Detective Krauss shifts carefully in his rooftop hide. The day’s heat has left the tarpaper tacky. Scanning the back lot of the women’s health clinic through binoculars, he waits for their nighttime visitor.
The last of the staff left an hour ago.
He concentrates his view on the dumpsters marked with biohazard symbols: “medical waste.” For the last week, someone has raided at least one a night. Krauss is sure it is linked to a number of similar break-ins around the city over the past three months. The descriptions of the perp share too many commonalities.
He hopes his suspicions are right as to the nature of the game he hunts.
Of all the stakeouts in his career, this one terrifies him the most.
“She is one busy girl,” Krauss muses to himself, “hits one joint for a couple of weeks. When the local patrols step up or hire security, she moves on to the next clinic.”
A few pigeons hear; a couple take interest in the interloper.
“You birds see anything? Was it some blonde chick in booty shorts a couple nights ago? Legs and tits to die for?” One waddles over to Krauss and cocks its head.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
Please let it be her, else I am shit nuts. Still beats watching the game. The fuck am I going to do if it is her?
Time passes, the roof cools off, Krauss still waits. Traffic dies off.
Half an hour to midnight.
A quarter ‘til.
Five minutes.
Click. Click. Click.
The unmistakable sound of a woman’s heels on asphalt penetrates the distance above the city’s din. Krauss hones in on the direction of the sound.
Click. Click. Click.
She appears. Krauss stifles a sudden intake of breath. The woman strides confidently without a care in the world, young, buxom, dressed in short shorts, fishnets ending in mid-length high-heeled boots, tube top with a short black leather jacket that exposes her midriff. Her face has a sensual cruelty about it. It is haughty, like someone who has seen all of life and death’s mysteries and found them banal.
Krauss watches and thinks, Missy was her name, twenty years old, nursing student at City U, part of the dance team. Was.
Missy walks up to one of the waste disposal units. Caressing the unit’s padlock lovingly, she seizes it in a sudden fury and rips it off. Throwing the lid open, she roots through the receptacle. She sniffs sealed bags of medical waste.
Krauss gets a lump in his throat, suppresses the need to swallow, and watches, transfixed. Even from a safe distance, he fears making the slightest sound.
Missy lays out six bags in a semi-circle in front of her. Krauss can see their murky ruby glow.
Daintily, Missy opens each one in succession, drawing deep of their scents.
Sweat beads on Krauss’ forehead threatening to run into his eyes.
Missy plucks out an aborted fetus from one and unhinges her jaw. In a flash, she swallows the corpse, neck muscles bulging, making her look like a powerlifter pulling a half-ton.
Krauss suppresses a trickle in the back of throat, vomit hammering at his gut’s sphincter.
He watches this show twelve times. Twelve times, she picks out a half-formed human and swallows it. After finishing her meal, she places the bags carefully back in the dumpster and walks off in the direction of Midtown.
Krauss springs into action, sliding down a fire ladder to his Mustang. Firing it up, he takes off, cutting around the block to pass her in the opposite direction. He sees her walking, face spotless.
She sees Krauss slowing down, checking her out. She locks eyes and winks, licking her lips.
A spike of fear shoots down Krauss’ spine and he guns it.
About as close as I want to get; now I know her M.O. I’ll wait for her to hit a new clinic. Something with a clear field of fire.
***
Missy walks ten blocks to Midtown. She looks for a club, any place she can dance, be seen, be admired, be desired. She has a cold fire burning need to feel sweaty bodies, to smell the male musk, to feel alive, even though no heart beats in her chest.
***
Krauss returns to his apartment. He tries making some chamomile tea and unwind. He plugs a USB into his new laptop and fires up TailsOS. Once booted up, he logs in to ProtonMail. He finds his inquiries have born fruit: an email from an old Hungarian priest and folklorist, Father Karoly.
…though your request is unusual, the popular remedies for the vrykolakas are not that different from the movies. Simpler, in fact. Things like silver, garlic are preventative, to be buried with evil person who may become undead. Sunlight isn’t said to turn them to ash like your movies, but the vrykolakas are said to prefer the hours of darkness. The reason has never been clear as to why.
But to kill one, simple: brute force. Heroes in the folk traditions who fight these monsters often overcome them by dismembering or crushing the creature. While the vrykolakas are not injured the way the living are, massive trauma seems to be a universal method of destroying them from Iceland to Japan.
It cannot be though you believe vrykolakas are real? I will agree with you that the pervasiveness of such similar monsters in mythology is interesting and surprisingly consistent. But many other folk beliefs are universal, like that of an afterlife. Now many post-date the spread of Christianity…
Krauss stops reading and debates whether to ask Father Karoly if a mag dump of .308 rounds in the head would work.
