Human bottom teeth

So I’ve run into several problems with mewing.

1. my tongue can’t seem to flatten out and get a good suction grip. It feels it’s too thick and if I make it more thin, my teeth will pinch it on both sides. I have intentions on my tongue from my teeth already. It’s like my mouth is small but my tongue is large?
   
2. I have a slight overbite—my bottom row rests a few millimeters behind my top and are 80-90% covered by top teeth when smiling. Because of this, mewing seems to either compress my lips (esp bottom) or if I move my law forward, there is a large air bubble and I loose the suction.
   
3. I have a tongue tie. If my mouth is completely wide open, my tongue cannot touch the roof of my mouth.
   

I’ve been attempting mewing for three years or so now but have yet to get a solid hold. Any tips?

I am SO DAMNED TIRED of seeing the same absolute horseshit every time someone asks about a thin horse. "Maybe it's just old." NO.
Repeat after me, folks: OLD HORSES ARE NOT TOO THIN JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE OLD.
Old horses are often harder to keep weight on for a variety of reasons. They sometimes outlive their teeth and need soaked feed. Sometimes they have medical conditions that make it hard for them to maintain their weight and need medicine to treat it. Sometimes they need more calories than younger horses to keep warm in the winter. Whatever the reason, they're only too thin because the humans responsible for their care are not caring for them properly. It's almost never malicious and almost always out of ignorance.
Old horses need their teeth looked after more often than youngsters. They need tested for metabolic, endocrine, and other disorders, and treated for any abnormalities. They probably have aches and pains, even if they appear sound (because who doesn't when they're old), so they might need a daily equioxx.
When your older horse starts dropping weight, call your vet. Have them give your horse a thorough exam, including teeth and bloodwork. Ask them what changes you need to make to your oldie's diet and what medications you might need to add. And if, heaven forbid, your old friend has some kind of wasting disease or cancer, don't let them wither away, no matter how "happy" they look despite their failing body. Horses mask illness and pain. Don't let your friend have that bad day when they're too hungry or can't get up. Give them the kindness of a gentle end BEFORE that bad day comes.
Pictured is my 37yo mare. She literally has five molars left. She has Cushing's and oldie aches and gets pills for those things. Her topline doesn't look great but her vet insists it's the Cushing's. Notice that you can't see her ribs and she has good coverage over the entire rest of her body. There is no excuse for old horses to be skinny. NONE.

I just figured out I have 2 more cavities on my teeth.
I had 4 fillings when I was 16 to 17 despite constantly getting praised for how good my teeth looked… I really don’t understand it. I take what I thought was really good care of my teeth… I constantly got praised at the dentist and it didn’t take very long for me to get them cleaned because they were always in good shape. Until I all of a sudden started getting random cavities. I had never had a cavity until 16. Then they had to fill a total of 4 between 16 and almost 18 all of a sudden.
My last filling my dentist actually gave free because he liked me and thought I took really good care of my teeth and I had unfortunately lost my health insurance due to my dad loosing his job at the time. The only thing we paid for was the cleanings. Tbh I don’t think they understood why I kept getting them either… the dentist acted like mine may have been genetics or I’m just super prone to them.
21 now and I just found 2 more cavities. Both are on my right side. One on upper back tooth and one on 3rd bottom tooth the right tooth. Weird thing is I don’t eat with my right side… I eat mostly on my left side. I always brush in the mornings and evenings. I use mouth wash several times a day average 3 times. I really don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Nobody else in my family has had many cavities that I know of. It seems I’m the only one that seems to get them a lot.
I am gonna get them fixed soon! I just want to try to prevent them as much as a possible because fillings be expensive in my area.

Conner sat listening to music while the history class droned on endlessly. What is the point of learning history? War never changes, right? It seemed tedious. What does history have to do with how powerful and cool a mech is, or how sweet it is to be a mech knight?
"When the darkness came from outside, only the humans knew what was happening. It was war, war from outside the peaceful galaxy. War that had started when the Milky Way first showed the twinkling signs of life. One insane intelligence, old as time, would not tolerate another living galaxy. Each must be consumed by its own weight, and only death may prevail.
Humans instinctively knew this, as the chosen ones, the T-Cells of the galaxy. When their alien friends started getting ravaged and marauded by the scouts of the Dark Beings, humans responded, retaliating with unbridled ferocity and driving the otherwise unstoppable enemies back into the darkness.
It was a frightening time, and it only got worse when the massive cloud of shade was identified as the locust fleet that had sailed for billions of years, the Silent Empty Eternal Darkness Sailors, as they called themselves. They were nothing but dormant hives, sleeping forever, ready to wake and kill and self-destruct, make the galaxy dead. They could have done so, but humans stood in their way, an unpredictable enemy, capable of war.
That is why human worlds were directly targeted by their commandos. Massive singular monsters of ungodly visage were deployed to human worlds, spawning armies of miniature satraps of the horrors, to pillage and assault human worlds, turning them into hellscapes of death and destruction. The alien friends of the humans did not sit entirely idle, they helped by selling powerful new weapons and armor to the humans who kept retaliating against the Dark Beings with ever more powerful and vengeful mech."
Conner perked up at the part about the mech. Various famous chassis flashed across the screen in cool paint and poses with alien worlds in their backdrop and accounting for their neatly colored camouflage plates. He paid attention to the famous battles, where humans had defeated the Dark Beings in honorable combat.
"Conner, do you know what made your clan's father and mother such great mech knights?" his teacher asked.
"They learned from their mistakes." Conner sighed.
"They learned from other people's mistakes. They studied all of our defeats, all the times the Dark Beings annihilated entire battalions or overwhelmed our defenses. It is a much heavier volume. We learn little from victory except that now the enemy will try to better themselves again. When they win, they use the same tactics again - that's when we win. We don't use the same tactics again, for they will be ready when we try. We conceptualize and learn their thoughts, through their actions. They do not understand us. It is our only advantage, for each progression of our tech is met by another evolution of their monsters. Someday we will not be able to make a stronger bullet to match their stronger armor. We must anticipate a limit to this war, and fight accordingly."
"I can only anticipate getting into a mech and fighting bugs!" Conner had said. His teacher had given him that look. Nobody else got that look. Conner got it everywhere. He thought back to those days, he'd really thought he'd see action, in a mech, fighting bugs.
The rest of his class went on to become mech knights. All of them had seen action. Of course, none of them were left alive, and few of their mech were salvaged. Except, Pharlie.
Her mech was the third in a row of ones hit by a single plasma beam of the enemy. While the first two were instantly blown to atomic dust, her mech was only knocked over and set on fire. The ejection seat in the cockpit had the one and a half seconds needed to egress the mech knight safely.
She'd spent some time in relieved-of-duty status on Maranda Beach before she insisted they give her something to do. They quickly evaluated her and decided she wasn't fit for duty in a mech. Something about 'shutting down the Berserker Program' and 'protocols preventing reinstating anyone who qualifies to pilot a Berserker Mech'. Not happening under Admiral Khaspa.
"How's getting into a mech and fighting bugs, Conner? Still anticipating it?" Pharlie asked her old classmate.
"You are under my command. Watch your tone, I run a cruel shift." Conner grumbled.
"Aye, Skipper." Pharlie cringed, realizing the bureaucrat Conner had no sense of humor anymore. She decided to make it her personal mission to work on that. Conner with no humor didn't sound fun.
That scene in the classroom was a long time ago, but it was with Conner like it just happened. He hated Pharlie, because she stood for his humiliation, and wanted to humiliate her, but then he hated himself for feeling that way. He resolved to leave her be because he didn't want to feed his own calloused resentments.
"We've got work to do. We are reassigned to military surplus salvage. This job just keeps getting better. I used to think I would somehow be tested on a battlefield to save the galaxy, but out here I just get tested by boredom. I don't even feel the shame of these janitorial jobs anymore, I'm numb to it." Conner said to Pharlie, the next time they spoke. Pharlie realized he was trying to be nice to her and asked him:
"You'd rather be dead, or be me?" She wondered.
"Yeah. You don't know what it is like flying around delivering stuff and counting crap. I hate it. I could've made an actual difference." Conner complained personally.
Pharlie smiled and said: "You'd have made no more difference than the rest of us did. You don't know what a victory against the bugs costs, do you? You think you just have to stand there bravely shooting back and if you die, oh well, otherwise it's all glory. It's never like that. It hurts, it hurts a lot, because you don't die. Everyone else does. And for what? We just play the same game again next weekend, and it never changes."
"That's war." Conner nodded. "What am I doing? I bring supplies to remote outposts. It's pointless."
"Not anymore, they reassigned us to go pick up supplies, remember?" Pharlie pointed out.
"Oh yeah - don't remind me, just when I though my life couldn't be more tedious or pointless." Conner fell silent, realizing he sounded weak and small, complaining so much. He wished he was stoic, but he had a chance to confide in Pharlie, and he had taken it. Pharlie said:
"You're right. But let's make the most of it." And she smiled, so Conner decided that letting someone know just how miserable he was wasn't entirely a bad thing. He just wished he could somehow just be good with it, without having to use drugs or somesuch. He really felt like his combat skills were going to waste, sitting on a ship for long years, asleep and going around picking up supplies. As Pharlie had pointed out, they weren't even delivering them anymore, new mission, go get all that stuff the aliens made over the centuries for the war effort.
Rhema loomed in the distance. "We are picking up artwork on this world. Are you kidding me? The manifest shows it is categorized as artwork. So this community of variety-hour aliens have compiled some kind of treasure trove of fine art. This is asinine." Pharlie offered.
"That's enough of that." Conner chastised her formally on the deck, but he was smiling as he said it. He loved having her there stating his real feelings. "The mission is to acquire this propaganda, it is deemed useful to the war effort."
The world was like melted orange-cream covered in brown fog, a desolate radiated landscape below testified to the destructive power of the Unknown. The same Dark Beings had taken shots from the darkness with precise aim and killed some of the older aliens, such as the Frendsikeel. Long ago the peaceful otter people had lived happily on Rhema, inviting trade via broadcast.
After meeting an assortment of artist-aliens wearing shimmering dark-colored robes and cowls, the human delegate collecting military surplus accepted the crates of fine art, packed for their shipping across the stars, trusted to nobody except the human military to safely transport it.
"Conner." A call came in from Supply Command Unk Gheldin, Conner's commander. "You just earned me a promotion. The patrons of Rhema have instituted a check as a downpayment on our services. It's enough to build an entire warship. These aliens are loaded and just became our daddy. You're doing good work out there, the war effort thanks you!"
"I'll be sure and handle with care." Conner saluted diligently.
The next world was Arienta, populated by what was left of aliens who looked like huge anthropomorphic tarantulas.
"We've perfected a drug that can induce Star Sleep in humans. They said it was not possible for such belligerent minds to Star Sleep, but our colony of volunteers have allowed us to test every kind of euphoria and pleasure-inducing drug we could on them. Most species wouldn't have such a supply of volunteers, but humans come from far and wide to live as our guests, accepting our hospitality for their entire lives, saying they don't ever want to leave." The high priestess of the Blue Light Watchers, Rhoxa Billi, explained the doped humans lounging around everywhere.
"They look like slackers, sir." Pharlie said loudly.
"That's enough of that." Conner admonished her, but was smiling, glad she said what he was thinking. He faced the high priestess formally and said:
"We'll take this drug, and thank you for your hard work." Conner waved his fingers in the spiritual way to show he knew the sacred gratitude of the Blue Light Watchers. He'd studied how to do it on the way over, practicing it for days until he was confident he could do it right.
The next stop was Basilik, an industrialized wasteland where the Sunder had hundreds of thousands of giant humanoid machines, in loincloths, working tirelessly to drag massive monolithic super metal beams across rollers, up ramps to assemble indestructible mech chassis to sell to the humans.
"Sir, we take shipments from here all the time. What are we here for?" Pharlie asked.
"Not a what, a whom." Conner said.
The casket of the revered Exalted Inquisitor Eshka Layenna was loaded on board, but it was not made by Sunder. No, it was tech from some other society, preserving her eternally in a state of dormancy, a kind of molecular stasis.
"We're taking her back to the ones who put her in there. They have a gift for us. She is our gift for them. The Sunder have agreed to this, in the name of the war effort."
The Desperado star sailed to the nearby Kriesene system where an old gravity cloud that looked like a planet had hundreds of planet-sized moons dancing around it like an insane ballroom.
"The shoals around their world will make this somewhat dangerous to traverse. We have a map, given to us by the Sunder, so we should be fine." Conner told Pharlie.
"Danger, eh? Kinda like it, don't you?" Pharlie teased.
"That's enough of that." Conner said without any real command in it, smiling.
The Skiesene had a moon-sized space station named Thoughtfulness where they conducted much of their trade with each other. They looked like dark-shelled nightmare creatures, some kind of H.R. Giger prophecy had remembered these creatures long before humans had met them.
Conner witnessed their massed warriors, in stasis, embroidered stole draped over them, crouched motionless atop pedestals with twenty-yard tall tapestries depicting their many victories in bloody combat. They sat there in a great hall in their various forms and armors, but always hideous monsters, reminding him of the Dark Beings vaguely, except devoid of insectoid features.
The Skiesene were delighted by the delivery of their goddess, Eshka Layenna. A time without bloodshed was declared, and the Skiesene offered a shipment of their finest warriors, in egg form.
The Skiesene Khan grinned with uncannily human-looking teeth, but in its grin was a sharpened beak that could pierce the solid dome that was their head, with no eyes or ears, at least not in one place, for they had sensory all over their bodies.
"Uh, thanks. We could always use some special, uh, special forces." Conner accepted the eggs, as he was under orders to do. They were preserved until called, using a key to deactivate the stasis they were in. Then they would serve the orders in their minds, to obey their human commanders.
"I hope they don't have to facehug us and chest burst us." Pharlie chuckled.
"That's enough of that." Conner told her, smiling.
The last stop was the world of the Beebee, aliens who looked like cats wearing incredibly fancy clothing.
"We've tailored new uniforms for the human armies. You'll like them." The Master of Design, top official of the Beebee, told Conner, purring as he went.
Conner put one hand on his elbow and one holding his chin, trying to keep a straight face, when he saw the uniforms.
"They are a little small, don't you think?" Conner looked at the feline models in the uniforms meant for human soldiers.
"And kinda derpy with all those frills and colors?" Pharlie offered further criticism.
The Master of Design seemed to think the uniforms were being complimented, anticipating no other response. It took a moment to sink in that the humans were mocking all their hard work.
"All of the specifications for armored clothing were met. These uniforms will preserve your body temperature in very extreme conditions and will slow ballistic projectiles so that they cannot penetrate the cloth, but instead have their kinetics splattered outward and also the colors shift to the mood of the wearer. You can make it camouflage if you like. We worried that human sizes made dispensing millions of these uniforms impractical compared to making an adjustable size. Try one on." The Master of Design was not offended, but stood his ground, his hair puffing up making him look sophisticated and official. His whiskers twitched handsomely at the end and he gave a prolonged blink.
"They still look silly, why so many frills?" Pharlie chuckled.
"That's enough of that." Conner sighed.
The humans were about to leave and board their ship when Conner spotted an ancient mech standing next to the star port.
"What's that?" he asked.
"The tomb of Drastic Conner Mcfarley, the mech knight who defended our world, surprising a lone scout of the Dark Beings and engaging it in single one-on-one combat, saving our world. Drastic Conner Mcfarley died in his mech during the battle. The scout retreated and left us unharmed." The Master of Design said.
"Why'd it leave?" Conner asked, but recalled what his clan father had done. He awaited the answer he knew:
"Drastic Conner Mcfarley disarmed it, but left its capacity to retreat intact. It is believed he deliberately used this measure of engagement, in order to ensure the enemy would not retaliate by bombarding our world. When one of them dies, the world they die on gets destroyed. He might have survived the battle if he'd just killed it when he had the chance. We know this. He sacrificed himself to save us."
"That's right." Conner nodded. He and Pharlie felt solemn, realizing how far their journey had taken them, all the way to where it had began for them. "We're him, and we won't let you down."

I am 19 years old and chipped one of my bottom row front teeth about 10 years ago and never treated it. I chipped a decent bit off the top and could never afford to get it fixed and just left it. I have never had any medical issues or infections because of it, just a bit of tooth sensitivity. Now, I am planning to get adult braces to fix some gaps and bite issues. Do I need to treat my chipped tooth before I can get metal braces? If so, what are some affordable ways to fix a chipped tooth that will work with metal braces?

