chapter 2: VAMPIRES
Careful not to wake her brother wrapped in the Raiders snuggie, Jackie slowly peered through the curtains that covered the black carpeting nailed around the window. The walls that surrounded the window and room were more thickly padded with cut up pieces from gym mats and rubber tiles. She pressed against the carpet with her palm and felt the warmth of the sunlight bearing down on their home, holding it only for a moment before quietly moving the curtain back. Her internal clock told her there was still at least an hour of sunshine left, so she crept back to the other side of the room where an old Gameboy and her tools were waiting for her. Quietly she lay down on a bean bag and leaned over the knee-high desk where her tools and pieces of old tech await. She pulled off the top of the console and began digging through the casing caked in dirt and pebbles with a pair of tweezers. What pieces of board and soldered computer chip were completely unsalvageable she took out and placed in a bin, and when she picked out everything that could be saved, the internal battery and the screen with relatively few scars, she placed the recovered pieces to the side and pulled out the next Gameboy from a bin next to the desk and repeated the process. The clockwork played itself out in a similar fashion with the next device as the minutes ticked away but soon Jackie was lost in the rhythm of her motions and a dreamlike flow took over her eyes and hands. She absorbed every detail of the consoles she took apart: the color of their casings, the amount of wear present on the buttons, what battery life remained inside them, etc. It touched a deeper sadness in her if she thought for too long about all the old tech that she dug out of the junkyards and pawn shops, so she focused on disassembling what took machines seconds to do en masse.
Her hands throbbing slightly, she looked at the watch on her right wrist and decided it was time to wake up for the day. She slipped out of the pajamas adorned in alcohol product placement and dragged the greasy polo and khakis over her limbs. Walking to the window and pulling back the curtain, she was met with the last of dusk’s light coming over the abandoned suburb. Looming over the boy still sleeping, she made a gun with two of her fingers and tapped the boys head roughly. He slowly opened his eyes before widening them in shock.
“You sleep too heavily. Need to be more alert next time.” She walked back to her corner of the room before he could mumble a response. She grabbed two backpacks, one filled with sandwiches and books and the other with a thermos, tools, and a knife. Her brother was sitting on the sofa and rubbing his eyes. She laid the backpack at his feet and rubbed her knuckles into his long hair. “I’ll be outside.”
Walking through the double doors and down the small ramp, Jackie looked over her shoulder at the shed and pulled out her smartphone as she waited. The sun was down, but she was still breaking a sweat and swatting at the mosquitos attracted to the scent of her breath and blood. All of the forums and discussion boards were horribly formatted for her outdated technology but Jackie endured the misaligned paragraphs and oversized jpegs to see what the anonymous hivemind thought of the newest trends, be they celebrity sex scandals or nuclear trucks developed for laborers. The boy pushed the shed doors dressed in basketball shorts and a jersey. He was sporting a strong frown, but Jackie smiled when she saw him anyway. He brushed past her and she followed him on their walk through the weedy yard onto the empty street. The lamps that hovered yards above them were long dead, and Jackie was grateful for it. She didn’t have to wear the light-cancelling glasses for longer than she had to. Seeing the world in her own eyes for what little time she could felt important for some reason, and she wondered if her brother ever felt the same way. The artificial lighting that clouded over the cities was much too harsh for them, to say nothing of the sun.
-
She’d walked with him as far as the block before the library, as was usual. He’d asked her to stop walking with him all the way down, and against her better instincts she granted him that bit of freedom. It was all she could give him for now.
-
The streets leading up to Chinatown were empty save for drunk men stumbling on apartment stairs and the occasional police truck, looming around the corners of the fifty feet building like stalkers. Once she was within the refuge of her familiar block, lit with neon hanzi and fluorescent lighting coming from the markets and clubs, she began to breathe more easily. She pulled out the light-cancelling glasses and snapped them on her nose. They resembled googles more than glasses, and were tight like them too. Most people she’d known before would’ve avoided areas where English wasn’t the first, most dominant, powerful language, but Jackie knew better than to be a chooser now of all times.
The usual bells rang as she pushed open the door. An old Chinese man looked up from his log book behind the counter of the restaurant. “Ah, Jackie. How’re you feeling tonight?”
“Why you gotta ask me that, Jack, you know once I get started I can’t stop all night.”
