by Diana Graves
I wiggled my phone in the air for a visual aid and said really slowly, “I-need-to make-a call-in the bathroom. It’s raining-outside.” That was a bit too condescending, but it got my point across. Two boys left, Beady Eyes stayed. Arms crossed, sandaled feet planted. It seemed that he wanted to make a point too. Fine by me. I shut the door. He sipped on his tub juice.
The music was cut off enough that I could hear myself think again. This was a nicely built house. I plopped on the toilet and stared at the phone like a life line, and maybe that was what it really was. So far the party wasn’t scary, but I hadn’t seen Mark yet. Maybe I had but hadn’t noticed. It was a costume party after all, not a masquerade. Masquerades are elegant, nice. This was neither elegant nor nice. I wanted Mato here, I wanted my backup.
I squirmed nervously on the toilet while Beady Eyes made slurping noises. He was perched on the side of the tub in cargo shorts and a toga, staring at me as I pushed a button to listen to Mato’s voice mail.
“You have-one-new message,” announced the machine lady. “First message, ’Raina, this is Mato. I am sorry, but we cannot crash Mark’s party!’”
“What?” I nearly screamed at the phone.
Beady eyes scooted closer to me, staring like he could almost produce a coherent thought. I turned away from him and held the phone tighter to my ear. “The EI went a different route and talked to Mark’s father. He is a very powerful man with powerful friends, including a couple judges. All our evidence has been ruled circumstantial. We have nothing Raina, I am sorry.’ End of messages.”
I sat on the toilet, my cell phone clutched in my hand, elbows on my knees. “Holy shit-balls,” I said in defeat.
“Bad news?” asked Beady Eyes.
I nodded, “Yeah.”
He grabbed a plastic cup from the tower of cups on the sink and filled it with the tub juice. “Here,” he said, handing me the dripping cup.
I took it, “Thanks.” It was full of orange-ish red stuff that smelled terrible but I took a sip to make him happy. It tasted like it smelled.
“Do you want to…,” he began but Beady Eyes didn’t get to finish that question because the door slammed open.
Obnoxious heavy metal music flooded the small room and another toga-man came running to the tub screaming, “Ambrosia, Ambrosia, the drink of the Gods!” The food of the gods, you idiot.
He was wearing a gold mask and a gold laurel leaf crown. The mask covered his face with a mocking smile.
“Greg, you missed it. There was a cat fight on the front porch and they got practically naked!”
He sat next to Greg, and dipped his empty cup into the tub juice. Greg laughed with his masked friend and I got up to leave.
“Hey, don’t go,” said Greg.
I looked back at them. Greg’s friend had taken off his mask to drink, and I froze. I recognized that tanned face, those big white teeth, that nose, those eyes! I stood there like a deer in head lights.
“What’s wrong?” Greg asked.
I said nothing and Mark looked at me after he emptied his cup in one quick swig. He stared at me with soul piercing eyes. At first those eyes were indifferent but they changed. Soon they were disdainful, knowing eyes that let you know someone was indeed home and he wasn’t a man you wanted to get to know.
“Raina Kirkland, is it?” he asked loud enough to be heard over the music. His drunken slur turned to grad student snobbery in just as many second. Charming, mocking smile painted so thick the fumes made me queasy.
“Mark,” I said, bowing dramatically, my eyes never left his. A weird smile crawled its way up my pale lips. I felt a strange sort of pleasure take me.
“What luck, you’re just the witch I’ve been dying to meet.”
“Maybe I should go and let you get back to dying.”
I moved to leave but he set his cup down ever so gently on the counter and stood to tower over me.
He smoothed down his toga he said, “I have something you should see.” And he didn’t wait for my response, which would have been something along the lines of, “All I want to see is you rotting in a jail cell with the occasional midnight mystery date.” Instead, he grabbed my arm and turned me as he ran passed me.
“Black hair and blue eyes suit you better,” he said as he tore our path down the hall. “You look almost human.”
