I want to share the prolog of Last Rites in this group. Let me know what you think: (the structure became affected somehow when I posted, not my fault!) This is how Lyndon became a vampire. Being dead had its advantages. Johnny could control his sense of smell and didn’t need to take in the putrid stink of dead fish and oil if he didn’t want to. He could block it or enhance it. Something humans couldn’t do. But Johnny didn’t mind. He actually liked the scent. A.D. Nineteen hundred and seventy three, total darkness, Texas; the smell of Texas dirt and Texas dry leaked into the room. Johnny Carradine, or rather the creature that was once Johnny Carradine, opened his eyes. Johnny did this every night in the darkness. It was time for him to arise, and as always, he had a purpose in mind. That bastard, he spat through cracked lips. The air that came out of his lungs was fetid and cold. Somewhere to the left of his coffin he heard scurrying and chitters. Rats? He sniffed. The place smelled of offal and old pee, but it didnt bother Johnny Carradine. The bastards going to pay, he snarled. He could taste old blood in his mouth. Vengeance, he whispered. I want my vengeance. He could almost taste new blood. He was going to make the man pay. It was that damned bastards fault he was like this. Johnny would kill the President of the United States of America. Richard Nixon? Oh no, not Nixon. Not the current president, but his predecessor, the guy who was in office before Nixon. Even though he wasn’t the guy, either, who was responsible for drafting Johnny when he was only eighteen and sent him to Vietnam. In1960 his whole life was in front of him. He had been so scrawny he barely passed the physical examination, but they sent him to Nam anyways. Now his life was over. His sanity had eroded. He had been far too young to deal with what had happened to him. After the war, he made his plan. He journeyed to Texas and found an old abandoned oil refinery in Dallas to set up housing in. JFK wouldn’t be the only president killed in The Lone Star state. Oh no. He was determined to see that his successor would also be destroyed, too. But it really hadn’t been Kennedy who had begun it. Johnny had been sent to Viet Nam under Eisenhower. And he went willingly. Oh yes, he deemed it his duty to serve his country. He did three tours of duty and was proud of his service, even when the goddamned hippies started their protests. But he had turned during LBJ’s administration. And that was the man that he blamed for his current affliction. He didn’t blame the creature that bit him and caused his affliction, that creature was just hungry. If Carradine hadn’t been in Viet Nam then the parasite wouldn’t have been able to feed on him. But that was 1963. Now, ten years and thousands of miles away, on this cold January Texas night, Johnny lifted the lid and read, for the thousandth time, the obituary that was taped to the inside of his coffin. The clipping erroneously reported that his platoon had been wiped out by the Viet Cong. The truth of the matter was that they had been wiped out by a clan of Setite Vampires. Most of the platoon had been killed, but several had turned, though he doubted that the vampires who caused his condition knew or even cared about that fact. In his mind’s eye he imagined what it was like when the military personnel drove up to his mother’s dooryard in their finest dress uniforms. The one on the passenger side would exit the vehicle with a grim look on his face holding official papers. His mother would already be in tears as she knew what the letter said before it was handed to her. It would be the notification of her son’s death. It would’ve been a cruel blow for Cindy Carradine, who had been widowed a year before her son left for Viet Nam. Johnny’s father, Seth, had been killed while cutting trees in a freak chain saw accident. This would be two family tragedies a year apart. Johnny had agonized again and again over whether or not he should go home and tell his mother the truth. Which is more devastating, to let her think that he was dead or to let her know that he had become one of the undead? Would the knowledge of his current existence be more painful to her than what she assumed was true? He didn’t know. He needed help with this decision and he didn’t know where to get it. Johnny closed the newspaper on his obituary and turned it over to the front page. There was a different photo there. It was LBJ. Johnny felt foam form in his mouth. His eyes narrowed and he was sure they had turned red with hatred. It didn’t matter that LBJ had nothing to do with Johnny Carradine going to Viet Nam, or that he had volunteered for his last tour of duty, the tour that saw