So I'm a Vampire... Now What? - Book 2 (Original Version)

Chapter 4.2 A Family Affair (pt 2)

To say the door exploded off its hinges would be a considerable understatement, but I'm going to say it anyway.

The door exploded off its hinges.

When executing a full-frontal assault, you have to get everything right.

Knowing the layout of the place you're running into is optimal. Since it was my apartment, I had the advantage. I even knew how hard it would be to improvise hiding places with my limited furniture.

The element of surprise was on my side as well. If you check your manual on frontal assaults, you'll see that mentioned right up at the top. Oh, you don't have a manual? Well, that's okay, since I didn't either and was depending on half-assed ideas from a lifetime of watching cops kick doors in on television. Adult me had also gotten the correct procedure on kicking in doors mainly from the internet. I'm sure there's a ton of YouTube videos out there showing you the proper way to kick in a door.

There were, however, a couple of things I hadn't quite taken into consideration. One of them was that I was a vampire, and I was a lot stronger than I used to be.

I had kicked it full strength, not really knowing precisely what full-strength was for me. A slow-motion camera would have been useful to anyone watching. Then you would have been able to see the wood splinter and then split along the hinges and the lock, as my foot slammed into and through the left side of the door. A microsecond later, the wood decided that physics had won this round and proceeded to tear just like paper. Physics then decided to take the win and run with it: the door split into pieces as it caved inwards and flew into the apartment as if a small bomb had just gone off.

You should have seen the shocked look on my face since I hadn't expected anything like that to happen. It seemed for a moment like I had been hit full force by the element of surprise myself, hoist by my own petard, and all of that nonsense, but then I quickly recovered and stormed into the apartment, quickly scanning the room for any shell shocked and surprised inhabitants.

My wordless scream of rage cut off and turned into a squeak of surprise when I came face-to-face with a terrified young woman sitting on my couch and clutching a spoon.

"Ronnie?" I asked, my mind finally matching the face to one that should have been 544 kilometres away at my mom's house.

"What the FUCK was that?" the terrified Ronnie shrieked, and she was shaking, literally shaking. I realized that there were small splinters of wood caught in her hair.

Conan O'Brien was telling bad jokes on the tv, the volume way too loud, and for a moment, I wondered how I hadn't heard the television from outside.

Claude popped out from the bedroom at that moment, and he was fast... but for me, it was as if time was slowing again so I could catch every detail. Claude had some kind of oversized yellow and black gun in his hand that was about to be pointed right at me. His finger was already tightening on the trigger. There was a determined look in his eye, a tightening of his lips as he prepared to shoot whatever had come crashing through the door. He had made the mistake of talking first during his last encounter with a vampire. That had ended badly, and Claude was not about to make that mistake again.

I dropped to my knees and leaned backward... and time resumed as if embarrassed to have been caught napping.

PHUT! PHUT! PHUT! Three shots rang out, zipping through the space where I had been standing just a second before. There was a second of confusion as I realized that I hadn't been deafened, or my ears left ringing.

I raised my hands and let Claude see me.

"Stop shooting dude! It's me!"

Ronnie was still looking at where I had been, and finally darted her eyes down at me on the floor; I wondered just how fast I had moved just then. She looked back at Claude, who still had his gun raised, and then she looked back to me.

"Claude," she called out nervously, "Why do you have a gun?"

Claude locked eyes with me.

"Did I hit you?"

"No, I'm okay," I said and glanced back at the wall behind me. "I don't think the wall made it, though..." I trailed off when I realized there were no holes in the wall, just three powdery impact points. There was a smell in the air that threatened to tickle my nose...

"Well stand still and let me try again," he snapped, but he lowered the gun and tucked it away into the back of his pants. "What the hell, dude? Can't you open the door like normal people?"

I sneezed and turned back to Claude, my eyes suddenly watering.

"I've been waking up to uninvited people in my apartment, so excuse me if I'm a little paranoid about people stopping by without warning."

"We texted you," Ronnie mumbled, her eyes drawn back to the broken door again. Her face twisted as conflicting emotions threatened to overwhelm her. "What the hell did you do to the door?"

"What do you mean 'texted me'?" I asked. "I've had my phone with me the whole time—" I pulled out my phone and glanced at it again. Something was not right... "Oh shit. It's in airplane mode..."

I sneezed again, one, two, three times, and moved to the other end of the couch. Claude was digging inside a duffel bag, looking for something.

A gust of wind howled through the open doorway, an eddy of snow dancing in to settle on the kitchen floor and the pieces of shattered door. There was a chill that came with it and instantly effected Ronnie in her t-shirt and sweatpants. How the hell was I going to fix the door in the middle of the night? And what was up with my nose?

I sneezed hard, three times and Claude tapped me on the shoulder. He had found what he had been looking for and now held a gas mask out to me.

"You'd better put this on," he said. "You and pepper don't get along too well."

I took the mask and quickly slipped it on, aware that a stream of text messages was hitting my phone, one after the other, DING! DING! DING!

I looked back at Ronnie and grinned until I realized she couldn't see my mouth. I gave the thumbs-up instead.

"Roberto, what's wrong with your eyes?"

Ronnie was giving me a weird look as if she had just figured something out. It occurred to me just then that I wasn't wearing my contacts lenses anymore and Ronnie was looking right at me. She walked over and grabbed me by the mask to have a closer look.

"Ronnie—" Claude warned.

"Your eyes are blue," Ronnie said.

She looked around as if making connections in her head and grabbed me by the mask again. She yanked it down with a snarl and looked me deep in my watering blue vampire eyes.

"Holy fuck, Bob: You're a vampire!"