Flesheaters and Bloodsuckers Anonymous: A Dark Humor

by HC Hammond

  The officer urged the man back with his cattle prod.

  Too late, Harold thought, if you’re here, shit’s deeper than that.

  The officer got the drunk back beyond the curtain with some careful maneuvering.

  “Two puncture marks on the back of the neck,” the RN said, coming to stand behind Harold, “Inflamed and weeping with nausea, mild catatonia and a fever. Looks like Abeos. We need a blood test to confirm antibodies.”

  Harold nodded, asking if the man had presented any problems. The nurse indicated that he’d pretty much arrived in this state. Harold sighed. Infecteds usually did arrive in a state of shock, especially near the end stages of transition. Docile, not fully aware, easily confused. Not to mention the fact that he and his buddy were picked up for drinking. The alcohol didn’t help Bill’s immune system.

  He wore a flannel shirt and dark pants. Both of the men were probably regular Joes working day shift at the GE plant. It was a Thursday night, payday and time to knock back a few before paying the utilities and buying groceries for the week. Harold could bet if he opened Bill’s wallet he’d find a couple hundred in cash the guy intended to blow on beer. Unless, he’d already achieved his goal, but he didn’t look that drunk. He looked sick, very sick.

  He came around the bed to prep the man for drawing blood. He explained the process to the man, who mumbled his name, as he went along. Security guards and a patrolman leaned in close to watch Bill. In the other partition, a lone second patrolman watched Bill’s friend. The one who checked out clean on visual inspection.

  Bill, the drunken undead, didn’t pay much attention to Harold’s spiel or the way Harold had to pull on a triple layer of gloves, with the top layer reaching nearly to his forearms or the mask or the safety glasses. Harold didn’t need them, but he wasn’t exactly out at work. No way they’d let him work Phlebotomy, if they knew. They never would have hired him in the first place.

  Harold sighed at his safety precautions. The chances of transmission were low anyway. Lots of people have been exposed to Abeos; only five to ten percent actually got infected. Otherwise, they’d be up to their eyeballs in walking zombies and the world would be very different.

  When Harold pulled out Bill’s arm to swab it with alcohol, he started screaming and struggling to get away. The cops jump on Bill, pushing him down to the hospital bed. Bill is looking in Harold’s face with absolute fear. He’s screaming at the top of his lungs, bringing the nurses and doctors running and the husky patrolman is leaning over Bill telling him to fucking shut up, but Bill ignores it, continuing to scream and stare at Harold with wide bloodshot eyes.

  He is still holding onto Bill’s forearm with a steely grip and can hear the rapid pounding of Bill’s heart as he twists and writhes on the bed, but can’t figure out why this vamp is freaking out. It sets Harold’s own heart into a rapid gallop.

  The cops yell at Bill to lie still. He’ll be alright; they’ll get off of him, if only he’d cooperate. Bill refuses to cooperate; someone pushes Bill’s head onto the pillow and his long hair falls back to reveal the bite. Red and inflamed, exactly as the nurse said. Some mad creature had ripped into Bill’s flesh and sucked out his life’s blood and Bill’s eyes are locked on Harold.

  Harold panicked; he backed out of the curtained area as a nurse rushes past him with a syringe in hand. A frustrated yell cuts through the air and Bill’s screams die down to a rumbling upset. Across the partition from Harold is another man, bearded, flannelled and wringing his hands. Instantly, Harold knows this is the other guy the Sheriff’s office pulled in with Bill. He’s also a vampire.

  Harold can smell it and see it in the man. This guy has been infected for a long time. No wonder they didn’t see a bite on examination. It healed without scarring.

  Harold placed a hand on the nurse’s station desk to keep himself from falling. His little vampire heart beat a million miles a minute. Had they not seen? Had they not made the connection?

  The husky officer came cursing out of the partition. He spotted Harold and pointed and fear slid through him again. They knew, everyone knew.

