Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

He walked around to the back of the store. The rear window was barred, but the door, with its rotting wood and flimsy, loose knob, looked promising. Jules gathered what remained of his strength and threw his shoulder against the door. The old wood gave some, creaking in protest. He backed up five paces and got a running start. Faced with the impact of 450 pounds of newly invigorated vampire, the sagging door split into five pieces.

An off-key symphony of Klaxons, bleats, and hoots sounded as Jules picked himself up off the dirty floor, rubbed his sore shoulder, and headed for the dog food aisle. He grabbed as many of the ten-pound bags as he could squeeze into his arms, then ran out the way he’d come in. The shrill whistles of the store’s alarm system chased him into the street like pursuing harpies. His canine companion barked excitedly at the noise and the tumult, despite Jules’s out-of-breath pleas for her to be quiet. He lurched into a dark alleyway and dropped his five sacks of purloined dog food onto a torn, stained mattress.

Then he fell back against the wall, slid to the ground, and waited for the sirens and flashing red lights of approaching patrol cars.

They never came. Once Jules’s heart settled down a bit, he crawled over onto the mattress and tore open one of the bags of dog food. His companion had her head inside the bag before the first dried protein pellets hit the mattress’s yellow-stained surface. She ate ferociously, as if she might never see food again.

Watching her, Jules felt happy for the first time in more than a week.Look at her go! he thought. His own stomach groaned piteously, adding its plaintive note to the alarms still echoing through the streets. He found himself wishing he could join his friend in her meal.She sure is wolfing that stuff down, he thought, half enviously; and his stray thought gave him the glimmer of an idea. A nasty, depressing idea, but an idea, nonetheless. Maybe hecould join her in her meal.

He found himself remembering a time in his life he usually avoided thinking about, the last time he’d been in straits as dire as these. He’d just been laid off from his job in the coroner’s office, cut off from the easy, simple existence he’d enjoyed for nearly thirty years. Suddenly on his own, he realized with horror that after three decades of living off the blood of the recently deceased, he’d totally lost his knack for hunting up a meal. Sitting alone in his house, he’d nearly starved, until one evening he noticed that his next-door neighbors had moved out, and in the pile of trash they’d left behind were several half-emptied sacks of dog food. Desperate, delirious with hunger, he shifted into his wolf-form and attacked the abandoned meal. It wasn’t brunch at Brennan’s, but that dog food kept him going for a couple of weeks, until he came up with the plan of driving a taxicab and having his meals pay to come to him.

That was years ago. It was an experience Jules had hoped he’d never have to repeat. The very notion was degrading. Resorting to eating as an animal was as low as a vampire could sink. Plus, he couldn’t be sure that his wolf-form’s digestive tract could still tolerate solid food; his human-form’s certainly couldn’t. But the longer his dog companion chomped away, the more Jules’s agonized, shriveled stomach pleaded-no,demanded — that he try something, anything at all. Sighing, he dragged himself to a corner of the mattress, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes tightly, and concentrated on a mental picture of the full moon.

The dog paused from her voracious eating long enough to produce a fearful whimper at the unnatural spectacle of flesh rearranging itself in a flurry of swirling mists. Jules pounced on one of the other bags of dog food and tore it open with his fangs. He was surprised at how good it tasted; maybe those paid flacks on dog food commercials who claimed that their brand was super delicious weren’t lying after all. He polished off the first bag before he even thought to wiggle free of his clothes. The second bag went down his gullet just as fast. The third bag was heavenly, and the fourth bag nearly as heavenly, even though by the time his long nose reached the bottom half of the sack, his wolf-gut was full to bursting. He had the unmitigated gall to stick his snout into his companion’s bag of food, but a few angry nips on his nose and tail were enough to convince him that discretion was the better part of valor.

Sated, exhausted from the exertion of eating so much so quickly, he felt his four paws splay out from under him as the heft of his grotesquely stretched potbelly dragged him down to the mattress. Damn, he feltgood! He hadn’t felt this good since… since… since he couldn’t remember when. Floating in a half-conscious fog of satisfied gluttony, no longer fixated on the need to consume, he began to notice the input of his heightened wolf-senses. Tiny insects buzzed in the storm gutters high above his head, the beating of their wings like distant applause. He sniffed the stains on the mattress and was able to differentiate the various urine stains, chicken grease stains, and semen stains by their unique scent signatures. And there was something else, another odor that overpowered all others, a potent muskiness that insinuated itself in his veins and sinews and bones and made him crazy, absolutelycrazy — He hadn’t realized it before, with his limited human nose, but his friend the bitch was in heat.

I’ve gotta turn human again,Jules told himself as he avidly sniffed his companion’s hindquarters, caught in the throes of a lust unlike any he had ever known.I’ve gotta turn human again, right now, immediately, before I do somethin‘ really stupid- But before he could even begin to muster the concentration necessary for a transformation, he had already mounted her.

The much smaller dog yelped with pain as Jules’s comparatively tremendous weight landed on her back. She tried to scoot away, but his strong paws clamped onto her sides and held her fast. As he pumped faster than he thought possible, his body trapped in the iron hold of canine pheromones that screamed “Make puppies! Make puppies!” his still-human mind was filled with remorse.I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry, I’ll make it up to you, you’ll never want for dog food again…

Nearly as quickly as when he was in human form, it was over. He slid off of her and collapsed in a furry heap on the mattress. He waited for her to reproach him, maybe bite him, and then run off. It was only what he deserved, after all.

But she surprised him. Rather than running away, she nuzzled him, then licked his face. Jules was astounded. Overcome with emotion, he licked her all over with his huge tongue until her fur was cleaner than it had ever been. They snuggled close together on the mattress, his bitch warming herself against Jules’s great potbelly. Jules fell into the deepest, most blissful sleep he’d had in years.

When he awoke a few hours later, startled out of sleep by a newspaper delivery truck, he was alone. Seized with panic, he crisscrossed the streets within a five-block radius, searching vainly for her scent. But she was nowhere to be found.

Jules howled. And every street dweller in downtown Baton Rouge knew that some creature had just lost its only friend.

Please deposit thirty-five cents,the mechanical voice said.

Jules fumbled through his coat pocket for a fistful of change, then pulled a frayed piece of paper from his wallet. He had to squint to see the faded writing in the yellow phosphorescent light of the parking garage. He punched in the number, almost forgetting to include the three-digit area code.

The number you have dialed requires a deposit of-two dollars and twenty cents-for an initial call of five minutes. Please deposit an additional-one dollar and eighty-five cents. Thank you for using Baton Rouge Telecom, your telecommunications specialists.