Death Becomes Us

Dead Again

Daytime in Hawkins was safe; that is when the living walked the streets. You were turned down by several different places while looking for work, including the gas n' sip, the hardware store, and Family Video. You were just about to head back when you saw the blue neon on the side of the next building, bricks painted black, windows heavily curtained. The sign said "Main Vein" in cursive blue letters and there was a red and white sign hanging underneath that read: HELP WANTED.

Because of the floor to ceiling, black out curtains, you couldn't get a glimpse inside, and when you tried the door, it was locked. You noticed there was more written in cursive on the Help Wanted sign: Humans Needed for Day Help, and then a phone number.

You bent your knee to make a table for yourself and wrote the number on the back of the application for Family Video in blue ink, along with the name of who to ask for: Bob.

You took one last look at the place before returning to your ride that was parked on the other side of the street. It was the 1976 Cadillac hearse that your father drove for 15 years as a funeral director before he passed on, and then he had one last ride in it.

Your hearse was your house at the moment. You'd made a cozy little bed for yourself on top of a bedroll in the back where 2 decades of corpses had been escorted to their final resting place.

You'd been parking (living) at the Love's Truck Stop that was just off the freeway about ten miles from Hawkins. They had showers there and you could brush your teeth, and splurge on a muffin and coffee in the morning. You should've moved on by now, but for some reason, you couldn't. Hawkins had a hold on you unlike any town you'd happened upon in the past few months. Maybe it was all the death.

You'd called Bob at Main Vein from one of the payphones inside Love's earlier and he told you in a chipper voice to come by the next day at a designated time after sunset, and that he was looking forward to meeting you.

Propped up behind the single bench seat in the hearse, you heard the motorcycles before you saw them. The windows around the coffin hold of the hearse were covered to ensure your privacy, but then their headlights lashed through the cracks in the black velvet curtains as they passed, shooting bright shafts of light across your face.

You poked an eye out to see the same vampire boys on motorcycles that you'd witnessed the night before. They always raced down from the hills, headed for the bridge and into town, long hair and black coats flying out behind them, howling and calling out to each other.

You drank the rest of your Yoohoo, hoped it wouldn't make you have to pee before morning, and tucked yourself way down in the blankets, covering your head.

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Sure, you were one of the living, but the sun had never agreed with you. You shielded your face with your arms, as if it were raining, as you dashed in and out of your hearse to do some errands the next day, including stopping by to check out a trailer for rent in an area that was mostly vampires. The human manager on duty was a woman in a floral muumuu and iridescent pink lipstick; her name was Dolores. She looked you up and down with unapologetic judgment.

"You're not from around here, I take it." She put her hands on her slight hips and exposed her pearly dentures to you in a bit of a grimace, squinting at the sun, her short, orange hair in perfect curls from her rollers..

You bit the inside of your cheek and told her you'd only been in town a few days.

She paused to indulge in a painfully drawn-out appraisal of the visible scars on your body. Thick, pronounced, railroad scars around your wrists that you tried to cover up with leather cuffs and bracelets, one that came up from the middle of your chest and peeked out from the collar of your shirt, one that looked like a long lash from the side of your mouth to your ear. Your left eyebrow was also cut in half by a line of scar tissue. There were other scars that you always kept covered up, and would never let anyone see: you were the freak of the human world, and you didn't have an excuse to hide like the vampires did, but you secretly envied them for it.