100 Miles and Vampin' Read online

  100 MILES AND VAMPIN’

  Book Two of the Straight Outta Fangton Series

  By C. T. Phipps

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 C. T. Phipps

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  C.T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The Bookie Monster.

  Bibliography

  The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)

  The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)

  The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)

  The Kingdom of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #4)

  I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 1)

  An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 2)

  Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)

  Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)

  Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G, Vol. 1)

  Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G, Vol. 2)

  Agent G: Assassin (Agent G, Vol. 3)

  Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)

  The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)

  Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 1)

  Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 2)

  Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 1)

  100 Miles and Vampin’ (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 2)

  Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight, Vol. 1)

  Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight, Vol. 2)

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  “So how’s being the vampire Judge Dredd working out for you?” My friend David Treme said as he read a copy of Sexy Supernatural Hotties (SSH).

  The two of us were behind the counter of the Qwik and Shop, a knock-off of 7-Eleven that existed off the highway leading up to New Detroit. It was a ridiculous job to have when you were a vampire and a zombie, but we lived in a world where the supernatural had been revealed to mundanes. After ten years of the oogie boogie being everywhere you turned around, two monsters serving Slurpees wasn’t that impressive anymore.

  David had long blond hair, a baseball cap on his head, a baggy Metallica t-shirt, blue jeans, and a look that spoke to a lifelong refusal to admit the nineties were over. The only things that marked him as a zombie were death-like pallor and a stitched over throat from where he’d had it slit.

  “My other job is terrible,” I said, returning a credit card to a woman who’d just realized she was being served by monsters. “It has no salary, all the other enforcers are jackasses, my bosses give Stalin a run for his money, and I’m constantly surrounded by things that want to kill me.”

  “So, it’s exactly like being the vampire Judge Dredd,” David said.

  “Yeah.”

  Thanks to a misadventure awhile back, I was now New Detroit’s bellidix, which amounted to being sheriff for Michigan’s vampires. I answered to the voivode and City Council that enforced the laws of the undead. Whenever they asked me to jump, I had to ask how high, and that was high since I had the power to fly.

  The woman picked up her card as if it had been contaminated by my touch, made a cross over her chest and exited out the door.

  “Thank you, come again,” I said, waving goodbye. “I hate this job so very much.”

  “Then why don’t you quit?” David said, showing his usual level of sympathy. “It’s not like this world is going to end if you don’t deal with all the dumbass customers stopping by for candy bars or booze. They’re all on their way to gamble and get their photos taken with the undead. Even the bigots. Especially the bigots.”

  New Detroit was the Mecca, Dubai, and Las Vegas for the undead. Ever since the Bailout, the event where the vampires of the world had revealed themselves to the public while rescuing the United States from bankruptcy, they’d been re-developing America’s Rust Belt into a place supernaturals could live openly among humans.

  It was an experiment with mixed results since most older vampires had difficulty adjusting to the idea humans were not just food and/or sex toys. The fact that the United States was the most religious country in the Western World, and we reacted to crosses like someone shoving a torch in our faces hadn’t helped matters. Personally, I would have set up vampire HQ in Canada. It’s not like the cold ever bothered me anyway.

  “Quitting isn’t an option,” I said, walking back to the Slurpee machine. “I still have bills to pay and even being your roommate means we can barely afford our trailer. Worse, there aren’t a lot of jobs where the owner doesn’t give a crap if I take three or four nights off to kill some rabid fangbros eating tourists.”

  I had other expenditures too, things I didn’t like to talk about with David but weighed heavily on my mind. Things like taking care of my dementia-suffering mother. You’d think the fact the upper crust of vampires, a.k.a. the 1% of the 1%, who ruled the world behind the scenes, could have bothered to share some of that wealth. Then again, you didn’t get to become a trillionaire by being charitable unless you were Bil
l Gates and he wasn’t a centuries-old vampire.

  David shrugged. “Our boss doesn’t care because he’s on a combination of meth and a pharmacy of prescription drugs. I doubt he noticed you were gone.”

  “True. Steve being a werewolf is probably the only reason he’s still alive,” I said, jiggling the Slurpee machine to make it work. “But it just proves my point.”

