NIGHTFEAST
Chris Tannhauser
You would not be wrong if you thought you saw Primrose and Pansy—world-famous conjoined twins, the celebrated “two-headed girl”—exiting the mass shooting event at The Vampire’s Kiss lounge in Manhattan with a back-slung combat shotgun and depleted bandoliers. Prim’s face was streaked with gore and a thousand-yard grimace, while Pansy sported a black head bag, cinched around her neck, for some reason. It’s true Prim yelled at a dumpy-looking guy with greasy hair and glasses, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” as she clambered up the side of a Cold War-era tracked APC and down the hatch, then tore off into the inky coils of a city-at-night illustration.
You did see these things, because while Pansy may have been a kindergarten teacher, Prim was a goddamn vampire hunter.
A couple things about the twins: Your mirror image bobs along with you everywhere you go on an ethereal tether—it’s ever-present, peeking like a conjured ghost from windows, car fenders, still pools of water. But imagine your mirror image embodied, imbued with voice, a permanent presence regardless of where you happen to glance. This was all they ever knew, and what they couldn’t quite explain. Make all the jokes you want about V-neck sweaters—they don’t care—they had two legs, two arms, two heads, but only one heart. The sister not a copy or an echo but a broader sense of self, a limelit stage and theater instead of being stuck in the one-bulb dressing room.
Now, the great thing about vampires is that you already know everything about them: how they drink jet fuel for kicks, how they fly with rainbows coming out of their butts, and how they give off a constant tuning-fork whine.
Of course, the vampires of fiction are debonair aristocrats possessed of the refinement of æons—the beautiful dead sheened in a glaze of taste, style, and world-weary insouciance... but in reality, they’re all misfits, either by the circumstances of their second birth or by the interminable caress of clock hands. After all, what’s fashionable in Hell is confusing in the dim embers of our world, and eating like a serial killer inevitably devolves into dressing like one.
As for vampire hunters, there were two kinds: wizards (who all smelled of cat piss and Hot Pockets), and techs. Prim was a stone-cold tech—instead of focusing her will into a singularity to warp reality or some shit, she put her trust in large amounts of kinetic energy delivered abruptly and liberally.
Prim had started out with a wizard sidekick, Marty, mainly because he had a car, a lime-green ‘75 Gremlin with a blown 304 and torn-out back seat. At that time, he was working on a special project—“The Martymobile”—a surplus Soviet BTR-50 Amphibious Armored Personnel Carrier, a growling, diesel-belching monstrosity painted with enough teenage skateboard iconography to strike fear into long-dead hearts.
As a wizard, Marty left a lot to be desired. He was known mostly for what he called his “magic murder rock”, which he swore had been ensorcelled at great peril to his immortal soul. He shouted impressive-sounding spell names as he swung it to crack heads and knock bloody teeth into the carpet. But in all the time Prim had worked with him, he never once made anything disappear, not even his virginity.
Prim felt bad, but what happened to Marty was his own goddamn fault. There were no numbered rules in the vampire hunting game—in fact, it was something of an in-group pastime to shout things like, “Rule number seventeen, no smoking in bed!” as you dropped a coffin lid on a startled vampire and a pinless grenade—but it turned out the last one, Rule Omega, was “Never let a vampire drink jet fuel.”
It was a standard raid, some Count Orlok wanna-be—Magnus Swankpot—loading his party jet with pretty little things for a picnic in international airspace—but they crashed the party early, caught him in his hangar, killed his crew and sent the girls packing. After the bright-lit, wide-open space was done echoing with gunfire and screams, they had him cuffed and tied to a heavy wooden chair, like a leftover prop from a Hammer film. The cops would be here tout de suite, and they needed to get this over with. Standard procedure meant digging a narrow hole, dumping the vampire in head first, dousing it with an accelerant, and letting Mother Earth absorb the threats and curses until it was done.
Here, they were going to have to Quảng Đức him, and hope he would pyre himself out before the restraints burned through. But Marty had another idea: Why not funnel him like they do in dirtbag crime movies? So Marty took his magic murder rock to Magnus’ protesting mouth, jammed a funnel down his throat, and poured military-grade jet fuel straight into his gullet. And that’s the moment the Good Old Days officially ended.
