Fathers Synopsis Rewrite

Fathers Synopsis

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” In most of the horror genre, evil is out to get good, whether on religious, vindictive, or simply sadistic bases. Fathers is a different kind of horror, where evil doesn't have to go out of its way to haunt, eat, or violate good. Evil simply has to do what it does best in the real world: stop good acts from happening. The heroes of Fathers are three normal people—a man, a girl, and a mother—who are trying hard to do what they think is best in a city full of people who, by trying to live normal lives, get in their way.

Book One: Fathers.

It begins with a normal night for Paul Moeller, a businessman with an appetite for cheating on his wife, Beatrice. When his prostitute drugs him and attempts to murder him, Paul transforms into a monster, going on a city-wide murder spree and finally collapsing into his bed at home. When he wakes up, he finds that the world hasn't noticed his apparent massacre: the world has transformed, and his wife has disappeared. He goes back to his office to find that it's full of drones. Business as usual, right? But now, their bodies reflect their mundane, uninteresting lives. Paul's coworkers no longer have faces, only smooth panes of skin. They make noises to indicate conversation, but their mouths are no longer necessary, and they can only inflect. Thinking that he's suffering from some kind of drug withdrawal, and still recoiling from violent memories of the night before, Paul begins his quest to find out what happened to his world.

The unnamed and unfamiliar metropolis is the centerpiece of Fathers, and as Paul goes from area to area, it dawns on him that perhaps he's not having some kind of drug-induced fever dream. The cops of the city are huge, brutish, but they carry on petty arguments about whether it's worth the effort to hunt down the “real monsters.” Children, untamed by negligent parents are tiny imps, brutalizing weaker things without empathy or pity. In the city's theme park, ecstatic men are roasted on spits—and all the carnival-goers eat fresh kabobs. Paul is led on by a little boy who looks just like his abandoned son, and as he visits each city locale, he finds a dark exaggeration of what he remembers as real.

Vivid illusions of his wife being tortured rip at Paul's conscience. He tracks down the hooker's drug dealer, a stage performer at a seedy bar. Her name is Diana. She confesses that although she cut a mild hallucinogen into the drugs given to Paul, they're not responsible for the drastic change in the world. “Face it, honey. I'm real.” As she sings, her skin peels off and drifts away from her in slices, like rose petals. Unhelpful as she is, she does offer Paul one lead: one of her clients is his ex-girlfriend, now a helpless junkie.

Drug addicts in this world are one of the many enemies that Paul has to face. Instead of just wasting away with altered minds, the addicts crave only the blood of people they love, feasting on it then punishing themselves almost immediately afterwards. Paul's ex-girlfriend is a literal husk—the more drugs she consumes, the less of a person is left. Paul gives her a little bit of his blood in exchange for information that she claims to have. She confesses that she never put their son up for adoption when she said she would. After Paul left her, she killed the boy and threw him into a dumpster. Paul leaves, committed to finding his child, and his ex finds his blood bitter and unsatisfying.

Paul wanders through the world more, searching for evidence of his son and his wife, and finally finds them in the custody of a massive creature, bloated and blistered, called The Mayor. Consumed by excess and power-madness, Paul's negotiation with the Governor are a simple exchange of services. Paul leads four people, including Lenny Kennington, to the Governor for access to his wife and son. It turns out the boy, much like the children Paul sees earlier, is a monster, torturing Beatrice in a dungeon beneath the mayor's office. Paul rescues his wife, but, like always, chooses to abandon her to her fate, resolving instead to raise his son up properly and protect him from the nightmare world.

Book Two: Children.

Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside; she feels more committed to his idealistic morals than to her hardworking mother, who scrapes together a small suburban existence for Lenny and her four brothers, who all went into the military. All four suffer from cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, ranging from mild, in the case of the middle twins, to her nearly comatose youngest brother. Lenny divides her time between caring for her brothers and haunting a nearby servicemen bar. One night, two regulars give her crap about being a slut, and a man who looks just like her father comes to her rescue. After awkwardly turning down her advances, he gives her his phone number and address—he has an apartment in the city. She promises to stop by if she's ever in town.

She returns home to find her mother weeping uncontrollably. She has wept her eyes out of their sockets, and keeps trying to put them back in, babbling incoherently. On the kitchen table are four folded up army-issue flags as well as a letter saying that all four of Lenny's brothers are dead. Lenny, transitioning into the change much faster than Paul did, comforts her mom coldly, then packs a bag and heads into the city.

