Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series

by Rosemary A Johns

  I panted, wiping my knuckles across my lips. I hugged the box to my chest as I darted across the hallway towards the dark of the connected garage. Your light-proofing’s still holding up for the glass panels above the shelves. I clicked on the over-head. The garage was fetid; mold seeped across the far wall in black blossoms behind the empty jam jars, which you were going to use six summers ago before…

  So many sodding befores. Like before this thing got its teeth in you, munching through your mind, piece by bleeding piece. Before it took you away from me. Before it took you away from yourself.

  I dived further into the garage, dropping the box to start dinner preparations.

  It’d been a long wait; the hunger had become a part of me. This isn’t sodding milk we’re talking about. It can’t be left in the fridge for later: this is kill or be killed. Basic predator 101. You hunt and then you feast. If you want to recreate that artificially…?

  Eat fresh.

  I pressed by my Triton motorbike, which was a slash of crimson in the drear. She was nudging me to take her out. She hates the winter slumber as much as I do. It makes her restless trapped inside.

  I selected a latex glove, stretching it out; it’d do. The blood from the butchers was thick fresh pigs’ blood. I must be their most regular customer: I’m one for black pudding me. It was your idea to drop that in when we set up the order. You still knew what was what back then, at least for some of the time. You always got how to cover, well, you know, what I am.

  You First Lifers act like drinking blood is disgusting but you still nosh it with your fry ups, don’t you…?

  I heated the blood in the microwave, which was stowed behind the plant pots, waiting for the ping. When I poured it into the glove, it bulged out each finger: a fat blood hand waving. Then I tied up the top tight.

  Here comes the best bit, when I hold back, anticipating and letting the thirst build: that blinding, intoxicating thrill.

  How could a First Lifer understand the rush?

  You never got how all life is laid bare in a moment, no matter how many times I tried to explain. Even though I’d see this look, as if you were laying yourself open, exposed to anything I gave you. Yet it didn’t matter: you weren’t one of the Lost. You’d never tasted the gush of blood.

  Words are simply the shadow. The memory of our real lives. But what else do we have?

  So right, the glove? It’s the closest thing I’ve found to human skin. Then I can mimic the glorious sensation of violation when the fangs sink in deep. It’s about more than the blood, you see.

  Slowly, I extended my fangs: two thin canine needle points. As I closed my eyes, I imagined…

  I said that I’d tell you all the nasties and wankery, didn’t I? Flay myself bloody?

  I imagined that it was your neck, as my mouth closed on that glove. I always have done. I imagined, as my teeth pierced the latex in dual sharp points, that it was your skin I was breaking. Your blood I was sucking. Faster and faster. Harder and harder. That the warm coating the back of my throat was your life drawn into mine.

  There was a dizzying buzz, like the world had exploded into multi-colored connectedness, after a month of monotone loneliness. Then the glove was empty, and you were in me — all in me — completely.

  Then I climaxed.

  It was over. My fangs retracted, as my eyes snapped open. I dropped the sucked dry glove into the bin, wiping the blood away with the back of my hand.

  Now, don’t get narked. You’re to blame that I have to drink this animal piss to start with: for my abstinence.

  It was an ultimatum. Yeah, yours. Give up First Lifer blood or lose you.

  Not bloody likely, I said.

  Then we rowed. I swore, bargained, and begged…

  Of course, you didn’t get it: what First Lifer blood truly is to us Blood Lifers. It’s our very breath. No drug blows your mind to such a high and the dead sweet part…? There’s no down. When it hits, you feel each chamber of your heart pumping, as every cell, nerve, and synapse sparks. The atoms of the world unite in flowing motion, as if you’re part of something infinitely bigger than you or the world. You could touch the face of sodding…god, nature, the universe because you’re truly alive in that moment more than when you slithered from your mama’s bloody womb.

  But here’s the thing…animal blood? It’s not the same bleeding deal. It’s like pretending sugar free can give you the same rush as the sugar laden delicious original. The spark and life are only just there. It singes but it doesn’t burn.

