The Dhampir Dimension

by Viktoria Alukard

  Down here, inside of the control console, there was not a soul in sight. It was still as freezing cold as ever in here, and there was a fresh pot of coffee brewed in the coffee mess at the corner of the booth. Regina stepped outside to visually inspect all six generators and hoped that she would find anyone out here in the dark confinement. Shit, maybe one of her friends had to be taking a shit or piss, so she went back into the console to check if the door to the bathroom was locked. Well, the door was unlocked, and the small passage that led to the single stall was dark. Nobody had been back here at all, because it still had the faint aroma that the floors were mopped with pine oil solvent. But once again, the stench of blood spores regained its power when she reached the door of the stall. She turned on the light, realizing as soon as it was late that this had been a mistake. Blood sprayed all over the walls and dripped down the ceiling in long, red congealed strings. She wanted to vomit, overwhelmed from the smell, the scene of depravity, and most of all, the taste she couldn’t get out of her mouth. She covered her face with her hand and walked up to the mirror where there was a message written with blood-dipped fingers. It was written in the dried-up fluid, and it read, “HELP US!”

  Then between and around the message, she finally saw her own reflection, and right away noticed something way off about herself. Her face was so shimmering white, it was almost a faint grey, as if she had just brushed a ton of the Halloween novelty makeup on. But when she brushed her hand over her own cheek, it felt bare and smooth, and notably hard and cold. Regina looked into her own eyes, and the fire dancing in her pupils flashed the glowing embers back at her. Her jet-black hair appeared thicker, more voluminous at the crown, and very lustrous, like onyx. Veins across her breasts were indented under her pallid, almost translucent skin as deep, thick blue lines on paper. She was really drawn to staring back at herself, her own reflection seducing her. Fingers touched the mirror, and her touch left a frost mark from how severely low her body temperature dipped.

  “Am I sick?” she asked herself. Upon watching the question slip out of her lips, here, is when she saw the glimmer of pointy white fanged teeth cushioned against the top edge of her bottom lip. Oh my god, when did happen? I’m a…..I’m a…v..vv….

  She didn’t finish annunciating the word to completion, because from the rearview, she’d seen a dripping bloody claw grasp the top corner of the ceiling, belonging to a crawler the planned to ambush her. She spun before the thing could launch and impale her to the wall and found that she was able to latch herself upside down on the ceiling, defying all the laws of gravity.

  At will, with the magnetism vibrating invisibly from her brain’s electrical frequency, she shattered the mirror, and the broken silver shards flew and impaled the slithering humanoid monster that was drenched in congealed strings of blood and exposed tissue from lack of skin. It fell off the ceiling and landed on its side, screeching in pain. It reeked of decomposing menstrual blood and decaying tissue, and it was the repulsive stuff of nightmares to witness. It bounced back up on its two deformed legs that were bent like a grasshopper’s, and it jumped for her, but she was able to send a jolt through the beast, and held it suspended in the air while she sizzled it to its grizzly death from the insurgence of current. It growled and screeched, and a red smoke that stank like fried fermented fish spread throughout the compound. When the last of her energy was spent, the thing dropped into a pile of charred flesh and bone, that oozed some sort of yellow grease from the ventricles in the holes of its striated muscle. She ran away from the scene, knowing right away that this wouldn’t be the first creature she’d encounter. In the uptakes, she found herself next, where the entire space was filled with smoke and visibility was low. The smell of burnt fuel stung in her eyes and tasted acrid as it filled her lungs.

  Light fixtures were flickering in the corner by the fuels testing lab, and she grew very uneasy, as the metal deck plates slammed below her boots. When she got to the end of the long hallway with silver and black pipes, she saw a red footprint here that caused her to gasp sharply. The red print dragged to the corner where the fuels lab was, and her stomach tied into knots when she saw that the dragging wet stain she suspected was blood culminated into a scarlet pool outside of the door of the fuel lab, and there was more blood sprayed onto the side of the wall and dripping off the fixtures in fast-falling streams.

