by Alexia Purdy
The day had yielded nothing and my patience had grown extra thin. I hadn’t even hit any feral vampire hives. I had managed to dispatch several lone ones, heading toward me in the bowels of the smaller casinos. Apparently, these were easier to break into for them than the larger casinos. Still, I was more frustrated than ever and my head ached with a throb that surged through my temples as I ended the day’s search, driving away toward home, once again without my family.
The drive was even harder this time than it had been the prior evening. As I drove, feelings of failure and disappointment stabbed at me like daggers in my chest. The pavement seemed hypnotizing as the sun’s light drained away over the horizon. I was leaving a little later than I had wanted but my desperation had grown to a fever pitch as I had frantically searched as much as I could in the last hours of daylight. Slashing down the ferals I had encountered left me more empty than satisfied. I just wanted to see my mother and brother’s faces again–longing to see their smiles and listen to their contagious laughs and giggles in the loneliness of the night that awaited me.
Pulling up to the house in the mountains filled me with dread. Another night alone, another night left wondering what had happened to what was left of my family. Would I ever receive the answers to the questions that seems to run marathons through my head as I lay in bed at night, praying that the alarms would trip and it would be them banging on the door to come in? The deep searing pain I felt as I wearily peeled my equipment and weapons off my body, letting them clank onto the cold concrete floor inside the cell that I called home, ate away at my brain.
I showered the dirt and dried vampiric blood off my skin, temporarily easing the soreness of the day’s activities. The water was amazing, hot and steaming. I remembered how absolutely thankful we had been to find that this underground refuge had a propane feed with a solar heater back up to heat water. Hot water, electricity–things I had taken for granted before–readily available only here. It had truly been a godsend.
I fell into my bed, barely pulling the sheets over my body before succumbing to the lure of sleep, so deep that for once, the nightmarish dreams eluded me.