Sunday morning at home

Xxxxx wrote:
> Please. [Vampires] prefer to be called “blood lab technicians”.
> And anyway they’re only pissed because of the stuff you
> write about them.

Can’t be that. Half the dingbats have forgotten how to read—SHUT UP, GUYS! C’MON, YOU’LL WAKE UP THE NEIGHBORS. AND LOOK, THE SKY IS GETTING LIGHT! SCAT!… FINE! STAY OUT THERE AND TURN TO DUST FOR ALL I CARE! Goddamn telepathic ones are the worst, you spend a week wondering if you’ve lost your mind, every time you walk into a room there’s a door just closing… What’s even worse is the psychics from the Van Helsing Society have spent so much time in empathic mental contact with them, they do the EXACT SAME THING. So you phone in for an assist; now you’ve got TWO people sneaking around and leaving cryptic notes written in blood in the goddamn vegetable crisper. Then one night you hear a bloodcurdling scream, and you get up out of bed and go and see if it’s a dustpan-and-broom job, or you’ve got another horribly mutilated corpse to try to sneak past the landlord.

Zombies are all right; they’re unto lilies of the field. They only have two behaviors—wandering around bumping into things, and trying to eat you alive—and they’re good at both of them. You hardly ever hear of a zombie in psychotherapy. You know why psychotherapists work during the day? It’s EVOLUTION. Whenever some fool starts accepting evening appointments, it’s only a matter of time before the cops are standing around in his office scratching their heads and/or puking in the wastebaskets. And then we have to go steal the case notes out of the evidence lockup—and READ them. Takes about fifteen minutes before you start thinking that if you see one more repetition of the word “spectral”, you’re going to start crying.

Oh, hell, pardon me a moment. WHAT? YOU IDIOT, I TOLD YOU IT WAS TIME TO GO HOME HALF AN HOUR AGO! OH, CHRIST, YOU’RE NOT ANOTHER ONE OF LUCRETIA’S, ARE YOU? LUCRETIA! YOU KNOW, TALL WOMAN, RED EYES, COMMUNICATES ENTIRELY BY TOUCH AND SULTRY GAZE… YEAH, THAT’S HER. THAT’LL TEACH YOU NOT TO PICK UP STRANGE WOMEN IN DISCOS… JUST STAY THERE UNDER THE STAIRS, I’LL GET YOU A LIGHTPROOF BLANKET. AND SOME PAMPHLETS! THAT I WANT YOU TO READ!

Hang on, I’ll be right back… Okay, that’s done. I’ll go out and check him later; sometimes you can talk some sense into them if they’re scared enough, and if not, one good yank on the blanket and go fetch the dustpan.

Lucretia… now THERE’S a major pain in the ass. A millennium and a half if she’s a day. First time my crew and I tracked her down, we managed to get a holy water claymore into place in time. We set it off; she just stood there dripping and looking bewildered. We figured we’d gotten another dud, so we went in with spears. Ten seconds later, the street looked like a wood chipper had exploded—and she was still just standing there looking bewildered. I figured we were all dead anyway, so I yelled for everyone to get clear and nailed her with the sacramental oil LAW. Burned her clothes right off her. Now she looked bewildered and embarassed. I don’t remember what happened next—but my crew says she walked up to me, huffed, and then slapped me hard enough to break my jaw and give me a concussion severe enough to cause short-term memory loss. Then she covered herself with her hands and marched away with an air of injured dignity.

We keep tabs on her as best we can; she knows us all by sight, now. She won’t have anything to do with me if I’m carrying a LAW, but otherwise she’ll come over and give me a kiss and a hug. She likes to cuddle. Do you have any idea what a fool you feel like sitting in a dance club with a hairline that says you’re about twelve years too old for the place, cuddling with a fifteen hundred year old soulless killer? Particularly since her fashion sense has begun to go—that’s how we know how old she is. So I’m sitting there half-deafened by teenybop techno crap, cuddling with a woman wearing one sneaker, one Rollerblade, pants from a tuxedo, a hawaiian shirt, a feather boa, a Cat-In-The-Hat hat, and a pair of socks on her HANDS. I don’t even have to Jedi Mind Trick anybody. People take one look, dismiss it as performance art, and have forgotten we were even there within five minutes. If I want a drink, I have to steal one from a neighboring table. We don’t even dare trying to give her clothes—if you hand her something, she’ll look at it and set it down, and if you try to undress her manually, you end up like that poor bastard out in my courtyard…

Reminds me, I’d better go check on him…

Idiot. Well, not surprising; you have to be pretty damn stupid not to take one look at Lucretia and know that something is dreadfully wrong about her. I’d better sign off and go find my dustpan.


&bull