“Pfahaha! Yeah yeah, hey Suzy’s waiting on you! A construction team on the other side of town’s doing overtime, big order coming in.”
“Again?!” She exclaimed in shock as she typed her code into the number pad inside the kitchen.
“Yes, again, the future is now girl, now go!” She ran deeper into the kitchen, tying an apron around her uniform, and found Suzy over one of several woks frying and stirring noodles.
“I’ll handle the cooking part, these laborers order here before. Many complaints! You put the food in box, okay?!”
Jackie ran past Suzy, careful not to slide on the grease that lined the tiled floor. A beat up CD player was stationed in the back, with three k-pop albums that were at least fifty years old and a blank CD from an indie rock band started by one of Jack’s grandchildren. The mix CD sounded vaguely like the Smashing Pumpkins mixed with Laotian percussion and wind instrumentation (it seemed to be the newest fad), and Jackie clicked it into position and turned the volume at a nice medium before running back into the kitchen.
“Okay let’s work.”
-
Her fingers tore away at the skin of the cushions of the dental chair and she’d nearly bitten through her bottom lip out of fear, but when the woman with tattooed hands dabbed Jackie's forehead with a cool rag she managed to control her breathing a bit more.
“There, there, child. There, there.” In another part of the room she could hear her brother sobbing into the plastic curtain and being comforted by a fat man with no nursing credentials. “The first needle will be to numb your eyes, then the second will give you those cat eyes.” Jackie wished she hadn’t said that. She felt like a coward, spending what little money they had on anesthetics for herself. So selfish, the thought of money weighed on her like an anchor. Money. An infestation on the mind, suffocating. What an ugly word, only good for protecting cowards like herself from what she had coming.
A light slap struck across her face and Jackie stared dumbfounded at the lady whose hand was now massaging where she’d slapped. “No time for self-loathing now, child. You have to be strong so you don’t scare your brother.” Jackie took a moment to process what was happening and where she was again before slowly nodding. A syringe was produced and the woman’s hand turned from a comforting paw to a vicious claw, tapping at the barrel with her sharp talon. The nurse with the face of a buffalo gently placed a tool around her right eye that held the eyelid open. Drops of salty medicine fell on her exposed eye and suddenly she found herself sobbing, water free to flow down her cheeks and face. If there was anything she could show her brother now, it was that he shouldn’t be afraid to cry.
-
Hours passed before the restaurant succumbed to its usual quiet. Customers came at every hour of the day, but they were sparse and of the same variety. Jackie sighed at the empty restaurant, leaning on the counter behind the register with her hand under her chin. The CD blaring whiny vocals and reverb-laden guitars had repeated at least four times, and Jackie wondered if she was similar to her mother in that regard. There was a woman who could listen to the same bland, stale five songs on the radio everyday of her life and not once take notice of the fact. Her father was the same way; the only difference was he acted mightier than her mother because he listened to old music with guitars and about heterosexual relationships. She pulled off her plastic gloves and rubbed her temples, it was such a disturbing thought.
The bells by the door rang sporadically for the rest of her shift, complete with the usual mix of tourists, lounge lizards, salarymen, and night cruisers. Some’d try to flirt, most just took their food and extra sauce packets and left. In between daydreaming about the newest gaming consoles from Japan and moving somewhere where the nights were longer, Jackie would daydream about the customers who sat eating from bowls of noodles or rice. Everybody, with few exceptions, wore earbuds for one reason or another. Busy on conference calls, listening to music at all times of the day, or catching up on TV they’d missed by going outside, everybody remained in their own worlds. It saved her some breath from having to say hello to anyone; they said their order and made the credit transfer with no input from her, and that was fine by Jackie. Staring at these people who looked right past her, she imagined about their lives. Did they live in the newest high rise condos? Were they illegals from whatever country we were at war with now? What was their drug of choice? The possibilities were endless in a Chinatown in a primarily Hispanic city with white politicians who’d been arguing the gentrification rate was only slowly rising for the past several decades and and colored business owners who resented each other's communities more and more as time went on. Truly, a world of admirable prospects.
-
Jack apologized profusely for keeping her later than usual, but she needed the money more than anything so she just nodded and made her way back to the street where the library was on. Jackie walked towards the playground across from the library where her brother was kicking pebbles underneath a slide. She picked up his backpack from the bench where he left it and unzipped it.
“You didn’t eat your sandwiches.”
