I walked the streets with the wind blowing and the drizzle gliding on the air. I turned to a newsstand to look at a paper. The date: January 3, 2001. The millennium was in full swing. The apocalypse never took place like everyone thought. The hand of God did not swat at the Earth. Lucifer’s hammer did not drop. Time did not end. Little did I know that I was about to find out that time, indeed, does not end but certain species do. Humankind was next on the list. And in order for humans to be saved, certain prophecies would have to be fulfilled. It appears that I am getting ahead of myself.
I had just got out the navy; well, I did not exactly leave the way I would like. I failed to advance to the required rank in the proper allotted time. They pay you a certain amount of money and show you the door. Fired, if you want to call it that. Laid off is what I called it. The certain amount of money turned out to be a fair, cool $14,678.43. That was after the federal government and the state of California got their share. I needed the money very badly. I now had no job and no home. My wife and I separated about a year and a half ago when I did not advance on the test. You see, in the navy, you take written exams to advance. I was not one for taking tests. Needless to say, I always seem to do not well enough. When we separated, she did not throw me out of our two bedroom/ two bathroom apartment we had dwelled in for the past four plus years; she simply left. She left me here in San Diego and went home to live with her family in Oakland. February 13th would be our eighth wedding anniversary. I had a lot to celebrate.
When she left, she took her income with her. Half the rent and credit card debt, the car insurance, and the telephone payment went with her as well. Unfortunately, the all the bills stayed with the person’s whose name was on them, me. The first month I survived with the help of my savings account. The second, I had to take out a loan to pay my debts. I took the car back to the dealership. I hated to have to take the bus but I would save over $500 a month without a car note and the insurance. I decided to move out of the $750 a month apartment and onto the ship I was currently stationed on, the U.S.S. John C. Stennis. I sold a lot of my things to get money. My big screen TV was the first to go and the hardest for me to get rid of. The next item was my comic book collection. The comic book store basically stole them from me. My Sony Playstation went for a discount price, as well did my games to go with it. I could not complain too much. I made enough money to pay off the telephone company and one of the four credit cards that I owed $5,000 a piece on. I used the loan to pay off the other three. At that point, all that was left was the $18,000 I owed on the loan. In the six months I was deployed to the Western Pacific during the year 2000, I cut almost $6,000 off the price. I would have a few months before I was to be separated to cut as much of the balance as I could. My severance pay was going to have to take care of the rest.
By the time it was all over, I ended up with a little less than $5,000. Just before Christmas, I checked into a hotel in Imperial Beach. I could not remember the name, but that is not important because there is only two there. I decided to spend New Year’s Eve alone in my room with a little rum and a lot of beer. I had stayed at a friend’s house for about a week, but I was imposing. I needed to be on my own anyway.
I looked at the front cover of the paper in the rack at the liquor store not more than four blocks from the hotel I had been staying in. It read “Vampire X finally caught.” It was in big, bold letters. Intrigued, I reached into my pocket to get 35 cents. Thank God, the newspaper’s price was the same as it was years ago, because I only had a quarter, a dime, and an endless number of pennies. I opened the rack and pulled a paper out.