I'm sure many of you have come across "trad-wife" content at some point or another online. I've been fed this content more and more lately, which had me thinking about what this "trend" means for mothers and families, and what impact it has overall for the mothers who are still "in the trenches" today. Whether it's a trend you participate in, or one you roll your eyes at, I think for the most part, it garners an emotional response from women, especially mothers, in either a positive or negative light. I also want to make it clear that "trad-wives" and SAHM are NOT the same thing at all, and should not ever be used interchangeably. These are two completely different things. A SAHM is still a working independent woman whos job inside of the home to be viewed equally as important as any work outside of the home.
I fall under the category of someone who is triggered by "trad-wife" content and generally have a pretty negative, critical response every time I run into it. But today, as I came across a video of yet another "trad-wife" influencer, who was defending her lifestyle, and call to "traditional" ways, I decided to stop and actually take a minute and be honest with what emotion I was really feeling when I come across this content. It isn't actually rage, disappointment or fear, like I tell myself it is. It's jealousy.
The truth is, my first reaction is jealousy and a sense of inadequacy that feeds off of my deepest insecurities as a mother. Jealousy for the mothers that can stay at home all day with their children, who can clean, bake, garden and cook with their little ones at their side. And as someone who is a working mum, but not by choice, I feel jealous of the extra time these women can spend with their children during these short pre-school years. I feel inadequate because I secretly fear I am failing as a mother by choosing a double income, over the financial insecurity of a one-income household. Inadequate because my house is a mess and I'm burned out from work from a job I hate by the time I get home, that I worry my children aren't getting the best version of me.
After the initial emotional response of jealousy, my logical brain kicks in and reminds myself that this lifestyle they are showcasing isn't reality. Most SAHM's aren't baking sourdough on homesteads all day. They aren't showing the 3AM wakeups or the teething drama. This isn't an accurate representation of motherhood for 95% of us. This leads me to my next emotional response, which is to then to substitute jealousy for criticism. I begin to list all the ways their lifestyle is flawed, naive and unsustainable to give myself some false sense of superiority to these women who are essentially just cosplaying.
I'm sure this reaction isn't uncommon. I feel it's a natural response for people to substitute the emotion of jealousy with criticism to justify their own lifestyles and choices that feel attacked. You could argue that the "trad-wife" movement is just that--a way for some SAHM's who may feel the need to justify their lifestyle and choices of not be in the work force, when surrounded by a world that places outside work in higher esteem than domestic work.
However, I would like to clarify that just because I feel jealous when watching this content, doesn't mean I wish I was a "trad-wife". I find the entire concept to be just as toxic as the "hustle"/"girl boss" culture they are fighting against. Not to mention, a completely misinformed and myopic view of what a "traditional" wife or family looked/looks like throughout the world. The "traditional" wife they are cosplaying as is just ONE example of a historic "traditional" family and a woman/mothers role within one. Yes, women have always been charged with domestic duties and childrearing. The home has always been where women have traditionally been taught to focus on, however, women have also ALWAYS worked outside of the home too—either on farms, factories or kitchens (etc). And women have ALWAYS outsourced childrearing to either a nanny or governess (if wealthy) or they had their eldest kids stay home and look after the younger ones. Working mothers, and hired childcare are not new concepts to the female history.
But, I do see how this trend came about. It’s an allergic reaction to the extreme push for women to get out of the homes and into the workforce. To climb the corporate ladder while breastfeeding. To pity the girl with the college degree and spit up stains on her shirt at home with unused potential. To take “equal rights” so literally we act like a man’s life or parental journey is identical to our own. Ignoring our monthly hormonal fluctuations and pretend we're fine to sit through that 2 hour meeting while popping Midol. That we add more value to society as another cog in a machine sitting in a cubicle, then managing your home and family, because that's just "sitting at home" all day, right? And maternity leave is really such an inconvenience…
Looking at both extremes, I found it funny how both sides share the same core issues/beliefs which do nothing but hold mothers, and families on both ends of the spectrum back. This is what I found were the major issues in the perception of motherhood at both extremes, when I took a step back and away from my own biases as a working mother.

1. We need to recognise that both lifestyles come with the enormous privilege many women don't have-- The ability to live off of one income is a privilege just like having enough money for childcare or family support is a privilege. For many, our family set up wasn’t a choice, it’s a necessity. The reasons to be or not to be a SAHM are not always a choice or preference. A lot of times these are hard decisions that include major sacrifices. Before you judge either lifestyle, acknowledge the privilege you might have in the CHOICE to follow either life path. A woman who HAS to work to keep her family fed, even if all she could afford were Poptarts for breakfast, is just as good of a mum as the one who made fresh sourdough that morning. The mum who has to go back to school shopping at the second hand store, and mend hand me downs to dress her kids on one income is just as good of a mum as the corporate baddie who bought her kids the trendy shoes their kid asked for. Both kids are fed, both kids are dressed, both kids are loved.
2. No matter what they say, we all love our kids, and how they turnout does NOT come down to your choice to work in or outside the home -- At the end of the day, I don’t think kids of working mums turn out much differently than kids of SAHM. I think we all know personal examples of rotten kids or adults with both types of mothers. Neither dictates your relationship with your child. As kids get older, they naturally drift away from us. The truth is we may mess up in ways we didn’t even consider. Our kids may always blame us for being overbearing by not having a life outside of the home. Or resent us for never being around because of work. Bad/toxic mothers can be found both in the home or the work force. Just think back to how the adults in our lives talk about their mothers--sometimes it was "mum had 6 kids at home, but she somehow managed to keep us all fed and cared for", or "mum had to work a full day cleaning houses, but she'd always make sure we read a book together after work". All mothers make sacrifices, no matter what type of sacrifice it is. Our kids aren't going to love or resent us for our choices to work or stay at home, but how we show up for them. Don't underestimate our children's ability to recognise our sacrifices on either end.
3. Full time domestic work and homemaking is a real full time job that hold just as much value as working outside of the home and should be treated and respected as such.-- Childcare is a full time job. Full time nanny's and daycares prove that. Homemaking is a full time job. We hire cleaners, interior designers and household staffs that prove it. Cooking, is a full time job. We hire chefs and nutritionists that prove it. So, when a woman is a SAHM does one (or more likely) all of the above jobs for her family, it’s given lesser value or consideration than someone who works outside the home? You hear “I like to get dinner ready and the house clean for my husband who worked all day he deserves to relax when he gets home”, as if you sat around watching tv all day? Just because you enjoy it, or it’s for your own benefit doesn’t make it any less of a real fulltime job. You deserve sick days and breaks throughout the day like any corporate job would...except you never actually get them. The person bringing in a paycheck doesn’t contribute a greater value to your family than you. And same goes for working mums—you already have one full time job, don’t discredit the work left at home as just “chores” that you additionally take on as “lesser value” expected tasks. If two people work outside of the home then two people need to be responsible for domestic work. These are full time jobs. Spouses cutting the grass and taking out the trash is not equivalent to cooking, childcare and cleaning. We need to stop ignoring the home in the overall picture of a healthy family life. We all need a safe place to live that is clean, we all need to eat nutritious food, and our children NEED someone to look after them. These things have a real invaluable place in society. As a working mum, I'm finding more and more how hard it is to bridge that gap, to manage two workplaces essentially, the home AND the outside work. All attention and focus goes to work outside of the home, but the home life doesn't just sustain itself. We are neglecting the importance of our domestic life in favour of the outside working life. This goes for both working mums and SAHM's. We need to stop ignoring that piece of the puzzle if we want to create the complete picture. As it stands now, most working mums cannot afford help in the home which is effecting our mental and physical health--SAHM's don't get any sort of financial nest eggs or assistance at basically working for free, which makes them more vulnerable to abuse.
4. Men need to be included in the domestic work in a way that sets them up for success. You are doing your family or spouse more harm than good by taking it all on yourself. -- By not giving dads a real opportunity to be involved in domestic duties you are depriving them and the children the full depth of a parent child bond and perpetuating that domestic life isn’t as valuable as outside work, or that domestic work is strictly a "woman's" domain. If you are a SAHM, and your job is to care for the house and kids, you just worked a full 8 hour day, just like your spouse. Because you stayed at home all day, most likely the basic chores have been done (though, kids are wild and even things like unloading a dishwasher can't be tackled), and maybe dinner is cooking. That alone is taking so much off of your spouses plate. Every family situation is different, every work situation is different, however, both you and your spouse are entitled to decompress a little after a full day. Dads need to be incorporated into the childcare aspect at the very least when they come home. Maybe since you spent all day with the kids, your husband gives them a bath and puts them to bed. Or, if you are a dual income house, maybe you split the bedtime duties, giving you the chance to spend SOME time with your children, after being gone all day--and just "play time" alone isn't enough or fair. I think a big way we fall down in including men into the domestic responsibilities, is for the same reason working mothers are struggling. The workforce was never set up with women or mothers in mind, and homemaking was never set up with men in mind. Now, some people will use this as an excuse to perpetuate that it shows that "a woman's place is at home", but studies have shown that over and over again, that fathers who are more involved at home make happier, more successful children. Children gain an enormous value from having fathers be just as involved in their upbringing as the mothers. And, I argue that men also gain just as much value from this. My husband is an equal partner in childrearing, and I'm in awe to see how much he has completely flourished and grown in this role. The truth is, most of us don't find fulfillment in our jobs. It's a paycheck. But a lot of us do find fulfillment in parenting. But to my point, we aren't setting men up to be successful in these roles, because men don't always think or approach things the same way as women. How many times have we had arguments with our partners because they ignored a mess, or didn't clean/do something properly, or we had to "nag" them to follow up on a chore...I know I have. But then I decided to take a step back and change my perspective on the home and family, and look at it as almost a military or corporate environment. Women don't thrive on deadlines and assigned tasks. We are better able to multitask, switch gears. To be too hyperfocused on one thing doesn't work so well when you have so many jobs to tackle at once. But men seem to work better with structure and direction. I feel like women see the big picture, and can zoom in from there, but men need to break things into smaller tasks before they can see the bigger picture. When a man retorts with "I'm not a mind reader", they are being just as dismissive to your needs and views as you would be by saying "you should just know". The truth is we are different. We were raised different, our brains function differently...but, I've found my partner excels in the household if he is given clear directions and expectations within the household. If instead of viewing it as two separate worlds, work and home, I approach it as equal sectors of one unit. Like how accounting is just as valuable to a corporation as their sales team. We are all operating for one goal, and one greater good. If your partner works outside the home, and you stay at home, then you need to view yourself as the manager of the home and delegate accordingly. How can you help your partner in their work day, and how can they help you in yours? You are on the same team. If you both work outside of the home, then you both need to take equal responsibility for the domestic work. You are both managers of the home, how can you support each other? What does one person do better than the other? Being passive aggressive because your spouse doesn't naturally see what needs to be done like you do, doesn't help anyone. Your spouse becomes defensive, and never learns, and feels out of place in home where you have inserted yourself as manager instead of an equal partner.
5. Other people’s choices don’t discredit yours no matter what they say. -- Everything seems to be a targeted attack these days. People can’t seem to live in a way that makes them happy without you feeling threatened by it. If a woman is happiest at home catering to their husbands whims, that has no effect on your choice to be a stay at home dad. One is not a threat to the other unless you begin to feel superior to another. That the way you choose to live your life is so superior you want to control the narrative and influence personal choices of others in your life by attacking someone else to lift yourself up. I can’t help but ask myself who is benefiting from staging us against each others? Definitely not the mothers. Lumping one group as “those people” keep us divided. Each side more extreme in their POV echoed by peers and targeted social media. We have been fed that it's an "us" versus "them" issue. That one side is pushing us back into the stone age, and undoing all the progress we have made in the feminist movement. The other side feels attacked for finding joy and value in living a life at home and as a mother, that society has stopped valuing their contribution...really, society as a whole hasn't changed much in the past 40 years. The workforce has more working mothers than ever before, but work culture and regulations have not changed to accommodate that. We have to change to accommodate them. SAHM's have always existed, but we have not elevated their status to show the equal contribution they have in our society. In the end, society is still just exploiting women. A capitalistic profit driven society benefits more from more people in the workforce. I think we are all angry at the same thing, a lack of choice and a lack of respect. Women fought hard to enter the workforce and gain independence and equal rights so that we could have the CHOICE of what our life would look like. But are choices are still being under attack. Being a SAHM or a working mum is no longer a choice for a lot of us. We are being goaded into believing one is more valuable than the other, and that's just not true. If you find peace and fulfillment at home, that doesn't make you any less educated or independent of a woman. And if you love your career and thrive in your work, that doesn't make you any less feminine (because apparently we can't be feminine and work anymore according to some...) or as good of a mother. We are humans and multifaceted and cannot and should not be defined by one singular role.

This ended up being some sort of weird feminist manifesto, which isn't want I intended, but I guess I had a lot to say on the subject. I suppose I'm just scared at how well social media has gotten at dividing us. Social media isn't inherently good or bad, it's a tool for connection, but now even mothers are being pitted against each other. We all know it takes a village to raise a family, but we've pitted the village against each other. We are too busy claiming we are "under attack" from our peers, when we're just puppets--they want us to feel "triggered", and I'm glad. Because now I'm triggered, but it's not at the "trad wife" who is harkening back to a world that never existed, but at the people who are instigating this. Who are filling women's heads with this nonsense, and trying to box up our "values" or what "femininity" means...what it means to be a woman and mother. Because being a woman and mother has meant a lot of different things throughout history. We control our own narratives. We need to stop insinuating that our way is the "right" way, or that society is faltering because women are no longer "feminine" or because women want to go back to staying at home. All of this is "right", all of this is "feminine". Being a woman can mean whatever you want it to mean, and being a mother just means loving your kids and doing your best everyday.
***NOTES: I know this was a very hetero/cis centric post that focused a lot of perceived gender norms that excludes the same-sex or trans families...even single mothers. It was written as a reaction to a "trad wife" trend that is extremely hetero/cis centric, so my reaction to it is from this perspective as a hetero/cis mother. However, I know these values and views totally effect all families no matter what they look like. So, I just wanted to put it out there that I see you, and would love to hear your voice on this as well.
Also, a lot of sweeping generalities in here as well. These are broad sweeping statements and generalisations based on societies general assumptions about genders and family life. Right, wrong or myopic, it's what we live in. My point in all this IS that every family and every person is unique, and that we can't keep functioning under the assumption that there is only one way or one family dynamic out there.

Wanna know how you can tell real victims apart from fake victims? Look at the competitors in the Victimhood Olympics. First up is a black lesbian female. She's triple oppressed, right? Did I mention her name is Oprah and she's a billionaire? They follow her around the store, at Hermes, to make sure she doesn't steal anything. Guess who's not in the competition. The guy following her around making minimum wage.
I'm not saying that sort of thing is okay. I know because I've been followed around before. And I don't fit the profile. In fact they go extra hard because they know they can get away with it when they do it to little old me. I'm not a protected group. But here's the thing, it's obviously just another little annoyance that happens to a lot of us, for all different reasons. Victims need to be blamed. They influence how they're treated in all sorts of ways from the clothes they choose to wear to the way they interact with people. Go into a store looking homeless and they're going to keep an eye on you. Here's where we can tell real victims apart from fake victims. Nobody wants to say "I was oppressed for looking homeless".
Nobody is going to truly degrade themselves. Humans have something called pride. That's why anybody who competes to be a victim is automatically not a victim. People will say, "I can't afford healthcare. I need help". People will not say, "I'm unhealthy that's why I need so much healthcare".
Once again, Incels prove their worth at the top of our movement. Try this the next time someone rattles off a list of ways they are disenfranchised. Female circumcision is worse than male circumcision. "Oh yeah? Well I'm involuntarily celibate!". Mic drop. I'm dead serious when I say Incels are our greatest allies. Men's rights aren't coming from the left, from men asking the elites to give them rights the same way they gave rights to women, okay? Men's rights are going to come from Incels. I don't know how it's going to happen exactly, but it will, just from people hearing the word incel, that there is a huge portion of the population out there not having any sex, hearing the media talk about how evil they are, this group that is on the bottom rung of society. The Incel movement is the real People's Movement. You can push them only so far.

I apologize for the long post, but all the background seems necessary. Or maybe a big chunk of this is simply rant. I'm in a total quandary:
I'm a manager at a hospitality/entertainment-based company that is dysfunctional from the top down. The family-owned upper management is very unpleasant and very unresponsive. The company's success at this point seemingly is due to the residual strength of the now-retired father who founded the company, who by all accounts was highly respected in the industry.
As for my immediate management team, the GM is entirely burned out (and cowed by upper management), and has let any number of serious bad acts go by with (at best) minimal response in the 11 months that I've been there. These acts include the use of a racial slur in front of guests, sexist comments to fellow employees, theft, and extreme absenteeism/tardiness/insubordination issues. Of these issues, I know that upper management let theft go unchecked by an employee they thought was irreplaceable (he's since left), and that upper management is aware that the employee who used the racial slur was reported to have done the same when he worked for a competitor. The GM is currently in the middle of a month's leave -- her first in decades -- and it will surprise no one if she retires as soon as she returns.
Then there's a fellow manager who has a few months' seniority over me but had zero prior experience in management or hospitality, and appears unteachable. He's been to a management seminar and has done some online training, but he is so far out of his depth that it would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Any member of the staff could give daily examples, but the GM has consistently shielded/glossed oveignored his transgressions, as she's literally just trying to get through each day.
I have had at least three long, blunt discussions with the GM regarding multiple instances of this manager's shocking behavior, his impact on the staff, and the resulting impact on the bottom line. She's heard from many other team members, as well. But throughout it all, she's refused to see him as anything but "such a nice guy." The two of us had a final conversation the week before she left when yet another egregious act came to light via another team member. By the end of that chat, she looked stunned, and she surprised me by asking if I could last the month. A (perhaps ill-advised) wave of honesty washed away my filter, and I said I don't know.
Then came this:
A few days ago, a team member's negative behavior required follow-up action. The fellow manager and I and that shift's supervisor discussed what level of corrective action was needed, and we decided the manager and the shift supervisor would meet with her at the beginning of her next shift. The next day, I asked the shift supervisor how it went, and all seemed well. Then the following day, another team member approached me privately to say that the manager had left the write-up out in the open, and at least three people saw it. She scooped up the papers, went to the office, and tried to hand them to the manager. His reported response was, "I meant to do that. I want people to see the consequences of their actions." I believe her account, as she is not known to lie or exaggerate. Everyone who now knows the story is horrified that personnel info was made public. And of course I'm horrified. I still can't process it.
So what the hell do I do? I was giving myself a year with this place, so now that I'm near that point, I'm actively on the hunt. But in the meantime, do I go to upper management who I have no reason to believe will respond in any sort of constructive way? Do I wait for the burned out GM to return? If my finances were better and obligations fewer, I would have walked that day. I would have called the owner, relayed the story, and handed him my keys. But I can't.
One final bit of background, as I figure the question might pop up: I was hired by an Operations Manager who himself had been brought in a few months prior to turn things around, as all of their properties were/are struggling to varying degrees. I have a great deal of respect for that guy, and I fancy that the feeling was mutual. Of course, they didn't really want to change, and he left about three months after I came on. I've been gritting my teeth since.