  And I hunger for the burn.

  Look, a pig’s not as high up on the evolutionary chain; it doesn’t have the same DNA to ignite the match.

  But you’ll survive, you’d insisted, you’ll live.

  Yeah, a half-life. A shadow. Still I’d done it for you: a half-life with you was better than a full one alone.

  There was no choice between loving you or loving the blood, after what we went through to be together. After the corpses we left behind.

  Real hearts and cupid me, aren’t I?

  Still, I deserved the ultimatum. Don’t think I’m wriggling out of the blame.

  After all, you found me with that blood donor.

  You must’ve followed me, when I was too drunk on the call of the blood to smell you.

  This punk rocker had invited me up. She had piercings in her lip, lower down too, but I didn’t look too closely because with that much metal, she’d have stuck holes in me if I’d got too intimate. She must’ve dressed for the occasion: pink tutu and combat boots, with eyeliner drawn on like battle paint.

  The punk kept stroking the Ace of Spades motif on my jacket, like it was a religious symbol she’d sworn to memorize; it made me wonder if she was writing a text for a band of deluded Blood Life worshipers.

  But the smell, Christ in heaven, the smell.

  Pot wafted in mushroom clouds, choking me, as I swaggered after her inside. My eyes watered.

  The donor had already drained her blood into a chipped I Love My Mum mug. It balanced on a dressing table that overflowed with spiked bracelets, fishnet stockings, razorblades and a bowler hat, which jauntily hung off one edge, as if it’d dropped out of the pages of A Clockwork Orange. She smiled when she passed me the mug, just a hesitant twitch of her mouth’s acned corners. Her fingers drifted over mine. I’d already offered cash, but she’d refused. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t bloody well offering what the punk — in her crush daydreams or death wish fantasies — was hoping for either.

  The blood was warm, swimming; I watched it dancing round and round in beautiful circles, singing to me to drink…

  Then came hammering on the door downstairs and your voice, hollering loud enough to wake the dead, “Get out here, Light; I won’t let the blood control you again.”

  I never did get that last drink but I didn’t lose you. Except, I’m losing you now, aren’t I?

  I paced around the garage with my shoulders hunched, clenching my fists up as if for a fight, whilst the blood bobbed through me, when I noticed that the board over the window was rotted.

  It flaked splinters in dust showers. The rusted nail was bent out of shape like a deformed spine. As I tested the board with my thumb, the wood suddenly crashed from the glass panel, flooding the garage with the orange glare of the dying sun.

  “Buggering hell.” I leapt backwards.

  My cheek smoldered like the tip of a ciggie, whilst my eyeballs melted ice-cream at the bleeding beach. I hissed with the agony of it and the indignity of the one sodding vampire myth that holds true: night walking.

  A sharp shaft of sun burnt across the garage, over the Triton and between me and the door out to the hallway.

  I was trapped.

  What if you needed me? I strained to listen. But the house was silent. You were either sleeping or were…

  Bloody morbid I was nowadays; death catches you like that. I’d forgotten. Not because Blood Lifers are immortal, in fact we simply decay more slowly because the blood rep
lenishes us. We still have a shelf life: this whole planet does. I’ve never seen one of us much older than half a Millennium.

  I leant against the wall, exploring my tender face. I couldn’t make out anything but dim shapes in the garage with my burnt eyes, except that blinding spear of light. The blood would fix that, given time. It heals, restores, and resurrects, even pigs’ piss poor substitute for the good stuff. The new skin cells were already tight where they were knitting themselves into place, grafting my face back to its never changing contours.

  That bursting into fire in the cruel light of day? See, here’s the thing, it’s more like wax reacting to a flame. Us Blood Lifers are candles: we burn bright.

  But there’s always a cost.

  If you want the science and not the poetry (you used to say that, and I’d nark you by merely grinning), it’s to do with how our cells synthesize the blood to repair themselves.