Traveling from a suburb into a city can be an adventure in and of itself. Lenny hitches a ride from a suburban family whose mother puppets her young children on literal strings, then gets on the subway, where anyone who makes eye contact gets attacked. On the train, she also meets Dinah King, who assures her that everything will be all right, because her baby says so. She goes through various other set pieces—a central transportation hub, a strip mall, and the college area—all the while finding her brothers pantomiming their wartime selves with innocent people. The twins, who jovially tortured people, torture themselves, while staring at each other in an empty mirror frame. The eldest appeals to attractive women, who are barely-responsive balloon figures, for forgiveness, then pops them when they can't respond.

The youngest is missing an arm and mutely scavenges others, trying to put himself back together. Lenny, still on the trail of the man she's sure is her father, has to try to sate their wartime desires, while keeping hold of the wonderful vision she has of patriotism and warfare. Her conclusion is that sacrifice of the self is worth it for the larger, greater thing, and she arranges to meet with The Mayor to negotiate the release of her father. The man slaps her, and tells her that sacrifice is sometimes letting other people take care of you. He fights the Mayor, and when the fight is over, Lenny finds herself back in the real world, forced to attend the funerals of her brothers and the mysterious stranger who looked just like her dad.

Book Three: Mother, tell your children not to walk my way.

Dinah King finds out that she's pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. After a few months, her ob/gyn gives her the bad news: the child has Down syndrome. “That can't be true,” Dinah insists. “My baby speaks perfectly.” As it turns out, Dinah's baby has already told her about his ailment and assures her that there is a cure at the heart of the city. The transformation of the city happens to Dinah as she clocks in for the graveyard shift at the stationhouse, and a horrible creature—recognizable as a transformed cop from Paul's earlier encounter with them—massacres a precinct of police. Dinah, however, is untouched, and her baby even seems to purr at the bloodbath.

Armed as best as she can, Dinah cuts into the heart of the city, following the footsteps of Paul and Lenny, but oddly in a different order. She goes to the Mayor's office first, where she finds and patches up Morgan, the man who looks like Lenny's dad, and Beatrice. She helps them defeat the Mayor, and recruits them to help her navigate the city safely.

Beatrice leads her to Diana, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dinah. She demands to follow them wherever they go, but ends up leaving a trail of skin petals for the Mayor's henchman, a ravenous beast who needs a master to live. The big set piece of Dinah's chapter is going into the underground mall and appealing to the queen of the mall for safe passage to a church which Dinah's baby demands to be birthed in. The queen constantly surrounds herself by things that she does not allow herself to have, an exercise in desire and self-torture. Dinah negotiates with her with what ends up being overindulgence and stimulation, giving and giving until the queen cannot contain herself. She gives Dinah two saints' bones which will take her over the river into the church an island.

For the birth of her child, Dinah is granted two options. The child can grow as a normal human boy in the nightmare world, or as a boy with Down syndrome in the real world, with the potential to bring apocalypse. Diana offers to take care of the child, and her greed forces Dinah to kill her. She drifts away in a cloud of petals. Dinah chooses the real world, but as she prepares to leave, Morgan and Beatrice beg her not to leave them behind. She relents. She returns to the real world with her potentially demon baby and two lifeless dolls for his crib.

Although obviously Fathers has a limited plotline, I think the story has enormous potential in the setpieces, exploring different parts of the city and how each part changes. Most zombies or horror in general these days features monsters afflicted by some kind of illness. I want to create monsters afflicted by a social disease—essentially, what could happen to society if it gets carried away with its simplest obsessions. It's motivated by good zombie flicks, bad zombie flicks, and survival horror video games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame.

Fathers Synopsis

On a seemingly normal night and without explanation, the world turns into a nightmare. The story of Fathers centers around a transformed and unnamed metropolis and the three normal people trapped in it. The enormous variation between quadrants in a city gets enhanced by a layer of modern horror. In some office buildings, the drone workers have become so bland that their faces have melted away, and they unresponsively follow the patterns that they know every day. The malls are full of howling shapes and angry juggernauts who will injure and kill and satisfy their needs. And some places, like the carnival, are barely recognizable through the veil of charnal strangeness. The three main characters must navigate the city to find their missing piece and plumb the depths of their own fear and anxiety.

