Apathetically Ever After
By Mia Darien
Copyright 2011 Mia Darien
Smashwords Edition
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In retrospect, slugging Charlie Peterson in the chin that way after fourth period was probably not the brightest of ideas I've ever had. Being bad at it really just made it worse because I broke his nose instead of bruising his jaw, and I think that was definitely the worse offense. My saying as much right after didn't really seem to help my case either and thus sped up the unhappy result, although it all depends on how you look at it, in the end.
"I didn't think they'd stuff a girl in a locker," Julia whined.
I rolled my eyes, despite the fact that she couldn't see me. "Of course they stuff girls in lockers. They'd put the principle in here, but they know they're too dumb to get away with it." I did have experience in this area.
She huffed somewhere to my immediate left.
Let's review.
My name is Jake Mills. I'm a junior at Walter Seymour High in small city called Redmont in Georgia. It was somewhere after midnight on October the thirtieth, so technically it was the thirty-first by now. My girlfriend, Julia Banks, and I were locked in side by side lockers on the third floor and had been for a while now. You can guess how we got there.
I feel that I should add that it was Julia's fault we were in here in the first place. I suppose it wouldn't have been so bad by her standards if it had just been me who got shoved in the locker, but she was pissed that being a girl didn't give her immunity.
I'll also add at this point that this is not a how-the-geek-got-the-girl kind of story. I freely confess to the fact that I am a card carrying member of the geek kingdom, but I already had a girl. We were, after all, romantically trapped in side by side lockers. Maybe she wasn't a great girl, but I was a geek and she was a girl, so that was enough for me. Besides, no one else had asked.
"They're coming back, right? They're going to let us out, right? It's getting really late, so it can't be much longer," Julia went on. I could hear her heel banging against the bottom of the locker. She was nervous and she should be. It was Halloween in Redmont, after all. Bad things happened here on Halloween; weird things, all sorts of things. They always had. I don't know why, but they just did. It was a bad day to be an unlucky person on. So I was nervous too, but more than that, I was angry. "Do you think they did this on purpose? They know what day it is."
The next banging to be heard was me, my head and the locker door. I didn't have enough room or mobility to make a really effective noise, but I thought it did the trick. "Of course they did it on purpose!" I shouted and then regretted it as my voice ricocheted off the locker walls and assaulted my ears. "I don't think they're coming back. Peterson probably hopes a convicted murderer from Georgia State Prison will have escaped and kill us and then he won't have to worry about me any more."
There was a snort and then a sniffle. "It's not like he had to worry about you all that much before," she pointed out. I could hear in her tone that she was angry at me for shouting, so she was going to be spiteful. It seemed to be a common enough trait in the female population. Then again, thinking about Peterson and his bad taste to lock us up on this day, of all days, I figure spite ran pretty strong in humans in general. There was a good dose of apathy, too. It had been ten hours and Peterson wasn't coming back. I was also beginning to think that Julia wouldn't have either if it had just been me in this locker.
"I love you too," I muttered. "We've got to get out of here."
"How?"
"If I knew that, then I'd already be working on it and not talking about it, now wouldn't I?" I asked. "Or if I'd figured something out a little sooner than now, I would have already done it instead of letting us be trapped here for ten hours. At this rate, we could very well be stuck in here until after the weekend."
There was a long silence. I was beginning to wonder if she'd had a heart attack and died in there. I hoped not, although after ten hours of being stuck in a locker, I wouldn't necessarily have been surprised. She'd start to smell real fast stuck in that small space if she had bit it, though. Even in October, the south gets warm and it wasn't going to be pretty if I was stuck next to a corpse for possibly forty-eight hours, or more. The locker vents were only enough to breathe, not to fumigate.
"It's all just rumors, isn't it?" she finally asked. "That stuff isn't really true."
She had spoken. Good news, she wasn't dead.
"You just moved here the past year. I've been here a lot longer. It's true and it's true enough that the last place I want to be is stuck in a locker today of all days." I started again on the pulling back and trying to toss myself in to the locker door, but there wasn't much room for getting a head of steam in here.
"I'm sorry," Julia suddenly said in a small voice.
