Christopher Moore - Bite Me

And I was all, “Oh, hell no.”

So I had them bronzed.

I’m looking at them now. We posed them like Rodin’s The Kiss and they shall be together unto the end of time, or at least until we figure out how to let them out and not have them tear out our throats and whatnot. Foo says it’s cruel, but the Countess told me that they could go to mist, and when they are mist time passes like a dream and it’s all good.

But Foo did figure out his serum thingy. We lured the Animals to our love nest and while I was wearing the fly leather jacket that Foo made me, complete with the UV LED warts, which is very cool and cyber, I drugged them and Foo changed them back to human. And the crazy old Emperor guy said he saw three young vampyres take the old vampyre and the formerly blue ho away on a ginormous yacht, so we don’t have to worry about them anymore.

Foo wants to cut Flood and Jody out of the bronze statue during the day, while they are sleeping, and turn them back to human. But the Countess doesn’t want that. So I think we should just wait. We have this très cool apartment, and all of the money, and Foo almost has his master’s in bio-nerdism or whatever, and I only have to go home like twice a week so the mother unit still thinks I am living there. (The key was to condition her from age twelve that sleepovers are normal. Lily, my former sleepover BFF, calls it slowly boiling the frog, which I don’t know what it means, but it sounds darkly mysterious.)

So, we are secure in our love nest and as soon as Foo gets home I am going to reward him with the slow booty dance of forbidden love. But something is screeching outside. BRB.

Fucksocks! It’s Chet the huge shaved vampyre cat, down on the street. He looks bigger, and I think he ate a meter maid. Her little cart is running and there’s an empty uniform on the curb.

Bad kitty! GTG L8erz.

· 1. The Countess Abigail Von Normal is:

· A. Emergency Backup Mistress of the Bay Area Dark.

· B. A Gothic hottie consumed by the banal hopelessness of existence.

· C. Not perky, but dark, complex, and très mysterious.

· D. All the above, and possibly more.

· 2. The vampire Flood and his nosferatu maker, the Countess Jody, were imprisoned in a bronze shell in the pose from Rodin’s The Kiss because:

· A. Their love is eternal and their mingled souls will live on in romantic embrace to the end of time.

· B. Foo and I were pretty sure that the Countess would go FOAKES (Freak Out and Kill Everything in Sight) when she found out our plan to turn the Animals back to human.

· C. We just like to look at our friends, naked and bronzed, because it gets us all hot.

· D. I can’t believe you picked “c.” You should get a big “L” tattooed on your forehead to save people time in figuring out what a ginormous loser you are! You wish that Foo and I needed pervy preludes to stimulate our orgasmic, toe-curling soul-sex. Trust me, the sun weeps that it cannot achieve the blistering hotness of our nookie.

· 3. Despite myths perpetrated by jealous day dwellers, the nosferatu are only vulnerable to the effects of:

· A. Garlic. (Right, because pizza and the breath of vegans will quell their ancient power.)

· B. Crosses and holy water. (Oh right, because creatures of darkest evil are total bitches of the baby Jebus.)

· C. Silver. (Uh-huh, and aluminum, because that makes sense.)

· D. Sunlight.

· 4. My and Foo’s greatest challenge as minions is to protect our dark masters, the Countess and Lord Flood, from:

· A. Cops, specifically Inspector Rivera and his clueless Gay Bear partner Cavuto.

· B. The most crusty old vampire and his mysterious fashion-vamp posse.

· C. The Animals, slacker wastee night crew from the Marina Safeway.

· D. All of the above and whatnot.

· 5. Our best chance of defeating Chet, the huge shaved vampire cat, is:

· A.Mouse ninjas.

· B. A big hug while wearing my most fly UV-LED leather jacket, fashioned for my protection by my aforementioned muffin master, Foo.

· C. A saucer of tuna blood laced with sedatives and kitty-butt flavor. (I observed in his former mortal form, that Chet loves kitty-butt flavor.)

· D. Make a vampire Rottweiler to rock Chet’s worldview.

· E. Either “a” or “c,” but definitely not “d” wouldn’t “a” be très cool? Mouse ninjas!

Answers:

1: D, 2: B, 3: D, 4: D, 5: E

Give yourself one point for every right answer.

Score:

5. You rock my stripy socks.

4. Loser!

3. Très Loser!

2. Such a Loser that Losers pity you.

0-1. Spare us your contagious loserness. Next bridge you pass? Over you go.

When he first arrived in San Francisco, Tommy Flood had shared a closet-size room with five Chinese men named Wong, all of whom had wanted to marry him.

“It’s horrible-like being packed into a take-out box of Kung Pao chicken,” Tommy had said, and although it wasn’t like that at all, and Tommy was just trying to use colorful language which he felt was his duty as a writer, it was very crowded and smelled strongly of garlic and sweaty Chinese guys.

“I think they want to pack my fudge,” Tommy had said. “I’m from Indiana, we don’t go for that kind of stuff.”

As it turned out, the Chinese guys didn’t go for that kind of stuff either, but were, in fact, very much interested in getting green cards.

Fortunately, only a week later, in the parking lot of the Marina Safeway where he worked nights, Tommy met a gorgeous redhead named Jody Stroud, who rescued him from his confinement with the Chinese guys, by giving him her love, a nice loft apartment, and immortality. Unfortunately, little more than a month after that, their minion, Abby, had them bronzed while they slept, and Tommy awoke one night to find that despite his great vampire strength, he couldn’t move a muscle.

“I’d rather be trapped in a take-out box of Kung Pao chicken,” Tommy would have said if he could have said anything, which he couldn’t.

Meanwhile, right next to him, sharing the same bronze shell, his beloved Jody drifted in a dream-state, a side effect of being able to turn herself to mist, a trick she had learned from Elijah Ben Sapir, her vampire sire. Between the dead sleep of daylight, and the floating in a dream-world, she could endure decades inside the statue. Tommy, however, had never learned how to turn to mist. There had never been time to teach him. So come sundown, his vampire senses came on like neon, and he experienced every second of his confinement with an electric intensity that nearly had him vibrating in his shell-an alpha predator pacing the cage of his mind and shredding his reason. Of course, he did the only thing he could do: he went barking at the moon mad.

He’d have to lick about a mile of kitty-butt to get the taste of meter maid out of his mouth, but Chet was up for it. He raked a couple of hind-leg kicks through the dust that was the meter maid’s remains, and headed across the street and into the alley, where he curled up in the dark and set about blunting the human taste.

It was only a little over a month since the old vampire had turned Chet, but already he was losing all sense of his former self. Time was, that he spent his days on Market Street, napping next to William, the homeless man who made his living with a paper cup and a sign that said, I AM HOMELESS AND MY CAT IS HUGE. Chet was indeed very large, and while much of his volume had been fur, he had achieved a weight of thirty-five pounds on a diet of semi-used hamburgers and French fries donated by passersby outside of McDonald’s.