by P. J. Day
My hands were trembling; I began sweating profusely. My eyes most likely looked sickly to everyone in the room. It was time to withdraw. I looked over at Alan and Rebecca and then looked at Yi. “There is nothing I can do for you, you’re right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Schnell has sent over their best minds to help you and your company at this moment. I’m no longer going to handle this account, you may refer to Alan and Rebecca from now.”
Yi smiled. “I’ve been talking to them for months now. If these are your best minds, then how come the problem hasn’t been fixed? Rald sends you? How are you going to fix this? At least your friend, Ted, could have translated through Alan or Rebecca so Havens could understand, but he’s not here.”
I started feeling dizzy. I needed blood fast. I couldn’t afford to snap at this very moment. I had to get up.
“Excuse me,” I said, as I stood up. “I need to step outside for a moment.”
Everyone at the table stared at me with minimal concern as I got up and walked out of the conference room. I saw a wooden beam in the middle of the hallway, I leaned into it with my forearm, while resting my head against it. Rebecca walked out of the conference room and approached me with a look of concern. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. I turned around and looked at her, my eyes were half closed. “It’s no big deal. We’ll convince him to let us see his operation,” I said, with self-doubt in my voice.
Yi, Havens, and Alan walked out the conference room together and approached me.
“Jack, you look very flustered. Alan told me about your condition. We made arrangements to accommodate you and your situation, but unfortunately there was a change in plans. I’m sorry,” Yi said without any real emotion.
“No, it’s fine. I understand,” I said, still resting against the beam.
“Look, I know what would help you. Let’s take a tour of the facility. It’s only the polite thing to do. A walk could make you feel better.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
Alan, Rebecca, and I followed Yi and Havens into a room across the conference room. This room in particular had a large window that you could see through. Others didn’t. All the rooms had RFID panels for authorized entry. These measures led me to believe that not even the upper brass trusted their own in an operation like this.
The room that Yi and Havens led us to had dozens of computers lined up in rows, with a giant server in the back room. I was familiar with this setup as it was called a PerlGP implementation. It was a grammar-based genetic program based in PERL. The reason I knew? There was a camel sticker on the side of one of the workstations. The camel had become somewhat of an unofficial logo for the PERL language.
“PERL, huh?” asked Alan.
“We’ve been using PERL for a few months now, why do you ask?” asked Yi.
“It’s just very slow. Yeah, it might get the job done. But our compilers were designed with Java in mind. I think I may have recognized one of your problems,” Alan said with confidence.
Yi began interpreting what Alan just said to Havens. I then looked at Rebecca. “Why did Yi tell me we needed Ted?” I asked. Rebecca flashed me a worried look, “Jack, you look really bad. You can sit down, you know.”
I kept closing my eyes as Alan and Yi continued to converse. Rebecca stood still just staring at me, not knowing what to do. What is strange is that whenever I get extreme hunger for blood I usually get spikes of adrenaline coursing through my body in intervals; however, this time, just like at the restaurant, I feel nothing but fatigue and pain, dizziness and depression, slight paranoia and back pain. Yet, I felt extreme pangs of hunger.
“Jack!” Yi said loudly.
“Sorry, yes?” I responded, as Yi snapped me out of my malaise.
“Your friend, Alan, has convinced me.”
I didn’t know if I should’ve felt relief when he told me that or accepted it as a cue to leave and find a way out of my current condition.
“Great,” I said, looking like a drunk.
“I’ll show you to our server room. Right this way,” said Yi, exiting the room first along with Havens.
We followed Yi and Havens down the long corridor. We passed by more rooms. Some you could see through the windows, others were sealed off from view. Everywhere, there were workers dressed in scrubs. Some had masks on their faces, others were in suits. Two young females in business suits walked right by us, one made eye contact with me. She gave me a look of pity. I didn’t bother to connect with her eyes long, it was like looking into a mirror of despair. The room Yi was leading us to was 150 yards deep into the corridor. Even though we were underground, the facility we were in didn’t go any deeper than the level we first walked into. Just a straight shot to who knows where.
Yi arrived at set of solid steel, orange-painted double doors. He used his RFID card on the panel next to it and then used his thumbprint on the biometric device located next to the RFID panel. He quickly looked back at us. “Highly sensitive,” he said smiling. Havens followed with a nod of agreement and nothing else.
