He wrenched open the door and dived into the sanctuary, feeling a ghostly whiff at his heel like a hand which missed by inches. He scrunched into a panicked ball to be sure that no part of him was outside the car.

Seconds passed.

The door hung open but that was alright if he was inside. Feet crunched and voices whispered from every side. “So sweeeet, so tasty, come to us little man, come out, you are a coward.”

Safe, he was safe! If they could have grabbed his exposed heel they would have; they teased because they could do nothing else.

Slowly he uncurled, sat carefully in the driver’s seat and looked ahead.

Like an evil frost, a death blizzard, pale faces filled every inch of space. A voice screamed thinly from somewhere. Dark bodies pressed against the car, crawled on the hood, deadly faces flattened against the windshield.

He turned his head slowly to the door beside him. Four of them knelt peering in, separated from him by nothing at all. He screamed without meaning to. Their hands, their claws were inches from the sleeve of the jacket tied around his waist – it had almost fallen out of the door!

“Baby, are you alright, speak to me!” He realized Cindy was screaming through the phone.

He wanted to close the door first but grasping hands were between him and the handle. He was going to have to leave open all night. They couldn’t come in but he couldn’t shut them out.

Wanting to vomit with the horror, he picked up the phone with trembling hands. Thank god he hadn’t dropped it outside! “I’m okay,” he managed to say. “Can you see me?”

Of course not. Vampires pressed against every centimeter of windshield. Even the slender gaps between their faces were filled by hungry faces behind.

“I can’t see you, honey, but you’re safe, oh my God, you’re safe. I’m sorry!”

Forcing calm into his voice, he said, “It’s fine. I’m here where I want to be. I wish I could see you.”

Suddenly her voice was calmer. “Enjoying the sanctity of our home means having our view too,” she said quietly.

Charla Thorp’s words, from her famous viral video!

And a moment later, Cindy said, “They’re pulling back from my car, they have to. You tell them too, baby, they’re still pressed like moths all over yours.”

“I want the sanctity of my home too, you bloodsucking bastards!” he said joyously.

Their faces lifted off the glass, leaving honest-to-God lip marks. He wanted to yell, clean up your mess! But he was too happy just seeing them fade into the shadows.

And there was Cindy, waving at him and blowing kisses. He smiled, kissed the air back. Then, riding high on the confidence, he called boldly, “The sanctity of my home extends out to the door and I get to shut my own door if I want.”

“What are you, oh golly your door is open!” came Cindy’s voice. But he was already sticking his hand into the night air. The darkness hissed, but he grasped the handle and pulled the door firmly shut, chunk!

The door light went out. Good. The battery wouldn’t drain. His headlights were still on. He shut them off but turned on the dome light so she could see his face.

“We’ll have to shut off the lights soon,” he said, then realized that she had no lights even now. Her alternator must have crapped out and the battery was completely drained. But he could see her eyes gleam in the light from her phone and he loved her more than he’d ever let himself. He imagined sharing a home with her.

And that was how it finally came to him.

The conversation with his mother which the dream had served up.

He’d been, what, fifteen? They’d sat at the kitchen table with the red and white checked cloth, eating a midnight snack by candlelight because the power had gone out. Margaret Fleck’s gold-green eyes had gleamed like Cindy’s as she spoke of the talk earlier that evening.

“He spoke of Spaceship Earth,” she’d said, considering her wine goblet in the golden light. “How like a man. The earth is not a spaceship. The earth…”

He had even rolled his eyes because at the time he’d known exactly what she was going to say next. How could he have forgotten it until now? She had lectured him more than once on the derivation of the word “ecology.” “M’ boy, the word was coined in 1866 by a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel was his name.” (Heckle and Jeckle indeed. Good God, this brain of his!) “He cobbled it out of two Greek words. Oikos means home and logia means the study of. So Ökologie originally meant the study of the home.”

Yes, he’d known exactly how she was going to finish her assessment of Buckminster Fuller. “The earth is not a spaceship. The earth is a home.”

