Halloween Drabble: vampire + locked in

The voting for the first drabble is officially closed! With 7 votes, “locked in” was a clear winner, and “vampire“ was tied at 6 votes with “there was only one bed.”  I decided vampire fit better.

Halloween Drabble 1

“You went to bury it, and it was gone?”

Aiko felt her eyebrows shoot up.

The innkeeper gave her conversation partner a despairing look. “Someone took it,” she said. “It’s terrible, but there’s nothing supernatural there.”

“No, no,” the old man disagreed. “It was in the coffin. The coffin was nailed shut. The downpour started, and the damn thing got hit by lightning. By the time the storm cleared up, the body was gone.”

Aiko mulled that over for a moment. “That’s pretty cool,” she said honestly. “But doesn’t that mean you all went inside and left the body in the rain?” She squinted at the man on the barstool next to her.

He hunched his shoulders guiltily. “The rain was really coming down,” he said gruffly.

“And it wasn’t a friend of ours,” added another man. Then he blinked at Aiko, a woman from out of town, and gave her a vaguely apologetic smile with his eyes creased nearly closed.

“I get it,” said Aiko, who was both far more cavalier with corpses and better at disposing of them than the average farmer. “I just want to know where it went.” She leaned back on her stool. “Theoretically it could have been stolen for parts, yeah, but there are ways to reanimate corpses.”

“There are not,” the bartender said, scandalized.

Aiko, a necromancer politician, decided it was time to be more of a politician and less of an admitted necromancer. She shrugged. “I believe it,” she said, thinking of all the would-be-corpses she had sent off into the world, confused and alone.

The door slammed shut.

She swiveled to look, because she hadn’t heard the door open. Her eyebrows shot straight up.

A dead man was in the dark doorway with his arms extended straight out. His expression was cold and hard. He was wearing extremely weird and formal looking clothing that she didn’t recognize, but instantly knew was ceremonial.

“Is that the guy?” Aiko asked, pointing at the corpse with a thumb.

Everyone in the room screamed. The bar broke out into panic. The dead man’s face lurched into a smile and then he lunged into the crowd. Someone hit him with a stool and sent the body flying back.

It got up, undeterred.

“It’s locked,” someone shrieked.

Aiko didn’t know what door they were talking about, but all of a sudden everyone in the bar was moving towards the lady’s bathroom. She got caught up in the crowd and excitement and found herself helping barricade the door shut.

“What is it?” She asked, passing a trash can to put up against the door.

“Vampire,” someone babbled back. “A Jiangshi, it wants our life energy.”

“A chakra vampire?” Aiko repeated. She made a face. “...sounds like Kisame, actually.”

The man next to her gave her a stare of blank incomprehension.

“Not Kisame,” she self-corrected. “His sword. Samehada.”

“A sword has a Samehada?” Her neighbor repeated.

“No, the sword’s name-“

She was cut off by a violent pounding on the door. It shook.

Everyone inside screamed. Someone began hitting the window.

Aiko eyed it. ‘There’s no way an adult is getting their shoulders through that window,’ she judged. She cast a disapproving look at the bartender. ‘There’s no way that this is fire safe. What are these people playing at?’

“We’re going to die,” wailed the barkeep.

“Well, maybe if you were up to code,” Aiko said snippily. She couldn’t help herself.

The door heaved again and this time it splintered.

“We need something else,” a man shouted. “Is there anything else?”

“Oh.” Aiko stood. She surveyed the room. The trash cans were already piled up against the door, and a few people were leaning against it with all of their weight. “Hmm.”

There wasn’t much. She pushed her way past someone to step into a stall and kicked through the bottom of the toilet. Porcelain shattered, and everyone screamed again.

Aiko sighed. She broke the metal pipe connecting the toilet to the wall and hauled it out to prop it against the door. The civilians watched her with wild eyes. “Want more?” She asked.

Water began seeping onto the tiles.

No one answered her.

“Do those things die again?” She asked, rubbing at her head. She’d forgotten her drink at the bar.

Someone cleared their throat. “I… a priest, maybe?” He ventured. “It’s an unholy thing, so…”

Aiko pursed her lips. She was an abomination that couldn’t die and was occasionally piloted by a resentful god. That was probably about as good as being a priest, right?

“I’ll just hit it really hard,” she decided. “That usually works.” She used hiraishin to move to the other side of the door.

The vampire barged into the door again. It was eerily silent, with no huffing or puffing.

There was a renewed round of civilian screaming from inside the bathroom. Water began leaking out from underneath the door.

Aiko snuck a sip of her shochu and then clapped her hands. “Hello, junior,” she said. She picked up the whole bottle, because no one was watching.

The vampire turned to look at her.

She pursed her lips. “Begone,” she said, imbuing power into her voice.

It sprinted straight at her, arms out to grab.

Aiko took a sidestep and used the bottom of her shochu to hit it in the head. It flew sideways and immediately struggled to get up.

“Scat,” she repeated, annoyed this time. She took another sip and put down the bottle. “I am banishing you.”

It shuddered.

“Go home!” Aiko barked, feeling her throat rasp with an echo of the death God’s voice.

The vampire fell down, limp.

She delicately kicked the corpse to check it was really gone before she called out that everything was fine.

No one answered from inside the bathroom, but she could hear splashing.

“I’m going back to my room,” Aiko called, picking up both her glass and the bottle. “Have a good night, everybody.”