Daikaijuzine

“Have I mentioned lately how much I hate you?”

Dorry peered through her Coke-bottle-thick, horn-rimmed granny glasses at the freshly-nuked bowl of lentil and sausage soup Cloris has placed in front of her. Which wasn’t easy to do. The placing that is. With her gout-gnarled hands, opening a can was the best Cloris could manage most nights.

“What’s wrong with it?” Cloris asked.

“Nothing Rachel Ray couldn’t fix, I suppose.”

“She won’t do much better when she’s got lobster claws, either.”

Dorry sighed and dunked her spoon.

Cloris sighed even louder, not wanted to be outdone, and edged slowly to the kitchen counter in her pink, quilted housecoat. 85 degrees in the Florida sun, but it still felt chilly to her. She envied her younger, 80-year-old roommate’s digits, holding a spoon so easily.

“Check on Set and Isis before you come back,” Dorry ordered.

Cloris remembered a time decades before when she’d given the orders…

She did as she was told.

Along the side wall of the living room of their elder-care apartment was a glass tank about eight feet long. Inside, wrapped like DNA helixes, their two 18 foot boa constrictors intertwined, cloaca lined with hemi-penes. It was pointless; Cloris was pretty sure that Isis was already pregnant and due to lay eggs at any moment.

The snakes were simply rubbing Cloris’s face in their intimacy. Watching the serpents made her chest grow tight. Even if it wasn’t love, it was better than nothing.

It was time for her own dinner, and she considered the alternatives: can of creamed corn? Left over salad? Fresh apples? Cloris had gone vegan years before, much to her daughter’s and doctor’s consternation. But after a few years of nightmare images that went back to her last few nights on the job in ‘53 — the slaughter-house of Dr. Boundagut, no less–– she’d decided enough was enough. Meat was murder? Maybe, but murder was definitely murder, and after murder you got lots of meat. Tons of it. She wasn’t going near anything formerly fleshy and bleeding again in hopes the pictures in her head might stop.

Creamed corn, she decided.

Their was a knock on the door before she could return to the kitchen.

“Probably another Jehovah!” Dorry yelled. The nurse/guard on the evening shift was a devout Christian. She had no problem letting anyone to sell door-to-door salvation.

“We need to make a complaint,” Cloris said, shuffling quickly to the door, really just staying one step ahead of a fall. She didn’t want a broken hip to go with the useless hands, but sometimes things get away from you. She knew that well.

She’d grown trusting after years of safety in the ViewLong Lifetime Retirement Community Apartments, so it was not abnormal for her to throw the door wide open, without consulting the peephole first.

What she saw after opening the door made her think she’d grown a bit too complacent in her old age. Standing in front of her was the last being in the cosmos she ever thought she’d see again before she died.

* * *

“Where is she?” he demanded.

Cloris would have choked if she’d had something in her mouth. She sputtered and coughed anyway. It couldn’t be him.

“Where. Is. SHE?”

Standing in the hall, hands on the door-jam, was a boy. He had a high forehead and black hair. To look at him you’d assume a pre-teen, 12 at most.

Arrayed around him, one on his shoulder and two at his feet, were monkeys, howling and chattering. They gave Cloris and her dressing gown an up/down scan, heads bobbing. One took a dump right on the paisley hall rug replaced last month after Mr. Torelmo down the hall had one of his “accidents.” In fact, his accident was pretty similar to what the monkey just did.

Good thing it’s already brown, she thought.

Last time Cloris had seen this boy – this being, really, as he was as much a boy as a wooden chair is a tree — his hair had been slick and shiny like a beach after an oil spill. Now it was rumbled, as was the rest of him. Maybe it wasn’t fair to call his clothes rags, but they were close: ripped and dirty and hardly suitable for any child. Especially him.

He had red eyes and sharp canine teeth, with the unfortunately side effect of giving each “S” word he muttered extra sibilance.

His monkey minions had matching fangs and crimson irises.

It was Kid Vampire.

But she’d always known him by another name.

“Arnold?”

* * *

The boy bloodsucker gazed coldly into the old lady’s eyes. “How do you know that name?”

“Arnold, it’s m—”

“Bah! Enough! Tell me where she is. Tell me where to find Chrono-Girl, or my shimian lackeys will have your wrinkled hide for a wall trophy to throw their scat upon!”

The monkeys did not seem elated at this target choice. One skittered behind the boy’s leg.

