reviews_and_ramblings | Excerpt Day: Wicked Game by Vaughn R. Demont

The Vampire Fred: Wicked Game by Vaughn R. Demont
Release Date: July 22, 2009
Publisher: Torquere Books
ISBN: 978-1-60370-760-2
1-60370-760-3
Publisher Link: http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2085

Blurb: Being a vampire sucks, especially when you’ve got to deal with things like a dead-end job as an office drone, avoiding vigilante vampire slayers on the subway, and being price-gouged on blood from the slaughterhouse. Add in a crush on your annoyingly charismatic sire, and unraveling a little conspiracy to upset the balance of power among the vampires of the City, and it’s all in a night’s work though for fledgling vampire Fred Tompkins, as long as he doesn’t miss out on any overtime.

Excerpt:

I didn´t start hating Scooby Doo until after I died.

To begin, it´s a ridiculous formula. How those kids could not catch on that it´s a guy in a mask every single episode just boggles the mind. And these mysteries just happen to occur on whatever long road trip they happen to be on. No one asks them to check it out. They just do! Don´t even get me started on how they spend entirely too much camera time on the stoner and the dog.

They also tend to show it in clumps, fat four hour blocks entrenched in the early morning, and by early, I mean two a.m. until just before sunrise. Granted, you would think this wouldn´t be much of a problem. Normal people are usually asleep, or working all night as is the case with myself. We´re either waking up or going to bed when the extravaganza of 70´s kitsch winds down

But I still hate it, and even though I never see the damned show, I have come to see that overgrown, badly drawn, gluttonous beast as the symbol that I am truly dead inside.

And I´m not talking about the put-on-a-hoodie-and-some-black-eyeliner kind of dead inside, I mean literally dead inside.

And who the Hell over the age of six still watches Scooby Doo anyway?

But I´m getting ahead of myself. Let´s rewind about a month.

Imagine if you will a cool April night, about an hour after sundown. The clouds are breaking above, there´s a waxing crescent moon that looks like a big banana, there´s still a light mist in the air since it only stopped raining maybe a half hour before. Imagine this in Victory Square, with all the lights and buildings and that great Italian restaurant on the corner where they shot that movie scene that one time.

Take that scene and insert a car. Not just any car, though. We´re talking upper tier, a car worth more than a house in Destry Bay, with sleek, clean lines and a loud engine. Imagine this scene as a still, a snapshot, if you would. Keep the car in that freeze-frame but let it rumble around in your mind that at the moment that car is doing about one-twenty.

Now imagine a man, about five nine in height, maybe a buck fifty, wearing an off-the-rack suit from a store that sells TVs, clothing, and produce, suspendedjust above the hood of that car, upended, his legs contorted into a position yoga instructors would wince at, one shoe on, the other knocked off by the impact, arms outstretched, his black hair blown away from his face by the rush of wind, his brown eyes vaguely registering shock, and his monitor-tanned face showing actual surprise.

That guy? That´s me.

Frederick Joseph Tompkins, twenty-five, of 11483 Cameron Avenue, Apartment 1712 (just inside of Allora, and I´ve got the rent tag to prove it), who died tragically after being struck by a stolen Ferrari driven by some asshole that ran a red light. He is survived by a somewhat estranged sister, four co-workers who might sign a sympathy card, and a disapproving mother.

Back to that snapshot. See me there? All shocked and surprised? I know I´m going to die.. And my big regret? The last thing that´s going through my mind (other than "Aw fuck," of course) is, "Where the Hell is my shoe?"

That´s it. Looking back, I´m rather pissed that I wasn´t lamenting that I´d never gotten laid, but I guess when you´ve got maybe a second to live, you focus on the weirdest shit. I didn´t even like those shoes.

Now, before you get the idea that you´re listening to yet another one of the City´s aggravated spirits, perhaps on a quest for vengeance to lay his angst to rest so he can ascend to the "next level," as if the afterlife were some strange video game, imagine something else.

Imagine you´re me a month later, wearing that same damned suit, having just finished working eight hours punching in mortgage data from microfiche into a computer database, standing in front of the door to your crappy little apartment on Cameron Avenue, knowing that when you open the door, the first thing you will hear, without fail, as you´ve heard every night for the last three and a half weeks, will be...

"You bring any blood home, fledge?"

The five eleven, buck seventy asshole with the brown hair and green eyes and wearing my favorite t-shirt and jeans who´s sitting on my couch and watching my TV? That´s the same asshole who hit me with the car he stole.

I want to throw the brown paper bag with the Styrofoam cup full of cow blood that I picked up from the local slaughterhouse at him. Ten bucks with tax. I add it to the running tally. I pour out the cup into a tall dinner glass which is supposed to be reserved for one of those "nice dinner occasions" and put the blood into the microwave for a couple minutes.

He returns to watching the screen, showing surprise, genuine surprise, when it´s revealed that the evil slime monster hiding in the swamp was, in fact, just some real estate developer in a mask. Who´d have thought, huh? Probably would´ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren´t for the human population having an average I.Q. over 25.

He gets up when he hears the microwave go off, and retrieves the glass He takes a long swig from it, making a bit of a face, and then hands it to me. I look down at the thick, deep red liquid. My mouth does not, in fact, water at all. I pinch my nose and upend the cup into my mouth, swallowing quickly, the taste absolutely revolting. The texture is close to sour milk, and there's a mixture of salty and sweet that´s a little too salty and not really all that sweet. I won´t feel as tired in about an hour or so, but I´ll probably be asleep by then anyway.

It really does suck to be a vampire.