by Ryan Schow
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well then, whatever it is you choose to do will have to be okay with me.”
“Please don’t say it if you don’t believe it,” he said.
“Do I have a choice?” his father asked.
“Always.”
“Then yeah, I believe it. Still I wonder what kind of person you’d be if you had to deal with what you were given.”
“You mean if I still had my birth body?”
“Yeah, if you looked like me.”
“I’m not sure, but what I can say is that if you’re going to tell me about the days when you couldn’t modify your body or face, it’s going to sound a whole lot like you telling me you had to walk uphill in three feet of snow for miles to get to and from school, and that you had hair on your balls by the time you were eight.”
He chortled at a low volume, and at a low intensity for longer than August expected, but then he said, “You know your generation is a bunch of pansies.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” His father glanced over at him and August followed this up with: “I won’t be a pansy. With Savannah being who she is, by virtue of that, I will most definitely not be a pansy.”
“When you see the guys I work with, how hard they go after each day, what they can tolerate, how big they are—”
“When you talk about not being a bitch, you talk about being big, working hard, not quitting things. That is not the only way to harness and wield power.”
“Your little friend already showed me that.”
“Honestly, Dad, what are you afraid of for me?” August asked.
He took a deep breath, then glanced over once more and said, “That you won’t measure up in my eyes.”
Smiling, but sad inside, August said, “Look at us, having something in common after all.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“What is it? Money? The ability to lead and feed a group of men? Produce something of value? Something more than a fart app?”
“That’s the app you made?” he asked. “A fart app?”
August nodded. Now his old man was smiling.
“Made a shit ton of money on it, too,” he said, causing his father to laugh.
“Shit ton on a fart app…”
He told his father what the app was about and how it worked. When he told him what he did to Cameron when he first developed the app, his old man fell into stitches, literally laughing to the point of tears. As August sat there with his father, smiling, laughing, telling him just about everything, it was almost possible to forget that he had a bomb inside his head. That he had a decision he had to make: Mortal or immortal?
Who would ever get to make such a choice?
His smile slipped a bit, but he held on to it, even though now it felt like it bore real weight on his face. If he chose to lead life as a mortal, he would fall in love with Savannah and she’d never age. She’d move on from him when he started getting old, crapping his diapers, drooling.
He wouldn’t let it get to that point.
He’d leave her a long time before she could see him begin to age like that. But if he was an immortal, if he could live forever, what the hell would he do with all of eternity?
One decision was the promise of pain and insecurity, a love destined to be lost; the other decision was hundreds, maybe even thousands of years on the same planet, seeing everything, becoming so smart and so talented he could literally become a God among men.
He never wanted to be a God, he just wanted a girl, a way to see some proud luster in his father’s eyes. More important, he wanted a way to live with himself, maybe even love himself.
The smile came back on his face. He made his decision. And just like that, it felt like the entire landscape of his life began to change.
Chapter Eighteen
How long had it been since he drank the dead highway patrolman’s blood? And how long had he been officially dead? Aloysius didn’t know. He wasn’t supposed to feel pain for such an extended period of time, but he did.
A sharp, debilitating agony worked its way through him, holding him half in slumber, half in a nightmare. It was as if his mind wanted to awaken, but his body ached to simply give it all up.
He tried to move, found he was in utter darkness. The barest of movements told him he was on a metal table, under a sheet he assumed.
Figures…
Everything on him felt tight and hot; not an uncomfortable hot, but the kind of hot that felt like you were sitting in the cremation oven just before you crumble.
He did not have the reserves necessary to pull through this, not having used so much energy trying to heal himself after being run over. He couldn’t stop wondering how long it was going to take. It was taking forever! Where he was at—in the county morgue surely registered as a John Doe—he was toe tagged and left under a sheet for awhile to see if anyone had come to claim the body.
No one would come.
A pair of females entered from a nearby door. He listened to their voices, tried to smell them, but found he was still in such horrible shape. He was barely even breathing as it were, let alone able to sniff them.
“So did someone call the authorities yet?” one of the two girls asked. “To let them know this dude’s seen no love yet?”
“No one’s come forward to claim him,” the other girl said.
“That’s what I just said,” she replied. “So like, do we put it in the box to chill, or leave it out to rot? Because he’s super hot for a dead guy but the second he starts to stink is when my love affair with him ends.”
There was hollow laughter he found inappropriate. By the sounds of them, they were young. Twenties, maybe. He felt something graze his privates, a small hand copping an over-the-sheets feel.
Unbelievable, he thought to himself.
“Who knows?” one of the girls answered. “Let’s just leave him for a bit because surprisingly, he’s not smelling like a fart salad sandwich yet.”
“But like, how long are we supposed to wait before someone tells us what to do?” the girl asked again. “Because when he does start to stink, honestly, it’ll ruin everything.”
“Jesus Jasmine, obsessed much?”
“Take my picture with it, will you? Nothing gross. Just me and him.”
“Are you shitting me right now?”