Cloris had hold of the open door with both hands, not in preparation to slam it closed, simply for support. Seeing this blast from the past had exhausted her. No one else at ViewLong could expect a boy-genius- turned-blood-drinker by a bitter teacher at his World War II-era boarding school (he only liked kids as snacks) to just drop by.

But Cloris could.

Maybe she should have expected it. However, it was the first time an old enemy from her science heroine days had ever showed, so she cut herself some slack.

Besides, in this case, it should have been impossible.

“Arnold, listen! It’s me!”

“Shtop calling me that!” His lisp combined with his pre-teen whine, immediately took the starch out of his crisp (yet rumpled) menace. Cloris almost smiled at the familiarity of it.

“I will, when you start listening.”

“I’m lishtening, old woman, but I’d best like what I hear or my undead hench-monkeys will—”

“Shut up, for god’s sake!”

Arnold the Kid Vampire slapped his mouth shut.

“It’s me.”

He stared. She saw the comprehension in his blood-colored eyes, but he shook his head. He looked at his hand, and she saw a few words scrawled on his pale, undead skin by a ball-point pen.

“Cloris Reynolds?” He asked.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“But that’s Chrono-Girl’s name.”

“I’m Chrono-Girl.”

He looked like he might cry.

* * *

“Who the fuck is it already?” Dorry came in from the kitchen. She didn’t have a housecoat on, she preferred big oversized t-shirts, sized triple-XL (Cloris always snickered at the Triple-X bit, knowing Dorry did some “artful” movie projects in the early 70s), which did little to hide her curves. Or curve, actually, since her torso was shaped like a pumpkin with a couple of tomatoes on top. Dorry’s t- shirt, a gift from Cloris’s youngest grand-daughter at Yale, read, “Cheerleaders are Athletic Supporters.”

One of the monkey’s shrieked.

“Jesus!” Dorry said.

“We have a guest,” Cloris said.

“Who’s the kid?”

“Dorry, don’t be dense. This is Arnold.”

Dorry looked at him. Squinted. Opened her eyes wide. “Holy freakin’ shit-turds. It’s Kid Vampire! Where the hell did you come from?”

The ageless-boy – who’d had only the emotional maturity of a 13-year- old when he first tried to enslave humanity using a giant psychosis antenna mounted on top of the Empire State building in 1947 – wiped a pink-tinged tear from his cheek and tried to sneer. “I got out.”

“Yeah, I guess you did, fuck-nut. But how?”

“I made a deal with someone powerful.”

“As I recall, the setup we had with Professor Peculiar was you go bye- bye for all eternity, specifically to something hellish.”

Arnold stomped a foot, pinching a monkey’s paw. It hopped away, then came back swinging, scratching his leg. Arnold ignored the primate. “You should know, nothing is permanent.”

“No shit. I mean, look at my ass!” Dorry pointed and laughed. “I used to have sailors bouncing quarters off that jelly roll!”

“Arnold,” Cloris said, “Do you want to come in?”

Dorry stopped smiling. “Tell me you didn’t just invite a god-damn vampire twerp into my house, you dingy broad!”

“Dorry, please. He’s not going to hurt anyone, are you Arnold.”

He stepped across the threshold and said, arms folded, “No.”

The monkey’s tried to follow, but bounced off the door every time, screaming in protest.

“Sorry, you little shit-birds,” Dorry cackled, and pushed the door out of Cloris’s grip to slam on them.

* * *

“Dolores ‘Dorry’ Timerton,” Arnold the Kid Vampire said. “Also known as Timer, the Watch Girl.”

“Thanks for the intro. Let me do you. Arnold Voorhees, the vampire twerp who never grew up.”

“Dorry, be nice. He’s obviously had a rough… day.”

“Week actually,” Arnold said. “I’ve been back a week. All my contacts are gone. My old hide-outsh are gone, bulldozed or collapsed into the ground. One of them was something called a Buckshtars.”

“So you came to us for help?”

“No!” He tried to sound fierce and came out choked. “I came to kill my nemeshis, Chrono-Girl, who’d put me in that ever-lasting torment.”

“Arnold, I really didn’t, it was Professor Peculiar, and you didn’t give us much choice—”

“Oh for Harold Christ’s sake, Cloris,” Dorry said. “Don’t apologize.” She went to the kitchen, ignoring Arnold.

“You tried and convicted me! You sent me to hell for the rest of…forever!”

