Hi, I'm Dresden, a 37-year-old queer artist and writer. They/them. I used to reblog a massive mess of things. Now I mostly just post my own content. I tag everything for easy finding/blocking. Pfp/banner are my own art, of my own OCs. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mochakimono
random rant about nostalgia-bait and why it doesn't work on me
anything that tries to tap into "wasn't [decade] great" or "don't you miss being a minor" pretty much instantly fails on me because. like
some of my earliest memories are being rushed to the emergency room and almost dying. yes, memories. plural.
my childhood was the occasional stretch of "okay"-ness and occasional spots of joy in between a non-stop carousel of chronic illness, chronic pain, isolation, poverty, homelessness, forced relocation, malnourishment, abuse, assault, loss, and eventually as a teenager being forced to be the breadwinner at a full-time physical labor job while badly sick and injured
btw, when I say "isolation" I mean being homeless or nearly-homeless on the fringes of the wilderness without any human contact for weeks or months with anyone except my parents or my abusers. and sometimes only one of my parents because we were forcibly separated. due to the poverty.
I have never yearned to return to the past. thinking about it too much just makes me intensely sad or angry.
I still enjoy older media and all that. but I just kind of have to totally compartmentalize it away from any adjacent memories I might have surrounding it. even some of my favorite things in the world are tarnished with people using those things to do harm to me.
I just don't think about it. I have to approach every media fresh like I'm enjoying it for the first time, in a way.
Quick li'l sketch of one of my favorite bits of writing from Survivors. Someday I will get to draw this scene fully rendered in the comic.
I pull his jacket open with my hands, and rip his throat open with my teeth. I stand and lift his body aloft, holding it overhead to pour his spraying blood down my gullet. It splashes over my face, my torso, pools in my cleavage, runs in lines down my limbs. I slam the emptied corpse at my feet, glaring around the room at his lackeys, knowing I look monstrous. I feel monstrous.
Everyone stares. Waiting on my next move, my next words, my next grand performance. Carrie at the prom, the hangman at the gallows. They could keep shooting me until I stop growing back, but how many would I take out first? So now they're just waiting to see if I pull them onto the chopping block instead. I'm the fox in the henhouse, and who's going to grease my chin?
I was loath to volunteer any information. Everything about his demeanor made me think of a cop looming over the driver's side window. I half-expected him to demand to see my license and registration.
"Where were you headed?" he asked.
"South."
"Where south?"
"Somewhere warm before winter hits."
He got the same look that a cop would upon realizing that I was the kind of person who had internalized the advice "don't talk to cops".
[ Index ]
[ Previous ][ Next ]
---
The new-lovers' honeymoon phase passed in a pleasant blur, interrupted by moments of horror and disaster in unpleasant blurs. There was always one or the other urging us along the road again.
Fires were frequent; in some places the power hadn't gone out yet, or was still actively maintained from somewhere, which meant electric wires going down in storms or catching on overgrown trees going up in flames everywhere. Or someone would use a bad propane stove or some expired batteries. Or leave a candle, campfire, or cigarette burning in a bivouac. Or a lightning strike in a dry field. Plenty of ways to start a fire, and no firefighters left to put them out. The horizon always gleamed in this or that direction as another summer blaze tore through another town or pasture. They became less frequent once the weather got wetter, and when there was nothing electric left to shoot a spark.
Zombies were still everywhere, and only grew in number. It always seemed every supposedly perfect bunker or remote town would have the one critical flaw in its security, and boom. Every victim was a new enemy.
Most of the time we decided it wasn't worth trying to hole up and weather the siege. I wasn't immortal, and Weijun wasn't immune. So we traveled on. And on.
Yet it wasn't the hell that the early outbreak had been. It wasn't the suffocating nightmare of New York City.
Between emergencies, there was just us, alone to enjoy ourselves and each other. Wherever we felt like, at any time of day or night. It's easy to get a little frantic, a little rabid about it, to just fall into a happy void of lovemaking every moment you have the opportunity. No jobs, no school, no shows to catch, no traffic to beat or traffic lights to wait for, absolutely nowhere to be at all and nothing left to do until you get to someplace new. When you weren't accountable to anyone but yourself and had no one else around for miles to worry about, well, why not?
