A Taste of Hate Read online

  A Taste of Hate

  Rob Cornell

  A Taste of Hate

  The mosque smelled of buttermilk, which reminded me of my grandmother, a memory that caused me nearly as much pain as standing in a place of worship. Memories like the smell of buttermilk hurt because they came from a life I can never go back to. The pain from the mosque, however, was physical, and started the very moment the three gentlemen with the shotguns shoved me through the doors.

  The taste of ash filled my mouth as my insides burned. Not metaphorically. My arteries and organs, though dead for over a hundred years, caught fire whenever I entered a holy place. A weakness of my condition, you see, as I am a vampire.

  But that isn’t why the men with the camouflage ball caps and American flag emblazoned t-shirts attacked me. They were too preoccupied with who they thought I was to realize what I really was.

  I fell to my knees a handful of steps into the mosque. I could smell the smoke pouring from my mouth. One of the men kicked me.

  “Get up.”

  “Ya damn sand nigger,” a second added.

  Since accosting me in front of the mosque, the three of them had hurled more slurs for Arab at me than I had heard in all my life and undeath combined. So strange. While I’d had a dark complexion in life, my vampirism had leeched most the color from my skin. Even with my dark hair, I could not imagine being mistaken for middle-eastern. Yet these gentleman had clearly made up their minds about me.

  The hard, twin eyes of a shotgun barrel pressed against the back of my skull.

  The mosque was dark, empty. Well after dusk. I was surprised it hadn’t been locked, but I suppose that was part of my attackers’ plan.

  “You people think you can come to our country and do whatever you want.” This one’s voice was thick and wet, as if he had a ball of phlegm caught in his throat. “We’ll show you what we do with your kind.”

  “My kind?” I asked. Smoke wisped from between my lips when I spoke. The men didn’t seem to notice.

  “Fucking terrorist motherfucker,” another of the trio growled. These lines sounded practiced, probably from the thousands of times they had fantasized about an opportunity like this. What a shame it would be when they learned of their miscalculation, their fantasy derailed.

  “I am not what you—”

  The shotgun barrel pressed to my head moved away, then swung and clipped my scalp. I fell forward from the impact. A trickle ran down through my hair and along the nape of my neck. Vampires do bleed. They can bleed a lot, in fact. Especially if we have recently fed. In this case, I could not spare much. I had yet to feed that night. I would not last long if they continued to abuse me while in the mosque.

  The answer seemed simple. Get out of the mosque. Outside, these men would not last long. Thus, I formulated a quick and, admittedly, weak ploy, that started with me playing along.

  “Please,” I begged. “I am merely a humble servant to Allah.”

  The plea earned me a jab in the buttocks with the gun barrel. The men’s laughter echoed in the silent mosque. “We don’t cotton to Allah,” the man with the phlegmy voice said. “This here is America. We worship the good Lord Jesus Christ.”

  “Amen,” his brothers intoned.

  Their attempt at humiliation did not burn a fraction as much as my disintegrating insides. The fire in my gut burned hottest. I crawled down the aisle. This brought me closer to the altar, which made the pain inside that much worse, but in the dark I saw the orange glow of an exit sign to the right of the alter. The mosque neighbored a small grocer and I gathered the exit led to the alley between them. It would be the perfect place to dispatch my new friends.

  If I could reach it.

  The negative effects of the holy place stole my natural quickness, made me slow even. The trio of attackers easily followed me up the aisle, they on foot and me on my hands and knees. I received another kick to the ribs. Then something whooshed through the air and a hard edge collided against my spine.

  I heard a crack that reverberated in the mosque’s acoustically designed space.

  “Ho-ly shit,” the man with the highest pitched voice said. “You broke your stock.”

  “You God hating son of a bitch,” Mucus Mouth cried and proceed to pummel me with the steel toe of his boot. “You broke my gun. My granddaddy’s gun.” He kicked and kicked until my ribs finally gave a responding crack of their own.

  If I’d been human, it would have taken half as many strikes to break my ribs. If we hadn’t been in a place of worship, they never would have broken.

  While the cracked ribs, the blow to my spine, and the cut on my scalp did not cause me much pain, the flames consuming my organs carried me to a new level of agony I had never known in all my undeath. I had to reach that exit soon, or I would die.

