AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Preface: Time for shameless promotion of one of my stories featured in "Adventures for the Average Woman." This one is based on an actual nightmare I had (as are most of my stories and graphics). It nearly got published by a Boston imprint but got kicked to the curb at the last minute. :(

Oh well, it's got my limited reading public hooked, so here is the first in a series of chapters for your amusement. (It's either this or more lamenting on how being a starving artist is a picnic with no sandwiches on a fireant hill.)

“Come here, you wretched O.” The vampiress’s words sprayed spittle and blood. She floated on the thick night air.

“I can smell your fear-riddled mortality,” hissed another with the scraping of long fingernails along the brick walls.

Gina crouched deep within the rancid recesses of an alley dumpster. Her nylons hung like shredded skin from her legs. Grease and sweat saturated the polyester blend of her knee-length skirt and blazer. She clutched the lapels of her white cotton blouse close to her throat. She tried not to breathe, but her beating heart relentlessly sent out a detectable pulse. She knew they were hovering just above the lid.

Like a kick-ass Jacky-in-the-box, Gina popped the lid. She slammed metal on bloodthirsty bone and leapt out. The first vampiress shrieked through her smashed face. The second flew after Gina with fearsome nails and bared fangs. A door of opportunity suddenly appeared around the corner, and Gina disappeared.

The powerful vampiress dove for her like Alice after the March hare. She reached through the crack of the door and scratched at Gina’s face with venomous claws. Gina struggled to close the wooden portal. With sudden force, the door clipped off several digits of her gruesome assailant, and the deadbolt slapped magically into its groove.

Gina felt pressure at her back. She spun around to meet an imposing figure whose long-nailed fingers clamped tightly over her lips. A soft “shhh” drifted across her cheek.

Beyond the door sounded the muffled voice of a man, “There it is! Get it!” The shrill wail of the vamipress followed.

“Move!” rasped the figure and jerked Gina from the door just as a deadly point of bloodstained metal pierced it.

Gina’s heart pounded in a fitful plea for release. She prayed for death unawares.

A ray of light traveled through the barred window to her right. “Be absolutely still,” warned the presence who pressed her tightly against the wall.

“Anything moving in there?” called the voice outside. The door rattled fiercely against the deadbolt then stopped.

“It’s locked.” The light scanned the interior to reveal a tangle of upraised hands, arms, and legs.

“Just a bunch of old mannequins. Let’s go,” said a second unseen man.

In the last flash of the beacon, Gina caught sight of an alabaster face boasting perfect balance framed in long platinum locks. Dark eyes sat nested in thick black lashes rimmed in black eyeliner. Two thin trickles of blood ran down from the corners of wet ruby lips.

A slow squeal leaked from Gina’s throat.

“No, no, honey, it’s not what you think.” The clamp of fingers loosed from her face, and the voice rose to a rumbling tenor. “Look, it’s all fake.” He proceeded to pull off the wig, faux lashes and nails. “See?” he assuredly smiled.

“And those?” Gina stared wide-eyed at his fangs.

“These, I admit, are real.”

Gina’s shriek succumbed to the chill flesh of his palm.

“Shhh! They’ll hear us.” He slowly slid his hand from her mouth.

“They after you too?” Gina peeped.

Like Liza after mascara, hon,” he muttered.

“Why, if you’re one of them?” she inquired nervously.

“One of who, the vampirellas? Heathens no.” He pulled back from her.

The grainy streetlight filtering through the gritty window showed the slinky figure of a tall shapely man in a long black cape, low-cut gown, and heels. “I’m being hunted down by Os, your kind. They raided my show tonight with bloodlust in their veins and harpoon guns in their hands.” He pointed to the metal nib poking through the door. “Critics, feh! Fortunately, this drafty old building has lots of hiding holes.”

Gina stepped away from the wall and wiped the sweat from her sooty brow. She surveyed the dark clutter filling the room, “Where are we exactly?”

We’re in the storage room of the rundown Gay Nineties Burlesque House.”

“Where you do your show?” She reached over to finger a mannequin’s molded hand.

“Uh-huh.” He studied her movements for signs of a strike.

"What sort of show?” She tried to stall him from what she imagined he was about to do.

“Isn’t it painfully obvious?” He fit the wig back onto the dark matted-down hair of his head.

The faint light limned Gina’s moon face. “Not really.”

“I’m Dragula,” he dramatized with a flare of his cape and flash of his teeth. Seeing her too petrified to laugh, he pulled off the wig and tossed it atop a mannequin’s bare crown. “And I thought playing Fire Island was grim.”

Gina stared at the pronounced canines. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you…? I mean, don’t you…?” She drew her hand to her throat.

