Misty Rose: Nature
Chapter 36
The next night started off… well… boring. Ferret said he had to get some stuff ready before he could teach me to drive his van, whatever that meant, and October meant it was getting dark early enough that I was awake before Kaitlyn got home from work. Which meant she still had the scooter, so no going anywhere unless I walked, and I didn’t have time for that.
And that’s another thing about being a vampire that sucks. Okay, everyone’s got those times when they have something to do but not right away, so there’s a gap in time where they got to fill it in somehow. Except because I was a vampire, there was a lot of the usual stuff people do that I couldn’t. Make food and eat it? Nope, don’t eat, and actually going for what vampires do eat took longer than I had unless I was going to just jump the first person I saw, which wasn’t an option. Run errands? Also nope because the stuff I needed took longer to get, especially if I was walking there. Couldn’t even screw around doing the waking up thing, coffee and whatever, because vampires go from dead to totally awake. Least I did. That pretty much left cleaning and messing around on my phone, and I really didn’t feel like trying to clean up more of the glitter Kaitlyn always got on everything because she’s obsessed with glittery stuff. So that meant yet another night where the vampire chick had like ten minutes of important stuff to do, and spent the next hour or so just looking at stuff online.
Not that it helped. There’s an awful lot of things online that tends to remind me about how I’m a vampire and can’t do some stuff. Like go out during the daytime. Or have a family, that was pretty much impossible, unless I wanted to be really shitty and make someone else into a vampire. Or be famous. Or a lot of other things. Sort of started feeling like the rest of the world wasn’t real, or, I don’t know, like I was outside looking in at stuff I wasn’t part of. So I could get how vampires would stop thinking about being human anymore, because they wouldn’t feel like they were part of the human world. And if their only social contacts were other vampires, they’d start acting more like vampires. Like forums and stuff online. They’d get their ideas on how to act from other people in the forum, and if that went on long enough, they wouldn’t know how to act except like people in the same forum or whatever. I’ve seen some articles on how that works, and it doesn’t take a lot of brains to see how a group someone belongs to can get really weird if their only social contacts are each other. Especially online. You just got to go to some site you don’t usually see that mostly has people who aren’t like you. And the more fucked up they are, the weirder they get. There’s shit online I don’t think would be a thing if the people doing it had to actually talk face to face with people.
Then again, it might, especially the really fucked up stuff, and vampires are a whole lot of fucked up without having to talk to other vampires at all. At least other vampires would be other people like you, even if they really weren’t. Or something. I don’t know.
Anyway, I spent too long making myself feel bad because of not being human, and I wasn’t in a good mood when Ferret turned up. In a Comcast van, which was a surprise. Didn’t think it was him at first, but it’s kind of hard to mistake Ferret for anyone else. I double checked I had my phone and keys this time and walked around to the passenger door. Before I got in, I looked into the back of the van and, I don’t know, I think I was expecting a bunch of wires and gear and stuff. There was some, but most of the back was a couple of metal benches that’d been bolted in instead. So maybe this wasn’t a real Comcast van, but it sure looked like one outside.
I guess my bad mood was all over my face when I got in, because the first thing Ferret said was, “Hey, Misty. You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorta. Why?”
“You look… down, I guess,” Ferret said. “Sad or depressed or something.”
I just shrugged and looked out the window. Ferret drove the van out of the parking lot by the apartment and headed off down the street. I didn’t have anything to say.
“Kaitlyn not home?” Ferret asked me after a couple blocks.
“No.”
“Oh. Okay,” Ferret said, as if that explained something to him.
“What?” I asked him.
“I just thought that might be why you’re down.”
“Kaitlyn not being home?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would that make me down?”
“Because you two are…” Ferret trailed off and just sort of gestured at me.
“Ugh,” I rolled my eyes. “Not this again.”
“What?” Ferret asked me.
“You asked that before,” I said. “About me and Kaitlyn bein’ an item. We aren’t.”
“No?”
“No. She’s my best friend, not my girlfriend,” I sighed. “Jeez, why can two guys be friends and they aren’t gay, but two girls livin’ together means they’re lesbians?”
“Well, Kaitlyn is bisexual,” Ferret pointed out.
“Yeah, well, I’m not.”
“Being a vampire can change things.”
“You mean how she looks tasty?” I said. “Been tryin’ to ignore that.”
“But you have to admit…” Ferret started. I interrupted him.
“No, I don’t. There’s nothin’ between me and Kaitlyn like that,” I said. “From my side. Her… I dunno, she’s always been a little weird about it. Jokes and whatever. But people can joke around and have it not mean anythin’. Even girls. Okay?”
Ferret held up a hand. “Okay, agreed,” he said. “But it isn’t just that.”
“It’s not?”
“No.” Ferret seemed like he was thinking for a moment. “It’s how… whenever you’re around Kaitlyn, you… well, you might not always be happy, but you always seem more… alive.”
