Blind Date A Book 2020 – Book #23
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Chapter 1
Mississippi Gulf Town Trailer Park Ravaged by Redneck Vampires – Warning: Nudity in This Issue
They rolled past the first two burned out doublewides before Jackson Wrath turned off the headlights on his Buick. The bad brakes whistled to announce their stop on the gravel path four dark and ruined trailers later.
Cull Staples stepped out on the passenger’s side first, hoisting the bulk of his camera and a tall flash which accounted for half the weight. The support handle on the side had the girth of a metal baseball bat. He had switched from film to digital back before he stopped shooting weddings and switched to crime scenes. Even after twenty years of snapping paranormal and unexplained stories for the tabloid, he still felt leaving film behind was his biggest betrayal.
Jackson pocketed the keys and slammed the driver’s door with a crash worthy of a bank vault. A spare ignition key sat under the back edge of the driver’s mat. They both knew about it, if it ever came to that.
Cull rounded the front bumper with his camera up and ready. Jackson fell in beside him and unclipped the mini mag light from his belt, but kept it off and lowered to his side because that’s how Cull wanted it in these situations.
“You know the joke about vampire stories, right?” Cull lowered to one knee and flashed two pictures like bolts of heat lightning.
Jackson blinked away the spots in his vision. “No, I don’t think so. Six or seven years of these road trips and I swore I had heard every story and joke you knew to tell. You must have found a new one between surfing porn sites, I guess.”
Cull lowered the camera, but then raised it to snap a third of the same curled aluminum peeling off the side of a trailer like an open wound. The flash revealed the corner of a sofa and crushed cans inside the opening. That damage could have been old, but digital photography and creative editing knew no bounds.
Cull stood and they resumed their stroll. “No, I only go to the site with your mother on it. Stick with what works.”
“See, that joke I’ve heard at least a dozen times. You stick with it, too, even though it doesn’t work.” Jackson pointed to the left. “How about this shit?”
Cull stopped and squinted. All he saw was a hanging cactus hooked to a porch which had pulled away from the door to the trailer tilting at a sickly angle. He almost asked Jackson to ignite his flashlight, but then he saw it too.
He blasted off five bolts of lightning and then walked right up under the thing to take a sixth and seventh shot. Jackson remained on the trail and turned to watch the deeper shadows around them.
Twists of rough bristle like a rustic broom head formed what could have been arms, legs, and head of a figure within a hoop of wood, twisting from the disembodied porch. “This is classic, man. It’s like a throwback to that Blair Witch stuff. Readers will be creeped out by this and not know why.”
“It’s probably a gnarled-up dreamcatcher coming apart in the humidity,” Jackson said. “Let’s see if we can find something we couldn’t fake ourselves in the office.”
Cull stepped out and they followed the curve of the path by more abandoned and collapsing structures. The metal skirts folded open on most, revealing wheels and webs underneath. He snapped a few wider shots as they walked. “I’m sure we’ll fake a few more once we get back. It is soupy tonight, speaking of humidity. I could do without the mosquitos, too. Maybe a real vampire will come along and the mosquitos will leave like in the movies.”
“Is that a thing?” Jackson waved his dark flashlight in the air. “Maybe he’ll exude cold off his undead flesh and we’ll cool off from ninety degrees and a hundred and five percent humidity at ten o’clock at night.”
“Ten o’clock at night.” Cull wagged a finger on the hand not holding the camera. “The joke about hunting vampires.”
“Good. Can’t wait to see how this ends up being about my mother.”
Cull grunted a laugh and then said, “In all the vampire movies, the angry villagers hang around deciding what to do about the vampire in the castle until it’s dark. Then, they get torches and pitchforks ready to take him on after he wakes up. If you’re not dealing with glittery heartthrob vampires, why not hunt them during the day? Stupid to go at night.” Cull panned the scene with the lens of his camera without taking a shot. “But here we are. Two stupid villagers.”
“Yeah, we got lost. That’s why we’re here at night.”
Cull clicked his tongue. “Well, that and night pictures are more creepy.”
“We can doctor pictures to make day look like night and to make the shots look creepier,” Jackson said. “Better than real life.”
“Now there’s the hidden truth behind every issue of Hidden Truth since the heydays of the roaring 80’s,” Cull said. “No imagination.”
“Shit. In the eighties, I was still in high school and you were still trying to be a legit nature photographer, right? We missed the heydays they’re always talking about.”
“Yeah, all our greatest failures were still in front of us.”
