The Edward System - a short story in six parts

[Laughin Jude]

I wasn't originally planning on posting this here, but I mentioned it another thread and there seemed to be interest, so what the hell. If you want prettier text and formatting, everything's also up on my blog here and here and here.

I'll just rip the description of this bit from my blog as well since it's late, I've just now finished editing the third part (of probably five) of this piece and I'm being lazy:

This is a short story about a vampire who feeds off teenage Twilight fans and gets in over his head when he picks a real nutbar of a girl for his latest victim. I suppose you could say this is my official reaction to the Twilight series.

Have you ever heard the saying "Reading one bad book does more for you as a writer than reading ten good books," or something to that effect? Well, I read all four of those godawful books, and it's past time I said something about the experience. But instead of posting another anti-Meyer blog post on the web, I think I'll let the story of a vampire named Trent spell out my thoughts on the matter.

So here we go:

The Edward System

I

Today was Trent's first day of school at Union Falls High, which makes this his ninth first day of school this calendar year and brings his running total of first days at new schools up to something like ninety. He has a tally going in a notepad that occupies the pocket of his trademark and oh-so-cliché black leather jacket, and he harbors vague plans to celebrate the hundredth first day by doing something nice for himself, maybe knocking off a blood bank or taking a trip down to Cancun during spring break and enjoying the buffet. Granted, it's not like feeding off of high school girls is the kind of work he feels the need to bribe himself into doing; the taste of their sweet, energetic blood is reward enough. Really, the worst part of the process has to be reading their blogs.

Some vampires get off on knowing their victims before the inevitable throat-puncturing finale of the relationship. Trent prefers to spend as little time as possible getting to the good part. It's not that Trent has problems with intimacy. Back when Trent was new to this current shtick, he used to get a kick out of the way these girls would latch onto him like he was their personal savior, some Emo Jesus of a boyfriend on which to hang all their nascent daddy issues. That was before they all began blurring into one metavictim, a high school girl of sixteen or seventeen (like it matters), five foot whatever, blonde or brunette or maybe red on an odd day, brownbluegreen eyes, wearing clothes from Hot Topic and crazy about Johnny Depp. Trent remembers the first girl he took under his Edward System, a junior named Katy from Hackberry, Texas, and he remembers Shawna, Rebecca, Lori and a few others who came later in that first year while he was still ironing out the kinks in the process. After that they all blend together into a mass of bubblegum and cigarettes and sweet pea lotion from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Maybe it's time that Trent moved on to a new section of the buffet, but while he's strayed from the Edward System a few times since its development to eat the occasional hitchhiker or lone couple camping in the woods for the weekend, nothing beats being able to pluck a fresh (and often willing) victim right out of gym class, and Trent can't help but keep returning to the modus operandi that's kept him drinking fresh teenage blood a couple times a month for the past six years. He really should write Stephanie Meyer a thank you letter.

This week/small town's victim is looking to be Noelle Worthingson, a.k.a. *~KawaiiKuriFan29~* on Deviantart.com. Trent has no idea who Kuri is or what makes him/her/it so "kawaii," but the drawings Noelle has posted under that moniker mark her as a perfect target. Most of the drawings fall into one of two categories. The first is that of fan art of characters from Avatar: The Land Airbender being "shipped" together. "Shipping" is one of those terms with which Trent has become familiar as part of the Edward System, to his great annoyance, and involves teenage girls arguing on messageboards about which characters are destined to be together; the whole process generally devolves into melodramatic flamewars that Trent's victims/dates occasionally feel the need to recount for him in epic detail before he has the opportunity to murder them. The second category features pictures of Edward and Jacob from Twilight (and occasionally Captain Jack Sparrow) fighting to be the object of Noelle's affections in the same faux-anime style as the Avatar shipping. The attendant blog posts detail why Noelle thinks either supernatural suitor would make the ideal boyfriend, which as far as Trent (who's admittedly a bit jaded) can tell comes down to "pays attention to me" and "is pretty." Vague sexual euphemisms surrounded by Japanese emoticons seem common throughout Noelle's writings. Did Trent think his victims were all melting into each other? Here's a girl who represents the Platonic form of an Edward System mark.

There are a few other drawings, most of them concerning a boy in a Union Falls letterman jacket. Trent doesn't recognize the boy, and there's no name given on the drawings or in the attendant blog posts, but if Noelle has a crush on some local boy, all the better. Hacking school records to add and remove himself from class lists is one of the skills that makes the Edward System possible, but Trent can't erase the memories of those he interacts with while he's scoping out his meals, so it's nice to have a scapegoat lined up on the soon-to-be-dead girl's website for the locals to focus on instead of the transfer student who disappeared after a few days of school.

Despite recent depictions of vampire-kind to the contrary, Trent needs to sleep just like the humans he feeds on, and he finds himself yawning as the hour drags past midnight. It could be that he's feeling low on energy because he hasn't eaten anything bigger than a stray cat in four days, or maybe his eyes are just heavy from reading all the blog posts about Nickelodeon characters and My Chemical Romance. Either way, he crawls under the covers of his motel room bed (even these spring nights can be chilly when you don't produce a lot of body heat) and sleeps until about seven, when it's time to get up and shower in the neon-walled bathroom with its cheap complimentary shampoo and finger-width bar of soap.

After that it's time for the walk to school. Trent has a black 1978 Ford Maverick, polished enough to reflect the clouds as they pass overhead, that he leaves parked at the motel. Experience has taught him not to drive to school. For one thing, his taste in cars tends to draw attention, and attention is the last thing he wants from anyone but whatever lucky girl he's picked out as that week's recipient of the world's messiest hickey. It's no good trying to slip out of town after a gruesome murder in a car that everyone remembers. That's what made Trent abandon his Continental Coupe in Michigan, and every now and then he still wakes up sweating from the odd dream that he's driving the Coupe down the freeway again, the familiar feel of its rod-thin steering wheel against his palm, the way the passenger side window rattled when he pushed the engine over sixty. The Coupe's loss is one of the few regrets that Trent's allowed himself in all his years of undeath. Now he knows better, and the car is reserved for dates and getaways.

It needs to be mentioned that Twilight did get one thing half-right about vampires: the sun isn't lethal to Trent's sub-species. What sort of sense would it make if it was? After all, the light of Sol may reach Earth in greater intensity than that of other stars, but it's of no different quality than the rest of the light that comes to this planet.  Trent finds the sun pleasant. The sun's rays offer his body an inner-warmth that his undead organs and slurried bodily fluids can no longer provide. Of course, all of that crap about vampires glittering in the sun is just that. Still, walking beneath the morning sun gives Trent a boost of energy like that a cold-blooded reptile gets from laying on a warm rock, and he spends the hour it takes to saunter from the motel to the high school repeating in his head what he learned of Noelle by studying her online footprint the night before, already half-tasting her blood in his mouth.

As the school comes into view, Trent wonders if Noelle is a regular soda drinker or a diet girl. That's a distinction he's learned to make from the taste of his victims' blood. The girls who drink regular soda have sweeter blood; Trent thinks it's probably all the high fructose corn syrup. It's funny the sorts of things you figure out when you feed almost exclusively on the same age bracket for long enough. Diabetics have their own taste too, though it's not one Trent's fond of and he tries to avoid them, though sometimes he doesn't find out until he's already put the System into high gear. Noelle was eating a bag of Skittles at lunch yesterday, so Trent thinks he's safe on that front this time around.

Trent gets to third period early enough to snag the desk next to where Noelle was sitting yesterday, which puts him at the back of the class in the second row from the windows. Part of what caught his eye about Noelle yesterday was her penchant for staring out the window while drawing in her notepad yet still answering the teacher's questions like she'd done the reading. The Edward System is tuned to the dreamy yet studious types. Sure enough, Noelle sits in the same spot again, and Trent has a polite-but-distant look ready for her when she makes brief eye contact. Noelle looks away in a hurry, just like she's supposed to. Trent's mouth waters a little.

Most of the class passes as the teacher yammers about the scene in The Sea Wolf where Hump sees red, and the teacher asks the class how it relates to Nietzsche's ideas about the ubermensch and whether Hump or Wolf is really the "higher" man. Trent was never much of a reader when he was alive, and of the nine books he's read since he died, four of them were about glittery vampires. That was enough to put him off reading for the rest of his supernatural existence. With fifteen minutes of class to go, the students finally get the go-ahead to split into groups, and Trent scoots his chair just an inch closer to Noelle.

"Hey. Did you do the reading?" he says to her, knowing she did. Her type always does the reading.

Noelle looks up at him, shocked that someone's talking to her, and she shuts the cover of her notebook to hide her half-finished doodle of what looks like a werewolf in a pirate costume. "I read it last year. It was one of my dad's favorite books." She brushes her hair back behind her ear and gives Trent a once-over look before she says, "Did you read it?"

One of her dad's favorites, eh? Sounds like he picked the right girl. "I haven't caught up yet. I only started here yesterday. Is the movie any good?"

"There's a movie?"

"With these old books, there's always a movie." Trent scoots his chair the rest of the way over to her desk. It doesn't look like anyone else is going to intrude on their little study group, which suits Trent just fine. "I'm Trent."

"Noelle. Did you say you just moved here?"

And so the Edward System is a go. They do little talking about Jack London and his sociopathic seal hunter. Instead, Trent steers the conversation to Noelle's perceptions of life in Union Falls, the cliques, the best and worst of the teachers, what little there is do that's entertaining to people in their age and income bracket. Getting a teenage girl who feels like a misfit to talk about what's wrong with her surroundings isn't the most difficult step in the System, and Trent's learned to mostly tune out the details and grunt and nod at the right bits, but the process is vital to the System's success all the same. The Edward System works best when the victim sees Trent as someone who can be confided in, someone who sees the world in much the way she does, a fellow rogue soul searching for a mate. He gives terse responses when she's looking for affirmation and agreement, enough to keep her on the hook without ruining the mystery; the quickest path to success, Trent finds, is to portray a vague outline of a personality and let his victims fill in the blanks with their own projections of who and what they want him to be.