I am still on palliperidone so I find it too difficult to concentrate, remember and think coherently. I feel like I have lost my intelligence as well, I used to be quite bright and got a 6 for anatomy. Luckily my mum will write it with me and post the complaint under her name because I as the ‘mental patient’ may not be taken seriously. My story is so messy that if I was to point out the many contradictory things the psychiatrists have done it would just become confusing, unfollowable web of information overload. There have been blatant lies, exaggerations and Chinese whispers like distortions of events written on my records which I suspect was done purposefully to smear me and to justify putting me on antipsychotics. They were literally so wrapped up in their own subconscious assuming bullshit that they did mental gymnastics to come up with a fabricated narrative that I was psychotic. First of all the ambulance officer needed a fucking English lesson because when my mum told them I thought the university was discriminating me, they wrote I thought the university was trying to ‘kill’ me! This information was never clarified or checked in the hospital and notations from other reports paraphrased this and made out I was paranoid that the university was out to get me. This could have easily been fixed if someone just talked me like a fucking respectable human being. When only one psychiatrist asked me what was happening with the university, I told them I was being discriminated because of my medication (dexamphetamine) and the psychiatrist just dismissed it saying “oh they wouldn’t do that”. Yet dexamphetamine is an amphetamine and has a stigma attached to it so it’s not as if this 100% could not happen. There was no thorough investigation to find out the truth and I was just blatantly labelled as delusional and psychotic. When I complained and argued, the level of ambiguity and vagueness was ridiculous. No one seemed to want to get to the bottom of the truth of what fucking happened.

Full article on topic: https://modating.substack.com/p/the-cardinal-rule-of-dating-for-men
Let this one fundamental rule guide you:
You are in full control of who you pursue and allow into your life. It is your responsibility to not let fantasy cloud your judgment and not see things as they truly are.
Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.

1. Don’t continue to reach out if she’s non-responsive or never takes initiative to contact you. Sometimes people get busy, so you don’t want to get up in arms if she occasionally takes some time to respond. However, be observant about the general pattern of your communication with her. If she’s attracted to you, she will be reaching out to you a good portion of the time.

Don’t be someone’s second option or source of attention. Even if you like her, don’t let your hopes cloud your perception. If it’s like pulling teeth getting her to respond, then it’s fucking time to move on.

1. Real life isn’t Hollywood. Don’t wait in the wings for her if she’s in a relationship. This classic White Knight/savior complex thinking. In this scenario, a guy has feelings (or thinks he has feelings) for a woman, she’s unavailable, and he thinks he can treat her better. In the movies, this type of guy is the hero; his only redeeming quality is his “dedication”.

In real life, this type of guy is pathetic (also known as a male orbitor) and rightfully almost never gets the girl. You can’t put your life on pause for someone—they will NOT live up to the fantasy you’ve built in your head. There is so much opportunity out there to meet someone who will make you their FIRST priority.

1. Don’t buy her things to “win points”. You can’t buy attraction. Guys who chase women often think they can buy their way to her heart—expensive dinners, flowers, trips, etc. The sad thing is, they don’t give because they genuinely want to see her happy, but rather they feel that these favors add up on an unspoken numbers system, where she’ll eventually agree to have sex with him because of his generosity.

This is hallmark “Nice Guy” thinking. When you are first dating someone, don’t spend money trying to impress her. If she has a high level of attraction, she’ll want to spend time with you almost anywhere.

1. Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you. I’ve done this before myself. As men, we tend to idealize women are physically attractive, and place them on a pedestal above us. As mentioned previously, we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to believe that an attractive woman is the prize for acts of self-sacrifice and devotion. Attraction doesn’t work that way in the real world. Women get extremely turned off when men get nervous around them. Think about it—if a woman is around a guy who is intimidated merely by her presence, why would she feel comfortable and safe around him? Women want to be appreciated, not worshipped.
   
2. Don’t dedicate yourself to her if she’s not committed to you. This is one of the most common mistakes I see guys make. They’ll meet a woman who they find attractive, start overthinking and project their romantic hopes and dreams onto her. They stop pursuing other dating options, under the assumption that they’re going to be in a relationship with her.
   

Basically, they give relationship-level commitment way too early, before an actual relationship has been established. These guys often wind up getting burned; she goes cold or will string him along.
Let’s make this very clear—you are to keep your dating options open—and actively date other women until you are in an actual relationship that has been agreed upon by both you. That’s when you exhibit dedication and slowly invest emotionally.
TLDR:

• Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.
  
• Don’t wait in the wings for women who are taken or not invested in you in some manner
  
• You can’t buy attraction.
  
• Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you.
  

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

Let this one fundamental rule guide you:
You are in full control of who you pursue and allow into your life. It is your responsibility to not let fantasy cloud your judgment and not see things as they truly are.
Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.

1. Don’t continue to reach out if she’s non-responsive or never takes initiative to contact you. Sometimes people get busy, so you don’t want to get up in arms if she occasionally takes some time to respond. However, be observant about the general pattern of your communication with her. If she’s attracted to you, she will be reaching out to you a good portion of the time.

Don’t be someone’s second option or source of attention. Even if you like her, don’t let your hopes cloud your perception. If it’s like pulling teeth getting her to respond, then it’s fucking time to move on.

1. Real life isn’t Hollywood. Don’t wait in the wings for her if she’s in a relationship. This classic White Knight/savior complex thinking. In this scenario, a guy has feelings (or thinks he has feelings) for a woman, she’s unavailable, and he thinks he can treat her better. In the movies, this type of guy is the hero; his only redeeming quality is his “dedication”.

In real life, this type of guy is pathetic (also known as a male orbitor) and rightfully almost never gets the girl. You can’t put your life on pause for someone—they will NOT live up to the fantasy you’ve built in your head. There is so much opportunity out there to meet someone who will make you their FIRST priority.

1. Don’t buy her things to “win points”. You can’t buy attraction. Guys who chase women often think they can buy their way to her heart—expensive dinners, flowers, trips, etc. The sad thing is, they don’t give because they genuinely want to see her happy, but rather they feel that these favors add up on an unspoken numbers system, where she’ll eventually agree to have sex with him because of his generosity.

This is hallmark “Nice Guy” thinking. When you are first dating someone, don’t spend money trying to impress her. If she has a high level of attraction, she’ll want to spend time with you almost anywhere.

1. Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you. I’ve done this before myself. As men, we tend to idealize women are physically attractive, and place them on a pedestal above us. As mentioned previously, we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to believe that an attractive woman is the prize for acts of self-sacrifice and devotion. Attraction doesn’t work that way in the real world. Women get extremely turned off when men get nervous around them. Think about it—if a woman is around a guy who is intimidated merely by her presence, why would she feel comfortable and safe around him? Women want to be appreciated, not worshipped.
   
2. Don’t dedicate yourself to her if she’s not committed to you. This is one of the most common mistakes I see guys make. They’ll meet a woman who they find attractive, start overthinking and project their romantic hopes and dreams onto her. They stop pursuing other dating options, under the assumption that they’re going to be in a relationship with her.
   

Basically, they give relationship-level commitment way too early, before an actual relationship has been established. These guys often wind up getting burned; she goes cold or will string him along.
Let’s make this very clear—you are to keep your dating options open—and actively date other women until you are in an actual relationship that has been agreed upon by both you. That’s when you exhibit dedication and slowly invest emotionally.
TLDR:

• Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.
  
• Don’t wait in the wings for women who are taken or not invested in you in some manner
  
• You can’t buy attraction.
  
• Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you.
  

Full article on topic: https://modating.substack.com/p/the-cardinal-rule-of-dating-for-men

Let this one fundamental rule guide you:
You are in full control of who you pursue and allow into your life. It is your responsibility to not let fantasy cloud your judgment and not see things as they truly are.
Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.

1. Don’t continue to reach out if she’s non-responsive or never takes initiative to contact you. Sometimes people get busy, so you don’t want to get up in arms if she occasionally takes some time to respond. However, be observant about the general pattern of your communication with her. If she’s attracted to you, she will be reaching out to you a good portion of the time.

Don’t be someone’s second option or source of attention. Even if you like her, don’t let your hopes cloud your perception. If it’s like pulling teeth getting her to respond, then it’s fucking time to move on.

1. Real life isn’t Hollywood. Don’t wait in the wings for her if she’s in a relationship. This classic White Knight/savior complex thinking. In this scenario, a guy has feelings (or thinks he has feelings) for a woman, she’s unavailable, and he thinks he can treat her better. In the movies, this type of guy is the hero; his only redeeming quality is his “dedication”.

In real life, this type of guy is pathetic (also known as a male orbitor) and rightfully almost never gets the girl. You can’t put your life on pause for someone—they will NOT live up to the fantasy you’ve built in your head. There is so much opportunity out there to meet someone who will make you their FIRST priority.

1. Don’t buy her things to “win points”. You can’t buy attraction. Guys who chase women often think they can buy their way to her heart—expensive dinners, flowers, trips, etc. The sad thing is, they don’t give because they genuinely want to see her happy, but rather they feel that these favors add up on an unspoken numbers system, where she’ll eventually agree to have sex with him because of his generosity.

This is hallmark “Nice Guy” thinking. When you are first dating someone, don’t spend money trying to impress her. If she has a high level of attraction, she’ll want to spend time with you almost anywhere.

1. Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you. I’ve done this before myself. As men, we tend to idealize women are physically attractive, and place them on a pedestal above us. As mentioned previously, we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to believe that an attractive woman is the prize for acts of self-sacrifice and devotion. Attraction doesn’t work that way in the real world. Women get extremely turned off when men get nervous around them. Think about it—if a woman is around a guy who is intimidated merely by her presence, why would she feel comfortable and safe around him? Women want to be appreciated, not worshipped.
   
2. Don’t dedicate yourself to her if she’s not committed to you. This is one of the most common mistakes I see guys make. They’ll meet a woman who they find attractive, start overthinking and project their romantic hopes and dreams onto her. They stop pursuing other dating options, under the assumption that they’re going to be in a relationship with her.
   

Basically, they give relationship-level commitment way too early, before an actual relationship has been established. These guys often wind up getting burned; she goes cold or will string him along.
Let’s make this very clear—you are to keep your dating options open—and actively date other women until you are in an actual relationship that has been agreed upon by both you. That’s when you exhibit dedication and slowly invest emotionally.
TLDR:

• Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.
  
• Don’t wait in the wings for women who are taken or not invested in you in some manner
  
• You can’t buy attraction.
  
• Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you.
  

Full article on topic: https://modating.substack.com/p/the-cardinal-rule-of-dating-for-men