The jet fuel made Magnus go nuts with psychotic strength, snapping the cuffs and standing up out of the chair in a cloud of splinters and rope—then he farted a rainbow and careened off the high ceiling, which would have been hilarious except for the torn bodies he left in his wake. Prim and Pansy were the only ones who made it out alive that night, looking back over their shoulders once from the darkened tarmac to see Marty snatched sideways out of frame by a Lucky Charms commercial.
Word spread, and pretty soon all the vampires were mainlining jet fuel, leaping into the sky with an ejaculatory grunt, bodies flexed in an orgasmic posture, rainbows streaming from their gaping anuses. And the sound, the sound was like glitter, like dollar bills dusting glitter off a stripper’s tits.
††
The head-bagging started after Pansy got PTSD from all the vampire stuff: stepping into the splash zone of a breaching charge, watching terrified undead juggle a live grenade, then the things bullets do, and close-in knife work with snapping fangs and grave-breath in the face—if she was going to be along for the ride, she put her foot down, it was going to be with earplugs and a head bag, because no one wanted to see that shit. It wasn’t long after that she demanded the bag whenever Tingleboy came over.
Pansy didn’t date, but Prim had Tingleboy, something like a boyfriend, a tattooed carcinogen she indulged in whenever she won the Saturday night coin-flip to see who got the pussy. Tails meant giving it up to Tingleboy doggy style—‘cuz he knew how to wreck it just right—as Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” ground the air into a mindless paste; heads meant pampering it like a fancy pet, elaborately trimmed, powdered, gently fed from the palm of the hand on pink satin pillows with something whiny and tinkly plinking in the background, the slow-build orgasm jolting Prim awake.
But when she was with Tingleboy, the thing that got her there every single time was the forbidden thought that he was riding her as just one woman, her sister made tiny and far, nothing but a quiet whimper under a shivering pillow.
The same whimper she made, distantly, when Magnus got his hands on them.
Prim figured they were dead when it all caught up with them—the jokes, the violence, the violation from every quarter—but Magnus was glad for what her kind had given to his, and wanted to magnanimously reward her with he called “freedom”.
“If you turn us,” screamed Prim, “we will rise and destroy you! We would rather die than have your ‘freedom’!”
“Oh, child,” cooed Magnus, “I’m not turning you. I’m setting you free.”
The worst part, the very worst part, was that even as Pansy began to realize what was happening, as the hands closed around her pulsing throat, even as Prim felt the vicarious body-panic and the absolute soul-tearing horror of feeling her sister, who was her very self, tumble away down a shaft of dwindling panic, there was, somewhere deep in the dark, the tiniest spark of relief.
††
Prim quit the business and threw herself into Tingleboy’s briar patch—it was everything you can imagine, and many things you can’t—for the only place their worlds overlapped was in their pants. She was his better in every way and he was no longer a strong enough opiate. The end came when she woke one night to Tingleboy nudging Pansy’s slack mouth with the head of his cock.
After the blackout, Prim knew Tingleboy was gone, but what she didn’t know was that no one would ever really find his body, that the Hefty bag of biosludge would take the coroner a good month to even ID as human—all that, just a black hole, like that one time she woke up with bangs.
But this time, this time she woke with an unslaked murder-thirst.
††
It was in the deep blue predawn anti-gloaming that Prim breached Magnus’ art deco sanctum with the Martymobile, treads making a hash of the precise granite stairs and getting air through the church-glass doors—as it ronched down into the parquetry she cranked the steering levers in opposite directions and floored it again, doing mad donuts and throwing up a polished walnut rooster tail in every direction. The 14-tonne wad of steel, fire, and hate slewed through the interior walls, knocking all the fancy finery to splinters and peeling tapestries and curtains off the walls and into the treads.
