I sat on the hood of the car, waiting for the coyotes to show up to take away their prizes. I wasn’t really seeing the woods or the bodies, wasn’t paying much attention to the cold metal below my butt or the fact that, yet again, Justine had run away.
How did it get to be this way? It was only a year ago I was working as a medical examiner in Chapel Hill, living a normal, boring, non-violent life. Back then, guns scared me and I was phobic of cutting to the point I could barely hold a scalpel to a dead body without cringing. But I’d always faced my fears. I nearly passed out when I had to do surgical rotations in medical school, but I got through it. To think, in a year, I went from that to hunting werewolves with a katana.
It all started with a visit with my brother, Dante Giovanni Rossi, or Deegee for short. He hates that name so, logically, I always called him that. Giovanni, he liked being called Giovanni.
I guessed I must have caught him on an off day or something, because one moment, we were talking and laughing after scarfing down a truly horrifying amount of food, the next, I was lying on the floor, convinced I was about to die. I remembered the look in his eyes. I remembered thinking he really WAS a sociopath. Psycho. Monstro. Monster.
The next thing I remembered lucidly was being in the hospital. I was treated for my injuries and released. But I was turning and it was a disaster waiting for a time and a place. I wasn’t a violent person. I was quiet and shy and a workaholic, more than happy to work sixty hour work weeks. I’d never forget the first time I killed someone.
#
I was still in the hospital. The pain was back, and the morphine wasn’t worth shit. So, I just lay there, curled in a ball whimpering.
Between the morphine drip and the blood transfusion, I couldn’t bend my right arm and my arm kept twitching as I tried to keep myself from drawing it toward my center.
The light hurt my eyes again, even though the shades were drawn, and they’d turned off the overhead fluorescents. The nurse came in to check on me not long ago, but I felt okay then. How long had it been? A half hour? An hour? Two?
“Knock, knock,” a male voice called from the now open door, the light searing even through my closed eyelids.
A moan escaped me as he eased the door closed behind him.
“Sorry,” he moved toward the side of the bed quickly, his slip resistant soles not making a sound against the industrial flooring. “I’ll go get the nurse or the doctor to look in on you, okay?” He reached to pat my shoulder reassuringly.
I still wasn't sure what my brain was thinking. Maybe it wasn’t. I sure didn’t remember telling my body to move, even though it did. Quicker than I thought I was capable of moving in my condition, I seized his arm, holding on for dear life. I finally opened my eyes.
“Wow,” he twitched his lips into the semblance of a smile, trying and failing to disguise his grimace. “You sure are strong.”
For a dead woman. The thought crossed my mind in a brief moment of clarity. No, not dead. Dying. The clarity slipped away and something else took over. My hand shook where it was still attached to the orderly.
He gently laid his hand over mine where it rested on his arm and tried to pry off my fingers without hurting me. Reflexively, my fingers dug in deeper. His grimace returned.
“Easy, Doctor Rossi. Just let go and I’ll get you some help. Okay?” He squinted, looking deeper into my eyes. “Doctor Rossi? Are you in there?”
Next, he leaned in closer, moving his throat toward my mouth. At the time, some part of me thought he was offering me a buffet. Now, I thought he must have seen my lips moving and thought I was trying to speak. My eyes drifted closed as he came within inches of my mouth. I tried to move my face away as an abrasive cologne assaulted me, but another scent hit me. The scent had my eyes popping open and, before I knew it, I was leaning in and breathing deep.
“Ma’am?” he said on a startled breath, trying to jerk away.
I didn’t let him, but extended my arm around his shoulders and brought him back. My teeth were already sinking in before any part of my mind had the faintest inkling of what I'd done. The hot, thick, metallic tasting liquid started flowing and I started lapping at it without thought.
He tried to get away. He was yelling, shoving, and hitting me, but I didn’t notice. Everything I was in that moment focused on the liquid flowing down his neck. My brain didn’t register what it was, and I didn’t really care.
The weaker his struggles became, the more I started to come to. At some point, I realized I was holding the orderly and let go. He slumped to the floor and my mind reeled trying to grasp what was wrong with him.
I smelled blood. It was everywhere. On the sheets, my gown, my arms. I even felt its sticky residue on my face.
“What?” I said under my breath. At first, I thought the blood bag had somehow ruptured and the orderly had fainted. Yeah, that made sense. But I had a nagging feeling I was kidding myself.
So much blood.
