The rain was pounding down on Bob’s head and ruining her hair when she found a bar and slipped inside. She liked bars. They were open when she was awake, they served alcohol, and people bought her drinks. This one was a tired place, grimy, dark, and mostly empty. A few patrons clustered at the stained wooden counter on stained wooden stools, engrossed in their beers. No one looked at Bob, which was fine with her.
Bob sat down at a rickety table in the corner. She pulled off her ancient leather jacket, emptied her pockets onto the table top, and counted her things. The entirety of Bob’s personal worth consisted, at the moment, of the aforementioned jacket, which had once been black (and which Bob had taken from a dumpster years ago), a flimsy green blouse with white buttons down the front, a bra, a short black skirt, red satin panties, a pair of black lace up boots, sixty-three cents, a maroon bandanna, sundry body piercing jewelry, a rusty nail, a mostly-used tube of bright red lipstick and an empty bottle of isopropyl alcohol that she had lifted from a drugstore in Gallaway.
She picked up the bottle and screwed off the top, licking a few drops of the stinging liquid from its mouth. She liked its bitter, antiseptic burn. She liked the swiftness with which it got her drunk, the haste with which it made her forget. She didn’t so much care for the occasional coma it put her in if she drank too much, or the vomiting of blood it sometimes caused. It didn’t really matter. There wasn’t any more – she had swallowed the last of it washing away the taste of the trucker she’d sucked off to get a ride to Memphis – and she was entirely too sober. She was beginning to regret things again.
She was tired. She’d been on the run for almost a month. She’d never managed to escape for this long before. Ro had always tracked her down. It surprised her, a little, that her sadistic bitch of a mistress hadn’t found her yet. She could feel Ro’s presence always, never far off, chasing her. She had to keep running.
Her mind, insufficiently clouded by drugs, allowed the entrance of a treasonous thought. What if Ro wasn’t chasing her? What if Ro was just trailing her, waiting for her to return, knowing Bob could hold out only so long? Even Bob wasn’t sure she could keep going with this. She wanted Ro desperately, wanted to scamper back into her arms, lose her soul again and again in the darkness of Ro’s cruel embrace. Bob loved Ro and the hatred that imbued her passion only made it fiercer; but Ro was evil, and Bob was trying so hard to be good. The thought of Ro, her burning yellow eyes, her razor teeth, her twisted soul, sent shivers of fear and desire through Bob.
Bob clenched her first and forced herself to focus on the items on the table. She started to put the stuff away. A jagged pang of hunger cut through her. She hadn’t fed that night and she hadn’t opened human veins at all in the weeks she’d been evading Ro. She’s been living off the discarded lives of stray animals and the cold juices of raw meat that she stole from assorted grocery stores. It wasn’t enough. She supposed she’d snap, eventually. She supposed she’d kill someone again, eventually. But for now, she was trying. She could do that, she could at least try.
She played her fingers over the rusty nail. She had picked it up along the side of the Interstate 40 a few nights ago and stuffed it into her pocket. It was a big nail, and long. She had forced it into her hand once, and it had gone all the way through, her skin cradling the iron in a keen embrace. She pricked her fingers on its precipice and put it back on the table. Bob knew fun things to do with sharp objects. She debated going outside, but it was dark, and no one was paying any attention to her, and it was raining.
Bob stretched out her hand and stared at her fingers, tracing the unchanging lines in her skin. She folded the last two digits of her left hand over onto her palm, and put her thumb over them, holding the other two together. One corner of her thin lips edged up in a half smile as she thought of other ways to use this hand position. She sighed and placed her hand face up onto the table. With her right hand, she picked up the nail and ran it up her arm, pressing the point lightly, deliciously, into her ashen skin. A light pinkish line rose up on her arm, marking the path of the nail. She closed her eyes, and imagined it was another’s hand that held this sharpness, another’s touch biting into her, and pressed deeper. Little drops of blood welled up, and Bob inhaled the ferric odor. Saliva dripped from the corners of her opened mouth, a corresponding wetness developing between her thighs. She swallowed, and started to rock gently, back and forth against the stool.
She pulled the nail away abruptly, forcing herself to wait. Her mouth wanting, her body wanting, her mind and soul wanting, she held it poised above her outstretched fingers. She whined quietly, clenching her teeth against the exquisite tension, ropy spit trailing down her face. She crossed her legs, and her thrusts against the stool grew more forceful. One ball of the barbell through her hood rubbed against the chair, sliding the metal bar across her clit. When she could take it no longer, she drew the nail hard across her fingers.
The point split through her, sliced flesh, scraped bone. She cried out, burning pulses of pleasure undulating through her, and shoved her ruined fingers into her mouth. She sucked at them, edacious tongue probing the deep gashes, the taste of her own blood letting her forget, if only for a moment, just how hungry she was.
She kept her fingers in her mouth until the blood stopped flowing, and when she looked up, she noticed people were staring at her.
“What are you looking at?” She barked, and slumped onto the table, head cradled in her arms.
After a while she felt a presence near her, and looked up. A man had come over to her table. He was big, rough-hewn, and wearing a plaid shirt.
“Are you alright?” He asked, his voice rough like his appearance.
“I’m fine,” said Bob flatly. Her chin was sticky with drying saliva, and she wiped it with the handkerchief.
“You screamed,” he said.
“I cut myself,” she said. By now, the wound in her hand had sealed over again.
He put his big hand on her shoulder. “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this, anyway?”
“Ha,” Bob said. It would have taken her the rest of the night to explain. She forced a smile onto her face, hiding the points of her teeth, and flipped back her listless hair, presently bleached blonde and streaked with blue. “Why don’t you buy me a drink?”
The guy shrugged, and strolled over to the bar. She sized up the situation while he ordered beers. He didn’t look rich, but he had to have some cash on him. If she let him **** her, and then stole his wallet, maybe she could buy a bus ticket or something, if she didn’t spend it getting herself intoxicated
. She had to keep moving, had to keep heading west. She had friends there, out west. She thought of Thalia – her raven black hair cropped in a slick bob just below her ears, her ghost blue eyes as sharp as her teeth, the flogger in the back pocket of her boys’ leather pants. Thalia, who didn’t like Ro very much, would surely take her in, if she could just get to Vegas.
She had tried to buy a ticket for the Greyhound back in Jackson. There was even a bus that left at midnight and arrived before dawn – but it had cost a hundred and sixty-two dollars to get to Nevada, and Bob never had that kind of money when she wasn’t with Ro. She opened a few buttons on her shirt and tugged it down, showing the lacy edge of her black bra. The points of her nipples, and the impressions of the rings that pierced them, poked through the thin fabric of her top.
The man came back with the beers. Bob sort of regretted that she has asked for the drink. She could have spent the money on transportation. He sat down next to her, and started asking questions.
He asked her what her name was, and she told him it was Jesse. She hated her own name and always had, but she could never really settle on something else to call herself. She usually used the names of literary vampires, but she was too tired tonight to come up with one.
He talked, but she wasn’t really listening. Bob had been around long enough to run seduction on auto-pilot. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, eventually. He smiled and stood up, offering her his hand. She found the gesture irritating, but resisted the urge to stand up unaided. She forced a girlish giggle. They walked towards the exit.
Bob smelled her before she opened the door, all dark perfume and sweat, the scent more intoxicating than the beer she’d just downed. Bob turned to her companion and sighed. “I think I’m going to have to give you a rain-check,” she said, as the woman walked in, the sound of her heels on the wood floor sharp and fierce.
The man in plaid was still holding Bob’s arm and he refused to let go. He wrenched her towards the door. A stab of energy shot through Bob’s body, her every muscle tensing, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. It took every ounce of control she still had not to rip him to pieces right there. She tore her arm away and whirled to face him, her mouth an inch from his neck. She watched the pulsing of his jugular and breathed three times – in and out – before she stood up on the tips of her toes and brought her eyes level with his. The corners of her mouth turned up, baring her arsenal.
“Get out,” she said without parting her teeth. It came out a whispered growl. He bolted before he noticed that she had stolen his wallet.
Bob followed the woman back to the counter. She was wearing black, a tight dress with a shredded hem, and black boots that hugged the contours of her muscular legs. She seemed tired, in the same way Bob was tired, weary of some cosmic something as she swilled cheap scotch.
Bob slid onto the stool next to her, her elbows on the table. “People tell you you’re gorgeous all the time, don’t they?”
The woman took a while to respond. She turned around to look at Bob, one eye hidden by her cascade of dark locks. “It doesn’t always seem like much of a compliment.” She looked away and traced her finger across the rim of her glass.
Bob knew what she meant, of course. Nice ****. Nice legs. Nice rack. The whistles and the catcalls and the groping. She made it for work for her, but that didn’t mean she liked it.
Bob slid her hand across the counter. She spoke rapidly. “Look, I’m not going to ask you what your name is, or what you do, because I don’t like to answer those questions myself, but did you ever want to try something different?”
The woman’s brown eyes met Bob’s as she covered Bob’s hand with her own. “It wouldn’t be different,” she said, the coldness of her voice in contrast to the warmth of her touch. Bob wasn’t sure if her words meant solidarity or rejection.
The woman brushed her hair back from her eyes. “Are you going to buy me a drink?”
“No,” said Bob. “You’re going to take me home.”
'Vampire Bob - Chapter 1' statistics: (click to read)
