz snorted again. “No one at Squid Towers has the guts to take me on. That includes you, Bill. I mean fighting me fang to fang, not shooting me with wooden bullets from half a mile away with one of your sniper rifles.”
“Okay, turn the testosterone down, boys,” Kim said.
“At a hundred and seventy-five years old, I still have testosterone?”
“I know I do,” Bill said. “Considerably more than you.”
“You’re going to cause a lot of anger if you go around asking people who disliked Marvin, of whom there are many, if they murdered him,” Gloria said.
“I don’t see what other option we have,” Agnes said. “Any of us could become victims of casual murder if we allow this to go unpunished.”
“So, we have to question everyone?” Gloria asked.
“Unless there’s a better option,” Agnes said, fixing Missy with her stare. “Such as magic.”
“Wait a minute, I’m a nurse here,” Missy said. “I need to maintain the trust of my patients. I can’t do that if I’m a witch-inquisitor.”
“No one has to know,” Agnes said. “You simply help us narrow down the suspects. We’ll take it from there.”
“I don’t know of any spells powerful enough to find the killer out of all the residents here. All I have is a truth-telling spell. And I have to use that face-to-face with the subject. I won’t do that.”
“Do browse through your spell books and see if you can find one that will help us, please,” Agnes said.
“Okay,” Missy said, though she had no intention of doing so. “But you guys can do a little more to narrow down the half of the population who disliked him without interrogating everyone. Do you know of any quarrels he’s had recently? Has anyone threatened him? Complained about him behind his back?”
“Those who complained about him behind his back make up the half of us who disliked him,” Kim said.
“Well, you know what I mean. There have to be some suspects who come to mind first.”
“Bill, here, wasn’t too fond of him,” Schwartz said.
“Hey, I’m the one who found him. I was concerned about his wellbeing. He didn’t answer his door, so I looked around the wall into his balcony. Speaking of fondness, I saw you yelling at him after he parked in the handicapped spot you claim as your own.”
“It is mine,” Schwartz said. “And I’m not the only one here prone to yelling at Marvin. Kim, if I recall, screamed at him at the pool just last week.”
“He was going on loudly with the new vampire couple from Scranton about his latest conspiracy theory. He was so loud and obnoxious, not one of us could hear the pool aerobics instructor.”
“And Gloria, you’ve been quiet tonight,” Schwartz taunted. “But you’re not innocent. I heard you rip into him when he accused you of being a Reptilian.”
“Of course, I did,” she said. “How can a vampire be a Reptilian?”
“But can a Reptilian be a vampire? That’s where he was coming from.”
“It’s utterly idiotic,” Gloria said. “And insulting. How dare he accuse me of that!”
“What’s a Reptilian?” Missy asked.
They all ignored her.
“Marvin had an entire insane asylum’s worth of conspiracy theories in his head,” Agnes said. “But the lizard-people one has to be the craziest.”
“Lizard people?” Missy asked.
“I thought you young people knew everything on the internet,” Schwartz said.
“I’m not so young. And I don’t read conspiracy theories on the internet.”
“Maybe you should start. If you want to understand Marvin’s mind.”
She did not want to understand Marvin’s mind. He wasn’t a patient of hers, but she’d met him and knew he was a kook. An abrasive kook. But she supposed if she was going to help the people of Squid Tower find justice without making themselves devolve into a civil war, she should find out more of why Marvin antagonized all his neighbors. She had the following night off and would do some research.
What she learned about Marvin’s world turned her reality-based world completely upside down.
Missy leafed through a few of her grimoires. She called them her magick recipe books. They contained advice and instructions for everything from spells to potions, from hexes to amulets. There was magick to heal warts and inspire love. There were spells to make your fields yield more crops and your 401K yield more earnings.
But she didn't find any spells for finding murder suspects. She didn't expect to. And really didn't want to. She worried about making a mistake and falsely accusing a Squid Tower resident. Besides, she wanted to use her magick to help others, not for law enforcement.
Instead, she turned to the internet. The internet was useless for finding spells that actually worked. Those were extremely valuable, so why would you post them on the internet for free?
The internet was more suitable for finding wacky conspiracy theories. After all, wasn't that what the internet was invented for?
It didn't take long to find Marvin Nutley’s extensive internet presence. It turned out he was a prolific writer of screeds defending his outlandish conspiracy theories and attacking his critics.
Most of his work were videos in which he laid out the case that the moon landing was faked, Elvis was still alive, and Bigfoot was holding Elvis prisoner in a cabin in the woods. The contrails in the sky from jets were chemicals that made us more docile. Moreover, the earth was flat. Every manmade tragedy was a false-flag operation, and everything that happened in the world was part of an evil plot by a secret cabal.
Many of his videos were Marvin talking to the camera about Reptilians, also known as Lizard People. These aliens from another solar system could shape-shift into human form and blend into our society. In fact, many of the most powerful individuals on the planet—in politics, business, and culture—were, in fact, Reptilians. Soon, they would completely run the world and enslave all the humanoids through mind control.
He used a lot of obscure, impossible-to-verify proof points and anecdotes to prove his
theory. But mostly he talked about it as if it didn't need to be proven, as if it was common knowledge accepted by everyone.
It was nuts. It would have been funny if Marvin wasn't so vehement about it.
Missy found videos from other conspiracy theorists who believed in Reptilians. Marvin wasn't the only one out there. But he was most likely the only vampire purveyor of the Reptilian conspiracy. That was a distinction he was surely proud of before he was incinerated.
Marvin had been in his sixties in body age, the age when he was turned into a vampire. Missy didn't know how long ago that was. It was impressive enough that a guy in his sixties had mastered the internet propaganda channels. For a guy probably more than a century old, it was remarkable.
Missy, in her forties, didn't even know how to make a video of herself and post it on the internet. How lame was that?
So far, what Missy found confirmed Marvin was as far off the deep end as his neighbors claimed. But it didn't provide clues as to why he was killed.
Those took a little longer to find.
She found them in a video titled, "Video proof that Reptilians Exist." Intriguing, yes. Who wouldn't watch this video?
This one wasn't like the others, with Marvin at home lecturing to his laptop camera. He shot this video with his smartphone in some rural location. He spoke breathlessly to the jerky camera.
“I’m here at the edge of the Florida Everglades. This area is well-known as a landing site for Reptilians arriving here from the Alpha Draconis star system. Their spaceships are invisible to humans, of course. But burn marks have been found on the grounds of a nearby campground that were made by the spaceship engines. And—hey, why is there a man walking by in the middle of the night in such a remote area?”