Paul Moeller, a compulsive womanizer tortured by his guilt over his loving but clueless wife, thinks at first that the transformation is because of a drug overdose. Wandering through the city, he follows the specter of a boy who claims to be his son, he at first reacts to the nightmare as if it's some kind of joke, but after an agonizing withdrawal passes, he realizes that he's in over his head. When Paul finds one of his bitter ex-girlfriends, almost a weightless, mindless husk, she tells him that she never gave his son up for adoption; she aborted the baby after he abandoned her. Pursued by monsters and visions of his wife tormented by chains and demons, Paul chases after the ghost of redemption by following his son into the heart of the city.

Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside, while her busy mom scrapes together a minimalistic suburban existence. Left mostly to her own devices, Lenny goes to bars and sleeps with servicemen, until one day she finds a man she swears could be her beloved father, in the flesh. After he politely refuses her advances, she follows him into the city—as she sees the way the metropolis is changing, she becomes convinced that the man actually is her father. Her goodness and gentleness become tested as she finds each of her brothers, who have become violent victims of the city's transformation.

Dinah King found out that she was pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. Her friends begin to worry when she tells them her unborn child wants her to go into the city to save the world. It gets worse when the baby tests positive for Downs syndrome. After walking through her stationhouse and witnessing a massacre that doesn't seem to harm her, she decides to follow her instincts and go into the city to give birth to her prophetic child and hopefully find out what his origins have to do with the changing of the world.

At first a kind of horror interpretation of the Wizard of Oz, the three meet and journey together at intervals until they reach the heart of the city. There is a literal pulling-back of a curtain, only to find nothing. No explanation for why the world is different and no higher voice to give them direction. Discovering suddenly that they're masters of their own destinies, they have no choice but to make their own decisions. Paul stays in the nightmare to raise his child, enduring the relentless assault of his vengeful wife who he neglected. Lenny sacrifices the memories of her father and returns to the real world to watch her brothers buried as heroes, even though they died as villainous reflections of their real selves. Dinah gives birth to a demon and has to choose: raise a monstrous baby who could be normal among the nightmares or go back home where her child could potentially destroy the world. She decides to risk apocalypse.

Things Khanem the Everhungry Refuses to Eat, Loosely Organized According to Why

Inconvenience: Heads of state. Jewish mothers. Asian grandmothers. Grass. Whole pomegranates. Whole mountain ranges. Tollbooth operators. Too much cabbage. Everything. Another of his master's (Edgrit, Commander of the Legions of Sorrow, bringer of heat and villainy to man, wolf, and certain shellfish, hero of the Culling, most generous master)'s henchmen. The climate. Russia. Himself. A huge hippopotamus, which if a hippopotamus had grown huge enough could probably inconvenience him a lot if he tried to eat one, but he'd never found or tried to find one so huge, it just probably would not be worth the effort, hassle, or time because hippopotami are generally kind of dicks. Nebulae. Very stubborn pistachios. Corn on the cob (unless dipped in melted butter, in which case the taste outweighs the awkwardness.) Mops. Her memories, which she had stored deep in the back of her mind, which he longed to eat, but were hidden like secret messages written in the fissures of a broken vase which had long been glued over and could not be seen again, but the writer and perhaps those she told knew they were there, but not what they said or even if what she said they said was true. Old coins. Above average fast insects.

Possible (but so far untested) retribution: Angels. Non-orphaned, non-hated, non-step- children. People driving cars he rode in. Chorizo. Dogs with woolly winter coats, because mother always said that the fur would grow in his stomach and he would become a dog himself and never turn back and being a dog for eternity may sound fun now what with an unlimited supply of frisbee throwers and kibble, but thousands of years down the line he would regret not being able to be bipedal for when the end of times comes, dogs would certainly be low on the list of creatures to inherit the earth. Relics and reliquaries of St. Theodore the Stratelate, especially the funny bits. Bodhisattvas. Nothing, for the rest of eternity. Her smile, because he told her once that it was possible, and she whispered so her breath was in his ear, “If you eat this last thing of mine, I'll make it so you can eat nothing else afterwards.” Volcanos. Leprechauns. Cats with patterns in their fur of the insignia of Chzal, his master's great enemy, whose armies once rose to challenge Lucifer and who was defeated by his master, but Lucifer rewarded his bravery and free will, of which his own master was violently jealous. Koi in ponds of holy water. Knights templar. Redheads with pale skin and freckles. Fruit bats with pale skin and freckles. China.

