he roar fills his ears: clawing, gnashing, putrid moans, ghastly cries and lurching so loud it echoes off the windows of the Imperial Tower in downtown Everywhere, where Toby Fries is watching from the ninety-second story. His clothes are filthy, disheveled, torn, urine soaked, blood soaked, half clinging to his body, half not, and yet his hair is still pretty much as it was since leaving the bombed out hotel room four miles away, where he certainly suffered intense radiation poisoning from the lingering invisible monster that haunts places melted by nuclear activity—bombs in this instance—not the large ones everyone associates with nuclear warfare, but the smaller ones designed to eliminate a four block radius. His shoes are soaked through; socks are shrink-wrapped around his toes. God only knows what he stepped in: It wasn't rain, that's for sure. It hasn't rained in thirty-one days, which is perfect for the dried out zombots mechanically crashing their empty heads into anything posing as an obstacle to their undetermined destination: a food source, any food source and preferably humans. Designed to piss, moan and consume, zombots are the pinnacle of Lord Byron's viscous plot to take over the world, one human at a time: established in 1819. Toby Fries had never given it a ton of thought until Lord Byron's living dead started invading his city, neighborhood and eventually home, threatening to take Toby's daughter, something he can't stand for, won't stand for, and plans on making it known, right now, this instant.
Lord Byron looked up from his exceptionally large, digitally-displayed map of the United States of Consumption and stared blankly at Toby before saying: “Is that a stake in your pocket, good sir, or are you simply aroused to see me?”
Wiping the sweat from his palms onto the damp cloth of his generic Target button-up, Toby grimaced and said: “What?”
“My dear Fries, I’m speaking of the bulge in your pants. I'm having trouble deciding if it's a proud erection of your man flesh or simply a wooden pole sharpened to strike a hole in my good heart.”
Toby adjusts the slipping glasses frame back onto the bridge of his nose and feels the awkward pull of his pants from where the stake in question is currently hidden. He fears showing the evil Lord what truth lies inside, opting to circle his prey in the fiercest manner an elementary school teacher from Indiana can exude. The uncomfortable silence that falls between the two foes is enough for Toby to size up the great beast he means to take down in hand-to-hand combat: a ballet of uncoordinated attacks that will surely end with one dead and the other laughing at the other's ridiculous postmortem spasms. Toby is hoping he'll be the one chuckling. His odds, however, aren't in favor of a successful fight. Aside from Lord Byron's ability to live over two hundred years, which has given him uncanny wisdom in the art of many things, including killing, he has a very noticeable size advantage over sweet tiny Toby. Standing at six-foot-three, Lord Byron's shoulders are the wings of a B-52; his hands are giant stone crushers and his face is a chiseled work of Michelangelo, which works as an intimidation device against Toby's less than average looks: a phobia he has suffered from since being publicly humiliated during the tender age of fourteen by Colleen Bobbins, in the seventh grade, when she flat out rejected him in front of the class, adding insult to injury by announcing that he looks like a rat, that she would never date a rat when she could date a ham, which was something that didn't make sense until much later. “I'm not a rat.”
It's Lord Byron grimacing now. “Excuse me?” He stands from the padded throne seated at the virtual map and limps around it, hands resting on top of the arched frame. “I don't believe I referred to you as one.”
Toby reaches into his pocket and grips the stake in question. Now is the time. Lord Byron's limp is possibly his only flaw: a chink needing to be exposed at the right moment. Toby did his research, spending countless hours reading about Lord Byron's explosion onto the world scene, oh so many years ago, with the publication of Vampyre, which has since been credited to John William Polidori, which all true vampire hunters know is a lie, a conspiracy to conceal Lord Byron's growing power as the leader of an underground cult known as The Blood Drinkers, turning the ordinary nine-to-five Joe into a soulless-brainless zombot, a weapon to wield against his fellow friends and family, ultimately cursing the face of mankind with the poison ejaculated from Lord Byron's two pointy eaters protruding from his handsome smiling mouth. The takeover began in 1819 but didn't pick up steam until 1897, when Bram Stoker indirectly exposed the Lord's operation, only to fuel the curiosity of the foolish who were willing to walk into the serpent's layer, defenseless, hoping to obtain immortality in exchange for their soul; a precious price to pay that never lives up to the advertisement, thus becoming a soulless, brainless zombot destined to walk the earth for all of eternity, unless a good natured fellow has the decency to end its miserable existence with a club to the head or a hole through the heart: the one thing that somehow still survives as the sole living force behind its abomination called being. Over the past two hundred years the numbers of zombots have grown exponentially, somehow undetected, and managed to breach the safety fence bordering reality and surreality, a chain link fence that Dali so dexterously balanced his life upon with two awkward feet, stepping one in front of the other, careful not to fall either way and ending his lustrous career, which grew to legendary status simply because he never fell off the fence: the one that the zombots have completely overrun, which is the reason why Toby Fries is there, inside Lord Byron's high rise lair, seeking life for his daughter through death of vampires.