"Where'd you move here from?"

Trent glances over his shoulder like he's afraid someone else might be listening in, then he leans a half-inch closer, just enough to give Noelle the impression of added intimacy. "Promise you won't freak out?"

"Why would I freak out?"

"Just promise me."

She laughs. "Okay, fine, I promise I won't freak out. Where did you live before you came here?"

He sighs and says in a low voice, "Forks, Washington."

"Oh! Squee!" Noelle bounces in her seat with a frightening energy like she just mainlined three hundred milligrams of sugar. "Okay, not freaking," she says, and she pushes her hair behind her ear again. "I so want to go to Forks, though. Are the burgers at Sully's any good? Oh my god, did you ever go on one of their Twilight tours just for fun?"

As you may have already guessed, Trent has never been near Forks. Everything he knows about Forks is gleaned from the Twilight books, the town's chamber of commerce website and Wikipedia. Regardless of the location of his last murderous dining experience, he always tells his victims he's fresh out of Forks. That claim alone is usually enough to get him a first date, and the way the Edward System works, the first date is all he needs.

Sure enough, by the time class is over, Trent has Noelle's number and vague plans to do something Friday night. Trent is an old pro at getting teenage girls' phone numbers, which raises all kinds of issues when you consider that, while he's technically seventeen, he's been seventeen for thirty-four years now. Having to wait until Friday is a bummer, but there's something about the coppery scent hanging around Noelle that makes his stomach churn. He was hoping to drink her by tomorrow night and be on the road again by Thursday morning, but he supposes he can probably find some vermin at the motel to get him by until the weekend.

[Laughin Jude]

II

The boy in the letterman jacket from Noelle's drawings is a Union Falls senior classman named Dominique. As far as Trent can tell, Dominique is the only offline friend that Noelle has, and he discovers from listening to their conversation that they've known each other since elementary school. Their introduction comes when Trent sits with Noelle at the lunch table on Wednesday. The boy offers Trent a hand to shake as he sits down across from them; Trent returns the gesture with a nod, wary that the coolness of his skin has been known to raise questions he isn't in a mood to lie his way through today.

"So what are you two doing on Friday?" Dominique says after he and Trent have felt each other out a bit.

Noelle grins. "Are you jealous, Dominique?"

"Why would I be jealous?"

"Oh whatever." Noelle slugs her old (and possibly only) friend on the arm. Trent doesn't say a word. He's long ago grown past the age of his hyperhormonal teenage mentality, both because he's several decades old and because his undead body just isn't capable of making all of those chemicals in the necessary abundance for a sustained amount of time anymore, but his constant proximity to high school students these past few years makes it easy for his mind to pick the mental flotsam out of the currents of their interactions much in the same way that living in a foreign country for long enough will acclimate one to an alien language and culture.

Trouble's brewing if Dominique wants Noelle as much as the girl's drawings hint that she wants him. In her passive-aggressive prodding, Noelle is all but encouraging the senior classman to challenge Trent to pistols at dawn for her affections. Is her head too full of trashy Mormon soft-porn and debates about cartoon characters' romantic destinies to see it, or is she just the type who purposefully creates drama to alleviate the boredom of her daily life? Trent hopes the bitch isn't going to be more trouble than she's worth—but oh, how that wonderful coppery scent fills his head when he's sitting next to her. What is that?

After more none-too-innocent talk, Trent agrees to take Noelle to the county fair opening this Friday. That's a more public venue than he'd usually pick when he's looking to make a kill, but he figures he can get her alone at some point during the night, maybe stray a bit away from the fairgrounds on the promise of a kiss and give her something she won't live to tell about once they're beyond the sight and mind of the crowds. Hell, if he has to, he can just eat her in the car at the end of the night, though that usually means replacing the bloody seat covers afterward. Besides, it's been a while since he rode the Gravitron or had an elephant ear, and Trent thinks it's important for the health of an eternal predator's mind to enjoy unlife's small joys once in a while.

Date set, and with an eye toward the drama Noelle might raise between himself and Dominique in the next few days, Trent fakes a dentist appointment on Thursday to avoid going back to the school. The Maverick is past due for an oil change, so Trent jacks the car up in the motel parking lot and goes to it, the simple repetitive motions of the task so familiar to his nervous system that his hands move as if by their accord.

Trent doesn't like having to think about things. He likes it when he can follow instructions from point A to B to M to Z, one thing after another, delineated and sensible without the need for bothering over how to accomplish this task or wonder what he should do now. That's why he came up with the Edward System.

It's true that the System sometimes puts Trent at greater risk than would plucking victims off the street at night like his old friend Murray does in Detroit. But that's too damn chaotic for Trent; taking victims at random like that, you never know what you're going to get for quality, never know what you're going to have to do to take them down if they surprise you, never know until it's too late if you've bitten off more than you can drink. Neither crucifixes nor holy water nor garlic hold any fear for real vampires, but Trent has seen what a jagged piece of junk lumber or a flame from a Bic lighter can do to his kind, and the risk that some asshole in an alley is going to get lucky and stake you just isn't worth it. You have to stick your neck out in public a bit more with the Edward System, and there's always the risk that the police will someday realize they have a serial murderer posing as a transfer student at high schools across the country to satisfy his cravings, but there's just no other way to ensure such a consistent quality in his meals, and outside of shows on the WB, high school girls don't fight back against vampires and win.

After the car's done, Trent spends the better part of Thursday afternoon watching reruns of Gunsmoke in his underwear. His stomach is growling by the time the local news comes on, and though the sun's still higher in the sky than he'd rather it was while he's hunting, it's not like the motel is hurting for empty rooms, and he doubts anyone will notice him if he goes out for a snack. Trent throws on some fresh clothes and slips out to the back lot of the motel where the green industrial trash bins sit amid long-congealed puddles of grease. A rat, a stray cat, a pigeon; it's just a matter of waiting for something to come by looking for a meal so Trent can have one of his own.

Some vampires look down on eating vermin, which seems plain crazy to Trent. Popular media may have suggested to you that vampires need human blood to live (if "live" is the appropriate term). Not so. Any mammal's blood will do so long as it's warm. Of course, humans remain the most desirable of victims for a number of reasons. They're big enough to provide a full meal, for starters; drinking every last liter in an adult gives a vampire enough blood to run on comfortably for a week, two if the vampire in question doesn't mind a bit of a rumbly in his or her tumbly the last couple days before the next feeding. Besides that, humans are plain delicious; in a world of vermin that tastes more or less like chicken, humanity is a quarter-pound bacon cheeseburger and a Cherry Coke. Human blood is easiest on the gut, too, because vampires start off as humans, and their bodies have to go through more trouble to digest the blood of other species, whereas fresh human blood can more or less be absorbed right into the drinker's bloodstream. On top of all that, killing a human tends to be a lot easier and safer than killing any other animal of comparable size; they lack claws and sharp teeth, and thanks to the sedimentary culture of modern America, a good many of them are as fat and slow as a paraplegic baby seal.

Something's different in Trent's room when he returns. Sucking the remains of a pigeon's lifeblood off his right index finger, Todd walks through the bedroom to the bathroom and back again, trying to make conscious the difference that his unconscious mind has noticed. The bed's still made up the same way; his mother had him making his bed every morning as a child and not even three decades as a sociopathic man-eater has robbed him of the habit. All the lights that were on are still on, and the converse holds true for those that were off. Then he notices the oil-splattered t-shirt that was on the floor by the bathroom door has migrated onto the back of the thin-padded chair by the writing desk.

Housekeeping? Except he told them to stay out when he checked in, and if it was housekeeping they didn't stay for long and did a piss-poor job while they were here. Trent looks out the window and wonders if someone's finally caught on to his game, but he refuses to let paranoia get a grip on his brain. He's not running now, goddammit. Not when he has a proper meal all lined up for tomorrow.

[Laughin Jude]

III

Trent skips school again Friday. Thursday night passed without a lot of sleep, and the less face time he puts in at the school before tonight's events, the better. It's seven in the evening when the Maverick pulls up to the curb in front of Noelle's home. Trent pulls out the collar of his signature leather jacket and checks in the rear view mirror to ensure his hair is properly coiffed. He practices his pout a couple times, letting his pale lips purse and rest in tune with Jim Croce on the radio. Okay. Time to eat.

The woman who answers the doorbell is a shadow of Noelle twenty years and forty pounds down the road. She stands silent in the doorway for what might be several heartbeats if Trent could still rely on that sort of thing as a measurement, then the woman steps aside the scant few inches necessary for Trent to squeeze between her robed figured and the door. No invitation is required, vampire lore be damned, though it would be polite.

Noelle's voice carries down the stairs from the bathroom. "Is he here?"

"He's here," Noelle's mother shouts back up the stairs, and without further acknowledgment of her daughter's date she waddles back to the her easy chair and unmutes Nancy Grace, who's busy encouraging a million-strong TV audience to lynch a suspected carjacker who will later be exonerated.

Trent shuts the front door but remains standing on the entry way linoleum. Past images of Noelle and her mother in practiced poses smile at him from within cheap faux-wooden frames on the wall. There is no indication of a husband or father. That's no surprise to Trent. One of the first things he learned from applying the Edward System is that most of the Twihards are looking for daddy.

Daddy is someone who's been gone a long time, someone whose memory fills them with sensations of euphoria and angst. There are all kinds of reasons that daddy is gone. Once in a great while he's dead. More likely, he and mom didn't get along, so now he only gets to see his special girl a couple weekends a month, if at all. Or, and Trent's fairly certain after his study of her books that this or something similar is the case with Stephanie Meyer, maybe daddy touched his daughter in a way decidedly undaddylike, and now daddy lives in another state or a federal prison, possibly both.

