by R. G. Nelson
“Look, it wasn't me. And no, I’m not even really one of them. I just help hand out fliers from time to time. And I'm sorry about your son. I really am,” I say weakly. I hope it comes across as genuine, because I am sorry. Unfortunately, my sincerity is probably buried underneath my fear for my life right now.
Some people around us have noticed the situation and are watching from a distance. Some of them are even calling out for him to put the gun down, but neither of us seems very capable of focusing on anything except our own tense conversation.
“Sure, you’re just the guy who hands out fliers. Just the guy who convinces people’s children to go out and hurt other people’s children.” He advances on me. “Let me guess, you just follow orders, right? Nothing bad that’s done is ever your call.”
His sarcasm cuts me deeply. I’ve always viewed my actions as just helping out friends, not really a part of the problem. Had I recruited people into the Movement? Yes. Have some of them done things I wouldn’t agree with? Probably. But even so, if I hadn’t been there handing out fliers, someone else would have. I never went out of my way to excel at recruiting or to really win over people that weren’t interested. A back part of my mind is admitting that my hands are a little dirty, but still, I really don’t deserve what’s happening now. And certainly not what I’m terrified might happen in a few seconds.
“You took him from me! You took his life. Someone needs to pay.”
His hand holding the gun is trembling, whether with nerves or with rage, I can’t tell. I’m very aware of how unsteady his grip on the trigger seems. I no longer even see his face; his features blur into the background as I stare down the tip of the wobbling revolver. I feel like a cobra entranced by a snake charmer’s flute … except that he’s the deadly one.
So I don’t see his lips move when he adds with desperate resolve, “You need to pay.”
I hear two loud explosions and I have time to think: I guess he was trembling with rage, then.
People are scared; everyone is running away.
I should run away, too.
But I can’t. I can’t do anything except fall; my body doesn’t seem to be responding to me. I look down in surprise and see my hands are covering a bloody hole in my stomach. I sense rivulets of liquid trickling down my neck as well. It feels so warm, a contrast with the frigid air. I realize it must be blood, too. That’s funny, I don’t remember feeling getting shot.
I’m staring at the clouds and trying to think of what this means. I feel detached from what is happening somewhat, as though it’s someone else here in this situation. Maybe it’s because I can’t feel anything. I start to estimate calmly how badly I’m hurt and how much my life will change as a result.
I realize that I’m on my back now, and the man is still standing there stupidly with the gun in his hand, unsure of what to do next. People are screaming in the distance, and I notice a crowd has formed a ways off, yet no one has moved to challenge the man with the gun. I get the feeling that this will not end well for me; one more shot and I’m done for. Then I smile as I wonder if my death will end up on YouTube–I’m sure someone out there is filming this right now. They’ll probably show it to their friends later and talk about how cool it was to see. And who knows, maybe the video will get a lot of hits and I’ll become a martyr or something for the Movement. Dying for a cause I don’t even believe in–wouldn’t that be ironic?
I hear someone close by screaming angrily. I know that voice. I manage to rotate my head a bit and see Vera facing down the gun with no fear.
“What did you do?” she yells.
The man is nervous, but holds his ground. “Are you one of them, too?” He waves the dilapidated weapon threateningly.
“Big mistake.” Before my eyes can really process what happened, the man is flying back into the wall. He hits it headfirst with a sickening sound. I chuckle as I realize my girlfriend just beat up an old guy for me. I stop chuckling instantly as the first spasm of real pain shoots through my whole body. Suddenly, every nerve is alive and searing with agony. I think I gasp, but it might have been a scream.
Vera is at my side.
Vera, my angel.
I see her distracted by all my blood–just for a second–before pulling herself together. I need to tell her how sorry I am about yesterday and today. How Megan really doesn’t mean anything to me; how she, Vera, has been my whole world these past few months. How I’m happy it’s me lying here wounded and not her.
“I choose you. I love you,” I manage. That’s all I can get out right now.
She’s crying now, tears tinged red with blood. “I'm so sorry, baby. I love you, too. I shouldn't have left you,” she babbles. I see her look around and notice all the onlookers. Some do have camera phones out. “Hang on, I'm gonna get you out of here. You have to fight the neverend for me–give me time!”
I want to protest against being moved; I’m not sure how much more pain my body can take. But then I feel myself picked up easily and spirited away gently. There is pain still, but I think my body has maxed out, and it’s no worse than moments before. We move fast but evenly, and I barely shift around in her capable arms.
Snapshots of places flash by: the street with its many curious faces, restaurant signs, garbage cans, fire escapes …. I think we’re in an alley now. It gets darker and there are many cars–I guess we entered a parking garage. A door is opened, and I see a lot of stairs. She lays me down gently, and I see that we are in a deserted stairwell. I think I feel the floor shaking under me.
“Human, hang in there. Don’t you die on me.” That’s funny. The still-detached part of my brain registers her comment and points out that technically she’s dead herself. I’d smile if I could.