The beginning of the end came with the first new group of survivors we encountered.
---
Our van ran out of gas, and we ran out of ways to refuel. Gas stations, it turned out, ran on electricity. We siphoned what we could until we couldn't anymore. Travel speed was less important without any schedule to adhere to; the van was most useful as a form of mobile shelter and means to transport supplies. So we found a set of bike strollers (thankfully, air pumps didn't need electricity) to haul as many supplies as we could.
Our only time crunch was that we felt it was necessary to get as far south as possible before winter, to find some place to hunker down, and possibly move north again for summer. We'd cross that bridge when we came to it.
We wouldn't come to it.
The group found us first, as Weijun and I methodically combed through the shops of a strip mall on the distant outskirts of Philly. Everything was already combed over, with nary any non-perishable supplies left, and perishables had been taken and heaped up inside a Wendy's to contain the miasma.
The others were all on horses. They came from downwind, else I would have smelled them first. Some had guns, some spears, the leader with a rifle with a bayonet mounted makeshift using lots of duct tape.
The group of six called us to halt and put our hands up. We obeyed, standing astride our bicycles. I thought: Great, bandits, just what we need.
The leader spoke with a heavy southern Pennsylvania accent, and was donned with a cowboy hat and a duster jacket. He stared us down with a look of disdain.
"Alright, Cheech and Chong, where's the rest of your group?" he demanded.
Weijun and I shared a knowing look.
Don't react. Don't talk back. It wasn't the first time. It wouldn't be the last.
"We don't have one," I said, "anymore. We're the last ones left."
"What happened to them?"
"The usual. Zombies, marauders, sickness." I was loath to volunteer any information to him. Everything about his demeanor made me think of a cop looming over the driver's side window. I half-expected him to demand to see my license and registration.
"Where were you headed?"
"South."
"Where south?"
"Somewhere warm before winter hits."
He got the same look that a cop would upon realizing that I was the kind of person who had internalized the advice "don't talk to cops".
"Have you got any bites?" the man said.
"No," I said.
"What about your friend?"
"No," I repeated.
"Does he speak any English?"
"Yes," Weijun sighed.
The guns and spears were still leveled at us. Weijun's arms were starting to droop slightly. We didn't dare drop our hands yet.
"Are we free to go?" I asked.
The rider was the one who shared a look with his fellows this time, a contemptuous look. I knew right then, we had been bumped up from a routine stop to being detained.
"Search them," he ordered two of the other riders. Then, to us, "Off your bikes. Now."
We complied, slowly and cautiously, putting down the kickstands and then standing beside the bikes as two cavalry cronies hopped down off their horses. They gave us a pat-down, looked through our luggage, relieved us of our weapons, and rolled up our sleeves and pant legs to look for bites.
"He's got some fresh marks, they look like bite marks," one of them said, moving back quickly from Weijun.
Shit. Of course he did - mine.
"I'm not -" he started to say, and every weapon leveled at him in particular. He sucked in a breath.
"Thought so," said the leader. "Right. You're coming with us. Go on and get on your bikes now and follow us. And don't you think about running - you can't pedal faster than we can ride, and you damn sure can't pedal faster than a bullet."
We were escorted away in the middle of the herd. Weijun was sheet-white with restrained terror.
Our path took us away from the city, past the airport, towards the river and the greenery along the water. We soon came to a broad grassy field patched with smooth ponds, marked with signs denoting historical grounds, and a broad stone wall grown over with moss and grass. Too high to be called a fence, but it didn't seem to be a building proper - and then I saw the sign in the same moment I realized: Fort Mifflin. An actual fort, back from the Revolutionary War. Guards manned the walls. The leader called out a strange phrase, returned in kind with another; pass-phrases obviously.
"What are you going to do with us?" I finally asked.
"You ain't really in a position to be asking questions, Geronimo," he said with the usual contempt. The others with their usual boot-licking smirked in amusement at his endless font of nicknames.
