Ryan had just turned the corner onto Main Street when he noticed Tara coming out of the Scissors Salon. She was strolling towards the Topaz listening to her iPod with her headphones, and didn’t hear the roar of the Toyota’s engine.
Ryan reviewed his options. This might be his chance to kill two birds with one stone. First of all, if Tara felt like hanging out with him, he’d have a reason to go out to Stillman’s Creek without saying a word about any vampire hunting. The less said about that, the better. Second, he might even get lucky.
He pulled the Toyota into the vacant parking space just before the restaurant.
He leaned on the horn to get her attention. “Tara, do you want a ride somewhere?” he asked.
Tara turned towards the noise, revealing the results of her newly shorn hair. Seeing Ryan, she smiled and walked back towards his car.
“You got your hair cut again,” he commented, trying to hide the disappointment in his voice.
“Do you like it?” Tara asked hopefully. The hairdresser had cut it shorter than she had wanted, but had definitely delivered on the punk look she was after.
“At least you left your bangs alone,” he shrugged, secretly wondering what army barber reject they had recently hired at Scissors. To him, her hair looked like it had been buzzed.
“I guess that’s a no,” Tara pouted.
“Give me a break, Tara. I’m just a long hair fan,” Ryan tried to explain.
“You?” Tara said indignantly. “You have no hair.”
“I’m a guy with a family history of receding hairlines,” Ryan shrugged. “I’m just speeding up the process.”
Sensing he had hurt her feelings, he tried to think of something to say to make her feel better.
“I like your earrings.”
Tara remained sullen.
“What’s up, Tara?” Ryan asked, knowing those three words could lead him into dangerous territory. Tara would either go mental on him and be done with it, or she might drag the inevitable fight out all night long. Sometimes it was best just to get it over with.
“Thanks a lot.”
“This isn’t about your hair,” he sensed. He had been through several styles with her, and several emotions because of them. Sometimes it took until things began to grow back before their relationship began to settle down. If that was true, this one might take a while.“The search group,” she whined. “Why didn’t you pick me to join your group of three this morning? Jacey wasn’t there. Why did you pick that new girl?”
Ryan winced. At the time he hadn’t thought about that choice coming back to bite him. “Oh that. You know Tom. He’s a player. He wanted to get to know Goth-Chic.”
“Tom didn’t pick her. You did. I heard you.”
Ryan had to think quickly. “We had it pre-arranged.”
“Liar.”
He knew he was caught. “Okay, you got me. But I couldn’t ask you to come with us. Your dad was standing right there. You must have heard him telling everyone what a deranged piece of society I was. I’m personal non gratis with him.”
True, Tara knew. Ralph would have had a fit if she had gone with Ryan, Still…
“You mean persona non grata,” she corrected him.
“Whatever. Hop in the car and I’ll take you for a drive.” He leaned over to the passenger door and opened it from the inside.
“A drive?” Tara smiled. The stars were aligning perfectly. It was a rare Saturday night when Ryan didn’t want to hang out with Tom and Jacey. Finally, she thought, a chance to get some alone time with him. “That’d be great! Where do you want to go?”
“I was thinking we could drive around for a little while and then go get romantic down by Stillman’s Creek. How does that sound?”
“Stillman’s Creek is a cesspool, and it happens to back onto our farm. We can’t go there. If my dad catches us, he’ll kill you.” She looked at him like he had completely lost his mind. “Why would you want to take me there?”
“Well, Goth-Chic said...”
The switch in Ryan’s brain that should have told him to shut up, had just malfunctioned.
Tara slammed the car door shut. “You, Ryan Lachey, can go to hell. Or you can take Goth-Chic to Stillman’s Creek. I really don’t give a shit.”
“It sure seems like you do. You keep mentioning her. Why is she up your ass? Are you worried I’m going to ask her out or something? Because I’m not. Goth-Chic’s a little out there, you know.”
Ryan didn’t know if he could save the situation, but he was going to try. Tara being this jealous of another girl was something new to him. An interesting turn of events. He could have told her not to worry, that Ellie had a thing for Tom, but he was finding it all kind of amusing.
“What do you mean?” Tara asked.