“Did you hear the one about the two guys who decided to split the cost on a high class–”
A piece of sheet metal blew out from the corner of a trailer near the column of a suspended air conditioner unit. Before the piece hit the ground, the shape soared out in the air over the trail in front of them.
Cull brought up the camera and fired off blast after blast following the motion without taking time to aim. The deer’s hooves connected with the ground and crossed in two bounds. Cull followed it until it vanished around another corner.
“Jesus, good jump scare,” Jackson said, “but it’ll still look like pictures of a deer. You’re back to your dream of nature photography. Congratulations, Cull.”
“Thanks, asshole. One of the pics will probably be blurry enough to ‘Bigfoot’ ourselves a nice vampire.”
A porch light flipped on and the door to a trailer a couple lots ahead on the right opened. The hinges crackled and the chain clapped against the top of the door. A heavy woman with unruly, long grey hair in a pink bathrobe emerged at the top of her wooden steps.
“Are you two here about the vampire attacks?”
“If she ends draining us dry with her fangs, this will be exactly how I want my career to end,” Cull whispered next to Jackson. He raised his voice to say, “Uh, yes, ma’am. We’re with Hidden Truth Magazine.”
“Really? I used to read that back in the eighties. Thought you guys went under.”
Jackson whispered, “Her eighties or the 1980’s?”
“They don’t carry you at the Stop-N-Shop anymore. You should call them and tell them you’re still around. Especially if you run this vampire story. People around here would read that.”
“We’ll do that. That’s good advice. Thank you.” Cull took a step toward her. “Would you mind giving us the story here?”
“Is there money in it?”
Cull cut his eyes at Jackson and then rolled them. “Yes, always. As soon as the story runs, they always cut the big checks for all our contributors.”
“I only have warm beer on account of my fridge being out again, but you can come on in.”
As they walked toward her porch where she held the door, Jackson bowed his head and said, “Is there a joke about two tabloid reporters being invited in by the only old woman in an abandoned trailer park?”
“Yeah, we’re the joke, as usual. Last one out alive writes the touching memorial for the other.”
Cull sniffed. “That no one will get to read at the Biloxi Stop-N-Shop.”
They stepped into the darkness of the trailer and she closed the door behind them, leaving only a harsh shaft from the porch through the square of glass on the door. The room smelled of dirty laundry and wet mold.
She cracked on the switch and the fluorescents flickered up with a struggle.
The sofa, crushed beer cans on the floor, broad stains which flattened and hardened the carpet, the open refrigerator with black spots radiating out from the plastic seals, and of course, the picture of a forlorn Jesus staring up into a brown and tan sky. This disaster was decorated like a hundred other trailers they had been in before and wasn’t out of place with the other husks of homes which made up the abandoned park. Abandoned except for her, of course.
Jackson sidestepped away from the door and the woman. “Why are you still here?”
“You mean with the vampires coming around?” she asked. The top of her robe parted on wrinkles, liver spots, and deep blue veins.
Jackson couldn’t make himself look away. “Sure.”
“My home is my home. It isn’t much, but it’s mine. Can’t give it up because monsters want to take it. Besides, I think they’ve mostly moved on to feed other places.”
Cull took a picture of the living room sprawl and then sat on the sofa. Dust billowed and sliced through the air and pale light. “You must be quite brave to stand your ground like this. You opened the door and stepped right out when you heard us. We could have been more vampires, you know.”
She shrugged and more sagging boob came free. “We’re always standing up to something, ain’t we? If it isn’t the vampires, it’s the government.”
“You mind if I get a shot of you for the story?” Cull lifted the camera off his knee by its baseball bat handle.
She patted the front of her robe and looked down without closing the breach in the halves of the pink cloth. “I’m not really presentable.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cull said. “This is a story of a survivor standing her ground against the monsters. You look like you’ve won a hard fought victory.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” Jackson looked from her blue veins to Cull. “Your story and your image will help others face these monsters. Vampires don’t stop. They’ll just hit another innocent trailer park and then another. Probably all along the Gulf.”
Cull pointed at Jackson. “That’s right. Then, who knows? The rest of the Bible Belt? People have to know and they have to see someone like them who stood up and won. You’d be saving people probably. A real hero.”
“Who can be presentable after fighting off the undead like this?” Jackson patted her shoulder.
“Well, I guess.”
Cull lifted the camera and she placed her hands on her hips. One hairy thigh showed as the robe parted farther in her stance. The flash strobed as Cull knocked off a set of pictures.
“We’ll need you to sign a release before we go so we can run these great photos of you,” Jackson said. He glanced at forlorn Jesus averting his eyes to the dusty sky. It seemed to Jackson the perfect answer to What Would Jesus Do in a situation like this.