  I’d learned my boss, Steve Emerson, was a cousin of werewolf royalty in a town called Bright Falls. The town was about thirty minutes away and filled to the brim with shifters. The shifter part was an argument right there for never going anywhere near it. Vampires and werewolves were related, one could even spawn the other, but it was a Cain and Abel sort of relationship. Personally, I’d lost all respect for them as monsters when I’d heard there was a weredeer branch of their race. I mean, seriously?

  “Can’t you just ask Thoth for money? He’s the vampire king now, isn’t he?” David asked.

  Thoth was my creator and probably the second most powerful vampire in New Detroit, especially after marrying the voivode Ashura. They lived the kind of glamorous unlife closer to what I’d expected upon being created. Their existence was a whirl of constant orgies, parties, and plots to rule the world. They could easily drop a million bucks on an A-list celebrity to donate a combination of blood and sex to their nightly entertainment.

  And did.

  “Thoth still thinks I need to be my own man,” I grumbled.

  “Didn’t you save the whole damn city?” David asked.

  “You were there,” I pointed out.

  “Still kind of blurry about that night given it got me killed and all,” David said. “What a world.”

  “Ain’t no rest for the Wicked isn’t just a song by Cage the Elephant.” I picked up an empty Slurpee cup and put it beside the full one. Sticking my straw in my Red Cherry SuperBombTM, I slurped my drink then spit it out into the other cup. I didn’t have the capacity to swallow anything but blood anymore, but I still liked the taste of sugar.

  “That’s really disgusting,” David said, grimacing. “I never noticed that while I was high on your blood.”

  David used to be my human servant; my Bloodsworn. “How’s being a zombie anyway? Finally got adjusted to it? I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to ask about it these past few months.”

  Honestly, I hadn’t wanted to ask about it. David had been pestering me for the entirety of our master-servant relationship to turn him into a vampire. I hadn’t because: one, I had spent five years as a Bloodsworn before Thoth turned me and two, vampires were very picky about population control these days. In the end, fate had made my choice for me, and Thoth had been forced to raise him as a different kind of undead. A decidedly far less sexy and well-respected form of monster. At least he was the Haitian voodoo kind of zombie instead of the George Romero kind.

  Supposedly.

  David shrugged. “I don’t have to use the bathroom, I don’t have to eat, I don’t sleep, and I need to take baths twice a day in order to keep my body moist enough that I don’t become all stiff.”

  “No need for brains? The flesh of the living?” I asked, less than delicately.

  “Not that I can tell,” David said, stretching his neck with a slight cracking noise. “There’s one big downside, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “I was watching IZombie today and saw both Rose McIver and Rahul Kohli in swimwear for their latest case.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing,” David said, sighing.

  “Nothing?” I asked. “Not a thing? You can’t…uh, respond anymore?”

  “Nope,” David said. “It’s as dead down there as the rest of me.”

  “I’m so sorry, man,” I said, before blinking. “Wait a minute, then why continue to read the men’s magazines?”

  “I still maintain a purely aesthetic appreciation for the human form.”

  “So, you’re asexual instead of bisexual now?”

  David glared. “Hey, hey, I decide how to identify my sexuality.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, pal.”

  Everyone had gotten extra sensitive since the Bailout, now more commonly called the Reveal. Personally, it was enough to drive me off the internet as everyone was always calling me either a crypto-fascist or a species traitor depending on what forums I was posting on. I mean, couldn’t a guy just hope Wesley Snipes did another Blade movie without making it a big deal? Why did it have to be controversial that he was slaying vampires when they were a real minority? Dude still looked badass doing it.

  “Thank you,” David said, smirking. “Besides, zombie or not, living forever is still pretty sweet. It’s not like I’m getting any less sex than I was before. Well, with other people. I can still do the other kind.”

  “Way too much information, David. Actually, no, wait, I hate to ask this but uh...just to make sure...there’s no, um, rotting?”

  “This is getting a bit personal.”

  “We use the same bathroom, so I think it’s a relevant question.”

  “No rotting,” David said.

  I nodded. “Good.”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  I owed Thoth big time for what he’d done, more than he could ever have repaid in money. His restoring my best friend to life was a gift that made unlife bearable. Of course, it was kind of unnerving to find out your creator could raise the dead, but I wasn’t exactly going to complain either. I wish he’d had this power eight years ago when my brother passed on.

