Some Adventures Never Die
A Monsters and Mayhem Short Story
By E.A. Comiskey
This is a short story written within the Monsters and Mayhem books series. The latest release, Some Sailors Never Die, has just dropped! The full list of the Monsters and Mayhem series is linked at the end of this story. Enjoy!
Having helped to destroy an entire gang of vampires earlier in the day, Richard brimmed with self-satisfaction. He piled pillows against the headboard and gave them a few hearty smacks to fluff them. A faint odor of bleach rose into the air. He found the scent comforting. The crumbling roadside motel might not have much in the way of modern amenities, but at least the linens were clean.
He was careful of his left side — friggin’ vamp hit him with an umbrella so hard the handle broke clean off. Honestly, who fights with an umbrella? No matter. He managed to settle into his freshly fluffed nest. At his right hand, atop a particle-board nightstand with a peeling veneer, sat two Ibuprofens, a bottle of antacid, an ice-cold glass of prune juice, and a twelve-inch spicy Italian sub sandwich. At his left hand rested the remote control — not just any remote control, either. This bad boy was the size of his hand and had five buttons. Four of them changed the volume and channel. The fifth was a big power button at the top. It had been built in a simpler, more reasonable time.
He pressed the power button, which made a satisfying click. The television flickered to life and right there on the first channel, Andy Griffith appeared, walking side-by-side with little Ronnie Howard through their black and white world.
Richard hummed quietly as he unwrapped his sandwich. If he didn’t look too closely at the blue veins and brown age spots on his hands, if he ignored the persistent ache in his bad hip, if he avoided any reflection that would confront him with the reality of a white cloud of hair that refused to be tamed, then he could just about convince himself that it was 1965, and he was still a young man in his prime.
Crumbs rained down upon Richard’s chest when he bit into the sandwich. Flavor exploded across his tongue, and he groaned in pleasure.
It had been only a few short weeks since Stanley Kapcheck had pushed him out of the window of his room at the Everest Senior Living Facility. They’d been running away from the nestmates of a soul-sucking she-demon. The road that led from that night to this one had been as twisted as a politician’s morals.
Friggin’ Stan Kapcheck. The old bald dandy had a thing or two to learn about how to act his age, but he’d pulled Richard’s bacon out of the fire. More than that. He didn’t just save Richard’s life. He’d reminded Richard how to be alive. It had been a long, long time since Richard had last been filled with joie de vivre.
He mashed up a bit more of the sandwich between his ill-fitted dentures and laughed out loud as Barney Fife scratched his head in confusion, knocking his hat askew. The laughter sent a shockwave of pain through his ribs. He hissed and pressed a hand against the sore spot until the stabbing sensation subsided to a dull throb.
He wasn’t about to complain. They’d come to California to hunt vampires, and they’d succeeded. The vampires were dead. The rash of murders that had baffled police for the past six months came to an abrupt end, thanks to Richard. Or…well…thanks to Richard, Stanley, and Richard’s granddaughter Burke, but he’d played his part and done it very well for an old geezer, thank you very much. The expression of shock on that punk-vamp’s face when Richard pulled a wooden stake out of his knapsack played across the movie screen of his mind. Then, when oh-so-dapper Stanley lopped off the leader’s head with a machete, and Burke dropped down from the ceiling like Spider-Girl, right in the middle of the gang… He chuckled. Poor saps never saw it coming. It was almost enough to make a person feel sorry for them. Or, it would be, if they weren’t homicidal maniacs with insatiable appetites for human blood and all.
Richard finished off the first half of his sandwich, drank the entire glass of prune juice in one go, and belched.
Life was good.
Three sharp raps sounded against the door in quick succession.
Probably Stan, coming to tell him about his next crazy scheme. Could be Burke, checking on him as if he were a little kid needing to be tucked in. Either way, he had zero intention of getting up from his perfectly comfortable spot.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Come in.”
The door burst open with enough force to slam against the wall. “I was hoping you’d say that, old man.” The vampire must have stood six and a half feet tall. His shoulders nearly touched the door frame. His eyes glowed red as flames in the dim room.
Richard squeaked like a mouse and rolled off the bed to the left, landing hard on his injured ribs. Black olives and mayonnaise splattered across the wall. His sandwich! Murdered!
He slithered in a weird, hitching manner resembling an overweight, epileptic snake toward the luggage rack that held his duffle bag.
