BLOOD IS BLOOD

 

Nothing has ever been so loud as the sound of his brother dying. In reality, Seth knows, it was barely a whisper; just Richie mouthing the words, “Fucking bitch, fucking bitch,” over and over until the words died off and the blood stopped flowing. But in his head, its all bells and whistles and fucking guns going off; it’s the world ending. It’s the loud, screaming finish to everything that Seth has ever known, or given a damn about.

In comparison, his brother waking up is a small, quiet affair. Maybe this is because, when Richie died, everyone was dying, but when he woke up only he woke up. All the other vampires are dead, and then there’s Richie, eyes open and trained right on Seth’s eyes, mouth saying, “I love you, too,” around sharp teeth.

And in the back of Seth’s mind, there’s a quiet little voice saying, I have a second chance.

Even when Richie attacks him, even when his face twists and deforms like a piece of wet clay, this is all Seth thinks. When some asshole comes between them and points a piece of wood at his brother’s chest, this is what makes Seth point a gun at the back of the guy’s head and say, “Touch my brother with that stake, biker, and vampires won‘t need to suck your blood; they’ll be able to lick it up off the floor.”

The guy looks at him like he’s crazy. And maybe he is, but blood is blood, and Seth still has Richie’s blood all over his hands. “He ain’t your brother anymore.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, and I don’t give a fuck about yours.”

Out of the corner of his eyes, Seth can see Jacob move closer, his hands held out placatingly. “Don’t be an idiot, Seth. He’ll kill us all.” In the background, the kids are holding their breath; Seth can tell they’re praying he won’t shoot their father.

Well, fuck that. He points the gun at Jacob. “Shut up.”

“Yeah, shut up.” Seth looks at Richie without moving his head. Richie’s face is back to normal, almost. His eyes are kind of…glowing, and his teeth are longer than they should be, but fuck it. If his face can go back to normal, so can the rest of him.

Seth fucked it up, but he can fix this. He can fix it. He has a second chance.

He takes the pool cue out of the biker’s hands, and says, “Come here, Richie.”

Richie smiles, and Seth tries to ignore how it makes his teeth look even sharper. He uses the pool cue to push the biker away from them, then throws it towards the bar, using his free hand to pull Richie close to him.

Kate says, “Oh, Jesus,” but Seth can’t tell if she’s swearing or praying.

Jacob’s still trying to reason with him. “Seth, that isn’t your brother. That’s the thing that killed your brother.”

Richie hisses, but Seth just places a calming hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Shut the fuck up, Jacob. I don’t wanna have to tell you again.”

“You’ve seen what these things look like when they die. They don’t die like humans, Seth. They die like dem—” Jacob jumps back, and thankfully shuts the fuck up, when Seth shoots at the floor in front of his feet.

“Well, my brother’s not going to die, so I don’t have to worry about that, now do I?”

Richie presses himself to Seth’s back, and breathes into his ear. “Let me kill him, Seth.”

Seth twists his head around to look at Richie. “You’re really not helping your cause here, Richie.”

“I’m hungry, Seth, so fucking hungry…” Richie’s voice is just a whisper, and it reminds Seth of when they were kids. Richie always relied on him, always asked permission back then, and with so much blood on their hands already, would it really matter?

Seth is thankfully saved from making the decision by the noises from outside. At first they were quiet, just an echo in the back of his head, but now they’re getting louder and louder. He’s not the only one who notices.

“What the hell is that?” Jacob asks.

The big black guy with the unlit cigar says, “At first I just thought it was birds.”

“No, its more of a gnawing sound,” the biker says. “Birds don’t gnaw, they peck. Rats gnaw.”

“Its them,” Richie says.

Everyone slowly, slowly turns to face him. “Them, who?” the black guy asks.

“The rest of them,” Richie says. “The rest of us. They’re coming to kill you. They’re not very happy about what you did to the girls.”

Seth sees some of the little bat claws coming in through the crack in the door. Jacob runs towards the door, yelling, “Give me a hand!” Somehow he and Scott manage to cover the crack with a table, the legs broken off, and then everybody else starts gathering things to board the door with. Except Seth. He stays still, gun in his hand, because all those people boarding them in have wood in their hands, and he’s not letting his brother die again.

