When I came out of my deep thoughts, I saw it was getting dark again. It seemed that I could get most of my business taken care of at night. This was the kind of life I was getting used to. I decided to take a walk and see what I could take advantage of and find out if there was any information of what I had done the night before. I was walking around town trying to act normal. The only thing that looked out of the ordinary was me, wearing dark glasses. With the bright lights coming from all the casinos I needed to shade my eyes. I suspected others may have understood, and besides, I did see a couple of other people wearing dark glasses.
I was really having a hard time dealing with the loud sounds and smells coming from people and places around me. If I concentrated hard enough, though, I could deal with them. I walked in and through a couple of casinos and wondered if there was a way I could take advantage of the wealth all around me. Maybe this was the key to living the way vampires lived, according to the stories I had read. With my senses so acute and my new speed, there had to be a way of taking advantage of people in these places. But how? And, how would I keep from getting caught?
I heard a couple talking about the money they had won. What came into my mind was so despicable to me that I almost felt sick to my stomach.
Burglary.
I could go from room to room and see what I could find and take it. I have the strength and stealth to do something like that, so I decided to take a chance. I made my way to the higher floors of the casino hotel to where the suites were and walked down the halls, listening for people in the rooms. I found several that were quiet and tried the door to one of them. I turned the knob and it broke open.
It was quiet inside and I did not sense or hear anyone. Without my dark glasses on, I could see as clear as daylight. I decided to go through their luggage. There were clothes and toiletries in all of the bags, but in one of them I found a wallet that had about $600. I took it and left the room. If there were cameras on the hallways hopefully they would think that I was a guest going into the room. I knew that I could not go into more than one room per floor in case someone was monitoring the cameras. I would have to restrict myself to one floor in the casino to avoid any possible problems.
It took most of the night and several casino hotels. By the end of the night I had a sizable bank roll. I thought about maybe checking into a nicer place, but I still had a problem with identification and a credit card.
The rooms I broke into were empty except for one. There was a young woman sleeping, but I could smell the strong odor of alcohol so I knew she was out. I had no problem going through that room. I was tired and anxious and decided to head back to the motel I was staying at. I stopped by the office and extended my stay for a week, again, all in cash and with no questions asked. I told the clerk that I did not need room service and settled in for the day. The pangs of hunger were beginning to hit me so I rested and decided that I would hunt again that night.
The lights of Las Vegas are so bright it’s almost like being in daylight. People from all parts of the country and different parts of the world come here hoping to strike it rich. There were people walking along the main streets drinking, laughing, and swaying to the music that various bands were playing. There were also those that were trying to take advantage of many of these people that were here for a good time.
As I strolled along the street, I noticed a young man standing in the corner. People would come up to him and exchange money for something that he was selling. After the customer left, he would walk around the corner and then return, waiting for another customer. I moved quietly to the area that he kept on disappearing to. I waited to see what he was doing. After a short time he came around the corner and knelt behind some boxes, pulling out a small wooden box and removing a small white bag of some kind of powder. Without even getting closer, I could smell the odor of some kind of drug.
I waited for him to come around again and, as he bent down I grabbed him and sank my fangs into his throat. Images of despair and sadness filled my senses as I drank. I felt his heart starting to slow, and so I stopped and laid him softly on the floor. I went through his pockets and took all the money he had and his wallet. I left there and returned to my room.
I went through his wallet and found his identification. There were also several others. Not only was he selling drugs, he was selling fake I.D. cards. As I looked through the stack, I found one that I thought I could use. At a glance, I resembled the man in the picture. The age was pretty close and he was from some place that no one would question. I decided to keep it and get rid of the rest.
I wondered about this man I had violated. Was he working for someone that would question what happened to the money he had acquired for the drugs? How would he explain it? Like the woman I had rescued before, was I making my victims’ lives more complicated? It made me wonder if, maybe they would have been better off dead. I wondered if my compassion for my victims would ever fade away. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? Was letting them live more of a danger to me? Would anyone believe them if they reported the attack? After all, there are no such things as vampires.
Chapter 6
Things were pretty uneventful for a few days. I made sure my rent was up to date. I tried out the new identification card in a couple of places to see if it would pass. All went well.
I was walking down Main Street just after sunset when I noticed I was being followed. I thought to myself that maybe I was imagining things. Had someone spotted my fake identification? Did they call the police? Was it another vampire that had sensed my presence? If so, was I not the only one with this affliction?
I stopped and watched some street performers, went in and out of a couple of casinos, but he was still following me. I was getting a little nervous and decided I had to do something about it. I remembered the isolation of the parking structure that I had been in a few days ago so I slowly walked that way. I ducked into a cove and waited for him to walk by.
As he passed I stuck my hand out and grabbed him by the throat, shoving him against the wall. His hand reached up into his coat. I caught it, grabbed the gun and threw it away. I quickly searched him for other weapons and found a knife that I put in my waistband.
