Welcome.
I’m a high school student.
You can call me Jonathon8.
And yes – I am.
If you’re new here, I recommend you Start From The Beginning. Saves time.
If you’ve been here before, recent posts are listed at the bottom of the page. You know your way around.
Let the carnage begin – and don’t say I didn’t fucking warn you…
– Jonathon8
We need to have a little talk.
One thing that pisses me off invariably about most vampire tales is the happy presumption that we can just choose a random menu item from the local smorgasbord, serve ourselves, and then walk away and leave the leftovers for someone else to clean up.
It used to be like that a few centuries back. Which was nice. But then people used to be far smellier, more disease-ridden, and more prone to leaving a bad taste in the mouth. Less nice. Win some, lose some.
Point is – modern times, boys and girls. We live in a crime-fighting age. Now we might call it simple sustenance, but you and the judicial system call it homicide - so we negotiate. Nowadays we’re not just up against a random individual: the occasional religious zealot or Buffy-wannabe or vengeful do-gooder. We’re up against Society and Science and the System. Permanent records, forensics, specific departments of criminal investigations. It makes going out for a bite far trickier than it used it.
Because – see, as every true villain knows, the secret is blending in. What people don’t know won’t hurt them until it’s too late for them to realise just what they’ve encountered. We have no desire to advertise ourselves – we don’t commit ’crimes’ for the notoriety or infamy.
We’re just hungry.
And despite the dining arrangements getting more – complex - we’ve also got fucking good at this, which is why you never see ‘death by vampire’ as a tick box on the life insurance forms. In some ways, for us it makes things fun – ‘extreme eating’, if you will. So these are some of our preferred outcomes to be written on our meal tickets after the fact…
Homicide (by person or persons unknown): Commiting an obvious murder is not off the list – you just need that ‘unknown’ proviso. Hence – lots of unecessary mess to cover up exsanguination and any distinguishing teeth marks. Fortunately, real life isn’t like CSI: with enough blood and torn flesh, it’s literally pretty hard to piece together anything at all…
Accidental death: You can get creative with this – stage a little event that apparently ended in unintentional bloodshed (gun-cleaning or animal attacks are popular), or do the deed and then apply the coverup (see above). Off balconies and in front of trains are useful then.
Missing (presumed dead): This is always a great option. I’ve said earlier that people usually write their own stories here in the end, and cold cases in real life tend to stay cold because the police have enough on… their (our?) plates. Only thing is, ‘missing’ needs to mean permanently, or at least long enough for you to have moved on, or the injuries no longer be recognisable. And that can be harder than you think – particularly if you’re not eager to engage in any kind of actual manual labor (ie. digging, igniting, dismembering, lugging around bags of lye….)
The main thing though, is to not be stupid. Plan or practise carefully, clean up well, choose wisely. Avoid high profile kills, anyone too connected to you, getting greedy, getting emotional.
So forget the movie shit, okay? The private hospital room on the deserted floor, with the call button to put out of reach and the quiet and unpluggable heartbeat monitor. It’s a fucking fantasy.
Brix at the moment is in a busy intensive care unit, where half a dozen beds are arranged open-plan around a central nurses station. That is always manned. He’s hooked up to all kinds of life-support and monitoring systems that play an ear-bursting emergency alarm symphony if disrupted. He has nurses and doctors passing by his bed every few minutes – and the family-only visitors even have to sign in.
I should know. I doubled back around the ER inquiry desk (when they brought in a dude having an obliging heart attack), slid carefully around the corner, and went and peered through the round pane of glass into the IC. And that’s as fucking close as I was going to get.
I’m not stupid. And I’m not that hungry. And Brix isn’t going anywhere.
I can wait. It’s all about – well… patients.
I have all the time in the world.
Harmony invited me over for dinner last night.
Actually, the exact wording was, “My big sister is coming over. If you’re not there to stop me going to jail for making myself an only child, I’ll throw you off your own fucking fire escape.”
Jonathon doesn’t do family gatherings. Can’t even recall the last time I sat at a dinner table with anyone whose relationships were only metaphorical blood ties. Harmony had regaled a little family history on previous occasions, and under sufferance. I can see why. Her dad sat at the head of the table and looked like he wished he was under it, anytime his eldest child deigned to look at him. He has thinning hair, and quick eyes, and is almost as terrified of his grandchild as he is of her mother.
