Tuesday June 23, 1998

Regardless of species, hell is riding a bus with broken air conditioning filled with sweating humans. The heat is one thing, but for a vampire, boarding a crowded hotbox with two dozen foul-tempered humans is either foolhardy or suicidal.

Vicky wasn’t sure which category she belonged in.

To a vampire, being assaulted by the combined aromas inside a crowded bus is like walking into a fast food joint and smelling cooking food. Except the food is alive, pissed off and vastly outnumbers the customers.

And in broad daylight, the vampire is nearly blind and doing some cooking of their own.

Vicky squinted, keeping her head down as she pulled out exact change from her pocket and dropped it into the slot beside the driver.

“Transfer please?” she murmured, keeping her wavering voice much lower than she normally would. Her softer volume was caused by her desire to avoid attention, but her voice quivered because she’d been roasting under the sun.

Putting on a jacket would have made more sense, but she’d thought that wearing it would have boiled her alive. To her mind, it was almost the same thing. Either way, she was cooked.

She would have preferred taking a cab, but when the first car arrived, the driver saw Vicky walk halfway across the lawn and took off. Her next call to the dispatcher had resulted in her being hung up on, and by then she was risking being late if she tried calling another company.

She couldn’t drive, not during the day. Even with dark glasses on, the sun was pounding her eyes, blinding her. She could make out shadows and shapes, but white halos surrounded everything and obscured her vision so bad that she couldn’t read.

This was why she had to ask, “What bus is this?”

The driver turned his head to look at her and scowled in revulsion. “Are you blind?”

Vicky nodded, straining to smile. The problem was, the sunlight pinched an involuntary bulge in her brow, which gave her whole face a menacing aspect.

“Yes, sir, I am functionally blind. I’m sorry, but I can’t read the sign, and I need to get to the blood and tissue center on Fred—”

“Yeah, sure, lady,” the driver cut her off. “You got the right bus, the 92.”

“Thank you.” Vicky walked slowly, looking down to make sure she wasn’t scowling at anyone to make them nervous.

Someone in a handicapped seat rose and patted her arm.

With her skin aflame under the sunlight, the incidental contact felt like a slap. Vicky managed not to flinch or pull her hand away.

“Here, take mine.” The voice sounded young, in the early teens, but in just the right pitch to be androgynous.

Vicky sat down and nodded. But before she could say anything, the hazy shape in front of her asked, “Are you a real vampire?”

Vicky laughed, trying not to let on how terrified she felt. “That depends. How many vampires do you know that can walk around in daylight?”

“Um…I thought Dracula could walk in daylight.”

Vicky smiled and nodded. “Yeah, it just weakened him. Did you read Dracula?”

“Yeah, last year. The first part is boring until the vampire shows up, and then it gets better.”

Vicky’s smile grew. “I thought so too.”

The voice rose in a soft laugh, definitely feminine. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Well, let me ask you a question. If you were a vampire on a bus full of nervous humans, would you admit it, or just claim you were an albino?”

“Albinos have pink eyes.” That was a different person, a man sitting on her left. He continued, “They also don’t have fangs, as far as I can tell. What are those, implants?”

Snorting, Vicky said, “Yeah, I got them back in the 80s, I think.”

“In Arizona?” The man asked. There was a note of worry in his voice.

“Oh, no. Lord, no you don’t think—no, I wasn’t involved in that.” Nauseous with fright, Vicky swallowed. It didn’t stop her stomach from churning. “I’m from New York, actually. Originally, that is.”

Beside her, the man sighed, and his outline changed as he went from rigidly upright to slouching.

She continued her story to settle his nerves. “I lived there for around two decades until the condominium went up in an electrical fire. So I moved to the Netherlands. I got tired of the climate and decided to come here instead.”

“So what brings you out today?” the girl asked.

Vicky started to say she was going shopping, but her sense of nervousness melted away. It felt wrong to relax, but even when she tried to feel wary, the sentiment faded.

She squinted at the girl, trying in vain to see her better. “I have a job interview.”

“Yes, at the blood and tissue center.” The girl laughed again. “We heard you. What job are you applying for?”

“Um…” The question made her wary of answering, and again the feeling dissipated without explanation. Vicky answered, “Night security.”

“Really. So, you see better at night?”

Taking the bus was starting to feel like a really bad idea. Of course there would be questions from the humans. During the last year, strange things had begun to happen all over the world, and humans were becoming more alert to the threats around them.

