After several days, I lost the ability to think clearly. My eyesight was not so much a picture as it was a rippling pond. Every moving thing made ripples that called me to it. If I installed a camera on top of a wolf’s head or some other predator, this was the footage I would have seen. There was no thought, no deliberation, only a constant game of seek and destroy. I became like one of them, a mindless wanderer ravaging the landscape.
During the day, I would find a burrow or some other kind of shelter to hide. Most animals had gained enough fear of the undead to leave me alone. All of them except one curious bear, that is. I must have been in a deep sleep when he came upon me, sniffing and pawing. Just like the undead, he could sense something off about my scent, something wrong. Unfortunately, hunger had overruled instinct.
He continued to sniff, taking playful swipes to test the waters. After an extended period of examination, he decided that I was dead. Far from being repulsed, this bear delighted in the treasure he found and bit into me. Now I decided to wake up. One beast came face to face with another. He roared and showed me his teeth. I showed him my fangs, fully extended like a pair of ivory daggers, and pounced upon his back.
We played rodeo for a while. He tried running, turning, bucking, but nothing would get me off his back. I buried my nails deep into his soft fur and held on tenaciously. He smashed me into tree after tree, but I was unfazed. At some point, I gained a window of opportunity and sank my fangs into his neck. His fur and protective coat of fat insulated the muscle and veins further down. This required some digging that he did not appreciate. His howls of pain woke the whole forest, but I continued to dig, finally getting at the throbbing artery and piercing it.
I almost drowned in the deluge that followed. The blood flowed rich and thick. After my extended fast, it tasted better than any human blood. I drank in long, gulping draughts, barely stopping to breathe. My stomach filled past the point I thought possible and continued to expand. By the time I was close to having my fill, the beast collapsed on its side. It let out one final groan of protest before expiring. I continued to drink away until I’d had my fill.
This burrow may have been the bear’s home, but it was mine now, until such time I decided to give it back to nature. I evicted the bear from his former home and went back to sleep. No other animal dared to wake me after that.
It’s hard to say how long I was feral or how far I wandered. It might have been weeks, months, even years. I must have covered the entire continent in my wanderings, eating when I could and hunting relentlessly when I couldn’t.
My hunger may have wrested away my self-control, but it did nothing to alleviate my loneliness. She was gone. I felt it in my heart and deep down the dark pit that might pass for my soul. I felt the abject desolation of her absence, like something vital had been ripped from me. All I could do was pray to the heavens to grant me the mercy of death. It never came. Each day I grew leaner and each night I ran myself ragged in an often fruitless search for sustenance.
At some point, I became desperate enough to start gnawing on the bones I found in search for a bit of marrow that might hold my hunger at bay. That proved to be my undoing.
It was that overcast full moon night that I found myself once again held captive by my hunger. I was able to feel every pang. It was like having shards of glass driven into every bone of my body. I was cannibalizing myself. Even after I collapsed, it might take a painfully long time before I ceased to feel anything and the lights went out inside. Then I would say, “Goodbye, world. It was great while it lasted.” This was the ultimate lesson: nothing lasts forever. Even a Vampire, destined to never die of old age, cannot endure for all eternity.
The end of my insanity came that night in the form of a large, fresh skeleton. It was human and recently deceased by the looks of it. It had been picked so clean there wasn’t enough for this body to reanimate. The skull had been broken open and its contents cleaned out. Still, the large bones were intact and I hoped to find some marrow.
My teeth cut into the bones and cracked them. The sound reminded me of a time long ago, when I was sitting on the verandah at my family home, eating walnuts with my father. It was such a simple memory that brought tender feelings to my heart—a sharp contrast to what I was doing, gnawing on bones like a common dog.
There was marrow inside the bones, and even a tiny bit of blood inside that had somehow not grown infected, not that I would have cared at this stage. It must have been quite the sight, to witness me feeding on a corpse like a scavenger.
Thunder echoed through the night. I looked up at the sky and saw nothing. Usually lightning preceded the crack of thunder. That was when I felt the pain burning in my chest. I looked down and saw the bullet wound. Out of pure instinct, I began to run, but I was a far cry from my supernatural speed at this point. I took another gunshot to the leg and fell over. My captors gathered around me.
“You got yourself another one, Ray?” asked one of the men. “That’s the third one tonight, save one for us!”
“If you want it, you need to be able to take the shot! What’s with all this hesitating crap?” exclaimed the woman’s voice. She sounded forceful and confident. One command issued from that voice might have been enough to send thousands of men (or women) to their deaths. I looked up and tried to make out what might be the last thing I would see. She had wavy black hair that gleamed in the moonlight. The light casting down from above sharpened her features. She had high cheekbones and eyes dark as night, with a light tan that suggested non-European ancestry.
Yes, her face would do just fine for being the last thing I would see. If it weren’t for the fact that I was still alive, I might have thought myself to be staring at an angel, all except for those eyes that stared at me like twin enigmas, reluctant to give up their secrets.
