by Jason Fuquea
Vampire Sunrise
An Alice Masters Novel
Jason Fuquea
ISBN 978-1-7340251-0-1 (paperback)
Copyright © 2019 by Jason Fuquea
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter 1: The Winter Storm
Chapter 2: Waking Up
Chapter 3: Neighbor Jane
Chapter 4: Broken Heart
Chapter 5: Christina
Chapter 6: The Blood Distillery
Chapter 7: The French Quarter Mansion
Chapter 8: Father Bennet
Chapter 9: Interfectorem
Chapter 10: Lilith
Chapter 11: Werewolf Surprise
Chapter 12: Vampire?
Chapter 13: The Hard Goodbye
Chapter 14: Zombie Royal
Chapter 1
The Winter Storm
I’m Alice Masters, and for me, it isn’t going to work out. Call it fate, or the grand design, or just life, but I am firmly on the wrong side of ‘it’ whatever it is that the lucky ones have.
I’m 23 years old and absolutely cursed. My relationships never worked out, not even with my dad. I haven’t had a stable home since the accident and not once worked a job longer than a few months.
All my money is gone and not just that thing called “savings” some people have. My only possessions are the most basic ones. I have a red toothbrush, three pairs of skinny jeans, a pair of sweatpants, a few shirts, my silver cross necklace, a wallet, and a hairbrush. I also have one pair of whiteish several-year-old tennis shoes with frayed laces and a small backpack containing only the necessities. You can say I live a very mobile-friendly lifestyle.
My life consists of striving to do the best I can while being crushed under the weight of endless failure. I truly want to fight the good fight, want to do some good, but that isn’t part of the grand plan, it seems. No matter how often I try to do the right thing, I still get caught with my pants wrapped firmly around my ankles and the world just points and laughs.
My tragic life has finally caught up to death and I’m just a spectator, as usual. For me, my ending is no better than the beginning, just another funeral waiting to happen, and this time no insurance. I wonder, “Will the state put me in a pine box or cremate me next month?”
The falling domino that started my tragic life in motion happened fifteen years ago on the night my mother died. I still can’t understand how I survived, not really. My grandmother, I called her Nanna, told me how my mother and I both died within seconds of each other.
The thief that stole her daughter away and almost took her granddaughter arrived disguised in the form of a rare February snowstorm in South Carolina. The storm was brutal and unforgiving, causing both our bodies to become beaten and traumatized. Our injuries were so extensive that at one point both of our hearts stopped. My heart restarted for some unknown reason, but hers stopped never to beat again. “You know, maybe my heartbeat returning event will happen again this second time,” I thought.
In that storm, a very mad hundred-year-old White Oak became tired of holding the accumulated wet snow on its uppermost limb. The tree deposited the limb and contents onto the roof of our old house at about 8:30 pm, just after the Prince found his long-lost love while wandering the desert blind. My bedtime story ended and Mom switched off the bedroom light. At that moment, the cold, wintery night came tumbling down without mercy, changing everything and casting me into a never-ending downward spiral.
Nanna told me it took quite some time for the neighbors and emergency workers to dig us out, but in the end, we were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital. St Mary’s was just over fifteen minutes from home, and Nanna, who we lived with, had called the ambulance. She was present for everything and once I was old enough, told me the details.
She explained how we were both hurt, blue from the cold and wet from the storm but breathing when carried into the ambulance. Then, just as we arrived at St Mary’s my mother’s heart stopped beating, with my heart following suit just after as if it knew my mother was leaving and wanted me to go too.
Thinking back, maybe my heart knew something I didn’t. “Would it have been all that bad if I had gone with Mom then?” I thought honestly.
The official report said my mother was struck in the head by the plunging limb, snow, and roofing materials while shielding me. She was very protective, and I can imagine her throwing her body over me in an instinctive attempt to ward off everything that came crashing down. The snow covered us both, but luckily the combined body heat we produced kept us from freezing to death even though we were both suffering from hypothermia during the rescue.
Ultimately the force of the impact on my mother’s head caused irreparable damage. Her bodily functions rapidly deteriorated ending in heart failure. I was also knocked unconscious and unable to maintain a steady heartbeat. I remember nothing after the bedroom lights went dark, but I know both of us were effectively killed simultaneously.
The medical team at St Mary’s didn’t stop working on my lifeless eight-year-old body, not even after oxygen deprivation had supposedly started brain damage. Several broken ribs, countless injections, and prayers forced my heart to start working. The terrible event at St Mary’s lasted for nine of the longest minutes in her life, she told me.
I died, then came back just as I was. Staying in the hospital for about two weeks while my body started to heal, but I would still be forever broken. Nanna took me home once the doctors were satisfied.
