Low-Skilled Job [Vol. 1] Read online

“Monroe said he was a sorcerer,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “You’re kidding me. What if Monroe is a crazy monster and were going on a wild goose chase? Like, what if Marcello’s already gone or dead or something?”

  “We got nothing else to do,” I said. “Might as well try. If he’s real, I got a lot of questions for him.”

  “So do I,” Heather said.

  *****

  I sat down with an interstate highway map and Monroe’s notes. I didn’t want any computer record of my trip floating around in cyberspace. Marcello lived out west. The town of Franklin would be easy to find. That part was pretty straightforward.

  Monroe’s notes covered fifteen pages. More than half of what he wrote featured detailed drawings of what we might find in Marcello’s mansion. I knew it was all real, even the bizarre composite creatures.

  “What the fuck?” Heather looked over my shoulder at the drawing.

  “It says, they were constructed to guard the tunnel entrances under Marcello’s mansion,” I said.

  “Why does he have tunnels under his house,” she said, “and where do the tunnels go?”

  “I don’t know and hopefully we won’t find out,” I said.

  Heather leaned over me and flipped the notebook’s pages with the tip of her index finger claw. She nuzzled my neck and purred. I could see a dark gray, vein snaking it’s way across her wrist. She tapped the needle-sharp tip of her claw on a drawing that depicted an insect-like creature.

  “Bullshit,” she said, “no way that’s real.”

  “Vampires are real,” I said. “Monroe is real, whatever the hell he was. There’s probably all kinds of weird shit out there.”

  “Monroe might be real, but he’s pretty fucking nuts,” she said.

  “These pictures remind me of the stuff the revenants drew on the walls of their nest,” I said.

  “So,” she said, “those fuckers were crazier than Monroe.”

  “Maybe they were able to tap into some kind of weird vibe,” I said.

  Heather looked at her wrist, sighed, then sat down on my lap.

  “So, at some point I should be able to see some really crazy shit.” She rubbed her wrist.

  I ran my hand under her knotted t-shirt. Heather’s skin was cool and smooth like silk. Her green eyes looked like jade.

  “I’ll get you some art supplies,” I said. “You’ll have to show me what you see.”

  “Fuck off.” She slapped me playfully, but just hard enough to leave a scratch on my cheek.

  Heather un-knotted her t-shirt and pulled it over her head. I caressed her breasts, her blue-gray nipples stiffened.

  “This might be a really bad idea,” I said.

  Heather laughed. I stood up, with her arms and legs wrapped around me, and carried her into the living room. I tripped on something and we fell to the couch. She slid off her jeans and kicked them across the room. Heather was closer to her vampire self as she writhed underneath me. I felt her razor sharp claws explore my back. The same claws she cut the revenant to the bone with. It excited me and she knew it.

  Afterword I lay on the couch, exhausted, while Heather flipped through hundreds of channels a minute. The broken remote clicked with a weird rhythm.

  *****

  I woke up just before dawn. There was no point in wasting any more time. I filled the car with supplies, including a cooler for the last of Ray’s blood and my booze. Then I took Monroe’s notes and hustled a grumpy, half asleep Heather down to the parking lot. She growled when the sun hit her.

  “Fuck, this,” she said.

  She wrapped herself in a blanket and crawled into my trunk. I patted her shoulder.

  “It’s gonna be fine,” I said.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  I got in the car and drove.

  I once had a friend named Bobby. We used to hang out, watch movies and get drunk on cheap beer. Bobby would go on about the New World Order, conspiracies and lost civilizations. It was fun to listen to when I was fucked up. A few years ago, probably while he was drunk off his ass, Bobby made some threats on a message board. When he sobered up, he realized he’d gone too far. By that time the FBI was looking for him. Bobby had all kinds of plans for when the world ended or the Global Elite sent their secret death squads after him. All the FBI found was the smoking ruins of his double-wide trailer. He still posts on the Internet occasionally from a compound far south of the border.

  Bobby had once told me about his weapons caches, just in case I needed some firepower when society collapsed. I still remembered the directions to one of them.