He slammed open a door and we entered a room with an oversize chemistry set lying out on three different tables. Clear plastic sheets covered the brown carpet and furniture. The far wall was covered in what looked like profiles of every vampire incident that took place and some I hadn’t known about. It looked better than the one I saw at EI, more detailed information. My own face smiled back at me from the far wall. It was a photo from my facebook profile and a red circle had been drawn around it.
“What the shit!” I yelled.
He smirked, “Such language, tsk, tsk.”
“You’re keeping track of all the people you’ve killed or worse! Why? Do you like being reminded of how fucked up you are?”
“Mark?” said a soft feminine voice. The voice belonged to a small woman with bouncy bleach blond curls and heavy makeup. She was sitting on a plastic covered couch, dressed as a nurse. Hell—o nurse!
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Why so grouchy?” Mark joked. His smile was a playful one.
“You are a fucking sociopath and I’m allowed to be grouchy when the man that fucked up my family and caused the death of so many innocents is prancing about his laboratory in a toga, scot free because of dear old daddy.”
“Raina you don’t understand how important my work is. If you had even the simplest idea of the progress we’ve made since we’ve distributed out cures, shit Raina!” He pulled his hair and began to pace the room, drunken and frantic. “I want you to understand, Raina!”
“Why do you give a shit what I think? You just got off scot free. You’re a murderer! You caused vampirism to spread like wild fire! It’s not even on the fucking news for Goddess sake! How the hell is this not on the news?” I yelled, looking at all the pictures on the walls. That was a huge question of mine. How the hell was this not on every news program? It was kind of a big deal.
“I know people,” he said quietly. He shook his head to push that subject away. “Not one of those people really wanted to be vampires. They simply wanted to live and I offered them the cure with a possibility that they would not even become vampires.”
Mark began to dig through a backpack that sat on the couch next to the nurse. Her face was pleasantly blank. Her perfectly painted face made her beautiful, but the look of complete ignorance made her hideous.
“They turned Mark, they did get the disease you promised them they wouldn’t and they went into a blood rage and infected and killed other people, innocent people! Kids, Mark, little fucking kids!”
“Yeah, aint it cool?”
His gold mask was back on, its smile so matched his own. He wiggled his cigar holder between two fingers teasingly. It was gold with silver lettering on it that read, “Carpe Diem.”
“My brother tried to kill himself last night, so no, I don’t think it’s all that cool.”
He flipped his mask so that it was resting on his head like a second face, “Spoil-sport. Don’t you see that you are the key to all my life’s work?”
“All your life—you’re what, twenty-something?”
He just smiled at me and then looked over my shoulder and his smile broadened.
“We’ve finally engineered the virus to strengthen the healing affects and make the vampiric side effect dormant, and you’re proof of that,” he said more to the man standing behind me than me.
The man that just entered the room was a tall black man with a cane, bald head and dressed in a nice suit. “Meet Darrell, he’s been given a three month death sentence. Cancer, it’s a bitch, but it’s good for business,” Mark said, smiling all the while. Darrell walked past me and handed Mark an envelope.
“Don’t do it,”
I warned the older man. “He’s caused so much suffering already.”
Darrel turned on me with pain filled eyes. “Don’t talk to me about suffering. I know suffering! I’ve been through chemo. I’ve seen the look on all the specialists faces as they told me I’m going to die. I’m not going to die because of this bull shit, I’m not! Death is not an option I’m going to entertain!” His eyes were haunted, determined. There was no talking Darrell out of it. I could feel his fear.
“Mark please, stop this! You’ve amplified the healing effect too much. Your last victims turned in seconds, Mark. If you give him that blood he’ll turn so fast your head will spin and then you, me, her and all your friends are vampire food! You can’t do this!”
Mark was shaking his head while he filled a syringe from the tube of blood he had taken out of his cigar holder. “This is the same I gave Paul, the same that’s inside you—but refined. It will work the same way but better.”
“No Mark, Paul, and two of my brothers turned. I’m not human. I don’t know what I am. It won’t be the same, Mark. Goddess!”