“Don’t be a bitch,” she answered. “Just make it quick.”
She pulled back the sheet, realized it was time to make his move, but found he was without much energy. He tried to peel back his lips, grow his teeth, but alas, the dead blood was playing hell on his body. Almost like a car with oil in the gas tank rather than fuel.
He drew up his strength in time for the girl’s flash to send a million tiny needles through his eyeballs and straight into his brain. His pain sensors flared, but his body was too weak to even flinch. So the sheet went back over him and he laid there like a slug on a hot day, unable to move, unsure of how he’d even recover.
Nearly a day passed before he heard someone say, “It’s right here, Detective.”
The sheet came up and a distinctly older woman said, “I think this is the one. I mean...good fuck, would you just look at the color of that skin!”
“You sure this guy’s been dead?” the detective asked. “Because…I mean, I don’t know. He doesn’t look right.”
A finger poked his cheek.
“He’s cold,” the detective said, “but not a block of ice either.”
“He’s just been here. Not in the fridge. Not enough room these days. Now if you’ve got someone to claim him, or you want an autopsy—”
“I said I didn’t need one,” the detective said. “Not until you do the other two I need. Those are pending cases. This guy’s…he’s a two hundred pound sack of shit taking up a good table if you ask me.”
“The other two are on the books,” the woman said about the other two autopsies. “It’s just, there’s been a lot of activ
ity lately and we’re short-staffed.”
“They aren’t going to slow down.”
“True.”
Aloysius took a mental assessment of his body, knew the limitations, realized that he needed more time before he made any kind of move. But at this point, even being able to move at all would be something.
Patience, he told himself. A healing of this magnitude took time.
“Well,” the woman said, “we might want to put this on ice. After you look at it, of course.”
The Detective checked Aloysius’s fingers, studied his prints for anomalies. Nothing would turn up in the database. No dental records either. The detective peeled back Aloysius’s lips, studied his teeth.
“What are you looking for?” the woman asked.
“A cat,” he said. She laughed, then: “They look different. A little…sharper. Even though that makes no sense.”
Aloysius heard him stand up straight, remove his glasses, rub his eyes for whatever reason. “Either I’m tired or these things are changing.”
“He stole a cop’s car, right?” the woman asked.
“A CHP cruiser.”
“Killed him, too, right?”
“Worse.”
Aloysius actually heard the woman swallow over a huge lump in her throat. “Ate him, I heard. Or he tried to at least.”
The detective looked at her and said, “That shit goes no where, you got it? No where.”
“Jeez, what’s the biggie? We get freaks in here all the time.”
“I don’t need a panic on my hands. We’ve already got some rather nasty homicides. And if I’m right, this guy has enough blood in his belly to fill a small child, which means if this gets out, you’ll see vampire shit splashed all over the front pages of The Chronicle, The Bee, and every other little piss ant rag from here to San Diego.”
“You know the news, Detective. No one believes them anymore. It’s like watching Jerry Springer, or Maury Povich, but at six, seven and eight o’clock at night.”
“Regardless, the news is still a brand and a service, and they have ratings to hold, which means sensationalism first and retractions later. Listen, I’ve got to go. Cool this turkey if you will. Get me those other two autopsies, please. It’s been forever.”
“If you weren’t here flapping your gums, Mr. Lawman…” she said, teasing, almost like she liked the man.
He laughed, then the morgue got quiet again. After they left, he had another six hours to try to heal before he was put into the cold chamber and left to chill at a frigid thirty-nine point two degrees Fahrenheit.
That six hours came and went, and just like that, he went from the table to the fridge. Now that the internal heat of healing was gone, the perpetual freeze was on.
For awhile, Aloysius’s body was able to produce enough heat from the rapid internal healing that he could stay relatively warm—well, warm enough—but the cold prevailed and he was once again dragged down into crippling state of near death.
The next day, a young woman pulled him from the cold chamber, stopped, mumbled something to herself about this being the wrong body, then put him back. After a half an hour, he came back out again and from a distance, Aloysius heard two women speaking about this incident.
He was laid on the table, left to thaw. His internal healing (courtesy of Holland’s Fountain of Youth serum) resumed, heating his body from the inside out before continuing to repair the damage caused by corpse blood, the mass internal deterioration that followed and now the cold.
“This man didn’t look like this when we brought him in,” a girl’s voice said. “He looked, I don’t know, like an unwrapped mummy. Now he looks younger, almost fresh. How does that happen? This just doesn’t happen. This is the wrong body.”
“I thought that, too, but it’s tagged right.”
“Someone’s messing with you,” the girl in charge said. “Someone’s messing with both of us.”
They drew the sheet back over him and from the other side of the fabric, he heard one girl say to the other, “We’ve got five fresh ones coming in.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Nope, not even close. They’ll be here within the hour. Mass shooting at an adult book store I heard.”
The women left the room. When the five bodies arrived later that day, Aloysius had sufficiently thawed and he was continuing to heal unmolested.