  I drove past abandoned farms as the gravel road gave way to dirt. The cache was buried five hundred paces north of a huge granite boulder that was split by an oak tree.

  The oak tree was dead, just like the farms I’d passed. I dug through layers of rusty scrap metal that Bobby had sowed into the ground to confound government metal detectors. Four feet down in the rocky soil, I got lucky and found several large plastic tubes. I muscled one of the tubes out of the hole and poured the contents on the grass. Bobby had sealed his ammunition in the kind of vacuum sealed plastic bags that I’d seen on infomercials back in the Nineties. I pulled the casmoline soaked paper from an AK-47. I almost dropped the rifle when I got a good look at it. The AK was identical to the one in my dream, except for being new and covered in reddish grease.

  I took the AK, several magazines and a bunch of the vacuum bags of ammo. Then I filled the hole back in, leaving the other tubes for later. An animal shriek cut through the eerily silent forest. I pulled the .38 out and spun around. My car shuddered and rocked on it’s springs. Heather was having a nightmare.

  Digging through four feet of dirt burned up most of the day. It was almost dark when I got to the Town of Franklin, so I found a hotel for the night. The town only had two. I picked the one with a warped, peeling sign. The place had character and it was almost empty.

  I parked on the far side of the hotel, away from the nosy old woman at the front desk. I got out and rapped my knuckles on the trunk. The lock clicked and Heather hopped out, still unsteady on her feet.

  “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d say Marcello lives in a crappy hotel.”

  “We’re not going looking for his house after dark,” I said.

  “Good point, but I still think this is going to turn out weird,” she said. “I have like, this feeling that none of this is going to turn out like we expect.”

  I glanced in the trunk before I slammed the lid down. Heather’s blanket had been torn to shreds and fresh claw marks scarred the interior.

  “What the fuck are they looking at?” Heather said.

  She pointed at a group of people standing in the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot. They stared back at us and passed around a bottle in a brown paper bag. A tall man with a trucker’s cap waved the bottle away. He held a Winchester rifle in his left hand. The guy made me think of the TV character, The Rifleman. His Winchester even had an enlarged loop lever. He looked worried, they all did.

  “Help me with the stuff.” I squeezed Heather’s shoulder.

  *****

  I looked around our room. An ancient CRT TV sat on a dresser, it’s remote control glued to the nightstand. I threw the filthy bedspread in the corner and laid out my gear on the yellowed sheets. Heather sat down on the bed. She clawed a vacuum bag of loose bullets open and started loading the empty AK magazines.

  “I can’t believe you got a Russian gun.” She examined the Cyrillic head-stamp on a single round of lacquered ammunition.

  I cleaned the casmoline off the AK with the threadbare hotel towels. A rectangular shaped, clean spot on the wall marked the place where a painting should have hung. In it’s place someone had nailed up a crude hand-carved wooden cross.

  “You know, the Cold War’s been over for a while,” I said. “The Russians sold this for Western money.”

  Heather threw the bullet at me and giggled.

  “I know about
all that,” she said.

  I lay down next to the loaded AK. Heather ripped the remote off the nightstand. “I don’t miss these crappy, old TV’s.” She angrily flipped through endless reality shows.

  “Basic cable sucks,” she said.

  “Welcome to my unhappy Midwestern childhood.” I sighed. “Six months of cold weather and nothing to but basic cable. TV’s only gotten worse since the Nineties.”

  “Eighties TV was way better,” Heather said.

  “Fuck yeah, Miami Vice, Magnum PI,” I said.

  “Lee used to tape everything, back when VCR’s were a big deal. We’d just hang out and watch shows for days.” Heather tossed a loaded magazine on the bed and started on another.

  “I just can’t imagine a bunch of vampires sitting in a room watching Dallas,” I said. “I mean, don’t you guys travel or do something constructive?”

