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spookyspaghettisundae · 3 years

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Bullets Only Buy Time

Loud rap music thumped from the radio inside the car. Some old stuff from the ‘90s, but it all blended together. The smell of weed smoke hung heavy in the thick clouds, billowing out of the cracks framing the vehicle’s windows. The dead of night made way to the deep blue twilight of dawn.

Still, that uneasy feeling weighed down his gut. Tension in his torso, like every muscle was so taut, steeling itself like tissue constantly only seconds away from cramping up. He did not quite feel sick to his stomach, but even his insides felt weird, tingly. D-Baser took a long drag from the blunt and passed it over to the younger man beside him, on the driver’s seat: Kid Lizard.

No matter how many times he had staged these takeovers, it never got easier. D-Baser had checked his guns more than once. Nothing ever took off the edge. Drive-bys were usually easier to keep some mental distance to.

Knowing you were gearing up to kill some people? Up close and personal? Always the tougher deal.

He checked his sub-machine guns again.

Lizard arched a brow and let his disdainful look sweep up and down the guns resting in D-Baser’s lap and hands.

“You keep checkin’ that shit like that, it’s gonna fall apart from wear 'fore we even walk in that sorry-ass joint,” he told D-Baser. “'Sides, we’re gonna need some special toys for this crazy mothafucka.”

D-Baser clicked his tongue, shook his head.

Lizard’s nostrils flared and smoke shot out of them like jets, like a dragon’s breath. He held the blunt back out to D-Baser.

“I got some tequila in the back if this ain’t enough to calm yo nerves,” Lizard told him.

D-Baser clicked his tongue and shook his head again. He rolled down his window, letting some of the heavy cloud of smoke escape. Cooler morning air poured inside, carrying the salty smell of the sea. Almost soothing. He had come to love that smell and had even missed it a bit.

“A'ight, suit yourself,” Lizard said in a high-pitched tone, smirking. He took another long drag from the blunt and placed it in the ashtray. “Might change yo mind later.”

D-Baser was doing his damnedest to zone out. He could not stand this sort of casual talk. Never liked the way some of the other muscle in their crew—especially younger ones like Lizard—did all their little rituals of chest-pounding and braggadocio to get themselves in the right mindset to walk into a place, guns blazing, and waste some sorry motherfuckers.

Unlike them, he fancied himself more Zen. Turning inward, almost like meditating. Not that he cared to learn anything so spiritual—out of respect towards ancient traditions—but just because it worked better for him. Accordingly, D-Baser’s focus blurred as he stared blankly ahead of himself.

“Shit, man, I need you on top of yo game tonight,” Lizard said. He slapped D-Baser on the chest with the back of his hand to tear him out of his trance, earning himself a glare of contempt from his homie. “I’m tellin’ ya, this one’s gonna be a weird one.”

He pointed at the five-story apartment building they had parked outside of, across the road. The silver rings on Lizard’s hands glinted in the dim light from the rising sun.

“Why the fuck are we waiting till it’s light out, anyway?” D-Baser asked him with a sneer. “The heat’s response is faster like this. What the fuck is the boss thinkin’?”

Lizard stopped pointing. His attempts at acting cool melted away and he had likely forgotten whatever he wanted to say. A lop-sided smirk stayed plastered to his face, revealing gold-plated front teeth that sparkled in the rays of morning sunlight.

The fiery ball rose across the horizon, blood-red and slicing through distant clouds.

“He didn’t tell ya nothin’, huh?” Lizard said. It did not sound like a question.

D-Baser averted his gaze and stared at the horizon. Seeing it always gave him a weird sense of nostalgia—marveling at that same vista of the morning sun as it bathed the silvery skyline of all the towering high-rises in all manner of beautiful colors, and the broken dreams it painted in his memories—mixed with the misery and death he had seen ever since and authored with his own two hands.

Those hands looked clean right now. Scrubbed them clean plenty of times before. Palms marked with wrinkles and lines, some scars from knife cuts and other scratches. How long had he been in the game already?

Another backhanded slap to his chest from Lizard brought him back. He glared at his homie again, and the tension started making way for anger. The red heat welling up in his belly rose and almost reached his hands, almost made them curl up to strike back as a little lesson.

But he appreciated it—the anger was good now. It balanced out the tension somehow.

Lizard still grinned at him like an asshole and opened the driver’s door, getting out.

“C'mon, lemme show you the toys. Yo peashooters only gonna help you so much today,” Lizard repeated.

He rounded the car to approach the trunk. The sigh that escaped D-Baser rattled out into a groan and he followed suit. The hip hop track thundering away inside their car resonated outside of it, and only know did he really consider that their targets in the block across the street might be aware that they were there.

Thick, heavy curtains masked the insides of the building. In the small cracks between them, only darkness lurked behind grimy windowpanes in desperate need of proper cleaning. That darkness stared back at D-Baser. Like something or someone in there watched.

Watched him.

