by Adam Thielen
“Oooh, you will break protocol?”
“The NDA was a convenient excuse,” he admitted. “Sandra Haulstein wasn’t working with Noxcorp.”
“What?”
“The universities back then were little more than prisons where mages were kept, sometimes from a very early age,” began Matthias. “Me and this other vampire worked for Noxcorp, doing its dirty work. Necessary work, but still more often dirty than not. So one day me and Frank, my partner, get a new assignment to track down an escaped mage named Sandra Haulstein.”
“Oh no,” said Cho. “You are going to destroy my inspiration, my heritage.”
“It’s not that bad,” the nightstalker asserted. “But if you want, I can stop.”
Tsenka tugged at the top of her hair. “I don’t think you can, now!”
“A’ight, so we start tracking down leads, and find out that Sandra was blackmailed into escaping,” continued Matthias.
“No,” whispered Tsenka.
“They had her mom held hostage, and demanded she kill a member of the vampire council.”
“No fucking way! How’d she get out of it?” blurted Tsenka.
Matthias sighed. “She killed him. And—”
“My god,” Cho reacted. “This was the one she fought and broke his jaw?”
“That was a different one.”
“What the hell? Was she a vampire slayer?”
“Are you going to let me finish?” asked Matthias.
“Go ahead.”
“Turns out my boss was behind the blackmail, and he didn’t like us digging around after we failed to catch Sandra in time,” said Matthias. “So we decided to collect evidence on him and take it to the council, but to do that, we needed to raid an office building full of mercs…”
Matthias paused for a moment, in case Tsenka had questions, and because he wanted to prepare his words in his mind. Cho patiently waited. Matthias cleared his throat.
“I convinced your grandmother that if she wanted to clear her name that she needed to come with us. There were a lot of corporate mercs in that building. A lot. And Sandra killed most of them.”
Then Tsenka’s lips parted and her eyebrows turned up. She suspected how the story was going to unfold from here.
“But the vampire whose jaw she broke tossed a grenade,” continued Matthias. “Sandra moved in front of it, to shield me. It was packed with little flecks of polonium that sapped her strength. It all happened too fast. She was shot. Killed. That was the life of your grandmother.”
“Hold on,” said Tsenka. “What happened to your boss and the vampire?”
“I ripped that merc’s head all the way off,” he replied. “Frank and I took care of our boss. Wu and the university came up with a cover story that sounded better, or at least simpler, for public consumption.”
Tsenka had lowered her forehead onto her fingertips. “Fucking corps,” she muttered. She lifted her head. “So she was a criminal, a murderer.”
“If that’s your takeaway,” responded Matthias, “then I have not explained it very well. Sandra was a hero who gave her life to save her mother and to save me. She was a far greater woman than official accounts can ever detail, cut down in her prime. And more than once, I’ve considered how things would have turned out if she had lived. I was certainly fond of her, even having known her for such a short time. And I got her killed.”
“I think I understand,” said Tsenka. “Thank you for telling me what really happened. It’s certainly more interesting than what I read.”
They both sat for a minute, deep in thought. Tsenka looked at her suitcase, sitting next to the couch where she had left it. “So are we going to make me a vampire now?”
“Not yet,” he said. “It comes with a price.”
“Matthias, if you’ve been toying with me this whole time…”
“When someone is turned,” he began, disregarding her concern, “their brain chemistry becomes less malleable. Your mind will become quieter over time, but certain aspects of your personality will refuse to change, no matter what the circumstance.”
“So?”
“So, right now, you aren’t in a good place.”
“I’m not going—”
“You’ve stopped going to sessions,” said Matthias. “And so we are going to do something about that. You will go, every day. At the end of a week, I will consult with your therapist. If she classifies your state as stable, then that will suffice.” Tsenka tried to speak, but Matthias raised his hand up with his palm facing her and continued. “You’ll get what you want, but first you have to do this. I’ve already talked with Mika and arranged it.”
Tsenka tried to protest, but in her heart, she knew she had waited this long, she could make it one more week, and so she agreed. The sessions were long, and forcing Tsenka to recount the details of her assault and the death of her comrades was almost unbearably heart-wrenching.
The former agent agreed to both hypnotism and a psilocybin trip as such treatments were effective in some cases. She ignored Mika’s suggestion to get a dog. At the end of the week, Tsenka was exhausted. At her final session, Mika asked Cho a new question.
“If the man that raped you were here right now, what would you say to him?”
“I—I wouldn’t say anything,” replied Tsenka.
“Why is that?”
“Because there’s nothing to say.”
“There’s nothing you would want to tell him then?” persisted Mika.
Tsenka shifted in her seat. “It’s not true,” she said. “I want to say everything to that monster, to make him believe it, to make him understand.”
“Understand… that what he did was wrong,” Mika extrapolated.
“That he should die, horribly,” Tsenka said, closing her mouth tightly afterward.
“You’d like to kill him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“If you aren’t willing to be honest, then you aren’t ready,” said Mika.
“You really want honesty?” asked Cho.
“Anger is natural,” said Mika. “And I’ve heard it all. Please.”