I stopped. I wasn't sure if I'd heard her right. "What was that?"
There was a loud breath. "I said I'm sorry," she repeated, louder. "I didn't mean to get us stuck in here."
"Charlie Peterson is a jerk," I said. "It happens. The more important thing right now is getting the hell out of here. I don't want to be the fish in the proverbial barrel."
"Which rumors are true?"
"All of them, everything you might have heard; everything is true," I replied.
I then both felt and heard my stomach growl. My legs gave an echo of aching in response and my brain started rattling around in my head. Until then, a certain sort of adrenaline had done very well to keep me from feeling any of this, but now that was starting to abandon me, too. It was letting the past ten hours catch up to me. This wasn't going to do anything good for me.
Julia's voice started trembling on the next question. "What could possibly come after us here, though?"
"Anything," I replied. "Believe me, a High School is not some holy ground. Nowhere is safe in this town on Halloween."
"Why do you people live here?"
"Every place has its problems. Every city has a price to pay. This is a great place all year, really. It just has the one flaw, and that flaw happens to be that things go batshit here on Halloween. Compare it to the big cities and how they are every day, and this place really isn't so bad," I replied. "Play it careful and you can get through it. Don't do anything stupid and we'll be fine." I rolled my eyes and stared upward in the darkness. "We've already done the stupid, but let's try to limit it from this point on."
There was another long period of silence. I was thinking. I'm not sure what she was doing, but neither was getting us out of there.
"Do you know how they say an animal will chew off its own leg to get out of a trap?" she asked.
"Yeah, I've heard that," I replied slowly. "What precisely are you suggesting?"
The pause told me that she hadn't really thought that one out. "I don't know. Chew ourselves up in to pieces small enough to fit through the grate?"
I tried to figure out if she was serious or not. My head fell forward again, hit the door...
...and the door opened. I tumbled on to the floor, hitting my head on the tiles but not hard enough to do any serious damage. Every muscle in my body that had been cramped before now screamed in pain as they were suddenly unfolded. As a matter of fact, I think that I screamed, too.
"What's wrong? What's going on?" Julia cried out from her locker. There was panic in her voice.
I groaned. "My door somehow opened," I replied, trying to command limbs to function properly and get me on to my feet. I looked around as my eyes adjusted from the pitch black of the locker to the semi-light of the school hallway.
"Get me out of here!" Julia practically shrieked.
"I'm working on it," I growled, able to get to my feet and staggering to the door she was behind, working off the lock and opening it to let her tumble out next. I tried to catch her, but we both just ended up falling down again. I was a little quicker to get back to my feet this time, although it was harder with Julia was weighing me down. "Come on," I urged. "We've got to get the hell out of here."
"Where are we going to go?" she cried.
"I don't know, but out of here!"
Grabbing her by the upper arm, I pulled her on to her feet and then started dragging her down the corridor. It was hard to see precisely where we were going, but I had a good idea of the school's floor plan and was crossing my fingers that it would see us through. I remember skidding around a corner past the chemistry lab and then sprinting past the math classrooms, which I never liked anyways.
We stumbled down the stairs, but made it to the first floor atrium. That put the front doors not far away and as we rounded the corner, I saw the moonlight coming through and felt a thrill of hope. If we could get through those doors, we could find somewhere safer. Safe was being around other people in well lit areas and not trapped with a whining girlfriend in a school that wouldn't turn on the lights again until Monday.
"The doors," Julia shouted at me, pointing with her free hand, as if I couldn't see them for myself and just wore these glasses for the style.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Julia hadn't said that. I knew that I hadn't either.
This was definitely an 'oh shit' moment.
The light coming in from the doors was suddenly blocked by the silhouette of a woman. I say woman because few figures I'd seen matched hers. This woman was probably taller than I was by a couple inches and she wore them well. (Yes, I'm male, this means she had big... yeah. They were a nice sight after being trapped in a locker for ten hours with Julia next to me.) Her voice matched her figure, too, and I had images of Julie Newmar, back in the day.
Meow.
"You don't want to leave so soon, do you?" she purred. Stepping forward just a little, the moon light came out from behind her and I saw her face.
"Tracy Hillman?" Julia asked in shock behind me.
