Straight Outta Fangton

by C. T. Phipps

  A few minutes later, there was a small pile of dead woodland creatures down at our feet. After feeding on a rabbit or two, I was strong enough to summon another deer and the awful taste aside, it put me in top form. It also would be enough to get Melissa through the night without killing anyone.

  I hoped.

  I recalled the horrible experience I'd had when I'd first been reborn. Thoth was a sink-or-swim mentor, so he'd put me alone in a room with a contract killer who had killed a vampire for his human wife as part of an insurance swindle. I'd ended up tearing the man's throat out and drinking every last drop of blood I could suck from his body. I still remembered the look of rapturous joy on the man’s face even as he breathed his last. Thoth had wanted me up close and personal with the downside of being undead. I liked to think I was kinder.

  Melissa, who would need a new outfit before I took her anywhere, looked up from the bloody animal holocaust before her. She looked more than a little shell-shocked by her experience and I couldn’t blame her. She wasn’t complaining about all the cute little murdered animals around her, though, which was a plus. “So, what now?”

  David came out from the store a few seconds later, carrying a yellow pad covered in what I assumed was a complete transcript of everything Thoth said. Thoth was much better at mind manipulation than I was and could even do it over the phone. He also had a lot less patience with David's idiosyncrasies.

  “He wants to see you,” David said, coming towards us. “As soon as possible.”

  “Now?” I said, licking my mouth clean and pulling out a pre-moistened wipe to clean my hands. “Now we go see my creator.”

  Chapter Three

  It didn't take long for us to get on the road, just enough time to get all of the dead animals in a garbage bag before leaving them for Steve and his friends to chow on. Oh, and to stop at a big box store to pick up some jeans and a t-shirt for Melissa to change into. There wasn't much that could be done for the little patches of blood in her hair, but that was a form of decoration where we were going.

  I was driving a ten-year-old green Jeep Liberty that had a plastic-covered interior and had seen better days. David was sitting in the back, playing on his cellphone while I kept my eye on the road, trying to make sense of all this. I still couldn't wrap my head around the fact an Old One had done this to someone. Didn’t those rich bastards have something better to do with their time than leave some poor girl to become a draugr?

  Apparently not.

  “So, what's your story, lady?” David asked, surprising me by ending our enforced silence.

  “Hmm?” Melissa said, pretending not to have heard him.

  “How did you get into our bathroom in the middle of an hour from the interesting part of the state?” David asked, ignoring her.

  Melissa was silent and looked uncomfortable.

  “It's a half hour to New Detroit and I don't want to get him started on one of his ‘Greatest Hits of Gangster Rap’ binges,” David said.

  “Because you have no taste,” I said. “I could have been the next big thing in rap. Straight outta Fangton.”

  “But you can’t rhyme worth shit,” David said. “Kind of hard to be a rapper that way.”

  I rolled my eyes, then shook my head. “I am interested, though, Melissa. You don’t seem like you’re a tourist or fleeing in terror. Those are the two kinds of people who usually get lost and end up at the Qwik & Shop.”

  Melissa gave a half-smile. “All right, but it seems silly now. I was going to a protest.”

  “A protest?” I asked.

  “Against vampires.”

  David burst out laughing and actually put away his cellphone.

  “It's not funny,” Melissa said, looking out the window guiltily.

  “Yeah, it's not,” I said, less than happy I was travelling with a bigot. I wondered if that's why the Old One had embraced her. Sort of a spur of the moment, “Well if you hate vampires, how about you feel what it's like to be one” thing. Nah, I'd yet to meet an Old One who possessed anything approaching sentimentality. Thoth came closest, and he was as cold as ice when it came to getting what he wanted.

  “Which hate group did you belong to?” David asked, showing a complete and admittedly hilarious lack of tact.

  “The Human Rights League isn't a hate group,” Melissa said. “It's not even anti-vampire, it's pro—”

  “Human?” I finished for her.

  Melissa blinked. “Oh Jesus, I never even noticed that before. It is a hate group, isn't it?”

  “All the murders of vampires they've been suspected of involvement in would indicate that, yeah,” I said.

  Vampire hunting was now illegal in the United States, but that didn't stop the various secular and religious organizations of the world from doing it. Indeed, the Bailout and subsequent proliferation of vampires had made it a renaissance for killers of the supernatural. Vampires were now public figures and their resting places listed in address books.

  Who could blame anyone should they accidentally catch fire or there be a random home invasion? About the only good thing was the fact it turned out most of the older organizations hated each other as much as they hated vampires, with the Mormon Mankind Fellowship currently suing the Baptist Living Souls Group for libel. I wondered how those groups would feel if they knew the Old Ones paid both of them a fairly hefty donation every year to keep them thinning the ranks of the young? Probably just cash their check and complain.

  “How did you get mixed up in a group like that?” David asked, showing more interest in our newborn than was probably appropriate for a servant.

  Then again, she was smoking hot, bigot or not.

  “My father was a Baptist minister,” Melissa said, looking uncomfortable. “He was always trying to teach me right from wrong, how to tell good versus evil, and how Jesus loved everyone but he loved some people more than others.”