He needed blood though. He was damn near desperate for it.
When the bodies were un-bagged, tagged and ready for paperwork, the attendees left the room once more.
Drawing from his stores of energy, he managed to move a leg, an arm, his mouth enough to bare his teeth. He slowly slid his legs around, the sheet falling away from him. After a long bout of concentration, and with a terrific effort, he sat up, opened his eyes and looked around.
The heat of the healing left him mobile and capable, but still he was shivering. Which was something for a vampire. It was coming up on the dinner hour, so he imagined the place wouldn’t be terribly busy.
Should he wait?
No.
He needed blood in him. Even if it was from the five bodies who’d come in an hour ago. Aloysius managed to stand on shaky legs, wobbling like an old man with hand holds on whatever was in reach. Finally he stood there on his own, naked with his bones and his nutrient-starved hair and his protruding hips doing their part to keep him from taking a header into the tile floor.
If Father Time were resuscitated then put on his feet too fast, he would look the same. To say it wasn’t his finest hour would be a laughable understatement.
He hobbled over to the first body, a woman with a gunshot wound to her head, and he sunk his teeth in her neck, but he was not strong enough to puncture her skin.
With a mighty effort that nearly sapped his energy completely, he produced the tips of the Wolverine-like bone spurs from his knuckles, pressed the two jagged spurs into her neck and leaned on them. The skin finally broke and a little blood started to leak out.
The smell was wrong, but right enough.
He just needed a little boost.
What was the start of a necessary feeding became an all-night bender. He knew he ended up in the morgue because he fed off the dead, but right then he was too ravenous to care. If any of the blood was worthwhile, then his efforts weren’t in vain.
When the first attendee walked in that next morning, Aloysius was sitting on the floor naked among the corpses, the five new bodies so torn apart and eaten the woman couldn’t even scream.
Blood was everywhere, his face, hands and upper chest covered in it.
He hit her with his eyes fast, pulling her into a hypnotic trance. She stood there, slightly pudgy with bad hair but a pretty face and glasses far too big for her features. He struggled to his feet, staggered over to her, feeling sick but in need of a live body.
Not once did he break eye contact.
When he stood before her, it was with downcast eyes, holding her body, her soul, her very will to run. She was shivering with either fear or anticipation. Sometimes they felt the same. Inside of him was a roiling madness that felt like insanity, mania—it was that thing that sharpened all his finer edges, making him not only sloppy, but violent and downright homicidal.
He reached for the collar of her shirt, grabbed it, and with an explosion of force, he ripped it down, all the seams tearing as her body jolted downward with the force.
“Stand up straight,” he said, his voice like broken glass. She stood, her skin pale white with moles, skin tags and a bad tattoo of a poodle over her sagging right breast. The torn fabric hung around her waist like a bib, her big breasts covered in a mostly sheer bra, her neck perfectly exposed.
His spurs punched through his skin. A grin cut his face in two.
Not blinking, making only spare movements, he sliced open the corners of his mouth, making it impossibly large and bloody. She didn’t scream, even though he saw the hysteria building behind those eyes. She also felt an untenable lust, that confli
cting need to let him have her, take her, make her his slave for now and all eternity.
He punched her in the neck, tore open his impossibly wide mouth, showed her two rows of what looked like shark’s teeth. She let out an exulted sigh. He took to her like a ravenous dog, latching on to her, emptying her out gulp after furious gulp. He was finally getting some live blood, and though he still didn’t feel right, the youthfulness of his body was swiftly returning.
He fed until he could drink no more. He then shoved her aside, fell to his knees and vomited the excess blood. He knew what blood he’d kept inside him: the alive girl’s blood. With each cruel expulsion, he purged himself of the old blood, the blood of the dead.
Two more people came down to the morgue and before long, he’d torn through them and half of the staff as well on his way out.
Upstairs, he pulled the clothes off a dead man, put them on, then walked out of there barefoot wearing slacks and a white button up (spattered red, tails hanging out, one side longer than the other because he’d put it on in haste and hadn’t lined the buttons up right). Half his face was smeared red and grotesque looking, like some horror show put on in NY by GQ where the models all looked amazing, and wildly insane.
He took a car from the lot, thought about driving back to Palo Alto, but realized it was closer to Savannah’s school and it would be best to just head there. He’d driven most of the way to the school, getting as far as the Newcastle exit, when everything changed.
On the two-lane country road leading to the school, a man stepped into the road in front of him, held up a hand for him to stop. Aloysius slammed on the brakes, the car pitching forward and sliding slightly off center as it screeched to a stop.
“What the hell?” he growled.
When he managed to clear his eyes enough, he found himself looking at a man looking very much like himself, but not exactly. By now the sun was falling and the low light of dusk cast an eerie shadow over everything. The doppelgänger walked to the side of the car. Aloysius rolled the window down.
“You look like shit.”
“I’ve been through it,” Aloysius said to his almost twin. “What are you doing here? I thought the last time you visited this universe was a one time trip.”