"Tracy Hillman?" I echoed, although my shock was a little different. When I saw that shape appear in front of us, I had no idea it would be the gorgeous senior who sat behind me in my honors level English class; the one I fantasized about during the boring lectures on prose and poetry.
Tracy smiled a very cat-like smile. I didn't believe my eyes at first when I saw these long pointy teeth in there. "I knew you guys would still be here, because I was around when Charlie was threatening to get revenge on you for his broken nose. He's just a big wuss. His nose looks better now anyways."
Personally, I was entranced by her teeth, but Julia got a bit of an attitude. "You waited until now to come get us out? Your compassion overwhelms me." I hadn't even gotten to the idea that it was Tracy who'd gotten us out, but if it had been, I didn't think this was time to give someone lip. Then again, I'm not a girl.
"I had to wait till now," Tracy explained. "I had to wait till midnight," she went on with another smile. This time, her tongue slipped out and ran down each of those two long teeth. If we hadn't noticed them before, it was impossible to miss them now.
"Oh," Julia said in that small voice and then her voice pitched towards me. "I guess this is what you meant by those rumors being true," she went on.
"Yeah, but I've never seen vampires," I replied. I had seen and heard of a lot, and some pretty weird shit, but this was a new one. Still, I'd seen enough to take things at face value when they happened on this night. I came out of my entranced state and began to realize that maybe we should have been running all this time.
Tracy tilted her head and this mass of black hair tumbled down over one shoulder and I was caught again. "We don't make as much of a mess as some of the others do," she explained and I did have to wonder why she was explaining at all, but who was I to argue? "See, we're only vampires for this one night. When the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its weakest then our... less living side comes out. We've got this one chance to feed enough to last the rest of the year and keep our other half alive until we can feed again."
"Feed?" Julia squeaked.
"Yes, feed," Tracy said with a sinister yet serene smile. "We're not like other vampires, though, and we have no interest in your blood. We just need your essences to keep us alive for the next year, and compared to the lives you lead, it won't really be giving up so much so that we can continue to live forever and be much more interesting than you are."
"Why Redmont?" Julia asked, and I wondered at the point of asking. There was a vampire standing in front of us and my idiot girlfriend was asking real estate questions.
Tracy laughed. "Why not?" she replied. "This place goes nuts once a year. Who's going to notice a few vampires taking a few essences? Especially since they won't notice that much; just a few missing people. More over, who's going to pay much attention to who they are, though no one who knows us is left alive anyway. Still, it makes it easier. We get to keep on living our lives the rest of the year as we like, until the whole immortal deal catches up and starts looking fishy, then we have to pack it in. But for now? It works."
"Do you always play with your food?" I asked with a small smirk. I was of two minds on this one. Part said to keep her distracted so we could get away, but another part just wanted to keep talking to her. It wasn't that I liked what she was saying, but I liked hearing her say it.
"Actually, yes," Tracy said with a musical laugh. "It's more than that, though. I've always noticed you, Jake. I thought you were cute, but..." she trailed off, looking at Julia and then just shrugging. "You know," she finished.
Julia squawked.
"Shut up," I growled at her.
Tilting her head, Tracy gave me a smile. "I'll tell you what," she said. "I'll do you two favors, because you're cute, I like you, and because you've been stuck in a locker since school ended. I'll warn you that I'm not alone in here. That's one."
"What's the second?" I asked carefully.
"I'll give you a head start," she purred, leaning forward with a grin.
Tearing my eyes away from the sight of all that cleavage, I turned and ran. They would probably catch us, I realized. I mean, we were two high school kids trapped in a dark building with a bunch of vampires, what chance did we really have? Still, it would seem wrong to not at least try to get away and I knew that there were other exits from the school. It was the same thing like what happened with me and Peterson earlier. I knew that it wouldn't end well, but sometimes you just have to do something, and sometimes there only seems to be one path.
Julia ran a lot slower than I did, although I managed to somehow get her to keep pace with me as we bolted down dark hallways and around shadowy corners headed for nowhere. It was frustrating because I thought that you would manage a better speed when running for your life like we were doing. Maybe I was just expecting too much.