Dorry stuck her head back in the living room. “A kid vampire who once tried to give the entire Congress and Supreme Court leprosy, lost for all eternity in the bowels of an ever-lasting inferno? Sounds good time to me. It’s pretty much what I god-damn live for.”

“Lived for.”

“I’m still alive, you toothy cocksucker.”

“If you call this living,” he muttered.

Dorry came toward him, two wooden stirring spoons held like a cross. Arnold shrank away toward the door, screaming, “Oh! Ow! Oh! Stop! It hurts!”

“Dorry!” Cloris slapped the spoons. “Stop tormenting him. My God.”

“Shtop saying that!” Arnold begged. “It burnsh!”

“Get up, you little turd,” Dorry went back in the kitchen. “Scientists proved around 1975 that the whole religious symbol thing against vamps doesn’t have any basis in reality. You dumb-asses are just superstitious.”

“Is…is that true?” Arnold asked, astonished.

“Yes. We had a vampire science hero, named Exsanguinator, who had some money to fund the research, and he found some willing participants who promised to drink pig blood for the rest of their unnatural existence—”

“No, not that, I mean, the year.”

“1975?”

“Yesh! Has it been almost 25 years since you sent me away?”

“Oh, no. It’s been…” she counted in her head, trying to remember if Prof. Peculiar had cast him out in ‘52 or ‘53… “It’s been more like 55 years.”

Arnold did cry then, rivulets of blood washing down his cheeks like he’d been poked in the eye.

* * *

The three of them sat around the kitchen table for a while, mostly in silence, while the Kid Vampire who’d once almost smashed a flying saucer of his own design into Mt. Rushmore (and was only stopped because he made it so easy to find the big, red self-destruct button) cleaned himself up with a roll of paper towels.

“It’s the quicker picker upper,” Dorry said between spoonfuls of lentil and/or sausage.

“I don’t know what that means,” Arnold muttered.

“Ha, I forgot. You went to hell before television! You poor, dumb sap.”

Before they got going at each other again, Cloris said, “Arnold, tell me again why you came.”

“To kill you. But…”

“But?”

“I thought…”

“What?”

“I thought it had only been a couple of years. I thought you’d be younger.”

Cloris remembered something Professor Peculiar had said at the time, something about time flowing differently in different planes of existence. Then the mysterious mage had grabbed his crotch and disappeared like he always did.

She so regretted that weird night with him in ‘47 in Count Permafrost’s ice dungeon. It couldn’t be helped though, they needed to stay warm… then she regretted thinking about it and went back to Arnold.

“I wish I could say we were younger. I turned 87 in August.”

“Hey, I’m still young,” Dorry said with her mouth full.

“But you live in the future!” he protested.

* * *

It was true, she had lived in the far-flung future. Cloris Reynolds once zipped back and forth between her original time in the early 22nd century using equipment her father made, always returning mere moments after ending her last visit to the post-war era. It worked fine for a while, but by the time 1953 rolled around, she’d lived twice as much as normal. Full-time in the past and the future. It was a secret even Dorry didn’t know – Cloris was more like 99 years old. But time travel hadn’t aged her much physically. Maybe it had even helped keep her young? She had no idea.

It sure as shit hadn’t helped with the gout she’d inherited from her own grandmother, who would be born in a couple of years.

None of it mattered after ‘53, when Sturm and Drang, the Toe-Headed Nazi Twins tried to bring about a Fourth Reich with a giant sleeper robot. It destroyed her Chrono-Gate and left her stranded in the past. If she hadn’t met her husband a few months later, she might have really regretted it. But the 50s and 60s were a good time to raise kids, especially if you believed in the American dream and liked Lucky Strikes. Which she did, in equal measure. She retired from science heroism and didn’t look back. She quit smoking in 1983, using hypnosis.

Her side-kick, Timer, went on to try and find other fame and fortune with the only super-power she’d ever had: bodaciousness. In those days, they called what Dorry had spunk. Which meant something totally different years later, but she got plenty of that during her adult film period.

* * *

“I’ve lived in this time stream since after you… left. I don’t go home anymore. I won’t live to see myself born.”

“That’s too bad. I always hoped someday to steal your electronics and experience the future.”

“Sometimes I wish I had it for you to steal.”

‘”But not always?”

“No,” she smiled. “Not always.”

