Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Fingers grasped at his hanging cloak, pulling the two of them back down. Suddenly, Jules heard broken, staticky words in his head-shirt, grab hold of shirt-so he disentangled himself from his black cloak and sank his talons into his white shirt, just before Doodlebug let go of the cloak. Then he climbed up the shirt to Doodlebug’s tiny red-haired legs and grabbed hold of them with his own feet. His friend flapped toward the narrow window of open sky between the net’s edge and a sea of grasping hands.

The world was upside down. Zombies clung to a ceiling of cobblestones and jumped down at him, only to snap back as though held fast by bungee cords. Those words in his head-they wereDoodlebug’s? He could read Doodlebug’s mind because they were both bats-? No time for puzzles-open sky was coming up fast. There’d be plenty of time later to ask Doodlebug about his latest trick At the last possible second, figures skulking on the rooftops along the alley unfurled a second net. Its mesh web tauntingly closed the gap just as Doodlebug reached it. His wing tips caught momentarily in the thick nylon strands. Jules thought he’d be dropped for sure. But with powerful wing beats and amazing control, Doodlebug was able to extricate himself without dropping his passenger. Even so, the tiny door on their cage had just been flung shut in their faces. Jules’s heart sank. They were trapped. And Cowboy Hat had shaken off his garlic poisoning; he looked ready to eat stainless steel and shit Ginsu knives.

Jules heard the staticky voice in his head again.Malice X… key- This time, pictures accompanied the barely distinct words. He saw what Doodlebug wanted him to do. But it seemed impossible-no one could transform as fast as he was being asked to. Then another image invaded his brain. The image of a miniature train racing steadily around its track. It calmed him, centered him. As they approached Malice X, Jules knew he could do what he had to.

He concentrated on an empty bathtub. He pictured his hands turning on the spigots. Liquid Jules flowed out the faucet. He grabbed the spigots and twisted them to full blast.

Mass flowed back to him in an overwhelming rush. Once again, he was 450 pounds of fighting-mad vampire. A Jules-bomb, dropped from fifteen feet up. Plunging toward his nemesis, empowered by gravity and velocity to squash him with thousands of pounds of crushing force. Malice X stared upward, frozen by the apparition of a falling, naked Jules. They locked eyes. Jules, dead on target, smiled ruthlessly.

And then Malice X, lizard-quick, stepped out of the way.

(Cripes, is this gonna hurt-!)

Jules belly flopped onto the cobblestones. The impact was equivalent to a Chevy Suburban and a city bus, both cruising at twenty miles per hour, smacking head-on. Unfortunately for Jules, he was the Chevy Suburban. Every puff of air was expelled from his lungs. Three ribs cracked on impact.

He lay stunned for a few seconds. Then he sucked precious air into his chest, which felt full of broken glass, and struggled to get to his feet.Hurtin‘ in places I didn’t know existed-gotta get up or I’ll be dead for real… He made it to his hands and knees before incredibly powerful hands dug into his fat shoulders and, amazingly, lifted him into the air.

“Man, I owe you-uh! — a wholeworld of hurt for what you done to Sonny and me,” Cowboy Hat said, grunting with exertion. “I’m gonna-uh! — stash you somewheres you won’t weasel away from, while I gets mytools ready.”

His vision clouding with pain, Jules saw brown wings dive toward his assailant, but Malice X knocked Doodlebug’s bat-form aside before he could claw Cowboy Hat’s face. He heard the shadowy vampires on the roofs above him laughing. Warm drops of liquid struck his face; were they spitting at him? No-it had started raining again. Then his center of gravity shifted radically, grinding his broken ribs together. Cowboy Hat body-slammed him into the narrow gap between the limousine and the brick wall. The pain Jules experienced in transit was nothing compared to the pain of his landing.

Blackness…

When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t sure whether he was awake or in the midst of a nightmare. His eardrums were stabbed with shrieks of approaching sirens. The hot-rodded V-8 in the limousine’s engine bay thrummed into life, vibrating the car’s flank roughly against his wounded side. The dozen zombies in the alleyway looked like they were emerging from comas. Some immediately fell to the ground and screamed as they experienced the extent of their injuries. Others ran or limped off into the night, scattered by the sirens like a pack of foraging rats startled by the sudden brightness of a flashlight.

Jules felt a pair of hands grasp his shoulders and massage them in a friendly, almost brotherly way. “Hey, Jules?” Malice X’s breath blew hot and damp against the side of Jules’s face. “It’s been real, and it’s been fun. Heck, I hate to take a powder when things’re just gettin‘, y’know,intense an’ all. But it just ain’tsmart for a vampire to get hisself thrown in Central Lockup. And you an‘ me, we’resmart bloodsuckahs, huh? Assuming you don’t get sun-fried in some jail cell, this’ll let us stretch out our fun ’til the next boogie-down. The big one. Me, I can hardly wait.”

The hands left his shoulders. A few seconds later Jules heard a door on the opposite side of the limousine open. “Oh, Jules? One last word to the wise. Or the not-so-wise. Get some pussy while you still can.”

The door slammed. Jules felt the limousine lurch into gear. Spinning tires shot broken cobblestones into his face. The Cadillac’s black flank dragged him a dozen feet along the broken brick wall before finally releasing him. His legs folded under him like wet paper. Jules felt himself plunging into jagged darkness again. The limousine rocketed onto the street, jumping a curb and showering the fleeing ex-zombies with a hail of undercarriage sparks.

But before he could retreat to comforting oblivion, Doodlebug was pulling him to his feet. “We need to get back to your car,” Doodlebug said, draping Jules’s arm over his shoulder. “How badly are you hurt?”

Jules winced as he took his first stumbling step. “Ribs-busted, I think-”

Doodlebug stared at him with wide, sorrowful eyes. “Jules, I amso sorry for dropping you and getting you hurt-”

“No-was a good idea-” The sirens grew louder. The falling rain caught strobed reflections of flashing red lights from a few blocks downtown. “Help me-grab my hood and cloak, would ya? And the car keys-”

Doodlebug scooped up the faded black garments and draped them around Jules. His own colorful ensemble had been scattered across two city blocks by the fleeing limousine. “The police are very close-can you walk any faster?”

“I’ll,uh, do my damnedest, pal.”

Melpomene Street looked like the end of the world. Or maybe the aftermath of the Zulu and Rex Carnival parades. The street was strewn with refuse of every kind, as half the neighborhood dropped their makeshift weapons and scattered for the refuge of apartments, bars, or the unlit depths of abandoned buildings. From the sound of the approaching sirens, at least half a dozen police cruisers were speeding up Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard from downtown. A police car had already screeched to a halt at the corner of Melpomene and Oretha Castle Haley, cutting off the escape route of a crowd of ex-zombies.

Doodlebug dragged Jules toward Baronne Street. They stepped around the sprawled bodies of combatants too badly hurt to run any farther. Mothers, still dazed, looked frantically for their children. Teenagers pushed the wounded into the gutters in their rush to escape.

“All this confusion should help us get away,” Doodlebug said hopefully.