Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“Oh baby, you the greatest!”

Okay, not as deep as he would’ve hoped.Jeezus, it’s like bitin‘ through elephant hide. But the first tiny trickle of blood was heaven. Jules gathered the dregs of his strength and worked his jaws like a punch press, plunging his sharp canines deeper.

“Ouch-aaohww baby! Cut it out! You hurtin‘-ekkk!”

Suddenly blood surged into his mouth with the force of a fire hose. Jules gulped it down as quickly as he could, but even his most ravenous efforts couldn’t prevent waves of overflow from splashing into the pan on the floor below. Her blood was manna, caviar, ambrosia.Oh, the incredible amazing richness-! He gulped and swallowed so prodigiously that his body forgot to breathe, but he didn’t care. The fresh triglycerides her blood teemed with hit his system like the purest heroin ever mainlined. The Cadillac spun around him; his ears filled with heavenly music (could that be his dear, long-departed mother’s angelic voice leading the choir?); the warm, spasming body beneath his seemed to liquefy, simultaneously caressing every molecule of his vast form with omnipresent pleasure.

He had no idea how long he remained on top of her. By the time a series of annoying sounds pulled him back to full awareness (sounds, he soon realized, that were coming from himself, as he alternated between belching and sucking the last few rapturous drops from her neck), Bessie’s body had gone cold. He wanted nothing more than to lay his head back down upon her soft, cool neck and doze for a week, but he glanced at his watch and realized that sleep would be suicide. Groaning at the injustice of the earth’s unpausing rotation(why can’t there be more hours in a night?), he forced his somnolent muscles into action, ignoring their protests as he pushed himself, massive posterior first, out of the Caddy’s scarlet-soaked backseat. He was careful not to upset the baking pan, which was filled to the brim with precious, New Orleans-prime crimson nectar.

He made his way slowly to the trunk, still fuzzy-headed from his enormous meal. Inside were a half-inflated spare tire, assorted pieces of a tire jack, a pile of old newspapers that he’d been meaning to take to a recycling bin, two badly wrinkled spare shirts, a pistol, a potato, and a crate filled with empty glass pickle jars.

Wishing ruefully that he had some slack in his pants pockets, Jules balanced the potato and the pistol atop the empty jars and lifted the crate from the trunk. He rested the crate on the great bulge his stomach made as it sagged over his belt, then turned halfway around before realizing that his weak knees couldn’t support both him and his cargo. Muttering with irritation and impatience, he set the crate down on the damp gravel and pushed it along with his foot as he maneuvered back around to the open door.

Twice, the potato rolled off the top of the jars and bounced into the water. Twice, Jules cursed a blue streak as he fished it out, until he decided it would be better to leave the pistol and the potato by the water’s edge anyway.

Back at the car, he pushed Bessie’s stiffening legs out of the way and sat uncomfortably on the doorjamb. He took a bottle of sodium citrate solution from the crate and poured some into the pan of blood, in order to prevent clotting and extend freshness, a trick he’d learned from Doc Landrieu. Then he began plucking jars out of the crate, unscrewing their tops and dipping them carefully into the blood. After five minutes of cautious labor, he had filled eight jars. The ninth jar he hugged between his thighs as he gingerly tilted the pan above it, securing the last few precious red droplets. He held this last jar in his left hand and its top in his right, hesitating. He stared at the jar’s viscous contents, glistening almost black in the dim moonlight, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, what the hell. I’ll need all the strength I got for what I gotta do next. A little lagniappe won’t kill me.”

He lifted the jar to his gore-stained lips. Already the blood had lost some of its freshness, tasting only like vintage Chardonnay instead of nectar of the gods; he floated in the clouds a few minutes, rather than being shot to Mars in a rocket. Returning to terra firma, he felt embarrassed and guilty at his lack of willpower.Hell-that jar could’ve gotten me through a couple of dry nights. Disgusted with himself, he threw the empty jar as far out into the swamp as he could (it was a pathetic throw, but he tried not to notice). Then he forced himself to stand.

“Night’s not gettin‘ any darker. Time to get to work, son.”

After ten minutes of sweaty, joint-grinding exertion, he had managed to drag Bessie’s body out of the Cadillac and down to the water’s edge. Grunting, he sat heavily on the alga-stained gravel. He picked up the pistol, a cheap Saturday night special he’d bought in a pawnshop, and the wet potato, his poor-man’s silencer. He stared at Bessie’s face, gone a milky chocolate instead of its normal dark chocolate, still frozen in an expression of pained surprise. Suddenly, sitting next to a dead woman in an empty swamp, ghostly silent except for the rumble of a distant car on the highway, Jules felt unbearably lonely. The space behind his eyes was pounding, and he was feeling a little sick. Who would fix him his chamomile tea, to settle his stomach? In all the long decades since his mother had passed, there had been no one to fix him tea and bring it to him in bed. No one except Maureen, his one great love, the woman whose bite had forever transformed him. And she hadn’t spoken to him in ten years.

He briefly considered loading Bessie back in the car, taking her back to his house, and letting nature take its course. She’d been an okay companion. Not a scintillating conversationalist, but at least she’d appreciated his music. And she’d be lively in the sack, for sure. He set the pistol down and gave her another look.

He frowned. “Naww. What the hell was I thinking? Look at her. She’s got an appetite bigger than mine, even. No willpower. No self-control. Too softhearted and softheaded. Let her become a vampire and before you know it this town’ll be up to its ass in homeless little-old-lady vampires, bringing the heat down on the rest of us. And then the gig’ll be up. Naww. Just get it over and done with.”

In all his years of undead life, Jules had only made another vampire once. Maureen had lectured him long and hard about predator-prey ratios and how important it was to keep the number of vampires in New Orleans strictly limited. He’d only done it once, when he’d been dying for a sidekick, a pal. And he hadn’t been all that happy with the way things had turned out.

“In this business, you’ve gotta be ruthless. Pity’s good for nothing but a stake through the heart.”

His lower back spasmed with sharp stabs of pain as he rolled Bessie over onto her stomach. He squashed the potato onto the.38’s stubby barrel, then rested the potato at the base of Bessie’s skull, where her brain stem would be.Wipe out the brain stem, and a corpse stays a corpse. Just like Maureen had taught him so long ago, back when pistols had been more elegant things. Jules pulled the trigger.

Plufff.

Knees aching, he rolled her body into the swamp and gave it a good push. It floated into an island of tall grass and partially disappeared. With any luck, it would sink into the mire before the sun got too high. And if somebody ended up spotting it, it wouldn’t be any big deal. The cops would call the killing a drug hit, or conjecture that the victim had been some whore dumb enough to double-cross her pimp. That was a great thing about New Orleans. Dead bodies were nothing extraordinary.

Jules pulled the plastic tarp from the Caddy’s backseat and rinsed it off in the water. Then he folded it up, stuck it under his armpit, and dragged the crate of blood-filled jars back to the trunk. Damn, his crummy knees really hurt tonight. He opened the trunk, peeled off his red-stained shirt, threw it on top of the spare tire, and pulled on a relatively fresh one. A glint of silver at the bottom of the trunk caught his eye. It was the head of his cane, poking out from beneath the tire. Jules pulled it out. It was a good old cane. He’d bought it back in his salad days, when a sharp-looking silver-headed cane had seemed exactly the fashion accessory for a young vampire-on-the-make. It was more than a fashion statement now. On nights like tonight, he needed it.