“Are you guys familiar with Python?” Alan asked.
Smart boy I thought, since Alan’s dummy code was based on Python.
Yi turned to Havens, “Nǐ shúxī Python ma?”
Havens laughed and made a snake wiggle gesture with his arm.
“No Python, just Java and PERL,” Yi said to us.
Alan and Rebecca both looked at each other and smiled.
Yi and Havens pushed through the double doors with maximum effort. A cool, fresh blast of air hit us head-on as soon as the doors separated wide enough from each other. My glazed, sleepy eyes suddenly received a burst of alertness as soon as I realized what was in front of me. This area was more than just a server room, it was a control room of some type. There were walkways above us where the walls were adorned with multiple servers, IT techs walking down the catwalks, meticulously checking temperatures, and their workstations. To my left there was a glass room with a podium and an electronic whiteboard. A black examination board hung on the wall, where a set of chromosomes hung, ready for inspection. To my right was a row of tables, each one with an array of microscopes. A room was right behind them, one with a door that had a radioactive symbol hanging on it. Another sign indicated an electron microscope inside.
“Holy...” I said, catching myself mid-curse.
I gingerly walked to the center of the large room. I stopped in front of a stainless steel examination table with straps and stirrups. There was a rolling tray with syringes, vials, a saw, scissors, gauze, and scalpels. I looked to Yi, giving him a slight chuckle, “Is this where you strap your super fungus?” No one laughed with me. Alan and Rebecca stood still, their arms at their side, both with thousand-yard stares. Havens stood next to them, his arms crossed.
“What, not funny?” I asked with unease.
Yi slowly walked up to me. “Mr. King, how do you feel?”
“Why?” I asked, feeling a gulp go down my throat.
“You don’t look so good,” he said, answering the question for me.
“Yes, I’m under the weather. Why are you so suddenly concerned about the way I feel?”
Yi had a stern look on his face. He made it a point to make eye contact with me. He then reached into his jacket and pulled a vial from his pocket. He held the vial in his hand a few feet away from me at nose level. I smelled it as if it were an inch from my nose as soon as he took it out of his jacket. Its dark red consistency, its purity evident as soon as it made a contact with the room’s artificial lighting. I felt my mouth begin to water uncontrollably. My pupils began to dilate further, accompanied with profuse sweat and horrific stomach pains. I could see Haven’s eyes light up with delight as soon as he saw me slowly morph into a pathetic needy beast.
I collapsed. My right knuckle hit the sterile, concrete floor, supporting me as my right knee smashed onto the floor as well. I grabbed my stomach with my left hand, trying to do anything and everything to alleviate the sudden, horrific pain t
hat overtook my gut. I looked up at Yi. I began to suspire rapidly.
“Mr. King, this can’t be true can it?”
My hyperventilation continued uncontrollably.
“I don’t believe your kind exists.”
I looked up. I felt tremendous amounts of sweat trickling down my face, seeping into the my eyes. A feeling of a hundred bee stings pulsating their venom deep into my cornea. Everyone in the room stood completely still with blank stares. A couple of workers ran to the double doors and closed them.
I wanted to get up. I wanted to escape. I wanted to leap straight at Yi’s neck and rip his jugular clean off of his scrawny, misshapen, pencil neck, but I couldn’t.
I stuck my arm out at Rebecca and Alan, desperately pleading with them, “Please, help me...”
Yi bent down on one knee and grabbed my chin. He used two of his fingers to pry my mouth open, exposing my teeth. “Amazing...incredible,” he said with a look of bewilderment.
He stood up and pointed at one of the workers and ordered him to go up to the wall and press a large green button. Suddenly, I began to feel a slight burning sensation on the back of my head. I looked up and saw a large piece of glass attached to the ceiling with a long crease of bright light in the center. The crease grew larger, the heat and light intensified. I began screaming, “Help me...please!” The light overwhelmed the room. A scalding, powerful energy began to overtake every inch of my body. I felt the threads of my clothes begin to fuse with my skin by the sudden onset of heat. The intense sunlight from the outside world splashed straight into the cavernous concrete breach, my tortured state of being helpless and dead-center.