His journey began three months ago after stashing his wife and daughter inside a bomb shelter dug deep into the ground of a farm house his uncle owned for twenty-two years before dying of a heart attack and willing it to his son who never returned from the war with Iran, thus passing the inheritance along to the next link in the Fries chain: Toby. The shelter was put in place in case some fundamentalist (Christian or Muslim) decided it would be prudent to send off God's children in a thunderous, fiery, crash of molecules we call atoms across a statewide feeding frenzy, burning up and feasting on internal organs until nothing is left but a decayed carcass that poisons the vultures who dine upon its charred and deformed remains. Never during the act of building the in-ground shelter did Toby think that it might be used to ward off a different kind of statewide feeding frenzy soon to consume everyone he knew: intelligent, capable and stupid alike. After Lord Byron unleashed his army of zombots onto the world, it seemed that only a handful few were willing to stand up against the atrocity that threatened their everyday existence. These few united together in strategy and arms while the government went ballistic—literally—and began detonating every city overran by the ravenous army of dead heads that seemed to be appearing everywhere, even in places Lord Byron hadn't been yet, somehow. Eventually the government encircled itself with radioactive fallout, thus ending its ability to exist, and beginning the reign of the few who united together in order to fight off Lord Byron's army of zombots. Since then, what few they had, dwindled to one: Toby Fries. It became his mission to strike at the heart of the one who created such a disastrous mess of wasted human flesh.
Toby sharpened his nineteen stakes (one for each vampire poisoning the people) to a fine organ-penetrating point at the farm house, just before sending his wife and daughter into the ground, and prepared his catch phrase for when the time was right: the one liner that every hero has and uses after striking down his foe in heated combat. At the time there were three companions joining him on the journey into the mouth of the beast, three companions that eventually became enemies as they were converted, one-by-one, into zombots crying out in the face of an infinite life of worthlessness. Toby properly dealt with each of them, keeping only their heads as proof of how far he is willing to go in order to end Lord Byron's infection. The twisted faces of his companions' heads were stuffed into the army-green duffle bag Toby carried with him, currently resting on the ground in Lord Byron's lair, waiting to be removed and shown, one-by-one, just as they were taken: dubbed the faces of determination.
Lord Byron strokes his sharp jaw line, contemplation reading across his face. He takes long strides that end with quick dips and says: “How is it that you were capable of getting through my lines of warriors?”
Toby, still clutching the stake, mirrors the movements of Lord Byron. He says: “JJ's Plowing Service.”
Outside, at the base of the Imperial Tower, rests a battered snow-plow truck Toby commandeered from its deceased owner and drove through three states, carefully running down any zombot daring to show its ragged, gray skinned and dry-eyed face. It was with him at the burnt out hotel where he condemned forty-nine zombots to a fiery end via a suspicious flame thrower he used with blind faith; where he killed the last of Lord Byron's vampire offspring using the second to last of his stakes: a pretty quick yet fiercely painful death, which Toby has observed eighteen times now. It was with him when the wail of the female vampire ceased and the burning zombots simmered and smoldered, where Toby rested before making his final push in the morning. And now it's with him at the Tower, anticipating the final act of what has become a long drawn out tripe of a play written and directed by Lord Byron and his now rigor mortis minions. The snow plow has become his final companion on the journey for liberation.