Her brother-in-law Nikolas was trying really hard to play happy families, and talked jovially of his new house renovations (that he was paying lots of other people to do), the game he took little Caleb to on the weekend (“Corporate box, Jonathon. Only way to go…”), and his latest business deals (during which his own wife yawned openly…)
Caleb fidgetted, whined, and complained he wasn’t hungry. In that, he and I were in empathy. Pasta is hardly part of my preferred diet. Like Caleb and to appease Harmony, I stirred it around on my plate a lot to try and make it look like I’d eaten more than I had.
And Caroline? Harmony’s sister Caroline is a fucking behemoth. Monstrously pregnant and resplendant in designer maternity clothes, she rules the room, the conversation and the world. She reminded her father (mid-dessert) that gambling was an addiction and he owed it to her to stop making Harmony ask her for money, because it just wasn’t going to happen. He said uncertainly, “Yes, yes. Good – good.” She asked Harmony if she’d improved her grades. Harmony said politely, “Caleb – just leave it then, and go watch tv. Caroline – fuck off.” In revenge, she then asked if I was Harmony’s boyfriend. I said, “No. She’s still gay, and anyway, I find long-term relationships only end in bloodshed. Don’t you?”
Harmony brought up the school gossip to stave off Caroline’s malice for a moment, and told the Brix story.
Nikolas remarked pleasantly, “How horrible”, and passed the water jug and promptly forgot what we were talking about. Caroline looked carefully for her store of manufactured social-sympathy, found a small sliver of it, and asked how the poor boy was going.
I answered mechanically, balancing a two-pronged cake fork across my finger.
“Straight into emergency surgery for severe internal injuries - unconscious ever since. They’re still not sure he’ll make it. In intensive care – shared ward, under observation, family visits only at the moment.”
She looked intently at me for a moment, and the little familiar flash of insight in the gaze reminded me that she and Harmony are in fact siblings…
Then Caroline, rubbing a hand across her sleek and swollen belly, said – carefully – “You and this Brix boy are close, then?”
I inserted the fork gently down into the leftover slab of cheesecake on my plate. It left delicate little puncture marks.
“Oh – nah. Just keeping a friendly eye, you know.”
My nemesis Brix met with a little accident yesterday.
That I didn’t actually cause. Well – directly. I mean - deliberately. That is… aw, shit.
Call it what you will. Dramatic irony, poetic justice, karma being a bitch, revenge being sweet…
I call it getting stood up for a dinner date. Fuck.
Was all geared up for fun, and fate suddenly decides my week needed livening up (or down, as the case may be…)
So afterwards, I listened to the local news - and then it was all over school today. Brix is in intensive care. There are mixed reactions to this from his vassals, viragos and victims.
As for me?
I’ve been indulging in little fantasies about how this might yet play out.
There’s the soap opera one where he comes out of hospital within hours, with a single bandaid over one eyebrow and a useful case of amnesia. Which means he can’t recall hating me, hurting me, or having any need to hide from me. Which makes then killing him really easy.
Then there’s the action one where he escapes from under the nurse’s watchful eye and, torn and bleeding and running on adrenaline, comes hunting me in a rage of fury and misguided vengeance (with a really cool soundtrack). Which then makes killing him really satisfying.
Then there’s the liberal humanist one, where my dying enemy calls me to his bedside to tell me long touching tales about his troubled childhood, or the pressure to succeed, or the stress of being a modern teenager, and beg desperately for my forgiveness for his sins against me. Which makes killing him then really enjoyable.
There are few things that surprise me.
Not a boast – just a fact. There’s not a lot of things that are still unexpected in the world when you’ve been kicking around it as long as I have.
Today there were three.
1. Walked into class, hale and hearty after the school bully treated me to a gunshot wound for Halloween. As you would appreciate, this was not surprising if you’re me. It is surprising if you’re pretty sure you killed me on the weekend, and you don’t know about my – propensities. The look on Brix’s face was meant to make the last few unpleasant days all worth it. So – without displaying a gaping hole in the midriff or looking more deathly or ethereal than usual, I sauntered into English with Macbeth tucked studiously and appropriately under my arm. As if on cue to prove my corporeal state, Harmony ducked in the door behind me and punched me ruefully for taking so long to recover from the stomach pains of ‘overindulging’ on the holiday.