  “You loose track of time,” she said. “I’ve heard of vampires letting decades pass, just doing the same old shit. It’s one of the reasons I don’t go around Lee’s anymore. What about you? What do you do, knowing that you could die at any time?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You seem to be a pretty average, normal guy.” She looked away sadly. “I never got to be normal, even when I was human. I don’t really know what regular people even do. You see movies, sit-coms, and now this reality bullshit. I always wondered.”

  “You didn’t miss out on much,” I said. “Normal life is really boring and most of us don’t appreciate any of it. For instance, I took that fucking job at the call center almost two years ago. It feels like no time has passed. Two years closer to forty and I have nothing to show for it. I’ve been putting out applications for months.”

  “Well, you have a new job now. Anyway, I was more talking about your childhood, not your lame adulthood.” She flashed me a disdainful look. “Did that suck too?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I played a lot of video games and watched TV. The worst thing I had to face, was not getting a Super Nintendo for Christmas one year. My childhood was just average.”

  “What about High School?” she said. “I quit before seventh grade was over.”

  “I got stoned and drunk when I could,” I said. “That’s about it. Oh, and we cheated the whole way through. I didn’t learn a fuckin’ thing.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty lame, Mike. No parties or girlfriends, huh? I woulda been awesome in high school.” She stared past the TV, likely imagining some idealized high school life.

  “Trust me it wasn’t like the movies. Unless you count prison movies, really boring prison movies, without any knife fights.” I drifted off, while Heather finished loading the magazines.

  *****

  I woke up to the sound of a dying air conditioner. Heather was gone. She’d left the remote embedded in the wall. The TV screen was cracked, but still functioning.

  I pulled the curtains open and looked out over the parking lot. It was still dark. A large group of people stood around my car. I recognized some of them from earlier. The Rifleman was there too, pointing his Winchester at Heather.

  “Aw fuck.” I stuffed some extra magazines in my pockets and grabbed the AK.

  I burst through the glass door into the parking lot, holding the AK like a handgun, with the stock folded and the barrel resting on my left arm. The group turned to to me. Heather and the Rifleman continued their standoff.

  “Hey guys,” I said. “Uh, what’s goin’ on here.”

  “I got no quarrel with you, son,” the Rifleman glanced at me. “You got yourself a gun. That’s good. You’ll need a gun in these parts.”

  Most of the angry mob carried crosses made of wood and silver duct tape. A few brandished shovels and axes. Everyone had a gun. I saw everything from old west six-shooters to AR-15’s.

  “We don’t have a problem with you either. We’re just passin’ through.” I swept the AK across the crowd.

  The Rifleman kept his gun pointed at Heather.

  “We, huh?” he said. “You travelin’ with this creature? We saw her scaling the hotel walls, like like some kinda unholy lizard. Looking for victims, no doubt. I woulda thought she escaped from that bastard Marcello’s wicked house.”

  The crowd murmured. An old woman held up her duct taped cross, trying to drive me back. I nodded at her and smiled.

  “How you doin’ babe?” I said to Heather.

  She growled and looked side to side for an opening. “I’m doing just fine. They don’t have a chance”

  “I’ve dealt with worse things than you, harpy. We’ve all seen the creatures that have found their way off of Marcello’s land.” The crowd murmured in approval. “For generations we have slain and burned those abominations.”

  “Try it, fucker,” Heather said,

  “Nobody’s getting burned,” I said. “Look, we’re leaving in a few hours.”

  “Yeah.” Heather shifted tones. “We’re going to see Marcello.”

  The air around Heather rippled. The Rifleman went slack. He slung the Winchester over his shoulder. Heather reached into her t-shirt and pulled her cross out.

  “You’re going to destroy him, after all this time,” the Rifleman said.

  “Marcello’s time has come,” Heather said. “Detain us no further.”

  The mob grew louder, then began to disperse. They disappeared down residential streets with shocking speed.

  “Good luck, brother.” The Rifleman patted my shoulder as her passed. “Nice weapon, though if I was going up against Marcello, hell, I’d want a crew served machinegun.”

  I walked sideways, back up the stairs, waiting for the angry mob to change it’s mind and regroup.