Richie leans in close and says, “Be careful, bro. They’re gonna start waking up soon.”

“They who?” Seth says, but Richie doesn’t have to answer. Already Seth sees--all those people the vampires fed on are waking up, just like Richie did. One of them goes for Kate, and Seth yells, “Watch out!”

The girl’s smart, though. When the vampire grabs her, she throws her head back and breaks the fucker’s nose. The biker manages to stake the undead bastard, but at this point it doesn’t really matter. They’re waking up all around them now, sitting up with their eyes glowing and their teeth sharp.

“Do you see, Seth?” Jacob yells. “He’s not your brother anymore. He’s one of them.”

Seth turns to Richie, and that clay face is back. But Richie doesn’t go for his neck; he just stands there, looking into Seth’s eyes, searching for a clue. Seth grabs him by the back of the neck, pulls him close until they’re forehead to forehead. “I need you with me on this, buddy. I don’t want you to get staked, and I don’t want to get bit, either. Now, you get us out of here, and you can have all the blood you want. But you’re not gonna bite me, and you’re not gonna bite any of these people here, got it?” He pulls Richie’s hair a little, for emphasis, and Richie makes a noise that’s between a moan and a growl. “Good.”

They don’t waste time fucking around with a plan. They just kill as many vampires as they can, and during the fight Seth keeps on eye on Richie at all times, half to make sure he doesn’t kill anyone and half to make sure nobody kills him. He’d be lying if he said the former was more important to him.

Eventually the last one is dead, killed by a fucking pencil while his heart is beating in someone else’s hand, and fuck if that doesn’t put this whole thing into perspective for Seth. But Richie still hasn’t tried to kill anybody yet, although his face still looks like something out of a monster movie. There’s no way Seth can stake Richie now, not when he’s pressing himself against Seth, feeling exactly the way he did when he was alive. Except colder.

“What the fuck is going on here?” the biker asks.

Seth laughs a little and sits down in one of the only unbroken chairs, picking a knife up off the floor. “Well, I can see someone here didn’t watch enough horror movies as a kid.” He pulls up his sleeve, thinks about using his belt for a tourniquet but ultimately decides against it. “What’s going on here,” he says, “is fucking vampires,” and cuts into his arm, just below the elbow. Richie falls onto his knees in front of him, mouth already opening.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asks.

Seth looks up from the blood trailing down his arm from elbow to wrist. “I made a deal with Ritchie. He doesn’t kill any of you, I get him some blood. And since I don’t think any of you are gonna exactly offer yourselves up, I had to fulfill my part of the deal myself.”

“Wait!” Kate steps forward hesitantly. “Um, Richie, do you know…what is it that makes someone a vampire? Is it the saliva, like with rabies, or is it…” She gestures to his face.

“It’s the teeth,” Richie says thickly. “Like with snakes.” He leans down to lap at his brother’s arm.

“Well then, if you put your teeth in me, Richie, I put a piece of wood through your fucking chest.” It feels almost good, though. Richie’s tongue is rough, like a cat’s, pricking at the sides of the shallow wound, drawing out the blood. It’s almost like getting his cock sucked, that same suction and pressure.

Jacob looks away from the sight of Richie feeding on Seth. “I don’t care what makes a vampire. I care what kills them.”

“Agreed,” the black guy says.

“Well, we have a vampire,” the biker says. “Why don’t we ask him?”

“I don’t think he should talk with his mouth full,” Scott says. He looks vaguely ill, but he can’t take his eyes off the sight of the blood on Richie’s tongue.

“Crosses,” Kate says. Her hand strays up to her neck, finds it empty. “My cross made one of them explode.”

“Good. Crosses. Do we have any?”

Seth doesn’t really listen to the rest of the conversation, because Richie stops licks his arm a final time, and the pulls off. Seth looks at him and his face is back to normal again. He’s just glad that this time he didn’t have to see it shift. “Seth,” Richie says.

“Richie.” He touches his brother’s jaw.

And then they’re kissing. They haven’t had time to do this since Richie broke him out, and there was eight years there where they weren’t allowed to touch each other. Now they can, here, with Seth holding a knife in one hand and Richie on his knees on the blood-soaked floor of a Mexican titty bar. Richie’s mouth is exactly the same as it always was, except for a slight taste of copper.

