Return of the Vampire

Return of the Vampire

‘Turn on Muvi TV,’ said Sara, ‘the news must have already started.’

As the picture gradually appeared on the screen of our ancient Supersonic we were presented with yet another sombre scene on the airport tarmac. Eight smartly uniformed soldiers stood around a huge polished wooden coffin. Surrounding the coffin was a crowd of mourners, crying and wailing, some rolling on the ground in grief.

‘As usual,’ said Sara, ‘all the rumours were right, and the government statements were all lies. Telling us he went for medical review!’

‘Perhaps they needed a coroner to review the corpse, to make doubly sure it was dead,’ I suggested.

But as we were talking the lid of the coffin suddenly flew open, and the crowd retreated, screaming in terror. The corpse sat up, revealing the infamous and frightening figure of the President of Vice, the infamous Redlip Dracula, with blood dripping down his red lips. Dracula carefully stepped out, closed the lid, and then stood on the coffin to address the crowd, which now came inching back towards him, transfixed by this eerie resurrection.

‘He looks better than I’ve seen him for years,’ I said.

‘Maybe the undertaker applied some make-up,’ suggested Sara.

‘My fellow zombies of Zombia,’ he began, as the crowd cheered, ‘while I was away there was an ugly rumour that I was dead!’

‘Ayi! Ayi!’ shouted the crowd. ‘Boza! Liars!’

‘These liars who wished me dead,’ continued Dracula, ‘are Satanists, sadists and witches!’

‘Good gracious,’ said Sara, ‘he’s insulting all the innocent citizens who paid for his medical expenses!’

‘He’s following the legacy,’ I explained, ‘of spitting in the faces of the voters.’

‘These Satanists,’ continued Dracula, ‘are jealous because they will die and go to Hell, but we vampires shall live for ever!’

‘Hurray!’ shouted the crowd. ‘Long live the vampires!’

‘Even the sadists are also jealous of our powers! They derive their petty pleasures from torturing a few people, but we vampires can suck the blood out of the entire population!’

‘And burn down their churches!’ sang the enthusiastic crowd.

‘And especially these witches, how they hate and envy us,’ shouted Dracula. ‘Because we can fly our coffins all the way to Johannesburg, whereas these useless witches fall out of the sky even before they have reached Kafue!’

‘Yoosiless baloshi!’ sang the crowd. ‘Send William Panga to deal with them!’

‘The Movement of Merciless Dracula, the MMD, will never die! shouted the Redlip Dracula, as his arms swung aimlessly and his body swayed inside his empty suit. ‘We are the living dead!’

‘We are the Malignant Moving Dead, we are the MMD!’ sang the jubilant crowd of bloodthirsty parasites.

‘But we must understand the lies of these people who thought I was dead,’ said Dracula, now in a more conciliatory tone. ‘We must remember that we ourselves were once human, and used to think like them. They think that if somebody lies down in a coffin for weeks, his body all cold, then he must be dead.’

‘Ha ha,’ laughed the crowd. ‘He just needs a few pints of blood! Send him to Mufumbwe!’

‘Even many vampires,’ continued Dracula, ‘don’t understand how sick you can become from sucking too much blood. Before I was admitted to the clinic I had personally sucked the blood out of the constitution, and left it lifeless. I had also sucked enough blood from the Director of Public Prosecutions to turn him into the Dracula of Public Persecutions. I had drunk so much blood that it was beginning to leak from my stomach into the other parts of my body, even into my veins. I was seriously in need of medical review.’

‘Vampires never die!’ shouted the crowd enthusiastically.

‘They never die,’ I said to Sara. ‘They just kill everybody else.

‘And we don’t have clinics for vampires in Zambia,’ said Sara. ‘That’s why they have to be sent out of the country for any minor ailment, even indigestion.’

‘That’s why they’re so expensive,’ I said. ‘But people who complain are not sensitive to their special needs.’

‘While at the clinic,’ continued Redlip Dracula, ‘I had to have all the acid in my veins replaced, because I couldn’t digest the excess of blood in my stomach.’

‘You are our champion bloodsucker!’ cheered the crowd. ‘An example to all vampires!’

‘But now I’m back,’ said Dracula, as the crowd continued to cheer, ‘we must continue our good work. Our next task is to win the next by-election in Alangizi. Our strategy is to suck so much blood out of democracy that it never raises its ugly violent head again. Then we shall have a referendum to accept the new draculocracy, a system where our victims just lie down and give their blood peacefully.’

‘Hurray,’ laughed the crowd. ‘We are a peaceful nation.’

Then suddenly, without warning, he stepped back into his coffin and closed the lid. There was a whooshing noise as the coffin slid along the tarmac, lifted up into the air, and disappeared into the night sky.

‘Where’s he gone?’ wondered Sara.

‘Perhaps he had an urgent need to go to the toilet,’ I suggested.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He had a sudden emergency evacuation.’