Pro Tip for Humans #41: you can either look like a badass, or you can be the badass.

The cherry-red Camaro raced across the desert highway like a bat with its ass lit on fire, a plume of dust rising from the road behind it. The dust served two purposes. One: it made the car look completely badass, and two: it obscured the coming light of dawn that promised to drown the land in the light of a new goddamn day.

I wish I could say that I was watching this scene from a great distance, knowing that something epic was about to occur, but that would not be accurate. Like at all. More like what people call a lie.

Focus now on the muscle car ploughing its way across the landscape, its windows tinted a very illegal shade of dark. If you had any desire to meet any vampires on that morning, you would have had to look no further than that car.

"Almost there Bobbikins! Two minutes and then you're going to BURN!" said the crazed, yet extremely attractive blonde woman who drove the car as aggressively as she could. "I've got a nice spot picked out just for you!"

Beatrice was the kind of woman that this muscle car had been made for. The designer hadn't known it at the time of course, but if pressed he might have described a scene just like this—beautiful blonde woman manhandling his well-designed and loud assemblage of machinery across a desert. He may have anticipated that this woman would be decked out in black from head-to-toe, including the leather gloves on her hands and the leather jacket that fit her curves as if it had been tailored for her, which in fact it had been. He may have also anticipated that she would be an expert driver. What he definitely would have not considered was that this woman was a vampire.

Since she isn't the one telling this story, and because I'm still very pissed off at her, I'm going to lie and say that she isn't that important. The reason I'm still pissed off at her is that at that very moment, I was in the trunk of the car and it was not getting any more comfortable.

"I don't want to burn!" I yelled back, although it was doubtful how much she could hear me over the noise of the engine, then again vampire hearing is pretty damn good. "I don't want to do any of this!"

"Dying is the only way to truly live!" Beatrice yelled back.

"That doesn't make any sense!"

I kicked once again at the closed trunk even though my efforts so far had been futile. I had no idea how long I had been in the trunk, but it wasn't someplace I wanted to stay. Smears and streaks of my blood covered almost every surface in the trunk. It was like a freaking Jackson Pollock painting if he had only had the colour red to work with. Yes, I can see in the dark, one of the handy things about being a vampire. My hands were almost hamburger by that point from constantly hammering on every available surface. When someone is threatening to throw you out at sunrise and set you on fire, you kinda owe it to yourself to avoid that fate with as much energy as possible. The kick worked this time; there came the creak and snap of something metal breaking--

The trunk flew open with almost no effort, and I stared stupidly at the open space for way too long, the cloud of dust rising behind the car painting the scene with a sense of surreal what-the-fuck. I hadn't even had time to really process what had happened and to be honest, I had zero plans beyond getting the damn trunk open.

Over the roaring wind, I somehow heard Beatrice swear.

I didn't wait.

I cursed myself for being an atheist since I didn't have any kind of god to pray to or swear at, and threw myself out of the back of the car.

There is a saying about throwing yourself out of the back of a moving vehicle travelling at what feels to be the speed of light. The saying goes something like this: "Don't do it."

If this were a movie, it would be the exact time they would do a hilarious freeze-frame of me flying through the air. This would be the split-second before gravity noticed that I was doing something that I shouldn't be, but at that moment, you might believe that man could fly. Yes, it is an awkward kind of flying, legs all splayed out behind me, bloody hands bound together with duct-tape, mouth open in a full scream that would inevitably end with a stream of cuss words, their only purpose to illustrate my pain.

In the distance behind me, the car slammed its brakes and skidded to a stop, a cloud of acrid smoke rising from the tires to join the Camaro's dust cloud.

Go ahead and laugh. You know you want to. It's not like you have to deal with the pain of landing and bouncing down the desert road. It's no skin off of your back, but it certainly was several layers off mine. No, that was my particular fate at that moment, that frozen moment never happened because gravity is a bitch and has no sense of chill.

"Fuck!"

Bounce.

"Ow!"

Bounce.

"Shit!"

Roll and bounce.

"Ow!"

Splat.

"RASSHOLE!"

That, of course, was my progress down the road. It may have gone on a little bit longer than that and involved a lot more Bajan swear words I'd picked up from Dad whenever he'd happened to be around, which hadn't been much, but when he had, lots of swearing had been involved. We must've been speeding at well over 140 kilometres per hour and man, that is a lot of rolling and cursing.

