Vampocalypse (old first draft)

Chapter One

The deader was a gruesome one, even by rotting corpse standards. Its hair was falling out, and one eye was already gone, a blackened emptiness gaped where it should be. It groaned and used its one good arm to claw at the hybrid. From the safety of my living room couch, I flinched. That swipe would be a deadly one to a firsty like me; to the hybrid, it was nothing. The wolf-man growled, revealing his dangerous, razor-sharp teeth, but it was just for show. He wouldn't bite the deader. Its dead flesh had nothing to offer him.

The hybrid slapped the deader hard across its decaying face. Its other eye fell out and hung there, a few new, bloodless cuts were visible. I felt bile begin to rise in my throat and swallowed hard. The hybrid's large claws had sliced through the dead flesh as easily as if it had been a rotting piece of fruit.

"Why do you watch this stuff, Skip?" I asked my older brother.

"Know your enemy." He said with a shrug.

"We don't have to worry about them. When do we ever come in contact with a hybrid or a deader?" I scoffed.

I didn't expect him to give an answer, it was my way of just saying, "Think about it."

I abandoned the television and returned to the book laying open in my lap. It was an Anne Rice book, Memnoch the Devil. I wondered if Lestat was a real superior. Never call them vampires. They are superiors. But Lestat was nothing like the superiors I'd met. Though, it was an old book - written before the superiors took over the world. They could have been like him when they were hiding among us, but I wouldn't know. I've never experienced a world outside of compound twenty.

"You never know, Harper." Skip said in answer to my rhetorical question.

"What?" I asked Skip. "You think you're going to be a firsty superior?"

Firsty potentials were the firsties the superiors deemed fit to be changed into a superior one day. Some firsties were mere firsty breeders - a horrible fate. They locked them in special compounds and demand they produce offspring to grow up and satiate their never-ending bloodlust. I was a firsty bleeder. That meant they took as much of my blood as possible, then let me be so it could build back up before took more.

"Are you kidding? Darn straight, I will be a superior one day!" Skip declared.

He was delusional. Changes almost never happened. A firsty was more than likely going to be a firsty something for their entire life. They called us firsties because that's how we all start out - as a regular human. When we hit puberty, if we turned out to be a hybrid (werewolf by my grammy's terminology), we were good to go. Hybrids are strong enough to kill the deaders (Grammy calls them zombies) and fight off the random vegabond superiors. They aren't as strong as the superiors, but they don't need the superiors' protection. If we die, we turn into a deader. If we're chosen, we become a superior. I've heard of other things; things like spell-casters and the even stronger spellbinders. Those are so rare, it's just rumor that they even exist. The truth is that the superiors probably found a way to kill them all, because they were stronger (especially the spellbinders). Superiors can't stand to be bested in any way.

The fight displaying in front of us was finally over. A superior swooped in to haul the motionless deader away. It hadn't stood a chance. A new opponent, a superior by the look of it, stepped into the dusty arena. His lips were curled in a sinister snarl and his fangs popped out at the ready, a crazed gleam in its eyes. It was the look of a wild vagabond superior. I shivered.

"You know that's messed up, right?" I asked, tearing myself away from the three dimensional image.

"You'll see."

"Oh, really?" I ridiculed. "Do you think Starsky will want to change you?"

Starsky was our usual lab superior. It was her job to bleed us, and Skip was crushing on her. I had seen the way he looked at her. All superiors are pretty - male or female, but Starsky was exceptionally beautiful - in the way that a panther is beautiful. Its sleek black coat was similar to her long, dark, silky hair. The wild eyes were the same as well. Her entire persona gave off a dangerous vibe that I could tell excited Skip.