I’m a Vampire…In Charge of Draculacare (4 page)

His bride, the banshee, had no such problem, since she was on call at any time during the night or day. But since death so often came after dark, the dying often had to do without her services, because it was so hard to find their deathbeds in the pitch-black night.

Her patrons most certainly included the upper-class Irish-Americans who had provided so many generous campaign contributions. They all knew that having a banshee wail for your relatives was about as high class as you could get, and were glad to pay for the privilege…as long as was available.

Putting it bluntly, since so many Undead Americans and their clients now had so little money to spend, the entire economy suffered…including many pitchfork-wavers, who found layoff notices in their pockets, along with the crosses and garlic.

So the public soon turned against the Sunset Shutdown…while protesting even more angrily against the government’s crashing failure to provide Draculacare, which would have given everyone access to the Eternal Care Act.

Clearly, something had to be done. And as the most obvious way of doing it, the public started begging for help from the most famous Undead Transylvanian-American of all…namely… Dracula!

(At the very name of Dracula, we would normally call for a flash of lightning and burst of thunder here. But too many weather forecasters had already decided join the Undead, as a way of maintaining their eternally youthful appearances, so now they could not work at night either. We need hardly add what that had done to 24-hour weather reports, which were now reduced to 12 hours at best).

“Ellen, you are mad!” Dracula told his spouse. “We cannot abandon Draculacare and end the Sunset Shutdown in such a simple way, no matter how many people are pleading for us to do it. Otherwise, we would have tried it long ago.”

“No, we would not,” she answered patiently, between sips of her blood-bank cocktail.

“But it is too simple!” he objected, pulling himself straight up in his anger, thus avoiding his usual slouch. “The Draculacare Web site keeps rejecting my password no matter how many times I tried to change it. I used
Dracula
and
Vampire
and
Vyrdelek
and
Tepes
and even
Vlad Tepes
, and every other version I could remember of my name, followed by numbers up to one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand and nine hundred ninety-nine.

“But always, it informed me that
the password is incorrect
. Some people still say that
I am
…
Dracula
is the world’s most frightening phrase, but it can’t hold a candle to
the password is incorrect
, leaving you locked out of your computer completely.”

In a louder voice, he went on, “The same thing is happening all over the country! No wonder people are waving pitchforks and trying to hunt us down…whenever they are not pleading for me to help them, naturally. Draculacare was named after me in the first place, so they blame me for everything that’s gone wrong with it. That’s why we have all those Secret Service agents running around our house, in the form of black cats. The only thing the public hates any worse than Draculacare is the Sunset Shutdown, which was meant to destroy us but is ruining the whole economy instead. And you think you could save us all in such a simple way.”

Her cheeks would have turned red with anger, if she had not been a vampire herself, with the trademark pale complexion. “It is so simple that no one has tried it…yet it is the most obvious way of curing a computer glitch. I learned that much while I was a teacher, typing out reports all the time. So why not let me just try it?”

In a more seductive tone, she added, “You know that we Vampire Brides can keep our own Sires under the Eternal Care Act…so we have every reason to support it. Besides the fact that the whole country is waving pitchforks, garlic and crosses at you and every other known vampire…except for the ones who wave Stars of David and Crescents instead.”

“Well, all right then,” he muttered. “Just lead the way upstairs.”

Eagerly, she jumped up to do so, as he carried a candle behind her. Those candles had always been a tradition, he knew…but he had reached the point where he was much more accustomed to using batteries, like the ones that kept his computer running…when it felt like running at all.

“It will never work,” he muttered, as she sat down in front of the machine. Without answering, she pushed the button that shut the computer down.

“One chimpanzee-two chimpanzee-three chimpanzee-four chimpanzee—” she murmured, as she counted out ten suspenseful seconds. She would have murmured a prayer, except that she remembered, just in time, that she was not supposed to so.

When the wait was over, she pressed the
on
button again, entered her Sire’s name and asked him what password he wanted to enter after it.

“Just try
vladtepes-666
,” he muttered. “Not that it will…”

Even as he spoke, the program obediently flashed on, revealing a list of Draculacare enrollees, to his stunned surprise. If tears of joy had been able to fall down his thin dark face and into his curling black moustache, they would certainly have done so.

“Ellen!” he whispered. “We have done it! We have saved Draculacare!”