They only stop kissing when someone clears their throat, loudly. The conference has evidently stopped, and the little group’s attention is now focused on Seth and Richie.

“I thought…he was your brother,” Kate says weakly.

“He is.” Seth shares one more look with Richie, palming the back of his head, and then he stands up. “So, what’s the plan?”

The black guy doesn’t even blink at Seth’s admission. “Daylight’s not for at least another two hours. But those bat motherfuckers are gonna break in way before then.”

“Okay. What do we have in terms of weapons? What’ll hurt these bastards?”

“As far as we know, pretty much the same stuff that hurts them in movies. Stakes. Garlic, maybe. Holy water.”

“Crosses,” Kate adds.

“But we don’t have any of the last three.”

“Not yet. Actually, our best bet against these motherfuckers is this man right here.” He points at Jacob. Even with his arm still bleeding, he can feel this. He’s in charge again. He is motherfucking Seth Gecko, and he can do this. “Our man Jacob is a preacher. And where there’s a preacher, there’s holy water, and there’s crosses, and there’s one big mess of dead fuckin’ vampires.”

Jacob shakes his head. “No. I’m not a minister anymore, Seth. Maybe your faith can come back from the dead, but mine can’t.”

He steps up closer to Jacob. “I know why you lost your faith, Jacob. How could true holiness exist if your wife can be taken away from you and your children? Now, I always said God can kiss my fuckin' ass.” He looks back at Richie, and his face is human and smooth, for the time being. “Well, I changed my lifetime tune about thirty minutes ago. As far as I’m concerned, God gave me a second chance with Richie. A chance to make things right. Now, you and I may look at what happened in two different ways. I look at Richie as a gift from God, and you look at him like a demon from hell. But either way, God exists. So what are you, a faithless preacher or a mean, motherfucking servant of God?”

Jacob just looks at him, and Seth sighs. Time to change his tune again. “Okay, how about this: you’re either a mean, motherfucking servant of God, or else your kids are going to die when those things come through the door.”

Their eyes lock onto one another’s, and now Seth knows they’re on the same page. Jacob reaches out to shake his hand. “All right. But you know that if that thing,” he gestures towards Richie, “tries to harm either of my children, I won’t hesitate to send him straight to hell.”

“Right. And you know that if any of you try to stake him unprovoked, I’ll send you there screaming after him.” It’s an uneasy truce, but a truce nonetheless.

When Seth looks away from Jacob’s eyes, he notices that Richie is staring at the biker. “What’s going on, Richie? You hungry again?”

“No,” Richie says, nodding towards the biker. “He is.”

The biker’s eyes widen. “What? No.”

Richie smiles, slow and predatory. “He’s turning. I can smell it all over him.”

“Wait—you mean he got bit?” Scott asks.

“He’s a fuckin’ liar! He’s one of them!”

“When we were killing them,” Richie continues, a smirk on his face. Seth recognizes that smirk. It means Richie’s got ahold of some information that was sure to eat someone up that Richie knew it, information that would bite away at that person’s defenses until he cracked. The kind of information Richie was good at using. “One of them bit you on the arm. I could smell your blood from across the room. I could smell—”

“You shut the fuck up!” The biker looks panicked, but Richie just keeps talking.

“I could smell the venom in your skin. And now I can smell it infecting you. Taking you over. Filling you up with thirst—”

“Blood-sucking motherfucker!” The biker lunges at Richie with the piece of wood that’s still in his hand, and Seth shoots him point-blank in the face.

He goes down, blood spreading like a halo around his head, and Richie falls immediately to his knees, teeth elongating and eyes glowing again. Kate has her hands over mouth, and Scott looks like he’s going to be sick. “Can I, Seth? Please, can I, he’s already dead, please,” Richie says, and his mouth is watering.

Seth just nods and sits down to reload his gun.

Jacob steps up to him. “You just shot a man in the face, Seth. You let that…that thing live,” he gestures to Richie, who is licking the blood from the hole where the biker’s face used to be, “and you killed a human being.”