I feel the floor shaking again, or is that my body? I try to turn my head slightly to see if she is still there. I think my vision is going foggy. Now there’s a flickering; is the light fixture old? I can hear it buzzing, along with a sickening, choking sound. I have to focus: Is she still here? With me?
Of course she is. I can feel her hand holding mine. She is telling me everything will be okay. I can’t really see her. I realize the light is not flickering–I think my eyes must be rolling back. I try to concentrate on them, make them stop moving. I want to see her again before the cold fog closes in.
Before she is gone forever.
Before I am gone forever.
“Adam, I’m right here. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she says.
I want to tell her that it’s okay. That I know she didn’t. That I love her. I try to move my lips, but my mouth is filled with some strange liquid. Blood. I guess that choking sound must be me. That makes sense.
I’ve finally managed to turn my head a bit to see her. There she is.
Vera.
So beautiful.
An angel … my angel. My angel of death.
I’m freezing. I see my blood racing across the white tiles to form a puddle around her kneeling figure. She bends over me, panic in her eyes. But underneath, I see love–love for me. I can’t help but smile at that. As I do, a convulsion wracks my body. I sputter blood all over her pants, staining them.
I never thought I'd go out like this, but here I am. Flashing over the mistakes I've made–wondering if they'll be my last.
Vera wipes the blood away from my mouth affectionately. “Adam, let me fix this. Let me fix you,” she says.
Without waiting, Vera bites deep into her wrist. A lot of blood begins to rush out of her self-inflicted wound. She trickles it over my stomach and then my neck. I hear her give a soft whimper, and I know it’s not working. The wounds must not be closing the way her little bite marks heal after our intimate s
essions together.
“Baby, I'm so sorry–there’s too much damage,” she chokes out. “You won't make it. I can’t keep you back from the neverend.” Even in this state I can still note the edge of panic in her voice, the anguish.
“But I can save you. I can make you like me.” She hasn’t asked the question yet, but already her voice is higher pitched, pleading with me. I know what’s coming next.
“Do you want to be one of us?” she asks as she takes my hand and squeezes it. I look into her eyes, red with blood. They are so full of concern for me that it breaks my heart. I don’t want to hurt her more; I don’t want to be a source of pain for her. But I don’t know if I’m ready for this. “Human, please, you have to choose,” she whimpers desperately. “Choose to stay with me. Choose me.” Again, the pleading. It’s hard to resist her.
Her proposal echoes around in my head. I have to admit I’d often wondered what it would be like to be a vampire, but I can’t really imagine being one. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess I was always open to that possibility, maybe five, ten, twenty years down the line. But now? What about my dad? What about–with a start, I realize just how few tethers to the human world I actually have.
As if on cue, another wave of pain wracks my body. Vera leans down on me, whether to hug me or hold me down I can’t tell. I feel myself slipping away from … me. And then, like a bolt of lightning setting the night sky on fire, one thought repeatedly blazes a flickering, illuminated path through my brain.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die.
Not like this, and certainly not right now. Weakly, I try to nod. Then I nod with more strength, more certainty. But it doesn’t matter: Vera isn’t looking at me. She is crying into my chest, her pleading words lost in the soaked folds of my ruined clothes.
“Yes,” I say, surprised at the urgency in my own hoarse voice. “Do it.”
Immediately, Vera is sitting up. She looks at me, perhaps not sure she heard what she heard. I reach out for her weakly, but she stops me gently. Never taking her eyes off mine, she bites deep into her wrist again to reopen it. I’m confused, we’ve tried this before, and it didn’t work. But then her wrist is at my mouth and the blood is gushing in. Warm. Sticky. Blood. I’ve never drunk from her before; never drunk blood at all, for that matter. I’m not sure I can force it down, even if my life depends on it.
“Drink, Adam. Drink,” she purrs.
So I do.
There are moments in life when you suddenly realize that somewhere along the way, you committed to something big, something bigger than you really understood, and that for better or worse, you ended up on a path that led you to this precise point. In these moments, you can only hope like hell that it'll all work out, somehow.
I’ve been drinking for I don’t know how long. I stop to pull much-needed air into my lungs. I don’t want to die. My eyes are closed, and in the darkness I’m more aware of my body. I’m panting weakly: I want to breathe deeper and take the oxygen down into the depths of my body where it’s needed, but I don’t have the energy. I don’t want to die.
I feel Vera’s warmth coursing inside me, spreading out. Trickling down into the tiniest of tiny capillaries and crevices in my body. I’m still for a moment, almost at peace.
And you wonder, what comes next?
* * *
I feel a shudder well up deep inside my being and pass throughout my body. I realize it has turned into convulsions. I’m shaking uncontrollably. I don’t want to die. I try to open my eyes, but can’t. Or else they are open, but I can’t see. I don’t think I can hear anything either except for the cursed buzzing sound. This can’t be right. This can’t be good. I don’t want to die.
It’s getting harder to breathe.