The particulars are irrelevant to Trent. The gist is that the Edward System involves filling the daddy role, at least for the night, which mostly comes down to paying the victim attention while remaining aloof and distant. Trent can remember trying to attract girls his age while he was still alive by being sensitive and attentive, and looking back, he's sure that's why he died a virgin. Now he knows to be a complete asshole to his victims because the type the Edward System is designed to ensnare lap up the abuse like a dehydrated mutt fresh from a trek across the desert licking at a puddle of antifreeze in the driveway.

Noelle comes bounding down the stairs two at a time and tackle-hugs Trent, who barely gets his arms up in time to catch her, and he has to plant his left foot against the doorjamb to stay standing. "Okay, mom, we're going to the fair!" Noelle's mother waves a hand in the air without peeling her eyes from the TV. Trent wonders if he might not be doing the old hag a favor by taking Noelle off her hands.

"You weren't at school today," Noelle says once she's buckled into the Maverick's passenger seat. "I would have called you, but you said your phone's not hooked up, and I couldn't find you on Facebook."

"I don't have a profile on Facebook."

"What?" She laughs. "You liar."

"I really don't."

"What kind of person isn't on Facebook?"

"I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy."

"Oh whatever," Noelle says, then she spends the rest of the ride to the fairgrounds regaling him with tales of Facebook drama that bleed into a story about a fight she had with a girl from New Mexico in someone's LiveJournal comments. "I swear to god, if I knew her real name, I would drive down there and burn the bitch's house to the ground while she slept, and if she came running out before she died, I'd fucking stab her in the neck, you know?"

"Huh," says Trent as he pulls the Maverick into a parking spot in the fairground's gravel lot. Well, good thing he likes them feisty. It can be a lot of fun when they try to put up a fight so long as they don't make a lot of noise doing it and bring the heat down on you. If worst comes to worst you can always snap a girl's neck to shut her up, but that first bite just isn't as satisfying when the victim's body is already limp as an overboiled noodle.

"Last year I did start a fire in chemistry," Noelle continues once they're out of the car and walking to the fairground gates. "The gas light was this pretty blue, and I was wondering if it would stay that way when it was burning other stuff, so I let it catch the tip of my math book. It didn't stay blue all the way, but the yellow was pretty too. Don't tell anyone, though, because Mr. Darby was super-pissed and they almost made me go to counseling, but I convinced them it was an accident."

"Sounds like you're a pretty good actress. Did you ever think of joining the drama club?"

"Nah, Mrs. Billsby is a total cunt. Did you ever do any plays at your old schools?" Trent shakes his head. That's something of a half-truth. While he's never been on the stage, he did help run the lighting and curtains during his sophomore class' production of Othello. Trent doesn't like to think about his time in high school—well, his first time in high school, when he was attending in hopes of securing a diploma instead of a meal. And he sure as hell isn't about to talk about it without his food.

Trent keeps an eye out for the Gravitron as they walk around; they still have those, right? That's second on the list of attractions he wants to partake of tonight, the first being Noelle's carotid arteries, but it's not that far down the list. Though Trent has a knack for machinery, the physics that make that particular ride possible may as well be riddles written in Enochian script as far as his incomplete mid-seventies high school education leaves him able to understand any explanation of how it works. The same goes for his comprehension of the seemingly labyrinthine innards of computers and the question of how microwaves heat things up without giving you cancer.

Noelle stops him every now and then so she can ride the bumper cars or the carousel or the pirate ship, and she makes him run through the fun house decorated with caricatures of Stevie Nicks and Neil Peart and Meat Loaf, where a blast of compressed air sends Noelle's intoxicating scent into his nostrils and half-tempts him to rip open her throat then and there, all the kids running past them to dive into the ball pit at the end of the platform be damned. It's not that he's worried about traumatizing the tykes; there just wouldn't be any way to get away clean if so many tiny, shrill-voiced witnesses poured screaming from the exit while he was busy drinking Noelle's lifeblood.

It's an effort to keep his hand away from Noelle's while they walk the fairgrounds. The girl seems desperate for palm-on-palm contact, but Trent's loath to provide it to her. His chill touch just raises too many questions. They strike a silent truce, locking arms at the elbows, and Noelle never voices any complaint despite her earlier attempts at lacing together their fingers.

They stop at a booth where the barker invites Trent to knock over a stack of five milk cans to win a plush doll that Noelle identifies as a "domocoon," whatever that is. Two dollars later, three of the milk cans remain standing and the carnie is wishing Trent better luck next time with a slap-down-your-dough-or-get-the-hell-outta-here smile. Noelle pulls a Hello Kitty pocketbook out of her matching purse and lays down a five, which the sign in the back says gives her three games of two throws each.

"I did this a couple years ago and won a panda," Noelle says. "It's not that hard. Watch me." She leans toward Trent, and he has the sensation she might be trying to kiss him, but if so she's unable to break past her initial hesitation. The moment passes as the barker hands her the softball. Noelle bounces the ball in her hand, more to show off than to test the weight, then throws and misses the stack of milk cans by at least two inches.

"One more throw this game," says the carnie as he hands Noelle another ball to throw.  She manages two cans this time, but the carnie just resets the stack afterward. Noelle's left eyebrow twitches and she throws again as soon as the carnie's out of the way, though she almost beans him regardless. It's a solid hit on the bottom center can, and the whole stack wobbles, but only the can at the top falls.

"Bitch," Noelle says under her breath. She really puts her whole upper body into the next throw; one foot comes off the ground as her body lunges forward and her arm rotates the full arc her shoulder blade will allow. Trent is reminded of a slow-motion replay of Charlie Brown giving it his all on the pitching mound. The thunk the ball makes when it strikes the plywood back of the booth turns heads. Unfortunately, she's off to the right by an inch.

Noelle stamps her foot in the fairground sod. "So unfair! Okay, this time I'll do it." But she doesn't. On the last throw, Trent notices a tear run down Noelle's cheek, and the booth attendant has to duck out of the way of a ball that Trent isn't entirely sure was thrown at his head purely by accident. Noelle spins away from the booth on her heel and wails like a two year old denied a new toy at the grocery store, then she bolts and Trent has to sprint after her to keep from losing her in the crowd.

He catches up to her behind the bumper cars. Noelle is hunched over with her right shirt sleeve pulled up to her elbow—and finally Trent realizes what that coppery scent that's drawn him to this girl these past few days is: Noelle is a cutter. Right now she's stabbing her arm over and again with a pin she's pulled from her hair, and Trent stands mesmerized behind her for a moment watching the pinpricks become bright red with condensed deliciousness. Does he dare take her here? No, there are port-a-johns across from the tent and no way of knowing when someone will come around the corner and see them. At least now he knows what that damn smell is. His stomach gurgles in anticipation.

His future meal sniffles when she notices Trent coming up behind her. "I haven't cut myself since I met you until just now," she says, and she's quick to pull her sleeve back down, which does nothing to stifle the scent to Trent's nose. "I'm sorry. I just wanted you to see how good I could be. I'm not crazy, I swear."

Trent isn't so sure about that, but batshit insane high school girl blood tastes just as sweet as sane high school girl blood. Throwing caution to the wind, he takes Noelle's hand in his own and tries not to let the worry show on his face when she shivers at the chill of his touch. "It's alright. Look, do you maybe want to take a walk away from here to clear your head?" If she really is crazy, it's best just to skip the Gravitron and the elephant ear and drink her before she has a chance to flip out so hard she ruins the whole evening.

But she stymies his attempts to murder her at his convenience with a shake of her head. "No, I'm okay. Can we ride the Ferris wheel? Please?"

And within the space of a minute she's back to bubbly and sweet again, tears rubbed away and smile wide enough that her cheekbones almost poke into her eyeballs. Now that Trent's given her his hand there's no getting it back, and she squeezes his fingers in a vicelike grip as the wheel makes its first rotation. "Your hand is so cold," she says, and she lightly touches his face. "All of you is cold. Are you feeling okay?"

"I'm fine. I always run a little cold."

"Do you?" Noelle's fingers creep down from his hands to his wrist, and Trent has the unsettling feeling that she's searching for his pulse. But she doesn't ask him why she can't find one, which means it's probably all in his head. She couldn't suspect. He hasn't given her any reason to think he's anything but some asshole new kid who fits her idea of Prince Charming. But if that's the case, why is he so aware of the chill of the evening air and the differences in the amounts of heat their bodies are putting off all the sudden? This date isn't going at all the way he planned. Could there be a flaw in the Edward System he hasn't accounted for?

The wheel comes around again, giving them a view of the entire fairgrounds and the empty fields that used to be farmland before the economy went to shit beyond. "We'll remember this night for the rest of our lives," Noelle says, and she snuggles her head against his chest. "Trent, I know this is sudden and all, but I'm so in love with you. I have been since we met. You believe in love at first sight, right? I just knew you were the one I was waiting for when you came over and talked to me."

The noise that escapes Trent's throat may be distantly related to speech, possibly a second cousin or step-uncle through marriage. It sounds like something between choking on a fish bone and the sudden urge to throw up. Regardless, it seems Noelle's mind is able to warp that response into an "I love you too" because she just buries her face deeper in his chest, her arms wrapping tight around his midsection, apparently satisfied with his unintelligible reply. It's a good thing that Trent doesn't have to breathe because he's fairly certain the crazy bitch is in the process of bruising his lungs.