“Wasn’t hungry.”
Jackie stood staring as he kicked more pebbles, avoiding her gaze.
“Bard.” He walked further into the playground, and she followed him under the set. “Bard, look at me!” She shouted under her breath.
“Don’t call me that!” He whipped back to face her. In the shadows under the rusty structure they saw each other’s faces clearly. She knew he could see the flash of hurt in her eyes, and she recoiled slightly.
“You don’t like that name?”
“It’s not my name.”
“Why not?”
He sneered. “It’s not the name I was born with.”
“And that defines your name?”
“You’re a retard.” He began to run but she grabbed his arm and jumped onto him. Bits of mulch and brown soil stuck to their skin and clothes as they wrestled, and yet neither gave in. He bit where she grabbed him, but she held on tight.
“Listen- Listen!” She nearly throttled him, looming over him like a killer in the dark. “Listen to me!”
“What?!” He spat on her face, and she grabbed him by his hair.
“You don’t wanna eat?” She stayed silent until he stopped squirming. “You don’t wanna eat? You wanna disappear? You wanna be mean? That’s fine. Do what you want. But just know, and just you watch, I’ll fight you every step of the way. I’ll force food and life into you until you see that there is nothing more important to me than life.”
She saw his eyes looking back into hers. Even with him pinned down and his expression passive she felt that he looked down on her. Had it been anyone else in any other time she felt she would’ve beaten him to a pulp and gone to bed without a second thought, but as dumb as she was she still knew better than that. Last year she brought him with her for pure self-preservation, but things were changing all the time.
-
The sun was already coming up, so the two had to wear their tight glasses and walk quickly to get back to their shed. Jackie walked behind her brother to block the sunlight; she felt the ultraviolet rays tearing away at her skin, so she pushed the boy along the sidewalk. They made it to the safety of their shed and Jackie threw herself onto the couch, covering her eyes with her arm and rubbed at the back of her arms with her thermos. The boy sat on a chair in front of an old, battery powered TV and turned it on, playing an odd cartoon from France. Jackie spied from the crack of her elbow and watched along with her brother. Frankly she found the animation aesthetically disturbing, the excessive toilet humor cringe inducing. There was also a forced romantic subplot in every episode that usually resulted in sexual comedy. She worried about the effects of such a show but knew better than to voice such complaints. Still she could only take so much before stepping over to her desk and digging through one of her bins.
From a blue bin of broken tech and wires, an off-brand handheld console was produced; it was probably the only piece of technology the two had that Jackie hadn’t personally fixed or tinkered with. The company that produced the console died a decade ago, so when she got it as a gift for her fifteenth birthday she wasn’t so surprised. Still, for a good few years it served as her one bridge to a modern generation of gaming so she was grateful for that at least. Newer consoles required Internet connections to get new games, so she was stuck playing the same ten games she got in her earlier years. It didn’t matter, really, for there was only one game there that she found herself returning to every morning after work and arguing. Laying on her stomach on the bean bag, the blocky title greeted her with soothing ambient music. Genesis Memory. It was a simple game, created in the 2070’s designed to reference the graphics of the 2020’s, with infinite possibility; Jackie took the role as a young white kid living with his suit-and-tie father in a suburban home whose main goal was to survive his father’s attempts to kill him. It’d been seven years since she’d first played the game, but the beauty was she found more to know about the world every time she played. Every new game started the same way, repeating the same cycle of jovial conversation between the child and the father until the father leaves for his anonymous desk job. Jackie knew she had about ten minutes to gather resources before the fight began. Run up the stairs, throw on the running shoes and football gear under the hoodie. The first time she played she spent so much time exploring this virtual space, reading old comic book titles on the shelf and turning the sink on and off repeatedly. The next few times, she tried hiding. Under the bed, in the closet, locking the bathroom door, the father always found a way. If she tried attacking him he’d beat her character with a baseball bat, but she found that, given the opportunity, his preferred method was strangulation.
Jackie felt a weight behind her on the bean bag and knew her brother was watching her play, his eyes wide with curiosity like they always were when he watched. She pushed to truly win this round. No
She’d made it to the garage across from the house and grabbed the flares and barbed wire when the familiar white truck pulled into the driveway. The father walked into the house, his hands balled into fists and his eyes dark. Two options now: hide as long as possible or run as away as fast as you can.
