The Vampire Will: Primal Skies: An Urban Romp in the Vampire Midwest, #1

By Kim Smeltzer

Will Foley is having the worst day of his life.

It was supposed to be an ordinary road trip.  See a few Indiana sights, do a couple of live interviews for his podcast, meet some interesting people, come home to his wife Helen and podcast partner Iain with stories to tell.

Instead, he's found himself the victim of a psychotic vampire, embroiled in a 400-year-old curse, forced to trust a strange woman he just met, and thrust into a life-and-death struggle that may mean he'll never see his wife again.

Worst. Road trip. Ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Smeltzer
• Release date: Sep 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386210313

Book preview

If you come to a fork in the road, take it. –Yogi Berra

There's more than corn in Indiana. –Indiana Beach commercial

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WILL WAS UTTERLY EXHAUSTED when he met his second vampire of the evening.

He'd spent the day in Indiana pursuing with childlike hopefulness that elusive golden interview that everyone in any kind of media hopes for: that career-clincher that you only hear about on 60 Minutes or that eventually gets turned into a made-for-TV movie.

Their podcast was doing fine on its own, of course: Edgar Allan Poe was a treasure trove of opportunities for interpretation, discussion, and, yes, humorous observation.  Will and his buddy Iain had always had enormous fun with the West Coast Poe Cast, had gotten to meet some amazing people, and occasionally learned something in the process.  But there could always be just one more.  One more guest reader, one more interview, one more opinion.  He hoped it never stopped.

The two interviews today had seemed promising at first.  He'd agreed to come out here only because his lovely wife Helen was out of town, it had been ages since he’d taken a nice road trip, and Iain was in Green Bay pursuing an interview with a self-proclaimed vampire.  His two weren't so glamorous, but they'd seemed interesting enough, and they deserved a turn.  And they were only half an hour's drive apart, so it was like killing two birds with one stone.

The first had been a complete bust.  A Goth kid who, once he got Will to sit down with him, started insisting his religion originated in The Time Before Time with the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred who in his madness authored the ancient and fearsome text, the dreaded Necronomicon. 

When Will had tried to explain patiently that the Necronomicon was entirely made up for the H.P. Lovecraft story universe, and was not in fact thousands of years old, the kid had gotten pissed off, started yelling unintelligibly, and hurled his store-bought copy of the Necronomicon at him.  Will had hurriedly gathered up what little equipment he'd had and gladly escaped out the door.

So, the first interview was down the drain... the first half of his trip was all for naught.  Iain would laugh his head off when he heard about this.

The second one, though... that one was much more interesting.

After that first nightmare, he'd almost chucked it all and headed back home.  But after he'd driven the countryside for a while, and gotten his blood pressure back under control, Will decided he might as well give the second one a shot.  The country out here was really nice, he decided, and it lifted his spirits as he drove.  And he had to have something worthwhile to bring home to Helen.  So, what the hell.  Onward.

It was late spring in northern Indiana and was getting hotter out.  As he drove he passed fields of crops (probably corn, he'd thought maliciously) just peeking out of the ground, saw tractors making their slow, noisy way across fields trailing attachments whose function he couldn't even guess, saw cows and horses munching their feed lazily as they watched him driving by with dull, lifeless eyes. 

It all formed a very strange but somehow familiar image in his mind.  It wasn't like the two-dollar paintings you found at flea markets with the smiling Amish farmers working cheerfully at their fields or tending their cattle, or even the Dust Bowl-era photos of miserable, starving farm families in worn clothes and dirt on their faces but hope in their eyes.

No, this was somehow different from all that.  There was something here in these fields, he thought, something he couldn't put his finger on.  No matter that the farming process had been largely mechanized in this day and age.  Never mind that huge machines dominated the fields now, tilled the soil, watered the crops, and finally stole them from the field.  There was something here that surpassed that somehow.  Something ancient... something that got lost somewhere between the field and the dinner table.  There were thousands of years of tradition out here. How many backs had been broken on these fields?  How many moons had shone down on farmers planting according to moon sign?  How much sweat had watered