  “You don’t want to do this,” I said. “I have...friends. They will be here soon.”

  “Bullshit,” Mucus Mouth said. “We been staking this place out for a week. You’re the only one comes this time of night.”

  Strange, since I not only had never set foot in this mosque before—for obvious reasons—I had only arrived to this city the day before. By some odd bend in fate, I must have resembled the man they expected to come here. Or their rage frothed so thickly it had blinded them. I supposed, like horseshoes and hand grenades, as the saying goes, close did count. As long as they believed I was the Muslim they planned on targeting, they could live out their vengeance fantasy without qualm.

  Reasoning with or trying to bluff them would not work. And at this rate, I would never make it to the exit.

  As a vampire, it is seldom a good idea to reveal one’s true nature to a human until the instant before you feed. This keeps the prey from suffering an unnecessary struggle, and the vampire safe from prospective lynch mobs. It is a lot easier to hunt for food if the food doesn’t know the hunter exists.

  Alas, it looked as though I would have to break this general rule for the sake of my survival. I needed to escape the mosque. Therefore, these men needed to realize their mistake.

  After enduring another couple of kicks and a slew of nonsensical slurs, I rolled over and sat up. I let my fangs drop and peeled my lips back to show them off. I widened my eyes, made them glow the deep red color of my demonic soul. My fingers stretched into claws, the nails curled like tiny scythes at each tip. I snarled. Then screeched like an angry bat.

  All three men staggered backward, their eyes bulging in their sockets like cue balls with dilated pupils. Even in the shadows, I could see a dark stain grow in the denim-clad crotch of the man with the high voice as he wet himself. The smell of urine and fear filled the air.

  Mucus Mouth, cradling his granddaddy’s broken shotgun like a dead infant, trembled. The dim light and his five o’ clock shadow couldn’t hide the cherry flush to his cheeks. After his few steps back, he gaped at me, frozen in place.

  The third man looked as frightened as his friends, but he was the only one with the presence of mind to raise his shotgun barrel in my direction. He squeezed off a reactive shot, firing from the hip, but the buckshot struck me square in the chest and thrust me down onto my back. My shirt and a good portion of flesh was shredded. A mist of my own blood rained back down on me, peppering my face.

  The echo of the blast seemed to carry on unnaturally long. Yet it also managed to break the spell of fear over the trio. “Kill it,” Mucus Mouth shrieked, his wet voice rattling in his throat. He swung his broken gun around to bear, the splintered stock pointing toward his belly. He would have been better off attacking me with the spear of remaining stock than shooting, the sharp end making a perfect stake to drive through my heart.

  The fool pulled the trigger instead, a wild shot that missed me, but the kick from the gun drove the p
ointed piece of stock into his gut. He hiccupped in shock. Blood ran from the stab wound, the iron smell of it making my mouth water even while the taste of ash still coated my tongue. He looked down at the damage he’d done to himself, a question in his wide eyes like What have I done?

  I couldn’t help, despite my burning insides, but smile.

  I think that smile frightened the other two men more than my fang-mouthed bat scream. The one that had shot me actually tossed his gun to the floor, spun on his heel, and ran out of the mosque. The one that had wet himself whimpered like a kicked dog, then turned and followed his compatriot, though he held onto his shotgun as if it had fused itself to his hands.

  Mucus Mouth, still staring down at the gun stock stabbed into his tummy, fell onto his ass. A wet wheeze slipped from his mouth on impact. He looked up at me with a frightened wonder. He looked like a child now, caught at something that would get him a good paddling.

  Smoke wafted from my tattered chest wound. I could hear my blood sizzling. And speaking of blood, his smelled delicious. I couldn’t stay another second in the mosque, however, and I didn’t have the strength to drag him outside with me. I would need to feed soon. I had suffered enough damage from both my attackers and the effects of the holy place that I could die if I didn’t receive necessary nourishment.

  I shuffled passed Mucus Mouth without another glance.

  He sputtered something that sounded like a protest, as if he expected me to help him. What an inglorious fool. I followed the aisle back to the front entrance instead of bothering with the side exit so close to the altar. I didn’t anticipate the other men working up the courage to come back and attempt to finish what they started. And they didn’t strike me as the honorable sort of men who would brave a return to recover their injured companion.

