Bite Me

of our nookie.
3. Despite myths perpetrated by jealous day dwellers, the nosferatu are only vulnerable to the effects of:
A. Garlic. (Right, because pizza and the breath of vegans will quell their ancient power.)
B. Crosses and holy water. (Oh right, because creatures of darkest evil are total bitches of the baby Jebus.)
C. Silver. (Uh-huh, and aluminum, because that makes sense.)
D. Sunlight.
4. My and Foo’s greatest challenge as minions is to protect our dark masters, the Countess and Lord Flood, from:
A. Cops, specifically Inspector Rivera and his clueless Gay Bear partner Cavuto.
B. The most crusty old vampire and his mysterious fashion-vamp posse.
C. The Animals, slacker wastee night crew from the Marina Safeway.
D. All of the above and whatnot.
5. Our best chance of defeating Chet, the huge shaved vampire cat, is:
A. Mouse ninjas.
B. A big hug while wearing my most fly UV-LED leatherjacket, fashioned for my protection by my aforementioned muffin master, Foo.
C. A saucer of tuna blood laced with sedatives and kitty-butt flavor. (I observed in his former mortal form, that Chet loves kitty-butt flavor.)
D. Make a vampire Rottweiler to rock Chet’s worldview.
E. Either “a” or “c,” but definitely not “d” wouldn’t “a” be très cool? Mouse ninjas!
     
    Answers:
    1: D, 2: B, 3: D, 4: D, 5: E
    Give yourself one point for every right answer.
     
    Score:
    5. You rock my stripy socks.
    4. Loser!
    3. Très Loser!
    2. Such a Loser that Losers pity you.
    0–1. Spare us your contagious loserness. Next bridge you pass? Over you go.

3
The Samurai of Jackson Street
    TOMMY
    When he first arrived in San Francisco, Tommy Flood had shared a closet-size room with five Chinese men named Wong, all of whom had wanted to marry him.
    “It’s horrible—like being packed into a take-out box of Kung Pao chicken,” Tommy had said, and although it wasn’t like that at all, and Tommy was just trying to use colorful language which he felt was his duty as a writer, it was very crowded and smelled strongly of garlic and sweaty Chinese guys.
    “I think they want to pack my fudge,” Tommy had said. “I’m from Indiana, we don’t go for that kind of stuff.”
    As it turned out, the Chinese guys didn’t go for that kind of stuff either, but were, in fact, very much interested in getting green cards.
    Fortunately, only a week later, in the parking lot of the Marina Safeway where he worked nights, Tommy met agorgeous redhead named Jody Stroud, who rescued him from his confinement with the Chinese guys, by giving him her love, a nice loft apartment, and immortality. Unfortunately, little more than a month after that, their minion, Abby, had them bronzed while they slept, and Tommy awoke one night to find that despite his great vampire strength, he couldn’t move a muscle.
    “I’d rather be trapped in a take-out box of Kung Pao chicken,” Tommy would have said if he could have said anything, which he couldn’t.
    Meanwhile, right next to him, sharing the same bronze shell, his beloved Jody drifted in a dream-state, a side effect of being able to turn herself to mist, a trick she had learned from Elijah Ben Sapir, her vampire sire. Between the dead sleep of daylight, and the floating in a dream-world, she could endure decades inside the statue. Tommy, however, had never learned how to turn to mist. There had never been time to teach him. So come sundown, his vampire senses came on like neon, and he experienced every second of his confinement with an electric intensity that nearly had him vibrating in his shell—an alpha predator pacing the cage of his mind and shredding his reason. Of course, he did the only thing he could do: he went barking at the moon mad.
    CHET
    He’d have to lick about a mile of kitty-butt to get the taste of meter maid out of his mouth, but Chet was up for it. Heraked a couple of hind-leg kicks through the dust that was the meter maid’s remains, and headed across the street and into the alley, where he curled up in the dark and set about blunting the human taste.
    It was only a little over a month since the old vampire had turned Chet, but already he was losing all sense of his former self. Time was, that he spent his days on Market Street, napping next to William, the homeless man who made his living with a paper cup and a sign that said, I AM HOMELESS AND MY CAT IS HUGE . Chet was indeed very large, and while much of his volume had been fur, he had achieved a weight of thirty-five pounds on