  I winced as the J-word set my teeth on edge.

  “Is something wrong?” Melissa said.

  “Vampires can't stand hearing the name of holy people,” David explained for me. “Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed, Saint—”

  “Goddammit, David!” I shouted, almost pulling over the side of the road. “What the hell?!”

  “They can swear just fine, though,” David said, chuckling.

  “You are the worst servant ever,” I said.

  “Yeah.” David laughed. “I am.”

  Melissa blinked. “Wait, is it normal for me to be able to say Jesus and not feel anything?”

  It wasn't, actually. “Not unless you're a couple of hundred years old, no. The Old Ones are immune to practically everything. They can't even be killed unless it's by another Old One.”

  As if they didn’t get enough benefits with their superpowers and wealth, they also were truly frigging immortal.

  So unfair.

  “Wait, what?” Melissa said. “How is that possible?”

  “Magic, duh,” David explained. “Same way they can fly, turn into a bat, and summon Bambi to murder.”

  Melissa looked ill. “I can't believe I did that.”

  I found myself intrigued by her story, though. “So you're an anti-vampire protestor who gets turned into a vampire at my workplace. Are you sure you don't remember anything about your attacker?”

  “No,” Melissa said, her voice low. “Nothing.”

  There was something about her tone that made me think she was holding something back. I didn't worry about that much, though, because Thoth was very good at ferreting out these sorts of things. I wasn’t too happy about having to go back to my creator with my hat in my hand, especially how we’d left things, but this was beyond my pay grade. Especially since I’d started working at the Qwik & Shop. Poor girl was probably going to get executed for getting created without permission, but there wasn’t much I could do about that if the voivode decreed it. The best I could do was keep her from killing people and give her the basics on her newfound, possibly short-lived, condition.

 
“What's your father likely to say when he finds out you've joined the Other Side?” I asked, pretty sure the answer was going to be disown her.

  “He's not going to do anything,” Melissa said. “He's dead along with rest of my family.”

  “Vampires?” David asked.

  “Car accident,” Melissa said. “I'm pretty sure vampires weren't responsible for the drunk driver who hit their bus with a semi. Still, I did my very best to carry on his work.”

  I didn't know how to react to that. “Well, we'll be in New Detroit soon enough. We’ll meet with Thoth and he’ll hopefully present you to Voivode Ashura.”

  “And if I don't get introduced to her?” Melissa said.

  “You'll be declared rogue,” I said. “Then you'll be hunted by the Vampire Nation’s killers, FBI, Department of Supernatural Security, and all of the hate groups that will have your name forwarded to them.”

  “Damn,” David said. “Vampires fight dirty.”

  “Damn straight.”

  Melissa was silent for a long time and I started looking for my Death Certificate CD. Finally, she said, “How did you get picked to become a vampire?”

  “I was selected to be Thoth’s servant first.”

  “How did that go?”

  A powerful memory overwhelmed me in that moment. I remembered standing over the dead body of my brother as he lay face up on a slab in the morgue. They hadn't even bothered to close his eyes. The technician had just called me in at three in the morning to tell me to come down and identify him. Damien had only been twenty-three and now he was just another statistic.

  A part of me wanted to go out to my car, get my shotgun, and track down the sons of bitches who'd killed him. I could do it too. None of these bastards were particularly subtle, and I knew more about tactics, as well as weaponry, than all of them put together. That thought left me, though, as I knew the circumstances for Damien's death. He'd killed a member of the Detroit 88s and had bragged about it to me, acting like it wouldn't fall back on him.

  Damien had never listened, to me especially, that gang culture was going to get him killed. That its time had passed, if it had ever had a time in the first place. He'd wanted so hard to have a place to fit in that he'd become like a dog to Carl “Red” Jackson, the leader of the 6th Street Knives.

  If I was going to kill anyone, I should kill him.

  But I didn't want to kill anyone.

  That was when I sensed someone behind me, a presence that seemed to fill the empty room the morgue technician had left me in. Turning my head, I saw a handsome shaven-headed Black man who was dressed in an expensive white suit with a fedora. He wore a little ankh on his lapel, a sign used by many vampires to show who they were. He had a gold-tipped walking stick that I saw had been modified to conceal a gun, even as something told me he didn't need a weapon.

  “My condolences for your loss, Mister Stone,” the man spoke with a light Caribbean accent.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, sighing. “You're Thoth the vampire. Damien used to work for you.”

  “Yes,” Thoth said. “He used to be my driver. Then he stole from me.”

  I spun around and threw a punch at him.

  Thoth was beside me by the time it reached where he was, not having changed his posture in the slightest. “I do not speak of it to demean your loss or the deceased. Damien was a man who dreamed of escaping the life he was born into. The allure of wealth was too much of a temptation for him, but I knew that hiring him was a risk.”

  I took a deep breath, aware I was going to die if I pissed this man off and not caring. “Then why hire him?”

  “Everyone deserves a chance for a better life.”

  “What would you know about that?”

  “I was born a slave. I know everything about that.”

  I grit my teeth. “What do you want?”