One of them kicked me. I writhed and growled in protest.
“Damn, these things are getting skinnier every day. This one’s barely even worth it,” said a second man.
“Don’t be jealous just because you didn’t tag anything yet,” quipped the woman with a slightly chastising tone. There were some oohs from the others.
“I’ll get this one,” he replied, aiming his rifle at my head. Everyone looked at him in disapproval, but the woman named Ray seemed like she could care less who killed me. She looked down at me with something that might have been pity when her eyes grew a little wider.
“Don’t shoot!” she shouted, slapping the rifle away from my face.
“What’s the matter with you, Ray? You going soft on us?”
One look from her was enough to silence all of them. I must have grown lighter in my starvation, because she picked me up as easily as a bag of bones and held me up for inspection.
“You see him? Tell me if you find something off about him.”
“Well, he’s not trying to take a bite out of you, for one,” said the first man.
“And?”
“And he’s ugly as sin! Good Lord, he looks like he’s been dragged halfway around the world. We might as well put this one out of our misery.”
“Anybody else?” she asked, tapping her foot with growing impatience. Everybody stammered. “He’s a living Vampire, you idiots! Can’t you see it? He’s alive and starving. That’s why he was feeding on these bones.”
They all let out a collective, drawn out “ooh.”
She scoffed. “You guys are hopeless sometimes. What am I going to do with you? Here, carry him back and load him up in the Jeep.” They took me and carried me at shoulder level.
“Damn, you weren’t kidding, Ray. This guy weighs about eighty soaking wet, I would think.”
“Yeah, looks starved out of his mind, too,” added the other man. “I don’t think there’s much of him left to save. Even if he lives, his mind will be gone for sure. Might be more merciful just to put him down now.”
“How about you let me decide that?” asked Ray. The men went quiet and she caressed her chin. She was actually considering putting me down
like a rabid dog. True to form, I gave her a snarl and she seemed to make up her mind.
“Get him in the truck. Hurry up, I want to get home sometime today.” The men walked to the back of the Jeep and threw me in the back like a load of cordwood. “Be careful, you idiots!” she snapped. They muttered an apology and got in their seats. She rode shotgun, with the second man at the wheel.
“Everyone ready?” he said, flashing a gold fang that gleamed in the moonlight. They all said yes, and he floored the accelerator, taking us all back to wherever they had come.
Intensive Care
I opened my eyes and found myself having a déjà vu moment. The room was bathed in painfully bright fluorescent lighting that reflected off the clean white walls. In fact, everything was brilliant white. Fluorescent, I reminisced. How long since I have seen this much fluorescent lighting? There were tubes glowing up and down the room, not a single one of them broken or flickering. This couldn’t be. It had to be a dream, or a figment of my imagination. I must have been dreaming of the pre-Fall world, my last hallucination before death, or maybe I had died already and it was the start of one neverending dream. There were too many thoughts racing through my head, and my mind felt overwhelmed and shut itself down.
The next time I came to, I felt so much better. I was still weak, but almost back to my old self. I looked up and saw that I had been dressed in a gown and placed on a hospital bed. There were two intravenous taps with blood bags going into me. Then I remembered that hospitals make our kind nervous. Places like these can quickly expose us, make us vulnerable to hunters or worse, doctors who might experiment on us out of “scientific curiosity.” I couldn’t have that. I had to get out of here.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the nurse who entered the room as soon as I reached for the IV inside my left arm.
“And why is that?” I asked. My hand curled up into a fist.
“You need that blood to recover. Just lie down and rest. We’ll get you right in no time.” She smiled and her ruby lipstick-painted lips parted, revealing white teeth with long, sharp canines. Now I understood. She was one of my kind. I was in good hands. “Excuse me, but I have to continue my rounds.” She was back out the door, leaving me with nothing to do but explore the room. I looked around and found a remote for the bed and decided to incline it so I could sit up comfortably.
Oh, the great forgotten comforts of modern life! The motor whirred softly and brought me up to forty-five degrees until I took my finger off the button. For that matter, there were no restraints on my hands, or muzzle on my mouth. I was actually a patient, not a prisoner. The IVs dripped a steady flow of blood into my veins, filling me with renewed life. If it weren’t for this, I would surely be dead now. Who knows how many of these bags it had taken to revive me?
My limbs had regained some of their fullness, but I still looked lean and scrawny. It would take some time for me to replenish my reserves and return to my original strength. At this point, I guessed I would be healthy enough to feed on my own. When the bags went empty, I took the needles out of both arms. The holes sealed themselves within seconds. In a few minutes, there would be no sign that they were ever there.
“Now, why did you do that?” asked the nurse with stern look on her face and her hands on her hips. The red on her lips was highlighted by the paleness of her face and the pure white of her uniform.
“I’m better. I can feed on my own now.” Honestly, I hated having those things in my arms. I felt like a patient, which I was, and I hated it.