Noelle pulls out her cell phone to glance at the time once they're off the Ferris wheel. "Oh hey, let's go to the elephant ear stand, okay?" she says. Trent nods, happy that he's finally going to get something he wanted out of this date, but his stomach drops when he sees Dominique wave at them through the throngs as they approach. The boy is wearing his usual letterman jacket and has his cell phone in his hand like he was about to make a call. Noelle runs ahead and tackle-hugs her friend with a delighted squeal, almost like she wasn't bawling and poking holes in her skin fifteen minutes ago.

"How's your night going?" Dominique says once Noelle is back on her own two feet. Trent catches up and gives Dominique a nod hello. Was he waiting here for them? Did the bitch plan for them to meet Dominique? Is that why she checked the time? Goddammit.

"Fantastic. Hey, I need to go pee. Would you two wait here?"

And she's off before Trent or Dominique can say another word. They both watch her slip through the crowd. Dominique clears his throat and looks Trent in the eyes when he speaks. "Hey, I needed to tell you something."

"What?"

"Look, I've known Noelle for a long time. She's one of my best friends. But she's like a sister to me, you know? I just wanted you to know that I'm not at all interested in her, you know, romantically. That would just be weird for me. I mean, we spend a lot of time together, but it's not like that. It's never been like that, and it never will be like that, I guess is what I'm trying to say." Dominique lets loose a heavy sigh at the end of his speech, like he's finally set down a weight he'd been hauling uphill for miles. "I'm just glad to see her with someone again after what happened last year."

Trent blinks. "What happened last year?"

"Oh shit." Dominique winces. "You don't know."

"You mean when she started the fire in chemistry?"

"No, after that. It was during her wiccan/juggalo phase, right after her last boyfriend moved out of town." Dominique stands on his tip-toes and looks toward the port-a-potties to make sure Noelle isn't in listening distance, which makes Trent's stomach sink even lower than it already had during Noelle's confession of her undying love on the Ferris wheel. "They caught her behind the gym with a couple tanks of propane, a bag of fertilizer and a blow torch during prom. The cops came in, said it was a crime scene and made everyone go home, and the next Monday there was this... I guess you'd call it a manifesto getting passed around that was supposed to have been taken off of her MySpace. It was all about how everyone you love always leaves you and she wasn't going to take it anymore. It wasn't on her page when I looked after school, though, so who knows if she really wrote it, and I've never felt right asking her about it. But she did intend to blow up the prom at the time; she's admitted that much to me. You seriously didn't know?"

"Hadn't heard a word about it."

"Oh. Sorry. I figured someone would have told you. That or she would have said something about it." Dominique rubs at the back of his neck. "I mean, everyone knows. It's why no one talks to her. You noticed how she sits off by herself in all her classes, right?"

"I only have the one with her."

"Oh, right, English."

"Yeah. Hey." Trent licks his lips. "How long's she been cutting herself?"

"Oh shit, is she doing that again?" Dominique sighs again and looks up into the night sky. "Goddammit, I wonder if she stopped taking her meds again."

Once Noelle returns from her piss, they remain a trio for the rest of the evening. Noelle and Dominique make small talk, with nary a mention of the topics touched on by the elephant ear stand, and Trent mostly keeps his mouth shut and holds Noelle's hand when they go on the rides. None of his subtle hints to Dominique that he'd like a little alone time with Noelle seem to get through the senior classman's skull, or if they do, Dominique doesn't give a damn that he's, well, not cockblocking Trent so much as inadvertently saving Noelle's life, but it's still damn annoying.

By the time Dominique offers Noelle a ride home (since it's on the way anyway, he says), Trent's all but given up on ever eating this delicious-smelling but terminally crazy little treat. He drives the Maverick back to the motel alone, musing on all the little signs he missed, and slips into bed thinking that, if nothing else, this has been a hell of a learning experience and one that he can use as a guide when he revises the Edward System. Tomorrow he'll move on to the next town, a little hungry but wiser for tonight's debacle. The crazy bitch doesn't know how lucky she is.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nice! I like it!

[Luna]

Good stuff, Jude, keep it coming!

[Laughin Jude]

So I was wrong and it looks like this will be a six-parter. I ended up splitting what I had planned for the fourth part into two separate parts after I outlined the rest of the story and finally decided on an ending. That probably means part five will be around the same length as parts two and four, while part six will probably be a bit closer to three.

Version with prettier formatting is here.

IV

Packing the next morning takes Trent all of three minutes. It's gotten to where he usually doesn't bother taking his clothes out of the suitcase until the day he wears them, and other than his toothbrush (vampires don't have to worry about tooth decay, but halitosis is an ever-present threat) and shampoo, there's not much to grab that isn't already either in his suitcase or on his person. Trent runs the suitcase and his laptop down to the Maverick, then returns to the motel room for one last once-over just in case he's forgotten anything and to leave the key on the bedstand like the manager requested when he checked in.

Leaving town without making a kill is a new experience, one that makes Trent unusually introspective. Fresh human blood in his system always gives him an amazing burst of energy that lasts for days, not to mention he's usually hopped up on adrenaline from the kill, so in a sense he's never moved on in a sober state of mind before. He's also lacking the quiet paranoia that's always accompanied his previous departures, that creeping fear that someone will realize the latest girl's missing and who she was with and start adding the equation up before Trent can get beyond the local heat's jurisdiction. Moving on without a dead girl in his wake is just plain dull by comparison. At the same time, it provides him a clarity of mind in the face of his departure that he's never experienced before. Greater self-awareness as a side-effect of failure—Murray would appreciate that. He was always the philosophical type.

Trent's fingers are on the doorknob, ready to open the door and leave Union Falls unscathed, when someone knocks on the door from outside. Could it be roomkeeping? Trent pulls his hand back from the knob and looks through the peephole. His throat tightens. It's Noelle.

Could it be he thought he was going to get skunked only to have the fish jump into the boat after he's reeled in his pole? Trent shakes his head. No; he doesn't dare eat her in the motel room. If Noelle has found him here at the motel, someone else might know he was staying here too. Besides, murdering her here would draw a link between the two separate identities he's assumed in every town he's visited, and the last thing Trent wants is for "Trent the transfer student" to be associated with "the anonymous, cash-paying drifter with the Maverick."  That would make it too damn easy for the law to track the places he's been before, and once they did that they'd see the pattern.

And that's all secondary to the main concern on Trent's mind. How did she know to find him here? Trent swallows, though that does nothing for the sudden fullness in his throat, and he opens the door.

Noelle immediately lowers her eyes when the door opens, like a parishioner aware of her sins who has hesitantly come to atone for them. Her foot traces an arc on the pavement. Then she looks up at him, and her eyes mist as she gushes. "Oh, Trent, I had to see you. Can I come in?"

She doesn't wait for permission before brushing past him and into the motel room. There's something about the way Noelle looks around the room, especially the way her gaze pauses when it passes over where his suitcase had been sitting all week until ten minutes ago, that makes Trent realize this isn't the first time she's been in his room, and it dawns on him that it wasn't housekeeping who moved his oily shirt on Thursday. How long was she here? Did she go through his laptop? Shit, was his wallet sitting out on the bedstand while he was down eating the pigeon? How much does she know?

Instead of asking her those questions or letting on that he knows he should, he says, "How did you find me?"

"Of course you'd ask that." Noelle's laugh is forced, but she sits on the bed and makes herself at home all the same. "I, um, kinda followed you on the way home Tuesday." At least she has the good grace to blush when she admits it. "Oh, Trent, let's not talk about that. We have to talk about Dominique."

Trent closes the door and locks it as surreptitiously as he can. "What about him? Does he know you're here?"

"You should see your face when I say his name." She stands and lays a hand against Trent's cheek. "You don't have to be jealous of Dominique. There's no reason for you to fight him over me. Don't you understand that you're the one I love, Trent? Only you."

If Trent wasn't sure before, he's absolutely certain now: this chick is psycho in ways not even the DSM could describe. Is she trying to manufacture a love triangle, trying to make Dominique the Jacob to Trent's Edward just to provide her life with some semblance of passion and excitement? Trent almost feels sorry for Dominique.

What is there to say to all that? Trent decides it's best to say nothing at all. He turns from Noelle and reaches for the doorknob, even manages to open the door a crack, but the girl grabs his arm and digs her chewed-short nails into Trent's chilly skin before he can step outside. "You don't have to run from me, Trent. It's okay. I know your secret, and I still love you."

Trent peels Noelle's grip from his arm. "Secret?"

"You're cold to the touch. You don't have a Facebook. You don't know who My Chemical Romance is and you listen to the oldies station. And," she says as she lays her fingers on Trent's wrist, "you don't have a pulse."

"I have a goddamn pulse." Trent pulls his arm away from her. "You just don't know how to find one."

"I was a candystriper. I know how to find a stupid pulse." Noelle shakes her head as if to ward off the phantom change of topic. "Trent. Trent, I know what you're doing. You're scared. You think you can't afford to love anyone because of your curse. But I know you're a vampire, Trent, and I love you."

"What?" Now Trent's the one to grab her by the wrist, and she gasps in what sounds more like erotic satisfaction than surprise or pain.

"I love you, Trent. I want you to make me a fellow creature of the darkness so I can share your eternal torment. We'll be together as lovers until the sun explodes and swallows the earth, just the two of us, walking the night and spending the days in each other's arms." She cranes her neck and throws back her hair so the splotchy skin of her throat is exposed, vulnerable. Trent feels his mouth watering despite his better judgment. "Drink me, my love! Transform me, so our love can transcend time. Please, Trent." Her voice, so melodramatic and self-assured, falters at the end.

So here's his choice: either leave the crazy bitch alive, in which case she probably tells anyone who will listen about her vampire ex-boyfriend who was staying at the motel, or drink the stupid bitch dry and dump her body in the dumpster. Given those options, does he have any reason not to eat her? He could try getting her into the car afterward, he supposes, maybe wrap her in a sheet and stick her in the trunk, dump her body on the road, though he hates doing that because it tells the authorities what direction he went after he left town. Even if he goes that route, he doesn't dare move her body until it's dark outside; while the motel has plenty of vacancies, it's not completely devoid of prying eyes. Trent realizes he's already thinking about Noelle as a body to be dealt with, which means he's made up his mind. Fine.