He tore his gaze off the windows and the eerie absence of anybody behind them and looked at the contents of the open trunk. Lizard had already popped the lid and made a sweeping gesture with his hand, like some sort of goofy stage musician presenting his main act.

D-Baser had to look twice. He did not quite believe what he was seeing. He had expected an overkill of guns and ammo back here.

Not this.

Arrays of pointy silver rods, wooden stakes, diamond-encrusted and gilded crucifixes, mean-looking machetes, and small plastic vials with cheap stickers depicting the Holy Mother Mary.

“Yo, what the fuck is this?” he asked Lizard.

D-Baser picked up one of the sharp-tipped silver rods and weighed it, surprised by how heavy it was.

“Yo, put that shit down,” Lizard cautioned him, shoving his hand and the stake back down towards the trunk and looking around to see if anybody had seen it.

D-Baser glared at him and resisted, shaking the silver stake at him.

“What’s this Dracula shit? You fuckin’ kidding me here? Y'outta your fuckin’ mind?”

Lizard’s grin widened, so much so that it had to hurt. His gold-plated teeth drew D-Baser’s attention again, the engravings of the letters forming “LOVE” upon them on full display. D-Baser hated Lizard’s look so much. Such pretentious, flashy bullshit.

“Boss said we’d be needin’ this. That’s why we’re waiting for sun-up, yo. I’m baffled he didn’t tell you nothin’,” Lizard said, the pitch in his voice rising with each sentence.

D-Baser rolled his head, letting his neck emit some cracks. Lizard patiently awaited his response.

“I just got back from a gig outta town, haven’t met up with the boss since I got back. You seriously tellin’ me the boss thinks that Marv and his boys are fucking Draculas or somethin’?”

Lizard cackled, asking, “You been seein’ that pretty piece o’ meat on the other side o’ town? I get it.”

“Whatever—get off my ass. Answer my fuckin’ question, foolio.”

Lizard’s wide, shit-eating grin slowly crumpled, reverting to the former lop-sided smirk until it fully faded from his face. Something dark flashed in his eyes.

“Yeah, boss said this, all serious-like. Like, he slapped the shit outta OGC when he started ripping into him with jokes about his Nosferatu rant.”

Lizard was dead serious. D-Baser read it clear as day, mirroring how the warmth from the morning sun was spreading throughout his limbs as it hit upon his skin. You could not make this crap up.

Now the nausea set in.

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” D-Baser muttered.

No reply from Lizard. D-Baser took a deep breath and weighed the metal stake in his hand again.

“Well, fuck. Is this like the movies? Bats, stake through the heart, heads off, garlic, and all that shit?”

Lizard grabbed a stake, some holy water, a cross, and one of the machetes, sticking the objects into his belt and pockets.

“Not gonna lie, homie. I don’t think the boss really knows himself. He sent me and Noize around town to round all this shit up and he didn’t seem to really have a specific plan.”

D-Baser stared at Lizard. The anger dissipated. He was not mad at this kid anymore.

“Shit. Boss finally fried his brain with some of the hard shit? I saw some shit outta town, but this is the whackest shit I’ve heard or seen all my fuckin’ life,” D-Baser said.

He felt like he was standing beside himself, like he was listening to himself speak. All of this was surreal in so many ways. So unsettling that, rather than sinking in, he was slipping out of his own body for a spell. Whatever he was preaching to Lizard right now, it reached his own ears with delay, like it had to pierce through a fog in his mind first. Everything he said, he said it more for himself than anything else.

Kid Lizard was still just a kid, as far as D-Baser was concerned. Sending them in broad daylight, armed with vampire hunting “toys"—as Lizard had aptly put it—to make a hit on some lowlife punks trying to muscle in on their turf?

Whatever unhinged crap the boss was sending them to do, doing it like this was bound to get the kid killed.

Then D-Baser looked up. That darkness behind the windows of that apartment building, it still loomed. Looked back at him, like something there stared at him with burning malice. The heavy bass continued to thump from inside their car, the blunt smoke had all escaped from it, his vision of the block unobscured.

The darkness, it leered. Lusted.

Lizard stayed silent.

D-Baser wondered right then and there if he was not losing his own mind. The tension was fully back, and he stuck one of the silver stakes into his belt. Crammed two of those ridiculously cheap-looking plastic holy water vials into his pocket and snatched one of the machetes, cradling its grip in his palm for a moment.

"Gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” D-Baser repeated, muttering again. “Need to have some serious words with the boss after this shit.”

Lizard slammed the trunk shut and made his way back to the driver seat where he grabbed his guns.

“Sun’s up, my man,” Lizard remarked.

D-Baser returned to the car’s front as well but pushed past Lizard and grabbed the blunt from the ashtray, firing it up with his lighter again in one fluid motion, and taking a deep, long drag.

Blowing the smoke back out sounded like a hurricane to him, drowning out the thunder of his own heartbeat in his ears, the blood pumping furiously in it, carrying an appetizer of adrenaline to come. He felt it in his bones. The music still droned, though the rapping rhymes barely got through to him in any comprehensible fashion.