“Remember that time,” Dorry said, tossing her spoon across the kitchen into the sink, something Cloris had talked to her about on several occasions, “When you and the Corporation for Chaos guys captured me, and Chroney and the rest of the Integrity Squad? And you actually gave the key to the guy guarding us? That was classic!”

Arnold frowned. It was a recent memory for him.

“Or the time you tried to convince Chroney to become your lieutenant, but the old guy who was your current lieutenant was still in the room and tried to shoot you? Ha!”

Arnold’s ears turned bright red.

Cloris put a hand on his. They both reacted badly. She jumped at how ice-cold his flesh was, a natural side-effect of not pumping any blood. He jumped because of her wizened, calloused fingers shaped like shillelaghs.

“You were quite… fetching then,” he said. It sounded extremely odd, coming from someone who appeared old enough to be enamored by High School Musical 3.

* * *

“Remember your going out line?” Dorry asked. She sat down at the table holding a photo album she’d pulled from her bed room. Cloris had never seen it before.

Arnold said nothing, which in itself said he did remember it and wanted to forget.

“You said, ‘No! I’m invincible!’” Dorry snorted. “The prof is pumping you full of energy juice and you think it’s going to make you all über- vampy and instead it’s powering your hyperspace jump to Dante’s table for one. Heee!”

“Hyperspace?” Arnold asked.

“It’s a Star Wars reference,” Cloris said.

“Shtar wars? There was a war in space—”

“It’s a movie.”

“Oh. A lot has changed.”

“Yes it has. Would you like a hot chocolate?”

“No thanks. I only drink, you know. Blood.”

“Of course. Silly of me to ask. So what about the monkeys?”

“Them? I came to in Central Park Zoo—”

“That’s where Peculiar took him out!” Dorry pointed at a newspaper clipping about the final melee, bending so close that her glasses almost touched the yellowed newsprint. It had a black and white picture, showing a young Chrono-Girl in her skimpy (for the time) garb, Chrono-Gate on her belt. She leaned on DarkMatter while she adjusted a leather boot. She hadn’t thought of him in years, not since the so-called ‘trial of the century ended.’ Supposedly he lived in Florida, too. Trying to find the real killers.

“The demon that freed me only gave me two weeks. Two weeks before I’m once again…” He trailed off.

“Made perdition’s bitch?” Dorry offered.

“I’m no—” Arnold started, but he couldn’t fight it. He was perdition’s bitchiest bitch.

* * *

“So despite fifty five years going by, you only felt like you were there for a couple… and you were bitten when you were 12 in ‘45, and, uh, sent away in ‘53 or so, so that’d make you…” Cloris hated doing math. She even let Dorry handle the checkbook for their expenses even though she had a QVC habit if not well observed. Doing math had been a big part of being a time-traveling science heroine and she’d dumped it cold turkey after losing the Chrono-Gate. “You’re about 22 years old! Isn’t that nice?”

Both Dorry and Arnold glanced at her like she had two heads. Which she had once, courtesy of the Duplicator. It had been easier to deal with than the gout.

“I’m trying too hard, aren’t I?” she asked.

“She gets the same way when her great-grandkids come over every couple of years,” Dorry said conspiratorially to Arnold, as if they were now fast friends.

“Great grand children?” He didn’t seem to believe it and shook his head.

“In fact, one of them is named Arny.”

“After—”

“Not after you, dumb-ass,” Dorry said.

His shoulders slumped.

“You guys forgot all about me then.”

“No!” Cloris said.

“Sure we did,” Dorry said. “Once you’re done, you’re done. But you’re in the history books.”

He brightened like a normal 12-year-old getting an Xbox, one without leech-monkey underlings. “Can I shee?”

“I’m not sure we have—”

“I’ve got Heroics in the Golden Age in my night stand, hang on.” Dorry went to her room again.

“She likes the past,” Arnold said.

“Apparently.” Cloris didn’t know that about her former sidekick. But it made sense, she supposed.

Dorry’s copy of Heroics was dog eared on several pages, the cover browned and brittle. It was an original, printed in the ’70s. Probably around the time Dorry was doing Uber Throat, which was both the name of the movie and its star.

“Let’s see, let’s see.” She opened a random page and skipped through.

Cloris looked at it upside-down but caught snatches of color indicating costumes she had not seen in years. Heroes today seldom went for color, preferring black leather, even long coats instead of capes. Very boring when compared to the days of a nice purple mid-calf skirt. Modest, yet still enough freedom of movement for ass-kicking left-over Nazis.

