The Dead Travel Fast

A near casualty

Below is something I pulled from the book, but eventually put back in. Though some of the self-professed vampires I met are in it, the scene itself has nothing to do with vampires at all. That is why I killed it. I eventually missed it terribly and of all the scenes that hit the cutting room floor--this is the one I truly missed. So I put it back in. I'm the author--I can do that kind of stuff.

It happen while I was hanging out with a group of self-professed vampires (including the below-mentioned "Jay" and "Ali"). They stepped outside for a smoke, I joined them, and that's where we met "Kyle."

Enjoy.

Jay and Ali wanted to jump outside for a cigarette and I decided to tag along. For something to talk about, Jay and I were lamenting the recent death of Washington's only alternative radio station. It had been unceremoniously replaced by Spanish pop music station called "El Sol." After taking a beating in the press, Infinity Broadcasting, the radio glutton that owned WHFS/El Sol, announced the station was returning--or at least the format was returning, during the evenings and weekend schedule on one of its Baltimore stations. There was another guy smoking outside who came up to us and spontaneously joined in our conversation. He said his name was Kyle, his neck had no less than eight fresh hickeys on it, and he was really, really, really excited to have WHFS back on the radio.

Kyle couldn't stop talking about how radio sucks, except for WHFS, and he was hoping that they would sponsor more local events, like the "Girls Gone Wild" night he recently attended at a local bar.

This excerpt is pretty self-explanatory. Here goes.

"Check out this one," I said while pulling out a black shirt dotted with spikes, eyelets, and about a dozen buckles that apparently held together little besides a faint sense of sinister coolness. "If I were drunk, I'd wear this."

"Mmm. I see where you're going," said my friend Shauna. "But I still think the frilly stuff makes a clearer statement."

Shauna and I were browsing at a store named Trash and Vaudeville in Greenwich Village. We'd originally met up for lunch while I was in the city, but Shauna decided to accompany me on my shopping trip. Shauna is one of my dearest friends and a beautiful, stylish woman. However, she wouldn't be my first choice for a Goth fashion consultant.

I was in town to attend a gathering of "the vampyre society of greater New York," called The Court of Lazarus. I was totally prepared for just about anything to happen that evening. The only problem was my clothes. In order to keep some sense of privacy at this semi-public gathering, The Court of Lazarus has a dress code.

Specifically, a dress code calling for "formal Gothic attire." Now, take a moment to look at the author photo on the cover of this book. As should be quite obvious, my round face and boyish looks are about as far from Goth as you could get, save for someone wearing a set of Musketeer ears.

This caused me an embarrassing amount of duress. I wanted to fit in (let alone get in), yet I felt that if I wore something overtly sinister, I'd be faking it. I couldn't imagine finding anyone willing to speak to me in an obvious costume. Originally I planned to just wear a black shirt and pants. However, after seeing pictures of previous Court of Lazarus gatherings, I was a little panicked. I arrived in New York with a list of Goth shops, most along St. Mark’s Place. Shauna and I were working our way down the list.

After visiting about half a dozen shops, things weren't going well. So far, a bunch of the stores on my list had gone out of business. Others were more tailored towards fetishists or wannabe rock gods, so unless I wanted something skin-tight or made of rubber and designed to allow easy orifice access, my pickings were slim. There were a fairly substantial variety of slutty Goth girl clothes, but for guys…the only option seemed to be Victorian shirts with puffy sleeves and lace around the collar and cuffs.

"No, I think that's a terrible idea," I said.

"Why?" she replied, pulling a white frilly shirt off the rack. "It's pretty Gothic-looking."

"On me it would be gay pirate-looking. That's not the variety of scary I think they're looking for."

"It could look rather sexy," she offered.

"Or it could look rather stupid," I countered.

Shauna held the shirt against my chest and took a step back. The look on her face is one you'd expect from a mother when her four-year-old tries on a pumpkin costume for Halloween--not the reaction I had in mind.

"Okay, hold up the red one instead," she ordered.

I did.

"You know, you're right. You do look like a gay pirate."

With each disappointment, we got more desperate. However, at Trash and Vaudeville we hit the jackpot.

"Ew, look at that," Shauna said, as I pulled down a heavy black cloak and hood. "It looks pretty scary."

