Archive for » September, 2009 «
Here’s some half-assed fanfiction at the request of my Canadian friend. It’s a The Lost Boys and Twilight crossover. Guess what happens. Be prepared. It’s very “rocks fall, everyone dies.” I wrote it in haste. That wasn’t supposed to be the original ending but I guess even my brain didn’t want to waste valuable energy on the glitter pixies.
The Frog brothers did not team up with vampires. Ever. The Awesome Monster Bashers, harbingers of truth, justice and the American way, slayed those neck-sucking bastards of Satan. The undead were guts at the end of their stakes. Ashes at the end of their matches. Coat racks at the end of their antlers.
Except now.
Now the Frogs brothers needed all the help they could get. Sure, they were vampire hunters but even they had standards. As if they would deign to off one such as a glitterpire. Those that don’t even kill humans. Those without fangs. Those who can actually go in the sunlight. Those who think they’re mosters . . . for glittering. These were not vampires. They were rogue pixies that were giving the beasts the Frogs hunted a bad name.
Really. What would it say about the Frog brothers, expert vampire slayers, if all they slayed were shimmering rocks? There’s no honor in that. Those abominations have fucked with the status quo and they must be eradicated so the Frogs could get back to real vampire slaying. It was that or hang up their stakes for good.
So here they all were – in the middle of the salt flats. Totally open terrain. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run. Just face to face in the war against posers.
All of the suck-faces were there – Mullet, Twisted Sister, The Little One and Silent Bob. The chick was there. Not sure what good she would do. Maybe her glitter scarves would distract the freaks and she could fashion a noose or something. Even Sam’s brother was there, Michael? He was holding a mace and a hacksaw. Good for him.
Sam? The Frog brothers always knew he wouldn’t be able to hack it in the heat. Him and the shrimp decided to skip out. Pussies.
It was twilight. The glittering things didn’t have night vision and the fang gang would burst into flames in he daylight. So they all had to settle into a compromise.
The salt underfoot glittered like the rogue pixies’s skin. Edgar wanted to puke. Too bad the perfect weapon was utterly useless and mocking them where they stood. The pixies had already proven themselves impervious to pretty much everything. Alan’s holy water balloon only made the blonde chick freak about her hair and two of the goons had already nabbed two of the Frogs’s squirt guns and were shooting each other with them around . . . the parents? Whatever they were. It all looked like the hillbilly Brady bunch to the Frogs.
“We gonna do this shit or what?”
Edgar turned his head just as Mullet flicked his cigarette filter onto the salt. It bounced a couple of times before coming to a standstill and spitting up a small wisp of choke smoke. Gross.
The vampheads kept their composure as the pixies got serious, pocketed the toys and took their, um, fighting stances. When they hissed, the Frogs took a step backwards, fearful of tainted glitter spit. From somewhere in the leather-clad group, a snort made its way to the Frogs’s ears. In all honesty, Edgar thought it came from Star. Him and Alan had to admit, they’ve seen more threatening faces from a six-year-old than the “monsters” in front of them.
Edgar nestled the arrow in his bow and prepared for the showdown. The pixies said their skin was like diamonds. As if those were indestructible.
Just as Edgar was about to put the arrow to his shoulder, Alan nudged him in the ribs. At first he ignored it but when the tap came again, he creaked his head over to face his brother and scowled. He exhaled a mighty sniff but kept his mouth closed.
Alan’s face was blank but his eyes quickly bounced up before looking back down at Edgar. Edgar cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him but when Alan did it again, Edgar couldn’t help but look.
There in the purple sky was a black dot the size of a bowling ball. And getting bigger. In a blink it was bigger than both the Frogs combined and before they could blink again, the Earth rumbled under their feet and a small explosion filled their ears.
Poofs of salt filtered up and blocked out what remained of the fading light. Who knew vampires could hack like the skinbags they ate.
Edgar waved at the salt smog in front of his face which did nothing to ward off the white cloud any faster. He looked over at their rickshaw band of pulseless fighters and little white piles settled all over their black get-ups. It looked like they didn’t care, though, as they were too focused on the sight in front of them. Their jaws were dropped and they had to be sucking in nothing but salt.
Damn their vampire eyes. Edgar and Alan had to wait for the cloud to clear. But when it did, their jaws, too, joined in the dropping.
In front of them, mere yards from where they all stood, was a giant wrecking ball being hugged by a small crater. All around the crater were twitchy hands and feet, remnants of dead wombat hair from the pixie with the creepy stare. But other than those random limbs, there was no movement from underneath to lift the massive ball up.