With the little energy I had left, I looked up at Alan and Rebecca. Rebecca had tears running down her cheek, Alan had a look so distraught, it can only be described as the first time a man looked death straight in the eyes.
“Why have you done this to me?!” I screamed. A scream so painful, so horrifying, it could only come from someone who was burning alive. I felt my heart racing, my nerves suddenly became numb to all outside stimuli. I collapsed into darkness, nothingness, just the slow, deliberate pants of my dying breath.
Chapter Seven
Samuel, I hope that your continued mission of saving the world from torture, enslavement, corruption, and war is coming along splendidly. I really wish you the best in your endeavors, there are few men in this world who have a voice like yours. I won’t lie, I’m slightly envious of your position in life. Being someone who has lived through almost four lifetimes, seeing countless wars unfold over the pettiest of reasons, seen discrimination, famine, and considerate amounts of needless deaths and suffering, I wish I could do more. You are sincerely my last chance and hope at acceptance and I am highly appreciative of our correspondence. Hong Kong is beautiful; however, there is a seedy underbelly about this place. There is a level of distrust that permeates throughout the city and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe I shouldn’t put it all on the city, it could be the people I work with and the situation I’m in.
There is a girl lying down next to me. She passed out drunk before we attempted to do “stuff.” She is one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever met and things are going well with us. I am starting to care deeply about her, but she doesn’t really know what I am yet. I’m tucking away that part of me away for now. She either will never know what I am and we’ll end up going our separate ways, or I am going to be so kind and good to her in the future that she will have no choice to accept me for who or what I am. But that is how fairy tales work and my life has been anything but. Well, I’m off to bed. I have a long day ahead of me with our client. Also, I don’t want Holly to wake up and get weirded out at seeing me use her laptop for correspondence without permission. Also, I think I hear Alan knocking on my door again. The crazy bastard knows where I am at all times. How did he know I was staying with Holly?
I started streaming in and out of consciousness. I heard the faint beeps of a hospital-grade heart monitor in the background.
I faintly overheard Alan’s voice in the background.“No one’s email is safe from you guys. You’ve actually made me paranoid about my own account.”
“Alan? How did you get in here?” I asked, in a slight breathy whisper.
“Jack?” Alan asked, his voice filled with dread. “Rebecca, please get Yi to send medical staff down here now!”
“Why Alan? What’s going on?” I said, slowly opening my eyes.
“Your sedatives are wearing off,” Alan said.
“I took Ted’s sleeping pills?” I asked.
“Shh...close your eyes, Jack.”
I could hear other voices in the room.
“What if he wakes up? What do we do?” asked a voice with a German accent.
“Does he have enough energy to break free?” asked a female.
“No, we’re fine,” added Alan. “In fact, if he’s semi-awake, we can open his arm and see how his blood flow actually works.”
“Will he feel any type of pain?” I heard the female ask.
“Maybe, but he is so drugged out of his mind...I don’t know—Rald, hand me the scalpel,” Alan said.
I tried opening my eyes, but I couldn’t. I was so weak, I was practically paralyzed. Then I heard Rebecca enter the room again. “I’ve instructed the staff to put him under more sedation.”
“Why? Can’t you see that if he’s in this state, his blood pressure is somewhat normalized; we can learn so much with him like this,” Alan stated.
“No, Alan. I didn’t sign up for a process of slow torture. This is starting to resemble some sick Dr. Mengele shit,” Rebecca stated emphatically.
I felt a needle prick my arm. Suddenly, a sound like a crashing wave overtook my auditory senses. Within the vacuum of sound I found myself in, a familiar squeaky voice reemerged. “Jack, how’s it been?”
“I can’t move, Milton,” I said.
“It ain’t me this time, my friend.”
“Then who is it?” I asked.
“Well, if I told you, you’d probably panic.”
“Okay, what do I do?”
“Well, the good news is we’re near you.”
“How so? You’re just a stupid dream.”
“Oh, Jack,” Milton said, patronizing me. “We’re here to help you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not the only vampire in that facility...”
“What!?”
Milton said, “Open your eyes, now!”
To be continued in:
King’s Blood
Episode Four: Vampire Descent
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Table of Contents
Acclaim for P.J. Day:
BOOKS BY P.J. DAY
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
About the Author