Being Undead

Chapter 2*

It was unclear how long later but Laura suddenly felt herself wake to a throbbing in her head. She put her hand to it but only realized then that the cause of the throbbing wasn't actually her head but her neck. Not relenting, she guided her hand to her neck and it came back wet and sticky. Blood, she realized, I've been bleeding.

And then, it all came back to her. "Oh God, I was murdered!" she exclaimed as she swiftly opened her eyes, almost blinded by the light which met her straight up ahead and she quickly closed them again.

Opening them again a few minutes later, she looked up to see John Doe standing, all dressed up in what could only be clothes he grabbed from the personal effects of other dead people in the hospital and walking about.

"I must have finally lost it like my therapist warned me I would if I'm starting to see dead men rising," she groaned to herself, somehow catching the attention of the standing guy.

"You're alive," he said, looking genuinely surprised to see her still breathing. "I could have sworn you were dead."

"And I could have sworn you were!" she returned, groaning again at the sound of her own shout.

"How can this be?" John Doe mumbled to himself, beginning to pace to and fro like it was some big problem.

Laura wasn't sure if she was comfortable with John Doe, who was supposed to be dead to begin with, debating the incidence of her alive, or even explain how it could be that she somehow had the memory of him killing her.

But whatever the head case was, she had a bigger fish to fry in that moment.

"Hey," she called up to him, "can you please help me off the floor? It's freezing down here."

He looked hesitant at first, seemly still debating her living status, but he finally gave in and carried her off the floor, setting her down on the slab which was stained with blood; and her labcoat too when she looked at it. It's official, Laura, she said to herself, John Doe really did murder you.

John Doe seemed ready to explain then and he began, "Lady-"

"Laura," she corrected.

"Laura," he corrected himself, his pronunciation coming out with an unknown accent when he pronounced Laura, almost like he had knowledge of some older variant of it, "it appears that I may have unwittingly gotten some of my blood into your system during our incident earlier. And... Well... Now... Well, I'm sorry but you've become an undead, like me."

Laura stared at him like he just spoke Mandarin.

Thinking that perhaps she didn't understand what he had meant, John Doe tried again. "Laura, you're an immortal now," he said. "You know, a vampire."

He seemed prepared to list all the different names he knew but she quickly stopped him with the raise of her finger. "I got the picture the first time you said undead," she said.

Thing is, while Laura herself wasn't a fan of the paranormal, she had lot of friends who were crazy for the stuff and they gisted her a number of things about the genre regardless of how uninterested she looked, chief among of which was what the word "Undead" meant.

What she couldn't wrap her head around however was how the hell could she have become undead. That thing was supposed to be fictional, she thought to herself.

"Look, Doe," she began.

"Frederick," he corrected.

"Frederick," she continued, "there's no way in the world that I'm a vampire, an "undead" as you called it. That's supposed to only happen in the movies. You know, fiction."