I leaned over on shaky arms to check the orderly. He lay slumped on the floor with his head leaning against the night stand at what had to be an uncomfortable angle. I reached over to touch his neck, which was covered in blood along with the front of his scrubs. The blood wiped away to reveal a wound, which was quickly covered in blood once more.
The door banged open and I closed my eyes and turned away to protect them from the light from the hallway. A terrible shrieking noise rent the air as someone in scrubs ran over to me on the floor.
How did I get on the floor? And what's that noise?
“Dr. Rossi? It’s going to be okay,” the woman tried to yell over the loud noise. Someone ran up to the woman and handed her something. A needle. It glinted. The noise stopped. Darkness.
#
When I opened my eyes, the room refused to focus. I blinked my eyes a few times but it didn’t help. I tried looking around, since focusing on the ceiling clearly wasn’t doing any good, but moving my head caused the room to spin like I’d just done three shots of tequila back to back. I closed my eyes with a groan and laid my head back down, ordering my equilibrium to settle into some semblance of normalcy. I tried to move my head again, this time with my eyes closed. I still felt the nausea sloshing in my skull, but it settled shortly after my head stopped, resting sideways on the pillow.
I opened my eyes, but the room still refused to focus. I could make out the blurred edges of the furniture next to the bed. The metal railing on the bed was up, but I couldn’t make out the door, its edges were too blurry to pull from the background. I closed my eyes again and groaned. Keeping them open was giving me the first twinges of a headache, like when you tried on someone else’s glasses. My eyelids were heavy, and I settled in, letting exhaustion take me for a while since keeping them open was just a pain anyway.
After a while, an itch on my arm became increasingly insistent, as they always did. Yay for gating, I thought sarcastically. Once my head was through being the focus of my attention, the itch that had started as a mild twinge became undeniable.
Ah, fuck it, I thought, or maybe I said. I wasn't sure.
I moved my left arm to itch my right but drew up short at the wrist. I tugged, again, to the feel of firm fabric pulling at the wrist. I whipped my eyes open and sat. I groaned, my head feeling like it was going to spin off and tumble to the floor. I stilled for a moment more, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath through my nose, then opened them and looked at my wrist.
Restraints! They had me in restraints?
A strangled noise escaped my throat as I began to tug at the restraints with increasing panic, forgetting entirely that I was a doctor, and knew full well how to remove them. If only I stopped panicking! In short order, people burst into the room and pressed me down to the bed, forcing my head to spin with renewed fervor and the sounds coming out of my throat to morph to screams. I didn’t see the needle this time.
#
The next time I woke, I didn’t panic quite so much. The doctor mentioned something about leaving me restrained and taking me off the sedative if I didn’t fight them again. Something about switching to a pill. I wasn’t really paying attention. I didn’t really care. I felt like roadkill. The doctor left me alone to sleep off the rest of the sedative.
#
I glared at the nurse as she doddered in with the medications. I couldn’t remember what I was going to be taking. She handed me some pills, and I downed them obligingly. She didn’t bother to smile. She didn’t bother to explain. She just shoved the pills in my face and stepped back as if I was contagious or a rabid animal. I guessed, with what little I remembered of the last few times I was awake, the rabid animal wasn’t too far off the mark. Once she was certain I’d swallowed my pills like a good little patient, she disappeared through the door and left me to my own devices, which really sucked.
I had nothing to do. There was no TV in the room. I had no books or people to amuse myself with. The minutes dragged by as if some demented gremlin was entertaining himself by poking me with sticks.
The effects of the drugs snuck up on me. One moment I was as fine as I got nowadays, the next I had this dizzy, drowsy, nauseous feeling that seemed to go perfectly together and yet sucked balls. I was grateful when the drowsy overcame the dizzy and nauseous and I fell asleep.
#
The next time I woke up, they'd scheduled me for a psychiatric consult because, of course, I was nuts. It took an effort to surface from my drug-induced level of inattention to answer the doc’s questions. I didn't remember but I thought it was a lot of trying to figure out why I snapped. I thought if I weren’t, you know, dying, I’d have been in a nut house for the criminally insane already. Instead, my specific medical needs made it so I got stuck with Dr. Numb Nuts hounding me in my hospital bed.
Honestly, how someone could think they could try to explain away the workings of a person’s mind when they were dying and completely out of it was beyond me.
Was I a violent person? No. Did I have violent impulses? At the time of that question? Sure. I had some violent impulses directed at the doc. Did I want to kill anyone? Hell, no. I was a medical examiner. It was my job to solve the causes of death and make sure any who might be responsible were brought to justice.