I was a mass of scrapes and cuts and bruises, each one stinging and screaming for attention is different ways as I somehow managed to pull myself to my very unsteady feet. My head rang in that familiar "you just got a concussion" way, and my brain was trying to tell me something, but my senses were buried in a thick fog. I think one of my fingers was broken, but it was hard to tell. Something was screaming at me to get moving, don't look back, just get moving and run and for fuck's sake, don't look back—

I looked back.

Striding steadily toward me through the dust and smoke was Beatrice and goddamn if she wasn't the angel of death. The katana that she unsheathed as she walked added to the ensemble in a way that said she knew exactly how cool she looked, but that was Beatrice for you.

"Don't run Bob! Embrace it!"

"Fuck that!" I yelled. "How about we do the complete opposite of that?" Beatrice only laughed and sped up her walk. I tried to implore to her good side. "Let's just go someplace dark and talk about me not dying?"

"Blaze of glory Bob!"

I looked over my shoulder at the horizon where the sun was still promising an eventual appearance and then looked back to Beatrice, realizing that I was tired of running. Or maybe I was just too beat up to run. It had been a long night after all. Either way, it worked out the same: I was fucked.

I watched Beatrice rise into the air, sword held up to strike. It was a beautiful and well-rehearsed jump that sent her flying through the air over the fifty feet that lay between us. Now that I think of it, it was the kind of leap that would have been awesome in a movie, especially with the sword raised like that. From my perspective on the ground, it was utterly terrifying.

Beatrice's fangs were bared in a grin, and I knew she was getting a kick out of the violence she was about to inflict on me. Her brilliant blue vampire eyes focused on my own as she prepared to drive the sword through my heart.

At least I would go out like I tried to live my life: I raised both of my battered and torn middle fingers and flipped her off.

***

Shit.

Almost everything I just told you is a lie. Not the actual story, just more of a "fact-type thing" if you know what I mean. If you ask Beatrice what happened, believe me, her story would be completely different, and it would not even involve a car speeding through a desert! Like seriously? Who tells a story this epic and leaves out a speeding car in the desert?

Fine! Be that way then.

Look, facts don't matter here, only the truth, and the truth is that my story changes every time I tell it. It's not entirely my fault though. I mean it's not like I'm going out of my way to lie. I just end up editing stuff a little bit here and there, you know, so I look more badass. More like a hero. Everybody does it, just in tiny ways. Sometimes it's just about how you totally got the best of that jackass who cut in front of you at Starbucks with the perfectly timed snide comment (even though you only thought of it twenty minutes after the fact). Or maybe the story about how you finally told off Sara and walked out on her (instead of how you begged for her to stay and she left anyway and took the Xbox with her since she's the one who had actually paid for it). How you tell the story of it shapes how everybody looks at you, and you want to see the look on their faces as they imagine themselves in your shoes and think of how they would have done the exact same thing, only they, of course, imagine that they look even more badass.

People are strange that way.

So anyway, sticking to the facts: the desert thing never happened. The truth is, I'm from Toronto, and there are no deserts anywhere around here, at least not unless you drive a few hours away and even then there's still no real desert to speak of. It just doesn't sound so cool when it's the road to the lakeside beach 20 miles out of town that we're talking about. Kinda super-lame if you ask me. Desert equals epic with the lack of anything around and maybe some of that cool wavery-heat thing in the distance. Beach equals obnoxious seagulls and a few houses here and there, definitely not an epic looking wasteland by any means.

So to be clear, no desert: just a beach.

I didn't escape from a car trunk either, although that would have been way more awesome and a lot less embarrassing than what actually did happen, and then there's the whole sordid mess of how I even got to that point at all. That's a whole story in itself, and I can either give you the cliff notes version or get into all of the gritty detail, but nobody's got time for that, right?

Oh, you do?

Of course, you do.

Fine then. I'll try to be as honest as possible, but don't hold me to that. When there's a chance for me to look like a badass, I'm probably going to take that option, so I'm not making too many promises. Just as long as we agree that everything I'm about to tell you is almost the complete truth.

Ready?

############# AUTHOR'S NOTE: ################

Question of the Day: What's your favorite vampire movie? 

The book is now AVAILABLE in Hardcover, Paperback and Ebooks. It's going to live here free on Wattpad, but if you love the story and want to support your awesome author (me), grab a copy from one of the lovely retailers below. 

Amazon - http://bit.ly/Amazon-SIMBAV | iBooks - http://bit.ly/iBooks-SIMBAV

Barnes & Noble - http://bit.ly/BarnesNoble-SIMBAV | Indigo - http://bit.ly/Indigo-SIMBAV

Check out the website: http://www.bobthevampire.com