“Of course.” She spoke through clenched teeth as she held her crooked smile for Cull.
Cull lowered the camera. “Those were great.”
“Tell us what happened here,” Jackson said.
He sat on the couch next to Cull as she began. “They came down out of the sky. They went after the younger ones first. The children and the pretty girls in their cutoffs so high up their asses that the pockets showed out from the bottom and the bikini tops instead of shirts.”
“You’re still here,” Cull said. “They missed at least one of the pretty girls.”
“Stop.” Her belt slipped the knot and Jackson saw she had a least one C-section below the fold of her belly. She hadn’t shaved her legs, but it looked like she took the time to shave elsewhere. “Some of the men tried to fight them the first few nights, but they didn’t do well. The police didn’t believe us and the families that were left tried to run for it. Some of them made it, but not all.”
“What did they look like?” Cull adjusted the angle of his flash.
“Hairy. Most had beards. Big and burly. Couple of them wore camo and hunter orange. Baseball caps too. Mostly Braves caps. They had fangs, too, of course. I’m thinking they may have been mostly locals what got turned and formed their own coven here, you know? Real good ole boys turned vampire, is what I’m saying.”
“What are police saying about the disappearances then?” Jackson asked.
Cull snapped a few more pictures of her open robe. She clutched it closed in the middle, but didn’t cover the parts she might have meant to. Her nipples were two different shades of brown. “They don’t believe it. Or they’re covering it up to avoid the bad press.”
“Good thing we’re here to tell your story,” Jackson said.
“And the check.” Cull snapped another picture. “Don’t forget the big check when the story runs.”
“Right. That too.” Jackson scratched his nose. When he placed his hand on the arm of the sofa, it felt greasy, so he pulled it back to his knee. “Maybe the police are in on it, you know? Like working with the vampires or covering for them for some reason.”
“I hadn’t considered that.” She lost her grip on her robe. “How big of a check are we talking about? I have a lot of repairs around here on account of the vampire attacks.”
“Right. Well, that depends.”
She stared at Cull with her hands on her hips. “Depends on how good my story is?”
“And how explicit the pictures are that we come back with.” Cull waved at her and then the door to the trailer. “The damage. The evidence of the attacks. The mystery. And the witnesses. It’s a modern audience, looking for edgy material.”
“And you guys are losing readership what with the Internet and the Stop-N-Shops dropping you, right?”
Cull cleared his throat. “That’s right. Explicit or gory are our bread and butter. If it bleeds, it leads. If it horrifies, the money flies. If we see the stuff, the check is enough. That might as well be the letterhead at The Hidden Truth.”
“You guys still pay for the nudie bits in between the stories then?” She opened her robe. “Started that in the nineties when people stopped reading so much. I remember that. Maybe that’s why the Stop-N-Shop didn’t carry you anymore.”
“It works for the online version of the issues.” Cull lifted the camera and she held her hips without protest.
“Is standing here good?”
Cull took his pictures in deliberate flashes with pauses between.
“Do you want me to keep telling about the vampires then?”
“Of course.” The back of the camera muffled Cull’s voice. “That’s why we’re here.”
“One of them got this twenty-year-old with fake boobs down on the ground and started tearing at her clothes. Others dropped on her and started draining her from every side and every tender spot you can image. There were others still around. Humans, I mean. They just watched it happen. They watched them do that to her. She fought and screamed at first, but then, I think she was starting to like it.” Her fingers went to her nipples down near her deep navel and she stared through the wall above their heads.
“That’s great,” Cull said. “Keep going. Can you turn for me while you talk, Dear? Yeah, that’s good.”
Jackson scraped his tongue along his teeth and the roof of his mouth, but couldn’t seem to clear a greasy film which reminded him of the arm of the couch. He shook his head and stared down at the mini mag still in his hands and never turned on.
“You guys want one of those beers? They’re warm on account of my fridge breaking though. How soon did you say that check would come?”
“Soon. Soon. Do you want a beer, Jackson?”
“I’ll pass for now. Don’t want to break up this great story.” He saw her toes and hairy shins over the flashlight as she finished her turn for Cull’s camera. One of her toenails was black and ready to fall off. Another was polished purple with red glitter, but it was the only one adorned at all. “Probably frontpage stuff, don’t you think, Cull?”
“You know, a story like this? I bet it will be. That’s a big payout.”
“Okay, well, she was on the ground then … naked … and all of them was on her, like I said …”
“Oh.” Jackson leaned forward by Cull’s ear as the lady continued her story. “Don’t forget to get her name before we go.”
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