Of the Blood

by Joshua Laack

Chapter 29

  As he lay there, languishing in the lack of pain, Andrew realized that he could once again breathe air into his lungs. He took a deep gulp of air. No sense of relief accompanied the rush of air. It felt strange to breathe in and out and when he let his breath out and didn't pull in a new one, there was no sense of discomfort, just a slight panicking in his mind that he needed to breathe.

  Andrew began to notice a few other things as well. He could hear noises in the distance. At first they were confusing. It sounded like there were cars driving right above where he lay. He also heard music and people talking. But they would fade into hearing, and then after a moment, they would fade out again. Andrew concentrated on the sounds, trying to understand what it was that he was hearing.

  As he did, he found that he could focus on just one sound or group of sounds and hear it as clear as if it were right next to him. Somehow, he was hearing the radios and the people talking inside of cars that were driving by.

  Other sounds filled his ears as well like the chirp of birds and bugs, wind moving through trees and water bubbling somewhere. All of these registered themselves in his mind and were stored away to reconsider later. Andrew found he could listen or push to the background any noise he chose by focusing on it.

  Andrew took a breath in through his nose out of habit, not for any real desire to have air. He gasped as he was bombarded with smells. There were ten times as many smells as there were sounds and it was that much more confusing to try to sort them all out in his mind. After a time, he was able to do the same thing with the smells that he had done with the sounds by concentrating on them one at a time. Some of them, he could identify. Flowers of some kind, dirt, moss, mold, decay, wood and a few others. Then there were a multitude that Andrew had no idea what they were.

  What amazed him the most of all of this was his mind. Andrew had always been intelligent, but he had never been a quick thinker. He always took his time to figure things out, but now his thoughts were jumping from smell to sound and back to smell again faster than anything he had ever experienced. It was also astonishing to discover just how his mind was able to process a smell and identify it. If it didn't recognize the smell, his mind stored it away for future reference and then moved on to the next.

  His nose and ears were behaving strangely so Andrew wondered if his eyes might be doing the same. He squinted, but still couldn't see anything. He wondered if maybe he could see his hand if it were in front of his face, and then it was.

  He didn't feel it even move. It was at his side where it had fallen while he was spasming in pain, and then the next instant it was in front of his face. Andrew's mind, which seemed to be processing things faster than it ever had before, didn't register a motion in between. It had just been one place and then the other.

  After that, Andrew was in almost childlike glee for a while, just moving his arms and hands around. He discovered that the same thing happened when he turned his head from side to side. He didn't think he would ever get tired of moving that way.

  While in the midst of playing, another thought entered Andrew's mind and stopped him. He was in a coffin, but wasn't dead. Now that the pain was gone, he didn't feel like he would be dying anytime soon either. In fact, Andrew felt far better than he ever had. So, since he wasn't dead, maybe he should get out.

  The sounds, which Andrew could still hear from time to time seemed close. It was possible that they hadn't buried him yet and a coffin was just a large box with a hinged lid. He just needed to push it open. As soon as he thought this, his hands were strait out in front of him, spaced about a shoulder width apart.

  This didn't have the effect that Andrew had been hoping for though. His hands had gone right through the fabric and the wood of the lid and buried themselves in the earth above. Any hope that he hadn't yet been buried was destroyed.

  Andrew felt a moment of panic as he realized that they had already put him in the ground. What was wrong with them? He was still alive. What kind of funeral home buried people when they were still alive? Weren't they supposed to check for that kind of thing first?

  This whole thing was just too strange. None of it made any sense. It couldn't be real. With that thought, Andrew realized it was possible that this whole thing was just a dream while he lay in a coma in some hospital bed. That made more sense than this being reality. A dream would explain the strange way his body was acting, the smells and sounds and the speed at which he was moving.

  The more Andrew thought about it, the more sense that made to him. Even if it was a dream that he couldn't wake up from because of a coma or medication, he sure wasn't going to find out, or wake up, just laying here. He pulled his hands back into the coffin and closed his eyes as dirt fell back through the holes. He punched again, a little bit away from the first holes he had made.

  More dirt fell through the now larger holes. Andrew punched again and again until he had almost broken out a square piece of the coffin lid. Just as he was about the punch again, it cracked and the square and all of the dirt above it collapsed and poured in and around him in the coffin. His head was buried and he felt panic take hold.

  That faded as he remembered that in this dream, he didn't need to breath. Andrew also noticed that despite the amount of dirt resting on top of him, he didn't feel the weight of it. His hands were underneath the piece of coffin lid which was resting just below his chin. He concentrated all of his effort on moving his arms to lift the wood and the weight of the dirt above it. The square lifted with little effort.

  As Andrew pushed, the square caught on the edge of the hole in the lid, but as he pushed a little harder, some pieces snapped off and it slipped through. He used one hand to hold the piece of coffin lid up. With the other on the edge of the hole that he had made in the lid, he pulled himself up into a sitting position in the hole. Another push raised the board up into the ground above him. He was amazed at how easy it was to push through the dirt.

