Chapter 2
~ The Other Problem With Being a Famous Vampire ~
It was another remarkably average-looking day off on the edges of the city of Covington. The sky was blue, the birds were loudly yapping away back and forth to each other in a way that the average human tended to mistake for singing, the bugs were buzzing... and a large and extremely suspicious-looking black van was pulling in to Pugh's driveway.
The van's side was decorated with a bright red design that resembled a wooden stake being jabbed into a heart, just barely cartoonish enough to not scare little children as it drove by the other houses. Printed in bold white text above this macabre logo was a name: "Shankheimer and Sons." And below it, completing the logo, was the rest of their company's name: "Professional Vampire Hunting Services."
It wasn't the sound of this van pulling into his driveway that managed to startle Pugh awake this early in the day, however. It was the sound of a second van, this one a dull yellowish color, making a sharp turn into his driveway and not stopping quite quickly enough to avoid rear-ending the other one. This second van, much like the first, had a large logo on its side; on this one, however, the logo featured a picture of a dead cockroach surrounded by the words "For All Your Rat, Roach, Wasp, and Vampire Problems." Apparently, the name that was supposed to adorn the upper part of the logo had been scraped away, probably in an earlier accident.
Pugh awoke to the sound of people yelling at each other in front of his house. He jumped out of the bed and took a quick peek through the curtains, seeing the two vans as well as an overweight man in a yellow suit arguing with an older, thinner man wearing what appeared to be military-style body armor. Two younger men--barely more than teenagers, really--jumped out of the side door of the black van and stood on either side of the older man, apparently preparing for a fight. It was at this point when the vampire noticed exactly what the logos on the sides of the two vans said.
"Well... looks like it's going to be one of those days again..."
Ignoring the men outside for the moment, Pugh quickly tossed his scrubs aside and changed into something a bit more appropriate for a fight--a dark blue suit in the style of the vampires of the 1950s, complete with a cape with a tall collar in the back. Which, admittedly, probably wasn't the best thing to wear to a fight... but considering the kind of blundering idiots he was going to be up against, it wasn't going to matter much what he wore. It was at this point that someone started knocking on his door--it was hard to tell who, thanks to the curtains covering the door's built-in windows, but whoever it was wasn't very patient and attempted to open the door from the outside after a few knocks without any response. Of course, since the door was locked, this didn't do any good.
Pugh ignored the attempts at breaking and entering for the moment and put on a layer of sunscreen, not stopping until every inch of exposed skin was ready to go outside. He grabbed a small bottle of blood from the refrigerator and gulped half of it down before finally putting on his sunglasses and walking over to answer the knocks on the door.
By this point, the exterminator and the Shankheimer family were not alone in Pugh's driveway--they had been joined by a small group of teenagers, each of which seemed to be carrying a crudely-carved wooden stake or some other homemade anti-vampire weapon. It was one of these teenagers who had come up and knocked on the door, and almost as soon as it opened, the kid lunged forward in an attempt to stab Pugh with his stake.
Pugh, of course, just calmly reached up and grabbed the boy by the wrist, stopping him in his tracks with pure strength. The stake hovered a few inches away from its intended target's chest, wobbling around a bit as its wielder began to shake with fear at the sight of an actual vampire grabbing his hand. Before the terrified teenager could try anything else, Pugh confiscated the stake and tossed it off into some nearby bushes, then let go of the boy's arm and walked out to greet the rest of his uninvited guests.
"There he is!", one of the Shankheimer boys yelled, pointing in Pugh's direction.
The other one (and the older man who was probably their father) both reached into their pockets and pulled out what looked like miniature crossbows with wooden stakes loaded as their ammunition. While the pointing son was fumbling around in his pockets for his own weapon, the other two Shankheimers fired, sending pointy wooden objects flying across Pugh's driveway. One missed by a mile when the vampire ducked to the side, and the other whizzed just a few inches past his head, tearing a hole in his cape's protruding collar.
"Hey!", Pugh yelled, glancing to the side a bit and noticing the hole. "This was my favorite cape!"
Just as the second of the Shankheimer boys managed to find his stake-launcher, Pugh rushed forward until he was just a couple feet in front of them. Right when it seemed like he was going to bowl them all over just like that, he instead jumped straight up in the air, avoiding another flying stake. On the way back down, he extended one leg and spun around, clobbering the two younger vampire hunters with a spinning kick that sent them flying back into the open door of their van; their father only barely managed to avoid it by throwing himself to the ground.