  She couldn’t help but look straight up, and her mouth dropped open in horror at the crime scene before her sight. The two badly mutilated and maimed bodies of both Cassandra and Radu were suspended from metal chain hooks tied to a steel support beam. Both of their throats had been slit from end to end, and they both had a bloodied wooden stake impaling them through the mouth.

  Both of their faces were drained of all color and were starting to turn blue from the chains around their neck. Cassandra’s body was almost about to be decapitated, from her body weight ripping her head and body apart at the slitting wound, that was beginning to coagulate after her blood drained onto the floor. Regina stood frozen in shock, trembling, with her hand over her mouth and tears of terror blinding her. Cassandra’s body then broke off from the head, and the decapitated corpse landed with a heavy thud on the deck plates in the pool of blood, and some of it splashed on Regina, causing the girl to scream bloody murder. As if this wasn’t grizzly enough, an unnaturally large, patent black centipede with a hardened body came crawling out of the hole of her severed neck, and aggressively launched itself at her. Violently, Regina stomped on the crawler to death, feeling it crunch and break underneath her boot. Yellow goo sprayed everywhere, until the thing was but a smear of black shell fragments and guts, with twitching stems for legs.

  Her legs were weak, and her heart was audibly pounding out of her chest, but the adrenaline rush helped her from fainting. She’d never seen anyone dead before other than in a casket. The body of Radu seemed impossible to tamper with, and his cadaver was also beginning to bloat and stiffen with rigor mortis. Smoke and steam made everything else difficult to see, and then the hum of the generators culminated into a deadening, darkening silence. The light fixtures went out, and the red emergencies came on, which only made the place more like something straight from a nightmare. Here she was, all alone, in the company of her dead coworkers. The red E-Lights only lit up every corner and end of each hallway of pipes up here, but in between it remained dimmed and smoggy. Nothing made sense, and a pounding headache ensued the maddening confusion. Her cries ebbed out into silence, that she indulged in for a moment, before some distant growling and shuffling broke her concentration.

  Her boots shuffled along the deck plates toward the red light that spread in translucence through the clouds of steam and smoke, and she formulated a blue energy in her palm to use as a light. Lucky for her, she picked up a crowbar from the exact location, by Main Steam Valve 3, before reaching the end. Boy, was she glad she did, because a gargling, growling and stumbling creature appeared out of the mist, and charged to attack her. Its eyes were completely white, and it looked like a mutated human with two extra arms protruding from its back that ended in scythes for hands. Regina found that she was able to jump up on the pipe to dodge a swing of the arms, and then she jumped back down and began to beat the thing upside the head with the crowbar. It swung back and attempted to bite her. The ugly, rotting creature possessed a rotting, black pair of vampire fangs that went well with its crackling, greenish-white skin falling off in chunks. With a stream of current, she stunned the self-coined “vombie” in place, before driving the tapered end of the crowbar through its frontal lobe. It collapsed back to true death, and she pulled the weapon out, the end of the stick covered in black blood and brains.

  The lights needed to come back on, and she down to the lower level to begin a generator feedback process before restarting and paralleling them. Another distant growl and the sound of breaking glass came from the lower level, louder as she approached it. The growling was dry but raspy and not coming from a human, but i
t was rabid. The closer she walked quietly towards the ladder that led to the lower level, the more it smelt unmistakably of rotting cadaver. The red lights that illuminated the load center level were flickering and buzzing as if there was an electrical short affecting the flow of current. When she walked down the stairs one by one, she saw nothing between the walkway of the six switchboards positioned parallel to each other, which didn’t make her terror any easier. As a matter of fact, she was even more terrified, holding her weapon against her chest in both of her small trembling hands. She looked up at the ceiling and saw nothing, careful to not make too much noise. The pool beneath her feet separated by a thick plexiglass was bubbling. The red illumination gave the illusion that she walked above a pool of boiling blood.