“And now you are truly my Sire!” she exclaimed. He responded by lifting her into his arms and carrying her to his bed. As he eagerly pulled her filmy white gown over her head, she responded by fumbling for his trouser buttons. But he pushed her hands aside, since he was, after all, the Sire.

He was a vampire, too, as he remembered. Even if he no longer drank her blood, he could use his mouth in other ways…the ones he had thought about, when he did not yet have a Sire’s rights to do what he pleased with his Bride.

Since he was her Sire at last, she did not even think of resisting while he ran his tongue around her nipples, leaving her writhing with desire…and then drew it all the way down her belly to her private parts. Soon she was moaning, gasping and crying out with pleasure, as he circled his tongue inside her.

When they reached the height of ecstasy, she lay panting with delight in his arms. At last, however, she managed to whisper…”You are my Sire forever, and I will always try to please you the same way you pleased me!”

Tugging his trousers to his knees, she took his organ into his mouth and sucked just as hard and as long as though she had been…well…sucking his blood. His cry of delight was almost as violent as her own had been.

“If only the whole world knew as much pleasure as we just did,” she sighed into his ear. “Then everyone would take part in Draculacare.”

“And thanks to you, they might very well do it!” he retorted happily.

* * * *

Once the computers were up and running again, the Sunset Shutdown was over. That gave many of their fellow Undead Americans almost as much pleasure as Dracula and Ellen had felt…if not always the same kind.

For Crina, the Leading Undead Realtor, the height of joy was reached when she saw listings flooding in, from vampires who had hesitated to sell their property when they knew they might have to hide there at any moment from the pitchfork-waving mob.

At the same time, she also found plenty of buyers, who rushed to join the Grateful Undead when Draculacare came roaring back to life. That meant looking for dwellings with large dark basements and walls without built-in mirrors, so Crina was quick to oblige them. Just to speed her business along, she offered the dark kiss to the
un
-undead as a bonus, in encouraging sales.

The results were so impressive, she wound up being chosen as Realtor of the Year and a lifetime member of the Million-Dollar Sales Club. Considering how long her lifetime was sure to last, that was quite an honor.

Her former sister-bride Simona was also cashing in, along with her movie-star spouse. Both starred together in
Draculacare
…the docu-drama miniseries based on the entire affair. She even got to play the organ for the background music, thus entitling her to two Emmy nominations, for both Best Actress and Best Musical Score. Tim Johnson also played himself in the movie, thus advancing from model to movie actor.

President O’Neill also benefitted, along with his undead son-in-law, George Zagorsky (D-Calif), his banshee daughter Maeve, his undead bodyguard Yvlenia, and of course the lady he always called his “be-witching bride.” Now he was boasting about them all openly, in every speech he made…and he was called on to make plenty of them, as his standing soared in the polls.

The polling showed the same results when it came to his pet project of Draculacare. Within a month, it went from “Eighty percent opposed, ten percent in favor and ten percent undecided” to the other way around.

As the pollsters pointed out, many of the favorable votes were coming from the wave of new Undead Americans, who were benefiting once again from the Eternal Care Act.

That new spirit of tolerance and understanding also embraced the werewolves, witches, zombies and other supernatural minorities. In this atmosphere, they found it easy to embrace each other…in spirit, anyway.

Privately, many vampires still looked down on zombies, while witches looked down on werewolves, but they all kept their prejudiced feelings to themselves.

As for the children of vampires, like Ellen’s son Luther, they were soon so well accepted that he was allowed to visit his famous stepsire on special occasions, like Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, and the publication anniversary date of
Twilight.

And as for the black tomcats that the First Witch had transformed into Secret Service agents…well, they were glad to be changed back again after the crisis was over. In their guise as human beings, they had gotten pretty hungry for pussy…and the real-life pussies were happy to oblige.

This silly but sexy series started with
I’m Undead and I Vote,
which was inspired by bumper stickers with mottoes like “I’m Pro-Life (or Pro-Chocie) and I Vote.” It had already occurred to me that I was reading about so many vampires in sci-fi fantasy stories, there would be enough of them to elect a president…so that’s just what I had them deciding to do. Since then, the best-selling Extasy series has also featured
I’m a Vampire and I Count, I’m a Vampire at War of Halloween, I’m a Vampire in the Line of Garlic
and
I’m a Vampire for Real.