  Steve Emerson arrived, somehow looking both stoned and wired at the same time. He was wearing leather pants, a leather vest with no undershirt, and a dog collar. It made him look like a BDSM slave at the world’s crappiest bondage club. I also noticed a couple of new tattoos, and I wondered when he’d found time for that given he was usually passed out in his office or at home. Did I mention he was a millionaire? His cousins, the O’Henrys, owned all of rural Michigan. The world was not fair.

  “How was your visit to Bright Falls?” I asked.

  “Too many other shifters. Gerald Pasteur says hello.”

  I nodded. He’d been a friend of mine before he’d gotten himself banished. The only vampire among the shifters. It was a fate worse than death, truly. “Tell him to make sure he flosses after he feeds. You never know how much hair is going to get stuck there.”

  “Cute,” Steve said, going to the back and returning. He was carrying a mop in his right hand. “I’ve got a job for you in the men’s bathroom.”

  Right, don’t make fun of the werewolves. “Great.”

  “Someone created another vampire?” David asked. He was making a reference to last year when I’d found someone had left an abandoned newborn in the can. I’d thought Melissa and I had something special, but we hadn’t spoken in months.

  “No, someone just had too many tacos,” Steve said, sniffing through his left nostril. “It’s a real mess in there.”

  I sighed and looked over at David. “I don’t suppose you’re willing to do this for me, my faithful servant?”

  “Sorry, I’m Thoth’s zombie now,” David said. “But if it’s any consolation, nothing is stopping you from getting another Bloodslave.”

  “I can’t afford you,” I said, noting finances were getting thin. Thoth had been kind enough to give me almost 50K in cash for saving the city last year. I’d ended up using almost all of it looking after my mom, and got her transferred to an assisted living facility that wasn’t ass. Apparently, the fact I was a creature of the night who could rip their throats out without consequence didn’t get me a discount. And people call us leeches.

  David shrugged. “We’ll work on that. Make it a hot chick or a hot dude. I’m not picky. Hotter than you. Ooo, let’s make someone rich into our servant so we can mooch off them. See if Taylor Swift wants the job. Maybe Rihanna.”

  “Pfft, I’d make Rihanna a vampire…and then she’d dump me for a better quality of vampire.” I rolled my eyes and walked
around the counter to take the mop. “Seriously, David, do this for me. What would you be if not for me?”

  “Alive?” David suggested.

  I paused. “Fair enough.”

  Steve handed me the mop. He’d been standing there the whole time, looking at us as if he were statues. “If you two yokels are done bantering, I’ve got heroin to shoot.”

  “Right,” I said, sighing.

  Heading back to the men’s bathroom, I heard Steve call, “Oh, hey, your vampire hunter turned vampire girlfriend called.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. “Melissa? Melissa Morris?”

  “You have another vampire hunter turned vampire girlfriend?” Steve asked.

  “When was this?”

  Steve said, “I dunno, it was left on my machine in the office. I listened to it four or five hours ago when I got back into town. She said she was coming into town and wanted to know if you wanted to meet up.”

  I checked my cell phone and saw it had died. Dammit. I’d been ignoring it since every time someone called me, it was to intimidate some newborn vampire into behaving around the tourists. “You didn’t think to tell me this?”

  “Of course I did, as soon as I remembered,” Steve said. “Which was now because I don’t care about your love life.”

  “You should call her back,” David called to me. If I was inclined to eat the brains or other parts of anyone, I would eat her. Her or Jason Momoa. Mmm Khal Aquaman of Cimmeria. Just the thought of tearing into his gooey fleshy bits and devouring the gristle…”

  I gave him a sideways glance. “Uh huh.”

  “But I’m not inclined to eat anything on anyone,” David said quickly, like he was snapping out of a daze. “Wait, I do kind of have a craving for raw meat. Maybe I should call Thoth and ask what a zombie’s diet is.”

  “Maybe you should. I’m going to go clean the bathroom and pretend that conversation never happened.” I headed to the bathroom door, which now had a big ‘Out of Order’ sign on it. I was grateful to have a distraction now as the subject of Melissa wasn’t one I was really interested in discussing even with my best friend, let alone him and my boss.