Shriek Highway
My truculent shrug threw off the craggy priest. It stood skeletal and still at the seared fringe, mummied frame blue in the moonglow. Spiked jags of teeth, the mandible of its ruinous face, rocked slowly while old evil fixed me in a rivet-hole stare.
The girl flung handfuls of ash at it. It was gone. Was it ever there? Of course. I could feel its curse humming along my bones, squeezing sponges of marrow, depleting me.
“You see it?” she asked with guttural fear.
I pointed to where some scurrilous shining silence floated a few feet away camouflaged among ragged wisps and flying fog, vacant eyes hovering.
She tossed streamers of ash into the looting wind.
Overhead, the carbon haze of stars jarred, and the moon sharply claimed a lower station in the sky. Enamel light dripped through the porous forest. We had somehow jumped forward in time.
The girl whirled about, aghast. In her voice, I heard the crackle of madness, “What’s happening?”
No time to explain. There was no time. If there had been, I would have had a lot to say. Not that she would have understood or will you now.
It took Bernie’s brain a while to make sense of my vampire ordeal. The world for the undead is different than for the living. In the fractal blood soul, space and time change places. Sort of.
We all know the living can move in only one direction of time, steadily away from the past, constrained in the now, tending always toward a mythic moment never reached. It’s like that for the undead – only not with time but space.
Space carries us with it as it expands toward where we know not. That makes the past inaccessible. But we can move sideways among alternate moments and fast forward in any timeline – but only ever as far as the rising sun.
From the girl’s pov, I vanished. Poof! In her mind, I’d run off into the night faster than sight. In truth, the shaman priest had snagged me. It got hold of me with my own words: The dream moves on. And my whole body of thought followed across time, forward toward dawn.
What bewitched me was the way the slayer priest bonded to my ideas of emptiness, to not-me, my committed identity with nonidentity. And it did this simply with spellbinding words, noises that held my attention but meant nothing to the vampire so that transcendence did not smudge its intent. The dream moved on. The ancient one moved in – tripped me on infinity’s threshold and propelled me across the floor of night to the fiery drop-off.
Sunrise!
I grappled. Plummeting through hours, I had nothing to grab onto but the fractal bloodline. That meant finding my balance in the Here, where the vampire’s iron offered purchase.
The shaman had figured me out. I was an anomaly among the undead – the ghost of a twice dead thing possessing a vampire body. The cremated remains of my body had scrubbed the vampire mind in Bernie’s brain and installed me instead.
Once the vampire priest understood this, it knew how to deal with me. Exorcised by my own words, I slid helplessly through the dark of time toward dawn. The only way to stop myself was to be a vampire.
So that you understand … I had no choice. To live, I forgot about Bernie and me and not-me, and I became the flexing fractal line of my veins. Into the chalice of my heart, the rush of hours spiraled, tightening to a tourniquet coil of blood hunger, the soul of the undead. The dream had moved on. And I found myself in the feeding place.
With whipcrack finality, surging hours stopped at a solitary moment of a single timeline, an undulant ridgeline with a forest of red-eyed trees.
The girl whirled about, aghast. In her voice, I heard the crackle of madness, “What’s happening?” Perplexity congealed to outright fear, and she backed away. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Why? The beauty of her frailty enraptured me. Her blood smoke unsheathed knives of hunger in my miserable soul.
“Breathe!” She slapped my chest with both palms. “Come on, Bernie! Breathe!”
Bernie’s name called down the long, cold road of my surrender. I heard it rebounding in the echo chamber of a higher dimension, in the basilica of space where life chooses and thrives, where once I had lived, half of a fumbling relationship. ▬▬Breathe…
“Don’t you scare me again.” She punched my shoulder, hard. “Where have you been? It’s morning! We have to get the hell out of here!”
The sun under the forest leaked lymphatic tinctures. The eastern sky brightened like a cosmic exhalation of relief. In a few minutes, killing wavelengths promised to disinfect the face of the earth.
▬▬We don’t have to go anywhere.
I turned toward the bone-chill and pinpointed the slayer priest in the green air. It skittered akimbo through the broomed grass, an outlandish staccato stomp-dance under the failing stars. It was dancing some cryptic incantation. ▬▬Soon, that thing dies too.
It didn’t acknowledge me. As it shimmied, the querulous wind picked up. Somehow, its crazy gyrations were changing the weather, gathering storm force.
“Come on!” The girl hooked my elbow and leaned toward darkness. “The car!” When I didn’t budge, she came around and scanned the length of my face. “You serious?”
▬▬I’m no vampire. Bernie and I belong together – but not like this.
I slanted a look at the hideous dancer jangling in the wind like a spindle-puppet. ▬▬In a few minutes you can walk out of here pretty as…
Shrieks of wind cut me off. From out of the purple vault of heaven, tempest gusts plunged, pummeling the grass flat, driving a cloud of chaff and dust into a rolling comber ahead of that skeleton jig. The shaman priest had used the potent mix of night’s cold depth and dawn’s fire to brew a squall!
Maelstrom force swelled across the field and stampeded into the trees under gunfire of snapping boughs. Lumber screamed and clouds of startled birds flung from the booming forest flew like shrapnel.
The vampire sorcerer skewed about, whirling off the stamped ground, riding a vortex that spun our way.
I sheltered the girl with Bernie’s broad back. The blast marched me bent over, the girl under me, faces squashed together in a grimacing tango.
Away went the ash of my twice dead flesh, allotted to drear horizons, pine jungles of mist and night murk.
Silence closed over us. The gale had lifted, leaving the firepit swept to its baked surface.
