Save Me From The Dark

Chapter Three

This is the story of how I became vampire catnip.

It begins with a little baby girl. She is born and she is cute and normal, and she has normal parents who love her to death. She doesn’t have a whole lot of family besides them – an allegedly nutty ornithologist aunt, some scattered fourth and fifth degree cousins, a grandmother on her deathbed, and that’s about it.

She has never seen any of them, but she doesn’t mind. Her parents are enough for now, and it will be a while before her shortage of close relatives becomes something that she has reason to worry about.

This story also begins with Marcia and Joshua Adelman.

Marcia was found on the side of the road as a child. Joshua’s family was taken by the plague. They are a young couple, and they have saved enough to buy the farm that they’ve been dreaming of having ever since they married. They intend to tend to it until they grow old, and to have children and grandchildren that will take over after they pass.

They believe that they are about to have a wonderful life.

They are wrong. The time that they have left as living, breathing human beings is slowly but surely drawing to a close.

On the fifth of September of 2046, two armed robbers enter the little girl’s house. They weren’t counting on anyone being home. The little girl’s mother comes down and catches them making off with her silver. She screams for help. One of the robbers fires a warning shot as her husband comes hobbling down the stairs, sporting an old WWIII ray-gun that belonged to his father.

There is a fight. More shots are fired.

In the end, only one of the robbers is left standing. He runs into the night, heedless of the crying child on the second floor. 

On an unrecorded day at the tail of the 1600’s, Marcia and Joshua are returning home from the market when their cart gets stuck in a mud bank. They spend the rest of the day getting it back on the road.

By the time they succeed, darkness has covered the land and creatures of the night run amok.

They remain unaware of that last bit up until one of them jumps them, dragging Marcia off the cart and throwing her on the ground.

The vampire slashes her neck open with his claw, slicing through the carotid artery and bloodying the dust underneath them. When he bends over to drink, she bites his nose off. She dies with the acidic tang of his blood on the tip of her tongue. The vampire transfers his attention to Joshua, who tries to fight him off with a torch, howling in despair all the while.

He doesn’t last long; just long enough for his wife to rise, her eyes turned black as ink, her teeth sharp as daggers. She kills her sire easily. He was starving before he found them, and hasn’t had the time to properly absorb their strength.

She then looks down on her husband, who is seconds away from expiring from wounds that no amount of stitching will heal, and makes a split second decision. 

The little girl is sent to an orphanage. Sometimes she thinks about her parents and her old home, who she remembers enough to miss, but after the first year that starts happening less and less.

One day she wakes up and realises that she doesn’t know what they looked like anymore. She has a vague notion that she got her auburn hair from her mother, and that her father had a beard, but their faces are empty, featureless blobs. She figures it’s for the best that her memories are starting to fade. Oblivion is more comfortable than painful remembrance.

Marcia and Joshua live through two human world wars and a hundred others. They learn what they have become. They accept what they have become, although some days that’s easier said than done. They find out that there is more than vampires hidden in the dark. They encounter others of their kind, and make acquaintances and enemies but never friends.