5 STORIES THAT BITE
A collection of vampire-themed tales by James D. Pratt
All stories © James D. Pratt
Smashwords Edition
Cover image © HeroMachine.com
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Table of Contents
HORTON HITS A HO
Horton eased the Harley off the Interstate and pulled into the truck-stop parking lot. The night was well past the Witching Hour and the moon hung low and pendulous as an old whore’s tits. To Horton, Truck-stops were like vampires. They never really slept and the most interesting stuff happened at night.
Horton wanted to stretch his legs, grab a bite to eat, and maybe even get laid. But mainly, he needed to take a major dump. Those burritos he’d eaten for supper had spent the last couple of hours percolating in his stomach and would be storming the ramparts pretty soon.
Horton had been on the road since sundown and was far from home, but the ride would be worth it. There was money to be made, and anyone foolish enough to get between Horton and a pay day had better be ready to eat their own balls (in fact had, on two unrelated occasions).
Plus, it was an adventure. That was how Horton liked to think of himself, a modern day adventurer living on the fringes of society and playing by his own rules. Hell, it beat spending half your life knee deep in cow shit like his father had working in a slaughter house, or worse yet sweating your balls off in some lousy factory making cheap plastic crap (which according to the “Buy American” philosophy was somehow still superior to every other country’s cheap plastic crap). He’d cut his own throat if it ever came to that.
Normally Horton found the monotony of the endless road hypnotic but with those burritos about to spring a surprise attack, action was required. When the generic billboard advertising, “TRUCK STOP – 30 mi.” came into view, Horton sighed in relief. And when he finally saw the harsh fluorescent glow on the horizon marking the truck stop itself, he felt like a lost pilgrim who’d stumbled across paradise.
Horton knew that the phrase “concrete jungle” hadn’t been coined with truck-stops in mind, but to him it still seemed quite apropos. Sometimes he thought of the eighteen-wheelers roaming the oil-stained lot as dinosaurs prowling a diesel-powered Jurassic age, and sometimes the fuel-pump islands as archipelagos sitting atop a primordial asphalt sea.
To Horton, the rigs’ headlights seemed like the forward-facing eyes of immense predators, perhaps in search of sports-cars, SUVs, and similar pretentious yuppie shit to ravage and devour. He would love to have seen that. Just the thought of it made him laugh.
Horton was fond of truck-stops. He couldn’t decide whether they were more like an oasis or an island paradise because he couldn’t decide which image appealed to him more, the highway as a trackless desert or a fathomless sea. He tended to be a bit partial to the sea metaphor because he liked to think of himself as a shark, which in his eyes was the ultimate predator. Lord knew he was as cold-blooded as one.
One of the things Horton liked about truck-stops was how they appealed to all the senses. The lot was a shining galaxy of halogen lights and gleaming chrome, a powerful symphony of profanity and squealing brakes and revving engines and blaring horns. The only smell was diesel fuel, as if all the other wimpier scents had run away. The exhaust was so thick you could taste it, feel the grit of it on your skin. It hung in the air like an obnoxious fog, smelly and insistent as a drunken prom date.
Horton also liked the hint of danger. It was the closest thing you could come to those one of those wild-west saloons, where scoundrels and dangerous characters gathered to abuse themselves and each other. Most of the fellas you found at truck-stops were just good old boys trying to earn a living. Some were the inevitable assholes out to make life difficult for everyone else, but a few were real hard-cases, borderline psychopaths that could barely function among normal human beings (Whatever the fuck normal is, as Horton had often thought) and found it necessary to sequester themselves in rolling metal cages most of the time. Horton liked to rub elbows with such men, and to sometimes test himself against them. Not that it was usually much of a contest. There’d been that hairy motherfucker in Abilene, but for the most part things were usually pretty one-sided.
And then there were the whores.