The earth is a home.

The earth is our home. And if the entire earth is our home…

Barely daring to breathe, he let the thought come. If the entire earth is our home, then we can kick the vampires off.

By the same magic that pushed them away from his car window just now.

If every single human declared the earth a home, wouldn’t the vampires have to go? Somehow?

He had a crazy picture of them being lifted into space en masse.

It staggered his mind. He couldn’t hold onto the idea, it was so big. “You are not welcome here in my home,” he tried to think but knew without a doubt that the thought would have to come from everyone, not just himself.

But how could he convince everybody? What about criminals, murderers, sick twisted minds that welcomed evil? Just two weeks ago there’d been a horrible headline about a guy who instead of grabbing a gun and shooting his family, had simply opened the front door and said “Welcome.”

How could he, how could anyone, convince the whole human race to say “leave?”

“Baby? They didn’t … hurt you while you were shutting the door, did they?” He realized that he’d been staring into the night for a long time.

Slowly he said, “I want to tell you about an idea I just had.” It barely sounded believable as he explained it to her. “The earth is a home,” he finished, defensively. “The word ecology means study of the home.”

“I know, from the Greek oikos, home, and logia, study of.”

“Damn, you’re good!” Why hadn’t he noticed this stuff about her before? He hadn’t once, all day, thought of asking her for help figuring this out.

How like a man.

Well, he’d change that. “So, help me figure out, how do we get everyone to believe it and say it all at once?”

The ideas they tossed back and forth were futile but it felt good to share them. The night looked so peaceful that it was hard to believe he would be consumed to the last atom if he stepped out into it.

“Baby?” she finally said. “I should probably hang up. “My phone’ll last for a while but not all night.”

“Right. We should try to get some sleep. We can’t do a thing more until morning.” He felt a rush of passion, thought of suggesting phone sex, didn’t know if she’d like that or not. They waved to each other and hung up.

They both had small cars with bucket seats in front. The back was the only place where you could conceivably stretch out. He made himself as comfortable as he could, but the night was long. Whenever he sat up and saw her shadowy form moving, he called her and they talked more. But at last he fell asleep.

At three in the morning the phone woke him out of fitful dreams. Heart pounding, he fumbled to answer. “Is everything okay??”

“Tee shirts,” she said.

For a crazed second, he wondered if she was initiating a “wet tee shirt” phone sex conversation (and waited for his mother’s voice to say “how like a man”).

But she was serious. “Make a web site and sell joke tee shirts. Don’t try to make people take it seriously at first. Make tee shirts which say ‘The world is our home. Out into space, vamps!’ Well, shoot, we’ll have to come up with something better than that. But we make it a big joke. Let people on their own get around to saying hey, this could really work!”

He sat up straight. “That could be the trick!” She nodded excitedly.

“But we’d have to have them in every language on earth,” he went on. “And it couldn’t be just tee shirts either, because it has to be everybody in the world and there are cultures that don’t wear them. I think. We’d have to bring people in who know other cultures, ask them, what would be the equivalent of a joke tee shirt in, say, oh, I don’t know, the jungles of Africa or with the Eskimos.”

He trailed off, embarrassed. He was pretty sure the word “Eskimo” wasn’t politically correct anymore and he remembered being in a crowd of guilty white liberals as an African American performer thundered “Africa is not a country, it’s a continent.” He realized that he knew only the vaguest things about other cultures, except for France and England. Well, he’d rectify that! If the earth was his home, it was time to treat it like a home.

“I love you,” he told her without realizing he was going to say it. She started to say it back, and her phone died.

He stared dejectedly at the “call dropped” message, feeling slapped in the face by God.

But he heard her voice faintly. He looked up: she was pressed against her windshield shouting, “Symbolism of dying phone rejected! I love you too!” She blew him a huge kiss, dramatic, extravagant. He gave her two thumbs up and mimed a kiss back.

When he lay back down several minutes later, he took out his phone again.

“Joke tee shirts Eskimo Africa,” he thumbed.