"I'm not -" I stopped and sighed. Not even worth trying to correct him. "I just wanna know if we should start making peace with our gods now. Hopefully you aren't gonna just cap us in the back of the head without any warning. We wanna go with some dignity."
He snorted. "Not unless we need to. I ain't sure if your friend's infected or not, so we're putting you in prison until we know for sure. Either you turn, or you don't."
"And if we don't?"
"We don't just murder people if that's what you're implying," he said, bristling.
"No, no," I said quickly. "But will we be free to go?"
"Go?" he laughed. "We don't tolerate free-rangers picking through the supplies around here. You're one of us now. It's better that way, for all of us."
As we passed through the dark corridor of the fortress's sally port, I didn't feel very much like agreeing.
---
We had crude cots in our shared cell, the old prison building put to use as one once again. I knew that because of the educational lectern we passed just outside. They cuffed us to opposite sides of the room, each by a cuff around an ankle.
"For your protection," their leader said. "Those chains aren't long enough for him to bite you if he turns."
"How long are you holding us?" I asked.
"A week. We'll know by then."
I thought about trying to smooth it over by telling him they were my bite marks - but I wasn't sure what might be worse, revealing that I was a vampire, or revealing that we're lovers. He seemed to be reading me as male, which with people like him was generally the safer way to be seen. Straight, too. I didn't want to implicate myself as female or both of us as gay. Better to just wait and suffer.
Weijun flopped back onto his cot with a weary sigh, apparently having reached the same conclusion.
It was times like these I wished I still had Uncle Chuck in my life. Who better to navigate someone playing sheriff in the apocalypse than someone who was a real defense lawyer before it?
"So what's your name?" I asked.
"Tom, Tom Lincoln," the cowboy said. How pretentious of him, having to repeat his single-syllable name for us.
"Van. This is -"
"Wayne," Weijun cut me off.
Retreating back into the safety of his western name. Neither of us had used it since he told me his real name. It hurt a little - not hurt-my-feelings, but something else. Like a homeless person with a sign when you don't have any cash. Like a cat with a broken tail. An injury, an insult, that I couldn't fix or protect him from.
Tom just gave us a look of incredulity, then shook his head. "I'll send food and water. And if either of you try to escape? I'll shoot you both."
---
Escape wasn't even on our minds. The fort might be old, but the prison was still made of solid brick and stone. The round windows were barred, and too small to fit through besides. Then we'd have to make a run across open ground to one of the two sally ports under the eyes of armed guards on the walls. And then what? Try to get someplace their horses wouldn't catch up to us?
I was laid back on my cot by now, having to simply trust that Tom kept his word, that we'd be imprisoned only a week at most, once he saw we weren't infected.
We weren't expecting our meals to be delivered by a child. A little blonde boy, maybe just shy of puberty, came meekly bearing two bowls of meat and veggies.
"They're hiring younger and younger these days," I joked dryly.
"I'm Jackson." He set the bowls on the floor.
Last name for a first name. Rough.
Weijun retrieved his bowl. Jackson watched us both wide-eyed, as if waiting for something to happen. I reluctantly retrieved mine too.
Fortunately for the illusion, I could technically eat, but it didn't do much for me, in either nutrition or satisfaction. The roasted meat tasted mildly better than the vegetables, but my lack of human appetite made it all tedious cardboard. It was like eating with depression, just shoving matter into a hole. I ate slowly, without energy.
"I'm not that hungry. Can you give my leftovers to my friend?" I said.
"My dad said he doesn't need to eat that much since he's going to turn soon anyway."
"Okay, well, you can eat it then." I set it on the floor. "I just don't want it to go to waste."
The boy picked it up, tried a bite, made a face, and set it down in range of Weijun instead. "There's no salt on it."
"You got salt here?" I asked.
"It's not for prisoners."
Weijun ate as quietly as possible in the echoic chamber, Jackson took the empty bowls, and we resumed our anxious silence on our cots.
---
I wondered sometimes what was the difference was between being somebody's prisoner and being a member of society. I still don't have an answer to that but I'm beginning to realize that not seeing a difference might say a lot more about me than about society.
