SHORT STORIES : Bloodlust

It all started on a cool night in the spring of 1995. I was about twenty-eight at the time, much better looking, an average joe with a gorgeous wife and son waiting for me at home. Just a normal guy who had worked the nine-to-five every weekday, paid a mortgage every month and was now at the local Seven-Eleven, picking up some milk and a pack of Marlboros.

A full moon lit up the clear night sky. I had just stepped out of Seven-Eleven with a carton of milk, headed for the car, perfectly calm, not expecting anything to go wrong. I had the keys firmly placed in the lock of the driver’s side door to my Honda, ready to unlock the door so I can get in and drive home for the night.

And that’s when something clasped onto my leg, startling me and sending my heart racing uncontrollably. I looked down, darting my eyes immediately to see what had grabbed hold of me the very second its (his) fingers closed over my left ankle. It was a hand, a human hand. Someone was under my car, trying to carjack me. I feared that someone was going to bash me over the head with a crowbar and then steal my wallet while I lay on the ground, gazing dizzily at the full moon in the dark sky and bleeding profusely from a massive head wound. And now, looking back at that time, I wish more than anything else that that was exactly what had happened.

I recoiled, shaking his grip from my ankle as I staggered backward a few paces.

He rolled out of the car, a big enough man to take his violent threats seriously but apparently not too big as to not be able to move freely underneath my Honda. The carjacker’s skin was ghost white, like that of an albino, with gray eyes and dark hair. He looked at me with a predatory gaze, and I have to admit, I was pretty afraid of the guy, scared, scared of what he might do to me. I was a family man, a man with no desire to get involved in any kind of rugged street brawl, the kind of man that would prefer to stay alive so he can be there for his wife and kid. I backed away, but he kept on approaching me, saying nothing.

“Look man, don’t hurt me,” I pleaded with him, but the carjacker remained silent. He just crept toward me, keeping a straight, poker face, completely emotionless and I somehow knew that this man meant business. “Please…I--I got a wife and kid…I--look, you want money, I can get you money.” I reached my hand into my pocket, fishing through it for my wallet while clutching the carton of milk to my chest with my other arm, assuming that money was what this guy was after.

I was wrong.

Dead wrong.

He suddenly lunged forward and pounced upon me, taking me down forcefully. The carton of milk slip out from my hand, flew midair for a second or two, then land further along the parking lot and ruptured open with a milk white explosion. I felt my back slamming down upon the hard blacktop of the parking lot, followed by my head, and the man now had me pinned to the ground. He snarled, baring his white teeth at me, and I thought that he must surely be insane.

With his mouth wide open, I felt him sinking his teeth into the left side of my neck, biting my carotid artery. And then, he was draining my blood, I could feel it leaking out of my body, could feel him chugging it down like precious nectar he desperately needed to survive, like a drug addict gone cold turkey for perhaps days and just now finally getting his fix. For a moment, I was paralyzed in fear. My mind went completely blank just then; I didn’t know what to do or how to react to any of this.

I raised my arm faintly, without him seeing it (he was too busy draining my precious life fuel) and mustering all the strength I could manage, I took a swing and punched him square in the jaw with enough force to knock him off of me. I rose drunkenly to my feet and then kicked him in the chest, pushing him back a few inches. I then turned and staggered off as fast as I could, trying to get away from him. My legs felt like rubber, I was swaying back and forth, staggering like a drunken sailor and feeling very nauseous.

I thought for sure that the man would come after me, but he didn’t. He ran off in the other direction. I didn’t know why he wouldn’t finish me off then, but I found out much later.

I was part of the same “club” he was in now.

Of course at the time, none of my thoughts were really coherent or even rational. I knew that I was going to die. I just knew it. He had ruptured my carotid artery. Blood was spilling from my neck by the gallons, and before long, my shirt was absolutely saturated in that warm crimson fluid. He bit me, I thought, as the world swirled before my eyes in a sickening, blacking-out vertigo. He fucking bit me…

And that’s when I passed out at the side of the Seven-Eleven building.

 

I don’t know how long I was out, and when I came to, I was still lying outside, near the side of the Seven-Eleven building, now lying in a thick, cooling pool of my own blood but somehow still alive. I rubbed my hand around the left side of my neck, it had stopped bleeding and the wound had fused itself shut in a rugged scab. The blood that had saturated and ruined my shirt was now starting to dry up, now in the sticky-resin stage, clinging to my back like an extra layer of skin. And--you’re not going to believe this, but I was actually feeling better. I didn’t feel like I wanted to puke or anything. I wasn’t dizzy; the vertigo was long gone and my neck, while it was still a bit itchy around the scab, didn’t hurt at all.