"Yeah, but that's too Anakin-Skywalker-Attack-of-the-Clones scary. Maybe even Grim Reaper scary. On me, it would look like Friar Tuck just walked in the room."

"No!" Shauna exclaimed.

I was holding up a four inch silver crucifix pendant, complete with a tiny Jesus nailed to it.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Eric, I worry about your eternal soul," she answered.

"What does my soul have to do with this?"

"That doesn't strike you as a bit blasphemous?"

"It's not like I'm going to take a shit on it or something. I'm going to wear it around my neck."

Shortly afterwards, we settled on a red shirt with skulls on it, then adjourned to a bar across the street to celebrate.

Living after midnight

Here's an excerpt about the first time I tried to "meet" a vampire. This happened very, very early in the vampire quest. I had just moved to DC and didn't even have a publishing contract for the book yet--I was just casually working on it while my agent found it a home.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory. Enjoy.

There’s an old story that begins, “There was once a time when vampires were as common as leaves of grass, or berries in a pail, and they never kept still, but wandered round at night among the people.” While that may have been true at one time, it certainly isn’t true today.

Even this early in my pursuit of vampires, I'd added this lesson: finding vampires is easy. Locating vampires is hard. Despite attempts to meet with some self-declared vampires, my number of successful meetings was low. In fact, so far, it was zero.

Judging by most vampire lore: you don’t find vampires, vampires find you. In Dracula, for example, Count Dracula could never enter a house without an invitation. As much terror, death, and various forms of supernatural weirdness that vampires bring, most mortals in vampire tales tend to bring this particular evil into their own lives, rather than simply being hapless victims.

But what if you are, say, writing a book, and don’t want to wait around for a vampire to come prancing into your life whenever he or she feels like it? How do you go about finding one? The same way you’d find an ultra-rare, mint condition Princess Leia action figure or the lyrics to Leo Sayer songs--go online.

If you think the Internet offered an impressive number conspiracy Web sites, readerless blogs, and porn--try searching for vampires online. Simply Googling the word “vampire” brings back more than 7 million results. I decided I’d zip through the first hundred or so to see what I could find.

I thought I’d hit pay dirt with my first real contact, “Steve.” I was so convinced that I was on the right track with him that I ended up sitting alone in a dark park, not completely unconvinced that someone wasn’t lurking in the bushes watching me.

While trolling the Internet for vampires, I had seen just about every odd name possible: Garth, Vlad, Marina, Jyad, Virgil, Ahab, Death Angel, Bug, Kyrmsin, Lady Rae, dozens of Vlads…and Steve. I’d noticed Steve posting on some vampire message boards, sometimes several posting, per topic, per day. Since he seemed like such a chatty Patty online, I figured he’d be a natural interview subject.

We exchanged several dozen emails before he agreed to meet me. In all those emails, I’d really only managed to learn two things about Steve: (a) he considered himself, in fact, a true undead vampire; and (b) his real name wasn’t Steve.

“Steve is an odd pseudonym for a vampire,” I wrote. “Honestly, I’d expect something ‘spookier.’”

“How do you think I’ve managed to live undetected among you mortals?” he replied. “I’m not just some kid who likes to pretend he craves blood.”

This statement, of course, just made me think that he was, in fact, a kid you likes to pretend he craves blood. I figured he was harmless.

Steve agreed to meet me in a park north of Military Road in D.C., just a few blocks away from my apartment. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a public place. Since this was the first time I was meeting an “actual” vampire, it was also the first chance I’d had to implement “the system.” My wife Katherine and I came up with “the system” as a safety measure for whenever I traipsed off to meet potentially dangerous strangers who were convinced that they were undead and needed to drink blood from the living (read: me). Basically, as soon as I met with the vampire person in question, I’d immediately call Katherine under the guise of letting her know when I’d be home. The real motivation behind the phone call was to make sure the interviewee understood that someone knew specifically where I was (and with whom). However…if I mentioned my buddy David in any context, it was a signal to Katherine that I was in trouble and needed help. As far as “systems” went, admittedly, it wasn’t great. I figured that if I was in serious trouble, I was dead anyway. Why worry the Missus?