We didn’t return to the house I grew up in. The storm had damaged it beyond repair. Probably for the best that we moved anyway, because I knew a part of my grandmother died during that awful night too, and that old house held so many memories that just daily living would have been too much for her. I can only imagine what it would be like to relive that horrible event every time something reminded her of Mom, I guess I reminded her in some way.
It was OK living with Nanna, but just like me, she wasn’t the same. She did the best she could to keep me safe and made sure I had something to eat, but we were poor and being poor offered few good options. I made it to college for a semester, but never managed to get a foothold at anything really.
The death of my mother was a long time ago, and now after many years the troubling thoughts no longer debilitate me. I’m ok when it snows, and don’t go catatonic during storms or freak-out in the dark anymore. It’s taken therapy and time to get functional again – if you can call how I live functional.
Most days my mom runs and laughs through my thoughts, and I think about the life I could have had with her. I still cry a lot. I struggle every day, needing my mom and a different path, but the time for my struggling is almost over. Now, I’m simply waiting until this twenty-three-year-old heart stops again. At least this time I know it’s coming.
I have stage IV brain cancer that has metastasized to my blood, bones, and nervous system. If cancer wasn’t bad enough, I also have contracted the Vampire virus. The virus turns a fractional percentage o
f male hosts into Vampires and eradicates all females.
I morbidly named the diseases my “combo-killer,” but oddly naming my killers somehow made me feel not so alone. Most people have a natural immunity to the vamp pathogen and would have no problem fighting it off, but not me. The virus has never left a female alive longer than three weeks, so death is immanent.
Due to my lack of insurance or resources of any kind, plus having my very mobile-friendly lifestyle makes going to the doctor a low priority. I found out a week ago about my cancer and Vampire virus combo, and while most people would have looked at this news as tragic, I have nothing to live for anyway.
Nanna will have been dead six years this Saturday. I don’t know who my father is and have no other family left. My only reminder of having a normal life resides on my face in the form of a hairline scar left by the thief that found his way into my bedroom just after storytime all those years ago.
The doctors have no idea what caused the cancer or even a definitive type. I was given so many hard to pronounce medical words by them it just isn’t worth the time I have left to go to the library and do any research. They gave me some meds to keep the pain at bay and optimistically to extend the couple of weeks I have left.
In the end, I have fought the good fight. I never hurt anyone, and I tried to help as much as I could, although I’ve never had very much to offer. I even started going to church on Sundays, but I’m already starting to lose weight and even I know that’s not good. So, this is it for Alice, I don’t have any hope for the pills or doctors, to be honest. I feel fine and would have never seen a doctor or been tested if it were not for my blood rent being rejected.
So, like I said, “For me, it was never going to work out.” At least I won’t freeze to death on top of everything. In New Orleans, the high gets around 73 degrees in March, and that’s fine by me. I’ve only lived here for the past four months, but it’s as good a place to die as any.
Chapter 2
Waking Up
I slowly opened my eyes. So, what am I going to do now? Thoughts about the past due rent are already parading through my mind. I closed my eyes and rubbed them both with balled up hands, turning my head to look at the old wind-up clock sitting on the three-legged bedside table, it’s 7:45 am. The clock and the table both came furnished with the apartment I’m renting.
I can hear a siren passing outside my bedroom window along with all the other sounds cars and people make outside on Decatur Street. Coming from the third floor I can audibly hear a dull repetitive thud directly above me. It reminds me of someone exercising or doing jumping jacks or maybe something more personal.
A sigh slipped through my tightly pursed lips in an almost inaudible huff, the result of being so dissatisfied with everything, and that frustration involuntary forcing itself to be known. “What a lousy way to start the finish of my life,” I groaned.
Where I live would not be considered nice, not by a long shot. The partially furnished apartment sat in the Cuban district of New Orleans on Decatur Street and was both a blood bank and cheap housing, aptly known as the Decatur Blood Bank Apartments.
It’s decorated in a style best described as “Forever Poor College Student,” and doesn’t even have AC. The apartment has only three rooms. A bathroom attached to the one bedroom, and a combined kitchen-living room made up the apartment in its entirety.
The apartment has a couch that sat in the living room situated against a wall to the right of the door and is at least a thousand years old. The floors are mistreated hardwood planks that are warped in places, bending when walked on. The few cracked pictures hanging in warped frames littering the walls also do nothing to help make this place feel like a home.
I did add a small, fake grass welcome mat I found in a thrift store to the front door, at least that was something. My own furniture consists of one large, brown, plastic milk crate with a cloth draped across the top. It’s my “affordable” coffee table. The apartment also comes with a small, older-model box tv with dual antennas made sometime in the 80s. Sometimes I can get channel 3.
The kitchen half of the apartment is galley style, which is fancy for all-in-a-line. The kitchen has a gas stove, sink with rusty faucet where only the cold works, and a humming 70s style icebox that finishes out the appliances. A few cabinets are built-in under the sink, but I’ve used none of them.