Obviously, I don’t expect you to believe me, or take me seriously. I am in a mental institution, after all…although it has nothing to do with what happened back then, I suppose. It really is unbelievable, what happened to me. You’d just have to be there and experience it for yourself, I guess.

Hell, even I didn’t fully believe what was going on.

I must be dreaming, I thought, simply shocked out of my gorge at the very notion of surviving what I had been through. I was bit in the neck, drained of blood. People have actually died losing the amount of blood I just lost here. And yet, I’m still alive. How can that be? How can I still be alive after what had happened to me. And who was the carjacker anyway?

But then I figured: Hey, I’m still alive, aren’t I? Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Who cares what the reasons are? I’m alive and that’s the important thing.

I was tired then. It was getting late and I just wanted to go home and forget about what had happened. I had to get up and go to work the next morning, so I didn’t want to deal with any interrogations or questioning. With that decided, I opted not to report what had happened and simply dismiss it as another psychopath--God knows there are plenty of those running around the world.

My scab would heal eventually. I looked at the rear view mirror inside my Honda and didn’t see any black or blue spots on my neck, so I couldn’t have been bleeding internally. My carotid artery must’ve fused together somehow, and that was that. I didn’t care about the specifics or how truly amazing it sounded. I just wanted to get home and get to bed.

So I pulled out of the parking lot in my Honda and headed home.

And I never saw my assailant again.

 

I got home and went straight to my bedroom.

I left the lights out; Emily was sleeping, or appeared to be sleeping peacefully, comfortably nestled in the bed and I didn’t want to disturb her. I stripped naked and crawled into bed next to her, embracing her warmth. By that point, the scab on the left side of my neck was starting to peal away, but it still retained the teeth marks.

I closed my eyes, starting to drift away to sleep. I felt her arms wrapping around my body; she was hugging me in her sleep and I hugged her back, caressing my hands around her firm, naked buttocks and feeling her nipples caressing against my hairy chest. She mumbled something, and I couldn’t understand what it was she was trying to say to me. I assumed it was just incoherent talking in her sleep. She was stirring now as she stroked her soft hand against the healing scab on my neck, and then she opened her eyes and asked what had happened to me.

“Nothing,” I answered. I had to be careful what I told her. I didn’t want to worry her too much.

“You’re neck…my God, are those teeth marks?”

“It’s nothing, Emily, go back to bed.”

“What happened to you?” Emily asked, nearly hysterical now.

“It’s nothing, really. Some guy just attacked me at the Seven-Eleven, that’s all.”

“Why are there teeth marks on your neck?”

And now I was laughing. It was hysterical laughter, but I tried my damnedest to make it sound like a humorous situation, if for no other reason than to calm her down. “He was a bit of a freak,” I told her. “Probably one of those psychos who thinks he’s a vampire or something and decided to try and suck my blood.” And then I was laughing even harder, but she saw no humor in this at all.

“He bit you in the neck?”

“Yeah--but lucky for me, it was only a superficial wound,” I lied. I had always hated lying to her--but what choice did I have? She was about to have a heart attack here. “It’s funny, really, this day in age, and there’re still people crazy enough to just go up to a total stranger and try and drink their blood--”

At that point, I was babbling. I guess I do that sometimes. Bad habit.

And it wasn’t helping the situation either.

“All right, look, Emily; just calm down, okay,” I said, my tone was more of a restless one than firm, and it did virtually nothing to help ease her hysteria. “Look, he didn’t puncture my carotid artery. I’m not bleeding internally, okay? It’s just a bit of a scratch; I can go in and get a tetanus shot first thing tomorrow morning if it’ll make you feel better, all right, Emily? He didn’t rupture the vein, nothing’s broken, I didn’t lose that much blood, and everything’s going to be okay.”

But it seemed like no matter what I said to her, I just couldn’t quell her hysteria, not even a little bit. She eventually calmed down a bit on her own, but was still worried sick over what had happened to me. To tell you the truth, I was a little bit concerned about it myself. Neither one of us slept well that night, and by three a.m., I was fiercely struggling against the perverse and shameful urge to bite her neck open and drink her blood.

 

By next morning, the scab on my neck had fully healed, leaving behind only scar tissue, and I had already forgotten about that promise I made to Emily about that tetanus shot. What had happened the night before was no longer on my mind, and I was trying to keep it that way. It was over as far as I was concerned. A thing of the past with no long-term effects and no strings attached either. I wanted more than anything to believe that to be true. I wanted more than anything for that to be true.