That’s where you found them out here in the no-man’s land between densely populated areas. Bank robbers robbed banks because that’s where the money was. The same logic applied to truck-stops. You went where the action was and, in lieu of street corners and other public meat markets, truck-stops were the busy hubs around which the rest of the universe revolved. Sure, most of the whores had seen better days and an aura of desperation hung over them like an angry cloud set to rain down big fat drops of tragedy, but it’s not as if the clientele was picky. A screw was a screw. Pay your money, take your turn, and everybody goes home happy. Nobody got hurt, nobody got used. It was a business transaction. Hell, you didn’t even have to tell her your name.
That was of another one of the things Horton liked about truck-stops, the anonymity of it. Everybody tended to mind their own business. He hated when people asked him dumbass personal question just to make conversation, like for example what his first name was. Horton’s real first name was Theodore, by the way, but when someone asked him for a first name he usually told them to mind their own business (“fucking business” often being the actual verbiage). On those rare occasions when he was so inclined, he’d say, “Call me Jesse”. The name of Elvis Presley’s stillborn identical twin, it was Horton’s idea of being clever, like he was sharing an inside joke with a long-dead baby that never got the chance to swivel his hips in front of thousands of screaming fans or, sadder yet, screw a young Ann-Margret (Horton had rubbed one out many a time while picturing Ann-Margret from that scene in Viva Las Vegas where she’s bouncing around in nothing but a snug orange shirt and sheer black tights). He sometimes imagined little Jesse Presley up in heaven, eternally frozen at the size of an infant because he’d died a newborn, cursing the universe for being such a shitty and unfair place. Chances were poor little Jesse wasn’t getting much action up there.
What Horton hadn’t learned until years after the fact was the private joke behind his own name. As it turned out, Theodore was the real handle of the fella that invented that famous, big-hearted (i.e. pussy) elephant with whom he shared the name Horton, only spelled a little differently. That had been Big Daddy Horton’s idea of a joke, and when Big Daddy Horton made a joke, by God you’d better laugh. Little Horton had learned a lot from his Daddy, mostly by being witness to or on the receiving end of his numerous inequities and endless parade of not so lighthearted shenanigans. Big Daddy Horton had been a class-A bastard, but come the day Little Horton had had enough and he put the barrel of a stolen pistol to Big Daddy Horton’s temple and told him that now it was his turn to beg, all his pop did was look at him and grin. And so that was the day Big Daddy Horton went up to Heaven to be with mama (whom by that time was barely a blip on the radar of her son’s memory) and Horton stopped being Little Horton and became just plain ol’ Horton, on account of how as far as he knew he was the only Horton left. He sometimes felt nostalgic about that day, and liked to think there’d even been a gleam of pride in his daddy’s eyes.
Horton parked his hog and strolled in. He made a beeline for the rest room, noisily took care of business (you know it’s a good burrito when it burns worse going out than coming in) , and flashed a mischievous grin at a big black guy in olive-green overalls who walked into the bathroom just as he was exiting the stall. One whiff of the aftermath and the guy’s eyes had widened in disbelief. Horton took it as a compliment.
Horton walked over to the cleanest looking sink (all things being relative) and started to wash his hands. The water that came out of the tap was freezing but Horton didn’t mind. He didn’t notice things like hot and cold so much anymore. He looked at himself in the mirror. A tall, thin man with pale, razor-sharp features looked back (Suzy Hovencamp, a chubby, good-natured girl Horton had tried unsuccessfully to woo in the 10th grade, once told him she would have killed for his cheekbones). The man in the reflection wore a black leather jacket, white t-shirt, faded jeans, and steel-toed Doc Marten boots (not typical biker-fare, but they sure were great for kicking stuff). His thick black hair was slicked back, almost but not quite in a 50’s style ducktail bouffant and a pair of narrow, well-trimmed sideburns hugged his jaw-line. His eyes were even darker than his hair. They were like holes, those eyes, just an endless blackness that if you fall in you would never be able to climb out.