I didn’t think much about meeting in a park at 7:30 at night until the meeting time came and I remembered that during November it is completely and totally dark at 7:30 at night. The park itself was shaped like a big triangle, with a ball diamond in one corner, basketball and tennis courts in another, and benches and kiddie play equipment in the third. The area with the benches is surrounded by a partial wall, trees, and shrubs. The park was completely empty when I arrived, though an occasional person did pass along the sidewalk.

Sitting there waiting in the moonlight for a vampire to show up, you’d think that I’d feel very alone. That was the problem. I didn’t feel alone at all. I felt crazily attuned to the surroundings—hearing every branch rustle, twig snap, and leaf tumbling along in the light breeze. 7:30 came and went. I became increasingly jumpy as I sat on the bench nervously checking my watch and spinning my head around to make sense of every little noise I’d hear. That’s when I thought I saw someone standing between two bushes at the side of the shelter building.

“Hello,” I called out weakly.

Nothing. Every time I’d convince myself that the shape I saw wasn’t a person, I’d notice something move or adjust and thought I saw a shoulder or arm.

“Steve?”

Nothing. That’s when I started to think of questions I should have asked myself, well, before I wandered into a dark park mostly obstructed from street view. Like why Steve wanted to meet someplace near my house, not his? Why Steve would chose to hide in the bushes instead of waiting on the bench or outside on the sidewalk. Why I would agree to do something like this in the first place? I don’t care how much you paid for this book; this shit simply wasn’t worth it.

After sitting there for a moment fondling my cell phone, I stood up and took a step towards the bushes.

“I’m sorry, is there someone there? I can’t see you.”

A car passed along the side street. At first I could see the headlights drift between the bushes. Then something swung between the branches and blocked out the light. Whatever it was--a thick tree branch, a very big squirrel, a vampire, or a nutty kid convinced he was a vampire and moments away from proving it--there was something in the bushes other than bushes.

I realized that whatever it was, continuing to walk towards it was…hmmm…a mistake! Without saying anything else to whatever or whoever it was, I dashed out the gate, out of the park, and about half a block down the sidewalk--all in about four seconds. As soon as I got home, I tried emailing Steve to ask what happened to our meeting.

I never heard from Steve again. Since then, I’ve never found any of his postings on the message boards, either.

Another huge excerpt

Granville Island - The Vampires Have Arrived
Originally uploaded by shanebee

No one ever tells me anything...I found this while visiting another Web site...

When people ask me for an example of why The Dead Travel Fast is unique among the thousands of books about vampires, I answer this way:

It is the only book on vampires where, on page 13, a soldier in Iraq has a chicken bone inserted in his rectum and you, as reader, think "Of course, I would have done the same thing."

My publisher has put forth a nice juicy excerpt from the book...basically the first 14 page of the first chapter. It covers the chicken bone incident, part of my application process to work as a vampire in a haunted house, and the whole blood drinking story.

Here it is. Enjoy.

Lost Magazine

LOST
Originally uploaded by mcbarnicle

The October issues of Lost (a fantastic online magazine) has a long excerpt from The Dead Travel Fast that isn't available elsewhere online. It's a great excuse to check out Lost, which describes itself as a literary mag with a singular mission: "to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things." (Full disclosure: one of Lost's editors is Peter Joseph, the boy genius who edited The Dead Travel Fast.

Snippet from the excerpt:

"There are two pieces of jewelry associated with Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Count Dracula in the iconic 1931 film Dracula. A silver medallion and a large signet ring. In the movie, Lugosi is often seen walking with his bent arms extended slightly in front of him, as if the ring was leading the way. The medallion is currently buried six feet under with Lugosi. The ring is nested in the box in my hands."

[Link] to the whole excerpt (is that an oxymoron?).

Excerpt from Chapter 3

Zombie and Vampire Hairclips
Originally uploaded by House Of Secrets Incorporated

For the past week or so, I've featured a huge excerpt from the book in this post. Then I realized that its considerable size (10 printed pages) kinda obliterated everything else below it on the site. So, I now have it as a separate page--as not to cloud things up.

As far as the exerpts on this site go, it is by far the pargest from the actual book.

The Spanish Dracula

Tribute to Béla Lugosi
Originally uploaded by frank rizzo

In addition to my dopey antics, The Dead Travel Fast does contain a lot of oddly fascinating stories about all things vampire.

Here is an excerpt that always surprises people--about the Spanish-language version of Dracula. Here's the story:

Most people are unaware that a second version of Dracula was shot at the same time as the Browning/Lugosi film—a Spanish-language version. It used the same sets, scenery, and props, but a different cast and crew. They would come onto the set during the evenings and film through the night.

Filming simultaneous versions of movies was a budding practice at Universal during the time. Making multiple language versions of a film during the silent era was easy--just replace the dialogue cards. The invention of sound created many expensive problems. At the time, Universal received half its revenue from foreign markets and several foreign governments were threatening heavy tariffs on imported English-language films. Dubbing movies into foreign languages was expensive and very difficult, so producers began creating shadow productions like the Spanish version of Dracula. It was a wise tactic. While Universal spent close to $450,000 to produce Dracula, the addition of the Spanish version only added $66,000 to the original production costs.

The Spanish Dracula, staring Carlos Villarias as the Count and Lupita Tovar as the Mina character, is actually a far more interesting film to watch than the original--revealing all the missed opportunities in the American version. Though some of the characters were renamed (such as “Juan Harker”), the Spanish Dracula sticks to the same basic plot outline as the American version. However, the Spanish version made use of all the camera angles, lighting, and visual effects missing from the “day time” Dracula. The Spanish crew would rearrange the scenery, props, and furniture to create more depth and visual tension. While the Count’s basic outfit is the same in both films, many of the Spanish version actresses (especially Dracula’s vampire wives) had much more sensuous, low-cut clothing and fleshed out the sexual elements of the story (pardon the pun) instead of suppressing them.

If you were a tree...

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of The Dead Travel Fast, in which I apply to, and briefly work at, a haunted house. The application/interview process was brutal--here is my actual interview to work as a monster. It appears in the book pretty much verbatim to the actual interview.

We sat around the House of Terror cafeteria for about another 20 minutes before our table was called. Once we reached the front of the interviewing line, we saw four tables, with two managers on one side and an interviewee on the other. The interviewee would take a seat, then some questions and polite conversation would go back and forth. At the end of each interview, the interviewee would scream, thank the interviewers, and leave.

When my turn came, I answered the standard questions,  but my mind was on the scream. What was it for? Would I have to scream? Would I be asked to scream, or was it just something that one person did to impress the managers, then others started to follow suit?

Then, one of the managers told me that being an actor in a haunted house was tough, thankless work. I’d have to perform for hundreds, if not thousands of people a night, and I’d have to give as good a performance to the last person as I had to the first. As a sign of my acting skills, she asked for my best scream.

“Now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she responded, looking confused, as if she wondered how I had missed the 70 other screams that morning.

“Okay, what am I screaming at?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, like…”

“I mean, what is my motivation?”

“For screaming?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I told you to.”

Fair enough. With that, I let out my best scream. Well, it was a shriek, actually. The kind of high-pitched shrill yelp you’d expect from a teenaged girl when Jason or Freddy Krueger jumps out from behind the sofa.

My two interviewers looked at each other, then back at me.

“Do you want to try that again?” one asked.

“Was that bad?” I responded.

“Well,” said the other. “We’re kind of looking for scary, not scared.”

“But I want to play a vampire,” I said.

“That’s fine, but vampires scream, too.”

“Why?”

“I’m sorry,…”

“Why would a vampire scream?”

“Because we told him to.”

I tried again. Slightly better, though still hoping anyone I know didn’t hear me.

“Very nice, you can expect a call next week.”

“So, I’m in?” I asked.

“We’ll call you if we need you,” she replied, extending her hand in an obvious gesture that our time together was over.

How to become a vampire in 6 easy lessons

Here's a new excerpt for you to chew on. It appears near the end of the book. After exhausting all my other ideas to pursue vampires, I decide to try to become one myself. To do this, I'll follow the instructions found in a booklet called "How To Become a Vampire in 6 Easy Lessons." The "Jeanne" mentioned is a vampire researcher who published the booklet. Katherine is my wife. Here is an excerpt describing my attempts to follow the book's directions:

According to what Jeanne told me, a woman came to her attention in the late 70s who claimed to be a former vampire named Madeline X. She claimed to have been undead for several hundred years before falling in love with a mortal and becoming human again. As part of getting to know Jeanne, Madeline X gave her the instructions laid out in the twelve-page pamphlet in front of me, entitled "How To Become a Vampire in 6 Easy Lessons." Jeanne published the booklet in 1985 with the blessings of Madeline. Soon after, Jeanne said, Madeline disappeared and has never contacted Jeanne again.

"You know what I think?" I asked Jeanne. "I think you wrote this and it's a big joke."

"Oh no," Jeanne said. "Madeline wrote it--it's legit. Or at least she says it’s legit."

The booklet spells out six lessons, each on different days, which need to be conducted exactly as she describes them. Madeline does note that for "convenience and accuracy" all the ancient phrases, in a language called Estralese,[*] are spelled at in phonetic English.

The list of items needed for the various mini-rituals included a few eggs, string, an empty bottle, twelve grains of rice, and a black human hair. There were also two items that I had no idea how to get. First was an owl figurine. This may not seem so difficult, but think about it: if you had to get a figurine of an owl right now, where would you go to buy one? Second, was a raw chicken liver. Again, not something that strikes you as hard until you realize that all the nasty liver dishes you grew up with were all made with beef liver. Chicken liver is not the part of the chicken that most people are interested in finding at the bottom of their KFC bucket.

I figured that since the liver would be the most difficult item to get, I’d have to hold off on the whole thing until I located some. I figured my best bet would be a butcher's shop, which, on request, will sell you just about any nasty animal body part you can think of. Problem is, find a butcher. Your grocery store probably doesn’t have one. In my neighborhood, the only butcher was a kosher butcher.

"Is liver kosher?" I asked Katherine.

"Why wouldn't it be kosher?" she asked.

"Why isn’t anything kosher—there are rules about this stuff."

"Well, can't you call and ask?"

"But what if chicken liver is really super un-Kosher and walking into a kosher butcher shop and asking for liver is tantamount to asking to have sex with the butcher’s children."

"Why do you need kosher chicken liver, again?"

"I don't need kosher liver--any chicken liver will do. I need to chant over it to become a vampire."

"Do me a favor," Katherine asked. "Don't tell that tidbit to the butcher, either."

I’d found some chicken liver recipes online, so I knew it wasn’t unreasonable to expect I could find it somewhere.

"How about chitlins?" Katherine asked. "Isn’t that made with liver?"

"Chitlins are made with intestines."

"Oh, too bad."

"Yeah, and they come from pigs, not chickens. And they're cooked, not raw."

Katherine and I eventually decided that the best thing to do to find chicken liver was to ask at the grocery store.

"Sure, we have some right over here," responded the clerk, before guiding me over to a dozen small tubs in the midst of fryer parts and skinless breasts. There they were—a small stack of tubs similar to those used for margarine spread—each packed full of raw chicken livers. I didn’t know what to find more disturbing—that there was enough of a market among my neighbors that our neighborhood grocery had about 24 pounds of chicken liver on hand, or that this packaged meat product was selling for less than $1 a pound.

With most of my ingredients in hand, I was ready to roll. The booklet said that in advance of the first day I was to make small holes in three eggs, drain their contents, and draw lightening bolts on them. Afterwards I was to hide them to make sure (a) that they were the first thing I saw when I woke up and (b) that no one else saw them. As I was cleaning out the eggs, I wondered to myself why becoming a vampire required handling so much raw food? Who knew how many little salmonella were swimming around in all this splattered and dripping raw egg--just waiting to crawl into my intestine and give me a case of life-ending diarrhea.

The next day's directions told me to wake up (making sure the first thing I saw were the hollow eggs with the lightening bolts drawn on them) and to hold each egg individually and concentrate on it for three minutes. The instructions were a little vague about what I should be concentrating about. I started off trying to think 'Boy, I'd really like to become a vampire,' but my thoughts kept wandering to the microscopic salmonella calling out to each other, "Hey, this way guys--let's crawl under his fingernails--he never remembers to scrub under there!" After three long minutes of concentrating on my slow and painful demise from food poisoning, I switched eggs and continued.