I feel myself slip, slip, slipping away into some void just beyond the edge of my perception. I wish I could see Vera one last time … or could hear her voice. Let her know that even though it didn’t work, I don’t regret being with her. That these last few months were the best in–
And then I die.
Part II: The Movement
8)
I step out into the night, once more amazed by the world around me. I’m almost blinded by the brilliance; the darkness sparkles with luminous intensity. The silvery moonlight filters through nearby tree branches and radiates down onto the lawn, reflecting on a thousand individual frosted crystals on a thousand individual strands of slumbering grass, each one completely resolvable by my new eyesight and screaming to be examined in detail. I thought simply being with Vera put magic back into my world; now, I feel like I’m part of the magic.
A block down, I hear someone rustling in her purse for her keys at her front door. I look over and see that it’s a brown-beige bag with one of those fake Louis-Vuitton patterns. Perhaps more ominously, I note that I can hear the faint rapid pulse that I instinctively know to be the beat of a human heart. Closer at hand, I get distracted by a rabbit off to my right braving the cold and scurrying under a neighbor’s fence. It’s so beautiful, with its moist, pale coat shimmering and firm muscles rippling as it bolts across the yard. Still, I’m uncomfortably aware that a rapidly surfacing part of me wants to rip over there and eat it. Or drink it. Whatever you call it.
Next to me, I hear Vera laughing softly. I glance at her and am suddenly sheepish.
She shakes her head. “It’s okay. Even now, all these years later, I still remember my first night. We all do,” she says. “Suddenly the darkness stops holding terror and reveals its wonders.”
It’s true. I felt that wonder earlier, the moment it was done, the moment I was reborn, or undied, or whatever their term for it is. Whatever our term for it is. I still haven’t quite adjusted to my new reality, no matter how well I can see in the dark. The trip home didn’t help matters. Everything in my house was the same: my dad seated on the couch, my room in a jumble, half-eaten leftovers in the fridge ….
Sure, my new senses revealed things I hadn’t noticed before, like a pervasive stench of sweat and stale beer (I grimaced to think Vera had been subjected to that all these nights), but overall, it still felt like home, which made it all the more difficult when Vera commanded me to pack a bag with whatever I couldn’t live without and leave with her. I took a long shower thinking over my situation and deciding what to take. In the end, I threw on an old t-shirt from my Southeast Asia trip to replace my ruined clothes from earlier in the night and then packed my old backpacking bag to the brim with clothes.
It’s weird–if you had asked me earlier tonight if I had any favorite clothes, I would have said no, but just now I couldn’t bring myself to part with that many of them. It kinda felt like parting with a piece of myself that I’m not ready to let go of yet. Not that I was particularly fond of my lot in life, but I had a surprisingly hard time walking across that threshold knowing it could be for the last time.
Vera must have noticed my smile fading in the night. “What’s wrong?” she asks as we begin to head away.
“I guess I still don't really see why I have to go. My dad barely notices me. He's already sleeping again. And earlier, when he let us in, he barely registered me–he was only annoyed that he had to be woken up and was very far from realizing that I’m dead.”
“Undead,” she slips in.
“Whatever.”
“You’ll learn the lingo.”
“Vera ….”
“Adam, what do you want me to say? It's the rules. We can't turn anyone unless they have joined the Movement. And if you are with us, you have to live with us.”
“You didn’t mention all this when you asked me if I wanted you to turn me.”
“
You mean when you were bleeding out in front of me with seconds to live? Would it have changed your answer, anyway?”
She has me there. Life may be what it is, but when you find yourself about to be deprived of it, your appreciation for living rapidly displays itself. “Maybe not. It’s just, do you all spy on each other or something? You can’t have separate living accommodations?”
“Adam, at some point someone determined this was the best way. So now it’s our way,” she says with a tinge of exasperation. But then she softens visibly and draws close to me. “Besides, is moving in with your girlfriend so bad?”
Well, when she puts it that way …. I realize I’m smiling again. “I guess not. But what do I tell my dad?”
She hands me her phone. “Call him. Tell him we're madly in love and that you're moving in with me–that you wish him the best, but won't stay around and enable his self-destructive patterns.”
I sigh. I’m sure he’ll buy it–it seems perfectly reasonable, and honestly, if we were both just normal human lovers, it might be about that time anyway. Plenty of people our age are conducting their first experiments in living as a couple, so why not me? We did say our first ‘I love you’s earlier this evening, and at least for me I wasn’t just feeling that way because I was about to die.
“Think he'll be okay?” I ask, out of objections.
“Adam, it's for the best. And you can still check in on him. Besides, you’re a new vampire. It’s gonna take some getting used to–and you don’t want any … accidents. Especially not with people you care about.”
Accidents. She says it so matter-of-factly but I can picture the horror behind her words. It reminds me of other people I need to be careful about. “Fine. I’ll call my dad later when he’s likely to pick up. But Franklin will be more complicated.” She looks at me questioningly, so I try to explain further. “I guess we've obviously grown apart a bit since we were kids, but he's basically been the only one there for me since my mom died. Until you. But I don't want him involved in this, ever.”