The vampire leaped from the doorway and landed on his feet on the bed. “You think you can come here and kill my offspring, hunter? You have no idea who I am!”
Changing direction, Richard did half a backward somersault and rolled into the bathroom. He kicked the door shut and locked it. Grasping the edge of the tub with one hand, he hoisted himself from the floor to the toilet.
“Do you think this door will save you?” The vampire dragged his nails down the length of the door.
The sound turned Richard’s guts to water. He’d managed to buy himself a few seconds of refuge, but what good did it do when his weapons were in his bag in the other room? He searched for any object that he might be able to use, but the tiny space yielded nothing more than a few raggedy towels and a tiny bar of soap. Unless he intended to scrub this monster to death, none of that would help, but the phone Burke had insisted he carry was laying on top of the toilet tank, plugged in and charging.
“It took me a hundred and twenty years to find just the right people and assimilate them into my world.” Something hit the door. Hard.
Richard snatched up the phone and poked at the tiny glass screen until Burke’s number appeared. He hit the green button with a trembling finger.
“My eldest son commanded them. The son of my body and my blood.” He hit the door again and the frame made a horrible cracking sound.
“What’s up?” Burke’s voice sounded scratchy. He’d woken her up.
“Vampire.” His voice cracked on the second syllable as if puberty had struck all over again.
“What? Where?” She was awake now.
“Here!” Richard hadn’t meant to scream, but sometimes a man couldn’t be held responsible for losing control just a little.
“Sit tight. It can’t come in if you don’t invite it.”
The monster smacked the door again and Richard dropped the phone. The glass screen shattered on the tile floor and the lit-up picture of Burke blinked out.
The door gave way and the vampire sneered down at him. “I’m gonna make you suffer for what you did, and then I’ll show your mangled corpse to your friends as a preview.” He crossed the tiny space, grabbed the front of Richard’s paisley pajama shirt, and tossed him against the wall of the motel room.
Pain erupted like Mount St. Helens — so much pain it was hard to say exactly which body part hurt. The world swam in front of his eyes. Everything turned blurry and dark except for those two horrible red spots.
Richard flailed for some object with which to defend himself. Any object. His hand smacked against rough canvass. The duffel!
“First, I’m going to break every bone, starting at the bottom and working my way up,” the vampire said.
Richard jammed his hand into the bag and latched onto a wooden stake leftover from the hunt.
The vampire lunged, and Richard thrust the weapon out in front of him.
The monster’s own momentum drove the wood through his heart. A strangled, gagging sound burbled out of his lips and he fell to the floor, his legs tangled in Richard’s.
Burke raced through the door, machete in hand. “Grandpa!”
Richard waved a shaky hand.
Her gaze darted from the dead monster to her grandfather and back again. Her thick black hair seemed to stand out from her scalp as though the shock had stood it on end.
Richard grinned. “I got him.” He managed to roll onto all fours and extricate himself from the gruesome mess on the floor. Burke offered a hand and he happily discovered that he was still capable of standing up, even if every part of his body except his hair and fingernails protested the action.
She shook her head. “How do you always manage to — ”
The monster flopped onto his back and growled. With a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt, he yanked the stake out of his chest. “Now I’m going to stick this in you and see how much you enjoy it.”
Richard and Burke backed away. Burke held her blade in front of her.
“Why ain’t you dead?” Richard asked.
The monster bared his pointy yellow teeth. “I’m an alpha, you old fool. You can’t kill me with a wooden stake, but I bet you can’t say the same.” He raised the bloody stake above his head, ready to strike.
A bullet whistled past Richard’s right ear. He lurched to the left, taking Burke with him. He slipped in a puddle of mayonnaise and they both went down onto the mattress.
Stanley stood in the open door wearing nothing but a pair of silk pajama pants. He held his pistol poised to shoot again.
The vampire with the hole in his forehead roared, “Really? Bullets? And now I have to walk around this way?”
“Oh, no,” Stanley said. “You won’t be walking around, at all. You came after the wrong hunters.”
“Two old geezers and a girl with pink fingernails? I’m not worried about it.” He advanced toward Stan and the insufferable old fart turned around and ran.
By the time Richard and Burke untangled their limbs and got their feet under them, the monster had already passed through the door into the night. A jet of flame appeared from beside the door. It hit the creature and lit him up like a Fourth of July firework.