But unfortunately, we don’t always get what we want, do we?

My six-year-old son Tyler had already gone to school that morning. And I guess that’s a good thing too, because I wouldn’t have wanted for him to witness what had happened next. I wouldn’t have wanted him to see his old man on the ground, being burnt alive like that, in that much pain, which is exactly what had happened to me about two seconds after stepping out of my front door, heading for my car so I could go to work.

I stepped down the cement steps, and was then exposed to the sun’s brutal rays; the vile stench of burning flesh assaulted my nose, and I felt a sudden and intense burning sensation all over the body. Within seconds, I was on the ground, screaming in great agony. And looking back on it now, I’m really, really glad that Tyler wasn’t around to see it happening.

Except I wasn’t too concerned about that at the time. I wasn’t thinking about it. All that existed to me then was the pain, the burning pain. I didn’t know why it was happening to me then, but it wasn’t soon that I figured it out. It was the sun that had done that to me. The sun that burnt me and disfigured me in this way…so hideously scarred. But I wasn’t blaming the sun at the time of my burning. All I could think about was the horrible, horrible pain I was in.

It was like someone had dunked my entire body in sulfuric acid, held me submerged in that acid for an hour, and then lit afire (and for awhile after it was over, when I was recovering in the burn unit, that’s pretty much what I looked like as well). I was on the ground, the flames were invisible to the naked eye, but they were there nonetheless. It was the sun’s boiling rays acting as the flames that no one could see. The effects could easily be seen by any onlooker. My flesh was blistering all over as it sizzled and boiled under that hot blazing sun. The blisters would pop, and teal green puss would boil out, steaming and eating away at my flesh like battery acid. I was screaming in great agony; the whole neighborhood must’ve heard me, I was screaming so loud. They would probably come over into my yard to see what all the noise and all the fuss was about, and then they would see me on the ground, they would see what was happening to me, or at least the effect it had on my body, and then they would know.

I can’t stress how thankful I am that Tyler didn’t see this. It would have no doubt traumatized him to see what was happening to me. I can’t even begin to imagine the effect something like that would have on the boy, seeing his old man being roasted alive by the sun.

Emily wasn’t so lucky; and if you thought she was hysterical the night before, that was nothing compared to how she was reacting now. She was crying, tears streaming down her face at what she was seeing, and she was screaming as well, screaming hysterically as I was, and screaming almost just as loudly as well. “MEDIC!” she hollered and scream.“SOMEONE GET THE FUCKING MEDICS! Oh God, what’s happening to him? Dear God, WHAT’S HAPPENING TO HIM?”

Finally, someone did call the medics and they arrived on the scene soon after.

 

By the time I was taken out of the sun and to a burn unit, I was nothing more than scorched, tattered, blackened, paper-thin flesh wrapped loosely around a pile of charred bones. I was no longer feeling any pain then; my nerves had stopped working at that point, and according to the doctors, I had no chance of recovery and the fact that I even survived what they called “spontaneous combustion of invisible flames” for lack of a better term, was a miracle in itself.

I spent the next several months on full life support, which they all assumed I would be on for the rest of my life. Emily came to visit every week, but she would never let Tyler come along. Emily was always crying during the visits; I told her not to, to try and think happy thoughts, but she couldn’t help it and I knew that what I was going through was tearing her apart just as much as it was me. The doctors could have put me out of my misery any time I wanted them to; they had enough morphine to kill a score of horses, but I couldn’t just die. Emily and Tyler needed my social security checks, so I stuck around for their sakes.

Other than Emily, the only visitors I had during the entire period I was in the hospital were my parents and maybe my brother once or twice.

For the most part, I was pretty much alone with my thoughts. Oddly enough, my brain hadn’t sustained much damage, for some reason and it had repaired whatever damage it had sustained itself (my medical records will vouch this if you don’t believe me--I know how it sounds). I could still see and hear stuff. I was fully conscious and aware of my situation, of what had happened to me and what was going on through the long, long months I was there (and they were very long indeed). And I can tell you this, Doc: I would rather spend an eternity in hell than spend another day in that position, locked inside a plastic vessel, unable to move, placed on full life support, with the days and nights passing by slower than a fucking slug dragging itself in slow motion.

Within six months (which seemed like six thousand years to me), the intense pain had returned throughout my entire body. But I was kept inside, away from the sun. I didn’t know what was happening then, only that I was in the same agonizing pain I was when the sun hit me on that morning after I had been bitten. But this time, the pain had nothing directly to do with the sun. It was because my nerves were beginning to work again, beginning to regenerate somehow. And I was uplifted then. For the first time in six months (six thousand years), I was actually happy. I’m getting better, I thought. It’s impossible, but it’s true. Somehow, I’m actually getting better! I thought that I must be dreaming, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t believe it, but I was, slowly but surely, beginning to recovery. I had no idea to what extent my recovery would make, and I would have taken whatever I could take.