Generalized grossness: Woolly mammoths, hair on. Icelandic dwarves, with their sinister smiles and miners' lungs, singing their throats raw about the fruits of the earth. Raw octopus. Sashimi, unless he closes his eyes and pretends it's bits of white whale, which it almost never is, but girls on dates tend to like sushi a lot, although it is disgusting to eat and even worse to watch someone else eat; he was thankful she never asked, as if she knew already the face he'd make, and he loved her for that, too. Polaroids. Whole boxes of kleenex. Coffee that had been turned into crystals. A lot of plastic. Overripe dumpsters. Bleu cheese has mold built right into it, did you know? Embalming fluid and specialized embalmers.

Gross texture, specifically: Tomatoes.

Indescribable: The feeling she felt when she saw him, crafted before her, and the warm glow in her eyes, even though he warned her that he had shaped himself out of his imagination, and she told him that she did not care, that she could see his inner self despite the fact that he and his master (Edgrit, the never faithful, honored torturer of adultresses and political traitors, father to three thousand sons who would scourge the earth's creatures with their sharp ice breath, but who loved none save those enslaved to him) had for millennia concealed his original being in layers of moldable flesh and bone until he was a creature of nightmares, but that one night in white Antioch, he made himself a man for her dark hands and dark hair, and found that he could not consume the feeling she felt when she saw him bare.

On Principle: Good mathematicians. Grenades (that's just silly.) His mother. Glass. The singing stones of Brazil. The last of anything. Archaeopteryces. His master, Edgrit the everlonely, who rules his domain under the great Lucifer, burning bright of his own will but ever shadowed by greater powers ruling his destiny, who molded Khanem out of brick and blood and harvested his blood from 97 virgins and kept the last three as his brides so that they would be bound together and he would have a servant who could never betray, never deceive, for although those three former virgins left him for Lucifer the great, Lucifer the bold, the 97 in Khanem himself never would. Fundamentalist latter day saints. Fairy tale villains. Out-of-season squash. Trees over three centuries old. Small things born before their eyes have a chance to open, also tadpoles. Her, unless his master Edgrit the merciful ordered him to, which he did only once, and never again. Peas.

Unnamed Vampire Story 4

Father Louis Hernandez had indulged in numerous passions before God became chief among them. Some of the things he had loved before he became a man of the cloth: women, fine wine, bad fiction, softball, boxing (both watching and engaging in), mafia movies, and action figures. He was one of those rare adults whose toys were displayed prominently on nice shelves in his living room; each Sunday after mass, he dusted each figurine, each superhero bust, each model plane with loving care. He thought of it as his second flock, but always his second. Although the elderly ladies clucked and scowled and spoke, he kept both his flocks in good order. The children in his congregation loved him.

Just after he completed seminary training, one of his first parishoners, a teenager named Kelly Gunderson, handed him a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula. She asked him for his thoughts on the vampire hunter, Abraham Van Helsing. After he finished the novel, he gave Kelly his thoughts. “I do not know what Dracula is, if he signed a pact with the devil or if he's just a kind of human that we haven't yet encountered. It is not my place to judge.”

“And Van Helsing?” she asked.

Though Kelly was a little too old for it, Father Hernandez ruffled her hair with his callous-covered palm. “We live in a scary world. I can't tell you that if a man is hunting you, that you should not defend yourself. But Professor Van Helsing's vendetta was based on his own judgment, not God's. Remember Miss Gunderson, our mission is to preserve life. You can't just look at something you don't understand and say, 'That's not life the way I live it, so it deserves to die.' Does that make sense?”

He stepped back. Kelly's face had crinkled into the intense glare of a young woman trying to grow. “But Dracula, he—He was the bad guy, wasn't he?"

Twenty years ago, he would have cupped her chin and stood close, but men much like him had been taking advantage of the holy vestments, and scandal was in the air. Father Hernandez stayed away from her and held his arms awkwardly at his sides. “Miss Gunderson,” he said, speaking warmly, “to someone out there, you are the bad guy.”