  A surfacing cadaver floated under her boots and stopped where she could only see the face of a lifeless man that was well into decay. The dull fish-eyes bored into her soul, and then, she jumped upwards when the mouth started to chatter and bite at her under the plexiglass. He thrashed violently, poorly attempting to break through. She showed him her weapon in vain, making sure he wouldn’t break through, when a wet slimy splash behind her diverted her attention, and she turned around. What she saw next was straight out of a horror film, and she didn’t have the option of running, as the thing was fast approaching the ladder, and if she tried to run, its long, scythe like arms would surely impale her through the railing.

  A humanoid creature appeared, with the upper half of a decaying human male, and the bottom half of the corpse molten into a dragging slug. It had two long, knife-like protrusions of exposed bone for arms, crawling rapidly towards her. It left behind a trail of black slime, and made unforgettable, very distinguishing wet gargling noises when it growled. Maggots crawled out of holes in its cheeks, and it spilt black centipedes she had seen earlier at the crime scene. It was a life or death, fight or flight situation, and she was trapped in there by herself. A surge of violent instinct pumped in her veins and she lunged towards the scythe slug with the crowbar and stabbed it right in its fleshy decaying ribs.

  Successfully, she penetrated the vile creature and the weapon fractured its ribs through a puncture wound, but when she tried to withdraw the weapon out of the creature, she was caught in a game of tug-of-war, as the weapon was being absorbed into the body of the creature. Shit, now she had no weapon!

  The thing vibrated as it absorbed the crowbar, and seemed to grow slightly larger and angrier, hacking at her with its scythes, and narrowly missing her face. She ran towards the back of the room, hoping to escape behind the narrow path behind the switchboards but the thing crawled too fast for her thinking. It had her trapped against the wall, and she covered her face with her arms before its arms danced down on her in violent slashes. The thing shrieked like a pterodactyl when a burst of flames coming from behind it sizzled all its backside, causing it to retreat away from her and turn back.

  The recognizable, tall thin figure of Enttu stood before the beast, with a challenging “Come hither” look on his face. He was in his usual black attire, wearing one of his brooding, flamboyant capes that touched the floor.

  “About fucking time,” she thought out loud. He was a handsome sight for sore eyes.

  He sent another burst of flames at the beast from his fists, and unsuccessfully drove a stake into its back, before realizing that his weapon got absorbed into its flesh. When the creature tried to impale him, the dhampir narrowly avoided the attack, performing a mid-air back flip, in which he landed on his feet next to a frightened Regina. He held out a protective arm across her as the slug came back to attack them both. She felt voltage pooling at her fingertips, when he was in vicinity of her. Briefly, she questioned herself as to whether he had transformed her.

  At once, she absorbed the power of the nearby switchboards and had all the current collected her flexing forearms, before she released, and sent forth an arcing burst of blue lightning toward the creature. The power surging through it began to cook it alive, and boils of pinkish-red goo began to form on the surface of its dead flesh. She growled out loud, absorbing power and causing the emergency lights in here to dim. The alarms for total loss of power sounded off in deafening gongs. Red emergency beacons fed from an emergency battery bank, the last resort, lit off after the rest of the poor lighting died off.

  She fried the beast with all the power in her veins, until the thing exploded everywhere. Enttu shielded both himself and her from the flying guts and grime with his cape. Behind the ladder, an upwards splash broke through the plexiglass and water began to flood into the load center room. They had to get out of there fast before the deadly combination of water and electricity fried them. The obvious problem was the zombie-like humanoids that were running towards them. The dhampir found his dagger sitting atop the bloody pile of slug entrails, and he proceeded to stab each of the three zombies through the frontal lobe. He gave them one sharp jab through the front of their skulls and they dropped dead instantly. Regina waited for him, and grabbed his hand, practically dragging him out of the lower level. They stared at each other through bewildered eyes, and he was in disbelief at her strength and deadly force during combat in her presently weak and sick condition.