  What gives life, takes it away. The world’s big on irony. Or would be if it cared enough…and it doesn’t. Our clever thinkers know the formulas. Me? It’s enough to know that the sun and me don’t mix. I walked in the day once, however, and now I have the night: 50:50 seems a fair split.

  I tried to edge around the strip of light, but the sun was still too high. My boot protected my foot for the second test, but by the intense heat in my toes, wouldn’t for long. I didn’t want to have to get out the stink of skin fused to leather because that’s nasty and not something you ever forget.

  I slunk to the trapdoor in the far corner, swinging it open, before I slid down into the belly of the basement. The basement is a cave-like room, with nothing in it but a truckle bed, wireless music system, and my tatty editions of Mojo. I sprawled on the blankets, letting the door slam shut and entomb me in the familiar blackness, whilst I waited for my eyesight to return and my cheek to mend. I slipped in headphones, moving by touch alone in my private refuge. I hoped the haunting melancholy of The Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” would sear away the pain; the driving piano, plucked bass, and recorder were part of the permanent soundtrack of my life.

  Memories of my own Blood Lifer Author — lost to me — were brought to life in the black.

  My own Ruby.

  This underground hole is where I retreat when the daytime carers come.

  In the early hours, when the sun’s still pausing for breath over the hills, I hand over your breakfast (toast and honey), your wash things and make-up because you deserve to look…yourself…and your mountains of multi-colored pills, to the whichever day of the week it is carer. Then I pretend to head for work through the garage. I don’t know what the carers reckon I do, or how I get there, but they don’t bother to ask, and I don’t bother to tell. It’s a game we play.

  Not that I can work, not even cash in hand, no questions asked stuff, with you to look after. Other avenues aren’t much better, not since you stopped me nicking stuff.

  When I was first elected into Blood Life, there was nothing that I couldn’t take if I fancied. Now I have to budget your pension between the two of us.

  Talk about being bloody defanged.

  At least pensions are one less thing I’ll have to plan for: silver linings in the dark, right?

  But when you… When I’m left behind, there’ll be no more pension or house. No more you.

  What shred of the First Life, which we’ve built for nearly fifty years, will I have to hold onto then? What part of it’s been real? The terror rises — sticks in my throat, darling — chokes me…when I think that.

  The past, it’s like this series of photos, but the future’s just this expanse of black. What if I slip back into those shadows with nothing to hold onto? Yet I don’t want to because I’ve already seen what’s in them.

  I know what’s waiting for me.

  I always lock the garage, once I’ve left for my pretend work because I see those women’s looks, suspicion like spiders in their eyes. Big bloody double padlock on the basement once inside. I’d dug this hidey-hole the first year we came back here.

  Overkill, you’d called it. Security, I’d said.

  Because they know: the carers, delivery boys, and all the other First Lifers who stumble across us. Not what exactly but they still pick up the prickling sense that something’s dodgy. Different. But do they say anything? Of course not. That’d be too simple and straightforward: the truth without artifice.

  No, I get the smile instead. You know the one. If we get any more repressed in this great country of ours, we’ll implode with all the crap that we’re not saying.

  It’s always been a problem. First, I was your husband. Then toy boy, son, grandson…to strangers.

  To you, I’ve simply been your Light.

  But we’ve had to keep moving, Christ, so many places, because of those labels.

  “Why won’t you register with the Blood Life Council? Things could’ve changed? They’d sort it,” you’d demanded.

  Sort it? Those nasty bastards? The Blood Lifers, who give other Blood Lifers the willies?

  We’d have got sod all from them, apart from maybe slaughtered. At least, they’d have given it their best shot.

  Let’s say the Blood Life Council were reasonable, for once. Do you reckon I want my balls crushed in the sweaty hands of Westminster? Just another dog to be leashed and tagged? Those wankering bureaucrats are no more than petty shadows of the First Lifer Parliament.

  And you know what I think of them.

  Except, Blood Lifers don’t even have the vote. There’s no democracy in our world, only a bunch of brats no more than decades old, wielding their power like their cocks, in the way only blokes can who are excited to discover how to use them: by buggering the rest of us.