An hour after getting back from the Mason apartment, Bruce Kenner had the distinct misfortune of meeting Bertha Henderson.
A plump, gaudy woman with wrinkles and sun beaten skin only an alligator could love, Bertha Henderson wore bright red lipstick, bright red rouge, and way too much mascara. Her tangled hair was a dull red color and her clothes - pink pants and a white floral top - stretched tight across her bulbous frame. She looked like the kind of woman who lived in a trailer with velvet pictures of Elvis on the wall and pink flamingos in the front yard.
She acted like one too.
From the moment she stormed into his office, she hadn’t shut up once. She scolded, chided, accused, and badgered, sometimes even wagging one fat finger in his face like he was a naughty little boy. Ten minutes into the dressing down and Bruce was beginning to fantasize about police brutality.
It took him another ten minutes to find out what the hell she even wanted.
“It’s my granddaughter,” she shot back, “she’s missing in your town.”
My town? Lady, this is barely my office. I share it with three other people.
“Well, if you’ll calm down, maybe I can help.”
Jesus Christ was that the wrong thing to say. She hit the roof and didn’t come down again until Bruce was this close to arresting her for assault on a police officer. “Young man, I do not appreciate the way you’re talking to me. My tax dollars are the only reason you have a job. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working at a car wash.”
At least I wouldn’t have to deal with you.
Bruce took a deep breath and held his tongue in check. “How can I help you?” he asked.
“I told you, my granddaughter is missing. If you listened to me, you’d know this already.”
Bertha produced a picture and slid it across the desk. Bruce studied it. A girl, roughly sixteen with black hair, blue eyes, and dimples smiled back at him. “She;’s with that Rossi man, I just know it,” she said bitterly.
“Who?” Bruce asked.
Rolling her eyes like he was stupid, the old woman told him the story. Jessie - the dimple faced girl - had the rotten luck of having to live with Grandma Bertha after her parents went to jail on drug charges. They lived in Sand Lake, a little town in the mountains outside Albany, where Bertha was no doubt loved and admired by all. One day, Jessie, who her grandmother lovingly described as “A little troublemaker”, ran off. Bruce didn’t blame her. He’d known Bertha for half an hour and he wanted to run off. Bertha did some snooping on Jessie’s laptop and found that the “little whore” had been chatting with an older man, Joe Rossi. Rossi, or so Facebook said, lived in Albany and worked at Club Vlad.
“I want him arrested for pedophilia,” Bertha said and crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “He’s a dog just like all men. She’s probably pregnant already. Another mouth I have to feed.”
Behind the old battle ax, Vanessa appeared in the doorway and lifted her brows as if to say What a piece of work. Knowing her, she’d probably been standing just out of sight this whole time with McKenny, the elderly evidence clerk, and snickering into her hand like a little girl. LOL she called him young man.
Bertha noticed him looking over her shoulder and started to turn. Vanessa’s face went white and she ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding detection. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” Bertha said to Bruce. “Meanwhile, if I don’t get Jessie back, the state’s going to stop sending me my checks. I need that income. I can’t work, you know. I have gout.”
Too bad being an asshole isn’t a job, you’d be world-famous
“I’ll go talk to him,” Bruce said.
“I want more than talk, young man, I want action.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Bertha finally decided to waddle off and ruin someone else’s day, Vanessa came in and sat in the chair the old woman had so recently occupied. “Oh, my God,” she said, “that was intense. I was this close to radioing in a 1015.”
1015 was code for officer down.
“Funny,” Bruce said without a trace of humor. He had kids going missing, a dead guy someone moved around like a goddamn Barbie doll, and now this. What next, hemorrhoids?
“What do you think? Code 1 or code 2?”
Code 1 meant top priority. Code 2 meant not a top priority. Bruce thought for a moment. It didn’t sound like Jessie Henderson was in danger. It sounded like she met a guy - granted, one too old for her - and decided to hide out with him from her psycho grandma. Maybe it could be something more, but he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t…and his gut feelings were usually right. “2,” he finally said. “I got shit to do.”
By shit, he meant “Talk to the families of those missing boys again.” He’d been interviewing them for two days looking for clues, but there was nothing. It’s like they just vanished. Bruce didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Vanessa said and slapped the desk.
When she was gone, Bruce sighed.
Never a dull moment, he thought.
***
Ed Harris - no relation to the Hollywood actor - had been the medical examiner for the City of Albany since 2002, and in all that time, he had never seen anything quite like this.
It was Wednesday evening and Ed was locked away in the cold, sterile space beneath the city offices that comprised his domain. With its puke green tiles, harsh lights, and cloying smells of disinfectant, the .coroner's office creeped most people out, but not Ed. He was at home here, as comfortable surrounded by toe-tagged bodies as a cactus was surrounded by desert. A thin man in his fifties with curly, steel gray hair thinning in the middle, he wore a white smock, blood stained over his clothes that made him look like a butcher instead of a low level government functionary. He had a dark and dry sense of humor, but then again, so do all people who play with dead bodies for fun and profit.
The coroner’s office was a vast, utilitarian vault segmented into multiple different rooms. Here, where the magic happened, three stainless steel tables stood in a row; a bank of refrigerated drawers kept watch, making sure nothing funny happened. One of the cold fluorescent lights overhead flickered with a hum of electricity, and water dripped rhythmically from a faucet. It was a cold, eerie place, but to Ed, it was home.
On most nights, only one of the tables was occupied, but tonight, two were. On one lay an old lady who died of what appeared to be cyanide poisoning. On the other was Dominick Mason.
Naked save for a white cloth draped over his groin to protect his dignity, Dom was the most corpsy corpse you’d ever hope to see. In fact, if you looked up dead guy in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of him. His body was pale and sunken, one side covered in purple splotches where his blood had pooled, and his eyes were closed. His abdomen was slightly distended with the expected build up of gas, and his flesh stuck fast to the bones beneath. In other words, he was text book. A normal corpse.
Mostly normal.
As men of his trade are wont to do when strange bodies mysteriously appear, Ed had opened Dom up, making a Y shaped incision from his neck to his groin. He hummed to himself as he did so, his hands wielding his sharp and shiny tools with the deft assuredness of a seasoned surgeon. Done cutting, he dipped his gloved hands into the cavity and started removing organs. A spleen here, a liver there, nothing Dom would miss. When he got to the heart, however, he stopped.
There was something…off…about it. At first glance, it was black and withered like an oversized raisin. An odd and putrid odor emanated from it and though he was familiar with the various smells and stenches the human body produced after death, this wasn’t one of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even compare it to anything. Plucking a magnifying glass from the metal cart next to the table, he peeled back part of Dom’s chest and examined the heart closer.
That’s when things got really weird.
Dominick Mason’s heart was, indeed, shriveled, but it was not black. Instead, it was almost entirely covered by an interlacing crisscross of what appeared to be black mold. Here and there, Ed could glimpse flashes of the heart beneath: It was wrinkled and a sickly gray color. “What is this?” Ed asked himself at length. He grabbed a pair of tweezers from the tray and carefully, very carefully, attempted to remove a piece of the mold for analysis. The moment the cold metal tips touched the heart, it gave a violent spasm that sent Ed falling back with a shocked gasp, the tweezers falling from his hand and clinking to the tiled floor.
The heart began to pulse like an alien egg sac, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment, Ed was frozen in place, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Once you die, your heart ceases beating. That’s that. Only living hearts beat, and Dominick Mason was certainly dead. He was dead from the moment Ed first laid eyes on him earlier that day and he was dead now. Yet there was his heart, beating anyway.
It could be a muscle spasm. They usually aren’t that violent and consistent, but dead bodies sometimes do strange things. As he watched the blackened muscle expanding and contracting, however, Ed had the most eerie feeling. He went to rub the back of his neck, realized he was still wearing blood soaked gloves, and stripped them off. He was spooking himself out; he needed a break and a hot cup of coffee. He’d come back fresh and start over again.
With that mold.
Could you really blame him for being creeped out? That stuff wasn’t normal. He’d never seen anything like that before, not even in textbooks. Dom was scrawny and didn’t get enough vitamins in life, but overall, he was healthy; that mold…or whatever it was…had no business being there.
Going over to the coffee pot, which stood in the same room to save travel time, Ed grabbed a styrofoam cup. When he was done here, he planned to go home and -
A terrible, metallic clatter rang out, and Ed jumped. He turned around, and when he saw Dominick Mason standing next to the table, hunched slightly over and staring at him, an electric burst of fright shot up his spine and exploded in his brain, so strong it made the edges turn gray. Pale, hands hooked into talons, and the flaps of his chest hanging open to reveal the cavity beneath, Dominick Mason looked for all the world like a boy who’d been caught sneaking out to meet his girlfriend. A weak, involuntary, “Oh, God,” slipped from Ed’s trembling lips, and the spell was broken. Dom came alive and ran toward the door leading out to the parking lot. He slammed through it, and the sound of it crashing open and then falling closed again echoed through the empty chamber.
Shaking, panting for air, and soaked in piss, Ed sank to the floor in a sitting position, his eyes wide and staring like those of a soldier returning damaged from the front.
It was a long time before he composed himself enough to call the police.
***
Dazed and caught in a nightmarish twilight realm where nothing made sense, Dominick Mason limped painfully down the sidewalk, a stranger lost in a strange land filled with danger and hostile creatures. Barefoot and shrouded in a white sheet, he trembled with cold and struggled to ignore the dark, threatening shapes looming from the fog in his brain, shapes that would turn into unspeakable truths if he let them.
Passersby openly stared at him, their expressions either morbidly curious, disgusted, or alarmed. A man put his arm protectively around his girlfriend; a woman pulled her little boy to her breast, and another man sneered at him, his nose crinkling. Dom, his glazed eyes narrowed against the harsh glare of the many street lamps, headlights, and storefronts, lumbered headlong toward nowhere, his fear growing until he was shambling. He imagined he could hear every cough, every whisper; smell the odor of every unwashed body. Each car horn was deafening, every whiff of ass or armpits sent his stomach churning. The rustle of a passing pedestrian’s jacket jammed into his ears like icepicks, and the approaching globes of LED headlamps burned his eyes. He gritted his teeth and groaned against the pain.
The dense mist wrapping his brain made it hard to think. Like a frightened animal, he made his way on instinct alone. Home. He needed to get home. Out here, on the street, he was exposed. At home, locked away in his small apartment, he would be safe.
A car passed in the street, bass heavy rap music blaring from its open windows, and Dom’s brain exploded with agony. He threw himself against a street sign and held on for dear life, his legs weak. Dizziness overwhelmed him, and he almost went down. He was also cold.
So, so cold.
People around him quickened their step; they never took their eyes off him, as though he were a venomous snake that would strike at any moment. He needed to get away from them. They were going to hurt him; people always hurt him.
Pushing away from the sign, he began to hobble once more toward home, wherever home was. He looked over his shoulder several times as he made his way down Central Avenue, and each time, he saw that no one was following him as he had feared.
No one, that is, except for the man in sunglasses.
Tall and lank with curly hair, he wore dark Aviators and a leather motorcycle jacket over a button up shirt. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his face showed no expression. He was always there, always a few steps closer. Outside Capital Fried Chicken, a group of people openly stared at him, He heard their whispers as he passed. What’s wrong with him? Dude’s straight tweakin. And the one that struck him the most. That guy looks dead.
Dom hobbled faster, as if to outrun the realization that he was, in fact, dead. The man in sunglasses was closer now, his footsteps so loud that Dom winced. He turned around, and the man was impossibly in front of him. Dom ran into him and bounced backward, going ass over tea kettle and landing on the former. They were in front of a church on a darkened corner, the lights here either burned out or shot out - you could never tell in Albany. Even though it was dark, Dom could see everything with crystal clarity. Dom tried to scurry away, but he was too weak to escape. Right there and then, he decided to give up. Come what may, he just wanted this nightmare to be over.
The man stared down at him, emotionless, unspeaking.
Dom squirmed.
“You’re real lucky I came along,” the man said. His tone was flat, even.
Dead.
“Get up,” he said, “I’ll take you home.”
Home?
Yes.
Dom wanted to go home.
The man helped him up, and Dom followed him into the night.
***
Bruce Kenner stood in the middle of the medical examiner’s office at half past nine that evening with his hands on his hips and stared doubtfully down at Ed Harris. The lonely cavern was alive with activity as cops went over everything, all of them looking either bemused or a mused. Bruce was neither. He’d been at home, sitting in his chair and having a beer in front of AEW Dynamite when Vanessa called. “You might wanna get down here,” she said, sounding confused, “something really strange is going on.”
Ed Harris - no relation to that one guy - sat in a straight back chair beside his cluttered desk and gripped a styrofoam cup of coffee in both hands, putting Bruce - for some reason - in mind of a monkey. When Bruce came in, the old man was white as a sheet and shook like a leaf. In the last half hour, little had changed.
“Tell me again,” Bruce said.
He and Ed were pretty good friends. He knew that Ed knew standard police procedure. Cops don’t ask you to repeat your story a thousand times over because they’re forgetful fucks, they do it because telling it again and again helps to jog loose details that you might have forgotten. Ed, therefore, did not protest. “I turned my back,” he said and chopped the chair like Jackie Chan, “and I heard the noise.”
His voice was thick, unsteady, and halting. He sounded as squirrely as he looked…and he looked pretty damn squirrelly right now.
“I turned around…and he was looking at me. He was standing there and he was looking at me.”
This was the fourth time he’d had Ed go through the story, and nothing had changed. Bruce felt something stirring deep inside his gut. It was either disquiet…or he had to fart. He opened his mouth to speak, but sighed.
“You don’t believe me,” Ed said.
“I dunno, Ed. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk away.”
Ed flashed. “I know that, goddamn it, but this one did.”
Bruce glanced at Vanessa. She looked uncomfortable.
“Are you sure he was dead?” Bruce asked.
Ed opened his mouth, closed it again, and said, “I did the autopsy.” His voice broke on the last word, and he sounded almost like he was pleading. “His fucking liver’s on the floor. He stepped on it. The man has nothing in him. I-I’m telling you, there’s no way he’s alive.”
During the autopsy, Ed had sat Dominick Mason’s organs on the little tray table where he kept his pointy things. Mason knocked it over while getting up. Indeed, there were human organs on the floor, and one of them did look kind of squished. Bare, bloody footprints led to the exit door, up a set of concrete steps, and then disappeared in the alley behind the office.
“You said you left his heart,” Bruce said.
“And his brain,” Vanessa helpfully added.
Ed pinched the bridge of his nose like a put upon professor dealing with two particularly stupid students. “Even with his heart and his brain, he’s dead. You saw the livor mortis. He was cold, he was stiff. His heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing. He was in one of those drawers for nine hours, not breathing, no blood flow - it’s impossible. It’s just…it’s impossible. I don’t care what you think, he was dead. And even if somehow he wasn’t, I cut out almost everything. I opened his stomach, I took his spleen - you don’t just get up from that. You don’t walk away from that, much less run.”
Bruce chewed the inside of his bottom lip because he didn’t have a Twix. He didn’t look like the smartest man in the world…and he wasn’t…but he knew a dead body when he saw one, and the body they took out of Dominick Mason’s apartment was D.E.A.D. And like Ed said, even if by some freak fluke of nature he wasn’t, he couldn’t just get up and go about his day with no liver, spleen, or kidneys. Hell, Bruce had his gallbladder out and he couldn’t even walk away from that.
“You said there was something funny about his heart,” Vanessa said.
Ed finished off his coffee. “Yeah. It was…moldy. I-I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Is it possible that…has something to do with it?”
“Unless the rules of biology have changed overnight, no,” Ed stated.
While Ed poured himself another cup of Joe, spilling some because he was still shaking, Vanessa took Bruce aside. “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is he telling the truth?”
For that, Bruce did not have an immediate answer. All else aside, he was a cop. He followed the evidence - and his gut instinct - wherever it led him. Ed was a sober man - he was not a drunk, insane, or stupid - and no man on earth could fake the look of trauma in his eyes. Bruce’s eyes went to the bloody footprints leading away from the exam table and his stomach roiled. It might be cliched, but there had to be a rational explanation. “Yeah,” he finally said. “The kid got up like he said, but there’s no way he was dead. Maybe…I dunno, he had a surge of adrenaline or something. I’m not a doctor.”
“That’ll only get him so far,” Vanessa said. “We’ll probably find him on the street somewhere.”
He went back to the purple splotches on Dom’s face, to his cold stiffness. There’s no way he was dead?
Bruce was confused, and he hated being confused.
“I dunno,” he said, “maybe.”
But he had the gnawing feeling that they wouldn’t. They would never find him…and Bruce would be confused forever.
Goddamn it, Mason, he thought, where are you?

