Another town. Another road trip. Niles Gule, resident vampire of Baltimore, watched the peaceful Virginia countryside swirl past the car window in a blur. With fall settling over the East Coast, the sky glowed a somber crimson as early as five o’clock in the evening. It cast a shimmer over the young deciduous forest that huddled near the berm like a protective mother and the occasional open meadow where wildflowers bloomed. Between the trees spangled lights from enormous houses set well back from the road on private lots guarded by walls and fences.
Niles and his partner, Mariella Cruz, had driven south from the city on the bay, motored around Washington DC and now puttered westward through rolling woodlands on a curving, picturesque two-lane road. Their destination of Clifton, Virginia lay somewhere close by where they would meet with a witness to a murder. For once, Cruz was coasting along at a tame fifty-five, rather than her usual blistering eighty plus because, she said, the view was worth the slower pace.
Indeed, Niles thought watching yet another mansion slide behind them, the view was enjoyable, if a bit redundant.
“Why do people build huge houses like this in the middle of nowhere?” he asked idly to pass the time.
“It’s not the middle of nowhere.” Cruz shot him a look from her luminous dark eyes. “We’re less than an hour outside of Washington. All those politicos and their money? They hide here, in these woods.” She waved a finger at a two-story Tudor behemoth complete with turret. “I’ll bet these belong to lobbyists or senators.”
“Our tax dollars at work,” Niles sighed. “Not that I pay taxes.”
Cruz swatted him.
“Still,” the vampire mused, “why such ridiculous overconsumption? It’s obscene.”
Cruz snorted a laugh. “That’s the point. To show which man has the bigger… well… you know.”
Niles lifted a brow but said nothing.
At his look, Cruz gazed at him archly. “Don’t vampire men one up each other that way?”
“What way?”
He earned himself a growl. “Don’t they get out the measuring stick to determine who’s the bigger man?”
Niles belched a laugh. “Good Lord, no! Firstly, our women hold all the power, sexually. Us poor males just sigh and hope a woman sets her sights on us. Secondly, if two men do face off, it’s fangs and talons. Only one walks away from the fight alive.”
“I guess the measuring stick is more civilized then,” Cruz quipped. “Who knew?” She gazed out as another mansion slid past. “I’d give my right eye to own one of these!”
She gazed appreciably at a rambling monster of French Provincial design with ten dormers four garages and a lively fountain in the front yard.
She sighed. “When you live seven people crammed into a tiny bungalow, you dream of places like these. I’ll bet they all have swimming pools. In ground!”
The vampire’s pale lips curled into the beginnings of a smile. “I would imagine they do.”
He considered his partner. Cruz had grown up the daughter of immigrants from Mexico. Her father had abandoned ship after dropping six children on his wife, leaving the poor woman who barely spoke English to fend for herself and her brood alone. Cruz seldom talked of dear ole dad, so Niles didn’t know why he’d left or where he’d gone, but the occasional snipe about drinking led him to believe Senor Cruz suffered from alcoholism. Having a less than tender relationship with his own sire, Niles knew when to leave well enough alone.
Cruz’s curse drew him from his reverie.
“Now what?” he sighed. When Cruz cursed while driving, it usually meant she’d hit someone or something. Not that he’d felt a collision.
She slammed on the brakes and sat staring at a sign. No outlet.
“I guess we’re lost,” he mused.
With a growl, Cruz punched at her GPS unit. “It says the road continues through!”
“The sign says it doesn’t.”
Cruz put her little Fiat back in gear. “Who are you going to believe? The internet or your lying eyes?”
Niles shrugged.
With a determination even a charging herd of buffalo couldn’t quell, Cruz forged ahead on the supposedly dead end through way. The road dropped from a smooth two-lane road to an unmarked country byway. They plunged deeper into forest. The houses thinned out.
About a mile up the road, Cruz slammed to a stop a second time. A narrow railroad overpass spanned the road. A flood must have consumed it at some point because a pile of forest debris clogged the tunnel, closing it to traffic.
“Thus the sign,” Niles murmured.
Cruz huffed. “Don’t people around here believe in maintenance?”
Niles considered the darkening woods whispering in the falling darkness. “I suspect the locals are thrilled the road is closed. Less traffic to disturb their vaunted tranquility.”