“Why are you following me?” I asked. For a few seconds he did not answer. Only then did I realize that I was choking him. I let him go and asked again, what he wanted. After a minute or so he finally answered, gasping.
“My boss lost a soldier and you are new in the area. I was told to check you out,” he said. “I was told to find you and bring you to him.”
I picked up the gun and emptied the bullets out of it and put it back in his shoulder holster. I said to him, “Let’s go.”
Sitting in the back of a limousine, I wondered why I was going along with this. Am I getting too cocky, to confident in myself? I am still not sure what I am capable of doing. Am I getting into something that I may not be able to get out of?
We drove for about half an hour and all the time I was thinking maybe I should get out of this. I could kill this guy real quick and leave. But if I don’t find out what this is all about I may wind up being followed again – I may not be so lucky next time. No, I have to take control of this situation and find out what is going on.
We stopped at a commercial building in the outskirts of town and walked in. There was a small office in the corner of the building. Two men were there, one sitting behind a desk and the other standing at the door. Standing Man and my captor flanked me as we stood in front of the desk looking at the seated man. After some time he finally looked up, staring at me. “Who are you?”
“Who wants to know?” I answered.
I assessed my situation in a flash. I knew my captor was armed, but unless he had reloaded while driving he was no threat to me. I felt pretty sure that the other man guarding me was armed as well. Seated Man had both his hands visible so I was not too worried about him.
“I have lost a very valuable man and I was told you may have had something to do wit
h it,” said Seated Man.
The woman I rescued must have remembered me and this is part of the operation she was involved with. The only way they could have known about what happened was if she had said something. I knew I should have killed her instead of trying to help her.
I kept my mouth shut and listened. I wanted to learn as much as I could about this man’s business.
“Besides him being missing, I am out a lot of money and merchandise that I have to account for,” said Seated Man.
Wait a minute, I thought. We are talking about the wrong man. I left him alive and I just took the money not the drugs.
“I run this operation here,” Seated Man said, “and I don’t need any interference from you or anyone else in this town.”
As he spoke, I saw him give a slight nod to the two men standing by me. I knew what was coming.
Standing Man reached into his jacket. In the wink of an eye, I grabbed his gun, moved around the desk and placed the muzzle to the temple of Seated Man. The room was so silent you could have heard a pin drop.
I smelled the stench of sweat and I could sense all three men trembling. “I am not here to do you or any of your people any harm,” I said, “unless you try to harm me.”
I released the clip from the gun, ejected the round from the barrel and tossed the gun back to Standing Man. Many options came to my mind. I could have killed them and ended this, but I saw that this was an opportunity for me to survive with all that I needed and wanted and it fell right in my lap.
“Who are you and what do you want?” I asked. “I could have killed you if I wanted to. If you are referring to the man I am thinking about, he was alive when I last saw him. Either someone else killed him or he is simply missing with your product and money.”
I had to play as if I was not too interested in this operation. I needed for him to trust me and include me in his business and, if I played my cards right, I would be in. I made myself comfortable in a chair in the room. We sat and talked for quite a while. I got to know him. He told me to call him Mr. C. The other two men assured me that they were only doing their jobs and hoped there were no hard feelings.
I told him that I had nothing to do with the disappearance of his man. I told him that I was in town for a while and, so long as I was left alone, I would leave them alone. I turned around to walk out.
“Do you want to work for me?” Mr. C said. “I could use someone like you.”
“I work alone, and I need a place to stay,” I said.
We agreed on my terms. He apologized and then told my former captor to take me to the complex and set me up with a place. It occurred to me that he never asked my name. Was he that shaken up or did he have too much on his mind?
After stopping at the motel and picking up my stuff, we drove to an apartment complex overlooking the strip. We walked to a room and my former captor unlocked the door and led the way in. He told me that as long as I worked for Mr. C I could live there.
He apologized again and told me that his name was Mitch. I apologized for handling him so rough in the alley. He thanked me and asked if I was some kind of martial arts expert or something. I explained that I had been living in the streets for a long time and had to learn how to take care of myself. He wanted to know where I was from. I told him that I traveled a lot and I was from nowhere in particular.
“Why do you wear shades all the time?” Mitch asked.
“I have a slight eye problem,” I said, with no intention of explaining my situation. “What do we do for Mr. C?” I asked?
“We meet every day at the office at 5 p.m. to set a schedule for the night,” Mitch said. “Mr. C will fill you in when we get there tomorrow evening.” He gave me the keys to the room and left me to check out my surroundings.
A far cry from the room I had left, this was a one bedroom apartment with a big window overlooking the strip. It had a fully stocked bar that I would never use. It had everything that a man would want. I looked around for any cameras or listening devices and found nothing.
Am I being a fool for trusting these people? I will be on my guard every minute.