The girl gasps when his teeth break her skin, and her fingers curl and uncurl a few times as her nervous system catches fire of a kind Noelle's never considered. After a few gulps, Trent throws his head back with a satisfied sigh. She's delicious, and from the taste of it, a diet soda drinker. Noelle's eyes are open, and though the light of life remains behind her pupils, she stares unblinking at a blank spot on the wall, mouth hanging agape. There's no way to tell if she can see him smiling at her. Trent goes back to her throat to drain the rest of her lifeblood while it's fresh, mind cleared of what came before and what will come after, all worries temporarily banished while her hot, sticky plasma is sliding down his esophagus.

"Noelle? Was he here?"

What's left of the girl drops from Trent's arms as he spins on his heel to face the door, but it's too late. Dominique knocks on the door and in doing so pushes it open far enough that he can see Noelle's body crumpled on the carpet behind Trent, and though the senior comes up short for an instant when he notices the blood dribbling down Trent's chin, he doesn't hesitate for long. Dominique lowers his shoulder and charges at Trent like a football player in one of those old Goofy shorts; Trent steps aside and tries to trip Dominique, but somehow he ends up being pulled off-balance himself instead, and Trent stumbles out the open door and falls onto his ass on the asphalt outside.

Dominique makes to follow Trent outside, then apparently thinks better of that idea and slams the door shut instead. Trent scrambles to his feet and rushes the door, but it's too late; Dominique has locked it from inside, and the key's lying on the bedstand. The boy's muffled voice is pleading with Noelle to live from the other side of the door, and after a moment Trent can hear Dominique's side of what sounds like a 911 call.

The Maverick hits thirty on the way out of the parking lot, and Trent almost hits a Greyhound bus pulling onto the highway. Probably twenty miles pass by, most of which Trent won't remember driving later, before he lets himself look in the rear view mirror for the first time, and he can't bring himself to turn on the radio for fear that he'll miss the distant warning of sirens beneath the cacophony of AM rock music.

[P3nT4gR4m]

This fucking rules! And I don't mean rules in the mamby-pamby modern, duly elected spineless wanker - sense, no, I'm talking about the - foaming at the mouth, decapitating the living fuck out of any one who stands against you - Genghis Kahn kinda ruling

[Laughin Jude]

This part ran longer than I thought it would, but hey, getting near the end regardless. Pretty version here. Part VI will be the conclusion.

V

Five weeks pass, during which most of Trent's meals consist of rats, strays and the random hobo, before Trent takes his first victim under Edward System 2.0. The lucky girl, Melinda Arwinkle, is a college freshman whose interests include trance music, ecstasy and paranormal romances. Her death is the end result of a complete revision of the Edward System—its basic tenets, its precautionary measures, even its targets.

It turns out it's remarkably easy to infiltrate a college campus even if you're not signed up for classes and haven't paid a cent of tuition, and both the number of students on campus any given day and the impersonal nature of American higher education lends a would-be murderer far more anonymity than does bouncing from one small town high school to the next. Knowing all that now, Trent wonders why he didn't just start with college girls to begin with. If he had to think about it, he'd probably say it's because he died a high school junior in an age when colleges were still mostly reserved for those pursuing professional careers and had exclusive entrance policies; today's colleges, which don't feel all that different from high school to Trent, surprise him with their liberal enrollment standards.

While Melinda's the sweetest meal Trent has had since the disaster in Union Falls, she's a little heavy and if not full-on diabetic was certainly headed in that direction from the taste of her blood. All the same, Trent's willing to mark Melinda down as a flawless victory. For one thing, the entire process from introduction to ingestion happens in under forty-eight hours, which fits well within the new seventy-two hour limit that Edward System 2.0 places on Trent's hunts. No more stretching the courtship out so crazy bitches like Noelle can stalk and study him until they figure out what he really is.

Another new rule is "Never miss the first opportunity." Going to the fairgrounds with the intention of eating Noelle there was a critical mistake. What he should have done was drive to some deserted parking lot or other lonely place on the outskirts of town under the guise of "hey, I want to show you this spot," pulled Noelle out of the car when they arrived (by her hair if need be) and drank until his stomach was distended. Melinda makes following the new rule easy when she pops what looks like an aspirin with a smiley face into her mouth while she's sitting in the Maverick's passenger seat. She dies, pupils the size of Skittles and too cottonmouthed to scream properly, in an alley behind a club on fourth avenue, after which Trent goes into the club alone and loses forty minutes stroking the padding on the edge of the bar because he suddenly finds its texture fascinating.

The second victim of Edward System 2.0, Sonia something or other, is a local enrolled at Iowa State University, and killing her is so simple that Trent almost feels a little cheated; she dies the same day Trent meets her, shirtless and straddling him while he sits on the edge of the bed in her dorm room. Another time, Trent might have gone along with her obvious intentions before opening her veins, but he spots a copy of New Moon on Sonia's bookshelf while she's whispering R-rated suggestions in his ear, and Trent feels the sudden urge to put an end to her life before she can utter another syllable. He tosses the book in the garbage on the way out.

After that, the victims start to bleed together again, and as another month passes Trent feels himself moving on from the near-disaster that was Union Falls. Once in a while he runs up against one of his new rules, such as "No girls who write fanfiction" or "Never meet her friends before the day of the kill," but he's still able to feed on a weekly basis, and soon he's worked his way northeast to Chicago, a city he hasn't visited since 1987. On his third day there he takes a sophomore from Roosevelt, but she's mostly something to tide him over while he looks for a real challenge. It's time he found some proper prey to prove conclusively to himself that he's back in his groove.

Oddly, if his undead body wasn't incapable of producing allergic reactions, he'd swear he was having one to that last meal; his arms start itching the day after he eats her, and it's not like he's changed his fabric softener or shampoo any time recently. But the issue passes before Trent can be bothered to do anything about it, and he returns to the hunt.

That's what takes him to Excalibur that Saturday, where a would-be dental hygienist from the city college meets up with him at the bar. She's goth or emo or whatever the nihilists who are into leather are calling themselves this year, black paint on her lips and skull-shaped barrettes in her hot pink hair, and if it wasn't for her fake ID she'd have to wait another year and a half to be here with him tonight; of course, it's not like Trent's driver's license is legit either, him being both dead and under age as well, but the better part of age (especially when your age doesn't show on your face) is wisdom, and Trent knows how to talk his way past a bouncer. If things go well, Trent thinks he might be too preoccupied to eat his victim until tomorrow morning; it's been too long since he played with his food, and the way the strobe lights make the glitter on the girl's cheeks sparkle has him feeling frisky.

There's an itch in between Trent's shoulder blades for the better part of the night, but it doesn't feel like something that scratching will help. It's more a mental annoyance than a physical one, though it does remind him of an old memory he'd rather not dwell on, so he does his best to put it out of his mind while he eye-fucks tonight's delicacy on the dance floor.

He doesn't notice the driver of the Tundra watching him when he goes into the club, nor does he notice when the Tundra follows his Maverick back to the would-have-been dental hygienist's apartment. But he does notice the broken passenger side window when he comes down to the Maverick the next morning, still buzzing from fresh blood and adrenaline, all of which is replaced with a sudden sensation like he's been punched in the stomach when he sees the manila envelope laid carefully over a nest of glass shards on the passenger seat. Hand shaking, Trent picks up the envelope and turns it over a few times looking for obvious booby-traps; poison needles or most chemical agents won't affect him, but there's no use getting stabbed in the finger or spending the next hour sneezing. Satisfied, he opens the envelope and studies the drawing it contains.

The style is what Japanohpile teenage girls on the internet call "chibi." Edward and Jacob from Twilight, Captain Jack Sparrow and what looks like a werewolf in a letterman jacket look on as an excited girl tackle-hugs a teenage vampire in a black leather jacket. A fiery orange heart rises above their heads like a helium balloon. Written at the bottom of the page in purple ink is "Soon, my love." There's no signature, but Trent doesn't need one to know who it's supposed to be from.

Two days later, Trent hands the drawing to Murray inside the older vampire's basement apartment in Detroit. How long has it been since he last saw Murray—six years? Seven? Trent's mind can't seem to focus on the small details the last couple days. His mind hasn't been working right since he saw the goddamn envelope now lying next to the untouched cup of coffee cooling on Murray's kitchen table.

Tall, red-haired and freckled forehead to foot, Murray was in his mid or late thirties when he was turned; he's a little sketchy on his exact age (possibly, Trent has speculated in the past, because he's unsure himself), but he'll admit his rebirth into undeath happened in 1943 during the Detroit race riot. After that, he spent a decade wandering the United States and sampling the local flavors, much the same as Trent has been doing the past decade, before settling back down in his lifelong home city, which is where he's stayed since and the place Trent first met him in 1979.

It was Murray, drawing on three decades of experience at the time, who taught Trent how to make fake IDs so he could blend in with his mortal prey as the years passed and his face refused to age; how to dispose of his victims' bodies in ways that minimized the chance they'd ever be found; how to sneak quietly up on his prey and strike quickly before they could make a peep. The older vampire's been around long enough to have met plenty of others of their kind as they've passed through the city, and the conversations he's had with them, combined with Murray's natural inquisitiveness, has given him what's probably the best understanding of their kind to be had on this side of the Atlantic Ocean; he's been known to refer to himself as a vampthropologist. Trent can't think of anyone better to give him the answers he needs.