The acrobatic shaman tumbled into the razed circle and jumped up vomiting noise.
The girl shouted her fright.
Quickly, I sashayed us away, and the thing didn’t pursue. It stood victorious on reclaimed earth, chanting primeval hunt songs, rallying the slayers. Hordes of vampires stirred in the ventricles of the forest.
▬▬Run! I tossed the girl in the direction of the car.
She threw me an urgent, aching look.
▬▬The swarm is gathering! I can’t protect you. Get out of here. Hurry!
“Come with me!” She hopped impatiently and waved at the slayer priest without looking at it, hopping there skewered on its wailing. Its tailspin dance unfurled noctilucent ribbons in the charcoal air. “He’s not stopping us. Come on!”
The way she said ‘he’ exposed such mortal helplessness before the undead, I couldn’t find my mind for a moment. She read in the human muscles of my face the fear – for her. My black hole stare saw her among the undead, and she recognized in my slumped body language her doom, my wretched helplessness to change her fate. ▬▬Let Bernie and me slow them down. Go!
She darted across the gray pasture, Bernie’s jacket flopping, running like a girl and not helped much by those heavy boots. She wouldn’t make it.
The undead raved through the pencil shadows of the forest, then out into the glassy air of the open field. They coursed like eels in the tasseled grass, and I heard the sizzle of their timeflow curling around the fractal line of possible outcomes that conjuncted with her blood.
I couldn’t bear to watch that feeding frenzy and turned away. The vampire shaman, upright now and still, stopped crooning and looked steadily at me beneath a sky filled with cloudy serum. Blood drained out of earth into heaven.
▬▬So now we die. My defiant words went nowhere, refuted brutally by the garrulous wind that carried vampire shrieks of claw and bite!
The shaman priest grinned four billion years of feeding.
I could have throttled that thing! Except I knew he’d jujitsu me through time into the roaring furnace of noon. I gnashed fangs and spit. At least now I’d get to watch him fry too.
Gold seraphim wreathed long-pinioned wings across the stratosphere. Gypsum clouds lit up with citrus hues. The conger eel timeflow of the undead slithered back into the early morning woods and beneath pulsing fog.
The slayer priest remained in place, sham eyes gouged with nothing, soapstone fingers busy as spiders, unwinding its wrap of human leather.
Laser rays of sunlight cut across the forest’s notched horizon and ripped fiery gashes in us. I went to my knees blazing with pain, ducking the fatal beams, and genuflecting before the victory howl of the vampire.
Fleshsmoke curled from its bladebones, incising another cicatrix notch in the slayer’s masterpiece of coup marks, a garish sun-scar across its back for each rival slain by solar fire. Only dying vampires witnessed the shaman’s secret. The flayed skin of a man snapped open to a bodysuit into which the emaciated slayer briskly stepped.
Leather sleeves with gloved fingers received the dowel-thin arms, and the cowl that pulled over the blackened egg of a head covered pike-jaw fangs with an obscene, mocking semblance of a human face.
Shielded by this leather from the lethal sun, the old one cast its shadow over me. ▬▬ O, impenitent beguiler, go to your beloved transcendence – and to oblivion! It leaned to one side and daylight charred through me.
I roasted a scream so loud I didn’t hear the car’s racing engine or tires tearing across the field until the girl braked screeching to a stop inches away. The fender smacked the vampire priest so forcefully the masked mummer whirled backward to its haunches, leather skin flailing loose.
She popped the trunk from her seat and swung out of the car to help me, scurrying frantically while the enraged vampire tightened its body armor.
I flowed into the trunk’s casket darkness with whimpering sobs. Briefly I glimpsed her prosperous smile. She held open Bernie’s leather jacket, stained with her blood from the lamia’s bite. The decoy had been shredded by the vampires’ teeming attack when she had cowered beneath it in the terrorizing moments before sunrise drove off the horribles.
Through the narrowing eyeblink of the slamming trunk, I saw the slayer rising up disheveled, human leather torn from its right arm and corrosive fumes wrinkling into sunlight. It reached for the girl.
I tried to warn her, but I was too weak. Blistered talons sliced apart her jacket’s bloody rags. She snapped the trunk shut, catching the loose sleeve of the vampire’s bodysuit.
I heard the priest bark furiously, the girl’s feet scamper away, car door slam, engine accelerate. The car lurched off, violently stripping the vampire. Its cry carried pain, horror and shrill surprise to a perishing pitch of silence.
Two days later, it’s sunset, and I’m driving. The girl’s in the passenger seat, those lucky boots up on the dashboard drumming backbeat to a percussive song blaring on the sound system – “Bad Boyfriend.”
Cancer’s gone. I can smell her healthy blood. Time to refill those coolers soon. Time for a lot of unexpected things. Even twice dead things.
A bucket of my combusted bones rides in the trunk, retrieved last night from the county morgue when everyone was asleep and the undead stalked the land.
Where are we headed? Soon as we pay a surprise visit to the girl’s distressed parents, probably to a town near you. Bernie will be liquidating Go Yoga! & Wok Like This! and those assets will finance a long road trip through the night.
Plans deepen and complexify under the incandescent sky on Shriek Highway. After an extensive vampire killing tour, there should be plenty left over for a small organic bakery-ashram, open all night, offering exotic fare, like pomegranate pâte feuilletée for the living and elaborate gâteaux laced with the ash of twice dead things that I will individually hand feed to the neighborhood undead.
The girl even hit on a splendid name, something I think captures human synergy and confidence, precisely the qualities we’ll need in our night shelter slash pastry shop: The Peace of Cake.
▬▬Originally published in Twice Dead Things, Elder Signs Press, 2006
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