  He walked to her and gently placed two hands on her shoulders. His emotions melted to a gentle countenance of concern and melancholy in his grey-sapphire eyes. Strangely, his very touch and presence instantly calmed her nerves even in the apocalypse that surrounded them. She gave in to the large cold hands and slender fingers running through the back of her scalp and rested her cheek on his chest, slipping her arms around his slender frame.

  “You need to feed or you’re going to die. Bite me,” he whispered gently to her.

  This was the confirmation of the suspicion she had of him. It was he who turned her into a vampire. Yet the prospect of drinking blood was revolting, and she couldn’t put herself to do it. He pushed a tress of that silky flaxen hair out of the way and pulled the collar of his shirt out of the way to expose his blue vein beneath the translucent, white skin of his sensuous neck. It looked inviting, the thought at having the opportunity to have him this time, but the thought of drinking blood was one Regina couldn’t stomach.

  “I can’t, that’s some nasty shit,” she stated while shaking her head.

  He sliced open his own jugular with the tip of his black nails, and he let his own blood cover his fingertips, which he then shoved into her mouth without warning. She almost choked, but he stopped before she instinctively bit down. The taste of him was surprisingly, delectable, and when she felt the drops of blood roll down her throat, it awoke a hunger within her she couldn’t ever have fathomed. He was sweet and metallic, and here he was, a vulnerable target to the vampiric lust awakened in the red glow of her eyes. Enttu stood there, calmly, knowing what would happen next. He knew he just dug himself a proverbial grave, at least she thought.

  Though he was much taller, she pushed him against the casing of a dead generator, and grasped a handful of hair, before she pressed her lips to the self-inflicted wound on his neck and siphon some life back into her. His blood was the most heavenly substance she had ever tasted, and she could finally understand the dangers of the unquenching thirst that came with vampirism. His sighs escalated more sharply the harder she drank, and he slumped down, taking her with him, until she straddled his lap while pressing her bosom on his chest. The feeling was overwhelmingly pleasurable for him too and caused a flooding warmth to spread all over his body as she stole his life. Her strength had exponentially increased, and she kept him locked in place, tugging his blonde hair and squeezing around his waist with her thighs. This was almost better than just fucking the beautiful vampire. His eyes were electric blue and half-closed, mouth slack, as he succumbed in her embrace, her lips pressed firmly against his fragile throat. He was deteriorating in her hands, as he slipped away in the bridge of climax and death.

  Then came the blood memories, and she saw for herself the v
isions and dreams he’d told her about. She saw a woman who looked just like her but with longer hair and in a Victorian corseted dress and a veil, standing with him, and exchanging vows. They made love under the kiss of moonlight, and he always climaxed with her, within her body. She saw herself pregnant once, with a girl, and then once, with a boy who never made it to full term. Her temperature increased when she saw the spitting image of her in 19th century garb being set on fire, and this was around the same time she drew back, and he gently shoved her off after he felt incredible, tingling weakness overcome him. She gasped out loud, to find herself back in the power plant, still straddling his lap but no longer siphoning the death and life cocktail from his veins. He wasn’t lying about his past, and this made her question herself even more about her dreams of herself as a woman named “Elvira.”

  The dhampir panted heavily, hands shaking as they kept Regina’s lithe frame in place to stop her from taking any more blood. He was drained of all color from loss of blood, but still had some strength, still more powerful than scores of men, in his muscles. He managed to stand up and he set Regina on her feet. She felt revitalized, but the ebbing stigmata of his own pain was now a part of her, and all sorts of emotions stirred wildly in her head, almost to the point where she couldn’t contain them. He leaned down to gently kiss her, and his own psychic frequency he emanated was enough to stabilize her. A single tear rolled down her cheek as his selflessness and evidence of the love he had for her grasped and cradled her soul. She placed a palm on his face, receptive to his kiss.