The fort's village moved on around us, distantly muffled through the stone. Conversation, horses, labor, laughter. I had no clear idea how many there were. At night was the chorus of crickets, including one that made it into the prison and chirped from a corner just outside my reach. I tried. Even the drop of blood in a bug was better than nothing. It just sat there and taunted us all night long.
With morning came breakfast and a glance-over by the change of guard who delivered it, keeping us away at gunpoint while squinting with a flashlight to check Weijun for signs of change. The guard only briefly looked at me, didn't seem to notice the animal shine in my eyes just before my pupils shrank to pin-pricks with the light.
Food and water was regularly brought in, and the buckets provided for chamber pots were daily taken out, all washed in the nearby river and returned. I hoped they washed the bowls further upriver. Jackson shrugged when I asked.
Days went by. My body hurt for real sustenance. The energy it spent just to process useless food only made me hungrier. I stopped eating at all. I couldn't pretend anymore.
My sensitive nose zeroed in on every waft of sweat and CO2, the tell-tale scents of blooded beings, flaring my nostrils the way pizza and cinnamon and caramelizing onions do for humans. I tried not to breathe, an easy thing not to do in normal circumstances, but my hungry body's instincts kept inhaling against my will, trying to goad me to hunt. I tried to keep my nose covered, eventually pleading with a guard to bring me a T-shirt from my bag to wrap over my face. I gave an excuse about the smell of the chamber pots being unbearable. They believed me, and soon I had an old shirt used as a makeshift bandana. It didn't help much.
Weijun looked on with eyes full of worries he couldn't voice.
By the end of the week I was both sluggish and twitchy. Every instinct told me to just hold still and lie in wait until prey came close enough to spring in ambush. My entire body ached down to the bones like a fever. It wasn't like human hunger, it wasn't a clutching throat and a stomachache, it wasn't acid and saliva. It was dry cogs without lubrication. It was a car with three flat tires. It was wading through cold molasses. My whole system was meant to be flush with the fluid that keeps us vampires running, and my reserves were tapped out.
I didn't know if a vampire could starve to death, because no vampire had ever tried. But if I had known I'd be forced into fasting, I would have tried harder to hunt more first.
Jackson came to bring us breakfast. All night, I had laid flat and board-stiff on my cot, arms folded on my chest in a classic vampire pose, eyes staring at the ceiling for signs of juicy moths. My fangs were at full extension; I couldn't retract them. Another reason to be glad I covered my mouth.
"Hey, Jackson," I said without turning my head, "Where do you get the meat?"
"We have chickens."
I didn't say more, because then Tom Lincoln strutted in like the black hat into the saloon.
"So, you lasted a week. I never heard of nobody lasting longer than that, so this puts me in a pickle, because either it means the infection can sit than that, or something else is going on here."
All I could think about was sinking my teeth into a chicken. I just needed to be seen as healthy long enough to get the shackle off my ankle. Just that long and I could feed again. Just a little longer.
"I have no symptoms," Weijun said. "And the marks are healing."
"So you might just be immune," Tom mused.
A beat of silence. Weijun cleared his throat. "I don't know."
"Hell." Tom paced. "But you're sure it was a zombie that bit you?"
I couldn't help but turn my head to let my eyes follow Tom's movements, just my eyes, every muscle tensing when he crossed closest to my cot. He was pure silhouette against the white sunlight coming in the single doorway. It was hard for me to tell, but the light seemed even brighter now. I think my pupils were dilated. Just a little longer.
"It was a lover," Weijun said after a pause. I could smell his flush without looking.
Tom let out an approving laugh and waved over a guard to unshackle us. My eyes follow the motions. I don't trust myself to move yet.
"I'll give you both a day to rest and eat something proper," Tom said, "then tomorrow we'll figure out where to put you to work."
"I can help with butchering livestock," I said quickly. "I used to work in an abattoir."
"That so? Sure thing then."
"I can start right away. I'm restless."
He shrugged. "Jackson, show him to the chickens."