"The cafeteria," I hissed, pointing ahead of us where I saw two squares that were lighter than the surrounding rectangles and I figured we had to be nearly to the cafeteria. We ran head first through the doors, tumbling to a pile on the slippery floor before hauling back up on to our feet and making a mad dash for the kitchen. "At least we'll have food," I went on whispering as we slipped inside, looking around for signs of anyone, or anything, else.
"While we try to avoid being food?"
"Something like that," I whispered back as we crawled underneath the metal serving counters deeper in to the kitchen.
"I don't think you'd do very well."
Did I say that? No... Did Julia? No... Unfortunately, that only left one candidate for the dulcet tones above my head.
Tracy was on one knee on the top of the counter and I'd never even heard her. Now there were others, although I couldn't see them very well. Tracy smiled. "It's not very easy to hide in High School when they want to find you," she pointed out and that was a point that was hard to argue. Looking up, she nodded to the others and they all started closing in. There was nowhere else to run to...
"Wait!" I shouted.
"Why?" Tracy asked, tilting her head and blinking like a predator that had just been confused by their prey, which... was really precisely what she was.
I floundered. "You said you thought I was cute," I said. "I was hoping to build on that."
Even as I said it, I knew that it didn't sound like the great escape that a hero in a novel or a comic book or even a bad B movie would say, but I guessed that's why I was the geek who read the stories instead of writing them, or living them.
Still, as ridiculously bad as my line was, Tracy seemed to be thinking about it.
"Maybe," she said and then looked thoughtful for a few more moments. "All right, you have two choices: we eat you, or we turn you. You're cute, wouldn't mind seeing you around for a while longer, so we could turn you... but there'd be a price."
"What, you mean like the whole turning in to an evil monster that eats people's essences every Halloween?" I asked, not entirely without seriousness.
Tracy laughed and it was a nice sound. I could envision spending a while listening to that laugh. "No," she replied with an indulgent smile. "The cost is... her," she went on, pointing at Julia who was trembling behind me. "We won't leave hungry. We came here on the promise of dinner."
I glanced over my shoulder at Julia, whose eyes were wide with terror, and then back at Tracy. I thought about the entirety of my day, and the past fifteen minutes trying to keep ourselves away from the creepy ass to-die-for chick with the pointy teeth. I thought about Charlie Peterson, and then about Julia egging me on earlier to defend her when Charlie - who had a good fifty pounds on me - had allegedly called her some name that wasn't really that bad, and the fact that I had let her talk me into it.
"Sure," I said with a shrug. Why should I die for Julia, after all? It wasn't like she'd done much for me anyways, getting me stuck in the damn locker in the first place. And there are just times when you have to do something.
Behind me, Julia screamed and clawed at my shirt, but the group was on her in an instant and pulled her away from me as Tracy took my hand and led me to another room. Julia's screams died off pretty quick and I was relieved. Her scream was as awful as her whine.
Tracy was good to her word and I spent the next day resting while the town did its annual dissolving go-round, and then on into the next night when I learned how to prolong my life through the lives of others, although I'd had a pretty good lesson in that the night before and was pretty good at it, I discovered.
I knew that come November 1st, no one would ask many questions about where Julia had gone. It had been another Halloween in Redmont, Georgia after all - home of the utterly bizarre and dangerous Halloween holiday. These things happen. I wasn't worried.
Tracy and I would stick together for a while, too. I wasn't worried about that either.
So, maybe this was a how the geek got the girl kind of story. It just wasn't the girl I started out with, you see.
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About the Author:
Mia Darien has lived in New England all of her life and knows that no matter where she goes from here, New England is always going to live in her. Presently, she still lives in the land of snow and fast talkers, with her husband, her son and her pets. She writes a bit of everything genre fiction (horror, romance, mystery, fantasy and science fiction) and thinks it sounds like an odd joke: a unicorn, a space monster, and a pair of zombie lovers walk into a murder investigation...
Other Works by Mia Darien at Smashwords:
Anniversary - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/91168
Descent - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/83622
Apathetically Ever After - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/95958
Connect with Me Online:
My Site: http://www.miadarien.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MiaDarien
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/author.miadarien
GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/mia_darien