  On the way out the door—noticing the lock had been broken—I heard Mucus Mouth cry out, “I’m sorry.” I don’t know if he meant the apology for me, or if he was asking forgiveness from his precious Lord Jesus Christ. I didn’t care.

  Once outside, I felt instantly better. The power of a holy place starts at its threshold. Even the religious symbols on the building’s facade did not hurt me. They gave me a jagged chill much like the sound of nails on slate might, but nothing as serious as the interior burning I had suffered while inside.

  At this point, I should have hurried away. As I said, I much needed to feed to counteract my injuries. While the flames inside me had died, I still felt terrible pain, though. The idea of stalking prey, the expenditure of energy in finding a suitable victim, waiting for the opportune moment, and only then finally springing and sinking my fangs into a throat, all sounded like too much work.

  Besides, I had an idea on how to skip all that trouble.

  I waited in the shadows by the mosque’s front door, cast by the ornate overhang that stretched as far as the sidewalk. These were the same shadows my three attackers had hid within before grabbing me as I had walked by.

  Ten minutes passed before he arrived.

  I was a little shocked by his appearance, which made me hesitate, almost giving him enough time to get into the mosque. He was short, stocky compared to my own lean build. He had a thick beard that hung nearly to his chest, whereas I was clean-shaven. He wore a turban, while nothing adorned my head except for my short-trimmed hair.

  In other words, this man looked nothing like me, yet this was the trio’s originally intended victim.

  The only thing that kept my hesitation from allowing him to slip by was his own hesitation as he noticed the broken lock on the door. He had long enough to make an inquiring hmmm, and then I was on him.

  I grabbed him, I pulled him into the shadows, and I drained him.

  As I strolled away from the mosque with my surface wounds already completely healed—I’d need to do something about my ruined shirt—I shook my head and marveled at the stupid bigotry of those men. How such ignorant hate could continue to exist in this world, I would never understand.

  You might think it strange, that I would hold such an opinion of these men, yet turn around and kill the very person they had meant to terrorize. But that’s just my point. I don’t care who you worship, who you love, what the color of your skin is, where you were born, what sex you are—or which you’d prefer to be. None of that matters.

  I am not prejudiced in any way.

  You all taste the same to me.

  THANK YOU!

  Thank you so much for reading “A Taste of Hate.” I hope you enjoyed the story! If so, you might want to take a look at some of my other titles. One that’s similar to what you just read is Darker Things, the first book in The Lockman Chornicles. The novel follows the exploits of ex-government agent turned paranormal vigilante, Craig Lockman, as he tries to protect his teen daughter from a secret and violent world of supernatural evil. You can find it HERE!

  You can also check out my website for other books and stories that might catch your interest.

  If you know for sure you want more free stories, updates on new releases, behind the scenes looks at my latest titles, and other random bits, sign up for my email list HERE.

  Thanks again for joining me in storyland. See you again soon!

  About the Author

  An accidental nomad, Rob Cornell grew up in suburban Detroit, then spent five years living in Los Angeles before moving to Chicago to receive a BA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College. He has traveled full circle, now living in rural southeast Michigan with his wife, three kids, and dog, Kinsey—named after Sue Grafton’s famous detective. In between moving and writing, he’s worked all manner of odd jobs, including lead singer for an acoustic cover band and a three-day stint as assistant to a movie producer after which he quit because the producer was a nut job.

  For more information and to contact the author, please visit rob-cornell.com.

  Be the first to learn about Rob’s latest releases. Sign up for the New Release Newsletter and never miss out on a new story.

  Books by Rob Cornell

  The Lockman Chronicles

  Darker Things (The Lockman Chronicles #1)

  Dark Legion (The Lockman Chronicles #2)

  Darkest Hour (The Lockman Chronicles #3)

  Darkness Returns (The Lockman Chronicles #4)

  Mysteries and Thrillers

  Red Run

  Last Call (A Ridley Brone Mystery)

  The Hustle (A Ridley Brone Mystery)

  Published by Paradox Publications

  Copyright © 2014 Rob Cornell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design © 2014 Robert Flumignan

  Cover Image © Margaret M Stewart/Dreamstime

  "A Taste of Hate" is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

 

  Rob Cornell, A Taste of Hate

  Thanks for reading the books on GrayCity.Net