Accenting the kitchen is a tea kettle and mug, both compliments of the DBBA. The half a box of Earl Grey tea sitting on the counter is worth more than this entire apartment to me. I had no kitchen table, so I used the milk crate on the living room side when needed.
The bedroom is simple; hardwood floors continued through and it came with a few furnishings. A small wooden dresser that seems to be made of pressboard with its top peeling off, a wooden three-legged nightstand with clock, and an antique four-poster bed complete with detached headboard that sit to the right of the bathroom opening. A full body mirror is glued crookedly to the door going into the bathroom.
The bathroom could be accurately described as the worst room in the house, mainly due to the floor to ceiling ugly green tile with now brown grout lines. The same green color that most schools used in their bathrooms forty years ago is floor to ceiling without separation.
The disgusting green tiles are used in the shower, on the walls, and to make this room more depressing as a vanity top. One rusted metal bar fastened to the wall is the only towel holder, rounding off this musty-smelling train wreck of a bathroom.
My apartment has no closets of any kind. I didn’t need much, but seriously, even for me it is a little rough.
Yesterday, I thought about jumping off my apartment building’s roof, and that was probably the best idea I’ve had in months. If I did jump, my only concern was what would happen to Buddy, and to be honest that was the only thing that stopped me from jumping.
Buddy is a stray cat, a mixed color short hair that for some reason wants to hang out with me. I don’t know why anything would choose to hang around me, but my best guess is he likes how my raspy voice sounds saying his new name. I always do my best for Buddy, but I’m sure he gets disappointed with me sometimes, especially when I have absolutely nothing to feed him. If I can’t feed Buddy, I don’t eat either, that’s the rule. Buddy puts up with me despite the missed meals and to me, that means loyalty, something I rarely encounter or give.
The day Buddy found me, he was laying at my front door, with blood soaked speckled green and yellow eyes and his face all swollen. It looked as if someone had tried to strangle him with a clothes hanger. A thin, bloody ring encircled his scrawny neck where even today, weeks later, no hair would grow.
I imagined, optimistically, that the bloody ring was merely because his collar got hung on ‘something,’ and that same ‘something,’ caused the ring-looking injury, but I probably had it right, it was likely someone had been cruel and tried to hang him.
It just didn’t register why anyone would hurt an undernourished furball that could only half purr. His speckled eyes and ragged purr melted my heart the day he found me. I was going through one of my really low moments, and without question, I needed him more than he needed me. Being alone for so long has made me rigid and calloused. I forgot I could still feel anything until he reminded me.
Buddy is curled up next to me, slightly purring what I considered his trademarked off-kilter purr. It wasn’t consistent or deep, and I figured this type of purr had something to do with the unfortunately hard life he has lived, but it sounds content.
Buddy is the only thing I feel responsible for in this world and couldn’t imagine him being left alone. “I really do need to find someone to take care of him when I’m gone,” I thought, and the sooner the better.
Thump, thump, thump. Three knocks thudded on my raggedy front door, as if someone were not using their knuckles to knock, but instead, the meaty part of a balled fist. The thumping immediately brought me out of
my inner monologue. “Who is it?” I yelled at the door with my raspy, Southern voice. Knowing the sheer paper-thin walls did nothing to dampen my voice.
“Hey Alice, it’s Allen, the apartment superintendent.” His low growl sounding through the thin wooden walls with ease. “Your rent was due yesterday, and I know you’re sick, but we don’t have no grace policy. You got till five to pay the rent up or you’re going to be homeless, and don’t try to pay with your blood either, it’s no good.” Allen said in his husky, out of breath voice as if walking up the one flight of stairs was pushing the limits of his physical abilities.
“I’ve never been late, not once, and you’re at my door banging on it like you’re the sheriff? Acting like you have no idea who I am!” I said, in a stern contractual tone. “Why in the hell would you bang on my door at 8:00 in the morning anyway. You know I sleep during the day.”
I didn’t lie to Allen, I did normally sleep during the day, but strangely, for the last two weeks, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to sleep at all, even now when I’ve been awake for days. Last night was another failed attempt at sleeping. I lay in bed most of the night with my eyes closed, no ability to search for that wonderful unconscious dream place where everything is possible.
I love to sleep, it’s the best part of life because in my dreams I’m not an orphan, and there’s no attacking storms or combo-killer.
In dreams, I can see my mom in vivid detail. She is with me again, just as in my last memories leading to the storm. Nanna is also there anytime I want to see her, and not the shell of a person I used to live with, the real her, and don’t forget Buddy.
Buddy isn’t far away in my dreams these days, although he looks the same, still half able to purr and scarred up. I hope when I do close my eyes for the last time, dreams wisp me away to my special dream place. The place where I’m no longer shattered and guarded. A place where I can laugh and cry happily around those that will not hurt me and will hold me without an agenda.