“Well, she thinks a vampire took Brooke Quinlan.” He used his index finger to make a loony signal around his head. “How’s that for starters? She’s checking out the seat-sales to Mars as we speak, trust me.”
“Why? What did she say?” Tara re-opened the door of the Toyota herself and slipped into the passenger seat. If the new girl really was as crazy as Ryan was making out she was, then she maybe she didn’t have anything to worry about after all. This little tidbit of news intrigued her.
“She said she had a dream where she saw this vampire-dude take Brooke off into the night.”
“A vampire? She told you this?” Tara laughed. She might have found it hysterical except when she waited for Ryan’s laughter in return, it didn’t happen. “Wait a minute. If you really think she’s crazy, then why do I get the feeling your sudden need to visit the swamp at the back of our farm has something to do with her? Did she say the vampire was at my place?”
“Maybe,” he admitted sheepishly.
“Ryan, you are so gullible. She’s just messing with your head. Girls like her are like that.”
“All I know is, she’s not talking to Tom or me right now,” he shrugged.
“There’s some good news. So why don’t you just forget about it? I can think of plenty of things we can do that don’t involve her.”
“Because it’s been my experience that when chics give you the silent treatment after they tell you something, they weren’t joking around.”
Tara tried to read Ryan’s face. She couldn’t get an accurate read on whether he was making this whole story up or not. At the moment, Ryan just looked perplexed. Did Goth-Chic really have a crazy dream complete with a blood sucker living at the edge of the Wildman farm? “Why do I get the impression that as much as you’re sitting there telling me that you don’t believe her, you actually do?” she questioned.
“I don’t. I mean, I think I don’t,” Ryan sighed. “Okay, I really don’t know what I think. Here’s the problem. Goth-Chic, she’s new here, right? She couldn’t make her way to the park without someone having to show her where it is. But in this dream she had, she talked about that old wooden bridge out by your place. The one over Stillman’s Creek. She even saw the crappy old schoolhouse down the sideroad. You have to admit that’s kind of freaky.”
“So, let me see if I have this right. You want to take ME on a romantic drive to my OWN backyard to see if we can find Goth-Chic’s vampire?”
“It doesn’t sound so good when you say it that way, but yeah. That and some other stuff. I thought maybe we could finish off what we started last weekend.”
“Does it not register in that thick, bald head of yours, that I can’t stand the new bitch?” Tara asked angrily. “Maybe I don’t want to have anything to do with her, or her dream.”
“Goth-Chic’s not a bitch, she’s just....”
“Drop dead, Ryan.”
Tara threw the car door open again and climbed out. Ryan had been thick-headed before, but this time he was going too far. She might not have had any plans for Saturday night, but even if she did, there was no way they’d involve that new girl.
She stormed off down the sidewalk, without a glance back to Ryan.
“What? What did I say?”
he yelled, as he threw the car into gear and spun out onto the road. “Chics,” he screamed out the window to startled passersby. “One’s as nutty as the next.”
He reached over and turned on the car radio. He had left it on the country station. Somehow, listening to the top-ten countdown didn’t fit the mood he was in. Despite what other people might think, it wasn’t the best music to listen to when you’re about to go looking for a body in a swamp. He switched it over to the oldies station, knowing it wouldn’t be long before something moody hit the airwaves.
“Next up, Jan and Dean with Dead Man’s Curve,” the deejay promised. Ryan liked that song. He found it ironic, how Dean Torrence was killed in a car crash after writing the tune. Not that it was a good thing. It wasn’t. But it got him thinking about what would happen if every song a songwriter made up, wound up coming true.
“It’d probably wipe out every blues singer on the planet,” he realized as he thought about the ballads he had written himself. The ones that no one had ever heard. Like the song he wrote about Betty. He laughed. “Won’t come back from Stillman’s Creek,” Ryan sang in falsetto as the station went to a commercial.
There was surprisingly little traffic in town for a Saturday night. It was as if a curfew had been put in place keeping everyone at home behind locked doors. All because of the missing girl.
Ryan stopped for an orange super guzzler then headed out the highway towards Tara’s farm. Other people might have been afraid of whatever sinister thing had taken up residence in Troy, but he wasn’t going to let it get to him. If luck was on his side, Ralph had gone home, got into some of the homemade hooch Tara said he made, and was now passed out in the barn with the heifers. He didn’t really feel like another confrontation with the crazy old fart tonight.