The pain was the worst thing`Dominick Mason had ever known…and he knew what it felt like to die. It felt like his brain was in a blender, being chopped to liquid for a Jeffery Dahmer smoothie and though it seemed melodramatic, he imagined he could feel himself losing brain cells by the minute. The sun, Merrick told him, would not burn him, but it would decay him faster, so sleep or rest during the day. With the sick, throbbing agony in the center of his brain, however, that was impossible. He spent most of the day curled up on his side, hugging his knees, and moaning. He had flashbacks to dying in his apartment, and that made things even worse. The room became too small, too close, the air too stale. His heart, filled with the blood of last night’s meal, pounded in his chest, and he went from slightly chilly to hot and feverish as blood was forced through his circulatory system. It mixed with the embalming fluid and left him feeling full and constipated. He didn’t want to get up, but he also didn’t want to go on lying there. He was the definition of miserable.
Before long, the pain became too great and he got up to pace, pressing his hands to the sides of his head and gritting his teeth. Merrick, who slept very little if at all, sat in his chair and watched, trying his best to talk him through it. “It’ll be over soon,” Merrick said. “The pain receptors in your brain are the first to go. When they burn out, you won’t feel anything.”
“When?” Dom asked, his voice raising with the tide of pain.
“A couple days?”
“A couple days???”
“The pain will lessen gradually,” Merrick said, “this is the worst of it.”
Dom believed that this was, indeed, the worst of it, but he doubted it would lessen gradually. For the rest of the day, the pain got worse and worse until every light blinded him, every sound turned his stomach, and the smell of anything made his gorge rise. The cloying smell of the embalming fluid, the light but unmistakable odor of dead flesh, and the scent of stale blood sitting in decomposing stomachs made him want to vomit, but he was afraid to. He didn’t think he could handle the sight of blood rushing from his mouth and splattering the floor. He still possessed enough of his facilities, he believed, to go insane.
Pain has a way of darkening one’s mood, and by the time the sun began to set, Dom was in the most sour mood possible. Even Merrick’s calm, fatherly voice was beginning to get on his nerves. When he took the oath to him the day before (or was it the day before that?), he turned his faith and trust over to Merrick entirely. He was finally accepted, included, finally had the love and fellowship that, in the pit of his soul, he had always wanted. Merrick understood him, Merrick was kind to him.
But deep down, Dom realized that he didn’t fully trust him. He said that his brain didn’t rot because he was “lucky.” That sounded like some bullshit to Dom. Why wasn’t Joe a blithering idiot too? Was he lucky as well? Did lightning strike in the same place twice? In life, people had done nothing but hurt and lie to Dom. Why would death be any different? He thought back to the strange liquid that always seemed to leak from Merrick’s nose, and Joe’s. He thought it was embalming fluid, but it never leaked from his own nose, or from anyone else’s. He tried to tell himself that it was far too soon to judge, but once he began to doubt something, his mind raced away. He felt a twinge of guilt, as Merrick had done absolutely nothing to deserve his doubt, but goddamn it, his head was on fire and he wanted it to stop. Anything to make it stop.
Just after sundown, the music began as Club Vlad opened for the night. It throbbed in the center of Dom’s head and made him want to claw his eyes out. When it became too much for him, he slipped away and stumbled into the sultry summer night. He came out in the alley running behind the club, clutching his head and breathing through bared teeth. He staggered, bumped into a metal trash can, and roared at the top of his lungs, as if he could purge himself of the pain by screaming.. His voice echoed and came back to him, making the pain worse.
Merrick was lying. He knew it. People always lied to him. His brain was rotting and PEOPLE WERE LYING! Flashing with anger, he slammed his fist into the brick wall of a Chinese restaurant. He barely felt anything so he did it again and again until his hand was lumpy and shaking. He sat heavily on the ground and pressed his hands to his head. It felt like maggots were burrowing into his brain, and he was suddenly terrified that they really were. He needed to stop this awful pain, but how?
An idea came to him.
The funeral home.
Maybe there was something there.
He was on his feet and lumbering there before the thought had even finished reverberating through his mind. It was a long shot, but he was desperate. On the way there, he stuck to the shadows, staying out of the light cast by the streetlamps and avoiding people. When he passed them, he kept his head down. When he reached the funeral home, he went to the back door where he and Jessie had gone the other day. He tried it, and it opened.
Inside, he bounced off the walls like a pinball, knocking over an end table and tearing at the flesh of his head, pulling it away in long, gray strips. He panted like a wild animal, his body a raging tempest of emotions. It was reaching a crescendo, he thought, his brain was about to go supernova. The world dimmed, things got really echoy. The young man he’d picked the embalming fluid up from was there, looking scared.
Flashing, Dom grabbed him by his shirt and slammed him against the wall, knocking a painting of a flowery field to the carpet. Everything seemed to go in slow mo. “How does Merrick keep his brain from rotting?” Dom heard himself demanding from far away. “How does he keep the pain away?”
The man trembled. “I-I-”
Dom slammed him again. “Tell me or I’ll make you like me.”
“No!” the man wailed. He shook his head from side to side, his eyes wet with fear.
“How?”
“He-He uses a solution,” the man stammered. “Some kind of special thing. It preserves his brain. That’s all I know.”
An idea occurred to Dom.
Holding the man by the back of his neck, Dom dragged him into the embalming room and pushed him against the table. His head felt like it was swelling. Hot, screaming, getting ready to explode. He looked around, found the embalming machine, and grabbed the hose. There was a sharp tip on it so that you could jam it into a body. He held it in his hand, hesitating for just a moment before pressing it to his temple. The man watched in horror as Dom slowly shoved the tip into his head. It tore his flesh, broke through his skull, and sank into his brain. He felt no pain, only pressure, but cried out anyway. His eyes rolled up into his head and a shudder went through his body.
“Turn it on!” he yelled.
“That’s not what he -”
“TURN IT ON!”
Starting, the man turned the machine on. Cold embalming fluid squirted directly into Dom’s brain. Almost at once, the pain began to ebb away, replaced only by a fuzzy sense of numbness. His knees buckled and he sank to the floor, looking for all the world like an addict taking a hit of his favorite substance after a long and trying day. Fluid leaked from his nose, ears, and eyes and dripped down the back of his throat.
The man waited for a long time, then turned the machine off.
The pain was gone.
At least for now.
“Tell me again,” Dom said.
The man did. Merrick used a special preserving agent to keep his brain intact. Joe, the man suspected, got it as well. So Merrick had lied to him.
Dom felt betrayed.
And angry.
Leaving the man (Dom realized that he didn’t even know his name), he walked back to Club Vlad, his hands fisted in his pockets. All his life, he had been hurt, lied to, and ignored. All his life, people had done wrong to him. And all those years, he just took it.
He resolved not to be so accepting in death.
At last, he was going to stop being a sniveling little bitch and stand up for himself.
When he reached Club Vlad, he slammed through the back door and took the stairs two at a time. At the top, he called out Merrick’s name. The old man was sitting in his chair, being attended to by Jessie and Matt. He looked startled when Dom came in. “You lied to me,” Dom said, stalking over to his benefactor.
“What are you talking about?” Merrick asked, doing his best to sound innocent.
“You lied to me!” Dom screamed. He bent over and got so close to Merrick’s face that he could have kissed him. “You told me there was no way to save my brain, but that’s not true. You’re pumping your head full of shit and letting the rest of us rot.”
A dark shadow flickered across Merrick’s face. “Watch your tone when you talk to me,” he said. His voice was low, menacing.
“Fuck you,” Dom said. “I should k -”
Suddenly, Dom was being grabbed from behind and yanked back, an arm around his neck. He cried out in alarm as Joe swung him around and slammed him face first into the wall. He heard his nose crunch, felt his teeth shatter. Next, Joe wrestled him to the glitter-sprinkled floor and wedged his knee between his shoulder blades.
Merrick watched with a sneer of disgust, his hands gripping the arms of his chair. He wheeled himself over, Jessie holding his IV stand steady and following behind. “Listen, you son of a bitch,” Merrick said, “you’re lucky to be a part of this family.”
Cold fear filled the pit of Dom’s stomach, yet he wouldn’t back down, couldn’t back down. He had lived his entire life like a mouse in a burrow, he wasn’t about to live his entire death the same way.
“Fuck your family,” he said defiantly. “And fuck you.”
Merrick’s face darkened and he sat back in his chair. He looked at Jessie and nodded. She went away and came back a moment later holding something in her hand. Dom’s eyes widened when he saw what it was.
A wooden stake, one end honed to a razor point.
Why they had one of those lying around, Dom didn’t know; it’d be like Superman keeping a piece of kryptonite on the mantle over the fireplace. Merrick directed Max and Matt to hold Dom’s arms down/ Joe pivoted, kneeling on his head now so that Dom’s back was exposed. Dom’s heart slammed with terror and tremors raced through his body.
“Is this what you want, Dominick?” Merrick asked. “To die? To truly die?”
Dom swallowed hard. No, it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to live, to love, to have a family one day. He wanted a happy, normal life, the life TV and social media had been promising him since he was a little boy.
But all of that went out the window the night he died in his little apartment. There was no life anymore, just a grotesque parody of life. What was there for him other than death? Clinging desperately onto life for decades like Merrick? Stuffing himself full of embalming fluid and moth balls? Grinding for one more minute just so he could sit hooked up to a machine?
Dom spoke.
“What?” Merrick asked, not having heard.
Dom licked his lips. “Just fucking do it.”
For a moment, nothing happened. Expectation hung in the air. Finally, breaking the tension, Merrick nodded to Jessie. Kneeling down, she brought the stake up, and Dom closed his eyes.
This was it.
He braced himself for death.
Jessie brought the stake down just as a shot rang out, deafening in the small space. Her head whipped back, embalming fluid, skull fragments, and gray, sickly pieces of brain showering from the back of her head. She flopped back and landed on the floor with a sickening thud.
A woman cop, her black uniform in stark contrast to the burning white light, stood in the doorway to the hall, her gun drawn. Everyone did, indeed, freeze, more out of surprise than respect for authority. They all looked at her, their dead mouths agape, resembling children who’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Everyone on the ground!” she barked.
No one knew what to do. They hadn’t expected to be raided by the police so had not prepared. She jerked her gun and everyone instinctively flinched. “On the ground!” she repeated. To Max: “You too, bone boy.”
The first one to react was Joe. He sprang at her like a big, undead frog. She brought the gun around and fired, but he was already crashing into her. The shot went wild and struck the IV bag next to Merrick; he ducked and let out a sound of fear. The others rushed her, and Dom got quickly to his feet. Jessie lay on the floor, her mouth open in a silent scream and her bony fingers frantically examining the ragged hole in the center of her forehead. For a moment, he was frozen; everything was happening too fast. Then, when Merrick saw him and cried, “Stop him!, he came alive. Jessie tried to grab at his leg, but he kicked her hand away and stomped on it like it was a giant spider. On the other side of the room, Matt, Joe, and Max had forced the cop to the ground. Perhaps excited by all the action, perhaps just hungry, they began to tear her apart. She howled in pain, and the last thing Dom saw before he fled was her open, blood-filled mouth. Her eyes were filled with pain…with terror.
After that, Dom ran.
***
When the interloper was dead, Merrick directed Joe and Matt to dispose of the body. “Get rid of it,” he said wearily and rubbed his temples, “make sure it isn’t found.”
They rolled her into a carpet from the office, and the way her feet stuck out may have been comical under other circumstances.
Goddamn it, this was bad. Merrick’s entire philosophy rested on avoiding detection. He had done well in that regard. Whereas other vampires had attacked their villages and gotten themselves dug from the ground and staked, he had made it four decades. He never shat where he ate, and there is no bigger turd than killing a cop. They might dawdle on all the boys who’d gone missing - taken because their blood was stronger and more robust than the blood of girls - but they would not take a cop dying lightly at all.
Merrick owned various businesses around the country. He and the others would simply move on. Tomorrow night, they would disappear into the night. They had done it before and they would likely do it again. Once things were settled at their new base of operations, he would have Joe killed for all the trouble he’d caused.
And Dom?
Let him go.
The little rat wouldn’t last a month on his own.
“Jessie?”
Jessie sat against the wall, gazing into space.
“Jessi…start packing. We’re leaving tomorrow.”
She didn’t move, didn’t seem to hear. The shot had all but lobotomized her.
Damn it.
Joe backed the van up to the back door of Club Vlad, and then helped Matt carry the carpet-rolled body down the stairs. They loaded it in and closed the back doors. Together, they drove around looking for a place to dump it. Merrick wanted it to go unfound, but Joe doubted there was anywhere isolated enough in the city. On a whim, he drove to Washington Park, a vast expanse of green trees and shadows. There was a large pond there. It seemed the best option. They were leaving tomorrow anyway, so did it really matter?
Joe backed the van to a railing overlooking the dark water and put it in park. He and Matt got out, fetched the body, and carried it to the railing. They lifted and heaved it over. It splashed. Thus, they rid themselves of Vanessa Rodregiez.
***
Bruce sat anxiously up in his easy chair and waited for his cell to ring.
Parked in front of the TV by warm lamplight, a beer wedged between his legs, he’d been watching the 11’o’clock news when the phone rang. He picked it up and it was Vanessa. “Hey,” she said, “I think I found our body?”
“Which one?” Bruce asked and took a drink. “We have a lot of those these days.”
“Dominick Mason.”
Bruce sat forward in his chair. “Dead Dom? Where?”
“He just came out of a funeral home, ironically enough.”
“That sounds about right,” Bruce said. “Where are you now?”
“I’m following him east on Central.”
“Are you sure it’s him?” Bruce asked.
“I think so, but I’m not sure. I’ll call you back when I’m done.”
Bruce sat the phone aside and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
At some point, he fell asleep sitting up, his head lulled to one side and his mouth open. He snorted himself awake, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. He checked his phone and was perturbed to see that it was past 2am.
Vanessa hadn’t called.
He dialed her number and let the phone ring until it went to voicemail. Sighing, he ended the call, then waited a few minutes and called again.
Still no answer.
It was possible she had forgotten. Maybe the guy turned out to not be Dead Dom after all. She followed some random guy around, realized it, and that was that. Hell, she was probably too embarrassed to call and tell him about it.
Something told him that wasn’t right, however.
There was something else going on here.
Something…darker.
Just before 3am, his phone rang. He snatched it off the end table next to the chair and answered it. It was Burt, the night sargent. “Rodriguez is missing,” he said simply.
Bruce’s heart sank. “Missing?”
“Yeah, she hasn’t checked in for hours and she isn’t answering calls.”
“I’m on my way,”
Bruce tore through the house, pulling on his uniform, socks, and shoes in less time than it took a Daytona 500 pit crew to service a car. In ten minutes he was speeding down 787, the Albany skyline rising in the distance. As he hurried to the station, he thought back to his last conversation with Vanessa. She’d found Dom the Dead Man, the “corpse” who’d scared Ed Harris out of a 20 year career. Despite all their talk about vampires and the living dead, Bruce didn’t believe it, not really. Even so, he was sure that Dominick Mason had done something to Vanessa.
He checked in at the station before doing anything else. They had triangulated Vanessa’s last known location via cell towers. Cops were already out searching the streets for her. Bruce went out as well, intending to start from her last known position and work his way east on Central. The closest funeral home was Tebbutt and Frederick on Central. There was also Lasak & Gigliotti on North Allen Street. Bruce didn’t know which one Vanessa had seen Dom come out of, so he checked both.
Both were deserted at this hour.
Undeterred, Bruce drove up and down Central Ave. At one point, he noticed a shape in an alleyway that looked human. He hit the brakes, jumped out, and pointed his gun at it. “Freeze!”
An old wino stepped out of the darkness. “Alright, you got me,” he said, hands up. “I started COVID. It was an accident, I swear.”
Bruce sighed and put his gun away.
For two more hours, Bruce searched the streets of Albany for Vanessa. At 4am, he spotted a squad car abandoned in the rear parking lot of an abandoned gas station on lower Lark Street. He called it in and the desk sergeant confirmed that it was the one Vanessa had signed out that night.
Still there was no sign of Vanessa herself.
Just after dawn, as the city came alive and CDTA buses began lumbering up and down the streets, Bruce got a call on his cell. “A jogger found a body in Washington Park.”
Bruce was in his personal car. He had no bubble light, no siren. Even so, he sped through the streets like he did, blowing through red lights and stop signs with little care to himself or anyone else. When he got to Washington Park, he found an army cops by the pond, the scene cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. He slammed on the brakes, threw open the door, and jumped out without even turning off the engine.
The body was rolled up in a carpet and lying on the bank. Two beat cops unrolled it at Bruce’s direction. “We should wait for -” one of them started, but Bruce cut him off.
“Do it.”
They compiled, and at the carpet’s center, like a rotten cream filling, was the body of Vanessa Rodregiuez. Her head was tilted to one side, her eyes wide and staring. Her throat had been mangled and ripped away, her head nearly severed. Even in the black and red mess, Bruce could make out the teeth marks and puncture wounds. They may have looked like something else to anyone else who saw them, but he knew, in that moment, what they were dealing with.
A sharp pang of horror sliced through him, and his knees went weak.
“Jesus Christ,” one of the beat cops drew.
Bruce fell to, rather than knelt on, one knee. He bent over the body, a mixture of horror and grief welling his throat. He wanted to reach out, to comfort her in death, but he stayed his hand. Instead, he visually examined the body. She had bruises on her face, defensive wounds on her hands, and her gun was gone. Whoever had attacked her, she put up a fight.
Something glinted on her pants.
“What’s that?” one of the cops asked.
“I dunno,” the other replied, “but it’s all over the carpet.”
Indeed, there were glinty little specks all over it, winking like mocking eyes. Nice work, eh? We really fucked her up, didn’t we? Wink wink.
“It looks like…”
The other cop cut him off. “Glitter.”
Bruce flashed back to his visit to Club Vlad the other day.
There had been glitter everywhere.
Bruce stood up.
He had work to do.
***
Instead of going back to the station to start his shift, Bruce went to Lowes. There, he bought a mallet, a gas can, and a dozen sticks of wood. An employee in a blue vest used a machine to sharpen them to a wicked point and he took his purchases to the car. Next, he drove over to the Mobil station and filled the gas can. He was so hellbent on revenge that he sprang for premium, the good stuff. No expense shall be spared.
His final stop was at a Catholic church. He filled a canteen with holy water from the marble font by the door, then swiped a crucifix from the wall. He stopped by the station, went inside, and grabbed a black duffle bag with POLICE written across the front in yellow. He opened the gun cabinet in his office, took out a shotgun, and loaded it with shells. He grabbed a handful from the box and stuffed them into his pocket.
He was just finishing up when Bertha came in. “There you are,” she spat, “I’ve waited long enough for you to do something. I demand -”
Bruce shoved the duffle bag into her arms. “Make yourself useful.”
“What?” she demanded.
“We’re going to get your granddaughter,” Bruice lied. Kind of.
Bertha’s demeanor changed. “Good. It’s about time. I was starting to think you were a complete incompetent.”
Bruce didn’t answer. Outside, he plucked the bag out of Bertha’s hands and tossed it into the backseat. He slipped behind the wheel and Bertha sat in the passenger seat. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Club Vlad,” Bruce said and started the engine.
“I want all of them arrested.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bruce said.
She barked orders the entire way there. Bruce was so deep in his thoughts that he barely heard her. The image of Vanessa’s ruined throat and terror-twisted face haunted him, and he felt a lump forming in his throat. Hot tears filled his eyes but he blinked them back and forced himself to calm down.
I’ll cry when I’m done killing, he thought.
A few minutes later, he pulled to the curb in front of Club Vlad. It was a hot and sunny day and the place seemed even more ominous because of it. The windows were black, the front cast in perpetual shadows by the old marquee from when it used to be a theater. The place was surely closed, but Bruce could hear music still playing from inside, some techno dance bullshit. “Alright,” he said, “let’s go.”
Getting out, he slung the dufflebag over his shoulder and carried the shotgun, the canteen full of holy water clasped to his belt. Bertha carried the gas can, looking confused. “Why do we need this?” she asked.
“We’re burning the place down.”
Bertha blinked in surprise…then an evil grin carved across her face. “That’ll show the bastards.”
Unlike last time, the door was locked. Bruce used the butt of the shotgun to break the glass, then reached inside and unlocked the door, being careful not to cut himself. This was the point of no return. What he had in mind would probably get him kicked off the force or even thrown in jail - and we all know how tough jail can be for a former barnaclehead. The memory of Vanessa’s contorted face pushed him on, however.
He’d suffer any consequences he needed to just so long as he got the sons of bitches who did this to her.
Inside, the club was cool and cave-like. Strobe lights flashed, on and off, black and white, dazzling Bruce’s eyes. The bartender was at his station, cleaning up from the night before. When he saw Bruce and Bertha come in, he started. Bruce pointed the shotgun at him. “Don’t fucking move,” he commanded.
The bartender hesitated, then reached for something under the bar.
The shotgun kicked in Bruce’s hands, and the bartender flew back, turning as he crashed into the barback. Bottles, glasses, and mugs crashed to the floor along with the bartender. Bruce racked the gun, and the shell flew out. He moved low and fast now, expecting to be swarmed by vampires, living thugs who worked for vampires, or vampire thugs who worked for themselves.
Though the shot had been like thunder, no one came.
Bruce had no idea where to go, but he imagined that vampires were naturally gravitate to the lowest part of the building. Was there a basement? Shit, he should have looked up the building plans at city hall. Damn, this is what happens when you go off half-cocked. He searched around a bit, opening doors and sweeping the rooms beyond with the shotgun. He found no basement, only stairs leading up. “Stay close,” he said to Bertha.
In the lead, Bruce crept up the stairs, the flashlight on the shotgun providing a cone of clean, white light. At the top of the stairs, he went right, and came to an office and a store room. Backtracking, and bumping into a bungling Bertha, he went into the next room. It was large and open with a vaulted ceiling, almost like a ballroom. Here the same strobe lights throbbed on and off, making him dizzy. Was this to dazzle prospective vampire hunters?
Either way, this was the place. Bodies lay strewn across the floor, some curled up on their sides and others in the classic vampire pose: Flat on their backs with their hands laced over their chests. In the center, like the sun to the planets, Merrick Garvis lay slumped back in his wheelchair, his neck exposed for any potential assassin to come and cut. Not that it would kill him. At least Bruce didn’t think it would.
“They’re all dead,” Bertha whispered. She looked around and gasped. “There’s Jessie.”
Jessie lay on her back, her hands folded on her chest. She had a ragged bullet hole in the center of her forehead. “Oh, God,” Bertha wavered, “someone shot her.”
He hoped it was Vanessa. And he hoped it fucking hurt.
Looking around, Bruce couldn’t find Dominick Mason. Was he the one who killed Vanessa? Was it a group effort? He wanted the little son of a bitch bad, but it looked like he’d have to go on without him. They didn’t have much time.
Unshouldering the duffle bag, he knelt down and rummaged around. “Start splashing that gas on the bodies,” he said.
“But -”
“Just do it,” he snapped.
There must have been a harder edge in his voice than normal, because Bertha jumped and did as she was told. She upended the can and began to splash gasoline onto the sleeping forms, the smell of it acrid and strong.
Taking out a stake and the mallet, Bruce went over to Merrick and knelt down. He gripped the stake in one hand and placed it firmly against Merrick’s chest. He brought the mallet up and hesitated, the gravity of what he was doing finally reaching him. What if he was wrong? What if -
Merrick’s head whipped up and their eyes locked.
Too late.
Bruce brought the mallet down as hard as he could. The stake drove deep into Merrick’s heart, and the vampire let out a howling screech that rang through the chamber like the cry of a banshee. His bony fingers clawed at the stake and his head whipped from side to side, his back arching and his robe coming open. In the quick strobe pattern, Bruce was shocked to see that his body was little more than a wood frame, chicken wire, and cotton balls. His blacked heart was hidden behind a screen of mesh that the stake had easily torn through. It throbbed, seemingly in time with the strobe lights, and Merrick let out another wail.
Bertha screamed, and Bruce jumped to his feet.
The vampires, drawn by their master’s cries of distress, were rising to their feet. Two, four, six of them, pale and ethereal like ghosts in a gothic mansion. They came toward Merrick, and Bruice fell back a step. The old man had gone still and lay slumped to one side, his eyes open and his mouth slack, embalming fluid leaking from the corner of his lips. Jessie bent over him and touched his face. Though she moved like a zombie, with no human emotion, Bruce was crazily sure that it was a touch of tenderness and love. Merrick didn’t stir.
He was dead.
Jessie looked at him. Yellow liquid leaked from her eyes like tears. Instead of attacking him, she turned on her grandmother and slammed her against the wall. Bertha screamed and dropped the can. It landed on its side, its contents sloshing out onto the floor. A man that resembled the pictures Bruce had seen of Joe Rossi only deader rushed him, slamming into him and knocking the shotgun aside. It hit the floor and skidded away. Joe grabbed Bruce around the throat and squeezed. Still the lights flashed, off and on, off and on. The walls thrummed with the mechanized beat of dance music, pierced only by Bertha’s screams as Jessie ripped out her throat.
Joe leaned in, his fangs wicked and glowing in the light. Bruce clawed at the monster’s face, tearing away strips of dead flesh. Joe turned his head to the side, and Bruce kneed him in the groin. Even dead, getting kicked in the balls hurt like hell, apparently. Joe’s grip loosened and Bruce was able to shove him off. Bruce unclasped the canteen and frantically screwed the cap off as Joe recovered. Joe sprang at him again, and Bruce splashed him in the face.
A sound like sizzling meat filled the air, and Joe screamed at the top of his lungs. He pressed his hands to his face and danced around the room, his skin liquifying and oozing between his fingers. The others were coming now, led by a terrible skeletal thing. Bruce scooped the shotgun off the floor, brought it around, and fired. The blast hit the thing dead center, tearing it literally in half. The top half flew back, an all too human look of surprise on its face, and the bottom half fell over with a wet thud. Another vampire came at, and Bruce slammed it across the face with the butt of the gun. He heard its jaw crack, saw teeth flying.
Bertha lay dead on the floor, Jessie bent over her. The smell of Bertha’s blood attracted the others, who seemed to forget about Bruce, Merrick, and everything else. Joe was on his knees, wailing in pain, and the skeletal thing was pulling itself toward Bertha. A feeding frenzy broke out as vampires fought to get a piece of her the way piglets might fight over their mother’s teat. Bruce watched in a mixture of horror and fascination, but recovered himself. He grabbed the gas can from the floor and dumped the rest of its contents on Merrick’s body, the feeding vampires’ backs, and the floor, using the last of it to make a little trail to the door. He tossed the can aside, bent down, and stuck a match.
A huge, fiery whump filled the room, and fire streaked along the trail. The vampires all went up in a huge ball of flames, and fire shot up Merrick’s body, catching his robe, his hair, and the wooden frame that had kept him semi upright for God knows how long. Letting out inhuman screams, the vampires broke from Bertha’s corpse. One stumbled around, bounced off the wall, and fell; another toddled toward Bruce before falling to its knees. The half skeleton kept drinking from Bertha’s neck even as it burned.
The heat was enormous, baking. Bruce backed away, and the last thing he saw before smoke obscured his vision was Merrick Garvis.
He was literally melting.
***
Dominick Mason tried to go home, but he no longer had a home. All of his worldly possessions sat on the sidewalk in front of his building, discarded coldly as easily. His key didn’t work in his door and there was a FOR RENT sign on it. Why would it be any other way? He was dead. Sooner or later, everyone forgets you when you’re dead, and all the things you held so dear wind up in the trash. It was a hard pill to swallow, but most people aren’t around to see it after they die.
He was.
From his building, he walked east toward Washington Park. In the distance, thick, black smoke billowed into the air, and sirens rose. He barely noticed and wouldn’t have cared even if he did. No more rubbernecking for him. That was for the living.
The pain that had plagued him so the previous day came back, only less this time. Maybe he was imagining it, but it was getting harder to think. Not that he cared, really. What was there to think about anyway? How he had no one to mourn or miss him? How he died and not one single person, except for maybe his mother, cared, or even noticed? How he had done nothing with his life? Even to the women he’d slept with, what was he? Just another dating app hookup. They probably didn’t even remember his name.
Merrick had been right about one thing. Death was easy. It was life that was hard…life that hurt.
With that in mind, Dominick made his way to Washington Park. It was a vast and deep place with many small caves and thickets. Kids played on the playground, their cries of laughter scenting the still air. It had grown cloudy and began to rain. Still, smoke poured into the sky in the direction of Club Vlad. Dom didn’t wish ill on Merrick and the others, didn’t hope it was them burning. He didn’t care anymore. Not about them, not about anyone. For better or worse (and he would argue it was worse), his life was over. His time came days ago, he just missed the boat.
Picking out an isolated little area, Dom sat against a tree with his legs splayed out in front of him. He titled his head back and closed his eyes. Yes, thinking was hard now. His mind felt sluggish, cold. He was thirsty…so, so thirsty, but he ignored it.
Slowly, the bugs found him. Flies buzzed around him and laid their eggs in his skin. Beetles scuttled over him, followed by worms.
Next, it was the birds. They ate out his eyes and nibbled at his blue, bloated skin.
The animals came last.
Their appetites were bigger.
And they left little remaining of poor, outcast Dominick Mason.
***
That night, Bruce sat alone in his little trailer, a bottle of whiskey wedged between his legs and unshed tears in his eyes. He stared at his reflection in the darkened TV set and took long swallows from the bottle. He planned to drink until he forgot or passed out, whichever came first. He tried to not think about Vanessa, but in his addled state, he couldn’t control himself, and began to cry. When that storm passed, like the others before it, he chugged from the bottle.
As distant church bells clanged the hour - midnight - a feeble knock came at the door. Bruce took another drink and it came again. Getting up, he stumbled, nearly fell, and gripped the bottle tightly. He didn’t want to lose one precious drop.
Again, the knock.
“I’m coming,” Bruce slurred. He staggered to the door and fought with the lock. He was dizzy and seeing double.
When he got it, he opened the door.
The bottle dropped from his hand and clanked onto the floor.
Vanessa, clad in a puke green hospital gown, stood on the step, her hands pressed to her chest and a look of anguish on her milk white face. Her head tilted to one side, the wounds on her neck cleaned but open, gaping. Her dark eyes shone with tears. “I’m dead,” she said.
Breaking down in tears, she collapsed against him and they sank to the floor. She was cold and smelled. Bruce wrapped his arms around her and held her to his chest anyway. “Shhh, it’s alright,” he said drunkenly. “Hey, it’s alright.
“I’m dead,” she repeated, and her voice broke. “I don’t want to die.”
Bruce held her close, trying to warm her icy skin. He didn’t know what to say, so he cried with her.
“You’re safe now,” he said, “it’s going to be okay.”
“I want blood,” she said and sobbed harder, “I want to hurt people.”
“Shhh,” Bruce said again. “It’s okay.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a utility knife. He flicked the blade across his wrist and searing pain shot up his arm. “Here,” he said and offered her his blood, “drink this.”
He did this without care and without thought. She needed him, and one barnaclehead always backs up another.
Vanessa hesitated, looking from his face to the oozing blood, unsure.
“Go ahead,” he told her.
Vanessa brought his wrist to her mouth.
And began to drink.