"Not a bad likeness," Murray says when he hands the paper back. "And you're sure this Noelle girl is the one who drew it?" Trent nods. He spent enough time looking at her other artwork when he first picked her as a victim to know her hand when he sees it. "Alright. So... did she draw this before or after you bit her?"

"I don't know. Does it matter?"

"Well, are you positive she's the one who broke your window and put the drawing in your car? Couldn't it have been this Dominique you told me about? Maybe he found this drawing after she died."

Trent thinks about that for a moment. What if it's Dominique who's found him and not Noelle? Or hell, it could just as well be that one of those crazy, self-styled vampire hunters heard about Trent from someone, probably Dominique, and has tracked him down; you see those deluded would-be-Buffys once in a while, and Trent can never help but grin when he eats them. But there's something in Trent's gut that tells him that's not the case, that it really is Noelle in the permanently preserved flesh, and the elder vampire grimaces when Trent says as much.

"Then it's probably her."

"What, because I have a hunch?"

"It's probably more than a hunch. Have you ever heard about lineage resonance?" The look on Trent's face must be enough of an answer for Murray because he barely pauses before launching into his explanation. "Okay. You remember what I told you about the infection that transforms humans into vampires?"

"Yeah." According to Murray, attributing vampirism to supernatural causes is just old-fashioned human superstition. The Asian and European vampire clans (who are far more organized than their comparably immature American counterparts) have known for the past century that the secret to their undeath is a bacteria-like microorganism that secretes an enzyme as a side-effect of their digestive processes which indefinitely preserves the host's organs and tissues. Those "bugs," as Murray calls them, feed off proteins in the blood at a much quicker rate than any body could compensate for, meaning the undead host so infected must ingest blood from other donors to avoid a more permanent death. "If you bite someone and don't take enough blood to prevent the infection from becoming self-sustaining, you get a new vampire, right?"

"That's the gist. How much of this girl had you drunk before Dominique showed up?"

Trent's avoided thinking about that day since it happened so he's surprised at how easy it is to remember the little details when he tries. "More than half. I don't know, seventy, eighty percent. It's not like she had a dipstick on her heart."

Murray grunts. "Were you full?"

"Not quite, but getting there." Trent sips at his coffee, but it's gone lukewarm. "I looked up the news on the internet a couple days later, and they said she died of blood loss at the motel before the ambulance could get there."

"Maybe we should check the news again."

"For what, stories about vampires? I'm pretty sure that'd be on the national news. It'd at least be on the ticker on the bottom of the screen."

The older vampire sighs. "How did you feel when you rose, Trent?"

If there's one memory above all others that Trent doesn't like to think about, it's the claustrophobic nightmare of escaping his coffin and burrowing up through the dirt the night after his funeral. "Confused. Energetic. Hungry."

"Right. So if Noelle rose, chances are she grabbed a bite to eat before she was far from home. Did Union Falls have any other murders later that week?"

Trent boots up his laptop and hops on an unsecured wireless network; there's one in just about every neighborhood in America, which is lucky for Trent because the only other computer in Murray's apartment is covered in dust and has a 14k modem. Google pops up a link to Union Falls' local ABC affiliate. It's worse than he feared. Trent turns the laptop so Murray can read the lead, which tells Trent all he needs to know and then some.

A senior at Union Falls High School wanted for questioning in conjunction with the death of a fellow student whose body disappeared from its grave the night after her funeral has been officially declared a missing person by the Union Falls police department.

"Let me check one other thing." Trent logs into Deviantart and searches for *~KawaiiKuriFan29~*. Sure enough, the account's still active, with the newest post made a week ago. Trent clicks the link, already knowing what he'll see, but that doesn't stop him from slumping in his chair when he sees a digital scan of the drawing from the envelope pop onto the screen.

"This is my finalized version!" reads the accompanying blog post. "It took me a while to decide just what should be in this picture. I must have drawn like FIFTY rough drafts. I hope he likes it!" The comments, apparently left by fellow Deviants unaware that their e-friend is no longer among the breathing, are full of animated emoticons and assurances that Trent, who is mentioned several times by name, will love the drawing and see how much Noelle cares about him.

Looking over Noelle's profile, Trent spots some of those rough drafts she mentioned. Some are just pencil scribblings and others are inked and colored as if they were final versions that Noelle only rejected once they were complete. It's obvious the crazy girl put a lot of thought and effort into designing the picture she left in his car. But none of the drawings or blog posts explain how she found him so Trent asks Murray what he's sure is the relevant question in that regard. "What's the resonance thing about?"

"It's something the bugs in our blood do. When a vampire's new, the bugs in his or her blood are the same bugs that were in his or her sire's blood. Those bugs evolve over time just like any other isolated population in a new breeding environment." Murray notices the look on Trent's face, smiles and changes his tact. "Here's where I'm going with this, kid: the bugs in your body and the bugs in her body are still able to talk to each other for a while because they're still the same bugs. Until the bugs in her body have gone through a few hundred generations and adapted to living in her system, they'll make her secrete a chemical that's identical to the one your bugs make you secrete, and if she's anywhere near you, she can hone in on it like a pig sniffing for truffles."

"She can smell me?"

"It's really more of a skin thing, like an itch."

Trent catches himself rubbing his arm where it was itching earlier this week. "How the hell do you know all this? And how long until it goes away?"

"There was a guy in the Ukraine who did experiments on new vamps," Murray says. His tone suggests the new vamps might not have been willing participants. "He figured it takes about six months before their bugs have evolved to the point where they're at a healthy equilibrium with their hosts. That's probably why new vamps have to eat more often than those of us who have been around for a while. He claimed that for the first few months, he could be in a room adjacent to where the new vamps he'd sired were being held and point through the wall at them, and that he was usually accurate within a couple inches."

The conversation hits a lull after that. Murray gets on the phone and makes a few calls while he paces back and forth in the living room. The coffee in Trent's cup is cold, but he drinks it anyway just to deal with the dryness in his mouth. He's thinking about the summer of 1977 and an older woman (much older, it turned out) with sad eyes who made his skin itch the second time he met her, and of how he ripped out her throat in the center of an urban basketball court the third and last time their paths crossed. Trent surfs through Noelle's Deviantart pieces a bit more, then puts away his laptop just as Murray walks back into the room.

"I know a guy who knows a guy who has the keys to a place on Lake St. Clair. It's been foreclosed on so no one's there, and with the market the way it is, it's not likely anyone will come by for the tour soon." Murray pats Trent on the shoulder. "I'd suggest you cool your heels there for a good two or three months. You'll have to get used to eating the local fauna for a bit. Your gut's going to throw a hissy fit wanting one of those teenage girls you're so fond of, but you'll live, and I might be able to run a live one out to you once in a while to keep you from going too stir-crazy. Once this crazy bitch's bugs have settled down a bit, you won't have to worry so much about her finding you anymore."

The sky's getting dark by the time Trent pulls the Maverick into the lake cabin's gravel driveway. He starts to swear when the key doesn't seem to fit the lock on the front door, but after a little jiggling the knob turns. Trent carries his suitcase into the living room, where the logs of the ceiling angle up from the tops of the walls to meet at a ninety degree angle almost thirty feet above his head.

It's an older log house, probably built twenty or thirty years ago if Trent had his guess, some yuppie's trophy of a vacation house in a less turbulent economy. Most of the personal effects seem to have been cleared out already—there aren't any pictures of the former occupants on the walls, no fish mounted on plaques in the den or doilies on the kitchen counters, though there's an old red velvet couch facing the fireplace in the living room, a few polished deadwood chairs in the kitchen and a bare boxspring on a wire bedframe in the master bedroom.

Trent leaves his suitcase in the bedroom and heads outside to tree a squirrel for dinner while there's still light enough to see the damn things. After he's eaten it's just a matter of waiting out the hours after the sun's set until he's tired enough to fall asleep. There's no wireless internet signal to hop onto with his laptop, no televisions in any of the rooms, and the only books he can find are a Gideon bible, a local phone directory from 1997 and a moisture-bloated copy of Atlas Shrugged that might have been through the washing machine at some point. Desperate for something to occupy his mind, Trent flips through the yellow pages for a bit before bed, making doodles in the margins with a pen from the kitchen.

He snaps awake sometime after two o'clock in the night, but by then it's too late. The shock collar's already around his neck, and when Noelle notices he's awake, she smashes him in the temple with the orphaned clock radio by his bedside and hammers on the collar's remote until Trent passes out, body spasming in his sleeping bag, and if he still had the need to breathe he'd probably choke on his own tongue.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

[P3nT4gR4m]

This story is made of five parts victory to eight parts win, sautéed in awesome oil and served with an epic salad and a generous sprinkling of coolasfuck!

[Laughin Jude]

I'm not quite finished with the last part, but I'll toss up what's done of Part VI so far. This is roughly the first half of the conclusion. Pretty version here.

Warning:  incoming

VI-A

It's the scent of the blood trickling off the tip of Trent's nose that brings him back to consciousness. The blood is dribbling down the ridge of his nose from a cut on his forehead that, considering the situation he's awakened to find himself in, he probably acquired when Noelle was dragging him down the basement stairs. Trent has to blink his left eyelid a few times before it will open all the way; some of the blood on his face has dried enough to glue his eyelashes together. Funny how even the smell of his own blood can make him hungry. But this is no time to be thinking about his stomach.

The basement that Trent finds himself in is well lit, though it's about as empty as the rest of the house. A few abandoned chairs are stacked against the far wall by an old washer and drier. Trent's sitting in a mate to those chairs, wrists tied behind the backboard with what feels like nylon rope and ankles lashed to this particular chair's front legs. The floor is dark grey cement that could use sweeping. Noelle stands before Trent wearing what looks to him like an aftermarket Elvira costume (sans wig, thank god) that she just doesn't have the figure to pull off. She flashes her teeth in what's probably supposed to be a reassuring smile when she notices that Trent is awake.

