Episode 3 – Part 2

THE WORLD IS A VAMPIRE, SENT TO DRAIN

OR

BETH I HEAR YOU CALLING, BUT YOU CAN’T COME HOME RIGHT NOW

 

Browning threw the crumpled pop can at the high schoolers. He threw it at the high schoolers who had screamed and ran away. The crumpled can did not travel far and so, the crumpled can did not hit them. “Dammit!” yelled Browning. He had really been hoping the pop can might stop them. Looking at the now stirring body of Bethany Ward, Browning was fairly certain his entire afternoon was going to be ruined.

Higher than high, and feeling not a little dizzy, Browning sat back on his butt once more, his tattered blue jeans falling away from his ever shrinking rear end, making him look like a skeletal plumber. He fixed his eyes and focused them upon Bethany Ward. He had been so very happy to feel her breathe back into his mouth, his efforts at resuscitation had been successful! To celebrate, he had taken yet another hit of his meth and then the teens had arrived upon his untidy scene. “Dammit!” he yelled, just thinking about it.

So, now, here he was, or rather, here they were, he and Bethany Ward, who he was quite familiar with what with her habit of walking through (and cleaning!) the graveyards of Hayward. There were walking paths! Bike paths! Lake paths! “Not good enough for you eh?” he said outloud to the comatose Bethany Ward. She looked better than he thought she should, didn’t look so banged up considering having been run over by his graveyard tractor–twice. Maybe he really had just hit her with the shovel. Still, there was blood. “Probably have to go to the hospital sooner or later,” he said to Bethany (who did not hear him). “Whole damn afternoon ruined,” complained Browning.

Time was not altogether an easy thing for Browning to judge and so it was difficult for him to ascertain if it was five or ten or thirty minutes before he first heard the sirens. He supposed it really didn’t matter since he was now irrevocably, absolutely convinced that his entire damn afternoon was shot to hell.

Browning had been fairly in a daze when the first EMTs (or were they police?) had grabbed him (and so roughly!) and started yelling and yelling. Oh goodness! How they had carried on! Browning had tried mumbling a little something to get them to relax and had even thoughtfully (and, he would add, generously) offered them a hit of his pipe–all to no avail. Really, it was beyond Browning’s comprehension. As he felt himself shoved into a vehicle of some kind, his wrists strangely locked together behind his tiny back, he said, “It’s not like I killed anyone!”

Officer Leets slammed the squad door shut. The clang reverberated in Browning’s head, reverberated along with the sirens and the shouting and the yelling. The sounds combined with all of the lights Browning saw flashing like some great Wisconsin disco ball, hitting the leaves in the majestic trees lining the graveyard paths, some of the only trees to have survived the Dutch Elm disease epidemic of the nineteen seventies, when Browning had been a mere boy of seven at the Hayward branch of Saint Bartholomew’s Catholic school, long before the nineteen nineties scourge of crystal meth had attacked Hayward, along with much of rural western Wisconsin, peoples’ lives shedding like leaves, like branches, like trees, indeed, like entire forests. Through the colored sound, Browning heard officer Leets talking to someone, probably his father, a former police officer himself (now retired), who ran the Drive In Motel.

…

     The East Trails hospital (known to most of the locals, quite unfavorably, as the Entrails) was a flurry of commotion, a whirlwind of panic and outrage. As the only fully equipped hospital in the greater Hayward area, the East Trails was not unsullied with death or tragedy of course, and all small towns have their killers, their outrages, their ghosts and monsters. But this bit, this piece of outlandishness was no tragic farming accident, no lackadaisical hunting incident, no drunken domestic dispute gone purple…this was virtually murder, virtually homicide, virtually the slaughter of an innocent, one of the best, one of their own!

Virtually, but not quite. For, miraculously, Bethany Ward was alive! In one of those stranger than fiction happenings which belies physics, belies reality itself, Bethany Ward had come out of being crumpled by a graveyard tractor (twice), relatively intact…damaged but not quite dead.

Oh, to be sure she had been mangled, she truly had been crumpled, but, it was suspected that her lithe self had in fact, in its very smallness, saved her from complete and total ruin. “Think of her as a branch, or really, a twig,” Dr. Nichols had explained to the veritable crowd of service people, nurses, nursing assistants, custodians… “While it’s true that a twig can be obliterated, utterly smashed by, let’s say a truck, it’s also possible that, given just the correct precision of angle, the concise abject velocity, the pressuring point of the introduced mass may amicably coincide briefly with the known mass without any appreciable disruption of the critical structure of either mass!”

The veritable crowd mouthed a collective, “What?”

Dr. Nichols, older and much more experienced than his boyish face might suggest, realized his audience was not a fellow group of orthopedic surgeons (his usual audience, he being both innovative in his surgical, and business approaches), restated, “Sometimes, a big thing can roll over a small thing, without much damage. There’s no resistance. Just a lot of give.” He thought that explanation might suffice. He waited. He saw lights coming to the eyes and minds of his coworkers and the service people and could see the understanding was underway.

It was Cody Twinnson, who offered the summation for all, “You mean, the tractor just rolled over her, ‘cause she’s so teeny?”

…

     Bethany Ward did not feel well. She did not feel well at all. Through the veil of a half opened eyelid she could see that her right arm was wrapped in gauze–heavily wrapped. She could see that her waist, her ribs, they were wrapped too. She could not move her neck well enough to look at her left side but she was fairly certain the view was similar. Bethany stopped this train of thought though, and reflected back on the pretty lights and the colored sounds which had been spinning through her speeding head. She wasn’t quite sure how long she had been soaring through space and time, where the beautiful sirens had come from, or what the red and blue lights were (she assumed they were comets, sent to her from Jesus, on his throne of celestial energy, which she also had clearly seen while on her trip to the present) but Bethany was sure that the delicious sense of heightened existence, the pleasure of ‘lectric hairs on her arms, and eyes which could see into the width of the wind, see the very expanse of the atom itself…that feeling was…fading.

And Bethany Ward did not want it to fade. She hungered for it.

Letting the buzz wash into her, letting it pulse into cells and blood and breath, she felt herself grow wings, and with these purple wings, she took flight. She felt her head brush just up against the ceiling of her new, strange little universe. She turned her head to the left now, all pain and all restrictions of the mortal life having been vanquished, and she could see a throng of people, astro-beings, listening to a tall man with a boy’s face, dressed in white, orating in a resounding tenor of a voice, his words cascading in the language of the stars. For an eternity she listened to the pleasant medical messiah as he seemed to sing to the assembled masses, his voice so lyrical, so melliferous as to sound like a hymn or a medieval ode or paean–was it “Greensleeves?”

But then the hunger, the hunger returned, and Bethany Ward’s mind refused to enjoin any more sound, refused to be further distracted from its true state. Feeling the rhythm of her wings beating softly against the ceiling, feeling them stretch out to the walls of her galaxy, she looked through the curtain of time and spied another being, another fellow traveler. He looked vaguely familiar to her, perhaps they had flown past Saturn together, within and without the untold trillions of orbiting apostles which from Mother Earth appeared as colored rings.

But again, the hunger refocused Bethany Ward and she looked to her fellow traveler. He was asleep, a child, a naughty child locked to his manger bed by silver bracelets. Instinctively, she knew he held her needed nourishment, the poison, the ambrosia, the meth.

Flying over to him, she hovered just above his bed. Gracefully, she gently reached her mouth to Browning’s neck…and feasted.

 

NEXT: I HAD TO DO IT! I HAD TO TITLE THE FINALE: VAMPIRE WEAKENED!