“Okay,” said Tsenka. “I’d like him to get older, less adventurous. Find him a woman to settle down with, fall in love, melt his heart. They have a child and he becomes a father and his brain changes as his family fills a void in his soul. He feels some regret for the actions of his former life. He creates some wealth, becomes established. His children have children. He’s a grandfather.”
Tsenka’s voice grew in volume, and Mika’s brow furrowed. Tsenka continued. “Then one day he returns to his large house where his children raise his grandchildren and for some reason, his wife doesn’t have dinner ready. When he goes upstairs he finds everyone curiously sitting in chairs in the loft. You know, those plain wooden chairs. And I’m there. And all I want to know is how many familial bones I have to break with a hammer before he agrees to dunk his head in nitric acid.”
Mika sat quietly for a moment. She stared at the woman across from her. Her tablet hung loosely between her thumb and forefinger. After a few seconds, she relaxed her posture.
“Do you believe you are capable of such sadism?” she asked.
“No,” said Tsenka. “But I concoct such fantasies, and I sometimes regret that they will never transpire, and it shames me and makes me feel like less than a person. Everything about me, what happened to me, makes me feel lesser.”
“And don’t you want to tell him this?”
“No, I just want to dunk his head in acid.”
Episode 5: A Bloody Mess
Tsenka Cho stared at the poster of the white man with red streaking down his face. His arm reached toward the former agent with the accompanying hand extending the middle finger, perpetually flipping anyone in Matthias’s basement room the bird.
While that poster was clearly dated, there were others, similar in that they appeared to be combatants in various forms of competition, and Tsenka even recognized one of them. She turned her eyes
from the walls and down to her bare midriff. It glistened with sweat, just like real skin would, and dissipated heat even better.
She turned the running machine off when she heard the sound of footsteps above her. Matthias, she thought, unclamping the large boot-shaped molds surrounding her lower legs. She pulled a towel off the handrail of the elliptical and patted herself down as Matthias descended the stairs.
He stopped at the last step and studied her. A shopping bag hung at his side.
“You haven’t told me that much about your modifications,” he said, continuing to stare.
Tsenka set the towel down. “Would it offend you if I wanted to keep a few secrets about myself?”
“Maybe, but I guess I’d understand,” he said.
“I will tell you one, though,” she enticed.
“Nah, I don’t care,” replied Matthias, sticking his hand inside the plastic bag and pretending to check its contents.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Tell me you want to know.”
“I won’t do it.”
“Graphene mesh,” she revealed.
“That’s nice,” said Matthias, unimpressed.
“Fine, whatever,” pouted Tsenka for approximately one second before pointing toward the posters on the far wall. “Hey, who’s that guy?”
“Which one?”
“The one with the face and the finger.”
“Oh,” said Matthias. “That’s a fighter from the UFC era. Nate Diaz… or was it Nick? Pretty sure it’s Nate.”
Tsenka moved in front of the picture. “It looks like he’s flinging us off.”
Matthias chortled. “Flipping, flipping us off. And he is.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “He doesn’t look mad. Did it mean something different then?”
“Nope.”
“Then what’s he doing?”
“Hm,” Matthias pondered. “I never gave it that much thought. He was always trying to provoke people with taunts like that. Then sometimes it seemed like it was a victory pose. As I recall, he found it very important to make sure everyone knew that at any particular moment, he was giving no fucks.”
“Was this before the Collapse?”
“Ya,” he answered. “At the time, people were flipping each other off so often I think it started to lose significance.”
Tsenka shook her head. “Your generation was strange. But I think I get it.”
“For a while,” added Matthias. “He was a bit of a meme himself.”
“So not surprised.”
“I’ll show you some of his fights and interviews. You’ll enjoy them, I think.”
Matthias pulled out a roll of gauze and some S&M padded wrist restraints. “Are you ready?”
“I bet it was embarrassing picking those up,” said Cho.
“I winked at the desk girl.”
“You bastard,” she uttered with a grin. “I’m ready, but do we really need those?”
“Need?” said Matthias. “No. But we are doing this my way, the safe way.”
“Have you done this before?”
“Newp.”
“Great,” Tsenka replied sarcastically. She then nodded. “A’ight, let’s go.”
The duo went upstairs and into the bathroom, where Matthias beckoned for Tsenka to disrobe and lie down inside an old style bathtub. She sat up and folded her arms behind her back, allowing Matthias to cuff them. He placed a stiff pillow under her shoulders and head, then wrapped a sheet around her legs, binding them together.
“This is a lot less romantic than I imagined,” she said.
“You could have tried to find another vampire,” pointed out Matthias.
“I considered it,” she revealed. “But I only wanted it from you.”
Matthias lowered her onto the pillow. “You think I’ll make you more powerful.”
“Not just that…”
“I know,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “Relax.”
“What’s that for?” she said, staring wide-eyed at an instrument resembling a metallic straw on the end of a hand mixer.
“I figure your skin is difficult to pierce,” he explained. “But it’s got to be done. I thought about using a needle, but the holes will be too small. A long punch might work, but I might stab too far in and do too much internal damage. My claws might rip too much off. This was my solution. It’s got a diamond edge, should cut a neat hole.”