#
The time in the hospital blended together in a seamless string of days where I was nauseous to the extent I could barely eat and ended up on a feeding tube, dizzy to the point I couldn’t leave my bed, and exhausted to the point I slept most of the time. I wasn't sure how long it went on for. I lost weight at an alarming rate so that, while I went into the hospital at a grand old weight of 185, I left weighing less than 120.
By the time I left the hospital, I had lost almost all muscle mass and every last ounce of fat on my body. Looking in the mirror was like looking at a skeleton rather than the well-padded woman I was just a short time before. They'd agreed not only that I could switch from oral haldol to something not quite so devastating, but also that I was safe to reenter society.
I still had to go back to the hospital for outpatient blood transfusions. That hadn’t changed. But I was starting to wonder about things that would change my life forever. At that point, the incident where the orderly died was starting to come together in fits and starts. I was back at work. I was lucky and grateful I still had a job when all that was over, especially with the accidental death at my hands. I went to work every evening, because my anemia had made me pretty much intolerant of sun exposure. I went home and stared at the walls, woolgathering, collecting the pieces that had been splintered for so long.
#
As time passed, my denial lifted, veil by veil. It was a few more weeks before the pieces really started to fit together. I started remembering more and more from the orderly incident. I started remembering more and more from the incident with my brother. Questions popped in my head that required answers. Secure in the anonymity it granted me, I ran google searches and posted on blogs and forums, hoping for and fearing an answer.
It all clicked one day while I was sitting on my couch, staring at the blank white wall across from me. I shrieked and jumped off the couch. I started pacing, stomping my way across the modern-patterned rug.
Vampire.
The word echoed through my skull like an accusation. I bit that orderly. I sank my teeth into him and bit him. Except there hadn’t been that much blood. And a lot ended up down my throat. I remembered that too. I still didn’t remember what Deegee did to me, but I remembered what looked like bite marks after the fact. The sensitivity to light? That was a vampire thing. With how often I needed transfusions, I imagined vampires needed to feed on a weekly basis.
Good God, I thought. My brother was a monster. I was a monster. My first thought was I had to talk to Dante. I had to get everything he knew about being a vampire. That thought lasted all of a minute and a half before I nixed it. Dante left me this way. He didn’t once come to see me in the hospital or try to explain. Either he didn’t understand much about being a vampire or he didn’t care. Either way, I needed to find another source of information on them. But where to start?
#
I felt silly searching for vampires on the internet, as if they were real.
THEY ARE REAL, my subconscious chimed in just to dig the thorn a little deeper.
It was three more days before I got a message in my inbox. It was from a forum I'd posted on. It said someone had replied to my post. All the response said was, "I know what you are." Shortly after, I received another email. It was from the same forum. It was a private message. "If you really are what you claim, meet me at the below address 8pm EST three days from now." An address in Pennsylvania was listed. The username was Amandil.
#
I quit my job the next day and put most of my things in storage. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I wasn’t going to find answers sitting around my living room staring into space. I also wasn’t going to find it chained to a hospital by the weekly blood transfusions I required.
That thought gave me pause.
I needed those transfusions. I’d go crazy without them. I had proof of that first hand. I paced my living room. In the end, a single thought drove me. I needed to find other vampires. I needed answers. Finding those answers was far more important than worrying about what I’d do for blood.
#
When I got home after the fiasco with Justine, I didn't want to go inside. I didn't know what to do with her. There weren't any alternatives for vampires. You fed or you died. That was it. I sighed, and massaged my temples. I was trying to pull an answer out of my ass, it seemed.
Justine was just like me, which was part of the problem. She was stubborn, opinionated, ballsy and dangerous enough to back up whatever she claimed.
#
Justine got home a little before dawn. I was still on the front steps. We looked at each other, the same hopeless feeling echoing in the other's eyes.
"I can't be like you," she shook her head as she stood there, her arms limp at her sides.
"What's it going to take, Justine?"
"I can't kill someone who doesn't deserve to die. I might not have the badge anymore, but I'll always be a cop. This? What you're asking of me? It goes against everything I am."
"Then who deserves to die?"
The look on her face changed, growing darker, more sinister. "Killers," she said, her voice cold.
I had a feeling a hundred examples ran through her mind.
"Then that's what we'll do. We'll feed off killers."
Did you like this chapter?
Don’t forget to vote!