His own plan was to get to the creek, check it out for vampires and go home. Just to ease his mind about the whole crazy story. It was a simple plan, but a plan all the same. He liked plans. Tom always let him do the planning when they hung out, because as smart as Tom was, he over-thought things and as a result, his plans were lame. Someday the chics would figure that out. Someday they’d learn that Tom’s good looks were as useful as an unloaded gun. But probably not until they were forty.
He turned onto the county road that led past the Wildman’s farm and out towards the old covered bridge, dimming the headlights on his car as he did so. There was no sense drawing attention to the fact that he was heading out towards the water. Having just experienced his own ridicule with Tara over the whole “is there or isn’t there a vampire out there”, he knew why Ellie had been so upset with the jokes he had made earlier. This was something that had to be done alone.
“Just keep your mouth shut, Lachey,” he said to himself.
Within the boundaries of the isolated area he could hear what he thought were a million bullfrogs, croaking in the background. Weird, he thought.
“It’s a fucking frog-fest. The coyotes that are eating all the stray cats around town should just head out here,” he surmised. “Frogs taste like chicken. You’d think that’d be pretty appealing to a canine.”
With the bridge now a few feet ahead of him, Ryan slowed down and drove the Toyota slowly onto the wooden slats. They creaked as he edged his car across them.
“Creepy,” he said, as he noticed how dark the darkness really was inside the old structure. The walls were restricting the reach of his headlights, and throwing the high beams on only made it worse. They bounced back and blinded him. He decided to park right where he was.
“Where’s the flashlight?” he asked himself, exiting the car and heading towards his trunk. Thankfully it was in its usual spot in the hub over the left wheel.
A small brown bat swooped down from the rafters, startling him. He shone the light in the direction from where it came.
“Looks like I’ve got company,” he said, as three more of the mammals darted down towards him before their internal radar sent them flying out into the night. “What are you guys still doing here in November? You should be down in Cabo by now sipping tequila from half-empty tourist glasses.”
A foul smell wafted through his nostrils, forcing him to plug his nose with one hand and hold the flashlight with the other. He shone it around the floorboards until he found the source of the smell. At his current vantage point, he could only tell that whatever it was, it was about half the size of him and definitely dead. He needed to get closer to identify it. He suppressed an involuntary gag by moving his hand from his nose to his mouth as he cautiously took a few steps towards whatever the hell it was. The flashlight’s beam soon revealed to him the half-mangled head of a bear cub. Judging from the pile of bat feces and maggots in and around it, Ryan figured it wasn’t a fresh kill.
“Okay,” he gasped. “I didn’t need to see that. All the same, I hope mama bear’s not going to put in a guest appearance around here anytime soon.” He took a deep breath before taking another look at the carcass. “The skull’s all in one piece, so it probably wasn’t shot. What the fuck happened?” he wondered.
While the head looked like it had been partially devoured, the body of the bear was mainly intact.
“Maybe the bear got hit by a truck and crawled away to the corner of the bridge to die. And then the coyotes came along and mangled his brains,” Ryan pondered. “Or maybe it was some bear-ball nut job who killed him, panicked and ran.”
He couldn’t tell from the position of the bear whether this was what happened or not. Either way, he didn’t feel like sticking around any longer to figure it out.
He exited the other side of the bridge into what he hoped would be fresh air, but the smell by the creek was nothing short of skanky. He couldn’t take a deep breath even if he wanted to. Something seemed to be sucking the oxygen from his every breath. He found himself wheezing, just like Stan often did. His heart began to beat rapidly.
“This is whacked,” he acknowledged. “It’s like I stepped through a time portal into the dead zone.”
The story Ellie had told him began to replay itself over and over in his mind, with the vampire getting bigger and nastier each time the scene played out.
He stood still for a moment to calm himself down, wishing he had a sports drink chocked full of electrolytes to put his metabolism back together. The area was suddenly eerily quiet. No bullfrogs croaking. No bats flapping their wings overhead. The creepy animal convention had packed up and gone home in less than five minutes. He wanted to do the same. “Get a grip, Lachey,” he told himself.