  The cop came closer. “You’ll still have to get samples.” Then he turned and moved on towards the bearded man who watched the scene unfold only seconds ago. The patrolman tried to shuffle Zeke behind the next curtained off partition.

  “No,” the man said, backing away from the officer. He glanced around the room, searching for help.

  “Sir, your friend is fine,” the officer said; stopping his forward movement, hand outstretched, “We need to take some blood.”

  “I can’t be here.” The man whispers backing further away.

  “Sir.”

  “No.”

  Zeke turns and runs for the nearest exit, far outpacing the cop in speed, but the patrolman doesn’t even try to run after the guy. He pulls his Taser gun and hits the man in the back as he reaches the exit.

  He tenses, falling to the ground in seizures, a quick duh, duh, duh erupting from his mouth. A nurse screams with delayed panic and suddenly everyone in the ER is backing away from them in the hurry. For a few moments, Harold relieves his own experience with a Taser gun. The jolt, the way every muscle in his body spasms and shakes at once. The sharp, electric almost pain of 50,000 volts.

  The patrolman leaves the Taser on far too long in Harold’s opinion before running up to the guy. His partner is behind him, Taser gun also drawn.

  Zeke gets one more quick shock for not rolling over fast enough for the cop’s preference. He finally gets on his belly, gasping for air, eyes wide and they slap cuffs on his wrists, pulling him up on wobbly legs and dragging him back to his bed.

  Seconds later, the patrolman comes out of the partition and calls to Harold. “You. Blood samples.”

  The emergency room returns to its former quiet chaos. A drunken and sedated Bill sleeps it off, while handcuffed to the bed. Nurses and doctors disappear back into the woodwork from where they’d just appeared. An orderly is called to clean up the mess Bill made.

  Harold took a deep breath and retrieved his kit. He followed the cop to the next partition where Zeke sat on the bed, sobbing. No recognition showed in man’s dull eyes and no marks showed on his neck. He was too focused on the fate those confirmed blood tests would bring. A vampire, in an accident with a recently bit man and running from the cops. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

  Harold drew the blood. He finished up with the man and told the cops a report would be ready in about half an hour. Harold left, eager to get away from Zeke.

  The husky cop nodded at Bill’s prone form on the bed, “You know, it is strange the guy reacted so strongly to having his blood drawn,” he rubbed his scraggly chin with a hand, “almost like he was scared to death of you.”

  Harold tucked his gloves into a hospital waste bag. “He’s probably afraid of needles. You know how people get.”

  “Vamps, you mean. Not people.”

  “Yeah.” He left the emergency room before the deputy could continue the conversation, blood samples in hand and a cold sweat trickling down his back.

  Harold slipped down the hall, making random turns, not stopping until he reached the administrative offices, with their dark rooms and locked doors. Sweat continued down his back and under his arms, staining the pits of his scrubs a dark blue. No one chased Harold from the ER. No voice came over the intercom signaling a hospital emergency in code. Nothing, but a man crying in the ER a few hundred feet away.

  He was an incredibly lucky bastard.

  After the adrenaline stopped pulsing through his veins and his pits were mostly dry, Harold backtracked to the lab. The immediate danger to himself over, but every person who passed him in the hallway seemed to give him a distrustful look or wide berth. By the time he got back to the office where David played solitaire, a new anxiousness had taken hold.

  It took twenty minutes to test the blood. Both were positive for infection antibodies to Vosanguvirus of the subfamily: Creuviridae, of the family
: Human Abeoviridae; generally called Abeos. The blight of humanity, affecting people by changing them in many different, strange and terrifying ways, depending on the particular virus. Harold held the remains of Zeke’s blood sample up to the light. He had Vampirism. The dark fluid hid its secrets from the average observer. Without a bite mark and with fangs retracted, Harold looked like everyone else. Just as that man down in the ER did. Harold didn’t know the entire story with Zeke and Bill, but he did know both were fucked. Bill would end up in a treatment facility until doctors deemed him suitable for release. Zeke, well, once the coppers got these test results they’d investigate more thoroughly. Test the DNA of the infection in both men. Draw their own conclusions.