“Me?” she murmured. How he'd wanted to hold her then. He imagined that little Kelly knew nothing of the special loneliness you feel when you know someone hates you for no reason at all. He imagined the rest of her life, from that moment when a busy, undiligent priest had made her cynical and cruel.

He'd expected her to quit right then, walk out of the church and never return, but it took Kelly another decade before her attendance slowed, then finally stopped altogether.

Even after she'd gone, the conversation haunted him. He was a man well-versed in fantasy and science fiction, and he studied other races, other times as vigorously as the Bible itself. Metaphors about Klingons and dragons slipped into his sermons, and the elderly ladies, now almost ancient, clucked their tongues and shook their heads. However, he was popular as a priest and made a name for himself as the geeky father who could relate to the youth, an archetype that the church sorely needed at the time. Over the decades, his office accumulated toys trinkets, as well as a wallpapering of crayon drawings depicting Jesus piloting Tie-fighters or wearing a wizard hat or riding astride various dinosaurs.

At age 95, he lay on what he knew to be his deathbed, surrounded by the donations and well-wishes of tiny children and the parents who raised them, who had once been tiny children themselves. Begging God for strength, he would play Nintendo Wii games with the youngsters; sometimes the teenagers would guide his wrinkled hands, palms still stiff with callouses. He had watched a man walk in space and seen the sequence of his own DNA. At 95, the world held such wonders for him that he hadn't known or understood back then, talking to Kelly Gunderson as a young clergyman.

So when he saw his first vampire, he was unsurprised that the world had again presented something new for his now deeply sunken eyes. “Welcome back,” he murmured. His voice creaked like a neglected hinge.

“I never left.” Kelly was a young woman now, in her late 20s. He could not tell if she was beautiful, but her voice was gentle, and he assumed that she was.

In a rush of sudden uncertainty, he feared he was suffering a morphine hallucination and let his eyes slide shut, just in case. The hospice workers had assured him that they would increase his dosage so he would pass easily. He had not seen any nurses come by, but he missed so many things these days. “I haven't seen you in almost sixty years.”

Her hand slipped into his, and it was cool, room temperature. “I wanted to thank you, Father.”

“Not that I don't deserve it, Miss Gunderson. I've lived a long, useful life. But what are you thanking me for?”

He almost didn't feel her, but he knew she was there. She lifted his head gently and embraced him, pressing her cheek into his chest. “Once, you taught me to embrace all life. I haven't forgot it. I won't ever. And God willing, I'll live a long, long life.”

He tried to nod, but like many of his gestures these days, it turned into a dry coughing fit. Weak as he was, she still seemed small, vulnerable, as she had been as a teenager. “Will you pray with me, Miss Gunderson?”

She took a long breath, and Father Hernandez wondered if it hurt her to pray, like the folklore said. But after a few seconds, she began. “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” As she spoke, her hands clasped around his, Father Hernandez noted that she was so close, he could feel her words vibrating through his hospital gown, but not the deep throb of a young woman's heartbeat.

After a while, she could not feel his either.

Unnamed Vampire Story 3

He sprints through the persistent drizzle, feeling the light, cold sting on his cheeks. He thinks about his mother. Her hands were soft. She sang abolitionist songs in the warm radius of an oil lamp while putting bloody stitches into living flesh. As a child, he had seen her at work once. He vomited violently onto the dirt floor of the medical tent. "How do you do it?" he asked. She had crouched beside him and folded his trembling body into a gray jacket that smelled like his father.

His mother was a woman of few words and simple wisdoms. "You try real hard, my dearest." They sat together, curled on the floor; he could barely see the injured soldier's toes over the edge of their kitchen table, which had transformed overnight into a surgeon's bench. Above their heads, the soldier moaned. "And then," she murmured, obviously eager to resume her sewing, "you keep your head above you, and your feet beneath you. That's all."

These days, he wears designer sneakers, but he's always mindful of where his human feet would have faltered. With the grace of a parkour master, he launches himself at a fire escape, hand over hand climbing the rungs; he can't feel the cold, but he knows the paint is flaking off and the metal is slippery. Head up, feet down. A pleasant electricity runs through his fingers; the sensation keeps him alert. He focuses. Head, feet.

Two hundred yards away, he hears a woman inhale sharply. It gives him enough time to dodge. For a moment, he remembers what his flesh was like: skin, sinew, muscle. A large-caliber bullet rips through his calf, and he lurches forward and up. She leads him expertly, and the second shot pierces his upper back.