Probably outside the old fella’s field, Krauss thinks.
Instead, he returns to his kitchen and looks at the parts laid out on the counter. He looks them over again. He waited because assembling them would be a final step in accepting reality.
Is it murder if I kill someone who is already dead? What is the feds’ role in all this? They take over the investigation of any new killings and keep the department in the dark.
He installs the trigger group, magazine catch, bolt hold open into the 80 percent receiver he milled out last week in his brother’s garage.
Two “vrykolakases” running loose in my town, and shit from the suit squad, beheaded corpses piling up, disappearances. Spreading, more outside the Grove every week. The local news isn’t asking questions. Rumors spreading on the Internet like the Smiley Face killings.
Krauss screws the buffer tube in place and sticks the main recoil spring inside.
What is the feds’ game? Are they wanting to capture or kill these things? If so, how?
He picks up the AR 10 upper, black nitride finish, dull and utilitarian, hides its high grade components.
Guaranteed sub MOA with match ammo.
Mating the upper and lower receivers, he drives home the takedown pins.
He mounts a scope on the newly assembled rifle; nothing rattles. Grabbing the charging handle, he racks the bolt a few times, pulling the trigger each time; a hard click greets him with each pull.
One last thing.
Inserting a magazine, he draws the charging handle; the bolt locks back.
I’ll go to the cabin tomorrow and test fire and sight in this bad boy.
***
Missy glares at the early morning sun shimmering through the gossamer curtains of the bedroom. Yellow and red hues paint the interior. Listless, she licks the blood coating her hands and arms, lapping up the last bit she can get after licking the bodies of the two dead dude bros clean.
Each degree of the sun’s ascension enervating her an order of magnitude, she wipes the blood from her naked body, licking her hands clean each time, savoring the taste of adrenaline and cortisol-laden ichor. She tries smiling at the memory of Chad and Brad DPing her. It took their drunk asses a whole five minutes of humping to realize she was corpse-cold.
Missy stares at the two bodies, faces locked in grimaces of death, throats torn out. She tries to recall the intense pleasure of butchering them. But now, in the clear light of day, the memory of that shocked looked of accidental necrophilia haunts her. The horror of what she has become crashes upon her. Curling up into a ball, she sobs until all the energy ebbs from her body. She lies comatose until the sun fades from the sky.
***
Krauss takes in a deep breath of piney air, the echo of the rifle’s roar rolling of into the distance. A hole in the ten ring.
One more click will do it.
He exhales slowly; as his breath dwindles, he squeezes the trigger, a hole appears in the X ring two hundred yards down range, a blast, the bolt cycles. He squeezes again, repeat, again and again until the X ring is obliterated.
He smiles, a giddiness overcoming him as the bolt locks open. Beneath his curled lips, he whispers one word: “Excalibur.”
***
Her eyes glow with hunger. More fetuses, more eats. Missy drools in expectation of a second weekly feeding. She pauses a moment at the back door of the clinic, ready to rip the handle off.
Someone is watching.
She sniffs the air, but the smell of carrion inside is too overpowering.
“Over here,” someone whispers.
She whirls around to face an abandoned lot.
“Over here.” Even fainter this time.
Her dark adapted predator eyes struggle to make out another person.
Two flashes of light strobe from the far end of the lot. Her pelvis explodes, twin booms echo in her ears. Poleaxed, she drops to the pavement. Catching herself on her palms, she skitters away when her arm and shoulder blow apart in a shower of bone fragments and black blood.
“FUCKER!” she howls, immobilized.
Two hundred yards away, Krauss places the crosshairs about where Missy’s head is.
C’mon bitch, hold still for a second.
She screeches something over and over. And for a moment, she stops, looks straight into the scope. Eyes lock.
He unleashes a double tap to her forehead pulverizing Missy’s skull.
She shuts up.
Krauss breathes in and waits. One heartbeat, two heartbeats, three heartbeats watching through the scope as her body decays. Her pale skin turns gray, then a sick greenish yellow melting into puss along with the underlying muscles. Missy’s gut bloats up, her abdomen expands and splits open, spilling out her guts with a torrent of blood and shit.
Satisfied, Krauss crawls away into the night under a gibbous moon.
***
In a bar in Midtown, Chad and Brad sit. In front of two pitchers of beer, they stare. Thirsty, but not for alcohol.
Proteus Juvenalis, of the Lost Generation, is a cynic and misanthrope orbiting Neptune and contemplating his former home. His stream of consciousness broadcasts can be found on Telegram.
