In Laymon's Terms

She told the police, Uncle Ray, and Aunt Charlotte everything that she thought they’d believe. Angie had gone out with an older man known only as J.D. He had been rough with her. By the next evening she disappeared without a trace.

The result netted Deadweight notoriety, the closest she’d come to popularity since she’d boarded the bus for first grade. For a while, her classmates even stopped calling her Deadweight and actually used “Becky.” In the vacuum of information left by a true vanishing like this one, the gossip mill needed answers, and had no one better to turn to. Had Angie been there to navigate her through the gauntlet of stares and eavesdropping, she could have perhaps turned it to the advantage of her social status. Yet instead she floundered, a moon with no planet around which to revolve.

Rain rattled the roof and crisp static thunder ripped open the sky the Friday night in February that Angie came back. She pawed at the window like a stray until Deadweight woke up. Deadweight tensed in her bed as if bound and felt her gastrointestinal reflux worsen. Bile and vomit tickled the back of her throat. Sleepdust crusted her eyes half-open. A raspy muffled voice barely made it past the rain and the window.

“Hey Deadweight, it’s me, Scabby Nipples.”

She slinked to her nightstand and fetched a Bible. She thrust it forward. “That only works with crosses. I really don’t have time for this.”

Deadweight answered aloud. “Don’t have time? You have eternity.”

“Deadweight...”

“Yeah?”

“I’m pregnant.”

Deadweight let her dry off with the comforter. There, drenching her bed, sat an honest-to-god, five-month pregnant, naked vampire. She’d lost some of her wildness and much of her confidence since she disappeared. Her shapely hips and still-scabby tits had retreated onto her emaciated frame. Out of modesty or repulsion, Deadweight shoved a terrycloth robe toward her. “You look awful.”

“Let me guess, all hagged out?”

“Seriously...”

“I haven’t fed...almost at all...rats mostly...I have no fucking thirst. I can’t fucking feed on people. What sort of loser vampire am I?”

Deadweight glanced at her belly. “How the fuck...”

“I don’t know...I guess his vampire jizz had a date with my vampire egg.”

“But, you’re both...”

“I know...”

A smile crept onto Deadweight’s face. “Just another preggers teen with bad teeth. In this town, it’s the perfect cover.”

Angie glared and growled. “This situation isn’t permanent, you know.”

“Angie, abortion isn’t always...”

“Shoosh your youth group talk.”

“You’ll be emotionally scarred for life!”

Angie cackled. “Now...at this point...you’re worried about that? I think that’s going to be par for the course, babe. Besides, the fetus, my baby...it can’t be alive anyway, right?”

“I have no clue. Could it be alive?”

“Not if I’m dead.”

“How are you going to do it?”

“Find me a phone book.”

Angie had only gone to one or two places where the air felt as heavy as that inside the abortion clinic. The AIDS testing clinic at the health department had been one, and the funeral home where they’d said goodbye to grandma and pop-pop had been another. All places where life and death mingled in an uneasy alliance. Angie wore jeans, an oversized sweater, and an overcoat for the occasion. The receptionist sat in the lobby, confirming that she was a girl here for an appointment, and not a fundamentalist terror bomber. “Name, honey?”

“Jenny D’Angelo.”

Deadweight rolled her eyes. She told Angie that with skin so pale, she should have picked an Irish pseudonym, not an Italian one.

“Yes, ten o’clock. You’re...”

“Early, yes, I know...”

The receptionist tried to smile the sort of knowing smile that older women flash when seeing a younger woman pass through a biological rite of passage. First period, first intercourse, first pregnancy. First abortion.

They sat and read six-month-old issues of People. “Ow!” Angie flinched, her mouth scrunching into a grimace.

“What’s the matter?”

“The little fucker,” Angie hissed, “just gnawed at me.” Deadweight groaned and pursed her lips in disgust.

Angie scanned the rest of the room. Two other girls waited. One older, probably in her mid-twenties. The other younger, fifteen at the oldest. Funny, how her gaunt, pale, frightened expression fit in among them.

The baby bit her womb again. Harder. She winced. Rose-tinted sweat began to bead on her forehead. Her head began pounding again, this time with the frequency of respiration. The fifteen-year-old approached and tapped her wrist. “What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong. “Wrong...wrong...” She heard the words over and over, in time with the pounding inside her skull. A blurry image formed in front of her. The fifteen-year-old lay spread in front of an older boy. “This is wrong...nooo...it hurts! It’s too big!” she screamed. The boy grinned and huffed atop her. No boy, wait...a man. Not just a man.

“Daddy...stop it...” The image focused. The man withdrew from her bleeding anus and plunged immediately into her vagina.