Prim locked the brakes and skidded sideways through the marble edifice of a flamboyantly gargoyled fireplace built somewhere far away at great expense, then dismantled, shipped, and remanteled here at great expense, and now demolished into raining chunks for the cost of a gallon of diesel. She gave the vampires a six-count to gather their wits, hiss dramatically, and burst down the stairs in a furball of anthill rage... On “six” she popped smoke, only she had swapped out the benign signal grenades for white phosphorus rounds, blanketing the room in searing phosphorus pentoxide and peppering the howling undead with nuggets of pure hellfire. She gave another six-count to allow the stragglers to make it to the party, then she triggered the reactive armor, blasting the flesh from their bones.
She popped the hatch and stood, her face obscured by a gas mask, Pansy’s head next to hers, encased in an honest-to-God saint’s reliquary from the Vatican, all gilt and bullet-proof glass, the head of John the Baptist having been shaken out of the getaway car’s window like a half-finished Happy Meal. The box was lit from within, illuminating Pansy’s half-lidded eyes over cheeks flush with murder blood. Prim took the pintle-mounted 12.7 mm DShk heavy machine gun in both fists and ran an entire belt out into the second floor from underneath.
She grapnel gunned up to the third floor, rising out of the white smoke on a thrumming cable and onto her feet in full battle rattle—grenades, pistols, shotgun, rifle, and a whisper-thin ceramic shard that was a knife the same way people are apes. Her carbon-fiber Make-A-Wish exoskeleton whined to life.
This was the party floor. The first two were people floors, meant for guests and plausible deniability, outfitted to look like movie sets. But up here, on the third floor, this is where the undead cut loose, raving with humans, bringing life to the party as it were, but they did forget to feed and water the ones they didn’t drain, as dead as forgotten pets, flopped over one another like Burning Man kaleidoscoped with the Holocaust.
Prim unslung her combat shotgun and reached back to key the emitter in her purple Dora the Explorer backpack—a blazing hologram of Christ being whipped rose above her twin heads, a nod to the idea that vampires should cower before such imagery, though it seemed to cause more confusion than discomfort.
But sometimes a moment of confusion is all you need. They converged on Prim from all directions, from every stinking hole, and every time a vampire looked up and winced, she blew a mess through their chest or knocked their head off with a shotgun blast. Here, she witnessed the full flower of vampire culture in all its endless forms: the hooker whose coffin was probably a dumpster; the pregnant one whose undead fetus will never be born, forcing her to eat for two for all eternity; the dude in the distressed denim jacket, moon boots, and no pants, with a gaping hamburger badger den where his genitals should be; too-many-hospital-gowns guy; trash-bag-diaper lady; and so on, ad nauseam, etc.
When the shotgun was empty, she dropped it—eschewing the luxury of a reload—and activated the twin 20 mm autocannons on the rooftop next door. Details evaporated into a sideways storm of splinters, chunks, and screams—the manufacturer suggested that you choose something weirdly specific as an IFF indicator, like a purple Dora the Explorer backpack, say—so all the chaos wedged around Prim like sleet off a sideways umbrella.
After the cannons went silent Prim peeled the gas mask—her face flush and sweaty, dark hair sticking to her cheeks—and worked her way up to the fourth floor along the edge of a tattered staircase, hugging the pock-marked wall with her back. She stalked through the mansion, the stragglers actively avoiding her now, allowing her to stoke and build the rage she had nearly spent below.
She knew she was getting close when she ran into the surgical centaur with a gimp mask and ball gag.
“Well,” she actually said aloud, “that’s different.”
The thing snorted, its great Frankenstein-stitched belly flexing, as it hefted the diagonal-cut axle from a car some tabloid mom drove into a canal to drown her children.
Prim set her exoskeleton to BREAK SHIT and charged even as the beast surged into a gallop and raised the axle over its black-leather-laced head—Prim slid beneath it, tucking herself between the obliterating hooves, coming out the other side behind a wave of gore and looping intestines, crimson-licked knife in her fist. The centaur stamped, gagged on the ball in its mouth, and tried to turn in the tangling morass of its own innards before collapsing and literally coming apart at the seams.
And that was it. Magnus had to be around here somewhere—the oldest vampires, the richest, they always had something shockingly expensive and outrageously stupid as their miniboss, it’s like they couldn’t help themselves. And then they’d be stunned when it didn’t work. The expense! The effort! The sheer brilliance of it! Of course it had to be right—I thought of it myself! But then, true intellect and self-awareness were not exactly vampire traits.