“Mark, sweetie, maybe you should do this later, just in case she’s right,” the girl pleaded. She was holding Marks arm, giving him puppy dog eyes. He looked at her like she was a buzzing fly.
“Go sit on the couch and get the camera ready, now!” he yelled. She shrunk in on herself and sulked off to the couch where she fiddled with a camera the size of a cell phone.
“Mark!” I warned as he prepped the needle.
“Raina, you’re about to witness medical history,” he stated, very serious. Darrell held out his arm. Mark tied it off to get a vein.
“No Mark!” I shouted, and I slapped the syringe out of his hand. It smashed against a table and landed on the floor. A small amount of blood pooled around the broken syringe.
“No!” shouted Darrell.
Mark’s fist found my face and my face found the floor. Pain washed over me, leaving me breathless for a moment.
“I can prepare another injection,” Mark assured Darrell, but Darrell was on his knees, dabbing his fingers in the spilled blood and licking them clean.
“Don’t touch that!” I shouted and the effort hurt like hell. I grabbed at the plastic covered floor as I tried to move past the pain in my head. “Shit,” I spat, trying to lift myself up. My head was spinning. The fucker could punch.
“Stop him!” I shouted at Mark, but Mark was busy patting his grieving client on the back as Darrell dug his fingers into the blood, desperation for survival eating at him like acid. His fear was loud in my mind—and then nothing. I felt nothing from him.
I couldn’t stand up just yet but I could crawl. I crawled to Darrell. His face was bloodied. I ran my hand down his cheek gently, he was burning up. He was dying!
“Shit!” I yelled over and over again as I crawled backward, getting as far away from him as possible. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“What?” the girl asked with her eyes wide.
I had to steady my aching head with my hands, “He’s fucking turning, now!”
Darrell’s body started convulsing under Mark’s hands and Mark stared down with wide eyes.
“Give me my gun, Jennifer!” he yelled at the girl.
He turned back to the table and lifted his toga to pocket the envelope.
Jennifer didn’t react to his words. She was staring at Darrell, her eyes and the camera fixed of him as he screamed and convulsed on the floor. She had a better vantage point for watching Darrell’s turn, or would that be a worst vantage point.
“My gun?” Mark demanded, but Darrell began to puke blood.
We watched in shock as the blood poured from Darrel’s mouth. I tore my eyes away from the horror and tried to get Mark’s attention by standing between him and Darrel.
“Where’s your gun, Mark?”
“It’s,” he began, but then Jennifer started screaming and I turned to see that Darrell had stopped shaking, stopped puking blood. The tall man stood, head bowed, face slack. He stared at Jennifer from a heavy relaxed brow, but she didn’t move. She cried and screamed for Mark with the camera still pointed at the new vampire. I looked back at him to find him at the door and I could see the moral dilemma playing in his head. Should he save himself or save her? Not the actions of a sociopath.
Darrell made a movement in my peripheral vision that brought my attention back to him. It looked like he was relearning how to use his body. He took a step toward Jennifer. She let out a helpless yelp but didn’t budge from her seat. She was paralyzed with fear, like Katie had been.
Fuck my head still hurt like hell, “Stop!” I screamed at him. “Darrell, no!”
But, he didn’t even pause for consideration, he wasn’t Darrell anymore. He was the walking undead, a hungry monster and he lunged at Jennifer.
“Help me!” she screamed standing on the couch, finally trying to run. But she didn’t get far. He grabbed a hold of her leg and she went down. Her hands grabbed at the plastic on the couch, but it was no use. He crawled up her screaming, fighting body with the ease of the strong undead.
“Fuck!” I shouted.
I ran to the couch. From behind Darrel I grabbed his head, trying to keep him from biting down. His teeth were still human but human teeth can do damage too. I pulled back on his forehead with all the strength I had.
“Help!” I shouted at Mark.
I held Darrell’s head back but he still had hands and they dug at Jennifer, making a bloody mess. I pulled harder, lifting Darrell’s head higher but that didn’t stop his hungry hands from ripping a hole in her stomach. She was still screaming for Mark when I saw bone peeking out from her chest. Jennifer’s blood was everywhere, leaving my face painted thick with it. The feel of her hot blood running into my eyes and mouth, the only parts of my face not covered by my mask, made something inside me snap and I couldn’t stop screaming.