“Oh my, no!” he exclaimed.

“Why not?”

He sighed. “First of all, I’m still gorged from my last meal.” He raised a hand to his mouth to suppress a burp. “Excuse me,” he politely intoned. “Second of all, as much as it galls me to be cliché, you’re not my type.”

“You mean blood type?”

The flamboyant vampire elaborated. “It’s not the blood type that matters to vamps like me, sweet O.”

“That horrid flying woman with the teeth and nails called me that. What does it mean?”

He hovered close and inhaled deeply. “Actually, you’re more of an A positive, but we call you living humans ‘Os’ because you are so… so… so ordinary,” he condescended with a flip of the wrist.

She backed into a crush of dolls. “Well, what type do you like then?”

He reached over and gently pulled a tangle of hair back behind her left ear. “The XY variety.”

“You mean men?”

“That’s why you’re safe with me. I have no desire to bite you."

“Like those horrid female vampires?”

“Yes, I mean no,” he stammered. “Where’d you encounter them anyway -- in an office or an outlet store?”

“An office. How did you know?”

“Perfect lesbovamp hunting grounds. Loads of lonely double-Xes of all blood types,” he enlightened. “Where did they attack you?”

“At the bus stop. I work a nightshift as a data-entry clerk. I was standing alone waiting for the bus and…,” Gina shuddered. “I, uh, hid in a dumpster.”

“That explains your ghastly couture,” he sneered. “Sorry, dear, go on.”

Gina continued, “I pushed the lid into the face of one then ducked down the alley where I saw the door. Thank God it was open when I pushed it.” She looked away from his intense gaze toward the door and swallowed back the rising acknowledgement that this fang-bearing fiend had saved her life instead of sucking it from her. “Do you think it’s safe to leave now?” she asked.

“They’re everywhere you know. Where will you go?”

“Well, I can’t stay in this stuffy place. I have to get home and protect myself, somehow.”

“With what? Smelly garlic and gauche crucifixes?” He fingered the small gold cross suspended from her neck and smirked. “Newsflash, darling, that only works in the movies and on former Christians-turned-vampire with a guilt complex. As for me, I’m a classic heretic: a kabala-practicing Jew.” He released the cross and brushed his fingers clean of its implications.

“What works in reality then?”

He nodded his head toward the punctured door. “Got a loaded crossbow under your pillow?”

“What am I going to do?” she whimpered.

“My advice, restrict your movements to daylight hours. The sun is murder on a vampire’s complexion.”

“But I work at night. It’s the only job I’ve been able to get since I moved to this jerkface town. I owe back rent and….” She raised a hand to her face and sobbed. “I don’t know what’s worse, debt collectors chasing me or vampires!”

He put his hands on her trembling shoulders. “Aw, sweetie, don’t cry. Maybe I can help. In fact, maybe we can help each other.”
Gina wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “How?”

“Well, you need protection from those vampirellas, and I need protection from the Os.”

“So?”

“So, maybe we can become the first neomod odd couple, you know, I pose as your boyfriend, you as my girlfriend.” He took her small hand in his and softly stroked it. “Only I’m a vampire and you’re an Ordinary. I’m gay and you’re straight. At least I assume you’re straight given your sheer terror of being bitten by a lesbovamp. I wonder, was it the fear of lesbianism that made you run or living the life as a bloodsucking immortal?” He grinned and bared his fangs.

“Both.” Gina tried snatching her hand back but found it securely gripped. “What’s neomod?”

“Neomodern, dearie. Postmodern is très très passé. Now, it’s a brave new modernity where ancient sodomy laws are being resurrected in an effort to dash any and all prospect of legally sanctioned gay marriage, where women can still work twice as hard for half the pay as men, and macho neocons can freely and without shame cozy up to wimpy bleeding-nosed liberals in their fight to erase vampires from the planet.

“Imagine it,” he continued. He curled her small fingers inside his. “We walk hand in hand down the dark dangerous streets and keep the other from harm’s way in such a world. Lesbovamps won’t descend on you in the company of a man, especially a vampire man. Os will see you with me, think I’m as straight and boringly ordinary as they, and therefore won’t bash in my skull or perforate my aorta. How perfectly romantic.”

“How would we make that work? I don’t know where you live. I don’t even know your name.”

"My name’s Clive, Clive Drefus, and all I need is a dark closet during daylight hours.” He set a finger under her chin and pushed it up. “What do you say, hmm?”

“I…,” Gina squeaked as though her jaw needed oiling. “I’m Gina Caravelli.”

“Piacere di conoscerti, Signorina Carvelli.” His lips softly pressed the back of her hand.

She gasped and jerked it away.

