When the Terrible Minds Speaketh…

Chuck said use these words. So I did. It’s flash fiction at my flashiest…

She

by Keith Karabin

 She is good & she is bad, no one understands…
She will hide in silence, then her day will come,
She was a virgin vixen…
-The Misfits “She”

 Dusk didn’t matter.

I knew protocol. The phone chain made it clear. You don’t move at dusk. They hunger at dusk. Sometimes, I hungered at dusk, too. Thus, I moved with that hunger. I’m beginning to believe that, if we’re ever going to win this war, then we’re going to need to be more like them. Screw the phone chain. My link was some ancient broad in the ‘burbs. What did she know of thirst? Manly thirst? Nothing.

Her figure was similar to an hourglass. And, when I say similar, I mean not very. She was stout and short, and—I hoped—cool to the touch. But, like an hourglass, the time to claim her was sinking away. Drip. Drip. Drip. I ached for her. I could see her from across the road. She glistened in the fading sun. Skin turned golden. Full of promise.

I swallowed hard in a throat caked with pulverized concrete and the dust of fallen humanity. Buildings did that now. They fell. I don’t know if it was the blood plague that left 90% of the people on Earth bald and vampiric, or the old nukes, or the damage that we might have done to the planet itself. I don’t care. All I care about is that a tremor hit across from my hidey-hole and that meant that all I surveyed was now mine. All was rubble save for her ripe, rotund form. She floundered; still chilled from her imprisonment. It had been so long.

Wait.

Who was this? Some blonde, long haired scavenger looking to pillage my beauty? Never! She was mine! I rushed from the cover of my hidey hole. I saw her again, her round figure silhouetted against the last ray of sun. He approached her. Goldie locks headed for the wrong bed. That’s my porridge, I shouted to myself as I ran, in a hunch, across the weathered macadam road. I crossed the yellow line, but I didn’t care. That had meant something once, but my girl meant more. I charged silently.

My cell phone bleated. Vile suburban harpy! What dire warning could be worth the price of my burly lady love?

My usurper turned. His wig fell away. Moon-smooth scalp met air damp with the first chill of night. His fangs bared. My stomach fell. I dashed forward and reached out.

Cool. Her skin was still cool. It was then, as the dew on her metallic skin merged with the sweat of my palm, that I realized my fatal error. I had no tap. It had been so long since I had gazed upon the shape of a vessel of nectar, that I forgot this crucial detail in my fervor.

I cursed my flirtatious temptress even as my assailant proved that he did not lack for such implements.

His taps struck deep. My ambrosia burst forth. Her skin, lost to me, remained cool.