“You killed my children?” Lord Byron says sounding more puzzled than angered.
“I have their heads to prove it,” Toby says gleefully and then moves to his army-green duffle bag. He reaches inside and removes what used to be an attractive blond-haired beauty, now greasy brown with an embarrassing expression of shock and pain across her face, the skin already flaking into dust particles. “She was pretty easy.” No pun intended.
The next head removed was a male's, whose hair was detaching from its skull in an odd velcro ripping sound. “A son of yours, I believe.”
The heads kept coming, one after another, shown, commented, and then discarded like a toy after serving its master's purpose. Eighteen heads rolling here and there with a sickening mush. The smell is no different than a county highway at 2pm, where truckers continually run down the carcass of a motherless deer.
“Enough!” Lord Byron shouts while puffing up into a devilish tornado of fury. Toby isn't through, however; he still has his three companions’ heads to show and his rehearsed speech to give, which is meant to drive fear through the innards of the beast.
“I'll have no more of this foreplay!” Lord Byron hisses and moves in to strike. Toby attempts to yank out his stake but it gets caught in his pant pocket, resulting in him staggering away, biding for one more second in order to properly prepare for the fight Lord Byron has commenced. This second, unfortunately, isn't granted and Lord Byron strikes: His powerful hands clutch Toby's arms, not allowing them to free the stake, exposing his neck, which is the most prone place for attack by a vampire. With a searing penetrative pain, Toby can feel Lord Byron sticking is two injectors inside his flesh while hot smelly breath clogs his nostrils, adding to the discomfort of being bitten. And then as quickly as it came, Lord Byron pulls away, relinquishing his position of power. There is a terrified look stretching his face into a deformed expression of one who just realized he ate rat poison. Toby knows what happened: His backup plan, in case the stake didn't work, has commenced. Lord Byron's powerful hands suddenly look frail as they claw at his own neck. A gasp escapes Lord Byron's mouth, something that sounds like: “You're tainted.”
“Of course I am,” Toby says while gently touching the blood spewing areas of the bite.
Lord Byron falls to the ground and gives a ghastly groan. “I drank poisoned blood.”
“It had to happen eventually,” Toby says matter-of-factly. “Did you really think that you could run this pathetic campaign of yours and actually win control of the world, filling it with blood sucking vampires such as yourself and those hideous children without eventually drinking contaminated blood? If there's one thing the US government does right, it's that they bomb the shit out of everything without regard to the aftermath it may cause, meaning the toxic air it creates and the poison that leaks into the pores of regular people, such as myself. Any REAL citizen knows that. Besides, what do you really have to gain in a world filled with zombots bashing around upon your orders? They haven't the ability to think. What kind of accomplishment would you have achieved by becoming a master of a world that can't think? Wouldn't it be better to be branded king of the intellectual rather than the dead? Regardless, I have a daughter to think about and I'll be damned if she becomes one of these manifestations of your poor choice in how to build an army of followers.”
Lord Byron continues to gasp and clutch at his neck, completely fallen now and curled up on the floor, dying a very slow and painful death that comes from drinking radioactive blood. Toby kneels next to him and offers the stake up as a possible means to an end. The Lord looks at the stake and then frightfully up to Toby, his eyes jiggling around like two Jell-O Gelatins. Toby's dirty button-up shirt is now coated red from the slowing gush of blood coming from his neck. He lifts the stake overhead and says: “It's better to eat stake than Fries,” before slamming the wooden dagger into the heart of the beast he came to slay. Lord Byron's eyes grow wider than Toby has ever seen, a cry of air exploding outward from Lord Byron's mouth, and then it ends: The evil Lord lies motionless with the wooden stake protruding from his chest.
Toby Fries stands victorious over his trophy, feeling very light headed, and gives a hearty laugh heard by the hundreds of zombots crawling along the street ninety-two floors below, aching for another command from their Lord, living a pointless existence until their light, too, is extinguished by the greatest villain of them all: Time.
Toby Fries won't live to see this but he does live long enough to know that eventually the zombots will die off and his daughter—and eventually her children—will no longer be threatened by a world so fucking consumed by idiot vampires and their dastardly plans.