So I Might Be a Vampire - Book 1 (Original Version)

3: Avoid Vampires

I'm going to cut to the chase here: you should definitely at all costs, avoid a vampire whenever possible.

See, the problem is that maybe 100 years ago you could actually do that, but these days, taking population explosion into account, maybe one person in every 50,000 you meet just might be a vampire. Avoidance might be a bit of an issue if you're that eager to not run into one, so yeah... good luck with that.

Imagine it. You're an ordinary guy, around thirty, which is my age, so you've grown up on a steady diet of rock music, horror movies, too much alcohol and withered expectations. I know exactly where Sidney was coming from since I used to be that guy who believed on some level that the movies got it right about vampires, no matter how many times they contradicted themselves.

I was that guy, and you were that guy too. Or the girl. Whatever. Stay with me on this.

Too many nights you've gotten drunk watching some bad horror movie with cheesy special effects or an equally bad horror movie with excellent effects. Either way, the movie is shit and you know it, and you love it. After all, you've been watching all kinds of horror movies since you were about eight, in an age before all the kids were on some sort of medication and before somebody's parents weren't trying to hide your eyes and your fragile little mind from the horror that is... well, horror movies. Usually, the most horrible thing on the screen was the story, but that type of analysis would come later when you became a teenager and by extension, an expert on everything under the sun.

By eleven, you were reading all kinds of horror novels, from Stephen King to Dean Koontz (although you gave up on him after all his books followed the same damn plot structure), and then Clive Barker entered the mix followed, of course, by Anne Rice and lots and lots of Neil Gaiman. You were the kid that everybody talked about and avoided because you were so weird and dressed in black all the time and why were you reading all the time anyway? Only weirdos spent that much time with their heads buried in books like they were always up to something.

By the time you were getting drunk at your best friend's house at the tender age of seventeen, you had seen it all and knew absolutely nothing about everything. But it was just an affliction, easily cured by turning twenty and having to get your first job.

So, of course, you know everything there is to know about the world, and still have no idea how or where you're even going fit in, but there are some immutable facts about the world and one of those facts is something you don't even have to think about: vampires don't exist.

Sure you and your friends have talked about how cool it would be if vampires did exist, but none of that talk is serious and is quickly forgotten, abandoned to dreams and broken, drunken memories. Most of that talk is nonsense in any case and none deal with the reality of how vampires would exist alongside with the rest of us and how invisible they would have to be to survive.

***

I noticed a girl at the bar glance over at us and look away, then she did a doubletake and her eyes widened, her mouth forming the words "What the fuck?" as her brain tried to figure out just what was going on, before deciding that she wasn't drunk enough for this shit and turned back to the bar.

So much for keeping a low profile.

Sidney's other hand was back in the bag and I knew it was clutching a wooden stake of some kind, either crudely made in Sidney's backyard or a prop purchased from the Internet. I thought about it and decided it had most likely been bought from some stupid vampire website that sold pieces of wood "blessed by a priest and sprinkled with Holy Water" to gullible people like Sidney. They weren't even hand-carved for a hint of authenticity, but instead were identical machine cut pieces of wood. Of course he had paid too much for it; it wouldn't be a proper scam if he didn't pay too much.