“Here’s one,” Dorry said.

It was a picture of Arnold, dressed in his usual tuxedo – the contrast is what made his current so-called clothes seem so ratty – inside a bubble control pod at the top of a tripod machine storming through a downtown street.

“I never understood why you attacked Wichita with that thing,” Cloris said.

Arnold shrugged. “No one ever goes after places like Wichita.”

“He’s got a point,” Dorry said.

They looked at some more pictures, hoping to find him, but there were none. All they found was a paragraph describing how he was finally vanquished in Central Park, sent for time without end (or 55 years, apparently) to some torture dimension. Professor Peculiar told the author of Heroics in a interview in 1968 it was “the one the Catholics use,” which caused a minor Vatican uproar until he sent the pope a gift.

“Nothing about my psychosis antenna? The zombie potion in San Francisco Bay? The giant pinball machine trap?”

“Oh, I forgot that one.” Dorry pointed at Cloris. “Remember that? Strapped to balls, heading toward the paddles?”

“Foreshadowing for some.”

“Hey! God-dammit, Cloris, you said you’d stop bringing that up.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Really.”

“Just… jealous,” Doris muttered.

Arnold shoved the book away, angry. “So much work over the years. The robberies to fund it all. The conshtruction. The mind-manipulation to keep the conshtruction workers quiet until I could spring the traps. The henchmen, getting them uniforms, and training, and health insurance for that one with the union, just so they could be fodder while I tried to take you out… it was all for NOTHING.”

The two elderly women looked at him for a long time, watching his pale face twist, his supernaturally strong hands gripping their kitchen table, splintering the wood a bit under his dirty nails. Finally, Cloris said, “Well, yes. You know the bad guys always lose.”

“And kiddo, you’re bad,” Dorry added. “It’s just your nature.”

“Yes.”

He stood up from the table and walked into the living room.

“Oh dear,” Cloris said.

“You sound like such an old lady,” Dorry told her. “He better not break my Hummel figures.”

They followed him, Cloris twisting her gnarled fingers, the pain flaring up. Arnold walked to the door and opened it, and the three leech-monkeys sat their dutifully.

“Could you let them in please?” He requested.

Dorry shook her head at Cloris, but it was too late.

“Come in,” she said.

The three monkeys shot to Arnold’s side, one scooting up his body to his shoulder, and whispered something in his ear.

“Fucking Kid Vampire speaks monkey talk now,” Dorry whispered.

Arnold’s body stiffened. He didn’t like what he heard. He reached with his opposite hand to his left shoulder, grabbed the primate by the neck and twisted him like a rag full of water. When the vertebrae snapped, he pulled the head off. He tossed the body in one direction, and the head in another. The head hit their 32-inch Sony TV, leaving a streak of gore on the screen.

“God dammit Arnold, that’s where we watch our programs!” Dorry stomped her foot.

“Stop. Calling. Me. ARNOLD!”

He turned now, his full malevolent vampire visage – basically a furrowed brow and fangs – on display. “I’m Kid Vampire! I will always be Kid Vampire! And I will have my vengeance!” The two monkeys that were left jumped up and down, reaching the height of his head, screeching for their master.

“You seriously didn’t see this coming when you let him in?” Dorry asked.

Cloris ignored her. “Arnold… Kid Vampire… this is pointless. What good does it do you to go after two old ladies like us?”

“Good? It’s not about good. It never has been.”

“See?” Dorry said. “You have to start listening me. I’m not a fucking sidekick anymo—”

“I get it, Dorry!”

“Besides, part of my deal with the demon that freed me is to bring him two souls in return. Two innocent souls. All I need to do is stay alive long enough to deliver, and he’ll take them in return for my eternal freedom to roam the Earth!”

“Only one innocent soul here,” Cloris said.

“Hey! I fucking told you to stop.”

“Sorry.” Cloris edged around the room, slowly, not wanting to fall now. This would be the worst time in the world to put osteoporosis to the test.

“Once I’m through with you, I’ll find a way to re-activate my legions. I’ll use them to find the names of the great heroes of today, just as I used every bit of my guile to find out your true names and track you here. Then I will destroy them all, one by one!”

“Or you could use the Web,” Dorry said.

“Dorry! Don’t tell him that.”

“The Web? Who is that? An information broker science villain?”

“Uh… not so much.”