“What? I told you I’m not the sort to bleed a woman dry.”

“I don’t know,” she wavered. “Maybe I should just pack up and leave this town. Start somewhere new and vampire-free.”

“Why not go together? I could use a fresh start with fresh material.”

“But if I go where there are no vampires then I won’t exactly be needing your help, now will I?”

“I hate to pop that idea bubble over your grungy little cartoon head but vampires are everywhere. Our numbers have grown since Os have sanitized our image in the media, made us more appealing, cute and cuddly even.” He lightly pinched her cheek then backed away to wax theatric. “But with an increase in population comes the need to cull the herd. Enter the harpoon hunters. And when the pressure is on, the hunted become more desperate to survive and add to their ranks. Those fanged beyotches have marked you either for a meal or a conversion, baby, so unless you want to undergo a hardcore manicure....” He reached down to pick up a severed finger from the floor and held it up in the pale window glow. “God, who does their nails? Ace Hardware?”

Gina bit her knuckle and squeezed her eyes closed to shut out the image.

He tossed the grim appendage aside and wiped the gore from his hands. “So, do we have a deal -- at least for tonight?”

“Okay, deal!” Gina blurted. “Until you get me home safe and bite-free. Then we’ll see.”

“How far is it? Can we make it before sunrise?” He glanced worriedly out the window.

“Well, the buses aren’t running now. I suppose it’s a good forty-minute walk.”

“Walk? Heathen’s no, child. Not on these tired dogs. We’ll grab a cab.”

“Oh, God. Where’s my purse?” Like a blind woman she groped the darkness. “I must have dropped it in the chase. Now, I don’t even have money for bus fare.” The tears began to roll.

He cupped her moist cheek in his sere palm. “I’ve got you covered, doll. Follow me.” He moved to unlatch the door.

She sniffled to regain composure. “You’re not going out with me dressed like that, are you? I mean, won’t it seem odd given how you expect us to appear out there?”

“Yes, I see what you mean.” He scanned the shadows. “Hold the princess phone. I think I can resolve the matter. I see some costumes way in the back.” He disappeared silently into the penumbra.

Gina squinted. “How can you see anything in here?”

“Excellent night vision.” When he reappeared, he bore a canvas pouch stuffed with garments and wore a baggy striped suit. “It was either this or Elizabethan,” he explained.

“What about shoes?” Gina pointed out. She heard him rummage around and saw him step out in a pair of paint-splashed workbooks.
Gina giggled.

“Oh, and I suppose you’re dressed like a Versace model.” He approached her and adjusted the lapels of her tattered and soiled jacket. “I may not be willing to make you viciously immortal, but I can certainly make you more fashionable. Shall we? Oh, one moment. I nearly forgot.” He looked around to find his black sequins purse. He reached in and pulled out an item that he slipped into his mouth.

“What’s that?” Gina asked.

“Fake teeth,” he lisped.

Gina raised her eyebrows in a questioning look.

“What? You Os wear fake fangs at Halloween and fancy dress balls,” he awkwardly annunciated.

“But why do you need fake teeth?”

Frustrated with trying to articulate against the plastic impediment, he pulled it out. “In spite of popular myth as touted by Hollywood, our fangs do not retract then re-extend. They are permanently in place. I use these to keep O suspicion down. They see my elongated bicuspids and,” he made the whooshing sound of a fleet arrow, “vampooned!” He cast a worrisome glance at the mutilated door then slid the prosthesis back into his mouth. “How do I look?” He flashed his plastic smile.

“A little long in the tooth, but passable,” Gina remarked.

“It’s hard to speak, so if we meet up with any Os, you do the talking and I’ll just smile, okay?” He adjusted the fake teeth on his denture with his tongue and flashed a corny grin.

“You have a little, uh…,” she made a wiping motion along her jowls.

He ran the dusty sleeve of the coat over his mouth. “How’s that?”

“Less bloody, more human.”

“That's a matter of opinion,” he tousled his flattened hair to release its natural wave, "but I'll take your word for it."

“Maybe you should give me that to carry.”

Knitting his brow, he looked down at where she was pointing then handed her the purse.

The door swung open heavily with the weight of the impaled vampiress. Clive’s long fingers twined around Gina’s right hand and roped her along out the door, past the gore, and into the alley.

“Your skin is so cold,” she noted. “But it’s early summer.”

“Poor circulation, dearie. Had it all my afterlife.”

"My ankles swell something awful during my period, and I got varicose veins,” Gina commiserated.

“Gina, I think this is the beginning of a beautifully bizarre friendship.” The two hunted souls strolled out into the night with the hope that each had found a personal savior in a foreboding neomod world.