  Alternating between pushing on the board and clawing himself upward, Andrew was eventually standing up in the the coffin. One final quick heave and the board shot up and out of the dirt, leaving a hole through the last little bit of dirt. Some of the dirt was falling back into the hole, but light flooded his eyes and Andrew felt hope that in this dark dream, he had a chance of escaping.

  It took some time, but he managed to work his way up through the loose dirt that kept collapsing in on him to reach the surface. He stayed there a moment, just arms, shoulders and head above the surface of the dirt, and stared around in amazement.

  He thought after destroying the demon that the sky had been brighter and bluer, but this sky was so far beyond that. He could see swirls of color moving around the sky. The colors above him ranged from dark navy to the lightest robin's egg blue.

  After a quick glance around, he decided that he was alone in the graveyard and that it was safe to climb the rest of the way out of his grave. He noticed as he crawled out that the top of the grave was loose dirt without any sod or grass growing on it. He couldn't have been buried for long.

  Once on top of the ground, Andrew shook as much of the dirt off of himself as he could, and then worked to push the mound he had created in extricating himself back into the hole. He found that he had to concentrate most of his attention on his motions. If he didn't, he moved so fast that he couldn't even register what he was doing. With focus, he was able to level all of the dirt that had been pushed out, back into the hole.

  There wasn't enough dirt to fill it back up since some of it had fallen into the coffin. Andrew looked around for more. Not too far from the spot was a backhoe that was probably used to dig the graves. Near that was a pile of the dirt with a shovel stabbed into it. He took some of that dirt and managed to level off the surface of his grave. To anyone walking by, it would seem undisturbed.

  As he finished, Andrew wondered why he felt the need to make it look like he was still in the coffin. He was alive. People were going to find that out after they saw him. What di
d it matter if they found the hole that he had crawled out of. He shrugged to himself and began to move toward the road that wound past the cemetery. It was there that he discovered the source of the car sounds.

  He heard them clearer now that he was out of the ground, but there were less cars than there had been before. A cloud moved out of the way of the light in the sky and Andrew glanced up. The moon there was the only indication to Andrew that it was night. As he stared, he could see all of its various craters. He just stood there staring at it. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen in the sky.

  A thought struck him an instant later. It was dark out, but he was seeing things as well or even better than he had in the middle of the day. What was happening? This had gone on way too long, and felt far too real to be a dream. A word floated into his mind. Blood.

  “No way.” The sound was melodic and reverberated in his ears as though he had shouted it instead of just spoken to himself. It wasn't possible, was it? A vision flashed into his mind.

  He was in the car, only it was moving sideways instead of forward. Once again, he was looking out of the driver side window at the bright light from the large truck barreling toward him. An instant later, the truck hit the car and the scene went fuzzy. The vision reappeared with him laying on the cold ground staring up into the rain. He couldn't feel anything but his face, which was freezing.

  Johari's face floated into his vision and blocked the rain. Andrew was grateful that she was protecting him from the cold water. Streams of tears fell from her eyes off of the bottom of her chin and landed on his face in place of the rain, but they were warm, so it didn't matter. Each tear tingled as it landed on his face. Andrew wondered what was wrong to make her cry like that.

  “No, no, no! It's not supposed to be like this.” She was sobbing out the words. “Not like this. I just got you. I can't lose you.” She stared down at him for a moment through her tears. Then her velvet hand floated in from the side of his vision and rested on his face. “Do you want to live,” she asked? What a strange question. Of course he wanted to live. He tried to tell her yes. He tried to comfort her to take away her fears and her sad tears.

  Andrew found instead that he couldn't move his jaw to speak or move his head to nod. He could moan though, and he did that, though it was not voluntary. He struggled to move anything on his body. The only things that responded were his eyes and a little bit in his lips.

  Andrew forced his mouth into a smile, which came out more like a grimace because it hurt to move his jaw. Then he blinked twice. He hoped that she would take that for a yes. She smiled, but there was still worry and sadness obvious in her eyes. “Do you understand that you will no longer be human if I try to save you?” She seemed to choke as she asked him the question. Andrew forced his eyes to blink harder and more slower. She smiled through her tears and nodded. “I will do my best.” Her eyes whipped up and away from his face. “Not yet,” she whispered, “It's too soon.”

  Andrew gazed up at that face as he felt himself fading away. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but he couldn't. Instead, he did the only thing he could. He forced himself to smile one last time. She struggled to smile back through her sorrow and that was the last thing he saw, her face struggling to overcome her sorrow to leave him with a smile. Then other hands grabbed her and pulled her away.

  The vision had come in an instant and it vanished just as quickly. As it vanished, Andrew found himself still standing where he had been, in the moonlight at the cemetery. Yet everything seemed different. Somehow, he was Blood. The look on Johari's face was not one of a person believing that she had time to succeed and he had faded before she fed him any blood, yet he was here. She must have gotten the blood into him in time. He smiled. Everything he had hoped to share with her was possible.

  Andrew wondered what he should do first. He glanced down at himself. He was filthy from the climb through the earth and the subsequent filling of the hole. He wanted to go home and get cleaned up. Then he would go find Johari. He couldn't wait to see the look on her face. More than that, he couldn't wait to begin the life he wanted so much to share with her.