“Computers have come a long way,” Cloris said. She nodded unconsciously at her old laptop, a dust covered ThinkPad she’d inherited from her daughter when she upgraded.

“That’s a computer? It’s so… miniscule. Where are the vacuum tubes?”

One of the monkey’s went over to it, checking it for the boss. He rubbed his ass on the keyboard’s home row, then ran to Arnold’s side. Arnold kicked at the creature. “Don’t get your feces on it, I may want to take it after I’m done! Jerk!” The monkey barely dodged the blow from the dirty shoe, and squalled at him, fangs bared.

“Arn—Kid Vampire, calm down, please. We can talk about this.”

“Yeah, Jesus, Arnold. You don’t really stand a chance these—”

Dorry choked as Kid Vampire, fast as ever, put his small hand into the folds of skin on her neck and squeezed.

“You were the one I wanted to shleep with the most,” Kid Vampire said. “Had you been my princess, I may have spared the world.”

“Ack,” Dorry said.

“What?” He released his grip a bit.

“In your fucking dreams, dead-boy. Not even on a movie set.”

He squeezed again.

Then Set squeezed.

While Arnold’s back was turned, as the monkey’s jumped and howled, Cloris reached into the big tank on the wall and pulled out the male boa. He’d only recently un-intertwined with his mate. He was easily agitated though, like any horny snake. She found it almost impossible to pick up the thick-bodied serpent with her ruined hands, and she felt the pain from the arthritis spreading up her wrists, thought she might drop him, that she might trip on the carpet or the coffee table or the damned monkeys. Set wrapped himself around her arm and she panicked a little, but she was there. Finally. She plopped the boa on Arnold’s neck.

With surprising speed, with that amazing instinct to find the right spot to squeeze and kill something, Set twisted cleanly around Arnold’s throat.

“Urk.”

He let go of Dorry’s waddle and reached for his own throat. He was strong of course, and would be able to pull Set off him, but the snake also outweighed him by a hundred pounds. He fell on the living room rug, right on his ass. He wasn’t really in danger of dying though. The snake cut off air and blood to the brain, but vampires need neither to keep ambulatory.

Cloris looked at Dorry, who rubbed her bruised neck fat. “Go get those spoons.”

Dorry didn’t even hesitate.

“Little known fact,” Cloris said. “Exsanguinator told me when I met him at a convention in St. Pete a few years ago that the research on the holy symbol impacting vampires had nothing to do with the holy symbol itself.”

“Yeah, you said that.” Kid Vampire almost had the pretzel of Set pulled off his neck, with minimal help from his howling monkeys. They were more like cheerleaders.

“The interesting thing is that most vampires are reacting to is what the symbol is made of. Usually wood.”

Dorry slapped one of the spoons into Cloris’s gnarled hand.

“Ow, fuck. That hurt,” she said. With the last bit of strength she had, she snapped the handle in half, got a sharp edge, and brought it down on the vampire boy’s chest.

“Oh, you bitch. You were like a mother to me.”

“Then I should have raised you better.” Cloris leaned on the spoon to get it into his gristle-tough heart.

* * *

It took a while for him to die.

“Wish they’d just turn to dust like on TV,” Dorry croaked.

Kid Vampire didn’t dissolve, but he did eventually stop gushing monkey blood (Cloris assumed). After that, his monkey minions reverted to their normal living primate selves, as per the arbitrary rules of vampirism of their reality. Cloris has visited another dimension once where that wasn’t the case, which had been a problem.

The again-alive monkeys attacked their old master’s dead undead body with gusto, flinging shit at him in a contest to get it in his open mouth, like drunks playing quarters. Set didn’t like this and let go, slithering over under the couch wrapped in plastic.

“Hey, look.”

Dorry walked over to the cage and they found Isis coiled around a number of snake eggs.

They both sighed with some content. The monkeys urinated in Kid Vampire’s ear.

“Good job with all that,” Dorry said.

“Thanks. I need some Ibuprofen.” Cloris waddled off to the bathroom, trying not to trip.

“Have I ever mentioned lately just how much I love you?”

About the Author: Eric Griffith narrowly averted a career in food service by entering the technology magazine industry; he’s currently senior writer for PC Magazine. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and works from home in his basement, surrounded by a few thousand books and comics and devices that eat up electricity, plus three Labradors who want to play RIGHT NOW. In his free time he blog and tweets at www.squishedfrog.com and hopes to soon sell his new comedy/horror/fantasy novel.