“Find the girl. Be a hero. Get laid. What the hell was I thinking?” he wondered. “This was a bad idea. I’d be having a better time at home with Betty and Stan.” It struck him how true that statement really was.
He had parked the car at the far end of the bridge. To get back to it, he either had to go back past the bear, the mere thought of which was making him nauseous, or wade through the water to approach the Toyota from the other side.
“Betty always told me to stay away from bears,” he said. “No coin toss necessary.”
He grabbed a broken tree branch from the bank of the creek and measured the depth of the water. It was about waist deep, and he knew he had a pair of old track pants in the car trunk that he could change into after he crossed through the algae infested liquid. He figured it would take about five minutes to get from the creek to the Toyota. There was no current to contend with to slow him down.
He stepped in and moved through the cold, murky water, taking the stick with him in case he needed it.
“Falling in is not part of the plan,” he said, deciding to use the stick much like a blind person would, to feel what was before his feet in the uneven creek bed.
The stick hit something small, and he used it to knock what ever it was out of the way. A dead fish rose to the surface.
The more Ryan poked around, the more dead fish floated towards him. “I never did like bobbin' for apples,” Ryan sassed, his stomach beginning to churn.
He was almost ac
ross the water when his right foot hit something that the stick had missed. A sunken tree limb?
He used the stick to feel its width. It was about two inches thick, he surmised. He straddled the object, trying to step over it, but it was wider than he had initially thought, and he inadvertently knocked it loose from the bottom of the creek. It rose up between his legs.
The heel of a little red shoe floated to the surface first.
“Oh my God. Oh. My. God. It’s a fucking leg.”
The rising human limb startled him, causing him to lose his balance. He fell backwards into the water, barely managing to keep the flashlight above his head. He wiped his face with his slime soaked sleeve as he strained to see the body in the water. It was now rising, floating face up, right beside him. He shone the light across it.
A water spider ran across the little bloated face. Brooke’s face.
“Fuck me,” he said, turning his gaze from her and scrambling up the adjacent edge of the water.
The urge to vomit overwhelmed him, and he spewed his downed super guzzler over the creek bank. For once in his life he didn’t care if anyone saw him puking his guts out. This was way worse than any story he could have dreamed up on a camping trip with Tom.
He reached for his cell phone and attempted to turn it on. No such luck. The water had shorted out the battery.
“Now what do I do?” he wondered.
He sat on a rotted tree stump, put his hands in his hoodie pockets, and tried to figure something out. He was unaware that he was being watched.
A pair of eyes, one blue and one brown, were tracking him from the edge of the tree line that backed onto the Wildman’s farm.
“I can’t just leave her there,” Ryan thought. He slowly stood up and turned back in the direction of the water.
The silence surrounding him was broken by a deep-throated snarl from behind.
Ryan turned and shone the flashlight into the direction the noise had come from. He saw nothing.
“Who's there?” he shouted into the darkness.
“Don’t touch her,” he heard someone hiss.
Ryan looked around nervously. “Tom?” he questioned.
Tom must have followed him out there. That was the only explanation available, because the voice sure as hell didn’t sound like Tara’s, and nobody else would know he had come out to the bridge. “Quit pissin' around. Get over here and help me. I've found Brooke.”
He waited for Tom’s voice to answer him.
“Seriously, dude. This is no time to try to get me back for anything stupid I did to you in the past. How do we get her out of here? I don't want to touch her. Do you have your cell phone, so we can call the cops?”
The hiss grew louder. “I said, don’t touch.”
Ryan turned around. Before him stood a teenager, about his age, but slighter in build and a few inches shorter. His dark hair hung over his face, hiding his features.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ryan asked. “My mother? Nobody tells a Lachey what he can and can’t do.”
“Lachey,” the teenager said. “French, no? You’re all stubborn pricks, boy band members, or both. Go home,” he snarled, showing his fangs to Ryan. “And don’t talk about yourself in the third person. It’s just wrong.”
“Dude. Really. You should call my barber.”
Ryan’s cocky demeanor was short-lived as he watched the teenager walk upon the water, and pick Brooke’s body up in his arms.