“What the hell now?”
Edgar didn’t know who said it but his eyes scanned the ever-darkening sky until they landed on another dropping something. It was far from the round dot of the wrecking ball but it was close to person-shaped.
In what light remained of the setting sun, a guy, person, whatever, parachuted down, his metallic feet touching lightly onto the salt with the nylon billowing behind him. He unlatched the chute and started walking over to them, the whole of his body hidden under a metallic-looking suit and tinted hood.
He waved one hand at the ball and reached over his shoulder with the other. As he walked closer, the Frogs noticed a tank on the guy’s back and what he held in his hands looked like a flame thrower.
The nightstalkers, being mind readers and all, knew exactly what Iron Man wanted and were at the ball and rocking it out of the crater. The diamond bodies underneath crunched and cracked as the real blood suckers heaved the ball onto the flats and let it roll off a little ways.
The pixies weren’t dead. They groaned and moaned and blood was pooling at the bottom of the little hole, turning the salt maroon.
Metal Man waved them back, reached to the side of the giant nozzle and twisted. The heat burned the Frogs’s faces and they both turned their backs to the flames. Edgar felt around his face to make sure his eyebrows were still there. He blinked rapidly, the salt at his feet slowly coming back into focus in the yellow glow behind him.
When the roar of the flame thrower finally died out and the heat at the Frogs’s back cooled, the crackling and snapping of a fire filled the air. The Frog brothers turned around to see the wrecking ball crater overflowing with a bonfire and the ball itself looking on from behind it.
The metal guy lifed up an arm and removed his hood. Sam’s head was underneath it. Edgar might have to rethink the pussy thought. The guy was airborne now, after all. Sam finger-combed his hair and looked at the Frogs with that gaped-mouth smile they both wanted to throw things into.
“Who says diamonds are indestructible?”
Another loud noise filled the air and the group looked up to see a C-130 cargo plane soar low over their heads, land on the flats and circle back around to face them. From a few hundred yeards off, they could see a little speck deplane from the open cargo hatch at the rear and come running at them.
As the speck got closer, it became clear it was the squirt and it dawned in Edagr’s head that he was the one that released the wrecking ball. Good aim.
The kid came running up to them with a bag of marshmallows in one hand and skewers in the other.
The Frogs and Sam waved the offer away. No way were they going to eat marshmallows roasted over open pixies. They watched at the real vampires impaled the marshmallows and as they were roasting, Mullet looked over to them and twisted up the corner of his mouth in a demented smile.
“Watch your asses, boys. Even though we tagged team these pussies doesn’t mean we like you.”
Edgar kept his face flat but in his mind he was saying, shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.
He knew they shouldn’t have bummed rides from the vamps on the way there. Maybe they should start walking.
The last rays of the sun sank below the horizon and the Frog brothers shivered.
I’ve been thinking about this the last few days, what with Banned Books Week coming up and all and how adamant I am for people staying the fuck out of library business and letting them do their jobs. Librarians aren’t parents. They’re not babysitters and they’re not nannies. It’s not their job to shield children from the potential evils in the world. Those are judgment calls best left for those children’s parents. And yet there are more parents than what’s comfortable thinking that not only should they themselves be making these decisions, but so should the libraries so they could be the beacons of safety they want them to be and their children can be theoretically safe everywhere.
While I could go on another rant about parents parenting only their children and so on, that’s not the point of this post. The point is is my abject dislike for these people in and of itself intolerant? Should I be more tolerant of their intolerance or does my intolerance at their intolerance of the First Amendment rights of others negate the intolerance definition? Is it ok for me to be intolerant of them because what I’m intolerant of is their very intolerance of anything different from themselves, thus incubating intolerance within their own community?
Basically, is my intolerance justified or hypocritical?
Did I make sense here?
Let’s see how long this lasts. I figured it was a good way to make sure I stay writing at least something even when I don’t feel like it. So every Wednesday I’ll try and post a piece of my writing, whatever it happens to be from. It’ll be really rough and pretty much just spell-checked so please be gentle.
For my first piece this is actually from a dream I had a little while ago that I’m developing into a book (or few). Thankfully my vampire dreams are devoid of glitter. But I can’t tell you how good it felt to actually write out a little scene.
“It’s all real. Every last piece of celluloid, every word in every book. Except Twilight. That was just cat shit. I could hear them laughing when that came out. I saw one guy that wore nothing but glitter and paste to the Halloween Parade. Their costuming.”