“He’s not the first man I’ve killed, preacher, and I doubt he’ll be the last,” Seth says, but he feels tired. “Besides, he wasn’t going to be human for long.”

The big black guy just snorts and lights up another cigar. “Yeah. Take the word of a bloodsucker. That’s sure to pay off well for you.”

For the first time, Seth‘s reminded of the money, and he wonders how long it is till sunrise.

He stands up and goes over to the biker’s body. Richie hisses a little when Seth pushes him off, but he doesn’t do anything else. Most of the blood has been sucked out of the biker’s head, and its weird to see a wound like that, open and raw, but bloodless. He ignores the look on the dead guy’s face and pulls up the guy’s sleeve. The bite is small, deep enough that it broke the skin. “Yeah. Lets not take the word of a bloodsucker, cause if we do, then maybe some other fucking bloodsucker won’t be able to kill us all while our backs are turned.” He stands back up, disgusted at himself for shooting this guy, disgusted at himself for doubting Richie, even for a second.

Richie’s face is back to normal, and now that he’s…well fed, he doesn’t look so crazy anymore. Just the normal Richie-level of crazy. Kate steps up to him and touches his arm gingerly, but he doesn’t attack her. For the first time, it’s like the hunger in his eyes is gone—not the vampire-hunger, although that’s gone too. But the hunger that made him rape and murder and steal for no good reason, that’s not in his eyes anymore.

“Is he gonna…come back again?” Kate asks.

Richie shakes his head. “That prick’s as dead as a doornail. Seth shot him before he could turn entirel—” He stops suddenly, and looks at the door. They’d all forgotten about it, but the scratching and gnawing noises had been getting louder and louder, until now. Now, the noise has stopped.

“I think,” Richie says slowly, “we should all get the fuck out of here.”

It’s at that moment that the door bursts open, and hundreds of bats fly in.

* * *

Later, he doesn’t remember exactly what happened, just slices of it. He remembers running to a room behind the bar, all six of them crowded in the small space and looking desperately for weapons. He remembers making crosses out of sawed-down baseball bats, and Richie flinching as Jacob blessed them. He remembers that he considered shooting the big black guy—his name was Frost, Seth found out—when he saw the bite mark on his shoulder, and deciding that he’d be put to better use as muscle, thinking Let him die on his own time. He remembers Richie looking at the door, head cocked like he was hearing something besides the near-constant battering from outside the door. When he was asked, Richie said, “They’re calling for me. They don’t like traitors,” and then went back to hacking at wood for crosses.

He remembers Frost turning, and Kate shooting him in the chest with a crossbow. He remembers Jacob’s head torn nearly off, and feeling dully relieved that the man hadn’t had time to change into a demon.

He remembers telling Richie to hide in the back room until Seth came for him, and shooting out all the windows, watching the vampires turn to flame while Kate sobbed. He remembers pulling Scott into the back room by the nape of his neck and thrusting him in front of Richie, and the relief that filled him when Richie sniffed the scratch on the boy’s arm and said, “No. He won’t turn.”

After the vampires are dead, after everything is calm and quiet again, its clearer in his head. He draped Richie with a blackout curtain he found in the back room and led him into Jacob’s Winnebago. He kissed him on the forehead, and Richie smiled up at him, the way he did when they were kids, before closing his eyes to sleep. He helped Scott and Kate carry their bags to Seth’s car, and then tossed them the keys. When he handed them a wad of money, they both looked up at him with wide eyes, like Hansel and fucking Gretel, and asked if they could come with them, with him and Richie. When he said, “No,” and “I’m sorry,” and “Don’t spend the money in the states, all right?” Scott hugged him, and Kate kissed him on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “I hope everything goes okay with you two,” and then he watched them drive away.

Once they’re gone, he can breathe a little easier. They’ll be okay, even with their dad gone, because they still have each other.

Seth and Richie will be okay, too. Seth coped when Richie became a rapist, coped when he became a murderer. Now, both of those urges seem to be gone, and Seth thinks he can cope with this whole vampire thing. Sleep during the day, find a couple of jerkoffs a night for Richie to eat, and make sure he keeps his fucking teeth out of Seth’s neck.

Yeah. They’ll be fine.

 

Thanks to Lassiter for the super-quick beta.

END

 

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