First/Previous
"Watch out!" Jack yelled out to the crowd as the now-glowing overhead turrets, long dormant and forgotten, suddenly whirred to life with a mechanical hum, tracking his movements as he ran, shoving past a group of unsuspecting Xarak to the side as he moved to dodge the torrent of rapid fire aimed right at him, kicking up smoke as the superheated plasma churned the ground underneath him, before the sound of gunfire abruptly stopped.
"Fucking overheating shittubes!" the voice on the speakers cursed. "The Outsider is by the two broken pillars!"
"I see him!" a voice replied from out of the crowd as Jack got his bearings, spotting a group of three uniformed soldiers rushing towards him. As the leader moved to stab him with a nasty-looking barbed shortspear, Jack quickly juked the direction he intended to dodge, dipping to the right as he smashed the avian in the stomach with a vicious kick, shuffling back as he caught the blade of the second soldier with his bracer before throwing them off balance, lashing back at the first with his elbow as he did.
He moved to check the third that was moving to take a swing at him with a bat, but before Jack could do so the soldier was suddenly yanked back as a long, coiled leather whip snapped around them. Following along, Jack spotted an older grey-skinned ganger in black leathers with a coarse, black beard to match his scraggly hair sat down with his back to a wall, casually drinking a beer as he observed the chaos with a mischievous smirk.
As the soldier pulled back his bat to strike the interloper, the ganger grinned and looked down where his legs were already spread wide, revealing a strange metal crotch plate. Suddenly making a jerking motion with one of his legs, the plate flipped up to reveal the barrel of a huge codpiece gun that flipped up to point directly at the soldier, before it fired once, catching the solder completely by surprise as the top of their body was utterly obliterated by a bolt of powerful plasma energy. Smirking, the ganger gave Jack a wink, chugging down the rest of his drink, before charging into the brawl.
Hearing an almighty roar, Jack turned around only to be knocked back yet again as a broken, avian body was roughly lobbed at him, staggering him backwards as the Redeemer turned to the last of the bird-like gangsters, picking him up with immense strength and smashing them to the ground before advancing towards the human more cautiously this time, shoving drunken brawlers out of the way.
“I have long waited for this moment, Outsider. With your death, my King shall grant you redemption!” The Redeemer snarled. Now having a good look at him, Jack couldn’t see any visible weapons on him, which was strange. Last time, he’d brought a gunship and was taking potshots at him with some kind of high-powered rifle. Then again, considering what happened last time, maybe The Redeemer wanted the satisfaction of using his bare hands to beat him to death.
It wouldn’t be a terrible plan considering everything the Ogar had pulled off so far…
While sports on Earth were often separated by gender, despite some resistance from the more liberal-minded, due to biological differences between men and women, combat sports were a whole different game, with mixed martial arts organisations having very specific weight classes for fair competition between athletes, with two fighters of similar size and weight less likely to cause serious injury to each other.
But if you placed an experienced lightweight against even a novice heavyweight? That would introduce major problems for the smaller fighter, who would need to contend with the extra size, reach and power of their larger opponent. Not an impossible fight, but a tough one.
And Jack very much felt like a lightweight here.
Though of course, he had faced larger opponents before. Even an Ogar, though they had defeated the Laird with a cunning trap. However, he didn’t know how well matched he and The Redeemer were in a fair close-range fight outside of the opening moments of the ambush.
Still, he had little choice but to find out. He didn’t have an easy way to escape, and he didn’t know what the status of the others was. If he ran while they were still here then The Redeemer and the Regulators would simply go after them instead to get to him…
No. He couldn’t allow those thoughts to shake him. His friends knew what the hell they were doing, and they could handle themselves just fine. He had to worry about himself right now.
He couldn’t run, so he had to fight.
With a speed he didn’t expect from The Redeemer, they grabbed a nearby chair and lobbed it right at Jack in one smooth motion before following through with another charge.
‘Aegis!’ Jack yelled as he brought his forearm up, as his new and improved shield eagerly sprung up to take the hit from the chair, before a fist smacked into the side of his head as The Redeemer used the chair as a distraction to change his angle of attack.
Spinning with the blow, Jack fought in his mind to stay in the fight as his vision blurred, with the powerful strike threatening to knock him out then and there, before another fist caught him in the stomach, with his battleskin dispersing a hit that would have otherwise easily taken the air out of his lungs.
Retracting his shield, Jack ducked another punch that threatened to decapitate him as he skidded under the blow, parrying a backfist with his forearm that tingled painfully as he ate the blow, before clocking the Redeemer with a punch to the jaw, his gauntlet extending to cover his knuckles with a well-forged plate of metal to add their power to the strike, before the Redeemer threw out a punch that caught him on the shoulder, sending the deathworlder reeling back.
Jack grit his teeth as he fought through the pain, adrenaline rushing through him. He wasn’t out of the fight yet, but he knew he’d gotten the worst of that engagement.
The Redeemer clearly understood this as well, as the zealot strode towards the human with a confident, wicked grin.
But this time, Jack was ready.
‘Caltrops’ Jack whispered the command word, as his gauntlets gave him a good handful of them, subtly tossing them in front of him with an underhand throw, which had gone unnoticed by the Redeemer as they stared at the human with hatred.
Suddenly dashing forward to quickly close the remaining distance between them, the Redeemer roared as he charged Jack again, suddenly grunting in pain and stumbling as his full, heavy mass sent a sharp, painful spike straight through his armoured boot, causing him to lose focus as he looked down at his foot for just a moment to see what had happened.
A moment of distraction that Jack used to its fullest, as he quickly swung his axe down right at The Redeemer’s head.
However, the Ogar reacted with surprising dexterity as he used his forward momentum to avoid the full force of the axeblade, his metal helmet taking a glancing blow as he shoved Jack off balance, causing him to stumble. Quickly predicting what would come next, Jack dropped his axe on purpose as he prepared for a takedown attempt, dropping low and widening his stance as the Redeemer tackled him around the waist to try and bring him to the ground for a quick finish.
“There will be no salvation for you, human!” The Ogar growled through his pain as Jack was forced back by the Redeemer’s superior strength.
“Aww, did you miss me?” Jack taunted, holding on and walking back with the ever increasing momentum The Redeemer was building as he was pushed back along the dancefloor. “I saw your tantrum on the TV afterwards, didn’t know you were a bitch too!”
‘That’s it, asshole.’ Jack thought to himself as he felt his axe clip back onto his back. ‘Get mad. You showed me last time that you like to talk too much. I need to time this right…'
“Your blasphemy ends here Outsider! I shall smite you in the name of my King!” The insane zealot roared out in an enraged challenge.
With a roar the Redeemer pushed with much greater strength, forcing Jack to change his slow backpedalling into a full on sprint as he scrambled to stay on his feet, fighting to keep his grip above that of the Redeemer’s to maintain his control of the grapple for as long as he could as he was gradually being put off-balance, almost being lifted upwards.
‘I’ve got to hold on until the last possible moment…’ Jack thought to himself, as tables, chairs and people alike were battered to the side.
‘Now!’
As the wooden pillar supporting the balcony passed them in a blur, Jack shifted his weight to the left and relinquished the grapple, using the Redeemer’s momentum against him as he shoved the Redeemer off balance, as they smashed into the crumbling brick wall head first with an almighty crash.
As they stumbled back, yanking their head back out through the newly formed hole, Jack growled as grabbed the Redeemer around the top of one of his legs, yelling with effort as he was only just able to lift the Redeemer up and over him, slamming the Ogar down on the top of his head as hard as he could in a vicious suplex that gave a satisfying crack.
Growling with effort, the Redeemer pushed himself back into a crouch and looked up just in time as Jack’s foot smacked into the side of his head in a savage kick that cracked his metal helmet and dislodged one of his fangs. Roaring in rage and pain, the Redeemer got to his feet only to meet a flying knee that shattered his nose as his helmet cracked and dented with the heavy impacts.
“Redeem that you ugly cunt!” Jack growled, moving in for another strike as the Redeemer shoved him away, showing no signs of faltering as he slowly got to his feet, even after the devastating blows he just took. The Redeemer simply gave Jack a wicked grin of satisfaction, before it fell slightly upon seeing something to Jack’s side.
As Jack’s Ring of the Berserker vibrated again, he spun around to spot a large, lanky Vivren with several piercings in overt heavy armour grinning at him with malicious intent as she pointed a wand at him and cast a word of power.
Before he had any time to react, Jack’s entire body erupted in a wave of agony unlike anything he had ever felt before…
*****
“Fuck! Alora! Sephy? Chiyo? Dante?” Nika coughed as she got up from where the balcony had collapsed from under them.
Looking around, she could see even more patrons fighting around them, revelling in the chaos of the brawl, but she couldn’t spot any of her friends in the immediate aftermath, as thick dust plumed out from the wreckage below her.
‘At least the crew of the ship we’re meant to be travelling on are probably out by now.’ The Kizun thought to herself. ‘Can’t go back, the CorvMart crew will have moved on by now, so sticking to the original plan is probably the best move, unless we can steal a vehicle one of us knows how to pilot.’
Assessing the situation before her, Nika went for her bo staff, though made sure that her shotgun was well within easy reach. Though many of the people fighting around her looked rough, they weren’t attacking her or her friends, and until that changed they could make good allies of convenience, or for a smokescreen to give their enemies the slip if they had to run.
Though slaying as many of their attackers as they could would be preferable.
‘Best way to do that is link up with the others, we’re better as a unit.’ She reasoned, hearing an almighty crash. ‘Well, that’s probably Jack.’
Dodging a thrown bottle as a Squarri ganger missed their intended target - a pissed-off looking quadrupedal furry species that Nika didn’t recognise - before dodging a swing of a bat from a Xarak that saw her as an easy target. Quickly raising her staff she parried the backswing before cracking the other end of the staff across the reptilian’s face, knocking the rough-looking thug out as he collapsed to the ground.
Yet before Nika could think to move on from the conflict, she had to dodge out of the way using her tail as a large Balnath with some kind of cleaver-like sword took a swing at her. Recognising the sigil of the Regulator group Chiyo had told them to watch out for - a stern-looking demonic rune surrounded by a neon-red triangle - Nika parried the next sword swipe from the figure.
“Let me guesth, you want to get to the Outthider?” The Balnath sneered at the Kizun with a lisp so thick that in any other situation she’d have to stop herself from laughing. “I’m stho thorry, but we can’t let you have sthilly ideas like that!”
“Are you for fucking real?” Nika asked as she dodged to the side and put some space between them before quickly switching to her shotgun, letting loose a powerful blast that the Balnath was able to raise his shield up to block.
‘Skill like that? Probably the leader or an officer of some kind.’ The Kizun noted to herself. ‘No choice. I’ve got to kill him.’
“Yeah, I know that you’re finking! You fink my teef make me sound sthupid?” The Balnath growled, with a few experimental chomps. “Well these teef like to gnaw and gnasth on Kizun flesth!”
“Come and try it!” Nika snarled as she twirled her staff around her in a well-practised flourish, eagerly accepting the challenge.
The Balnath charged forward with lightning speed as it came at Nika with a series of feints, before swiping at her with a brutal overhand chop, using both hands. The Kizun was able to deftly parry with her staff, the kinetic modules battering her opponent’s grip to the side, though she felt the strength behind the blow and knew that the Balnath was stronger.
Still, she knew she could take him.
Ever since she was little she had roughhoused with her brothers and the local boys in fights around their ranch, and had learned the hard way from an early age that her gender and short build worked against her when facing her peers, so she had trained to be the strongest she could be, and learned to be quick and tactical to make the best use of that.
She had eventually kept up with the neighbourhood boys, using holds and precise strikes until her elders found out what she was doing when she was meant to be working on the ranch to help the family scrape by, and quickly put a stop to the shenanigans.
When she moved to the city, she only got better from there.
The tip of her staff thundered against the Balnath’s shield like the striking of a gong, forcing the larger being back as Nika could tell he was already tiring. Though she wanted to finish this fight quickly and get to her friends, she knew she couldn’t allow herself to give her opponent an opening, even as she sought to exploit an opening of her own. She had to be patient.
Her staff rattled against the shield again and again, as she felt her opponent’s defence get weaker and weaker, with the powerful force of her kinetic module focusing the strength of her strikes into a single point. Eventually something would break, his shield of his arm. Once his defences were finally down, she would go in swiftly for the kill.
Her opponent’s frustration won out as his shield shattered and fell to the floor, forcing him to attack Nika with a vicious two handed swipe. She blocked the strike handily, before the Balnath grabbed her staff, locking them in a clinch.
“Giff me sthome help over ‘ere!” The Balnath called out, as Nika reached for a knife, forcing the Balnath to adjust his stance as she stabbed blindly, glancing off armoured plates before finding purchase somewhere, causing her attacker to grunt with pain as he shoved her back, holding her up against a wall.
‘Shit.’ She cursed in her mind. ‘He’s stronger than me, but all I need is a moment to take him by surprise and I can break away and kill him!’
She held strong with her arms, holding the Balnath back as his jaws snapped shut barely an inch away from her neck. He tried again, and she pushed back harder, the jaws snapping shut around nothing, but much closer this time.
He tried again, bringing his vicious maw even closer still…
‘Gotcha!’ Nika thought to herself, as she jerked her head forward in a headbutt, catching the Balnath by surprise and giving the Kizun the space she needed to bring her knees up to her chin, before kicking out as hard as she could into the face of the Balnath, knocking him back with a roar of pain, before he leapt forward with a side swipe that Nika used her tail to quickly dodge, before in the same motion she brought the tip of her staff round and smacked the Balnath as hard as she could, right in the face, the powerful strike shattering its lower jaw completely.
“My fathce!” the attacker got out, clutching what little remained of his lower jaw, before looking up in the next moment as they stared down the barrel of Nika’s shotgun.
“Plea-” They got out, before their head was obliterated in an explosion of dark, blackish blood as their body clattered uselessly to the ground.
“Fuck you.” The Kizun retorted. Using her tail to quickly clip the sword to the magnets of her armour, Nika could see more Regulators in the crowd heading towards the DJ booth. Quickly checking her weapons, she headed right into the brawl!
*****
“You don’t belong here, girlie!” the thug cackled as their cybernetic arm crackled with electric discharge.
“Replacto!” Alora snarled as she swiped her wand out, blasting her attacker with a sudden flash of light that sent him stumbling back, clutching at his eyes.
“Anyone else?” Alora asked, trying her best to channel Nika’s cool, calm demeanour, crossed with Jack’s intimidating presence as the cluster of gangers and mercenaries all looked around at each other for just a moment, before deciding that the Eladrie wasn’t actually that intimidating, as one tried to rush her with a broken chair.
‘Oh by the Mother Tree! How do those two do it?’ Alora cursed in her mind as she summoned her spiritual weapon - a spear of light - that she quickly stabbed at the fish-like Osi, gutting them in the stomach which quickly made them drop the chair, while Alora wisely moved to the side to get out of the vicious melee happening all around her. Where were the others?
‘I have to make sure they’re all right.’ the Eladrie determinedly told herself as she began casting another, more complicated spell…
“Attention all idiots!” The voice over the speakers sneered out over the ever-changing music that the DJ didn’t seem to have any control over. “We discussed this. Though the Outsider is a priority, you target the spellcasters first if you can! Must I do everything myself?”
Thrumming with sudden power, the turrets above them finally opened fire, shooting almost indiscriminately at the crowd below, cutting several of the brawling patrons down before they even knew what hit them.
Chanting and waving her hands around as quickly as she dared, Alora maintained her concentration of her spell, completing it just in time as the turrets finally tracked her as she summoned a great holy aura of light to cover herself that would give her the protection she needed, the Armour of Faith deflecting the lights of the laser turrets harmlessly aside.
A loud bark sounded out, and knowing Dante’s warning for what it was, Alora spun around to see two Regulators, who were both Vulstas fighting through the brawl to get to her. Unlike Rena, these two were males, both carrying plasma shotguns but unable to get effective shots off through the crowd. Not that something like that stopped them from trying…