Sarah laced up her knee-high goth stompers and I tried to inconspicuously inch further away from her on the bed. She was always a little quirky but now she’d crossed the line to bat shit crazy. She even had a wooden stake harnessed to her fish-netted leg. And I was pretty sure something sharp was going in that thin sheath on her arm.
“Buffy was a prototype, right? Didn’t work, though. It wasn’t enough to fuse a piece of a vampire to a Chosen One. Obviously. Generation after generation of BuffyFail proved that.”
My twitchy eye asked the question for me. Sarah just looked at me like I had six heads and should know this information already.
“That mole, you know? Vampire piece. Usually a piece of their heart. It was always thought to be the most potent.”
She kicked the waste paper bin over to me. My “let’s retch” face might have had something to do with that.
Okay, I understand drama students are usually, well, dramatic. Sarah was off the wall sometimes but this was hanging out the window. By dental floss.
“And, um, I’m supposed to believe this?” I asked as I choked back a big ball of phlegm.
Her eyes bore into me like a parent giving a drug lecture. A thin, pale finger pushed up her thick, black-rimmed glasses at the center and the light caught the lenses, making her eyes flash even crazier.
“I’m your best friend,” she said, which was true. I refused to room with anyone else at school. “And I’m only telling you this so you can protect yourself. I don’t wanna wake up one morning to find out you’ve become mud scum for a leech.”
She put her hand on my wrist, like a mom, but I expected her to bust out laughing. No deal. She just went back to lacing up her stompers.
What should I do? Should I humor her? Should I go along with it until I could actually point out that, ‘hey, no such thing as vampires?’ But what if—no. No way. It was fiction. Totally, purely fiction. Right.
I heard jingling and I looked up. I didn’t even feel her get off the bed but now she was rummaging around a drawer, blocking out most of the light from the one lamp that was on. We both liked to keep the room dark. Made it feel less like a dorm room that way, all cozy. Now she was just shifting the light around as she moved, casting irregular shadows all over the walls.
From where I sat the lace and the laces of her purple top matched her shorts and goth get-up from the waist down. That’s her “killer” outfit?
Her body turned and something silver whipped around with her, jingling together to break the silence. The light was to her back and it reflected all the fly-aways sprouting up from her mass of black, curly hair. It was pulled back tight, this time with orange streaking down her head. Last month they were blue.
She walked towards me with her hand held out and two pieces of what looked like tin clinked together.
“Here.”
I just stared at them and then back up at her. Her eyes and the jerk of her hand told me to take it. Dog tags. The metal was cold against my fingers as I flipped them over.
In that Army block lettering was my full name – Janet Maria Coletani – she couldn’t use JJ like normal people? Underneath that was Vampire Hunter. Great. Now I was part of the White Jacket Warriors against my will. And underneath that – Squib.
I scrunched my face and looked up at Sarah. “What’s a squib?”
She put her hands on her hips and shifted her weight to one leg. “A noob. Bottom of the totem pole. You’ve gotta earn your way up.”
“What’re you?”
A smile flicked at the corner of her mouth but it was gone as soon as I blinked. “Handler. One of the youngest.”
“Oh. Okay.” Like I had any basis for comparison. “Why dog tags?”
Her weight shifted to her other leg and she crossed her arms over her chest. “We’re soldiers. Fighters for the freedom of the American people. Vampires. Are. Everywhere. And so must we be.”
“Uh huh.” If she heard my skepticism, she ignored it. “So if I die, you’ll kick this into my teeth and send my parents a flag?”
Sarah’s eyes narrowed and her jaw clenched tighter. “We don’t have a flag.”
Not so much that time.
She just kept staring at me, her eyes all squinty like a school marm in punishment mode. I started to tap the two tags together and my eyes bounced over the random stuff we had all over our room. What was she waiting for?
“So, uh, Buffy was a no-go, huh?”
Sarah shook her head. Why wasn’t she talking? All she needed was a wooden spoon and I’d be cowering.
“So if that, uh, implanting thing didn’t work, what d’you, uh, guys use now?”
Fine. I’ll play. Just stop staring at me and make me a vampire voodoo doll already!
