The Vampire War

Chapter One: Sobs

Tears fell from her soft face; her morning had been going on for what seemed like hours. She clicked open the cylinder of the .38 caliber revolver and spun it around a few times. Once satisfied with the smooth tapping of the moving metal part, she snapped it shut and sniffed once more.

The heavy smell of cigarettes floated up from the first floor of the two story house and leaked into her once perfect room. The smell was always there, sneaking into her room through even the slightest of cracks. All her belongings reeked if her dad's nasty habit. Her fairly small room was engulfed by the over-sized bed propped up in the far corner, as far away from the door as possible.

She went over her most recent encounters. Her fluffy blue pillows were now shoved within her wardrobe, directly across from the bed. Her dad had ruined the last week on his drunken investigation for drugs. Her father ruined everything. She inhaled a lungful of air and concluded: her dad was disgusting.

The light blue covers and teal sheets on her bed now had several small drops of blood on them. Her nervous nail-biting habit dug so deep into her fingers it made them bleed. The room was, until recently, painted the same blue colour as the bedding until her father managed to ruin them too. "That bastard," she cursed under her breath vividly remembering his actions. He had this idea, she recalled, this idea to become a painter his experiments were forced into her room while she was out late at night. He blew up in her face when she got home well past midnight and said; "this is what you get for staying out too late!" he didn't seem to notice that, at eighteen, she was no longer a child. She was almost done with high school - why couldn't he accept she had grown up?

The walls were now splattered with off colours. Some pink added in with black and reds, along with a few terrible stick figures and several holes. Her dad couldn't paint and his frustration covered the walls.

In front of the door and opposite the bed was a broken TV and bookshelves filled with her favourites. The TV had gone out years ago. She never bothered to get a new one. The books started with the oldest books on the top shelf and drizzled down, the bottom ones being her most recent reads. As time progressed and her life changed, the colours of the books shifted from excited yellows, whites and blues to darker blacks and greys. The stories went from engulfed in love and gossip to those of misfortune and destruction.

A TV could be heard downstairs from her room. The volume had increased and echoed dimly up the staircase; it was some reality show. The announcers voice picked up a suspenseful tone, "Lisa and Danny, you are out of the fame. You can eave now or sacrifice your winnings, the car and forty-five thousand, to remain in the game starting off at zero and in last place."

She could hear her father roar at the TV. "Ha! What a nasty twist. Bet they deserved it. Get the hell off the game, no one likes you anyway!" he stopped yelling at the TV, most likely to suck in another draft and growled into a different direction, her mother. "Hey honey, they should take it so they can lose next week and get nothing - those bastards deserve nothing," the response from the other person downstairs was so weak it failed to creep up the stairs.

Tears broke out again as she sank into another sobbing fit. The sound of his voice was sickening. Her makeup ran down her face in uneven streaks. Two black lines trailed down her face where the tears etched the same path over and over. She couldn't believe it. When she finally got home from her hour long walk, she had her phone - the only thing of value left to her - smashed on the porch. To add to her crushed reality, he decided to give her a serious lecture in addition to her smashed personal life his lectures always ended with her getting thrown into her room for hours on end. Sometimes they included fists, threats and hurling sharp objects at her.

Ignoring her part in his attacks, she went over the result of his most recent rampage. The first noticeable thing was her torn shirt. The expensive yellow blouse was ripped at one shoulder and no longer covered the bruises on her arm. Her legs ached from the silverware he violently chucked at her during her flee to her room. Several scratches covered her legs below her white shorts while one larger one leaked blood over the edge of her shorts. They too were now ruined.