I turned off all the lights, walked out the door and roamed the streets looking for food.
I found a young man lying in a side street. He smelled like he had too much to drink. I looked around and saw that we were alone, so I bent over him and sank my teeth into his throat. I felt his heart beating a regular rhythm so I drank until I started to feel it slow down. I left him as I found him, minus some blood, and headed back to my room.
I sat, watching people walk along the strip, and thinking of how long I would be able to keep this up until I was discovered. Until a few weeks ago, I was an average man working at a job that kept me housed and fed. I lived alone with not much to keep me occupied. Walking down the street, no one would pay any attention to me. I was living in a world of my own with not much of a goal to look forward to. Much had changed since that night in the Sonoran Desert. Now I was a creature that lived on the blood of others. I had killed at least one person and maybe two, something that I never thought I could ever do. I felt more confident in myself than I had ever felt before. I knew that I could handle anything that this life could throw at me if I was careful enough. I was still in awe of what was happening to me. In my previous life, I would never have confronted these men that I met earlier. I suspected that this job offer had to do with illegal things, again something that I would never had considered in my previous life.
A knock at the door startled me. I was so deep in thought that I never heard anyone approaching. As I moved to open it, I got a whiff of a familiar odor. Mitch was standing there. He asked if I was ready to go to my first meeting with the group.
I was becoming familiar with the area around this city and saw that we were headed back to the place Mitch had taken me before. We parked, walked into the building, and entered the office.
There must have been thirty men ranging in ages from twenties to mid-fifties. The sound of everyone talking was deafening. The smells of body odor, cigarette smoke and other smells I did not recognize were overwhelming. After a few minutes, Mr. C came in and called for everyone to be quiet and take a seat.
“There is a new person joining the group,” he said, pointing to me and asking me to stand, “but I don’t know your name.”
If I give my first name only, I thought, no one will find out who I am. “James,” I told him. That’s the name I had been using. He told me that I would learn the names of others as time went on.
I discovered that this was an organization that distributed drugs, set up prostitutes with clients, provided fake identifications, and pretty much had its hand in every illegal business that one could think of. Here was I, a man that payed his taxes on time, one that had no police record, and mostly obeyed the speed limit. Changing to this kind of life was overwhelming. I was surprised that I was taking this all in so calmly. I should be dead by now. The virus that was running though my body was changing me in ways that I had never imagined. My only fear was how long this was going to last. Was I going to revert back to the person I was before or was I going to be this way forever?
My mind was racing with all these questions and I almost missed important information that was being given to the people in the room. When Mr. C called my name, I snapped out of my daydream and he told me that I would be “protection” for the people working the streets. He gave me a general idea of the areas they would be working and I was to patrol these areas and make sure that his people were left to do their jobs. I asked about any problems with the police. He said the lawyers would handle that. As the meeting broke up and I was leaving, Mitch came up to me and handed me a gun. I told him that I did not want it. I left the room telling him that I would make my own way back to the apartment.
I made my way through downtown observing the people all around me. Many of them were just trying to make a living by dressing up as caricatures from science fiction movies. Some were posing for pictures with tourists. Many
people were displaying their talents by playing music or doing paintings using spray paint cans. Under the canopy covering the street loud music played while projected images danced to the beat. I had to cover my ears and was thankful that my dark glasses were enough to shield the brightness of the show. I noticed that others were having problems with the loud music also, so I did not look out of place reacting the way I did. As I was leaving the area, I spotted two of the men I had seen at the meeting earlier doing their jobs. All seemed to be normal so I found a cab behind a casino and headed to my room.
A couple of weeks went by without a major incident. Every day or so, I would find an unsuspecting victim and feed off of them. I would continue with my job, checking on the people working the area that I was assigned to patrol. I realized that I could not do this forever. What I wanted to do was be in Mr. C’s position. I was learning how the organization worked. I found out how everyone was dispatched and who reported to whom. I saw how money was collected and how many people were involved.
What I did not know was how the organization was being supplied with the drugs. I also did not know how the women were being acquired to work as outcall girls. Was anyone higher in the pecking order than Mr. C? This would take some time to learn and I knew I was being drawn into a very dangerous situation. For me to survive for who knows how long, I had to learn as much as I could. Time was what I needed to find out about the organization and find out what was happening to my body.
During one of my attacks, my victim had a knife and tried to stab me. I quickly disarmed him, but not before receiving a wound on my side. It started to bleed, but as I was feeding I felt the wound healing. Minutes after I finished with him, my wound was completely healed as if nothing had ever happened. I felt the cut as it was happening and it hurt. As it was healing, though, it felt like an itch being satisfied by a mild scratching. I learned that my body would heal itself very quickly so long as I had some blood to feed on. Fortunately I had been feeding while I was injured and except for a little pain, I would be all right.
Diary of a Blood Drinker Page 3