Her arms swung down to her sides and her posture slackened just the slightest. And her jaw unclenched. Finally. Any longer and she’d be spitting bone dust. But she still didn’t speak as she made a clunky turn and walked over to the mini fridge on her side of the room. I could hear plastic bumping against plastic. She was a bottled water freak. What she brought back, though, was so not water. It wasn’t even V8. Sarah just stretched her arm out to me with the bottle of maroon sludge in her hand. An offering.
“What is it?”
No matter how far I tilted my head, I couldn’t put my brain’s finger on what it was.
“What we use.”
She gave the bottle a little shake and the goo inside stuck to the walls of the bottle. Her cold fingers wrapped around my wrist, my arm jerked up and she shoved the bottle into my hand. My fingers had no choice but to wrap around or risk spilling the sludge. Even through the bottle I could feel how thick the stuff was. Like if I let it out, it would form a Jell-O genie and grant me a wish or something.
“So it’s, like, a Molotov cocktail against vampires?”
Metallic air whapped my face when she emo-sighed and turned to dive under her bed to rummage around for something else. With one hand I lifted the tags over my head and they clanged against my chest. With my now free hand I brought the sludge bottle closer to my face to examine the contents.
Sarah’s muffled voice came at me from under her bed. “You’re human. No way in hell you can go toe to toe with a vampire and keep your neck unless you were in a panzer. Since those things are a little bulky, we had to try other means.”
The bottle was like one of those stress things you see on people’s desks with colored water that tips back and forth while some little plastic dude surfed the little wave. I was mesmerized by the goo movement.
“Which are?”
“Vampire blood.”
The goo continued to slosh as the bottle came to an abrupt halt.
“Huh?”
“Vampire blood,” her tone full of duh. “We drink it. It’s the only way we can stand a chance again the undead.”
I wanted to let the bottle go. Get it the hell out of my hands. But it’d land on my sneakers with the potential of leakage. I liked my sneakers too much. Original Chuck Taylors, man. I didn’t want blood on them. So it just started to shake and little foamy bubbles rose to the top.
“Now I know what you’re thinking.” I so doubt that. “And the answer is no. We don’t turn into vampires. Not even half. That stuff comes right from HQ. Pure vampire benefits with no undead aftertaste. The squints removed the contaminants that would change us. It’s totally safe.”
I think it was the right time to start considering a new roommate. Or a single. How many poor little animals had to die to fill the bottle? And Sarah expected me to drink it? If I opened my mouth now, a speech bubble would pop out filled with hash marks and asterisks.
Wood scraped against wood as Sarah backed out from under her bed. I hoped she could feel my slack-jawed awe burning through her shirt. Nope. Way too into the chest she pulled out. Some designs blurred into each other on top of it but I wasn’t paying attention. I swear the blood bottle in my hand started to pulse. If I stared hard enough, the bottle actually puffed out a little. It was alive!
“JJ!”
Just my eyes zipped over to her as my nose remained a millispec away from the bottle. I could almost smell the iron.
“You need to take this. C’mere.”
My body lifted itself up from the bed without me even thinking it. The bottle dropped down to my side as I shuffled over to her. What now? A good luck head? Seriously. We didn’t need to go to Fang. We needed to head up to Bellevue ASAP.
Sarah was squat in front of the chest and she looked up at me when I’d finally ambled over next to her.
“Here.”
All I saw was a black handle. Sarah had a grip on the rest and her body was blocking the view. She let go as soon as I had my grip and I swear I heard my shoulder pop as the thing slammed back into the floor. What the hell?
When I looked down, I had a piece of Dark Ages combat equipment staring back at me. A mace, to be exact. And now a handful of its mean-looking points were wedged into our dorm room floor. That was so not coming out of my deposit.
“Uh, maybe we’ll start you on something a little lighter.’
As Sarah dove back into her chest of death, I looked from the bottle of supposed vampire’s blood in one hand to the heavy ass weaponry in the other before I looked down at her. She was totally into this. She totally believed everything she said. And she was going to nail vampires to the sun in fishnets and goth gear. The stake strapped to her thigh tapped against the chest and the sheath on her arm was still empty. No doubt its friend was buried under all the steel in front of her.
You know what? I could only think of one thing.
“Can I at least stay in my jeans?”
Who knew what she’d do to me if I tried to fight it. How she kept that level of crazy from me all those years was an unsolved mystery. I’ll just play her game. It’s probably some crazy RRG she’s really into. No need to get too freaked out.
Sarah stopped rummaging and looked up at me, her hands still wrist deep in self defense. Her eyes slid down to my sneakers and back up to my face.
“If you think you can kill in it, go for it.”