“Why does he wanna kill you this time?”
“Kid probably brought his dad’s CP to school again.” They shared a laugh that they had shared hundreds of times before.
Jackie dashed from the garage and clicked on the truck. She knew the boy couldn’t drive it, but she also knew she found something new every time she played. Sure enough, the doors were locked and the keys out of sight. The shadow of the dad appeared from a window on the second story, watching the boy for a moment before disappearing from sight. Jackie mumbled a curse under her breath and dashed to the street. She ran along the street for as long as she could before the truck became visible behind her character. She turned into the house that she knew an underground tunnel was hidden in, narrowly avoiding the truck’s wrath as it rammed into the front door of the house. The father was now running after the boy as Jackie opened the basement door, dropping the barbed wire at the base of the stairs. A howling sound of pain came through the speakers as the boy descended into the secret tunnel, the path lit only by flares. Jackie felt her brother shiver at the barbaric shouting, so she chuckled for his sake.
“He’s gonna kill you!”
“C’mon, this is the easiest part.” Just a mad dash towards the light. No stopping, no looking back. Easier in games.
Thudding steps could be heard, growing faster in pace as the father grew more frustrated. Her brother hissed through his teeth but the boy’s face remained stoic, defiant in Jackie's eyes. The boy broke through the light and was welcome with the sight of an industrial city, complete with toxic barrels spilled over and vandalized storefronts. No time to take the sights in, Jackie pushed forward and made a quick exchange with a bearded homeless man; the worn-down sneakers for a gun with no bullets.
“You don’t have any bullets.”
“I can see that.”
“Why’d you buy the gun then?”
“Cuz I’m gonna get bullets later! Plus you can point it at the dad and he’ll back off for a bit.”
“Are you gonna get the bullets right now?”
“Bard are you gonna backseat game all night?” She realized her mistake as soon as she said it, but thought it best not to acknowledge it. Her brother shifted in the beanbag, but he stayed where he was.
-
Forty-five minutes of their collective lives had gone by and still they sat, mesmerized by the flashing screen and moving only to wipe small beads of sweat from their hands and forehead. Jackie knew the end was coming. She could feel it in her cramping fingers and her exhausted mind. The boy had gone from football pads to SWAT gear, protecting him from his father’s lethal swinging but slowing him down enough for the dad’s running speed to match his son’s. They’d reached the outskirts of the nuclear city, the two ran along the beachfront. The oceans were only as polluted as they were when the game was made, and Jackie took in what beauty she could from the sight of it in a grim manner.
“He’s catching up to you.” Her brother said, and this time he was right. The boy was running out of solid land and the wetter the sand and dirt became the slower he ran. In one fell swoop the father throttled his son with the bat, now caked with blood and wrapped in the barbed wire, strangling and breaking the boy’s neck. Jackie let out a breath of exhaustion and began laughing quietly.
“Haha, almost beat my record.”
“Really?!” Her brother said, leaning over to see the screen which displayed the total time played. There was no other measure of progress in this game.
“Well… No.” Jackie smirked over her shoulder. “Four hours is my longest game.” She turned back to the screen before turning back to her brother. “Maybe don’t tell anyone that.”
“Who would I tell?” He made a good point but he still laughed when he said it. He started to get up but Jackie stopped him.
“Where you goin?” The game's grim silence gave way to a lush, heavenly orchestra. “You gonna miss the best part.” The black screen slowly turned to white, and from that white a field of grass as far as the eye could see came into view. The music swelled in anticipation, finally releasing as a smiling racoon popped up from the ground and waved to the player. In big bold letters, the game read: You Are… The Racoon.
“The racoon?”
“Yeah, cause I like to use a lotta items. Last time I think I was like, the snake. I really tried killing the dad that time though.”
Her brother’s face twisted slightly, staring at the anime-esque racoon. “So what, that’s what you unlocked?”
“No, no, it’s like uh… That’s what you’re reborn as. You know, in Buddhism and shit.”
“This is the best part?”
Jackie stared at the creature, so happy to be alive. As if the past hour’s horrors hadn’t happened at all. “I’ve never seen a racoon before. Have you?”
“Yeah, in videos.”
She sighed at the waving animal before pressing start and being greeted once again with the game’s theme and menu, welcoming her to try to survive again. Her brother stood up and went back to the TV, and Jackie turned the game off.
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