Horton smiled and the man in the reflection smiled back, revealing a set of impressive canines. He wasn’t sure exactly how the whole thing worked, but he figured his reflection would fade away eventually. Unlike in the movies, the process seemed gradual. Maybe it depended on how often you indulged the thirst. After that, Horton reckoned he’d have to comb his hair based purely on guesswork and instinct.
The prospect of losing access to the utilitarian benefits of reflective surfaces or not, Horton couldn’t help but feel like he was on top of the world. Things had been going pretty good for a while now, which was a far cry from the way they’d gone most of his life. For a while there, say from year one on, Horton had suspected his life was going to be one big fuck up. But then came the night when the little Mexican whore at that bordello somewhere south of Tijuana went and bit him on the neck. Horton thought she was just being kinky until he felt a trickle and realized he was bleeding like a stuck pig. He shoved her backwards and sat up as the Mexican tumbled to the floor. The whore rose up, seeming to float rather than clamber to her feet, and was momentarily illuminated by the headlights of a passing car. That’s when he saw the bizarre transformation that had come over her walnut-brown, heart-shaped face and how her eyes had shined critter-style in the headlights. It was the teeth that mainly caught his attention. They were long and curved and would have been more appropriate on some kind of threshing machine or pagan idol than in a human mouth. The whore came after Horton, fingers grown long and outstretched like claws, but he was already half-way out the window. Shit-luck or not, he was a natural survivor otherwise he wouldn’t have made it through a childhood under the kind tutelage of Big Daddy Horton. Horton managed to lose the whore (who seemed to spring through the air like her lungs were full of helium) in the labyrinth of trash-strewn alleyways, hid under some garbage, and passed out. He woke up a few days later with a tremendous headache, smelling like the bottom of a trashcan (soiling himself hadn’t helped), and thirsty as hell. It didn’t take him long after that to figure out that a profound change had taken place. What happened when the sun came up was the clincher. So far the cravings were pretty manageable, but time would tell.
After finishing up in the bathroom, Horton went to look for the truck-stop’s diner (Circle of life, he thought). It was the oasis within the oasis, a harshly-lit vision in formica populated by men in denim vests nursing bottomless cups of coffee. Horton slid into a corner booth and went through the motions of perusing the grease-stained menu. He already knew what he was going to get, but looking through the menu was something you just did, like breathing or stealing motel towels. A couple of minutes later a waitress came to take his order. From a distance she could have passed for sixteen, but up close was a different story. Her face was a roadmap of frown lines and you could have used the bags under her eyes as luggage. They were so dark they could have been a pair of black eyes. Come to think of it, they probably were.
Horton ordered a bacon cheeseburger (extra rare) with all the fixings and a big order of fries. He was dying for a beer, but didn’t feel like torturing himself. Alcohol no longer affected him so drinking beer was like masturbating without the release. He ordered a large strawberry shake instead. The waitress mechanically took his order with all the charisma of a 1930s movie-serial robot. She was also majorly lacking in the caboose department, but Horton graced her with a grin and a wink anyway. The prospect of a payday always put him in a good mood and he was feeling generous.
After the waitress left, Horton pulled a crumpled white envelope out an inner pocket in his jacket and dumped the contents on the table. He scanned the newspaper clippings, all of them stories about people killed by vicious animal attacks in and around a small town up north with the annoyingly quaint name of Lickety Split. ‘Experts’ attributed the attacks to a roving pack of wild dogs, most likely made up of abandoned pets or rejects from underground dog-fighting clubs. Whatever the case, in every instance the victims had been savagely mauled and their throats torn out.
“Them assholes have got themselves a werewolf,” Horton had observed after receiving the anonymous letter and going through its contents. Very mysterious, but he’d established a pretty good reputation for himself and a fellow traveler on the underground circuit had probably decided his services were needed. And so Horton had saddled up and hit the road, ready to do his civic duty and earn some scratch.