  “Stop playing the rebel,” you’d said.

  Know what? I’m not playing, love. I tried conforming once, didn’t fit.

  I won’t be what the First or Blood Lifers want. But I’ve tried, for you. My blindside. My wonderful weakness, for whom my blood hums.

  My Kathy…please…don’t leave me.

  The sun had finally bled behind the moors. My new skin was tight and pale. I could see as sharp as a night owl again.

  I switched off The Stones, swinging out of the trapdoor into the garage.

  When the rotten board crumbled in my hand, as I tested it, I ached for you; I’m a creature of the night, but you were the creature of the toolbox.

  I ripped what was left of the wood from the nails, hurling it against the far wall, where it shattered with a satisfying bang. When I heard you startle awake, I instantly regretted it.

  You were crying. A low animal wail.

  I legged it into the hallway and then up the stairs into our room. You were thrashing side to side in the bed, agitated. Your gaze wandered to me in confusion, as I dived towards you. But there was no recognition, only fear.

  “Just me, love.”

  “No, no, no…” Your fingernails scrabbled at me, as I soothed, scratching deep gouges.

  “All right.” I backed away, the blood trickling down the backs of my hands. “You’re safe. It’s night. Sleep time, yeah?”

  You quietened. For a moment. These bursts of violence burn you out and scar me.

  I tried to smile. “Kathy…”

  A low moan. Your mouth hung open and then twisted into a snarl. You clawed at the covers, raking them up and down, as if you were trying to escape.

  It was your white wisps of hair — more fragile than even the bones in your thinning body — which got to me. Sometimes it’s the little things, which you could never guess at, rather than the big stress or drama, which boot you in the gut. It made me march to the door, without looking round again, as I mumbled, “I’ll make us a cuppa.”

  Only once I’d clicked on the kettle in the dark of the kitchen, resting my forehead against the exposed stone of the open hearth, did I realize that we were out of mugs. That cheeky bitch Wednesday had slurped tea all day, without cleaning up after herself. Instead, she’d stacked the mugs with grainy rims in haphazard
piles in the Belfast sink.

  Sighing, I threw off my jacket, ran the water and started rinsing.

  The image of your white hair on that white pillow, forced itself on me: no escape this time. Look, I’ve seen enough corpses in coffins.

  Morbid, right?

  I concentrated on drying your special Union Jack mug: the one that I’d nicked from “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet” on Carnaby Street in the 1960s.

  We’re both still here.

  The mug’s colors were faded, and there was a hairline crack under the handle. Me? I’m smart as ever; not that I ever was smart.

  I dropped the teabag in but as I turned for the kettle, I heard your shriek, “Advance…”

  I swung around, catching your mug tottering off the edge. I saw the danger but bugger me if I could do anything to stop it.

  Not this time.

  Everything was in slow motion: The Union Jack mug tumbling arse over elbow to the flagged floor, red and blue smashing in a spectacular bang Mr Firework. Great Britain shattering. Yet all I could do was watch.

  I stared down at the now still pieces. Your mug: broken.

  Then I was bawling out my nancy heart, balled up under the oak table because it was like the world was falling and I’d better find somewhere to hide. Except, I’d forgotten how to feel like that because Blood Lifers’ll tell you that we don’t fear. Yet we do, when we’re motivated.

  And love’s the greatest motivator of all.

  So, I kept on bawling, until it felt like there was nothing of me left — I’d salted it out in tears. Then I cleared away that old broken mug, before brewing you a new cuppa.

  You studied me dead close as you supped your tea. I experienced one of those moments, when I reckon you know me — not for long — just for a second or two.

  When I snuggled next to you, massaging your palm in the way that you always like round and round, anti-clockwise, you smiled. “We’d lie like this out on the moors, remember Kathy? That first night we did it, on the hilltop by the Twelve Apostles? Buggered your dress with stains, but you’d stripped me down to the skin, so my clothes were all right.”