After the first night, his mother never asked him to assist, but she did invite him to watch. He could see her biceps flex as she bent her full weight onto the bone saw. She spoke in relaxing tones, but that wasn't enough. Until the end of the war, their house was stocked with plenty of cheap whiskey for future amputees. Over the sounds of her patients and the grind of metal on bone, she told him, "You could take away his arms or his legs or his pride or his country, but he's still a man so long as he drinks hard liquor."

Cool blood pours out of the exit wound in his chest, but now he knows exactly where she is: a warehouse window, four blocks east, six floors up. Taking a liquidy breath--she punctured a lung, apparently--he lines his legs behind him and pushes off like a swimmer doing laps. He doesn't have the mechanism nor the magic to fly properly, but gliding is a different story. His arms fan wide, and for a moment, it's like free fall.

Head up, feet down. He lands on top of her, chest on her chest, but she doesn't scream. She's already got her combat knife drawn, the sharp edge flush against his throat. "You're getting old, Steward. Maybe a century and change is your limit."

He grins when he hears her gasp. The blade digs into his skin, then his throat. He presses his lips to her neck, feeling the hot rush in her jugular. Even soaked in the same stinging rain, her heat makes him drunk. He is surprised and pleased to find fear radiating from her, and it gives him goosebumps. He bares his teeth against her skin. Up, down. Reorient. Draw back.

They sit side by side on the cement floor. She dismantles and polishes her weapon, replacing each piece in its molded foam groove. "I guess I deserved that," she says, her face molded back into the impenetrable mask he was used to working with. "I used real bullets. FMJs. The blanks fly wrong with the wind. Sorry, bud." She shows him a sheepish face, but he knows she doesn't mean it. Nevertheless, their working relationship is based on a mutual deception and tolerance; he lets her apologize as best she can. "My bad."

He nods, but the gesture hurts. He opts instead to wait for his body to repair, holding the halves of his throat together with cold fingers. He is extra conscious of his parts, muscle binding, skin cells reknitting into the pattern they remember. When he finds his voice again, he says, "Don't forget, Anabelle. They're not like you. They don't have to stop."

"Lesson learned, steward." When he was on top of her, she had grown pale. The color returns to her cheeks again, a perceptible glow that he can feel on his skin. "Next time, I won't need a second shot."

Unnamed Vampire Story 2

September was the worst, especially towards the end. The tension and exhilaration before and after the candidates' first debate were difficult to bear. Marion monitored the television, newspapers, conservative radio talk shows, even the tabloids with a feverish obsession. Her husband loaned her one of his junior aides, Lauren Schiavone, to create what he called his personal drudge report. At one point, while Mark was at a rally in Ohio, Marion received a personalized assassination threat at one of their campaign offices in Pennsylvania. The campaign staff agreed that there was no way to link the threat to Kerrigan, but afterwards, Marion was constantly flanked by two secret service agents.

In addition to her daily gossip report, which she gave over breakfast, Marion did what she called "The Patrol," a series of mostly unscheduled walks in the towns wherever her husband happened to be speaking. She shook hands and held babies and made the late night talk shows every time a baby decided to spit up on her carefully selected casual suits. Every once in a while, people would try to book her for patrols, but she had a reputation for graciously turning down invitations, instead preferring to show up unexpected. All of these variables frustrated her two guards to no end. Geri, despite having biceps the size of Marion's thighs, objected shyly, but Richard, a retired police sergeant, barked his disapproval every day before they stepped out in public together. She placated him once by visiting his old precinct house, beaming as she helped the police captain turn the news media and tourists away from the door. Then she spoke solemnly with the newest class of academy graduates. "Fight the good fight," she said. "Never forget that the man you capture is a human being. Never forget that when you take off that uniform at night, when you have your straight scotch and watch the Steelers highlights, that that criminal is trying to have a life like yours. We're all hoping to go home, settle down, have a drink. You can't just protect and serve nothing. You have to protect and serve everything you possibly can. Remember: I can only walk the streets because folks like you make them safe."

She lingered there, listening to each beat cop's complaints, making a mental checklist of names, hopes, and desires to share with Mark the next morning. By the time they left, it was almost dark. As they walked back to her hotel room, Richard, keeping his eyes straight ahead, said, "Thank you, Mrs. Summers. That was a mighty fine thing you said today. I'm voting for the other guy, but I like you better."