I rose to follow. The boy led me through the fort. Colonial-era buildings stood around, some wood, some brick, each with its own lectern in front. The place was mostly green, and the green was filled with crops wherever practical, mostly heavy and fruiting. Men and women stared in passing. Lookouts sat on the points of the walls in lawn chairs sheltered by umbrellas. It was all so verdant, lively, and safe.
Jackson was pointing out this or that building to me, but I couldn't focus on his words. Off in a shady corner was the chicken pen, and I could smell the butchering station somewhere nearby.
"Right, I'm going to butcher a chicken now, you don't want to watch," I said, quickening my pace.
He kept up with me. "We keep the feathers."
"I'll keep the feathers."
"And the guts."
"And the guts."
I nimbly vaulted the wire-mesh fence, sending startled chickens off to the corners. I crouched low and approached slowly. They clucked nervously, waffling back and forth, uncertain how to respond to me. I was too slow to see as a full threat, too unfamiliar to trust. Then I took the last comfortable step and they tried to scatter again, but by now this meant rushing past at arm's length, and in that rush I snatched one. It kicked and wriggled as I clutched its soft, warm body securely to my chest, nimbly vaulting the fence right back over.
Jackson, unfortunately, was still there, watching with those big fish-pale eyes of his.
"Don't watch," I repeated as I strode past him.
"It's okay. I've seen a lot of blood and guts."
"Well, then, this won't be that interesting. Why don't you go see what Wei- Wayne is up to?"
He kept following me. "Why didn't you eat anything?"
I side-eyed him from under my shades. "I lost my appetite."
"I thought people died when they didn't eat."
"A person can live a long time without eating." I was getting worried about my prospects here, if they'd be tracking my eating habits, or lack thereof.
We arrived at the butchering station. By now the chicken had calmed, thankfully. Frightened prey makes for a sour taste. Not that I could afford to be picky right now anyway.
"Are you sick?" the boy asked.
"I'm hungry," I said. "And I don't like being watched while I work." After a moment, I added softly, "Please."
He relented wordlessly and sulked away at last. I waited while petting the chicken, calming it further, and after a painful minute I brought it to my face, pulled away the bandana-shirt, and drank. God, it was ambrosia like morphine the way it washed the pain away. It didn't cure me completely but it took the edge off enough to think straight again and keep my fangs in for now.
Back at the abattoir, I was allowed to take home buckets of blood after my shift, and I suspected I wasn't the first vampire to think of it due to the dull non-surprise the managers reacted with to that request. Back at at the abattoir though we had all the latest powered technology to assist with the butchering process, something we lacked here at Fort Mifflin. Oh well. Hand-plucking it would be.
Every time you killed something, you had to do it at a distance in your brain. At least I did. In normal times I couldn't imagine hurting an animal. I had to shut my brain off every time I did it or I'd just be a shaking, crying mess. Like the first time I had to slaughter a cow. A pig. A fish. A zombie.
I wasn't at a point where I could hurt a living human yet, not really. Yet. But we already know how that goes, eh? Long after all of this, long after I lose Weijun, my afterlife in the apocalypse has chipped away at me, forced me to reconcile between needs and wants, made me compartmentalize more and more. Years and miles from Fort Mifflin, I will be theatrically drenched in Mike's blood, turning my body into the whole killing room floor, bolt gun, and blade.
I don't want to think about what I'd think about myself, if the Van then knew what the Van now would be like. If human me knew how I became a vampire. If child me knew anything about me at all.
No version of me really thought I was going to live another year anyway, at any age. I hate to think of the version of me I'll be a year from now.
I hummed quietly to occupy myself as I worked. I was so disconnected from my surroundings that I hadn't noticed Jackson never got that far away from me in the first place.
Cat skull embroidered with pale green floss on black fabric.
Pattern drawn referenced from photograph by Coluberssymbol on the Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Felis_catus_gaping_skull_and_mandible.jpg
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I wanted to do a proper embroidery shoutout once I had the correct tools and supplies, as a sort of make-up work for my first pass years ago. Ergo, this shoutout includes both present and past patrons, even those who aren't patrons anymore but were at the time.
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl