Geoff
Thurston
Geoff
was born Geoffrey M. Thurston, IV, on the sixth of March, 1979. His folks
were eccentric rich Bostonians - the heirs to old money that had somehow become
inundated with left-wing ideals: down with the man, embrace the green earth,
shun greed and capitalism. As a result, a four-year-old Geoff was
sent to be raised by distant relative on a remote ranch in eastern Montana.
The nearest town, all of 564 people (not counting Baby May), was Circle - a
hundred miles away. It was as far from civilization as his parents could
put him, and they hoped he'd grow up to be a man of character there.
Whether or not they succeeded, Geoff did grow up on the
ranch. Stetsons, cattle drives, chaps and stirrups: it was life set back a
hundred years, interrupted here and there by the latest pop beats on the radio
and semimodern education from a private tutor, courtesy of the Boston Thurstons.
He learned to drive a tractor at thirteen, and it wasn't long after that, that
he saved up enough allowance to buy himself his very first hunk-of-junk car and
its corresponding Chilton auto repair manual. From then on, auto repair
has always been Geoff's favorite pastime.
Years passed; life remained much the same on the ranch.
His mother thought he should be with kids his own age, so the private tutoring
stopped and Geoff enrolled in junior high. The modern world began to seep
in a bit. Geoff discovered CDs at 14, girls at 15, went to his junior high
graduation ball at 16 (his parents never believed in pushing kids through school
too fast) in a plaid shirt, handstitched boots and a ten-gallon hat. His
date was the freckled girl from the neighbor's ranch, but after her dad caught
them in the back seat of his car (it was a Pontiac Bonneville back then) his sophomore
year of high school, it took a hefty bribe from Geoffrey M. Thurston, III, to
ensure that Geoffrey M. Thurston, IV, didn't end up in a shotgun wedding.
That was the end of that.
*
After he graduated from high school, his father thought it
was high time that Geoff upheld the family legacy at Harvard. Alas,
Geoff's rustic upbringing had meant a fifty-mile drive to high school
every morning, which had in turn resulted in a staggering amount of truancies
and a rather dismal 2.07 GPA – not to mention the 840 SAT.
He didn’t exactly stand out in things other than academics, either.
He could play a guitar decently well, yowl a few lines of Hank Williams,
but he was no star. He could charge
a few yards with a pigskin under his arm, but – he was no star.
It took three dinner invitations to the Chancellor of University of
Montana to get the acceptance letter, and Geoff gratefully accepted.
Harvard seemed awfully pretentious for a glorified auto mechanic, anyway.
The summer after his freshman year (GPA: 2.45.
Dad: “I’m proud of you, son!”), he and his dormmates set off on a
cross-country roadtrip down to the beaches of the Gulf.
Geoff, however, didn’t make it past an overnight stop in an Idaho
small-town. Walking back to the
motel that night, he was smacked over the head, bitten in the neck, and then
glutted with something that tasted suspiciously like blood.
It was bizarre.
He woke up stuffed headfirst into an oversized trash can.
One foot had been left out for the sun, and it was a black stump.
In compensation, stuffed in with him was roughly two thousand dollars of
cold hard cash, a gold Rolex, an almanac with the sunrise and sunset times
dog-eared, a sac of whole blood lifted from some hospital emergency ward, and a
note. Welcome to the afterlife.
It was like some idiot’s idea of an urban legend, and Geoff wasn’t
too amused. Nor did he believe the
little “afterlife” schtick until a couple of realizations sank in.
One, he couldn’t seem to help sleeping all day, and no
amount of alarm clocks or neighbors banging on the wall to tell him to turn the
damn clock off could wake him. He
slept, in fact, like the dead.
Two, some sort of weird superstition caused him to sleep
all day in dark, cramped corners where the sun couldn’t touch him.
Sometimes he stirred in his sleep and a part of his body would catch the
sun. He’d wake up, and said body
part would be charred to ash.
Three,
he picked up a girl at the motel bar one night. They went up to his room, he got naked, she got naked, and
while his conscience yammered and howled, he bit her. He bit her, he drank her blood, and it was the best he ever
had. Yammering and howling
notwithstanding. After that, Geoff
gave up the denial game and accepted his fate.
Nightstalker, demigod, auto mechanic from hell.
Or something like that.
*
Geoff didn’t stay long in Idaho. The population was too sparse, and any fool could see a
vampire feeding in a small town was bound to raise eyebrows sooner or later.
And if someone caught him – well, Geoff still remembers his close brush
with becoming a shotgun bridesgroom. He
hated to think what smalltown fathers would do to him if they found out he was
drinking their daughters’ blood.
So Geoff took his cash and bought himself a couple of overnight
Greyhound tickets southward, eventually ending up in Houston.
It was by far the biggest city he’d ever seen in his life, and for a
while he was in a bit of a culture shock: the Montana cowboy-turned-vampire,
awash in a sea of anonymous humanity. Pretty
soon, though, other vampires that looked like they had walked out of an Anne
Rice novel found him and he figured out he wasn’t the only one.
The ones that found him – Camarilla, as it turned out –
dragged him in to the nearest Tremere and had his blood tested.
You’re Brujah, they told him with more than a little disdain, and it
didn’t mean much to him. There was some talk about Clans and Sects and some weird
Jyhad thing; it all sounded too voodoo cult to him, so he ignored most of it and
struck out on his own. Anyway, the
nightly soirees of the beautiful people and the nightly
sneering-down-their-beautiful-noses at the sireless young Brujah was enough to
drive even the least rebellious neonates from the so-called Elysiums.
On the streets, he found other likeminded individuals who
spurned Sect and Jyhad, striving instead for a bit of respect – most of them
claiming his own Clan, which he was starting to get a feel for – some of them
from others: Nosferatu (so hideous he nearly ran screaming the first time he saw
one in full light), Malkavian (lunatics, all), a few hairy Gangrel (lie down
with the dogs and you…), more than a few Clanless (even more confused that he
was). He tolerated them; they
tolerated him; one might almost say he made some friends.
He hung out in Houston for a few years with the other Anarchs.
Anarchs, of course, was the name the Camarilla gave them.
They called themselves a variety of different things, anything from
freedom fighters to freeloaders – depending on their individual outlooks.
As far as Geoff could tell, “Anarch” was just a catch-all term for
all the vampires who didn’t subject themselves to anyone else’s rules or
holy wars. Sure, there were a few
rage-against-the-machine types, but there were just as many looking for their
own little niche in the afterlife. Don’t bug me and I won’t bug you types.
Geoff was one of the latter.
But sometimes life just can’t leave you alone. As it happened, Houston was close enough to Mexico and large
enough to be a major bone of contention between Sabbat and Camarilla.
Though Geoff wanted no part of the war, that didn’t mean the other two
Sects saw it his way. The Camarilla Scourges would come through one week and try to
blow his head off; then the Sabbat recruiters would come around and try to bury
him underground after cleaving his head open.
As the years passed, the tension escalated; the city traded hands back
and forth, and every time it happened, vampires died. After his umptieth close shave with one side or the other –
he personally couldn’t see any difference between the fascists – he decided
he’d had enough and got out of town.
But
where to go? He asked around,
listened to the rumors and ran his options over in his head.
Not a foreign city. He
didn’t speak anything but American. Not
a small city. They were pretty lax, but the vampires there were straight
out of Children of the Corn. Besides,
as he found out in Idaho, a small population doesn’t support vampiric activity
well.
Most of the big cities, though, were clearly carved out amongst
the Sects. And Geoff wasn’t going
to go to a Camarilla city. The
Scourge would be constantly trying to crush him like a beetle.
Not a Sabbat city either; without Camarilla opposition, the recruiters
would have even freer rein and he’d be a shovelhead in a week.
And certainly not one of those Anarch cities in California.
They were too hardcore for him, and they’d recruit him to their cause
just as fast – and just as brutally – as any Sabbat.
An independent city, then?
Las Vegas was a good one – except it was another bone the Cammies and
the Sabbies liked to fight over. That
left Atlantic City. It was big
enough to go unnoticed in. Small
enough not to attract too much attention from the tightassed Sects, what with
the big glittery mass of New York/New Jersey close by to fight over instead.
Run by some mobster types who liked cash and dead things, his sources
assured him that all he had to do was keep his head down and his nose clean.
He could do that. Hell, he would
do that, if it meant he’d have somewhere to stay.
*
So Geoff packed his bags and caught a series of cross-country
Greyhounds, ended up in Atlantic City. He
lived in a roadside Motel 6 until his cash ran out, and by then he’d made some
friends on the night side at a small factory outside town.
A corn oil refinery that ran all day, all night.
He camps out there now, sort of as a combination squatter and
jack-of-all-trades handyman. He
fixes machines for them when they need fixing.
Given the state of disrepair of the factory, that’s pretty often.
He doesn’t ask to be paid, so in return, they make sure no one bothers
him when he crashes there during the day and don’t ask any questions.
Usually the shift supervisor is happy to spot him when he’s short on
cash. It’s a good deal.
When you don’t have to pay rent and you don’t have to pay for your
food, it’s amazing how far a dollar can stretch.
It’s a new city for Geoff and so far his stay has been
pleasant. It’s his first time out
on his own – really on his own, no parents, no classmates, no fellow Anarchs
– in all his life, and the young Brujah’s just taking it easy.
For now.