Going to Dred
All she had to do was think about him. It wasn’t instantly, but within a few hours, the phone would ring. It was as easy as that to contact him.
“I fucked up,” she said when he called her. “I’m sorry, I fucked up, and I want to leave here. What do I do to be with you?”
“You really want to be with me?” He asked in delighted disbelief. “I’ve been waiting so long for you to say that.”
“Yes,” she sobbed, “but how do I get out of here? I have all my stuff here. I don’t know what to do.”
“You know that your landlord is my cousin, right?” Dred inquired with a slyness to his voice. “She’ll hold onto whatever stuff you don’t want to bring with you, and I’ll make sure that nothing happens to it until we have time to get it later. Just pack a bag, two at the most, and I’ll send you a ticket.”
“What about my cats?” I sniffled back a wad of snot. “They’re my babies, you know.”
“Have you seen how many cats my cousin has at her house? Don’t worry about them; they’ll be taken care of. She loves cats and would not let anything happen to them, trust me.”
“So that’s it?” Black Widow tok a long sigh and contemplated, “it’s that easy? All I have to do is pack?”
“How soon you want to leave? Tomorrow? Is that soon enough?”
“I guess that’s fine,” Black Widow laughed. “So I’m going to come out there and join up with you to make some quick cash? What is it that I’ll be doing?”
“Within a few weeks we should make a few thousand dollars, enough to get us a place and get us started. I’m thinking maybe like Hollywood, Florida, not California. It’s not real expensive, but it’s close to the ocean, and you can probably do something here like the rope wall or whatever you want, really, Princess.”
“Make whatever arrangements you have to make,” Black Widow resigned. “Just let me know where I have to be and when. All I care is that my cats are taken care of, and I don’t want to be away from them for too long.”
“Vamptasia is here with me, too, now that he had all that commotion with his girl and all. He’ll be excited you’re coming, too. It’ll be great, I swear; you’ll love it out here.”
“I know it’s a good place for a vampire,” Black Widow gnawed on the side of her fingernail. “I’ll make due. Just give me a call when you know more, and I’ll go pack.”
“I love you,” Dred said, excited as a little school girl. “I’m so excited to actually be with you. Don’t worry, if anyone give you any problems, I’ll send some boys to straighten things out, you just go pack, and I’ll talk to you soon.”
I hung up the phone and sauntered inside to my empty apartment. My cats greeted me, and as I swirled around the house, I tried to explain to them that I was going away for a while, that it would not be long that we would be parted. “Mommy has to go on a trip to see Dred, then we’ll come back and get you.”
Just the essentials were grabbed. A hoodie, three pairs of jeans, a couple pairs of shorts, a week’s worth of bras, underwear and socks, a couple notebooks, three pairs of shoes, a handful of pens, my knife and my jackets. This was going to be a trip of elated outlandish survival.
Traveling via bus was not exactly ideal, but it worked, getting me to where I needed to be. Quick stops and transferring points even allowed me a few fresh victims for snacks. I forgot the joys of going from state to state in a blink of an eye, being a careless as you wanted, because you’d be gone before anyone knew what happened.
By the time I got to the Dark Carnival, I had a crew waiting to greet me: Vamptasia, Johnny Quest, Hause, Kentucky, Willy and Dred, along with a few others I had met while traveling on Ozzfest, those in the Village of the Damned controlling all the rides and minor amusements, such as the headless whore. Welcomed in as always, I was offered pot, blood and other specialty head trips, making my vacation one of a true mind trip. Being one of the few girls brave enough to try carnival life, the carnies found me as a rare delicacy.
The first game I was put in control of was the rope ladder. The point of the game was to climb to the top of the rope without having it flip over on you and knock you off. If you won, you got a huge gorilla that was really too big to be carried.
Cat-like reflexes and balance made me able to show humans how simple it was to scale the rope ladder, causing me to laugh in their face each time they fell. “But look, I can do it, and I’m a girl. You wouldn’t really let a girl show you up, now would you?”
With my glowing long blonde hair, I stood apart from the group, and many came to play my game just to have the chance to flirt with me. I’d bat my eyelashes at them and lure them into the magic numbers, getting them to spend over a hundred dollars before they even knew what had happened. Putting 20% of my take in my pocket before handing the rest in to the guy who does pick-up, the more money was better for all.
It’s an unspoken rule that carnies can stash away about 20% of the draw. You don’t want to ever get caught doing this, but the bosses rather expect it from you, not believe those who actually never touch the money and play it all honestly. If you don’t tuck away that little something extra, it’ll be your loss in the end anyhow, because the boss is rarely ever honest with you in the first place.
The joy of being on the carnival is that you can get as fucked up as you want; there’s not too many other professions out there that expect for you to be fucked up on the job, so long as it doesn’t hurt your work performance. I could be as outlandish as I wanted, cuss at little kids and call their moms whores. Carnies are supposed to act like that.
Go ahead and tell my boss, if you can find him when he’s not passed out drunk or smoking something with some trailer trash ho. What’ll he do? Yell at me in front of you and then hand me a joint after finding out how much money I raked in for him?
Feelin’ hungry? I could take a quick break just about any time I wanted by hollerin’ over to the tweaked out werewolf working the pinball next to me, “hey, watch my joint.” I’d disappear into the crowd, lock eyes with some dorky loser, pull him aside, bite the shit out of him and leave him dazed and confused as to what just took place.
Dred and I were well respected, so carnies loved to chill out with us after work. There’d be stupid humans, void of regular life, who would come travel with us, offering their blood to anyone in hopes of escaping their pathetic lives. It was all one big game, a traveling carnival, quite addicting, really.
In a heartbeat, Dred could have boys summoned, regular werewolves and vampires with an irregular taste for carnage. People feared that, and they respected how he cared for me, giving anything I had a whim for at a given moment. Life was both peaceful and what you made it; carnivals are a place of excitement and fun, especially when seeing how many bodies one can leave from one town to the next.
At night, Dred and I would curl up in bed, making music. He’d strum his guitar, and I’d hum along. An audience would gather outside of our bus, just to hear our nightly rendition.
When it was time and enough money was gathered, after a few weeks of carnival life, we summoned the boys to gather my stuff and my cats. Finding a cute little bungalow in Hollywood, we often visited the Florida ocean, usually swimming daily and nightly. Having our former Florida connections, we fit in nicely with the Lauderdale and Miami scenery, making money by playing covers and creating jewelry.
One of his brother’s connects from New York even gave us a record deal as a wedding present, allowing us go record an album and even bring my cats along on tour. It was a fine life, which almost allowed me to slip into peaceful oblivion… that is until Dred was dead. That’s the problem with marrying someone nearly twenty years older than you; time’ll separate you.
By that time, we had enough of a savings for me to survive on, but the pain lingered inside of me, a pain that the blood of so many lives could not cure. Still, I could not regret my moments of sheltered joy and protectiveness. It was simply the timing that made my fate, making me a Black Widow.
THE END
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