“Fred, snap out of it! Don’t you remember anything at all?” Ergo pleaded.
But Dracula merely smiled with half of his mouth. Around them the rest of the vampires arrived and slowly, menacingly circled around the two.
“You deceived me, furry red boy!” Dracula looked mildly frustrated. “And here I thought you were going to be one of the best recruiters of vampires we ever—”
“Listen to me.” Ergo fumbled to think of anything to say that might bring back his old friend. “I, ah, sense the struggle within you. The struggle to be simply Fred, not this undead abomination drinking the blood of the living…”
“You make it sound so terrible,” chided Dracula. “And that name Fred no longer has any meaning to me.”
“It is the name of your true self and you’ve only forgotten and all that stuff!” pleaded Ergo.
Dracula shook his head and laughed. “Foolish boy. I suppose there’s no convincing you, so you leave me no choice…” Dracula leered with sinister intent.
Ergo felt the blood drain from his face, leaving him dizzy.
“Vampire network marketers, attack!” and suddenly the mob of circling vampires closed in on helpless Ergo. “You aren’t worth my time, so I’ll leave you to my downline…”
The vampire host crowded around Ergo, enclosing him in their evil, dark shadow as they slowly loomed closer. They grinned at him wickedly, their white fangs glistening in the moonlight, and growled and hissed with hunger. He was trapped and surrounded and it was only a matter of time before…
“Yee-haw! I say, yee-haw!” yelled a booming yet calculatingly nerdy voice, and suddenly Frankenstein Monster, with Sea Monster perched like a freakish bird on his shoulders, charged through the assembly of vampires like a massive bowling ball through vampire pins.
Ergo rolled out of the way as Frankenstein Monster easily threw the screeching, creepy host of blood-drinkers soaring through the air and into tree branches. He had enormous platform boots, likely a size 20, and each kick delivered a brutally devastating blow even to undead vampires. Sea Monster joined the action and sprang across the ground from one opponent to another, delivering powerful chest-kicks with his huge, slimy webbed feet.
“Go, Ergo, run, run, you red goof! We’ll keep these creeps busy!” yelled Frankenstein Monster as he held Angst in a headlock and pummeled his head with one fist.
Ergo didn’t miss his chance, and he scrambled away from the frantic screaming. Ahead he could just make out the light of the moon reflected on the river. Running water was directly in front of him and all he needed was to—
Before he could take another step, a vise-like grip of iron stopped him cold and yanked him into the air.
“Now tell me, dear Ergo,” taunted Dracula as he leaned closer, “how you intend to stop me, Dracula, the most powerful of all vampires?” He laughed menacingly and tossed Ergo like a rag doll to the ground.
Ergo smirked. “For one thing, Count, my blood isn’t fit for human or vampire consumption. It’s pure mercury. You’ve been wasting your entire evening on a lost cause.”
Dracula’s face fell. “You’re bluffing.”
Ergo smiled and waggled a furry red finger. “Oh, and there’s something else you haven’t figured out yet.”
“What’s that?” Dracula seemed to pale, even more than his usual pale pallor.
“Those times I asked you to repeat the networking pitch, and the time I spent leading you to find me in the castle, and the pursuit in the woods, and this drawn-out bit of dialogue…”
“Yes yes yes???” a frustrated Dracula pleaded. “What are you getting at?”
Ergo smiled. “Has anyone bothered to check the time?”
As if on cue, a forest rooster cock-a-doodle-doooed, and the vampire host froze, looking up in terror. A delightful sunrise was just peeking over the Transylvanian mountains, and somewhere, one could almost hear the strains of Rossini's beginning of The William Tell Overture, complete with birds cheeping. It was too late.
Ergo sat up and studied Dracula, who shook and shuddered horrifically as the first sunbeam hit him. He collapsed to his knees in a terrible, sparkling shower of light and fire and smoke. Ergo watched, transfixed, but his enemy’s face, within the hazy plumes and flames, seemed to distort. Dracula no longer regarded Ergo. Instead, Fred studied his old friend as his body burned up from the growing sunny intensity.
“It’s that… machine, Ergo… that terrible Larger Collider. No one… should have ever turned it on. It’s… changed all of us. One by one we’ll all eventually wind up here by the riverside…”
He continued to immolate and crumpled to the ground, his head resting on smooth pebbles by the water’s edge. “You would have been… a great vampire…”
Ergo looked away, overwhelmed with pity and confusion, then turned back to his decomposing old friend one final time, tears in his eyes. He asked with a conciliatory smile, “Well, what about my free gift?“
Dracula-Fred, little more than a pale corpse, looked surprised, then smiled, reached into his burning coat, retrieved a small coffin-shaped box and handed it to Ergo. Ergo studied the object in his red hands and slowly lifted the lid. Inside was a tiny oil diffuser.
“It’s… rather pleasant… if you keep it… on your desk… and use a few drops of… lemongrass…” and with that final word Fred crumbled into powdery white ash and drifted away in the cool morning breeze, carried along by the river current.
All was calm and quiet now, and from high above, all that could be seen was a small red dot sitting quietly by the riverside.
The flight back was moody and sullen as Henry and his daughter quietly worked the shuttle’s controls. Having cleared Transylvanian airspace, they were now vaulting speedily across the sea, on their way back to the warmth of California.
Ergo sat meditatively, a thick bandage wrapped around his neck. The pain was gone, but the terrifying memories would last forever. He had done the right thing in helping Henry rescue his daughter and in liberating a village held by the grasp of terror, and he had single-handedly eliminated a vile vampiric network and destroyed the world’s most powerful vampire. And yet his thoughts drifted back to his old buddy Fred, so viciously transformed by diabolical science, and Ergo couldn’t help but wonder what that device had done to him. He studied his hairy red hands, which trembled slightly.
He closed his eyes and drifted into an uneasy sleep, one filled with visions of wraiths sweeping from the sky, of the panicked cries of villagers and chilling shrieks of the undead clamoring for him to join their networks, and of Fred, his old friend, swirling into oblivion in a cloud of ash.
Oh, and there were a few clowns there as well, for good measure.
Chapter 9
In utter peace, Quarl rode home from the community college on his bicycle, his completed birdhouse cradled on the handlebars, its colors glowing brightly in the warm sun. The bike trail wove between tall green trees and led back to the rural, off-the-grid communal eco-village where he lived.
He arrived at his hut and put his bike away, then walked over to a tall pine tree. Reaching up to a low branch, he carefully attached the birdhouse with some soft string and thanked the tree for allowing him to hang his birdhouse there.
Contentment consumed him. Quarl smiled and stepped back, admiring the birdhouse when, seemingly from nowhere, a bright bluebird swooped down and landed on the perch. It deftly turned its head to study Quarl. Then, with an agreeable chirp and a bob of its head, it hopped into the little house.
Quarl’s smile turned gleeful, cheerful, and cheesy tears rolled from his eyes.
The End
Don’t miss the entire ridiculous series!
Also by Rob Marsh
About the Author
Rob Marsh is a Texas-based author who writes fables about human-puppet hybrids, inquisitive primates, devious public radio monsters, and other unusual characters, mostly for all ages or for highly immature readers. He waits
patiently for that call from Hollywood with an offer to convert any or all of his book titles into computer-animated 3D pablum in return for millions of dollars or perhaps just a platter of cupcakes.
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