him turn into a Setite. Somehow it just seemed that it was all Johnson’s fault! He ripped the picture out of the newspaper and carried it with him everywhere. Now Johnny arose and tore the picture of Johnson off of the inner lid to his coffin. He put it in his mouth and chewed it, then swallowed. Johnny wouldn’t need it any more after tonight. *** The former President of the United States of America had let his hair grow long. He was depressed. During his last year in office, teenagers had taunted him on the White House grounds. When he had taken office, after JFK’s assassination, he had been incredibly popular. In 1964, he won the largest popular vote in the history of the nation; a full twenty two percentage points over his opponent. When he made his first speech to Congress as President he said the appropriate thing; “All I have I would gladly have given not to be here today.” Before he became the President he was the Vice President and before that he was Speaker of the House, and one of the most effective Speakers in the history of this nation. As President he thought nothing would be able to stop him. He passed legislation for health care, revitalized a dead economy, and supported civil rights like no other before him had ever done, or after for that matter; the architect of the Great Society. That’s what he thought history would say about him. Yet he would not be remembered for any of this. What was he remembered for? Not something that he did. It was a brushfire that he did not start, but rather inherited, much like the Presidency that he resided over for the first year of his administration. It was someone else’s mess. He was a good politician. He had known when it was over and had decided not to run for re-election once it all turned. Besides, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to live with the idea of Bobby Kennedy beating him in the primaries. That was the real reason for his leaving the presidential race. Of course the opposing party would now inherit the white house as a result of his fateful decision. That’s the way it went. It was on a Sunday, January 21st to be exact, when he was just sitting in his home, brooding about this. The air was crisp and the night sky clear, lit up with incredibly bright stars, brighter than usual. Ladybird called him out to the porch shortly after the sun had set. She wanted him to see an unusually bright shooting star that had appeared. “Come out quick!” She yelled to the former president. “What is it?” “A shooting star,” she said. “Oh, we’ve seen plenty of them.” “Not like this one dear.” He ambled out of the house as fast as he could. He had taken up smoking again against his wife’s wishes and had gained weight since his presidency. His drinking had also increased. “That’s real nice dear.” He said to his wife as the shooting star disappeared into the horizon. The former President breathed in a dose of that healthy Texas night air, then sat down on the porch swing and lit a cigar. He buttoned the top button of his shirt and pulled his sweater shut. The temperature had dropped considerably in the last hour. “Well, I think I’m going to turn in,” Ladybird informed her husband. She brushed the cigar smoke away from her nose and said “Are you coming?” “In a minute dear,” he told her. “I’m gonna have another smoke.” Ladybird shook her head and turned to go inside. He sat, smoking, and watched as the inside lights went off. He pictured the way she’d climb into bed, sitting sideways, feet together, and then turning until she was flat on her back. While he was thinking of his wife, he heard a rustling sound and looked up to see a tall lanky man dressed in B.D.U. green cross the yard and step up to the porch. “God damn it how did you get past security?” Lyndon asked with a confused look on his face. “Those idiots at the front gate, it was easy,” the stranger said and laughed. “What the hell do you want?” Lyndon said as he crushed the cigar and tossed it into a garbage can. “Dare I say it? It’s a classic.” “Say what?” “I want to suck you’re blood.” The stranger spoke in a phony Hungarian accent. “You’d better get your damn ass out of here, or I’ll…” “You’ll do nothing, old man, except die.” Lyndon saw by the look in his eye that Johnny meant business. He was going to make his mark on society. The President saw Johnny’s bloodshot eyes open wide and felt his head push back. He struggled surprisingly strong for a man his age. He grabbed at Johnny’s neck and Johnny had to use his full strength to pull the man’s hands off. He pulled LBJ to his feet and they stood on the porch in an awkward dancelike embrace, each one trying to hold down the arms of the other. Finally Johnny wrenched one arm free, yanked aside the former president’s head, and sank his teeth deep into LBJ’s jugular vein. The former President struggled nobly but in the end he was no match for a being that had three times his strength. He succumbed to the vampire’s bite and keeled over. The demon that was formerly Johnny Carradine was going to finish the job to make sure his “meal” wouldn’t turn. But before he could decapitate his victim a shot rang out. Johnny was startled; he thought he’d killed all the guards at the gate so he fled. Lyndon glanced up and saw Ladybird running toward them, .22 rifle in hand. “Oh my lord, are you all right?” She said, alarmed. “I’m alright, don’t nobody worry about me. I…got bit by a dog is all,” the former president said, knowing they wouldn’t believe the truth if he told them. “That didn’t look like any dog I’ve ever seen! He ran on two feet.” Head of Security Mike Howard exclaimed as he ran up to the porch. “Let me take that from you Mrs. Johnson.” He eased the .22 from Ladybirds hands. “It was a dog and I won’t have any more discussion of this,” the former president said, and let the security man move him back to his chair. “I’ll be fine.” “You’ll need a rabies shot,” Ladybird said as she handed him a shot of scotch. “I said, I’ll be fine.” Howard looked around the dark night. “Well, I’m going to look through the house anyways,” he said. He did a quick search of the house and ordered two other secret service men to stay on the porch with the former President. He ordered several other agents to look for the intruder. Ladybird had gone inside for a wet facecloth, antibiotics, and some bandaging. “I’m alright, just a little tired. Let’s go to bed.” They tried to get the former president to go to a hospital but he refused, so they helicoptered a doctor to the ranch. The doctor bandaged his neck and said, “I want to see you first thing in the morning sir. I still say you should go to the hospital.” “I don’t need no damn hospital! It’s just a small bite!” “Alright sir, but we have to find that dog and check for rabies too. Or else I have to prescribe you a sequence of rabies shots” “Alright, alright, let’s go to bed. We can do that in the morning. ” The President retired to the bedroom with his wife. Before Mike Howard left, he ordered two secret service men to stay the night on the porch and many more to search the grounds the entire night looking for the intruder and the dog that the President said bit him. The next day; the President refused to get the bite checked. “I’m the President, and I make the decisions around here,” he said. “No one is looking at a little scratch on my neck.” Not that it would have done him much good. At 1:10pm a thin trickle of blood seeped out of his wound, he put another Band-Aid on it. At 3:50pm he called the switchboard; “Get…Mike…” The former President gasped into the intercom. The secret service scrambled to reach their employer bringing an oxygen unit. But it was too late. The former President was ashen gray which they mistook for the blue skin of a man who died of natural causes. Mike Howard arrived at 3:55pm and tried to do an external heart massage. But the President did not respond. By 4:45pm Lyndon’s body was in San Antonio, Texas where Col. George McGranahan pronounced him dead. An autopsy was ordered at Brooke Hospital. McGranahan prepped the autopsy room and returned to the morgue for the president’s body. His assistant, Col. Hieger, accompanied him. When they got back to the slab that held the former President, he was gone. They turned the morgue upside down, but the former president was nowhere to be found. “What the hell…” Hieger said. “Where did he go?” “He couldn’t have just got up and left,” McGranahan stared at his assistant for a long minute. “Someone must have stolen him.” He paused then finally said: “Listen, I’m not getting in trouble for this. We have a John Doe over there that’s about the same age…” “You can’t be serious.” “Do you want to explain to the media and the government how the body of the President disappeared? Especially considering what happened to the President before him?” “But what if his body shows up somewhere?” “One problem at a time, we can say this was the body we were given. We did the autopsy, not the identification.” The two coroners’ quickly prepared the John Doe to make him look as much like the former President as they could. Luckily, he had been identified by Lady Bird before they brought him in. She would not have to look at the corpse again. Given the former president’s desire for a closed casket funeral, McGranahan figured they were safe.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 21:56:40 +0000
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