Bite Me

himself.”
    “Just because he didn’t draw it out of the scabbard doesn’t meant it wasn’t a sword,” said Jeff, the tall, blond jock.
    “It was a battle of honor,” said Troy Lee.
    “One little old guy with a stick, seven of you?” said Rivera. “Honor?”
    “He told my grandma to suck his dick,” said Troy.
    “Still,” said Cavuto.
    “But she said okay,” Troy said.
    “That shit is just wrong,” said Lash.
    Grandma, who was standing with the other outraged, blood-splattered customers across the butcher shop, fired off a volley of Cantonese at the policemen. Rivera looked to Officer Tan for translation.
    “She says she misunderstood what he was saying because his accent was so bad.”
    “Don’t care,” said Rivera. “Where’s the guy with the alleged stick?”
    “He ran out before we got here,” said Tan. “We called in backup, but we put the responding unit on finding the victim, when these guys didn’t resist.”
    “ Resistance is futile, ” said Clint in a robot voice.
    “I thought you were Christian,” said Cavuto.
    “What, I can’t love Jesus and Star Trek ?”
    “Oh for fuck’s sake. Rivera, let’s just arrest these morons and—”
    Rivera held up his hand for silence. “Officer Tan, I’m afraid I do need them. You have their names if the stick guy shows up and wants to press charges. Have all those people leave their names with the butcher. These guys will pay for their dry cleaning.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Tan. “They’re all yours. You want me to clip the restraints?”
    “Nope,” said Rivera. “Come along, boys.” He led the Animals, their hands cuffed behind their backs, out of the butcher shop and into the flow of the Stockton Street sidewalk—a river of people.
    “You’d better bring Troy Lee’s grandma,” said Lash, rolling to the side as a vendor with a handtruck full of crates bumped by.
    “Yeah, Grandma has a secret weapon,” blurted out Troy Lee.
    “I heard,” said Cavuto.
    Jeff, the tall jock, said, “Hey, did anyone wonder why a little old Japanese guy would need eight quarts of animal blood?”

16
Being the Chronicles of Abby Normal, Nosferatu
    W ell, that was dramatic. Ronnie is all crying and cowering in the other room because I drank a little of her blood. Fuck’s sakes, you mopey emo-toy, cowboy the fuck up, you have quarts! What did she expect, she got to kill me, that’s not free? I’m not like some easy death slut who lets you kill her for nothing, I am nosferatu, bee-yotch. That shit has a price. Her blood totally tastes like zit cream, too. I almost hurled.
    I know, très cool, non ? So, now that I am a dark and beautiful creature of unspeakable evil, I think I’m going to start a pay-subscription blog. Except I can only, like, advertise darkness and unspeakable evil, because I’m totally starting from the beginning on the beauty. First, all my tattoos are totally gone. Gone! Like wiped off. After I succumbed to the dark gift by taking a whole bottle of the Motherbot’ssleeping pills, Ronnie hid me under a pile of blankets and stuffed animals in her room, and when I awoke at sundown and crawled from my sepulcher of Carebears and Muppets and whatnot, all my tats totally wiped off. Like the ink was pushed out on top of my skin. Now Ronnie has an Epileptic Elmo with more of my ink on him than I have. And my piercings healed up. My bars and rings are all in the carpet.
    Boobs? Still pathetic. I had so hoped to swoop down on Foo and totally flash my awesome vampyre cleavage on him. You know, like put on a bustier and really squish the girls out the top, then be all: BAM! “Check it out, Foo. Cower before killer décolletage, and beg me to let you rub your handsome ninja face on it.” But no! Now he’ll be all, “Oh, it looks like you dropped a couple of dimes down your shirt, vamp child. Can I help you with those?”
    So I suffer.
    And you can’t get implants. I saw what happens when the Animals’ blue hooker turned vampyre. You wake up and your implants are on the floor and you’re all, “Hey, I blew like a hundred strangers to get those.” I’m only estimating. I’m sure the number of strangers will vary depending on prevailing suck and surgical rates in your area. (You acquire arcane medical knowledge when your mother is a nurse.) You can’t have stuff removed either, you know, if that might be needed.
    Even my makeup is ruined from where Ronnie tried to smother me with a pillow, so that’s going to take like