That was how Horton made a living. After that night at the bordello south of Tijuana, Horton had discovered that a whole other world was out there, one most folks never even got a glimpse of, except maybe in dreams or (more likely) nightmares. It was the denizens of that world that had inspired all the tales of shadow-haunters and boogiemen told around campfires since the dawn of human history. There were some folks, folks like Horton for example, that straddled those disparate realties with a foot firmly planted in each. Likewise, there were folks in both worlds that would pay top dollar for the pelts and innards of various creatures of the fantastical and mythic kind.
The waitress returned with Horton’s order less than ten minutes later. Horton took a bite of the cheeseburger and chewed thoughtfully, then wolfed down the rest. Smothered in fixings, the juicy burger was a delicious mixture of two of his favorite things, blood and grease. He figured at some point he would only be able to subsist on the red stuff, but until then he was going to eat the hell out of every piece of undercooked meat unlucky enough to cross his path. The fries were a little on the undercooked side (Horton liked them nice and crispy) but the strawberry shake more than made up for it. Thick and frothy, it was the best damn thing he’d ever tasted, hand down. Horton made a mental note to stop off there on his way back home for no other reason than to enjoy another strawberry shake. Hell, maybe even two.
Horton left the waitress what he thought was a generous tip and headed out the door. He was anxious to hit the road, take care of business, and get back home. Horton had bought a nice little rancher with a full basement that he was finishing himself, and he’d been surprised to learn that he actually enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment one got from applying hammer to nail.
The hootchie-mama wiggled into view just as Horton was about to mount his bike, magically emerging from the winding canyon of rigs parked on the far side of the lot. She wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, but she was in decent shape, looked Mexican, and had a nice round ass. If she spoke with a thick Spanish accent, it would be the trifecta.
The woman seemed to feel his stare and glanced his way, took a breath, and put on her working face. Ample, spandex-covered hips swinging, she sidled up to Horton and flashed what was supposed to be a sensual smile but came off as more of a silly grin. Amused, Horton grinned back. Even under normal circumstances, Horton’s canines were a bit on the “fangy” side. The woman blinked but quickly composed herself. In her business, she’d probably seen things far stranger things than an odd bit of dental work.
“How’s it going?” she asked in a perfect Texan-American accent.
Oh well, Horton thought. Two out of three ain’t bad.
They worked out an arrangement and, because Horton didn’t have a rig where they could conduct business, ended up next to a dumpster outside the rear entrance of the truck-stop’s diner section. Even this late at night the temperature was high and the smell was intense. Flies buzzed lazily about. Even they were worn down by the heat.
Horton unzipped his jeans while the woman squatted down and immediately went to work. She was a professional and it didn’t take long. The whole thing was almost disappointingly quick, in fact. Horton watched her the entire time and his face stayed calm, almost studious, till the last moment.
Their business concluded, Horton helped the woman to her feet. He even considered paying her a sincere compliment on her skills, but decided against it. He figured she would take it the wrong way and, whether it was his intention or not, by making her feel insulted he’d be breaking one of Big Daddy Horton’s three golden rules.
For all his many shortcomings, Big Daddy Horton had lived by three unbreakable rules; three sins which, no matter what the circumstances, he would never commit. One of them was never abuse nor disrespect a woman, not even a whore. Big Daddy Horton had idolized his dearly departed wife, had even settled down somewhat for the duration of their tragically short union, and perhaps he saw a bit of her in the face of every woman (whore or otherwise) he came across. That’s not to say he didn’t break a few hearts and tell a few tall tales in the pursuit of trim, but he never, NEVER insulted a woman nor laid his hands on one in anger.
Soon after that night south of Tijuana and the strange transformation that followed, Horton had adopted Big Daddy’s three golden rules and come to obey them as fiercely as his pop before him. The funny thing was, so long as he lived by those rules, he was untouchable. No man could get the drop on him. No quarry could escape him. Horton had thrown down with cold-blooded killers who’d been in the game far longer than him and come out on top. He’d even gone up against older, stronger members of his own night-bound fraternity on occasion, mostly those pretentious, gothic-type pricks he freaking despised and couldn’t resist fucking with, and always walked away without a scratch.