  David now worked laboriously over a series of biopsies for the surgical department. His back was to Harold and he was completely absorbed. Harold made a split second decision.

  He went into the freezer and grabbed a bag of whole blood with the same blood type as Zeke. Quietly skewered the bag with a syringe and drew a clean sample. He slipped the pint back into the case sideways for later retrieval and went back to his workstation. Harold tossed Zeke’s true sample and results out, reset the centrifuge and ran a new test with the clean sample.

  Twenty minutes later Harold delivered the results to the highway patrolmen waiting downstairs. One clean and one infected.

  Harold finished up his shift feeling a little bit on edge. David came back from break a few hours later with news from one of the nurses about the same scene Harold endured earlier. David talked on that the rest of the night while Harold played indifferent to the topic and tried to start up game of poker, but the man was all over the story. He spent the rest of the shift speculating about what happened, tossing out everything from willing victim to late night snack. Harold only said they’d probably know more after the report came out in the news.

  Chapter Four

  Harold slid into the booth at the all night diner where Zork the slug sat stuffing itself with blueberry pie. A pretty waitress tried to give Harold a menu. He waved her away.

  On the wall, A Time to Dine Clock, brightly announced the current time to the diner crowd so they could flip their menus to breakfast, lunch or dinner by its calculations. Waitresses, brisk and professional, click-clacked across the tiles with platters full of plates. Underneath, the black and white tiles shined from a recent waxing and Harold wondered how those brisk women could hurry so without slipping and sliding all over the floor. A unique geometric arrangement to the tiles had Harold’s eyes following them along the restaurant’s layout. They traversed through the ins and outs of the dining area. It felt nostalgic to be in one of these places again. The retro theme was very similar the diners of old. Too much music and fluorescent lighting and the clothes weren’t right, but it was almost as the same.

  Large by most diner standards, this place was filled to the brink with normies and a few other questionables. Every booth boasted two or three folks and every booth featured a glittered red and grey chevron on plastic vinyl. The red repeated itself in the soft backlight reaching across the ceiling. Classic big band songs familiar to Harold from his younger days, played softly in the background. Blinds on the wide windows only accented his view of those rushing to do late night holiday shopping.

  The restaurant even plastered its walls with framed photos and posters of famous Hollywood stars from the good old days. Authentic looking, but not real, none of the posters featured warmest wishes to the diner from any star, long dead or alive.

  The jukebox in the corner playing CDs, but not records dressed in red plastic. The sugar, salt and pepper shakers on the table appealed to Harold with red enameled lids. Bright chrome coated the place in a mirror finish. Classic brass ceiling fans pulled the air up from the floor with a slow, easy rhythm. Nice enough and clean and filled with so much lovely red that Harold could have been chilling in bliss were it not for his current mood.

  “Have something to eat,” Zork muttered clearly while not moving its mouth from the food on its plate. Sitting next to Zork and opposite Harold in the booth were silent men in dark grey, off the rack suits. Men Harold recognized as soon as he walked in. It almost made him turn around and walk back out again, but a part of him, feeling dour in light of recent events and all the holiday cheer figured things couldn’t get much more unpleasant. Besides he was curious how the G-men knew Zork.

  Agent Bergstrom asked Harold for some identification, giving no indication he knew the vamp. So, they were going to pretend not to know him. Two could play this game, he thought Harold raised his eyebrows at Zork.

  The slug pulled its face out of the plate of food, “Go ahead and show ’em. They’re my government buddies, right?” He turned his question to the G-man sitting next to him, who nodded.

  Getting the distinct impression a gun was being pointed at him from underneath the table, Harold hurried to pull out his wallet and handed it to Potts beside him.

  All of this cat and mouse stuff was starting to irritate him. Not a week ago, he’d seen more of authority than he wanted to ever encounter again. That night he vowed to go straight, stop playing about, maybe even put some effort into this program the very feds sitting in the booth pushed him into, but eventually he got hungry again and it dulled his memory of Tasers and handcuffs. So he ate, from the blood bank, but he couldn’t look at a pint without first flashing to Zeke’s face when he realized he’d find no help.