“Jen!” Mark screamed, but he was too late to save her. She was dead, silent, nothing but meat. I let go of Darrel and he dived into her meat, making a bloody pig of himself.
“Come on,” I grabbed Mark’s arm.
“No, Jen! She’s pregnant with my boy!” he was staring at her or what was left of her. That explained his uncharacteristic care for her. She was caring an extension of himself inside her, was. I spared a thought for the young life that would never be, but I had to get everyone out of here before Darrell got bored of chewing on her. He wouldn’t get full. He would bleed us all before the night was done.
“She’s dead. We have to get out of here! We have to get everyone out of here now!” I shouted at him as I reached for the door handle.
“No!” he screamed and jerked his arm out of my hand.
He pushed Darrell off of Jennifer and grabbed at her, trying to lift her broken body off the blood soaked plastic, slipping and grunting with the effort. That wasn’t a smart idea. He made himself a target. Darrell lifted himself from the floor. His faces and hands were covered in blood and dangling bits of other stuff. He grabbed Marks right leg, toppling him to the plastic covered floor, and Jennifer’s body broke his fall. Darrell ravaged his legs with something close to vampire speed. Mark’s tight jeans gave him little protection. Darrell ripped at Mark’s jeans with his teeth to get at the meat filling, and when he did Mark broke into wild screams that hurt my ears. How could no one hear this?
He kicked at the vampire with his other leg but it was no use. I ran after him, but I didn’t know what I could do. Mark reached for his blood soaked backpack and pulled out a metallic blue gun, and I stopped in my tracks. I didn’t know how experienced Mark was with a gun and I had no wish to be shot. It was small, couldn’t have had but five or six shots. He pointed it at Darrell’s head and fired, again and again, every shot point blank.
Darrell’s head was blown back. He wasn’t moving anymore. Thick blood and brain matter oozed out lumpy over Marks leg, over Marks wounds. Shit!
“God damn it!” Mark shouted at the dead vampire as he tried to pull his leg out from
under so much dead weight. “Fuck,” he breathed, “Raina, help me, please.”
I shook my head, “No.”
“Come on…look, I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m sorry I hurt so many people! Please Raina!” he screamed, tears pouring down his face.
I took my mask off and threw it on the floor so I could wipe Jennifer’s blood from my eyes, and slowly backed myself closer to the door. “You’re infected.”
“NO! RAINA! NO!” he screamed as I opened the door and slammed it behind me.
“Run!” I yelled at the people in the hall. “Run, get out of here!” But they just laughed at me. “Vampire!” I screamed and heavier laughter erupted.
But Greg stepped up, “Who?” he asked, scared, knowing the danger, “Darrell Dolton?”
“Yes, he’s dead though, but he infected Mark!” I shouted over the music, loud and scary now that it matched the occasion better, Rob Zombie’s Living Dead Girl, perfect.
Greg looked good and scared, “Shit, don’t yell vampire or run. These shit heads won’t understand that!”
“Hey,” one of the shit heads yelled in happy protest.
Greg waded into the thick of the party and yelled, “Cops!” And, everyone was yelling, screaming, running for escape.
“Cops! Cops!” I yelled frantically as I ran through the house.
29:
THERE WERE ONLY a few kids in the house when Mark tore the door off its hinges. Everyone else was out in the front yard. Some were stumbling to their cars. I was on the phone with Mato, who had someone on the phone with Detective Travis. Greg was on the phone with the police, like many others I would guess. Those in the house, after all our warning and nearly dragging to the door, were screaming now. No more laughter, nothing but screams.
After I frantically told Mato what had happened he spent a good while telling me what I should have done. I should not have gone in without him. I should have left the moment I got the message. I should have called the police when it was clear what Mark was planning.
“Mato, I’m sorry,” I said close to the phone so he could hear me over the screams and music coming from inside the house.