Horton would never admit it to himself, but deep down he felt that so long as he obeyed the rules, Big Daddy Horton was proudly looking down from heaven (or more likely looking up from someplace further south) and watching his back.
Horton pulled out his wallet to pay the woman and finish their transaction. That was Big Daddy’s second rule. When you made a deal, you always played it square. That didn’t mean you couldn’t apply a little creative interpretation to the letter of the deal every now and then, like a crafty djinn in one of those old Ray Harryhausen movies with the jerky but nonetheless cool animated monsters, but for something as simple and honest and straightforward as a blowjob you paid what was due and went on your way.
As he pulled out the cash, Horton’s license tumbled out of his wallet. By the time he noticed what had happened, the woman had already scooped it up and was scrutinizing the photo.
Her eyes widened. “Wow, you’ve changed.”
That was true. Not only had the photo ID been taken prior to Horton’s big life-changing event, it was well over twenty years old and way past expired. He’d held onto it as a sort of keepsake. In an out-of-character gesture of responsible fatherhood, his dad had insisted on driving him to the DMV to take his driver’s license test. After Horton passed his test, his father had given him a congratulatory slap on the back and said “Now drive me the fuck home”.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Horton replied. “Now hand it back.” He tried to sound pleasant and conversational, but even a casual observer would have detected a hint of strain in his voice.
The woman held onto the license. “Hey, I didn’t mean no offense. You look fine.” She took another look at the license and her face broke into a grin. “Theodore? You’re real name is Theodore?”
The muscles stood out on Horton’s neck. “Give it back.” His voice had become as dead as his eyes.
The woman didn’t seem to notice. Pupils fully dilated, she was probably operating on a whole other level. “Theodore. Wasn’t he one of those singing chipmunks? My kids love those fucking things.”
“Give me the fucking license, bitch!” It came out sounding more like a snarl than a spoken language. He was on the woman in a heartbeat, one hand snatching the license out of her hand, the other backhanding her across the face. The woman’s neck broke with a muted POP! and she tumbled to the ground.
Horton took a deep breath and sighed. “Well…shit.”
In one fell swoop, Horton had broken all three of Big Daddy’s golden rules. One, not only had he hit a woman but went and killed her stone dead. Two, being dead, it would be impossible for him to pay her and thus conclude their otherwise textbook business transaction. Three, and perhaps the most important one of all, he’d killed someone on the fly rather than in a time and place of his own choosing.
“Shit,” Horton repeated. He heard and smelled and even felt the heartbeat of the man sneaking up behind him but didn’t bother to turn around.
“What the fuck, man?”
Horton slowly turned and saw a man standing a few feet away, staring at the scene in horror. The man (more like a kid, really) looked like the archetypal white-trash gangster-thug wannabe. Rail-thin, he had the prerequisite scraggly goatee, gold-plated chain necklace, wife-beater tank-top undershirt, baggy, low-hanging jeans, and Timberland boots that had never seen nor would never see a hiking trail or construction site. One of the man’s hands held a pistol. The other was pressed against his forehead in disbelief. “What’d you do to Wanda?”
Horton glared at him. “Who the fuck are you?”
The man-kid leveled the pistol at Horton. “I’m her goddamn pimp! Who the fuck you think I am?”
Horton had to smile at that. Like a lot of Americans, his concept of pimps was eternally frozen in 1970s popular culture. He just assumed all pimps looked like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, skinny black guys in platform shoes, animal-print jackets, and purple, wide-brimmed hats. Horton looked down at the woman (whose name had been Wanda, apparently) that been blowing him only a minute earlier. “Yeah, sorry about that. Guess I don’t know my own strength.”