  “For one, to inform you that Carl Jackson has been found with a very large amount of cocaine and is going away for the rest of his life thanks to his prior convictions,” Thoth said, his tone even. “Also, I've managed to negotiate a truce between the 88s and the Knives. Neither side will be doing any further harm to the other, and both will be employed as security at some of my lesser holdings.”

  The vampires had been buying up downtown and demolishing it to build their little resort town for years now. Some of the money had gone back to Detroit's people, helping them get better lives and get people back in school, but lot of it had just gone to out-of-towners. Worse, plenty of people had been displaced from their homes and sent to live in even worse accommodations than before. I wasn't a fan of the Vampire Nation as a result.

  “Could have done it a little faster,” I said, looking back at Damien. “My brother is dead because of their stupid fucking war.”

  “All wars are stupid fucking wars,” Thoth said, “even the ones that need to be fought.”

  “You put that on a fortune cookie and someone might read it.”

  “I want to hire you.”

  I actually laughed at that, all of the bitterness of the past year flowing out in a single moment. “My brother is lying dead three feet away and you're here to offer me a job? Get out of my face, fanger.”

  Thoth didn't move, though. “It is because of your brother's death I was able to negotiate the truce. He was a good man whom many people liked and symbolic of the losses both sides had suffered. He died, in his own way, a hero.”

  “He died because Red thought it would be hilarious to send him to shoot up a bar full of thirty armed 88s without telling him they were there.”

  Thoth was silent. “I want to give you an opportunity to escape the life you're trapped in. To repay your debts and to live free with a chance for something even greater after you have proven yourself.”

  I was about to tell him to piss off when I thought about Grams and the fact that I couldn't afford to pay for her care. Mom had run out years ago and my dad was God knows where now, probably still chasing his dream of getting rich enough to come back for us. “I'm listening.”

  “I would like you to become my servant.”

  “You mean your Bloodslave.” Since vampires had gone public, a lot of information had become commonly known, even if they lied out of both sides of their mouth about it.

  “We don't call them that,” Thoth said. “Anymore.”

  I was ready to walk out, but something stopped me.

  “Detroit is changing, Peter, and so is the world around it. The Bailout has allowed vampires an unprecedented amount of influence and is the rock on which we may build a future as friends of humanity rather than merely its keepers. This is an opportunity for the people who live in the city as well as vampiredom as a whole. The problem is there are many people who would like to see this experiment fail and go back to the days when humans hunted us every bit as much as we hunted them.”

  Something about his demeanor, cold and emotionless as it was, rang true. “Why me?”

  “You are man of principle,” Thoth said. “When others in your neighborhood and circumstances surrendered to the allure of crime, you chose to become a soldier. When you returned, ignored and forgotten by the country you served, you struggled to remain honest. You succumb to neither alcohol nor drugs to cope with the pain in your soul.”

  I thought about the terrible things I'd done in the war. The kids I'd had to kill because assholes used them to throw grenades or worse. “You don't know a damn thing about me.”

  “Don't I?” Thoth said. “Your soul is very easy to read. It is not your nobility alone that attracts me, though. It is also your willingness to break those principles you hold dear when necessary that attracts me. I know about Sergeant Matheson.”

  I'd shot that racist piece of shit with a gun I'd recovered from one of the many conscripts we'd been killing during the initial invasion. Matheson had been the worst sort of soldier, and long before I started seeing all the weird and freaky stuff that had
turned the Iraq War into the quagmire it was (not that it'd needed any help), he'd been the first genuine monster I'd ever known. The military had never picked up on the fact I'd killed him and I knew my squad mates would never tell.

  I stared at him, my mouth open. “How?”

  Thoth just smiled, looking like a snake as he did so. “Like I said, your soul is very easy to read. I do not judge for that or, if I do, it is with approval. He was a murderer and a thief who would have sent your unit to its death.”

  I was screwed. He could burn me anytime he wanted. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to drink my blood and become a half-breed. You will gain great strength, as well as the ability to heal terrible wounds and bleed less when injured. You will be able to hear my voice wherever I wish. You will help me train my new security and be my personal bodyguard for the coming few years. If it becomes necessary, you will kill those who would do me or my project harm.”

  “So, after my brother was killed by a gang, you want me to join a bigger, richer one.”

  He paused. “There's one difference.”

  “And that is?”

  “My group wants to end the fighting. My enemies want to keep it going forever.”

  I stared down at my feet then my next question made a lie of any nobler motivations I might have tried to convince myself were my reason for accepting. “How much do I get paid?”

  It was more than enough to buy my soul.

  The entire memory flash had taken less than half a second. Picking up my CD and putting it into the player, I said, “Oh, it was nothing. He needed someone and I was available.”

  “Oh,” Melissa said.

  We arrived at New Detroit soon after.

  Chapter Four

  Detroit had become unrecognizable. Before he'd taken off to search for oil in South Dakota, my father had told me stories about the city during its heyday, when it was the City of Rock and Roll and money was there to be made hand over fist in the auto industry. I suspected he was exaggerating, even if my hometown was a place I'd taken pride in even during its worst years.