Brix looked up – ah. Wait for it. Shock, horror, guilt, dawning realisation, bewilderment, frustration, fury, relief, terror… Any second now.
No. Nothing. Fucking nothing. He sat there, stony-faced, a blank wall of – Brix. What the fuck? So okay, yes. I was surprised.
2. By lunchtime, I was actually feeling - weird. Because now I was kinda thinking that it was pretty fucking cool. I mean – for a high school nemesis, Brix had really upped the ante. Dude had hunted me down, gone for the kill, and gone on like nothing had happened. I was sort of proud of him, ruthless little sociopath that the boy was proving to be. Sure, he’d clearly been totally wasted on whatever his mommy likes tripping on, and maybe he’d convinced himself it was all some drug-fucked nightmare and never happened – but I didn’t think so. Fairly certain he couldn’t have talked himself out of that reality – that momentous experience. Who would have thought Jonathon would have so much blood in him, right?
Even wondering if maybe he saw something that needed destroying in me, now – misguided nobility to kill what he’d realised was monstrous and inhuman. A real antagonist, yeah? And that’s pretty cool. Dumb – but pretty fucking cool. And okay, yes. Finding myself thinking like that - I was surprised.
3. By the final bell, my fawking pseudo-revenge plot was falling into shit. See – you know I don’t really ‘get’ vengeance. It’s just cleaning up inconveniences. But I was almost rethinking the fall of Brix now. Not a moral dilemma of course, but more a reoccurance of that occasional suspicion I get that the world might be more interesting with certain people still ending up in it - rather than their innards ending up in me. (At least for a while, anyway. It’s why Harmony hasn’t mysteriously disappeared. Yet. And Kane – never mind.)
But then – it’s Brix. The dude did try to kill me. And it fucking hurt. And he was being a fucking pain in the ass before that. No – look. He totally fucking needs to go. Where was he now?
He and three other guys were loading noisily into his car, down in the lower carpark. I stood on the grassy slope by the flag pole, and watched Brix pull out the gates, rev unnecessarily around the corner, and begin picking up speed to show off to the waiting kids loading into the school buses out front.
And then – just for a second - he looked over, and caught my eye. And there were fucking daggers in his smile. And I knew he knew what he’d done, and that I was a fucking dead man as he’d said all along, and that somehow he was going to get to the bottom of this, because if you take someone down, they should stay fucking dead, and that this was only the beginning because now he was ready for me, and
Bus pulled out suddenly. Brix looked back too late. Car swerved, missed the bus – wrapped itself around a tree.
Okay, yes.
I was surprised.
Remember, remember…
Gunpowder, treason, and plot…
Appropriate quotation, eh? (and yes, for fawkes’ sake - I heard it before V For Vendetta, okay?)
See, as you’d remember, yours truly actually had a recent close encounter with gun powder. And that’s because someone committed an act of treason against a school mate (not sure who started it, actually…)
Doesn’t matter.
Because now? - I’m plotting.
I’m going back to school today. And I’m expecting fireworks.
You know in those movies when someone fakes their own death to fool the bad guy, then you get that awesome recognition scene where they reveal themselves and the look on the dude’s face is priceless?
Deliciously enough, I know from personal experience that this actually works in real life. It’s just that not many people are immortal enough to survive death and pull it off. Plus the whole good guy/bad guy division gets kinda problematic.
This time, the guy in question though is Brix - and he’s going to burn today.
Yeah, yeah – I know. Could totally have sauntered over to the house of Brix earlier this week, and had a quiet little debate there about the need for him to continue to breathe. But after his dramatic and bloody stunt scene for Halloween, I can’t let him go gentle into that good night. Oh no – not now. He hijacked the plot, and brought the action back to my door. And that wasn’t how Jonathon’s plan was supposed to go. So that means we now need to end this with a bigger bang than his single gunshot, boys and girls.
Okay – I probably shouldn’t play with my food. Maybe I’ve been hanging out with the Cat too long, and the insidious pleasure of toying with one’s intended victim has rubbed off. But Brix has it coming. Sure, after gunpowder and treason, this little plot might blow up in my face – but I’m willing to risk it for the sake of seeing the look on his, when a man he now knows should be dead walks nonchalently into class later today.
Shitting Brix proved to be a real pain in the guts. I plan on returning the favor.
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