Christopher Moore - Bite Me

And he’s all, “Ow, ow, ow.”

And I’m all, “Your cross-dressing sissy-man kung-fu is no match for my superior household lighting kung-fu.”

And he whines like, “I’m going home. You hurt me. You suck. This sucks. I have to go have family dinner-with my family-and I’m going to school tomorrow so you can just fuck off and die, Abby Normal.”

And I’m like, “Fine, give me my boots.”

And he’s like, “Fine.”

And I’m like, “Fine.”

And it would have been way better if he could have just stormed out right then, but it took us about a half hour to get my boots off of him, with me sitting in the sink and him on the counter, guarding me with the tennis racket, because it turned out that I have a pretty low tolerance for rat fog trying to bite me, too.

’Kayso, we got my boots off of Jared and he decided to stay and help because it turns out that even a stream of biting rat fog is more fun than family dinner. So Foo had the Shop Vac all scienced up with sunlight LEDs and whatnot and he turns it on and starts sucking in the mist with most awesome suckage. (Gay Builder Bob rocks hardware!) And it’s so cool, because we can see the fog go in-then we can hear the thump as the sun LED turns the rats to solid again and they hit the inside of the plastic drum.

And Foo is all yelling over the motor, “We may have to unload and put them in their boxes before we get too many. We don’t want to open this and try to deal with a hundred rats.”

And I’m all, “Why don’t we just leave them in there until sunup and then they’ll all be asleep?”

And Foo looks at me, all surprised, and I’m like, “Shut up. I can be smart and hawt.”

And he’s all, “’Kay,” which I don’t know whether he meant sarcastically, or that I couldn’t be smart, or that I wasn’t hawt. But I never found out, because right then the Shop Vac starts making this, foof-thoop splat noise, and Jared lets loose with his little-girl scream.

And it turns out that the exhaust of the Shop Vac is blowing vampy rats out the back side, which is the foof-thoop noise, and splattering them against the wall, which is the splat . And with every one, Jared is eeking. So it’s like, Foof-thoopsplat-eek! Foof-thoop-splat-eek! Foof-thoop-splat-eek! I know! It would make a totally cool industrial beat for a dance groove. But I didn’t sample it because there was stuff happening.

And Foo is all, “Pick them up and put them in their boxes. Seal them with duct tape.”

’Cause it turns out that vampy rats are pretty durable, and after they splat and slide down the wall, they are starting to pull themselves together again and sort of limp away, but slow enough to catch. But they’re still all squishy and whatnot.

So Jared and I just turn to Foo and give him our best, “Bitch, please,” look.

So Foo’s all, “Okay, then, you work the hose.”

And I’m all, “Sure, now you want me to work your hose-”

And he’s all, “Abby, please!”

Up until then I thought Foo was the most chill love ninja in the Bay Area, but it turns out that if his science gets a little sideways he goes to pieces. So I take the hose and start doing the rat suck, while Foo finds some rubber gloves and a spatula to scrape up the splatter pets.

Then Jared gets the idea of shooting the rats right into their little plastic cages, which, as it turns out, kind of works after we blast a couple of them through the plastic and he starts holding the boxes against a pillow he tapes on the wall. And Foo starts duct taping on the lids before the vamp rats can pull themselves together.

Then I’m all, “You know, if we could use this to shoot tiny dogs at the vamp kitties, we’d be finished with this nonsense in a day or two.”

And Foo and Jared both roll their eyes at me like I’m high or something, when they are the ones sealing in mashed rats for freshness. ’Kayso, by, like, midnight, we have all the rats boxed again, and most of them are kind of fixed, but some of them are still pretty fucked up from the flight, and Jared is all, “I’m going home. I have issues.”

Which I know probably means that he is going to go home and break the news to Lucifer 2 that they are no longer BFFs because Jared has lost his rodent wood forever due to our night of rat carnage, which is a good thing, I guess.

Then Foo is like, “I have to go, too. I have to meet with my academic advisor in the morning, and I have to prepare, then I have work in the afternoon.”

And I’m all, “You can prepare here.”

And Foo’s like, “I don’t think I can.” And he looks away.

I was going to tell him that I had decided to become a creature of the night, but they were bailing on me, so I was all, “Fine. You two run along. I’ll stay here.”

And Foo was like, “Wait until dawn, then give each of them a water bottle of blood. They’ll heal. But make sure you tape their cages back up so they can’t escape. Blah, blah, biology, science, behavior, science word, science word, blah, blah.”

So I kissed him like it was the last time, and went into the bedroom to lie down and wait until dawn, but there was like this huge maze made out of wood on our bed, so I went back out into the living room and chilled with the rats on the futon until dawn. I couldn’t sleep anyway, because I was thinking of all the people I was totally going to get revenge on when I was nosferatu, after I found Jody and Tommy and rescued them, of course.

’Kayso, like the Terminator (the liquid one, not the one that was governor), I will rise from the wreckage of my own metallic spooge to conquer all who oppose me. I know what I have to do. When Foo is at work, and Jared is at school, I shall use the blood that is blessed with the dark gift and become nosferatu. So suck it, bitches!

’Kayso, at dawn, when all the rats stopped scrambling around in their little cages, I found one of the syringes that Tommy had gotten from the needle exchange program when he was pretending to be a junky, and I drew blood from the most healthy vamp rat we had. Then I had to decide to drink it or inject it, and after a while, I decided to inject it, which it turns out works just like in the movies and hurts way less than getting your eyebrow pierced.

So then I lay down and waited for the vamping to come on. I thought about Foo, riding the BART all the way back to his parents’ house in the Sunset instead of staying with me, and how that was kind of an assbag move on his part. And I thought of our time together, over six weeks, and how it would be hard on him when I was a superior creature of unspeakable evil and supernatural beauty. And I thought that maybe the Countess and Flood and I might have to live together in a ménage à trois , and Foo and Jared might have to be our bug-eating minions, like Renfield in Dracula, except Foo would still have his fly manga hair and I would do him occasionally out of pity.

And I cried a little, over the loss of my humanity and whatnot, because I realized that as soon as I was done saving Tommy and Jody, and enslaving Foo and Jared, I was going to sneak into Mr. Snavely’s living room one night-come in as mist under the door-then form into my most awesome alabaster naked badassness and freak him completely the fuck out for failing me in Biology, and that it would be kind of an inhuman thing to do. And as I grieved, I fell into the deep sleep of the undead.

I know. Très awesome.

But no! Now I’m awake, and it’s still light out, and the vamp rats are still out and I don’t have super powers and my evil is still totally speakable. Fucksocks! I forgot, I have to die before I change. I looked all over for that potassium chloride stuff that Foo said they killed the rats with, but all I found was the hammer, and I was all, “I don’t think so.” So I went up to Market Street and thought I’d throw myself in front of a bus, but then, what if they left my body out in the sun and I burned up? So that was out. So then I was like, “Oh, duh, cut your wrists?” But it hurt like holy fuck, so I only kind of cut one wrist a little bit, and I bled for like a half hour and I wasn’t even light-headed, so I was all, “Fuck this fun-free circus, I need an accomplice.”