“Give her to me,” Ryan demanded. In his head, he could hear Tom telling him not to touch the body, but there was no longer much hope of keeping the crime scene intact. “Good trick with the water walking, Incisor-Boy. But I’m guessing you’re not a man of the cloth.”
“She’s mine,” the teenager warned. “Go get your own girl.”
“Like I haven’t heard that one before. I know who you are. You’re the dude in Goth-Chic’s dream. Sorry to take away your meal ticket, Funshine. Hand her over before I...”
“Before you what?” the teenager laughed. “Before you kill me? Sorry. That film ended. We’re onto the sequel now. Mortal.”
“Didn’t you ever listen to Journey?” Ryan sneered. “The movie never ends, it goes on and on and on.”
He rushed back into the water, throwing all his weight towards the vampire. The ratio of weight to bone was in Ryan’s favor, forcing the stranger to lose his grip on the girl’s body.
“Tumbling dice," Ryan said as he grabbed the vampire by the collar of his jacket.
“I told you to leave her alone,” the teenager said as he turned and positioned his fangs within biting distance of Ryan’s left hand.
“That’s my throwing arm, asshole,” Ryan commented, taking his right fist and pummeling it into the teenager’s nasal cavity. “Ambidextrous. Look it up.”
“Don't you know what I am?” the teenager hissed. “You can’t kill me. I'll feed later tonight and then I'll come back for you.”
“Feed on this,” Ryan said, grabbing his own crotch. “Now, are you going to leave her with me, or am I going to have to make you even uglier?”
“There’s only a half-quart left in this half-pint anyway,” the vampire sighed. “Keep her. But you owe me,” he warned Ryan, shaking his finger at him.
“Ooh, I’m shakin’. Tell you what. Next time I’m in the neighborhood of 666 Hadesarootin’ Drive, I’ll stop in for a bite. Or is that your line?”
A strong wind blew in from the west, forming a mist upon the water. Ryan’s view of the teenager was now non-existent. When it had passed, Ryan saw that the vampire had vanished into the night, leaving him alone with the little body.
“This has got to be the part where the aliens come,” Ryan laughed aloud. The laugh was full of nervous emotion, and even to Ryan’s own ears, it sounded like one only a raging lunatic would let out.
He walked back to the creek and pulled Brooke gently onto the grass.
“Now I know why Tom fainted when he saw Old Man Wagner. Sometimes there’s only so much a guy can take.”
His own consciousness left him, and he collapsed to the ground.
Across the water, Ralph Wildman was listening to a story his daughter was telling him. She was upset. That Lachey kid had insulted her new haircut, and he hadn’t stopped there. He had wanted to do things with her. Down by Stillman’s Creek. She was pretty sure he went there anyway and was probably waiting by the bridge, hoping she would change her mind. But she wouldn’t, because Ryan had said Brooke’s body was down there, and she wasn’t having anything to do with that.
Ralph went for his rifle.
Five minutes later, the long barrel of Ralph’s firearm was jabbing into the good shoulder of Ryan Lachey, who was lying next to the body of Brooke Quinlan.
“Get up,” Wildman said angrily. “I’m not going to say it twice, you warped little prick.”
Ryan regained consciousness and flinched.
“Wildman? Fuck, I never thought I’d say this, but am I ever glad to see you.”
“Tara told me what you tried to do to her tonight. She told me you knew where the body was.”
“Wildman. This is not what it looks like. Brooke was already dead when I got here. And that little girl of yours is bi. As in polar. I want you, I don’t want you. She can’t make up her mind. Is Mrs. Wildman like that?”
He tried to stand up, but Wildman pushed him back to the ground.
“What was it you said earlier? About me being bored and wanting to shoot something in the head?” Wildman raised the barrel dangerously close to Ryan’s face. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t unload this rifle into that sick, demented brain you have, Lachey. It would save us taxpayers the cost of a trial.”
This wasn’t good, Ryan knew. Of all the people that had to stumble across him and the body he himself stumbled upon, it would have to be Wildman. Someone who really couldn’t give a shit whether he lived or died under the best of circumstances. Ryan had to think fast. One wrong word and it could be lights out forever. Then he remembere
d. Ping-pong.
“Because seeing me in the electric chair would give you an orgasm,” Ryan sneered “Fuckwad.”