“Yes, but it’s much faster this way.” She walked up to the bed and examined me, looking in my eyes and opening my mouth. “Well, you look healthy enough. I guess we can go ahead and have you sip on the bags.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
This was something that had become routine for me. The teeth on the neck method was pleasurable, but it often resulted in damage and bruising, not to mention the lethal infections that followed. My method was unorthodox but clean, and it seemed that I had found likeminded Vampires who survived using the same methods.
“You are my kind. How did you survive?” I asked.
“I could ask you the same thing. How did you manage to get along by yourself all that time out there?”
By doing whatever I had to. Scavenging, trickery, anything that got me the blood I needed to keep on going. Nothing was off-limits as long as I was still alive at the end of the night.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a hospital in the city of Anathorn.”
“Anathorn?”
“Yes, it’s been one of the first cities retaken after the Fall. There are others, but we’re probably the biggest. The territories go out farther than you can see. We have oil, manufacturing, basically every resource we need to get along.”
Sounds like paradise. Someone better tell God he sent me to the wrong place. I was supposed to go a few floors downstairs.
“You’re telling me there’s a whole city here? Are there any more of our kind?”
“There’s many more. This isn’t just a safe haven for humans. Our kind suffered a lot during the Fall.”
“You’re not kidding.”
“From what I hear, we were nearly wiped out. It was luck that brought me here. I was a nurse before I was turned, just a little before the Fall. My skills were in high demand as civilization collapsed, so I had no shortage of patients or donors, willing or unwilling.”
“Just happened to be in the right line of work.”
“Yes, I was. That, and…Anna helped me a lot.”
“Who is Anna?”
“You’re in the city of Anathorn.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“It was named after her, Anna Thorn. She essentially founded it. She is simply known as the Mother.”
Anathorn. She might as well have called it Shangri-La.
The Mother
After our conversation ended, she brought me a tall glass of my favorite drink. It had been kept chilled and stirred back to a semi-normal consistency, but in my emaciated state, it tasted like ambrosia.
I was curious about the nurse. Since the Fall came, I had not seen another of my kind. I was sure that someone must have survived elsewhere in the world. It was simply a matter of probability. I survived, so others must have survived as well. Still, I had not seen anyone else and my hopes had all but faded away.
Despite my attempts at getting to know more about her, she seemed to get quite busy as the night progressed. I suspected that she used her work to avoid me, but I would have to be satisfied with her answers for now.
The next night, that same nurse came with a handful of release forms for me to sign and sent me on my way.
“Will there be any charge for this?” I asked. She laughed.
“And how would you pay? You don’t have a cent to your name.”
Ah, a taste of the poignant wit of our kind.
“Don’t worry,” she added. “It’s already been taken care of. Looks like someone is looking out for you.”
“I can’t imagine who, but I thank whoever it is.”
“Yes, that’s all good and well, but I still need you to get out of here. There’s a patient coming within the hour and I still have to clean this room.”
I considered arguing with her some more, just to get a reaction out of her, but I could see that she was deathly serious about this one thing and decided to comply.
She directed me to the elevator and wished me good luck. At the moment of saying goodbye, I thought about asking her where she lived, or maybe a phone number. Did they have phones here? I liked to think that they did, yet all I did was thank her and go on my way. The wound was too fresh. I did not feel like I could make a connection with anyone, not even a friendship. I hoped that would change with time.
The streets reminded me of how things were before the Fall. Some of these “perks” of modern existence I could have done without. Scores of cars traveled up and down the road. They we
re piled high into the first live traffic jam I had seen in decades.
I had seen a great number of them on the roads, forever frozen in time. Their bodies lay shriveled inside without ever having reached their safe haven. Some were infected and destined to die a second death inside the car. Others just gave up. It was easier to lie down and die than it was to stand up and fight the new threat. In a way, I understood. Being a human meant that you had only but one life to give. You might as well hurry up and give it away, get it over with. No such luck for me.
There were lights everywhere, far more than necessary. I wondered if they did it out of fear or out of celebration. It was reminiscent of the wastefulness that went on before the Fall. People consumed and devoured like locusts. Those in charge allowed this to go on out of ignorance or fear. Industries and corporations held the governments in their grasp.
Even to the very end, they held fast to the notion that it wasn’t that bad, that everyone should remain calm and wait for the authorities to take care of it, except the authorities never came. When the horde came, the military decided to withdraw. It was a game of numbers. Either send all your forces to their deaths or cut your losses and consolidate your resources. I’d like to say it worked, but their campaign of denial had gone on for so long that the infection had infiltrated their high-tech hazmat barriers. They didn’t stand a chance. The remains of their response centers in every major city I visited were proof that all the way to the end, they tried to keep a handle on it, but it was just a case of “too little, too late.”
This place was about as different from Jericho as it could be. I walked down the street unnoticed. People walked past me without the slightest acknowledgment. I would think that survivors would be eager to connect to one another, but these people here were just like they were before the Fall.
After the Fall Page 15