"Sorry I had to do that, my love, but I didn't want you to run off again before I could tell you that I understand what you've been doing. It's okay." She steps forward, the hem of her gauzy black robe noisily swooshing against the dusty floor, and she strokes Trent's cheek with a black-press-on-nailed hand. "You don't have to test me anymore. We can be together forever now, Trent."

Trent pulls his cheek away from her hand as well as he can. "What the hell are you talking about, you crazy bitch?"

For a moment Noelle's face twists into something subhuman; her nose crinkles, her brow drops, her cheeks twitch, and to Trent she looks more like some kind of mutant hobgoblin from the disturbing late night cartoons he used to watch in the eighties than the forever young corpse of a seventeen year old girl. But in the next instant she's herself again, bubbly and grinning, with that crazy in her eyes that he should have picked up on from the start. Noelle flicks her fingers against his chin. "Baby, I just told you. We don't have to do this anymore. I understand that you had to test me. That's why you left after you changed me. You had to know that I could hunt and track; you had to know I could feed myself. And you had to know that my love was true."

"I didn't mean to change you, it was a fucking accident. I had to leave before I was done drinking every goddamn last drop of blood in your loco body because Domi—"

The rest of that sentence turns into a high squeal when Noelle pushes the button on the remote for the shock collar still tight around Trent's throat. At least she doesn't keep it going until he passes out this time, but his toes twitch for a few seconds after the pulse subsides, and even if he wanted to pick up that sentence where he left off, his tongue's temporarily incapable of forming the necessary syllables.

"So it doesn't work if you take too much blood. I was afraid that was it." It sounds to Trent like Noelle's thinking out loud instead of addressing him, but he's not long spared her attentions. "Trent. Baby." She kisses him on one of his blood-sticky cheeks. "I told you to stop testing me. I know damn well it wasn't an accident. You changed me so we could be together. That much is obvious from all the clues you left so I could follow you."

Trent's mouth works in silence for a moment before he gets out, "Clues?" He neither knows nor cares what she's talking about, but as a longtime viewer of the kind of movies where the hero inevitably pulls off an escape while the villain dialogues, Trent's determined to keep Noelle talking as long as possible while he tries to work his wrists loose. If that doesn't work, his only other hope is that she either lets him loose, which is about as likely as Trent starting to breathe again, or that Noelle's "love" for him will prevent her from killing him until Murray comes for a visit and inadvertently comes to Trent's rescue. But something tells Trent he shouldn't count on Noelle's affection for him to translate into any meaningful chance he'll survive to see another sunset; there's a new smell hanging around the girl now that's undead, not the coppery scent of slit wrists but the rancid butter smell of a rabid animal, and while she's playful now, Trent suspects it's just a matter of time before she bites.

"The girls, silly. You know what I'm talking about."

"Tell me about it anyway."

She grins, happy that he finally seems to be playing along. "Well, once I rose from my grave—which was really hard, by the way!—I had to find out what direction you went when you left town. But it was hard to find any more clues, and I was hungry all the time. I knew you'd left me alone so I could learn to be self-sufficient, so I traveled from town to town feeding and asking if anyone had seen you or your car. Then I finally found someone who'd seen you in the Maverick and I knew I was on the right track."

Trent grunts. He knew he should have ditched the Maverick once he was far enough away from Union Falls, but he just couldn't make himself do it, not after losing the Coupe. That sentimentality may have been the death of him.

"After a while, I started seeing a pattern. I'd go by motels and ask about a boy in a Maverick, and there were people who'd seen you. Then someone in Ames told me they thought you were going to the college, but when I got there all anyone was talking about was a girl who'd been murdered in her dorm room. They said her throat was ripped out like a dog attacked her. I knew it was you. After that, I knew all I had to do to follow you was read the news and look for stories about college girls turning up missing or dead. I wanted to rush and tell you that I understood everything when I caught up to you in Chicago, but I was afraid you'd run again if you didn't know how much I'd learned, if you didn't know that I was ready to join you."

The ropes still don't want to give Trent so much as a centimeter of slack. "So you broke into my car and left me a drawing?"

"I had to let you know!" She sniffles and puts her hands to her breast. "Oh, Trent, I wasn't sure what to do. And I didn't know that there was still one more test for me to pass, but I did it, baby, I beat him! I did it for you!"

"Who? What?"

In answer, Noelle goes back to the stairs and picks up a backpack leaning against the bottom step. It's the same backpack, Trent realizes, that she was lugging around the day he first approached her in Union Falls. She unzips the pack and pulls out what Trent at first thinks is a stuffed animal until she flips it around so he can see the shock in the staring dull eyes and he realizes he's looking at Murray's severed head.

For her part, Noelle looks proud as a cat who's just delivered a wild bird on her master's doormat. "In a lot of ways he was the hardest of all your tests, Trent. He wouldn't tell me where you were. He wanted to keep us apart. He was a bad man, Trent, and he deserved everything I did to him. Do you understand me?" There's nothing gentle about the way Noelle grabs Trent's chin this time. "I've passed all of your tests. I understand it was necessary for me to learn how to be a vampire so I could be with you, but it hurt me so much, Trent."

She raises her arms and brushes back the sleeves of her gauzy black costume so Trent can see the fresh criss-crossed scars running from her wrists to elbows, half-healed brown-caked canyons dug into her pale flesh. "And just as I suffered to learn what your life is like as a being of the night," she says as she pulls a razor blade from her backpack, "now you have to feel the pain I went through, my love, so that our souls might be intertwined for all eternity through our shared misery. Hold still for me, baby."

Holding still is the last thing Trent intends to do, but it quickly becomes apparent that no amount of squirming will dissuade Noelle from her mission. The first time the razor splits Trent's skin he jerks so hard that three of the chair's legs leave the basement floor; Noelle lays a hand on the top of the backboard to keep him steady afterward. Contrary to Sheryl Crow, the first few cuts that Noelle makes are shallow, drawing only beads of blood at regular intervals like buttons down the front of a dress shirt. Though Trent can't see the damage for himself, Noelle narrates the scene as she goes, her vivid descriptions of his wounds accompanied by gentle cooings and assurances of "There, baby, that's not so bad" and "It's okay, honey, it's alright."

Still, Trent's grunts of pain don't seem to be enough for Noelle, so the girl cuts deeper again with the razor, splitting fat and muscle. More of Trent's precious borrowed blood dribbles down his arms, dripping in what sounds to him like slow motion off the tips of his fingers into the dust on the floor. "You're doing so good for me, baby," Noelle says, then she scrapes the razor along the bony protrusion of Trent's right elbow and digs down to his ulna, carving a hair-width line in the exposed bone down to just above the ropes still around his wrists.

Finally he screams, one of those sphincter-tightening, oh-god-someone's-fucked screams that he's been on the other end of a few times over the course of his career. It's the kind of scream you get when you don't sever your victim's vocal cords on your first bite, the kind of scream his meals would make when they still had the voice to express the bitter certainty that they were going to die and couldn't do a fucking thing about it. The chair wobbles despite Noelle's grip on the backboard.

Noelle wraps her arms around Trent from behind, linking her crimson-stained fingers across his chest. "Poor baby," she whispers in his ear. One hand shoots up to stroke Trent's hair, razor still perched between her fingers; at least the sharp end's facing up and away from his scalp. "You get it now, don't you?" She slides around in front of him again, hand never leaving his chest. "How much pain I went through for you?" Noelle tilts Trent's eyes up to meet hers with a finger to his chin. "I'll go draw you a bath so we can wash you off, my love. After that..." She purrs and plants a gentle kiss on Trent's mouth.

Only after the door at the top of the stairs has closed with Noelle's passing does Trent allow himself to slump in the chair and sob. His arms are on fire; his fingers, icy numb. Just wiggling his fingers enough to ensure that the bitch didn't saw through the tendons—that his fingers are even there—makes his stomach retreat to somewhere below his belly button. But the experiment leads to a surprising discovery: the now-blood-soaked rope binding his hands has become slick and, with a little back and forth that nearly leads to him dislocating his left shoulder and leaves his fighting for consciousness again, he manages to pop a hand free.

[Luna]

Liking this a lot, keep it up!   

[Laughin Jude]

Here's the rest of the conclusion. I'm going to eventually clean the whole piece up a bit now that it's done; I know the dialogue in particular still needs a little more work. What I've been tossing up is pretty much my second draft. I'll try to remember to toss a link to the final version in this thread whenever I get it done, but I have to let the story simmer for a bit so I can be objective when it's time to go back to it.

Pretty version here.

VI-B

Untying the ropes around his ankles replaces the numbness in his fingers with a warm prickling, something in between the sensation that his fingers have fallen asleep and the feeling that they're being repeatedly stabbed by sewing needles. Trent isn't sure if that's an improvement or not. Feet free, he stands, happy to find his legs can still support his weight despite how wobbly he is from the loss of blood. He has a chill, not a surprise considering he's standing on bare concrete in a basement wearing naught but the pajama bottoms he was sleeping in, but he's sure that having lost a liter or more of blood probably has something to do with that too.

Trent pulls at the shock collar around his neck and feels his sphincter tighten when he finds the tiny padlock on the buckle. His fingers are too weak and whatever space-age fabric the collar's made out of too tough for him to rip the damn thing off, and there doesn't seem to be anything in the basement capable of sawing through it. As long as he's wearing the collar, Noelle has an obvious advantage over him, but there doesn't seem to be anything he can do about it now.

Besides, his main concern is getting the hell out of here without Noelle noticing him. The thought stings Trent's pride, but even without the shock collar in the equation, Noelle could probably overpower him now. He's lost too much blood, and it sounds like she's been feeding regularly. Hell, she probably drank whatever was in Murray, and who knows what side-effects come from eating another vampire. If Trent has any hope of getting out of here alive, it involves slipping out while she's busy running his bath or whatever crazy-ass thing she's doing. So how does he escape before she comes back?