“Stevarin!” she yelled out, pointing her wand at one of the two who was about to open fire on a downed ganger, as with a flash of yellow light their movements slowed, quickly freezing stiff as a board as they failed to resist the Holding spell, their eyes widening in sheer terror as the gang-mates of their would-be-victim set upon them in a fury with fists and clubs, before a spell cast from the rafters sent all of them clattering to the ground clutching at their minds.
‘One of the enemy mages providing overwatch.’ Alora noted as she quickly looked up for any sign of them, but not seeing them. ‘Under a veil of invisibility no doubt.’
Feeling the dull impact of a shotgun blast dissipate harmlessly against her magical armour, Alora spun round to the other Regulator, cursing her moment of hesitation as the Vulsta drew a long knife with which to get in close with.
Remembering her fight with Izadora all those weeks ago, Alora waved her arms around quickly to summon a bubble of light to engulf her, before quickly following it up with an explosive flash that thundered all around her like a flashbang grenade, while leaving her unharmed.
As the light dissipated, she deftly avoided the blind lunge from the temporarily blinded Regulator, before jamming her spear into his stomach, using her reach advantage to dodge the desperate swipes he sent her way.
“Garrash!” Alora spoke a quick cantrip, using her affinity with life magic to channel poison through the top of her spear. Her already-weakened attacker quickly slumped to the ground as the debilitating effects took hold, but before Alora could pull her spear back, she was hit by a spell that came from above, disrupting her magic and causing her magical spear and armour to disappear.
‘Damn! It’s that mage above me!’ Alora cursed to herself as she quickly ran underneath one of the balconies, as the turrets chased after her with gunfire. ‘You want to hide in the shadows like a coward? I’ve got something to fix that!’
Quickly making sure there weren’t any immediate threats around, Alora quickly rummaged through her pockets for a wand of white crystal she had prepared about a year ago that still had a few charges. Casting quickly, she levelled it towards the ceiling and prayed to all the gods that she was aiming it at where the enemy mage was hiding,
“Glitasha!”
A spray of shining, sparkling particles of light shot out of her wand, puffing out to cover a good half of the ceiling, and as they began to fall to the floor and latch on to the people below, Alora spotted a huddled form by one of the rafters.
‘Got you!’ She thought with satisfaction.
“Ilthax! Get out of there!” The voice over the speakers warned, presumably the name of her target, but it was too late…
“Solaris!” Alora yelled, throwing her palms out in a thrust as a great javelin of light shot out of her palms. The enemy mage had barely moved before it impaled their centre of mass, sending what must have been a fireball spell way off target which blasted apart a huge, gaping hole in the back wall.
The invisible form of the glitterdust-covered mage slowly began to materialise as the blue-furred, ape-like Regulator clutched at their chest in pain, with wide eyes of disbelief at the spear of hard light that had gone right through their torso. As their flight spell dissipated, their lifeless body fell three stories from the rafters to slam down on the ground floor below.
“Nice one Alora!” the Eladrie heard the voice call from behind her as Nika came up next to her, the Kizun bleeding from a cut on her face. “Where are the others?”
“I don’t know. But we need to find them now!” Alora frantically told them as she took in the sheer state of chaos around them. Many broken bodies lay amongst the carnage, and though the Eladrie knew some would likely be still alive at the end of the night, she knew that many would not.
“You don’t need to tell me twice!” Nika agreed with a grim expression.
*****
First/Previous
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As the last orange light of day drained from the sky, the living dead in Club Vlad rose. Max the skeleton and Jessie the…not skeleton…sewed up the gaping Y-shaped incision on Dom’s chest under Merrick’s direct supervision. Dom sat there, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. He’d woken with a headache and a feeling of cold, and even now, he could feel the dull throb above his left eye. It felt like someone was tearing his brain apart with a fork. He had told Merrick, and Merrick had nodded sadly. “Is my brain rotting?”
“Most likely,” Merrick had said.
There was a certain peace in the idea of losing his cursed humanity. As Merrick had said, he would feel no pain, know no quandaries. He would live only for the night and for his master. On the other hand, watching someone like Matt sit and stare into the distance, drool coursing down his chin and nothing happening behind his dead eyes, scared Dom. He didn’t want to be a braindead idiot. He didn’t care about keeping his emotions, he just wanted to function.
Like Merrick.
There wasn’t much he could do, however. He was dead and that was the end of it.
Once Dom was patched up and dressed in a pair of jeans and a hoodie, Merrick called his children before him. “I have done my best to love and protect all of you,” he began. “Jessie, you were miserable with your grandmother, were you not?”
“Yes,” Jessie said tonelessly.
“You were depressed, bipolar, and cut yourself. Now you’re happy.”
“Yes,” she replied again.
“Joe, you were a two bit nobody staring down a ten year stretch in jail.”
“Yes.” Thin yellow liquid dripped from his nose.
“But now you are free.”
“Yes.”
“You appreciate what I’ve done for you.”
“Yes.”
Merrick flashed then, slamming his fist onto the arm of his wheelchair. “Then why do you keep fucking up? The police were here earlier. They have messages between you and Jessie. I told both of you to delete those. Then I find out that you bit someone and turned them despite my orders. We have an endless supply of blood here but you still went off on your own. How many are there?”
“Just one,” Joe said.
“Are you being honest with me?”
“Yes.”
Merrick sagged back in his chair, looking somehow older. “Joe, take Matt and go to her. Bring her back here before she causes any more problems. God alone knows how many people she’s changed. Too many vampires without a father will bring heat on us, and you know what happens in that case? We get pieces of wood shoved in our chests.”
Turning to Dom, Merrick said, “I have a job for you and Jessie. We’re nearly out of embalming fluid. You haven’t had your first dose and the rest of us are starting to get ripe as well. I have a contact at a funeral home. He texted earlier that the order he placed on my behalf has come in. I want you to pick it up and to pay him.”
Dom had never been picked for anything in his whole life. No one had ever wanted him on their team and no one had ever placed their trust in him the way Merrick was now. He was honored, proud, and would do anything to not let Merrick down.
“That cop who came here might be a problem,” Merrick went on. “We may have to deal with him, but we’ll leave that for another night. In any case, I want this place cleaned from top to bottom. If the police come, I want them to see nothing out of the ordinary.”
Now that everyone had their marching orders, they dispersed. Merrick handed Dom an evelope stuffed with cash, and Dom slipped it into the pocket of his hoodie. The other team - Joe and Matt - left, while the remaining vampires began tidying up.
A fleet of vehicles waited in the parking lot behind Club Vlad. Dom and Jessie took a black pedo van with no back windows. They drove in silence, the radio off. Dom did not want to hear music, nor did he wish to speak to Jessie. Their kinship was one of blood and circumstance, not one of words and emotions. He had no questions for her and wished to answer none of his own. The only thoughts he had were of the mission ahead and of the growing pain in his skull. He thought of the staring stupid Matt, of the decayed Max, and a shiver went down his spine.
What was left of his humanity recoiled at the idea of becoming like them.
The pain grew hotter, more intense. He forced it away and focused on driving.
The funeral home was on North Allen Street, next to a restaurant called Pepperjack’s. A tall, white house with dark shutters and a sign out front, it looked like a quiet, peaceful place. “Pull around back,” Jessie said.
Dom pulled the van around back and parked under a balcony, killing the headlights. They got out and went to the back door, Jessie in the lead. He assumed that she had done this before and that the seller would recognize her. She knocked, and a few moments later, the door opened. A youngish man with a shaved head appeared, wearing an apron and gloves. He saw them and tensed a little. Dom could smell, rather than sense, his fear, and his throat panged with thirst. “Come on,” the man said quickly. He stepped aside and allowed them to enter. Dom noticed that he walked behind them, wary of putting his back to them. “Do you have the money?”
“Do you have our order?” Jessie countered.
“Yes,” the man said, “I’m really risking my neck for this. They don’t just give embalming fluid away, you know. They keep track of it and if they realize I’m over ordering, someone from the state’s going to come down here and check.”
He led them into an embalming room. Three boxes sat on a table. Dom gave the man his money, and he and Jessie carried the boxes outside, loading them into the van. The whole time they were there, the man was edgy, like he was afraid they were going to attack him. Dom would be a liar if he said that the hot smell of the man’s blood didn’t excite him. Perhaps once his brain rotted away, he wouldn’t be able to control himself, but for now, he could.
A lightning bolt of pain shot through his head and he nearly dropped the last box onto the ground.
Once the man was paid, Dom and Jessie drove back to Club Vlad. In fifteen minutes, they were drinking side by side from two passed out partygoers, their reward for a job well done.
Meanwhile, across the city, Joe and Matt weren’t doing as well. They were standing outside of Heather’s apartment. Joe, slightly annoyed (anger being another emotion vampires could feel, along with fear) pounded on the door. He knew she was in there; he could smell the putrid odor of decay. “Let us in,” he said. “We won’t hurt you.”
Joe could barely remember changing her. He didn’t mean to, it just…happened. Like an unwanted pregnancy. You can bite someone as much as you want and drink as much as you want, but if you take too much at once and they die, you get the vampire equivalent of a baby. Joe liked the hunt. It was exciting. Having his meals brought to him Club Vlad didn’t arouse the same level of excitement. It was like shooting an animal tied to a tree. Or hiring a prostitute instead of wooing someone. No real satisfaction to it.
That was probably his greatest downfall. He had lured Jessie the same way, though Merrick was indeed interested in rescuing her from her grandmother. People you have saved obey just as well as people with no brains.
He felt fluid on his upper lip and sniffed. “Come on, let us in,” he said.
No response.
He looked at Matt and nodded to the door. Together, they rammed their shoulders against it. It shook in its frame. They were both dead and weak, but modern American architecture is even weaker, and the door eventually slammed open. The apartment beyond was dark, messy, and reeked of death. They searched high and low, and eventually found Heather huddled in a corner, trying to hide. She was naked save for a pair of panties, her body bloated and beginning to turn black. Her skin hung from her frame and her eyes were filled with blood and fear. It was a wonder no one had called the police yet. The smell was overpowering. “We’re here to help,” he said. “You have to come with us.”
She shook her head and trembled. Maybe she remembered that he was the one who did this to her. Maybe her memories had rotted away. Those were usually the first to go. Then your emotions, then your personality. Finally, your capacity for higher reasoning. “I’m sorry I did this to you,” he said. That was a lie. He was not remorseful. Nor was he proud, for that matter. It just happened. Like rain. “But I want to help you. We can fix you.”
No amount of coaxing or conjoling could induce her to move. Joe weighed his options. He doubted anyone would call the cops even if they heard the door coming down - people who lived in places like this rarely called the cops, which helped Joe and his cause immensely. Even so, there was the possibility. Every minute they spent here was a minute that something could go wrong, and Joe had a lot to lose.
So, too, did Merrick.
Giving up, Joe took out his cellphone and called Merrick. “She refuses to come,” he said simply.
The line was quiet for a moment, then Merrick’s voice came back. Cold. Calculating. “Then do what you must.”
That was the go ahead.
Hanging up, Joe looked around the apartment and found a wooden chair in the kitchen. He lifted it over his head and slammed it on the counter, shattering it into a million pieces. He selected the longest, sharpest, and sturdiest looking one. He went back into the room and directed Matt to hold her down. She fought, kicked, and spat, but she was weaker than even they were. They had been embalmed. She hadn’t.
Matt pinned her hands above her head and Joe straddled her. Animal terror filled her eyes and she whipped her head from side to side. Joe lifted the makeshift stake with both hands, and brought it down as hard as he could, driving it deep into her heart. Her eyes bulged from their sockets and a high, otherworldly scream ripped from her throat. She bucked, thrashed, and kicked her feet. Her resistance began to ebb away until she was twitching…until she was still.
Heather from OKCupid was dead.
Truly dead.
Joe couldn’t help wondering what it was like.
Pulling the stake out, he tossed it aside and got to his feet, Matt doing likewise. A soul petrifying scream might be cause for even the tightest of lips to start talking. “Let’s go,” he said. And together, he and Matt fled, leaving the poor, dead body of Heather behind.
***
As it turned out, one of Heather’s neighbors did call the cops. At 10;13pm, Vanessa Rodregiez arrived with two patrolmen and found the front door of Apartment 237 knocked down. Guns drawn, they entered, Vanessa at the head. The first thing she noticed was the smell. It jammed itself into her nostrils, shoved its tongue down her throat, and violated her - all without even buying her dinner first.
Vanessa hadn’t been at this as long as her buddy Bruce had, but she knew a dead, rotting body when she smelled one. They searched the premises, and sure enough, they found a vic in the bedroom, lying in the gap between the bed and the wall; it looked like the former had been moved, perhaps in a struggle. Vanessa knelt down to check the vic’s pulse, but stopped.
There was no need.
The vic - who looked like a female but could have been an overweight male - hadn’t had a pulse in a very long time.
Examining the body, Vanessa found a wound in the chest, just above the heart. Black, stinking goo leaked from it, and Vanessa gagged. She fisted her hand to her mouth, retched, and then ran for the kitchen sink. Her partner for the night, Jim Walsh, stared down at the stiff before him, and his face turned a sickly shade of green. He avoided puking because he didn’t nose fuck the wound like Vanessa had, but he wasted no time in getting out there, dry heaving in the hallway where the air was somewhat fresh.
After leaving her lunch in the sink, Vanessa radioed back to headquarters, and before long, the place was crawling with cops. The assistant medical examiner - who had taken over after Ed Harris quit the previous night - knelt over the body and studied it. A solidly built black man with a mustache, his name was Leon and he knew death just as well as his old boss, so when he said the vic had been dead nearly two weeks, Vanessa accepted it.
That begged the question: Who broke in and screamed just now? A relative? The caller clearly heard screaming and peeked out her door to see two males fleeing on foot. Maybe they found the vic and freaked out? Or maybe they were the killers returning to the scene of the crime. After all, the vic had clearly been murdered.
In fact, they found a likely murder weapon. A long sliver of wood soaked in black goo. Blood turns black after a while, but there was something different about this stuff. “What is it?” Vanessa asked Leon.
“I’m not sure,” Leon said and pulled off a pair of Latex gloves he’d donned to examine the vic, “could be blood or…”
“Or what?” Vanessa asked.
“Or something,” Leon said. “Give me a few hours.”
And a few hours it was. Just before 1am, Leon called Vanessa at her desk. “I think you should come down here,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later, Vanessa stood over Leon as he pulled the vic’s chest open with a pair of tweezers. “That’s the heart,” he said, “whoever stabbed her scored a direct hit, but this…this is what concerns me.”
He prodded a furry lump with the tip of his scalpel.
“What is it?” Vanessa asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “it looks like mold.”
That word - mold - triggered a memory in her brain. “Ed said something about mold last night. He found it in -”
“The Mason boy,” Leon finished.
“Yeah. The one who got up and ran off.”
Leon turned away from Vanessa and looked at the dead woman - for it was a woman. Vanessa got the impression that he didn’t want her to see his expression. “I’ve known Ed ten years. I know something happened last night, but a stiff getting up and walking off? I thought he was confused. Now…I don’t know. That makes two bodies in 24 hours. And get this. The chest wound? It was done post-mortem. I can’t find a cause of death anywhere. Except maybe blood loss but it’s hard to tell at this point. And speaking of blood…”
“What?” Vanessa asked quickly.
“When I opened her stomach up, a whole shit load of blood spilled out. And a lot of it was a lot fresher than she is.”
Vanessa furrowed her brow in confusion. “You mean…?”
“It’s not hers,” Leon said. “I can’t be 100 percent sure until I run tests, but I’d put money on it.”
Vanessa’s head spun with information both new and old. You know that full, heavy feeling you get when a poo is brewing in your guts? That’s kind of what Vanessa was feeling, only in her head instead of her stomach.
Leon was just as mystified by the whole thing as she was and stayed up late to run a few preliminary tests. By sunrise, he had confirmed that the blood inside of Heather’s stomach was not hers. In fact, it had come from at least three different sources. “Is it human?” Vanessa asked over the phone.
“Yes,” Leon said, sounding troubled, “it’s human.”
In the cobalt hour before sunrise, Vanessa sat at her desk and tried to piece this whole thing together. They had:

