Love Bites Chapter 3

Marty learns more about being undead and his new vampire master

3.

Marty opened his eyes.

Above he spotted the pockmarked face of the moon momentarily before being swallowed by clouds. He laid there a moment trying to separate nightmare from reality. He was in fact lying in an alley near the Blue Ball porn shop�"he knew this because he could see a large blue neon side with the moniker burning bright. He smelled the rot of trash and the sour stench of puke. His puke.

There was no vampire.

He tried to sit up, but couldn’t. He tried again with the same result, him lying in the stinking gutter. Everything he attempted to move was completely immobile. He was paralyzed. And then came the pain. It started in his toes, and then like wildfire, spread up his legs, hips, stomach, and settling in his arms. Just as he was about to cry out, everything went numb. He lied there with tears streaming down his cheeks too afraid to move anything, even his toes.

“It will pass Mr. Jenkins,” the vampire said quite matter-of-factly. He heard footfalls. A moment later, leaning over him and looking down, was the vampire.

“How do you know my name?”

“You’d be surprised what I know,” he replied smoothly and in some sort of European accent. Seeing as he had never actually traveled outside of Indiana, Marty couldn’t place it. It could have been Australian for all he knew.

“Did you drug me?”

“No.”

“Why can’t I move?”

“You are suffering from rigor mortis.”

“Rigawhat?”

“Rigor mortis,” he replied coldly.

Where had he heard that phrase before? His frantic and terrified mind searched for the source and then zeroed in on it firmly. A paramedic in the film Return of the Living Dead had mentioned it to Frank and Freddy after moving them around and discovering bruises on their backs. It was proof that they were dead.

“Holy s**t,” Marty gasped, “You mean I’m dead!”

“More or less.”

Thunder boomed overhead, causing the vampire to look anxiously above and then back at Marty. “Would you mind if we had this conversation someplace less exposed to the elements?”

“F**k you!”

The vampire sighed and shook his head, “So ungrateful. What did you have before me? You could argue your job, but the sad truth is you lost that yesterday after your boss, Mr. Moore, caught you playing turkey bowling. House? Nope, you live in a s****y apartment, which you’re about to lose because you don’t have the rent. For love, Mr. Jenkins, I might have passed you by and selected somebody else, but you don’t have a girlfriend either do you? You saw a girl tonight, Ann Graves I believe her name is, but she’s so far out of your league she might as well be from the moon. The horrific truth of the matter is,” the vampire said stonily as he crotched down putting his arms across his knees, “is that you have no one or nothing binding you to this world except Gail and your parents. You are so lonely in this world that by your passing and sudden disappearance, no one’s going to care. What I did to you tonight wasn’t a curse, but a blessing in disguise. I’m just gave you something to live for.”

“How do you know all that? Have you been spying on me?”

“It’s in the blood,” the vampire said. “Your fate is sealed my dear boy. You are now a corpse. But death, as they say, is only the beginning.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll kill you again. This time death will be permanent.”

       Lighting flashed again overhead and was immediately followed by a gutter ball rumble. Marty weighed his options, but knew they both sucked. On one hand, he could go off with this freak and enter a world of living nightmares, where vampires lurked and God knew what else. His choice was to die. Yeah, what wonderful f*****g choices he thought bitterly.

       “What’s your name?” Marty asked.

       “I am Maligant.”

       “That’s an odd name.”

       “Well, it’s an odd world.”

       “I’ll join you.”

       “Good,” Maligant said, yanking him up and tossing him across his shoulders. As the rain began to fall, the vampire started running.