  Zork didn’t notice the tension. It continued to dive into its blueberry pie. Zork eating human food surprised Harold. He knew some infecteds could eat regular food, but Harold barely knew anything about this slug buddy of his, let alone knowing Zork and the feds were good buds. He started to wonder if maybe he wouldn’t have been better off with Rufus the werewolf.

  The G-man looked at Harold’s license and handed it back with a nod to his partner across the table. Bergstrom returned the nod and Harold sensed the gun being put back in its holster. As if he were impersonating himself. Who would want to impersonate him right now?

  Zork finished his meal with a belch. “They know you’re a vampire. Just checking your identification,” Zork smacked its lips, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t already have someone tailing you.”

  Harold’s stomach dropped. He glanced between the two solemn agents. Would they have followed him earlier at work? If they knew what Harold had done they weren’t letting on.

  “What is this?” He asked.

  Zork’s eyestalks twisted around themselves and untwisted again. “These guys keep an eye on me. It’s a long story.”

  Bergstrom held up a hand. “Top Secret. You don’t have the clearance.”

  A series of harsh grating sounds erupted from Zork and it took him a moment to realize the slug was laughing in its own strange way.

  “Yeah, totally top secret. You’d flip if you knew the truth,” Zork managed to grate out along with its disturbing laughter. The G-men remained stone faced, they were apparently used to Zork but Harold wasn’t. The laughter made him uncomfortable.

  Zork sure drew a lot of attention for a bloodsucking or possibly flesheating monster which should really shun the attention of others. Didn’t it know what happened to those like him? Horror stories of getting staked, burned and having heads cut off filled popular culture and the nightly news. At the very least, creatures like the werewolf wouldn’t be able to get jobs if people knew what they played around at every twenty eight days or so. Harold didn’t know what the hell it was, but a three foot slug probably wasn’t welcome anywhere in the first place. The slug’s crap still stubbornly refused to leave Harold’s trench coat despite repeated washing and a trip to the dry cleaners. Maybe Zork had the G-men for protection from angry dry cleaners.

  Were Harold to hazard a guess, he’d peg the slug as some mutation created in a government laboratory gone bad. Rumors persisted that the government was working with Abeos to create a kind of bio-weapon. Harold didn’t really subscribe to conspiracy theories, but he couldn’t debun
k a talking slug sitting right in front of him. The slug ate people. It’s slimy. It had a bad attitude. Zork had B-rated horror movie written all over it.

  Harold held his hand to the side of his face to hide from curious onlookers in the pie joint. “Shut up!” He muttered at Zork. Agent Bergstrom, sitting next to Zork, finally jabbed it in the side with an elbow. Zork’s laughter ceased.

  “Right, listen boys, why don’t you go enjoy your coffees at the bar while my group buddy and I get our bonding out of the way.” Zork’s eyestalks motioned meaningfully towards the bar. Harold stood up to allow Agent Potts to squeeze out of the booth as they both quietly left with their drinks, but not before Agent Bergstrom’s very meaningful glance at Harold.

  “That was easy.”

  Zork deftly reached an eyestalk around the handle of its coffee mug and lifted it to an open mouth for a sip. “Eh, not really. They’ve got me on a pretty tight leash. Try anything in the least suspicious they’d be back over here in a flash, guns blazing and all. Tell me, are they looking?”

  Harold glanced at the two agents and saw one openly watching. He avoided Potts gaze. “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Zork shifted around on its side of the booth and changed position. “Slide your hands around under the bottom of the table.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it kid. I’m looking for something.”

  Harold tentatively pressed his hands against the particle board under their dining table. His fingers encountered dried gum and other unpleasant substances. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “Bugs, they always bug me to record what I’m saying.”

  Something slimy crossed the tips of his fingers and he drew back from the table. His hand covered in slime, again. This was going to be a recurring problem with Zork, he could tell.