Well, that much was true. Kaitlyn could be annoying as hell, but she helped keep me human. I’ve talked about that a few times already. Even stupid shit like still making me clean the toilet. She… knew I was a vampire, but she… still treated me like me, y’know? Made me… actually do stuff instead of just running away and hiding from things like usual. Even though I complained about her pissing me off, or the glitter, or the jokes, or her giving me shit, or whatever.
“She helps keep me human,” I said eventually. “But that still doesn’t mean we’re a thing.” And that was going to have to be all I said, because I knew Ferret wouldn’t get that my vampire side being all possessive and shit about Kaitlyn was just it being an asshole. He’d probably turn it into another reason why me and Kaitlyn were a thing, or should be a thing, and I didn’t really feel like being shipped right then.
I guess it worked because Ferret just nodded and didn’t say anything for a while. I watched a few blocks go by, then turned around to look into the back at the benches again.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Ferret said. “Fitted everything myself.”
“Mmmhmm,” I said. “Why a Comcast van?”
Ferret grinned at me. “Because nobody sees them,” he said.
“Uh… nobody sees vans?” I asked. “They’re kinda hard to miss.”
“Sure. Black panel vans and white panel vans, anything the CIA or the FBI or the MIB or the criminals use in movies and TV shows. People see those. ISP vans? Not really,” Ferret shrugged. “They’re everywhere, they’re usually parked and empty, and nobody really notices them. Plus, they’re an excuse to haul around a lot of equipment, including ladders.”
I glanced towards the back again. “Equipment for…?” I said.
“Anything,” Ferret grinned again. “Mostly for breaking and entering. Other things as I need them, and most of it is stuff ISP repair vehicles would probably have anyway. Or can be made to look like it. It’s great how much illegal gear can be hidden in a tool belt.”
“Don’t the cops check up on the van?”
“Nope. If it were a city vehicle, they might, but vans like this are commercial vehicles.”
“Okay, but what if they did?”
Ferret grinned at me. “All the plates are copies of actual repair vans.”
All the plates? “You got more than one of these?”
“Oh, yeah. Half a dozen or so, all different ISPs, and I switch plates after each job.”
“Huh,” I said, and I really didn’t have anything else to say. Ferret knew a hell of a lot more about the shady side of things than me, and I was kind of hoping to keep it that way. But he seemed… sort of proud of his vans. And like he wanted to show them off, I guess. So I made the right kind of listening noises for a few minutes while he talked about times he’d been breaking into some place and cops totally ignored one of his vans because it looked like it didn’t matter. And I was listening and all, but I just didn’t have anything to say. I will say, though, that Ferret might be a thief, but at least he wasn’t an outright violent thug like Kaitlyn’s brother Mike. Which reminded me about how maybe Ferret stole the game console he brought over from Mike, but I wasn’t going to ask because I didn’t really care. If Kaitlyn wanted to know, she could ask.
In any case, Ferret’s stories filled in the time until we got to where we were going, which wasn’t actually very far and turned out to be a parking lot. Which looked sort of abandoned or unused. You know, weeds growing in cracks in the asphalt, all the metal things rusty, that sort of stuff. And a bunch of orange traffic cones arranged around the place, which were probably new. Ferret pulled into the parking lot and drove around to one end before he stopped the van.
“What’s with all the cones?” I asked.
“Driver’s training course,” Ferret said.
“Okay, but why?”
“Oh, just because,” Ferret said, and grinned at me. I was getting the feeling that maybe agreeing to drive for him and his friends was going to be a bigger deal than I’d thought.
“Um… okay,” I said, looking at the cones. It didn’t look too bad.
Probably best I don’t go through the rest of the night the long way. It was… well, it’d been a while since I’d driven anything but Kaitlyn’s scooter, and Ferret warned me the van might feel sort of top heavy, but what that actually meant was a lot different than what I’d thought. I knocked over a lot of cones before I started getting a feel for how the van worked. Ferret would go set them back up again, and I’d try again, and he seemed pretty patient about the whole thing, which was good. The major problem was that I wasn’t used to pedals, I guess. Kaitlyn’s scooter didn’t have them. So at first I’d manage to step on the gas instead of the brakes. Didn’t help, but I got over that problem eventually. I was ready to give up right about when he started having me weave around the cones backwards, but Ferret didn’t let me, and… I guess it paid off because by about two in the morning I was doing the course at pretty good speed without knocking anything over. I felt pretty good about that.
Then Ferret moved some of the cones around, and I spent the next two hours knocking most of them over again. Guess he made it harder. But he didn’t seem disappointed in me. Wouldn’t tell me why I was having to do all the practice, though. He dropped me off about an hour before sunrise, and I let myself into our apartment. Kaitlyn was asleep, which was good because she had work the next day. I wound up looking up driver courses online and… can’t say I remembered what Ferret had set up all that well, but some of the ones for police driving looked pretty familiar. But why Ferret would have me learning how to drive like a cop I had no clue. Guess I’d find out.