Pugh glanced around for a moment after landing, spotting several of the teenagers with stakes and crosses approaching from one side. On the other was the older man from the Shankheimer van, who was still on the ground; standing just a few feet away was the brightly-clothed exterminator, who appeared to be fiddling with some sort of round, metallic object. For a brief moment, he turned back to the teenagers... before realizing that the round metal thing must be some sort of bomb and immediately focusing his attentions back on the exterminator.
Unfortunately, he realized just a second too late; the exterminator chuckled slightly and tossed the bomb to the ground at Pugh's feet, and almost immediately a cloud of yellowish-white gas with a very familiar smell started to drift upward from it.
"Garlic!"
Pugh took a deep breath and then pulled his cape up around his face in an attempt to protect himself from the garlic-bomb's effects, then just stood and waited as he was surrounded by the allergy-inducing cloud. One of the teenagers, standing not too far away from the cloud of garlic gas, suddenly started scratching himself uncontrollably; the others backed away from him, apparently worried that this allergy to garlic was a sign that he too was a vampire. This apparently distracted them enough that they didn't notice when Pugh dove out of the cloud of garlic fumes and rolled along the ground right past their feet. He rose up behind their backs, and when they finally noticed he was there, he raised one hand as a warning.
"Don't come any closer," he said, "I know kung-fu."
This threat, apparently, was not taken too seriously by the teenagers. They hesitated for a moment, but then all of them (except for the boy currently distracted by his own garlic allergy) brandished their stakes and crosses and prepared to attack. Before they could even take a single step, Pugh revealed that his other hand, which had been behind his back before, contained a large brick that he had picked up from somewhere in his yard. The teenagers paused again, not sure what exactly he was about to do. And then... Pugh yelled.
"KUNG-FU!"
Before any of the teenagers knew what hit them, Pugh had swung the brick in a wide arc in front of him, smacking each of them in the face and almost instantly knocking them to the ground. The one member of the group still standing--the one who had been too distracted by the itchy red spots forming all over his skin to actually attack--let out a girly scream and then took off running down the street. Pugh then turned back to the exterminator, who was staring at him with his jaw hanging open.
"What, slapping somebody with a brick doesn't count as kung-fu?"
He shrugged, then tossed the brick back over his shoulder. It bonked the vampire hunter from the Shankheimer van in the head, sending him back down to the ground once again (and this time, he was probably too unconscious to get back up.) Pugh then took a few steps toward the exterminator, causing him to panic and dig around in his backpack for another weapon. He eventually did find a second garlic bomb, but when he threw it it was unexpectedly caught in midair by a pigeon wearing a tiny brown hat.
"Nice catch, Conando!", Pugh said, recognizing the pigeon as one of the ones he had trained to fight earlier. "Now, why don't you give it back to him?"
The hat-wearing pigeon cooed mischievously and fluttered his wings a bit, then swung his legs forward and let go of the garlic bomb, sending it flying back toward its original owner. The exterminator caught the bomb, but fumbled and nearly dropped it before catching it again. Then, realizing it was about to explode, he freaked out again and ended up juggling it back and forth between his hands half a dozen times in a matter of seconds before it finally blew up in his face.
"Aaaaagh!", the exterminator yelled as he stumbled blindly backward and bumped into the nearby garage door. "It buuuurns!"
Pugh sighed and shook his head slightly, then calmly walked over to the panicking exterminator and knocked him out with a single punch to the face. He then walked across the rest of the front yard-turned-battlefield, checking the condition of every one of the would-be vampire slayers and finding that each was alive, but knocked out cold. He was just about to move the crowd of unconscious bodies out of his yard when suddenly another pair of footsteps approached from the sidewalk.
Standing at the edge of Pugh's driveway was a Catholic priest, wearing full priestly robes, carrying an old Bible in one hand and what appeared to be a cross made from several wooden stakes tied together in the other. Strapped across his chest like an ammo belt were several small glass bottles of holy water, and in a holster at his hip was a second Bible, smaller and newer-looking than the one in his hands. Before Pugh could even open his mouth to say anything, the priest flipped open the book in his hands and began to read.
"And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among them, that eateth any manner of blood, I will set My face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people."
Pugh blinked a couple times, then cocked his head to the side.
"Okay," he said, "What was that?"
The priest smiled and closed the Bible, then exchanged it for one of the bottles strapped to his chest. He shook it up slightly and watched as the liquid inside swirled and bubbled a bit inside the bottle, then turned his attention back toward Pugh.
"That, undead spawn of Satan, was Leviticus 17:10."
Pugh groaned.
"Undead? Well, if you really think about it, wouldn't 'undead' just mean 'alive?' That would be the opposite of 'dead,' right?"
The priest apparently ignored him, instead throwing the glass bottle in the direction of the vampire. Just before impact, Pugh jumped to the side, and the bottle smashed harmlessly on the ground, sending shards of glass what appeared to be plain water flying everywhere.
"Aw, come on, don't get broken glass all over my driveway..."
Once again, the robed man didn't react at all to Pugh's words, instead flipping open the Bible again and reading another verse.
"Therefore I said unto the children of Israel: No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood. Leviticus 17:12."
"Okay, I get it," Pugh said, backing up a bit in case the priest suddenly attacked again. "You don't like people drinking blood. What do you want me to do about it, starve to death?"
The priest stepped forward again, but this time did not even attempt to attack. Instead, he flipped to a different verse and continued reading.
"That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if you keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well. Acts 15:29."
He then closed the Bible and raised up the large wooden-stake cross he had been carrying the whole time, waving it about and pointing it in Pugh's direction as if just showing a cross to the vampire was going to have some effect. To absolutely no one's surprise (except possibly the priest himself), nothing happened; Pugh just shrugged and took a step forward.
"Look... I'm no expert on this kind of thing, but I'm pretty sure all those verses are just saying that humans shouldn't drink blood," he attempted to explain. "I really don't think the guys who wrote them had vampires in mind when they said 'thou shalt not eateth the red stuff.'"
A vein on the priest's forehead bulged out slightly, and his usually-calm face twisted into an expression of rage.
"SILENCE! I will not tolerate such blasphemy from a blood-sucking demon from Hell!"
"Hell? But I've never even been to Michigan. I'm from--"
"I... SAID... SILENCE!", the priest almost roared, brandishing the sharp-tipped cross like a weapon and pointing it straight at Pugh's chest. The vampire jumped back slightly, then got into a fighting stance; it was pretty clear by this point that the priest couldn't be reasoned with.
Moving with surprising speed for such an old man, the priest lunged forward and thrust one of the stake points of the cross directly at the center of Pugh's chest. He leaned backward at an uncomfortable-looking angle to dodge the attack, then quickly backflipped away when the enraged priest pulled his cross-shaped weapon back in preparation for another attack. This time, he swung the cross like an axe, narrowly missing Pugh's shoulder as he ducked out of the way. Pugh took a swing of his own, but the priest dodged to the side just in time to avoid what would have been a direct hit to his face.
The priest suddenly jumped backward and changed his stance, holding the cross in an usual way that would be completely inappropriate for actually swinging it at someone. Instead, he pulled his arm back and threw it, sending it spinning in Pugh's direction like some kind of pointy, wooden, cross-shaped... boomerang-type thing. Fortunately, the same kind of heavy wood that makes good stakes doesn't exactly lend itself to flight, and Pugh was able to easily intercept the flying cross with a high kick that sent it spinning upward into the sky. A moment later, it came spinning back down a couple of yards away, crashing down hard onto the asphault.
The old man turned and was about to retrieve the weapon, but before he could even reach for it, an oversized red pickup truck came barreling down the road at a speed that almost certainly wasn't legal, blasting country music at a volume that probably wasn't legal either. The old wooden cross was no match for the weight of the speeding vehicle, and before long it was reduced to little more than a pile of sticks and splinters scattered all across the road.
Now panicking a bit, the priest opened up his Bible once again and flipped through it furiously. For a few seconds, he looked at the pages with an almost puzzled look on his face; it almost seemed as if he had run out of anti-vampire verses. Eventually, he seemed to give up on his search and just flip to a random page, reading off a verse that seemed to have nothing at all to do with blood or vampires.
"For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I yet pleased men, I should not be--"
This time, he was unable to finish his verse. Three pigeons, including the hat-wearing Conando who had joined in the fight earlier, had crept up behind the priest and were now flying straight up... while holding the back of the priest's robes in their foot-claws. He was too busy reading off his randomly-chosen Bible verse to notice that his pale, hairy legs were becoming visible. A slight breeze finally caught his attention, forcing him to abruptly stop reading from the Bible and look down.
"Huh," Pugh mumbled to himself. "So priests wear gold cross-print boxers under the robes. Who knew?"
The priest's face suddenly turned bright red, and once again the bulging vein appeared on his forehead. He was so distracted by this embarrassing situation that he didn't even notice that Pugh had very quickly cleared the distance between them and had crouched down slightly in preparation for an attack. The pigeons fluttered away and let his robe fall back down, and Pugh promptly sent the priest--and his robes--flying several feet up into the air with a powerful uppercut.
Everything seemed to slow down for a moment as the disgraced religious figure drifted up into the air over the road, robes fluttering in the wind as he went, Bible slipping loose from his hands and spinning up into the air at an unusual angle. After what seemed like a full minute of free-fall from the priest's point of view, he slammed down onto his back, groaning in pain and nearly losing his dentures from the force of the impact.
For a few fleeting seconds, the priest struggled to pull himself back up off the ground. At first, it even seemed like he would succeed in this endeavor; he was able to sit up straight, at the very least. But then, just as he was about to push himself back up onto his feet, the heavy leather-bound Bible came tumbling back down, landing right on the top of the priest's head. He groaned, mumbling what sounded like the last few slurred words of the interrupted Bible verse, and then fell over backward onto the street, the Bible flipping open and falling down so that it covered his face.
"Hmm... looks like that's the last of them," Pugh said, carefully dragging the priest by his feet until he was in the driveway rather than right in the middle of the road.
Of course, almost as soon as the words left his mouth, he heard another two sets of footsteps--this time accompanied by loud, Southern-accented voices--coming down the sidewalk toward his house. He quickly ran back over toward the house and ducked behind one of the bushes, then just watched as two rednecky-looking hunters wearing raggedy old camouflage outfits (and, of course, carrying double-barreled shotguns) walked out to the front of his driveway and stopped to look around.
"Dang it, Cletus," one of the two said, "I don't see nothin' here but a buncha people layin' on the ground."
The other redneck, apparently named Cletus, scratched his head and spit out a disgusting-looking wad of chewing tobacco before speaking.
"Maybe that vampire from the news done killed 'em all?"
The two hunters walked over to the unconscious priest's body, then moved on to the group of knocked-out teenagers, looking up and down in an attempt to figure out what happened to them.
"Naw, cain't be. Look, they ain't even bloody or cut up or nothin'."
He crouched down to take a good look at some of the unconscious teenagers, and Cletus stuffed another wad of tobacco into his mouth before squatting down next to him to watch.
"See, lookit this'un, Cletus," he continued, lifting up a teenage girl's hair to take a closer look at her neck. "Ain't no vampire done did this. They's always goin' around bitin' the little girls' necks, y'know?"
Cletus shrugged and stood back up. Both rednecks looked around the yard for another few minutes, but eventually they decided that there probably wasn't anything around that they could legally shoot at. Disappointed, they slung their shotguns over their shoulders and walked off to find something else to do.
Once the coast was finally clear, Pugh stood up from behind the bush and brushed a few stray leaves off of his cape, then immediately went to work coming up with a way to explain why so many people were lying around unconscious this early in the morning. Looking up and down the street, he spotted a house that had been abandoned recently, and an idea quickly began to form...
About an hour later, everything was set up perfectly. Pugh had moved the two vans into the abandoned house's driveway, setting them up in the same position they had been in before. He had also relocated all of the unconscious would-be vampire hunters, setting them up in various embarrassing positions in the backyard, using some empty beer cans and bottles borrowed from one of the neighbors' recycling bins to imply that they had ended up this way due to some sort of deranged, booze-soaked party the previous night. The priest was slumped over one of the picnic tables with one arm around one of the teenage girls and the other just inches away from a large bottle of wine. The fat, yellow-suited exterminator was lying on his back underneath a small tree, using a pile of beer cans as a pillow. The Shankheimer family looked as if they had all passed out on top of each other, with three empty bottles of vodka sitting on the picnic table next to them. And finally, the rest of the teenagers were spread out across the rest of the yard in various states of undress, though none of them were quite to the point where they could've been arrested for indecent exposure (Pugh didn't want to see any more of them than he absolutely had to.)
Once Pugh was finished distributing the rest of the empty cans and bottles, the formerly-abandoned backyard had become a pretty convincing replica of a drunken party's aftermath. It was entirely likely that, when they finally did wake up, they would all be so embarrassed by the scene that even they would believe it; the fact that most of them would wake up with a pounding headache would make it even easier for the not-so-bright crowd to believe, even if they all remembered being beaten up by a vampire instead.
After adding the final touches to the scene, Pugh dusted off his hands and returned the neighbor's (now empty) recycling bin to its place in front of their house, then headed back inside for some much-needed rest.
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