A basement window sits maybe eight feet up the wall and looks promising at first. Trent places one of the chairs beneath the window and stands on it, but he's still four inches short of reaching the latch. He tries stacking another chair atop the first and gets a grip on the latch, but it won't turn, locked or possibly rusted shut. The chairs almost go tumbling out from under Trent on his way back down to the basement floor. He paces from one end of the basement to the other and finds that there's only the one window, which he can't imagine is in line with the fire code; maybe the bad economy has nothing to do with this place still being on the market.

That leaves him no choice for escape from the basement except the stairs up to the living room. Before he begins the climb, Trent picks through the pack Noelle left behind, hoping to find some kind of weapon, but all that's left is a blood-spattered art pad and a plastic bag full of markers. No lighter, no more of those razors—no luck. None of the aforementioned chairs are wooden either, so there won't be any improvised stakes.

Trent climbs the stairs, feet making horrible sticky noises like he's walking on a dirty linoleum floor, and though he's leaving a trail of bloody footprints in his wake, he's fairly certain that's from the pool that had collected under his chair and not any ongoing bleeding. The cuts in his arms have mostly gone dry, though that's more a sign that they've run out of blood to spill than of any supernatural vampiric healing abilities. Trent wonders what'll happen if he really does bleed out every last drop of blood in his body. He's never seen a vampire starve to death, but Murray's told him—no, no more thinking about Murray. Not until he's out of here.

He jumps when the third stair from the top creaks under his weight and almost goes tumbling back down the whole flight. Finally at the top of the climb, he pauses and puts an ear against the door, but he can't hear a damn thing. Praying that Noelle didn't lock the door from the other side, Trent puts his hand on the knob and wheezes his relief when it turns.

The basement door lets out at the back of the living room, and all he can see without going around a corner is the staircase going up to the bedrooms. Trent pulls the basement door shut as quietly as he can and stands still listening for the sounds of Noelle's immediate presence. He hears the sound of water running into the tub in this floor's bathroom, which lies at the far end of the hall on the other end of the living room. He can just barely hear a wordless hum accompanying the splashing, which tells him that Noelle is still on this floor. A few pops and hisses from around the corner suggest she must have relit the fire he had going earlier as well.

That's enough to make up his mind before he realizes he was considering his options. His clothes, his laptop and most importantly his car keys are all upstairs in the bedroom (or they were, and he doubts Noelle moved them). If he runs now, he can make a clean getaway—but only on foot and mostly naked. Not to mention he'd lose everything in the laptop, including all the work he's done revising the Edward System and several gigs of torrented music. Maybe he's being stubborn and exercising poor judgment out of wounded pride, but Trent refuses to run without something of his dignity, "dignity" in this instance defined as "all of his worldly possessions."

So up another set of stairs he goes, again as quickly as he can manage with his feet blood-sticky and the muscles in his legs quickly going from wet noodles to dried concrete, trying to remember if any of the stairs squeaked during his earlier trips up and down them. He throws on the dirty clothes lying on the floor in his bedroom, tosses his laptop in his suitcase, pockets his car keys and, suitcase in hand, has a nasty case of déjà vu that freezes him to the spot when he imagines he can hear Noelle knocking on the bedroom door. Trent cusses, shakes his head—which leaves him dizzy and makes him wonder again just how much blood he's lost—and hurries back to the stairs as quietly as he can.

Getting the suitcase down the stairs without making a racket takes a few minutes. Trent's fingers don't want to grip the suitcase's handle as securely as he'd like; he wonders if he'll ever be able to hold a pencil or type properly again, but those are things to worry about more down the road. Right now he's more concerned about all the noise it'll make if his luggage goes bouncing down the stairs. Trent uses both hands to lower the suitcase a step at a time, resting more and more every time as the pain creeps up from his wrists and forearms into his shoulders and back like twin cracks spreading in glass.

He rounds the corner from the staircase, headed through the living room toward the front door, when the sight of the figure sitting on the couch puts a halt to his feet that his brain doesn't notice until several precious seconds have passed. Of course he knows who the poor, rigor mortis-stiffened bastard in the Union Falls letterman jacket sitting on the couch across from the fireplace has to be, even with the plastic and faux-fur werewolf mask hiding his face. As Trent approaches the couch he can see the flames in the hearth reflected in the marble eyeballs of the mask. His nose wrinkles against and rubber-and-putrefaction stench when he pulls the wolf mask off Dominique's head. The boy's eyes are rolled up toward the ceiling, and the way the tip of his swollen tongue protrudes between his purple-brown lips makes it look like a distended rectum lies between his nose and chin.

"I drank too much from him," Noelle says. She's watching Trent from the hallway at the other end of the living room. To Trent's relief, she doesn't seem to be holding the remote for the collar. "Trent, baby, what are you doing up here? And dressed? I told you I was running you a bath."

Instead of answering her, Trent grabs the pointiest stick he can see in the pile of firewood. He isn't sure that he has the strength to jam it through her ribcage, but what's his other option?

Noelle saunters toward him. "Baby, I'm so disappointed in you. I've given, and I've suffered, and I've done everything I could to make this relationship work. Talk to me, baby. What do we have to do to make this better?"

Trent sets his feet apart, hoping his legs don't give out beneath him. "I should have killed you on the way to the fair, you psycho bitch."

That does it. Something in the girl's brain snaps; he can see the heretofore simmering crazy explode behind her eyes. Her feet might touch the floor thrice in her dash to reach him, and when she tackles Trent he feels like a girl scout going to scrimmage against a bull elephant. The stick flies from Trent's fingers in the first two seconds after Noelle takes him to the floor. The girl's teeth rip into his shoulder; when she jerks her head back it feels to Trent like Noelle's just taken a pound of skin and muscle with her, and in exchange he gains yet another wound to leak precious blood from.

Noelle's hands wrap around Trent's throat, costume sleeves tickling against his face. She howls and squeezes his extraneous undead windpipe, obviously not having thought this one through. Trent pantomimes shock and pulls at her arm with one hand as he tries to grab the stick with the other. It's a good thing he doesn't have to breathe because the way things are now he couldn't fight the bitch's grip on his throat if he tried. The damn stick's too far away so he changes tact and, feeling a little guilty but willing to fight dirty if it means preserving himself, grabs a fistful of hair and yanks Noelle's face down to his own. He bites a chunk from her cheek on size with the one she took from his shoulder, but instead of jerking back like Trent expected, the girl headbutts him in the nose, shattering his bridge and sending a fresh cascade of blood dribbling down his cheeks and into his eyes.

Then for a moment it seems he's free of her, but Noelle is only shifting position. She grabs Trent's leg when he tries to stand, then he bellows in surprise as much as pain when her teeth sever his left Achilles tendon. His effort to kick her only places his right leg in her grasp, and she severs that tendon as quickly as the first. Trent screams, but in the madness of the pain he's able to twist himself around and give Noelle a mighty shove that sends her stumbling backward into the open fireplace.

The flames catch Noelle's gauzy getup, and a half-second later her undead skin ignites as well. She hits her feet running and screaming as the flames spread. Unable to see a thing through the fiery haze that's engulfed her, she crashes into the couch, sending Dominique's corpse to thump on the floor as both his letterman jacket and the upholstery begin to burn. There is neither order nor meaning to be found in the sounds Noelle makes as she scrambles over the back of the couch, charred press-on nails clawing at her face as the flames spread to her hair and hit the caked layers of spray therein with a whoof. She trips coming back down to the floor and goes skidding into the far wall, then hints her feet and runs down the hall from whence she came.

Trent tries to pull himself to his feet, but with the tendons in his legs severed it's a pointless attempt. He can hear Noelle screaming down the hall, then her babbling ceases in a splash and a sudden hiss like the world's biggest kettle is boiling over. Serves the crazy cunt right.

The couch and Dominique's body are both burning in earnest, and flames are rising up the wall and along the floor where Noelle passed. Trent crawls along the floor on hands and knees, grunting with every necessary expenditure of what little energy he has left. The blood in his eyes is making it hard to see where he's going, but every time he spares a hand to try to rub it away he falls on his face, and that gets his nose spurting again. If he can just get through the front door, he keeps telling himself, if he can get that far before the flames spread there—Shit, what about his suitcase? It's still over by the stairs. Leave it. He has his keys in his pocket, right?

Sweat pours down Trent's forehead, mixing with the blood in his eyes to produce a new elixir of stinging blindness, as the temperature rockets and the room fills with increasingly darker smoke. He's made it maybe fifteen feet when he hears the pounding of footsteps cross from the hallway and Noelle pounces on his back. Her weight brings Trent crashing to the ground, and his limbs splay out in four directions. The crazy girl wraps her char-crisped arms around his waist and lays her bald, blistered skull against his back.

"How romantic." She sounds like a ninety year old lifelong smoker when she speaks. "I always knew it would be fire, my love. To hell with this world. Let's die together, baby."

Trent tries to pull himself the last few feet to the door, but her weight holds him to the spot. His arms are too weak to lift his chest off the ground with Noelle on his back, and his jelly legs won't propel him another inch despite his efforts to slither forward. The flames wrap around the wall, engulfing the front door and dashing any hope he had of making it out before he either burns to death or the roof collapses on him.

Though he has no need to breathe and can't suffocate, the smoke that fills Trent's lungs has the effect of preventing him from making a sound, and so as the flames close in and the crazy bitch who ruined his unlife hugs him tighter in morbid ecstasy, he laughs, soundlessly but without a sense of irony, until his skin begins to melt and the inaudible screaming begins.

His last thought before his brain boils out his ears is that he wishes he'd never read Twilight.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That last line is priceless. 

[Luna]

Very cool.     Nicely done.