It did nothing to remove the edge. If anything, D-Baser felt even worse than before. Muscles so taut they felt like steel being bent to the point of snapping. His stomach had made a 360-degree twist and he counted his blessings that he had not had a bite to eat all night, or it would have probably splattered out onto the dirty curb right about now.

Where he looked at the asphalt, where sidewalk and street met in gritty marriage, he almost saw that imaginary spray of projectile vomit. Then his mind’s eye replaced it with splatters of blood.

D-Baser looked at Kid Lizard. Lizard shot him another stupid grin, theatrically brandishing his pistol and machete like some idiot posing for a lousy movie’s promo poster.

He did not even have it in him to sigh at the kid. Deep down, he knew this was not going to end badly. Lizard was going to die.

And while he silently refused to believe that vampires were real, the shadows behind those windows, leering inside the building, that darkness maintained their oppressive air. Like the curtains were hiding some ominous presence. His mind refused to combine the thoughts of some goons like Marv and the fictional concept of vampires.

Then again—had they ever seen him out in daylight?

D-Baser tossed the blunt away and leaned inside to grab a sub-machine gun. He checked it again, assuring he could shoot some motherfuckers.

“Fuck it. Let’s go kill Dracula.”

He marched towards the building with newfound determination, tightly gripping the weapons in his hands. Lizard followed with delay, taken aback by D-Baser’s fierce pace and sudden burst of determination. This was how his generation rolled.

Vampires, no vampires—did not matter one lick, all just some dumb motherfuckers who needed wasting. That was the way of this city. That was his way.

As these things always did, time slowed down and sped up in equal measure. Like a blur, D-Baser acutely registered every small detail around him and yet none of it really breeched his consciousness, waiting with unholy patience to crash down on him once his day’s work was done.

Kicking in the door, wood splintering and something smashing into a glass table, hostile reaction waited. Crept around the shadows for a few seconds. The dust had yet to settle around D-Baser as he stood inside the entrance, gun raised, allowing his eyes to suggest to the dark premises within.

Then the hissing started. People inside, hissing at him like feral cats.

The sub-machine gun’s muzzle roared to life with flashes of light, unleashing bullets all at three different targets. Figures lunged at him, leapt at him from several directions. He barely swiveled, bracing against the recoil with years of experience and training the sleek little steel weapon on each of them, gunning them down like anybody else.

One of them twitched after eating a dozen shots. Then another. He only realized after the fact that sharp fingernails had scratched his leg from the floor where one of them dropped. He rammed the metal stake right into a rib cage.

Not as deep as he had hoped. It thrashed and clawed at him, fingernails scratching up his shirt and skin like little knifes. The struggle was on, thrashing against each other as a person riddled with ten bullet holes wrestled with D-Baser at the door.

Kid Lizard was somewhere inside now, screaming, dragged through the darkness of the room by two figures, the motes of dust dancing in the meager light pouring in through the front door.

The third one had gotten up faster than D-Baser had expected, and the searing pain of fangs piercing the flesh, and blood being sucked out—it all hurt like hell.

Gritting his teeth, he did not scream. He would not. Did not want to give this creep the satisfaction. He instead slammed the vamp into the doorframe and then threw himself out with it into the sunlight.

D-Baser groaned with pain as the human figure clinging onto him—fangs sunken deep into his shoulder—exploded into flames. The fire licked at him and burnt his skin, wracking his body with searing pain. D-Baser shouted and kicked and flailed around, throwing the creature away from him, sending it rolling onto the sidewalk where she went up in bright flames like a dry bale of hay.

His own clothing had not caught fire, fortunately. Unfortunately, judging by the phenomenon he was witnessing right now, vampires were real after all.

D-Baser did not really have the capacity to concern himself with such thoughts right now, though.

Lizard’s screams behind him had died down and made way for pained, gurgling noises, orchestrated and punctuated by what sounded like wet bags of meat slapping against hard counters. Or flesh tearing. It was not like D-Baser was familiar with this sort of noise. Motherfuckers he normally dealt with tended to use guns and knives, not claws and fangs.

Emitting a string of profanities as he shot a glance down at the deep wound on his shoulder, from which blood rhythmically and menacingly pumped out, D-Baser ejected the clip from his gun and he inserted a new one to replace it with a motion reflecting his callousness and routine.

The gurgles from inside the apartment briefly sounded like Lizard was whimpering and pleading for his life.

D-Baser’s gun flared up with more automatic fire, short burst after burst peeling the horrific monsters off Lizard’s mangled, twitching, half-dead body. The vamps only reeled; the bullets only bought tiny windows of time. The stakes were not as effective as D-Baser instinctively believed.

A glint of sunlight flared up off the surface of the machete as he slung it out of its place on his belt.

More work to do.

Always work to do for men like him, in a city like this.

—Submitted by Wratts

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