Vicky was partially responsible for the attention being focused on her. She’d killed humans for months after moving to San Antonio, and she doubted they would feel better about her kills if she explained that she’d been on a very strict diet.

Under the influence of nightmare blood, Vicky and her coven master, Emil, had wiped out a house party of teens. The massacre was seven months past, and Vicky and Emil were still tormented by the slaughter. Hunting stray humans outside was one thing, but breaking into peoples’ homes broke vampiric social taboos.

Neither would have broken it if not for the artificial bloodlust created by the poisonous blood. But they’d both tried in vain leech the poison from Amber, Vicky’s partner. The poison had resisted their efforts, requiring the efforts of a spiritual healer to cleanse Amber.

But the damage was done, and it didn’t matter that the slaughter wasn’t really their fault. Since then, the entire coven had followed Claudia’s diet, feeding only on blood collected from their pets.

The males didn’t care for drinking cold blood, and they prowled their territories, collecting sips from pets throughout the night. They’d all been on their best behavior, but lots of humans were being slaughtered nightly, and those deaths were caused by something else.

With so many people dead from having their blood consumed, of course a six foot, nine-inch white woman with fangs was going to catch attention.

“Yes, I see better at night,” Vicky said. “I’ve been working in goth clubs for years as a model. I’m getting older, and I’m burning out on the club circuits. But after all that time working in the dark, normal daylight messes with my eyes.”

The girl leaned close, so close that her scent overpowered everyone around her. She smelled clean, free of diseases or vices. There wasn’t even a hint of caffeine in her.

The aroma of halfling was impossible not to notice at that range, and Vicky’s mouth watered.

The girl whispered, “Are you aware of the fact that you’re getting a tan?”

Vicky grimaced and glanced down at her hands, pulling them up close to her face. Still, nothing looked wrong. But when she lowered her glasses, she realized that she was not white, but light blue.

“Oh hell.” Vicky pulled her glasses back up.

The girl had leaned over to check her eyes, and she laughed again.

Vicky wondered what was so funny. “Okay, so, this looks bad, I know.”

The girl asked, “Why does a vampire need a job anyway?”

Vicky shrugged, but she was still thinking about how she would look like a freak when she applied for the job sporting a tan. Although her last trip in the sun was close to seven decades in the past, she still remembered how quickly her skin changed colors under full sunlight. She just hadn’t counted on walking to a bus stop and waiting half an hour for a bus to show up.

Every time she tried to feel agitated, the overwhelming calm feeling returned. She thought the girl had to be manipulating her, but her suspicions faded away just as fast as her feelings of anxiety had.

Vicky said, “I like working. Where I’m living now, the bills and food are taken care of, but I’d still like to have my own source of income.”

The man to her left asked, “And, what do you eat?”

“Mostly…” Vicky shook her head, thinking, No, it’s better if I don’t go there.

But only a moment later, the sense of calm overrode her common sense. “I go into a nightclub, and I find someone willing to…” She fought against answering, but she couldn’t. “And then we—they volunteer, and I take sips from them.”

“You drink people,” the girl said.

“Yes,” Vicky said.

Whether the whole bus was looking or not, Vicky couldn’t tell. But she felt like people had begun to crowd in.

It wasn’t an impression, and with so many people moving closer to surround her, they soon blocked out sunlight from the far window. The haloes diminished enough for her to make out more details. The faces were hazy, and it was hard to make out most expressions.

“How weird.” The girl was standing so close that Vicky could see a white blur from her grin. She was completely unafraid. “Are you planning to skim the books at the blood and tissue center?”

Vicky laughed. “No, I’m taking the bus because they called me in for an interview.” She held up her transfer. “After I finish with them, I have to go to another interview at a regular bank, and I don’t plan on skimming their books either.”

“You’re really just looking for a job?” The girl’s smile fell, and she sounded disappointed.

“Yes. I was supposed to take a cab, but they bailed on me when I walked outside.” Pointing at her bulging brow, she offered a strained smile. “I can guess why, so I don’t blame them.”

“So, be honest,” the man to her left said. “What’s really going on now?”

Vicky considered lying, but it didn’t seem like she was capable of it around the girl. She was surrounded, blinded and at a severe disadvantage in broad daylight, and yet she felt emotionally cool. The situation had begun to take on a dreamlike quality.