Cruz sat tapping her fingers on the steering wheel while she pondered the conundrum. With an annoyed snort, she poked at the GPS unit to find an alternate route. Niles checked his cellphone for messages.
A movement outside the window drew the vampire’s eye. A figure loomed out of the woods and charged for the small car. For two breaths, Niles struggled to comprehend the vision because the individual appeared to be wearing some sort of strange, all-encompassing coverall, like a haz-mat suit. The person raged at them. Niles yelped when he spied the small hatchet the individual wielded in his hands.
“You’re on private property!” the man yelled. “I have your tag number!”
Cruz tore her eyes from her GPS just in time to see the hatchet slam into the passenger side window. Glass exploded. Niles threw his hand up to protect his face and eyes as shards pelted him, landing in a shimmering pool in his lap. Cruz yelled.
“You are trespassing,” their attacker growled. “Get off my land or I’ll chop off your head!”
“Shit!” Cruz swore. She threw Fifi into reverse and tore backwards without paying attention to where she was going.
The man swung his axe again, hitting Niles in the shoulder but not doing any damage. Niles grasped the hatchet, dug his talons into it and hung on, wrenching it from the assailant as Cruz raced backwards up the lane. When she lost control, Fifi spun out. Cruz didn’t hesitate, she slammed into drive and shoved her foot to the floor. Fifi gamely responded by zipping back the way they’d come.
After they’d put a half mile behind them, Cruz pulled over and sat panting and staring at the woods silhouetted by her headlights.
“Well that was embarrassing,” she muttered. “Two police detectives running from a nutcase in the woods. Like we aren’t armed.”
Niles considered. He carried a silver knife that he used to defend against vampires but was otherwise unarmed. Cruz always carried her service pistol. He supposed they could have arrested the man.
“He startled both of us,” he said to soothe his agitated partner. “Came at us too fast for us to react.”
“Shame on me,” Cruz complained. “I’m supposed to have a calmer head.”
“Do you want to go back and find him?” Niles asked, looking behind them.
“No!”
Niles hefted the hatchet. “I’ve got his axe.”
Cruz gave Niles the stink eye. “One, I doubt our miscreant hung around after we took off with his axe. Two, I’m not wandering around strange woods at night looking for a dude in a bunny suit.”
“Bunny suit? Is that what it was?”
Cruz shrugged. “Looked like it to me. I thought I saw two long ears atop his head.”
Niles frowned. “I thought it looked like a capirote.”
“A what?”
“A capirote. One of those conical head pieces that Klansmen wear.”
Cruz threw her hands in the air. “Oh great! So we’ve been attacked by a Klansman with a hatchet.”
“Not saying he was, or he wasn’t,” Niles replied. “Just that’s what it looked like to me.”
Cruz sat tapping the steering wheel. “What should we do? Report it to the police?”
“That would be the smart thing to do.” Niles’ eyes swept the woods, seeking… what? A man in a bunny suit? “Let the local gendarmerie know they’d got a nut on the loose.”
“I don’t think they’d believe us.”
Niles held up the hatchet.
Cruz snorted. “Still don’t think they’d believe us.”
“Ok then. What?”
With hands that had steadied, Cruz put the car back into gear and puttered back the way they’d come.
“We find Clifton, interview our witness and get the heck out of Dodge.”
Niles brushed the glass from his suit while he studied the hatchet. A chill wind tore through the broken window, tussling his short, corn-colored hair.
“We sure encounter some strange stuff,” he murmured.
Cruz nodded. “Yep, we sure do!”
© 2021 Newmin
Niles comments: I investigated the incident further upon our return to Baltimore. Turns out the area is rife with stories of the Bunny Man of Virginia. Most of the stories occur around the Colchester Overpass, a Southern Railway line spanning Colchester Road near Clifton. In fact, the overpass is sometimes referred to as Bunny Man Bridge. Two sightings of the Bunny Man were recorded by police in the 1970s. The Fairfax County Police opened investigations into both incidents but those were closed for lack of evidence. Eventually, over 50 people contacted the police with claims of seeing the Bunny Man. An article in the Washington Post even reported that the Bunny Man had eaten a man’s runaway cat. Who he was or what he wanted has never been solved. He remains a mysterious figure to this day. Lest you think I make this stuff up, here’s a photo of the actual hatchet wielded by the Bunny Man.