“Are you sure that’s the best idea?” she said, lifting off the pillow.
“I believe it’s the safest,” he said. “If you want to call it off, or even postpone this, we can.”
Tsenka’s chest heaved. She shook her head. “No, I trust you. Still, please don’t slip.”
Matthias pushed the button on the neck slicer and it whirred to life with a terrifying whine. He released the button. “See, nothing to be worried about.”
Matthias pulled out a small box and plugged it into a wall outlet. He connected a tube exiting one side to a bag filled with red fluid and attached a needle to a tube exiting the other side.
“Why all the gear?” asked Cho. “Can’t we do this like the natural way?”
“Tsenka, vampirism stayed alive for centuries due to luck and sacrifice in equal measure. The natural way would be to kill four people before the fifth survived the process,” he explained. “Okay, I’m ready, are you?”
Tsenka’s expression became rigid. “Do it.”
Matthias wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and hovered the borer above her jugular. He pressed the button and the minuscule teeth dissolved into a blur. The vampire lowered it, grazing the skin. It cut with little pressure. Blood began to seep, but Matthias dug in further, removing a circular patch of Tsenka’s synthetic skin.
Cho’s eyes were frozen in terror at the sensation, part of which was the warm trickle down the side of her neck. Matthias put the machine aside and cupped his lips around the hole. As he drank, he didn’t try to delve into her mind, but her emotions poured out into his mouth as if begging to find a new host to share the pain with.
He saw what she had seen, felt what she had felt on the day that began her transformation. The nightstalker pulled away, outraged, disgusted, hurt. He didn’t want any more. His gaze met Tsenka’s. Somehow she was still alive. She had gotten up, she had escaped, she had survived. Every night, she continued to survive. And because of that, Matthias decided he could survive the next five minutes, and resumed sucking blood from the wound.
Tsenka’s eyes fluttered and her heart raced until she succumbed to the lack of oxygen via fresh blood to the brain. Matthias pulled away and grabbed a rubber patch and the gauze. He pulled a thin clear layer from the patch, wiped at her neck with a cloth, and pressed the patch down, hoping the adhesive would hold. He wrapped her neck with the gauze and tossed the rest aside.
Matthias extended a fingernail and sliced open his right wrist. He pulled Tsenka’s chin down and let his blood stream into her mouth. Tsenka turned her head and tried to spit it out. Matthias quickly covered her mouth and nose. She fought him and tried to sit up. She moaned in disgust, but gave in and swallowed. Matthias stuck his fingers in her mouth and repeated the process.
When he began to feel light-headed himself, he grabbed his wrist and waited. Tsenka became still and her chest lowered. It did not rise again. Matthias looked at the blood pump plugged into the wall, unsure if he should risk botching the entire operation or continue to risk Cho’s life. He took a deep breath and decided to wait.
A full minute passed and Tsenka was not breathing. Matthias’s wrist had stopped bleeding and the patch on his victim’s neck held. He pulled her chin down again, squeezed her cheeks with his thumb and index finger, and placed his mouth over hers. He pushed air into her lungs three times, then began compressing Tsenka’s chest with his palms.
Cho came back to life, sucking in air and blowing it back out. Matthias did likewise. He caressed her forehead while he waited for her to wake.
And wake she did, but only for a
few hours before passing out again. Over the next few nights, wakefulness was a brief occurrence as her body transformed. While conscious, she suffered bouts of delirium. Tsenka ate, she threw up, she even wet herself, but Matthias was there to clean her up and watch her vitals. Her skin didn’t change, so it was difficult to gauge how far along she was.
On the fourth night, she opened her eyes. The one that she was born with had lightened into a very faint brown. Matthias sat on the bed next to her. The sheets had come untucked and crumpled around her body from tossing about in days prior.
“Did it work?” she asked, finally lucid.
“Yes,” he said. “How much it worked is yet to be determined.”
Tsenka closed her eyes again, still exhausted.
“I will get you some blood,” he continued. “If you are far enough, it should do wonders for you.”
He left the room and returned shortly with two clear plastic medical bags filled with red fluid. At the sight of them, Tsenka tried to roll over to face away.
“I don’t want any,” she said.
Matthias walked around to her side of the bed. “This is something you will need to get used to in order to survive.”
“Ugh, I know,” she moaned. “I just don’t want to yet.”
“You’re weak right now,” he said, kneeling in front of her. “You need to drink it.”
“How often do you drink?” she asked.
“Usually once a day,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t eat much meat either, so if you can get it rare, it might suppress the craving enough to go every other day without a bag.”
“What if I just choose not to drink?” she asked.
“You will die,” he said. “It may take a long time, but you can’t go forever. First, you will lose your strength and resiliency. Then, you will starve, no matter how much food you eat.”
“What about bloody steaks?”
“You might be able to live off that.”
“Well, there you go,” she said.
“It’s really not that bad,” he said. “And sometimes you get opportunities to drink it straight from the source, and there is nothing else like it.”