††
Prim found Magnus lounging sideways on a shitty TV-show throne, something someone had told him was cool once, so he drove the owner of the Pasadena storage joint where it was kept into bankruptcy and bought the business at a fire-sale price so his agents could pop the padlock, claim the janky nerd seat, and torch the place for the insurance money.
Magnus was wearing one of Elvis’ Vegas-era bejazzled jumpsuits, a roomy white leather job with a spattering of faux jewels and terrycloth internals that had never been laundered because white leather—it was soaked with the very essence of The King, a potent, sloshing bath of testosterone, uppers, downers, alcohol, and hurled panties.
Marty stood before him in the vast and filthy throne room, monochrome in shadow and blacked windows. His insides dripped from his groin in glistening gray wattles as he read aloud from a crumpled, dirty notebook with faux-Shakespearean gravitas:
“...tarot girls turn cards and say, ‘Things from beyond the stars lick the sweat off your dreams,’ but so it is at every scale, whale-fall in the deep when cetacean corpses drip into that far seabed that comes suddenly alive with chitinous, multi-jointed life, boiling like your mattress when you lay yourself down to sleep only to awaken a nightfeast of mites in their tens of millions, a carnival at the knees of fleas, those lumbering titans—”
Prim’s hand reflexively reached for a grenade.
“Stop,” said Magnus, “both of you.”
Marty turned and didn’t look the least bit surprised.
Prim addressed him. “You know what we promised we’d do if the other turned.”
Marty spread his arms. “I didn’t turn—this is becoming! I’m more me than I’ve ever been, Prim!”
“You were supposed to be better than this,” Prim said, “you were supposed to transcend mere flesh, remember?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Marty took a step forward, entrail skirt waggling. “I have passed through the night and into that brighter day! The fog is gone! Everything is energy! It’s glorious!”
Magnus sat up and leaned forward, clutching the edge of his seat and tapping his feet. “I knew you’d be back,” he enthused, “I just knew it! And you’ve exceeded all my expectations. I haven’t been this entertained in—” he looked down and furrowed his brow. “Well, in a very long time. But it doesn’t have to end here. Together, we can wipe away the past, build something new and exciting! Something to seize the Earth and make the gods tremble!” His eyes blazed blue in the darkness.
Prim stared.
Marty cleared his throat. “Take the Master’s offer—you’ll live forever.”
“What about Pansy?” Prim said too quickly.
Marty clucked his tongue. “She’s already flown the coop. Took the eggs with her. You wouldn’t like what happens when you… reanimate the dead. We can get her something even cooler than that terrarium you have her in, something—something befitting your love for her?” He trailed off and shrugged. “Or we could just cinch a cord around it till it falls off.”
Prim startled at the word love—a dead thing, a stone in her gut... Pansy was gone. Her light and life, the best part of her, erased from the world like a thumb across a tear. What more could she hope for?
Magnus sat back and steepled his fingers at her hesitation. Marty chuckled softly.
And yet—
Beneath that stone, that magnetic rock of dead love, the atomic spark of life.
This wasn’t a hand reaching down to raise her up, but the desperate grasp of the fallen to drag her down into a long, irretrievable descent—the only thing they ever really had to offer.
Prim responded to that grasping hand in kind, stripping the grenade of its pin and tossing it at Marty in a single motion, a motion that continued to her slung M4 carbine.
Marty caught the grenade reflexively, bobbled it, turned and tripped in the puddle of himself.
Magnus snarled and leaped as the grenade WHAPPED Marty’s corpus into a shower—but the throne Magnus sat upon was not actually iron—it was fiberglass—and his Elvin spangles caught in the elaborate back of it, the whole thing cracking in half instead of throwing him skyward.
Prim shouldered the blunt M4 and flicked the selector from UH OH to OH NO and let an entire magazine of 5.56 NATO fly—as a contortional blur, Magnus dodged most of it, but as rounds began to find a home in his flesh, he became less frenzied, more in focus, finally slouching back into his ruptured throne.
With practiced economy Prim dropped the spent mag and slotted a fresh one, snapped the charging handle back, and filled him like a beehive at sunset.