1. A corpse that (allegedly) woke up and dipped out
2. A dead girl who’d been stabbed in the heart with a piece of wood after somehow ingesting the blood of three different people.
3. Some missing kids
4. Oh, and both bodies - the girl’s and the runaway corpses’ - had the same weird fungus in their heart cavities.

All of this - even the missing kids, Vanessa felt - was related. She just didn’t know how. The only answer that half way fit was that both of those bodies were vampires. Like…what’s a vampire but a dead body that gets up and walks around at night? And how do you kill a vampire? Why, you drive a piece of wood through its heart.
The idea that vampires were real was dumb, but the more she turned it over in her mind, the more she became convinced that it was at least an option. A lot of things people thought were fantastic and made up turned out to be real, so why not vampires too?
Shortly after 8, Bruce came in. He was just sitting down when Vanessa came in and slapped her report on the desk. “Buckle up, bitch,” she said, “things just got weirder.”
He stared up at her with one of those grumpy - but cute -expressions he was so good at putting on. As he read, however, his brow knitted. “Jesus,” he muttered to himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a weary sigh.
“I have a theory - kind of,” Vanessa said, “but I don’t want to say it.”
“You might as well,” Bruce said. “It can’t be more kooky than reality these days.”
“Okay,” Vanessa started, “what if - and I’m just thinking out loud here - what if there are vampires in Albany?”
She expected Bruce to give her a dirty look, but he chewed it over, actually taking it seriously. “And those missing boys are victims?” he asked finally.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “That girl’s been dead two weeks. Maybe she bit Dominick Mason and he came back for revenge after realizing he was cursed to be a goddamn shit sucking vampire forever.”
Bruce nodded. “Yeah, but who turned her?”
“I don’t know,” Vanessa said, “I don’t know.”
***
Before dawn painted the eastern sky, Merrick Garvis sat in his chamber like a withered king, a mess of IVs hooked into his arms and neck. The vault was silent save for the soft noise of the machines as they filtered out the old embalming fluid and replaced it with new embalming fluid. Embalming fluid always made him spacy, like a drug. The others had gone first, and even now lay near comatose around him like addicts in an opium den.
As far as he knew, Merrick was the oldest vampire in the world, perhaps, even, the oldest vampire to ever live. Though he was not fully honest with Dom, he was not lying when he said that vampires rotted like any other dead thing. Conditions considered, you had a few weeks tops if left untreated. There may be living vampires in remote corners of Egypt or the northern most reaches of Russia, where the climate preserved dead things, but unless you made it to one of those places, you were pretty well fucked.
Merrick was not a proud man, nor was he concerned with saving face - the dead have no need for that. He was being truthful when he said that he feared death. What’s more, he feared being helpless. Deep down, vampires are people, and people don’t exactly have the greatest track record with caring for their infirm. He read once that the first sign of a civilization was a broken leg that had healed, as it showed that someone stayed with and cared for a fellow human long enough for them to get well again. In Merrick’s opinion, that was true…and thus there was no civilization. Merrick was fifty-one when he died in the year 1982. In his lifetime, he had seen The Great Depression, World War II, and a million small acts of cruelty and selfishness in between. He’d seen beggars starving in the streets, abused children shuffled out of sight and out of mind, and disdain for the poor and the weak.
The living were awful, and the living dead were no different. Once their humanity rotted away, they cared only about filling their stomachs. They were like ticks - they would drink until their bellies literally ruptured…and then keep on drinking.
That left him in a precarious position. He was old, his body was weak. He couldn’t stand unassisted and if left to fend for himself, he would decay into a pile of bones within days. He would be cursed to lay in one spot for all eternity, aware and hungry, little more than a ghost tethered to a black and still beating heart.
He refused to let that happen to him. Thus, he had created a family, a clan of vampires loyal to him and to him alone. He did this through acts of simple kindness and understanding…but also through deception. He knew, for instance, how to preserve the brain. He’d figured out how to do it early on - you pickle it. Like a fetus preserved in a jar. He sawed off the top of his own head and filled it with a special solution that kept his brain - and his intelligence - intact. It slowly drained out through the nose and ears in a thin, yellow liquid, but it worked well enough. He couldn’t save everything, however, and had lost vital things in the process, such as most of his human memories, his sense of humor, and some motor functions. He shared this secret with only Joe, and a few others before, because he needed a strong captain. He kept the others in the dark because vampires - like people - are easier to control when they don’t think for themselves.
Right about now, however, Merrick was beginning to regret sharing the formula with even Joe. Joe had brought him nothing but grief. Joe, you see, could think for himself. He could make decisions. He could go behind Merrick’s back. Joe had something called free will, and free will is a worse affliction than vampirism. Free will is messy, free will is dangerous.
Free will could very well turn Merrick into a pile of bones.
That was, of course, if they weren’t discovered first. Joe had made several mistakes lately, not least of which was the turning of Heather. Sitting there in the predawn hour, attended by Tony, his gay bartender and human familiar, Merrick decided to have Joe killed. There are only two ways to kill a vampire: The stake and the flame. The latter seemed somehow appropriate in this case. After Joe, there would be no more captains, only him, one father with absolute power. That was how it had to be. One man, one vision. Democracies didn’t work. That was especially clear today. Everyone was so divided and nothing ever got done. If the humans had one strong leader, they might go in the wrong direction, but at least they would go somewhere. Instead, they stagnated.
Merrick didn’t particularly look forward to killing Joe, but it had to be done. To protect the family. To protect him.
And Merrick would do anything…anything at all…to protect himself.
***
Vampires.
Bruce kept coming back to that single wor, hoping each time that he would chuckle at the absurdity of it.
But he never did.
Did that mean he believed it? Not necessarily, but damn it, he considered it a possibility, and that alone was enough to make him feel like a fucking clown. All the evidence he had pointed to vampires, but then again, it might point to other things as well. Like aliens.
But let’s say the whole vampire thing was real. Who, like Vanessa asked, was patient zero? Who started this whole mess?
A name came to mind.
Merrick Garvis.
He had not had time to check into Garvis the previous day, but by God, he was going to do it now. He ran his name and social through the system and everything seemed to check out. Merrick Garvis was born on June 31, 1963 in -
Wait a minute. Weren’t there only 30 days in June?
Bruce checked, and there were, indeed, only 30 days in the month of June. Hm. Bruce did a little digging and found something out. Before 1987, social security numbers weren’t issued at birth. You had to sign up, using other forms of ID. Merrick Garvis applied for his in April 1984 and the date of birth on his state issued driver’s license was June 31. Bruce spent an hour on the phone with the DMV and learned that they had never issued a license to a Merrick Garvis. He then spoke to the Social Security Administration, and after much wrangling and frustration, he managed to get a photocopy of the license Garvis used to get his social security number. It was dated 1983.
The face staring back at him was almost exactly the same face he’d seen at Club Vlad, except maybe a touch less stiff and waxy. Though not as rough looking, there was no way in hell Garvis was 20 in that picture. It had to be a fake,
Bruce thought back to the events of the previous two days. Missing bodies, staked corpses, hearts that still beat after death.
Vampires didn’t seem like such a crazy explanation.
And if anyone was a fucking vampire around here, it was Merrick Garvis.

This is long but I would appreciate help so much. I
I have seen a

• Dentist
• Oral pain specialist who is well respected
• And a PT who specializes in TMJ.

Two year ago, after getting a new retainer (my dog ate mine, went 5-6 weeks without one entirely), I legit woke up the next day with jaw clicking/popping that was minor but consistent. I’d never had issues prior. The dentist was very confused but redid my impressions and ultimately that didn’t help things. The oral pain specialist says that some jaw clicking is normal, and as long as it’s not painful he encourages me to just chug along. He said I could try PT and a mouthguard but said the jury was out on if they’d work.
For the longest time I had no pain at all from my jaw popping, it’s was just that, popping, sometimes subtly and other times more obviously. My PT noticed recently that the bottom part of my jaw is moving right when I open my mouth. She told me to work on looking in the mirror and practice the botton of my jaw opening straight down. Since doing this things have gotten worse. My range of motion is more limited when I open straight down (I cannot open nearly as wide and yawning always ends in a weird pop). Additionally, my jaw seems to get stuck (locked?) in either a “straight down/limited range of motion” OR “open to the right but wide range of motion.”
I am so confused and have no idea why this problem is so unsolvable? If I was clenching or grinding I'd get it, but this feels so random? All the doctors I see seem to just be shrugging and not offering real solutions. It’s starting to grow more uncomfortable and at times painful. My denist and oral specialist both said they don’t see any signs of clenching or grinding on my teeth, so I don’t think this is a mouth guard solve? I am just so perplexed.
Couple facts to reiterate

• As mentioned, my jaw popping came out of no where.
• No jaw trauma in my history
• I’m 28
• No signs of clenching or grinding
• Not a jum chewer
• My mom has TMJ from clenching, so maybe it’s somehwat genetic, but again, I’m not clenching.
• Not interested in Botox, esp when this doesn’t seem to be a clenching issue.
• I'm insanely stressed and working on it. This started during the worst depressive episode of my life and am in active therapy.

I guess my ask, is there anything I’m missing? Anything else to try? I’m so discouraged by this. I’m really worried it’ll turn into a bigger deal as I get older and cause pain. :(

Let this one fundamental rule guide you:
You are in full control of who you pursue and allow into your life. It is your responsibility to not let fantasy cloud your judgment and not see things as they truly are.
Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.

1. Don’t continue to reach out if she’s non-responsive or never takes initiative to contact you. Sometimes people get busy, so you don’t want to get up in arms if she occasionally takes some time to respond. However, be observant about the general pattern of your communication with her. If she’s attracted to you, she will be reaching out to you a good portion of the time.

Don’t be someone’s second option or source of attention. Even if you like her, don’t let your hopes cloud your perception. If it’s like pulling teeth getting her to respond, then it’s fucking time to move on.

1. Real life isn’t Hollywood. Don’t wait in the wings for her if she’s in a relationship. This classic White Knight/savior complex thinking. In this scenario, a guy has feelings (or thinks he has feelings) for a woman, she’s unavailable, and he thinks he can treat her better. In the movies, this type of guy is the hero; his only redeeming quality is his “dedication”.

In real life, this type of guy is pathetic (also known as a male orbitor) and rightfully almost never gets the girl. You can’t put your life on pause for someone—they will NOT live up to the fantasy you’ve built in your head. There is so much opportunity out there to meet someone who will make you their FIRST priority.

1. Don’t buy her things to “win points”. You can’t buy attraction. Guys who chase women often think they can buy their way to her heart—expensive dinners, flowers, trips, etc. The sad thing is, they don’t give because they genuinely want to see her happy, but rather they feel that these favors add up on an unspoken numbers system, where she’ll eventually agree to have sex with him because of his generosity.

This is hallmark “Nice Guy” thinking. When you are first dating someone, don’t spend money trying to impress her. If she has a high level of attraction, she’ll want to spend time with you almost anywhere.

1. Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you. I’ve done this before myself. As men, we tend to idealize women are physically attractive, and place them on a pedestal above us. As mentioned previously, we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to believe that an attractive woman is the prize for acts of self-sacrifice and devotion. Attraction doesn’t work that way in the real world. Women get extremely turned off when men get nervous around them. Think about it—if a woman is around a guy who is intimidated merely by her presence, why would she feel comfortable and safe around him? Women want to be appreciated, not worshipped.
   
2. Don’t dedicate yourself to her if she’s not committed to you. This is one of the most common mistakes I see guys make. They’ll meet a woman who they find attractive, start overthinking and project their romantic hopes and dreams onto her. They stop pursuing other dating options, under the assumption that they’re going to be in a relationship with her.
   

Basically, they give relationship-level commitment way too early, before an actual relationship has been established. These guys often wind up getting burned; she goes cold or will string him along.
Let’s make this very clear—you are to keep your dating options open—and actively date other women until you are in an actual relationship that has been agreed upon by both you. That’s when you exhibit dedication and slowly invest emotionally.
TLDR:

• Only dedicate time and effort to those who value you.
  
• Don’t wait in the wings for women who are taken or not invested in you in some manner
  
• You can’t buy attraction.
  
• Don’t place her on an imaginary pedestal. She’s a human being with flaws, just like you.
  

Full article on topic: https://modating.substack.com/p/the-cardinal-rule-of-dating-for-men

I have a boomer neighbor who gives me rides to work and other places because I currently don't have a car or license. She gives me a much better deal than Uber or Lyft. She's a nice lady most of the time, but she is ridiculously paranoid.
This lady literally is the crazy cat lady. She lives on the bottom floor of an apartment, and she has two cats. That's not so bad, but she also leaves food out for stray/feral cats. She has had several complaints about this from neighbors, but she gets upset over them being angry about a bunch of feral cats being around.
Anyway, she is extremely paranoid about getting attacked and thinking people have broken into her house or are planning on it. Whenever a delivery driver or exterminator or someone is around she thinks it's actually someone planning to break into her house and hurt her cats.
When we had a strong storm and her porch umbrella blew over, it couldn't have been the wind. No, it was obviously some human intervention. She's also said how some men on a construction crew broke into her house and drank some of her milk. She's just absolutely positive she had more milk before she left than she did when she got back. It had to have been the work crew guys breaking into her house to drink her milk. I'm sure it's no coincidence she thinks that because these men were latinx.
This lady lives I'm section 8 housing on government assistance. We've had several arguments over this. This culminated in her being angry with me because I said she has nothing worth stealing. The worst part of all this is she constantly posts her suspicions on the Next Door app and all the other boomers chime in with their paranoia and feed each others' delusions. Why are they like this? How did these people get this way? I'd understand if it was only her but soooo many boomers also believe her.
TLDR: Poor boomer living on government assistance constantly thinks people are out to hurt her or steal from her.