Day two was chicken liver day. The instructions for that day's "lesson" called for me to place the raw chicken liver in a jar with half a cup of vinegar at exactly 10:00 a.m., then store it in a dark place until exactly 11:30 a.m., when I was to pull it out, sprinkle salt on the chicken liver, then chant over it. Everything seemed to go fine until I opened the tub of chicken liver. It seems that most meat you purchase is cleaned, cut, and packaged in a way that makes it less than obvious that this substance was previously part of an animal’s body. Not so with my chicken livers--they still had attached veins and tube-looking things that gave you the impression that they were yanked out of a chicken carcass and dropped into this tub pretty much as they were. I prissily picked one up and put it in the container with the vinegar. After putting it in a file drawer I thought to myself--what will the vinegar do to the liver? Will it smell? Start to foam? Grow to ten times its normal size and explode out of the container?

I had a meeting in my office soon afterwards and kept worrying that some embarrassing chicken liver accident was about to occur. I kept an eye on that drawer. Later on I looked at the clock--it was 11:27. The meeting was still going on.

"I'm sorry," I interrupted. "We're going to have to break this up--I have something I need to do right away."

"Is everything okay?" asked my co-worker Robert. "You seem a little frazzled."

"I'm fine. I just need to chant over some raw chicken liver at exactly 11:30 and I’ve just got a few minutes left to go."

"You're chanting? Over raw liver?"

"Yes," I replied. "Chicken liver. I’m trying to turn myself into a vampire."

"What happened to getting bit on the neck to become a vampire?"

"This is the short, easy version…chicken liver."

Robert nodded.

"I'm sure you'd like the door closed," he said as he walked out of my office.

After removing the chicken liver from the drawer (it was the same size and smell as when I’d put it in there), I chanted the following, clapping my hands above the liver once for each syllable: "Pen-an-galan. Fen-an-galan. For-or-galan. Bead-a-LEE."

So far, so good.

Day three required the owl figurine and despite looking at every bric-a-brac and gift shop I could find, no owl. With my back against the wall, I decide to improvise. I found a picture of an owl online and taped it to the front of a plaster Vlad the Impaler figurine I’d bought in Romania for 50 cents. More chanting over the "owl figurine": "Pont-ten-ask-oh. Pont-ten-ack. Listen to this plea. Rise from soil and grave mold NOW. Harken well to me." Afterwards, I was supposed to put the figurine on the highest shelf in the tallest closet in my house. Check.

Lessons four and five were no problem--chanting and shaking a jar of rice grains a black human hair (stolen from Katherine’s hair brush). Waving a gold ring around while declaring my oath to serving as a vampire for eternity. Simple.

Lesson six, on the final day, required assembling a bunch of left-over stuff from the previous five lessons, including the nasty germy eggshells (which had been sitting in my underwear drawer all week--if someone else saw them, they'd lose their power) but thankfully letting the chicken liver stay in the trash. After grinding it all together, I had to find some naked soil. Now, we live in a large apartment complex. There really wasn’t a lot of "naked soil" around. There were a few trees in front of the building with some exposed dirt where the tree trunk met the ground. That would have to do.

As instructed I snuck outside at exactly 11:00 p.m. and chanted the following while spreading the mixture around the ground:[#] "From my grave I will wander. I will not grieve the severed links. I will love the groom I have chosen and will drink his lifeblood forever. If my race is won, young and old ‘neath my vengeance will sink. I will fear naught but the cross. I will heed none but the master. I will live forever in his shadow. Oh, Master, I am yours."

According to the booklet, "If these instructions are followed TO THE LETTER--and to the master’s satisfaction--you will awaken…AS A VAMPIRE!"

Awesome.

The next morning I woke up Katherine.

"Bad news…I’m not a vampire."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, I'm pretty sure. I feel no different at all."

"You really expected to become one?"

"Well, I guess not. But I did put in a lot of effort."

I called Jeanne.

"Oh, I could have told you it doesn’t work."

"Well, why didn't you?” I asked.

"Well, you never asked, for one," she said. "And if you read the instructions, it says you can't do any of it on a Saturday--but in order to follow the instructions exactly, you need to do things on seven consecutive days. If you can figure out how to do things on seven days in a row without doing anything on Saturday, then I guess you deserve to become a vampire."

She had me there. Damnit.

[*] A word that sounds more like an artificial fat substitute than a language. Wherever Estralese was spoken, it’s been well-hidden since. Googling and searching Lexis-Nexis for “Estralese” returns exactly zero hits.
[#] Since this was also the area where most residents walked their dogs, I hoped that adding dog urine to the mixture wouldn’t turn me to into a giant badger or something.