Episode 1 : Tonight
Beep beep beep beep.
I opened up my lid and reached over to the nightstand. Stupid alarm. Whenever I set it the same thing happened. It would go off, and I would fumble with it for a full minute before I could figure how to stop it. Back during the Industrial Revolution, I had known the whole “technology” thing would be nothing but trouble. Alarm clocks and universal remotes had proven me right.
Of course, the salesman down at Bestbuy had sworn the thing was just what I needed.
“It sets itself,” he said. “Atomic time. It gets the signal for the right time from a radio station in Colorado.”
I didn’t care if it got its signal from men on the moon. If it meant less pushing buttons, I was all for it. And he had been telling the truth; I didn’t have to set the time. But I did have to set the alarm, and figure out how to turn it off. I finally managed to get the thing to shut up, and I clapped twice to turn on the lights in my apartment. The Clapper. Now that was technology that improved your life.
I sat back in my coffin and sighed, then looked around the room. There I was. A vampire living in a one bedroom apartment with carpet that was growing mold, duct tape over the windows to keep out all trace of light, and enough roaches to start my own zoo. Being undead sucked about as bad as that pun did. My back was killing me, my hands were arthritic, and I was borderline incontinent. Even my vision was shot to hell--I had to wear inch-thick glasses just to be able to read the evening paper headlines. Some nights, it seemed like a better idea to just stay asleep. I shook my head. That kind of thinking was the kind that finished you for good--the kind that got you buried and stuck in the ground. Permanently. Not unheard of for vampires my age.
It was time to get up. Time to do my daily exercises. Time for--
Bingo.
That got me up faster than anything would have. With old age came senility. Thank goodness I had remembered in time. Every first Sunday evening a month, the American Legion held their big Bingo gala. Not many men came to the thing, but it attracted grannies like Tom Cruise in a vampire getup. I had missed March's meeting, and there was no way I'd miss tonight's.
I cracked my neck, then hobbled off to the bathroom to get ready. Last night I had set the alarm for an hour earlier--it took time to get an undead body presentable, after all. One of the few plusses to my lifestyle was that if I cut myself shaving, I didn’t bleed. Not having a heartbeat can do that for you. The fluorescent lights in the bathroom were on the fritz, flickering on and off and giving my preparations a strobe like effect. It was about as close as I’d get these days to the trendy strobe lights of dance clubs where younger prey played.
It hadn’t always been like this. If the vampire who had Made me had come up to me in a faded bathrobe and terrycloth slippers and tried to convince me of the wonders of coffin-dwelling, I would have laughed in his face. But he had been slick, and he had been good looking, and he’d had a girl on each arm who laughed and jiggled at his every word. What was there not to want?
As with everything in life, the sales pitch didn’t quite live up to reality. Was I undead? Yes. Ageless? Not exactly. I just aged more slowly. Seeing as how I had been Made in the mid-Seventeenth Century, I’d had about three hundred fifty years for age to catch up to me. True, if I had young fresh blood on a regular basis, supposedly the years would melt off me like snow off a snowman, but what geriatric in diapers could hope to attract fresh young blood? If I had money, perhaps . . .
The phone rang while I was in the shower, and I was damned if I was going to get out just to answer it. Then again, I was damned no matter what, technically. I finished rinsing off and then put my towel around my scrawny waist to shuffle to the answering machine. I pressed the blinking button.
“Victor? Victor are you there? Victor. Victor it’s your cousin. Karl, Victor. Pick up the phone. Pick it up. Bah! I hope you’ve fallen down and broken a hip. I just vanted to tell you that I’m coming tonight. Do you hear me? I’m coming to Bingo, and I don’t vant you interfering with me like last time. You got that? No poaching, Victor. I von’t tolerate it. Finders keepers tonight. I’m getting there early, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Hah!”
The machine beeped, and the message ended. In retrospect, Making Karl had been a mistake. At the time, I had thought it would be better to go through undeath with a friend by my side. Someone to talk to after a full night of sucking and carousing. But people change, and so do vampires. Where humans usually only have sixty to eighty years to develop really good grudges, vampires have centuries.
First Karl had stolen Lady Arsbeth’s love and life from me. But he had said he was sorry, and I forgave him. So what if I returned the favor by sucking his mother? It had been in his best interests, really. He had been surgically attached to her apron strings. But from there, our friendship had hardened into dislike, which turned to hate and then settled on blind loathing. Neither of us would let the other have any successes.
Look where that had left us: old, scrawny, broke and ugly. I couldn’t even hold down my Wal-mart greeter job, and he still couldn’t kick that ridiculous accent.
But not tonight. Tonight, I’d beat Karl there. I’d get the girls, and then what could he do? Nothing: he had made the rules himself. Tonight would change everything around. A bit of blood for the first time in months, and I’d build on that. Get a bit of my youth back, and move on to younger women--say some girls in their seventies. It might take a few years to move up the food chain, but the sky was the limit.
I went back to the bathroom with a spring in my step. My dentures were sitting in a cup by the sink, waiting for me. I even whistled as I opened my medicine cabinet and found the Viagra. Age had taken my teeth--all but the two most important, and those had issues these days. Issues I had discovered Viagra, interestingly enough, helped overcome. There was probably a huge untapped market out there for the drug, but it wasn’t exactly one that you could advertise on television for.
I popped my teeth in and set them in place, then gave my reflection a big smile that almost looked real. Sure, my earlobes were hanging to my jaw, and my nose was big enough to be called a horn. And maybe my hair was gone except for tufts coming from my ears. Somehow, none of that mattered anymore. Suddenly everything was feeling right. Tonight would be perfect--I could feel it in my bones. I was ready in half the time I usually took. My motor skills were spot on. The weaker sex would be putty in my hands.
I whisked on my shirt and pin-striped pants, slipped the suspenders over my shoulders, slapped some cologne on my face to cover up the old-folks smell, and got my jacket on. A glance in the mirror confirmed everything was where it was supposed to go. No toilet paper trailing from my shoes, and if my suit was a few decades out of style, so were the women I’d be meeting tonight. I checked my alarm clock one more time before I left: 6:45. Sunset was safely behind me, and it was now okay to go outside.
Three steps and I was at the door. I swung it open--
And was met face first with a blast of sunlight. Not the last few trickles of a fading day, but a sun almost a full hour away from setting. At that moment, a flurry of thoughts raced through my mind.
First Sunday.
In April.
Cursed Daylight Saving Time.
Cursed self-setting alarm clock.
Cursed vampire curse.
I closed the door and went back to my coffin. It would take me a month to sleep off the burns I’d just gotten. This was Karl’s fault, somehow. He had called me early on purpose. He knew the problems I had with technology. If I hadn’t been in such a rush to beat him there, I might have watched the news. Might have slowed down enough to think straight. Might have . . .
I sighed and closed the lid. Bingo would have to wait for next month, and so would revenge.
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