She said, “There’s this other plane of existence, and the creatures there have been minding their own business until recently. I was visited by a creature from this other plane, and he tried to recruit my partner for his plans. I don’t know what his plans were, because Amber refused him, and he went away mad.”

She paused, but no one spoke.

They were waiting for her to go on. “I’m not sure if what’s been happening is his work, or the work of something else he brought with him. But there seems to be two different creatures working here. One consumes whole buildings of people and pets and leaves nothing behind. The other leaves peeled bodies. They prefer humans, or maybe they eat something else and I’m not noticing a trend in missing livestock.”

“Who is he?” Someone asked, a man somewhere behind the first row of gawkers. “Who is this creature from the other dimension?”

Vicky couldn’t even catch his scent, but she tried to look in his direction. “His name is Dimitri. He’s a wyrm, and he came from a place called Lissand. All the really cool magical powers that vampires are supposed to have, he has. He’s a shapechanger who can be anything he wants, and he consumes everything, not just blood. But he’s not a finicky eater, and he’ll eat anything. Even vampires are food to him. That’s why I think the empty buildings are his handiwork.”

“So the news is lying to us. These aren’t mass abductions.” The new male voice to her left wasn’t asking a question. It was a statement made with certainty, and the note of anger in the man’s voice wasn’t directed at her. “Something big is coming, and they’re covering it up.”

“Nobody wants to be the first to admit something if it will make them look crazy.” Vicky sighed, sitting back in her seat. “If not for all these sudden deaths in the city, you would have just thought of me as another freak. Now I’m stuck and feeling a bit claustrophobic because you know I’m…a vampire.”

“So, you don’t have any cool powers like that?” The girl asked. When Vicky shook her head, the girl laughed. “You can’t turn into smoke or hypnotize people?”

“No, nothing like that. I can move faster, and my reflexes and senses are more fine tuned. I heal faster than humans, and my bones are more dense. If you jumped off this bus at top speed, you’d be wet mush. I would land on my feet and jog to a stop or tuck and roll to minimize the impact, and within two seconds, I can be walking without limping.”

Someone coughed, an old man judging from the voice. “Holy water?”

“Not effective. But, as you can see, sunlight hurts.”

“Like really bad?” the old man asked. “I mean, you’re getting darker, but you seem okay to me.”

“I have an extraordinarily high threshold for pain, but even sitting here with the tinted window blocking out some of the UV rays, this is torture. I’ve been ready to scream long before I sat down, but right now, I’m feeling the strangest kind of calm.”

“The sun blinds you too,” the girl said.

“Yeah, I can’t really see you except as blurry shapes. With you all crowded in, you’re filtering some of the sunlight, but you’re still more like splashes of color. Which is funny, because in my night vision, I only see in shades of grey and black and white.”

“Seriously?” another man asked, too far to the back of the bus on her right for her to see him. “You only see color during the day?”

“Yep. Why do you think vampires have a preference for black clothing? It’s because we’re effectively color blind most of the time. It’s only during the day that I can see any color at all, and it’s muted by haloes.”

“Garlic?” That was the same old man who had asked about holy water and the effects of the sun.

“Okay, look, before I let this press conference go on…” Vicky paused as everyone laughed, and she had to resist the urge to grin. “But before I get into a list of allergies and medications, I just want to be sure I’m going to survive to make it to my job interview.”

People backed up, letting light spill in and blurring everyone into messy blobs again.

The old man asking about weaknesses said, “Good grief, you don’t think we’d gang up on you, do you?” He didn’t let her answer before he asked, “And what would we attack you with, folding pitchforks? Pocket lighters, or perhaps lit cigarettes?”

He coughed a rumbling lung-butter laugh. “No, wait, I’ve got it. We’ll pin you down and let the driver feed you road flares.”

Vicky grimaced as her mind conjured a mental image to fit the suggestion. Her stomach gurgled and she swallowed hard. “Yeah, that’d do it.”

“Tell you what,” the old man said. “If you jump us, we’ll go with that plan.”

Vicky laughed, and everyone gasped when she exposed her fangs. “All right, then I’ll just sit here quietly and think about fatal heartburn.”

Bonus Blog Fiction: Job Interview With a Vampire - Part 1, 4.0 out of 5 based on 4 ratings

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... I write dark fiction in a variety of genres. My blog contains my rants and rambles, and some short fiction that can only be found here. I can be pretty fucking offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Bonus Blog Fiction, Dark Fantasy, Job Interview With a Vampire, Vampires, my writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.