  Back in the room, a vintage Hercules movie played on a cracked screen. Heather tapped her foot, overflowing with nervous energy.

  “What the hell happened out there?” I clicked the AK’s safety on and tossed it on the bed. “How did you manage to get an angry mob of peasants to come after you, like some kind of Frankenstein movie? You know, I swear some of them had torches and pitchforks.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.” Heather pointed at the TV. “Reality shows suck. There was nothing on.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “So, I went out to explore and that fucking cowboy and his hillbilly posse were waiting in the parking lot,” she said.

  “I guess this means that Monroe’s drawings are real,” I said.

  “This whole town’s fuckin’ weird from being too close to Marcello,” Heather said. “Makes me wonder what kind of shit we’re gonna see.”

  “Those poor fuckers think I’m gonna kill Marcello,” I said. “It’s not their fault that they’re like that.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about those assholes. They were going to, like try to kill me. They didn’t even know what they were fucking with, like they thought I’m some kind of freak.” Heather smiled mischievously. “You know, when we meet Marcello, I’m gonna tell him about those assholes. I’ll say they’re defying him and conspiring against him. Maybe he’ll send his creatures to destroy the town, or something.”

  Heather sat down and put her arm around me. I watched ebony claws retract into her fingertips. She drummed her hand on my shoulder.

  “It would be awesome to see the centipede-thing, that Monroe drew, just thrashing this town,” she said. “I wonder how big it is.”

  “I don’t know.” I looked at my phone. “Shit. I need some fucking sleep.”

  I hooked the cooler with my boot and pulled it over. I handed Heather a bottle of blood and fished a bottle of beer out of the ice. Heather sipped her blood and read through Monroe’s notebook. I drifted off, watching Hercules throw styrofoam boulders at what looked like Roman centurions.

  Chapter 7

  Check out was at noon. Heather had found her way to my trunk while I was asleep. I loaded up the car, made it to the front desk by one o’clock and slid my hotel key to the morbidly obese manager.

  “Your room is on the house,”
she said and pushed two fifty dollar bills across the sticky, soda splattered counter. I recognized the old bills. I’d found them in a snake skin wallet, back in the revenant’s strip mall.

  “Uh, thanks.” I stuffed the money in my pocket.

  “Don’t come back,” she said.

  “Yeah, sure. Fuck you very much.” I walked out, wishing Heather was there to childishly shatter their class doors.

  The Rifleman and a few of his friends were waiting in the parking lot. The large loop Winchester was nowhere to be seen. They all seemed happy. I felt bad for them.

  “Hey guys,” I said. “You really should relocate, find a new place to live, all of you. We’re probably gonna die at Marcello’s.” They just stared with stupid grins on their faces. “Can’t you see this town’s fucked.”

  “We’ll do alright here. Even if y’all don’t make it.” The Rifleman reached out, but didn’t touch the fresh claw marks on my door. “Anyway, y’all seem to know what you’re doin’.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  *****

  Marcello’s place was easy to find. A wall of megalithic stone separated his land from the surrounding countryside. It reminded me of some sort of ancient South American ruins. Each massive stone block fit perfectly against the next.

  I kept driving until I found a huge, medieval-style wooden gate. It looked like the kind of thing that was supposed to keep King Kong on his side of the island. Two stone guardhouses stood on either side of the gate. Both were empty, except for disturbingly large spiderwebs. Small bones littered the dirt floors. There was no intercom or any other way to contact Marcello. I parked and waited, expecting something huge and horrible to peer over the wall.

  The sound of squealing metal woke me up. I didn’t remember falling asleep. A black Cadillac Escalade rolled through the open gates. I started the car on the first try and pulled forward to block the driveway. The Cadillac’s doors opened all at once. Three goons in designer suits and sunglasses stepped out. I drug my AK out of the back seat. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The goons and I stared at each other for a second. Then a well dressed man, who could only be Marcello, stepped out. He looked like someone who used to walk the streets of Rome, arguing how best to remove Caligula with the other patricians. His black eyes burned at me.