"That means a lot to me, Richard," Marion replied. She turned to look at him, to see if she could find that tiny twinge in his usually expressionless face, the way she swore she had seen it in Redding's.

She glanced over in time to see his forehead explode, shards of bone and blood flying away from his face as if anxious to escape. For a moment, his large body stood still, unable to catch up with the rest of him, and then he began to topple forward. Behind her, Marion heard Geri's soft voice: "I'm not voting for Mr. Summers either." Then pain. Then vertigo. Then black.

Unnamed Vampire Story 1

Marion was glad that she had accepted the last-minute face powder the show’s makeup girl had offered before stepping under the bright stage lights. She decided that the hot-burning whiteness could come from nothing in nature. Later, she would call her husband, and he would reassure her that her forehead was not shiny like a new car. But she didn’t believe it now, and she wouldn’t believe it later, looking for flaws on their TiVo. However, blasting towards the Redding Report’s stage desk in her new pumps made her feel like a superstar, and even she had to agree that her smile was radiant.

Clarence Redding, a notorious liberal pundit, was in his 20th year yelling at a camera about his agenda, and his age had only made him louder. He introduced her with an old timey auctioneer’s holler: “Ladies and gentleman, the potential first lady, Marion Summers.”

The words rolled off her tongue robotically, “Great to be here, Clarence.”

“So let’s get right to it. Vampire rights. Warren Kerrigan’s campaign has been giving your husband a lot of flak about this controversial subject. Now, the vampire vote carried Mark Summers to victory in California. Do you think Small Town, USA will buy it?”

Her husband’s PR team had given her a basic rundown of the things Redding would ask in advance, but it was essentially a lecture on the party line. Rosa, the media director, had finally buckled under Marion’s stress and told her, “Just talk how you want. We’re getting major blue collar votes from the way you talk straight and hit below the belt. Punching that racist at the last rally really got the middle aged white voter’s attention. You being you is your husband’s best chance.”

So Marion smiled, looked Redding in the eye, and said, “Do you mean evangelical Christian America, Clarence? I think you do. I’ve heard the in-human, in prison argument that Governor Kerrigan is making. But vampirism is a somewhat small movement at this point. When Joe Six-Pack sees another opportunity to spend time with his dad or his mom after their cancer treatments fail—which would not happen if the esteemed other candidate hadn’t voted against health care reform when he was a representative—then maybe they’ll come around. Now, they only see a subculture in those freaks out on the coasts. What we’re seeing is an opportunity for all of the country to heal, to reinvent themselves and reconcile with death in a different way. It’s a resurrection, Clarence, plain and simple, and it’s about time middle America gives that a second thought.”

This close to the TV personality, she imagined a smile that the cameras wouldn’t catch. Maybe later, they would edit the twinge away, so that the network could maintain its alleged no-bias policy. Clarence continued, “Your husband, a second-term senator, has spoken out against the career politician. Wouldn’t increase vampire rights encourage not just a lifetime politician, but an anti-lifetime government man?”

Marion nodded sagely in a way that she had seen thousands of other senators’ wives nod. She hoped she had gotten it right enough to carry on the legacy of the hot first lady. “No, of course not. I don’t think a vampire will be elected into office any time soon. I’ve spent a lot of time in the shelters and halfway houses in Oakland and the Bay area, and this isn’t a condition where you can just slather on some sunscreen and hop on a bus to Disneyland. These people are in pain when the sun’s out. A full-time vampiric candidate could never sit long enough in the Capitol to do their job. Not that I know many Republican senators who make it out to cast votes full-time, mind you.”

A chuckle from the audience. She understood then what her husband meant about momentum during the media parade. She took a breath and kept on going. “But you don’t see many beggars or battered women on the hill either. So we all get together and do what we can: select a person who will represent us, no matter how badly the world has treated us. My husband is ready to listen to everyone and do what he can to ensure that all human beings get fair treatment in these great United States.”

And there it was, that little grin again. For the rest of the interview, even after her impassioned rant on education reform, Marion didn’t see it again. Later, as she played and replayed the clip, her husband would be unable to see what she saw. After her futile search, they would go to sleep, as they had for 20 years, their fingers entwined.