He shrieked in exactly the way that Richard figured any reasonable creature on fire would shriek, but things took a bizarre turn when he exploded into a billion tiny sparks that rained down on the black pavement where they fizzled away to nothing.
Richard raced to the door with Burke. They found Stanley standing with his back against the outer wall beside the door, a flamethrower in hand. He gave a tiny shrug. “Guess we didn’t get them all yesterday.”
“Ya think?”
Around them, lights winked on. A door squeaked open toward the far end of the building. Stanley slipped inside his own room, taking the flamethrower with him. Burke followed. Richard huffed and went along. It seemed to be the right thing to do. He entered behind Burke, shut the door and flipped the bolt.
Burke pulled the heavy blackout drapes over the grimy window.
Richard threw his hands in the air. “What in the name of St. Pete’s backside was that thing? I thought vampires were supposed to die when you stake ’em. Why ain’t it with the nest? How’d it find us here?” He wiped a hand hard over his mouth to still his babbling.
Stanley took his time stowing his gear and washing his hands. He opened the top drawer of the warped dresser propped up in the corner and pulled out a crisp white tee-shirt which he tugged over his head. The fabric slipped over his flat stomach. It wasn’t natural. A man Stanley’s age should have to tug his undershirt over a proper gut. Finally, he sat on the corner of the bed.
Richard and Burke stood like a couple of store-front dummies while Stanley finished his hygiene.
“That was, as you know, a vampire. It seems he was this area’s alpha. The creator. Young vampires rarely have the self-restraint needed to reproduce. Alphas tend to be very old and extraordinarily powerful. There are very few ways to kill them, and they can do a good many things average monsters cannot. They even walk in the daylight and eat human food when they are so inclined. As to how he found us, who knows? He tracked a scent? Did some good old-fashioned detective work? Psychic powers?” Stanley shrugged as if to say he didn’t know and didn’t really see the point in trying to figure it out.
Richard scratched his head, felt something, pulled a chunk of green pepper out of his hair. “Maybe he wasn’t with that gang last night because he’s got more than one gang.”
Stanley grinned. “Maybe so.”
Burke returned his grin. “Good hunting in these parts.”
“Indeed,” Stanley agreed.
Richard looked between the two of them. “Y’all are more than a few pickles short of a barrel.”
“Oh, come on, Dick. You know you love hunting as much or more than anybody. Admit it, old boy.”
Richard scowled at him. “The only thing I’ll admit is that my sandwich got all smashed up and I’m still hungry.”
Burke rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to starve, Grandpa. Breakfast starts in less than seven hours. Just go to sleep and you’ll be eating again before you know it.”
Richard huffed. Dang kid don’t know nothing about nothing. He stormed out of Stan’s room and hobbled down the wide, cracked sidewalk toward his own door. Wait until breakfast, indeed. Maybe the whole sandwich wasn’t ruined. Some of it was smashed on the floor, and no doubt that portion was beyond redemption, but there could be a bit left on the bed. He’d already established that the linens were clean.
Something caught his eye.
Near his room, a car sat catawampus across the white line. He thought maybe that’s how someone would park if they were real mad and on a mission of destruction.
A quick survey of the parking lot proved that he was alone. The curious crowd drawn by the earlier ruckus had dispersed. In this neighborhood, people hesitated to call the cops. If the drama was out of sight, it was soon out of mind.
Hmmm. If he could live without food, but he had the ability to eat it when he wanted, he knew there were two things he’d always keep close at hand.
Richard drew up next to the vehicle and tugged on the handle. The door popped open and the dome light glowed. He sat on the driver’s seat and reached across to the glove box. There, just as he’d hoped, was a Snickers bar and a bag of potato chips. He cackled with victory and hustled back to his room to enjoy his treasures.
Back in bed, with the taste of chocolate and salt dancing on his taste buds, Richard watched I Dream of Jeannie — Andy Griffith having ended sometime during the commotion. He had to admit to himself that he really did love hunting. It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I admit it to Stan Kapcheck, though. He popped the last of the candy in his mouth and mashed it up. He licked the remnants of salt from his fingertips.
Now he would be set until breakfast, and after breakfast, they’d all climb into the big red Cadillac once more and set off chasing death and destruction.
That night, Richard slept the sleep of a deeply contented man.