I could make movements; small movements, but it was still a big deal to me. I tried to limit my motions at first; it made the pain even worse. But on the seventh month, I could actually make those small movements without that sharp surge of intense, ripping pain. My body was starting to take shape, a little bit more than scorched, paper-thin flesh wrapped around charred bones. It was actually getting sturdier, stronger, more elastic and durable. It was a slow, gradual process, but I remained hopeful, optimistic.

I made a full recovery one year after the sun had fried me, in the spring of 1996. Plastic surgery restored my face so it wasn’t so frightfully grotesque anymore, although it will never again regain its full beauty. I was on physical therapy for several months after my release from the hospital.

I was considered a medical miracle. The doctors couldn’t explain how I could have possibly made such a full recovery, let alone survive, and at the time, I couldn’t either. Much to my dismay, I found out a few years later what the real problem was, but I’ll get into that soon enough. The tabloids couldn’t seem to get enough of my “amazing recovery”, but I’m not going to get into the various ways they butchered the events in that one.

You can check my medical records if you want to, and they’ll confirm that at least that part of my story is true. Go ahead--I won’t even gloat and say I told you so after you’re given the proof. Just remember that I don’t go into the sun. I never went into the sun again after that, and I swear I never will.

 

Weeks went by, then months, and nothing bad happened.

It wasn’t that difficult to figure out that exposure to the sun had been the key factor in my little “accident”. I could go out at night just fine, but if I so much as stuck my arm out the window during the daytime, my skin would begin to sizzle, I’d smell it burning, and I’d have to yank it back inside before any serious damage was done. I had about two seconds to do so before it was too late. I switched over to the night shift at my job, no sweat, and everything was just fine. I had already quit smoking; it was the one positive effect from my little “accident” with the sun. I don’t know how it did it, but it seemed to burn away whatever addiction I had to nicotine, the craving was no longer there and Emily and Tyler, both of whom always used to nag to me quit smoking for I don’t even know how many years, couldn’t have been happier. I was happy about that as well, of course, not realizing that it that craving had now been replaced by an even more perverse one, a dormant but soon would be fully awake thirst for human blood. But even that one didn’t hit me for the longest time after my recovery. I suppose had I known what it was, I might have been overjoyed to observe that it didn’t come anymore and that I was free. It must’ve burned away when I got fried by the sun last year.

But I would have been wrong. The Craving (for blood, not for cigarettes--I never craved another cigarette again to this day) was still there, still there and I didn’t even know what it was at the time. But it was there nonetheless, just hibernating, just on a brief little hiatus before it bounced back with a vengeance.

 

It came back one evening; I was sitting on the couch, Emily was in the kitchen, and Tyler was playing some video game on his Sega Genesis, I believe it was Sonic the Hedgehog. I was just sitting there and watching him. I really loved my son, you know. I never did anything to hurt him, never tried to hurt him. Not until that evening anyway.

By that time, I had forgotten all about the craving, if I had ever known what it was to begin with, that is.

I was looking down at him, playing his video game, a young boy sitting on a plush blue carpet in front of the TV, with short dark hair, a red tee-shirt and denim shorts on, his back turned to me, too preoccupied with his video game to notice what his old man was doing, or how I began staring at him, staring at his neck. As I lay on the brown sofa for a short while, watching him play his game, I found myself wanting to bite down on his neck and…and…you know. I fought the Craving as best I could. I slapped myself in the face, trying to snap myself out of it. I couldn’t believe it. This is my son we’re talking about here. My son. My pride and joy, and I wanted to exsanguinate him. I clenched my fists as tight as they would go, so that the veins and tendons in my inner forearms were bursting out. Beads of sweat dripped down my brow. My heart was racing, beating against my rib cage. My temples throbbed painfully. I held my mouth tightly shut, knowing that if I opened it, I’d be that much closer to giving in to this wretched urge to hurt…to kill my only son.

“Daddy, are you okay?”

I nodded slowly, struggling to keep my jaw locked.

I slapped myself in the face once again, and Tyler giggled in amusement.

The next thing I knew, I was on top of him, my hands pressing down upon his chest. The Craving had finally overwhelmed me. I had absolutely no control over my actions whatsoever. But I can remember it vividly. The look of utter horror over the boy’s face. His mouth hung open as he cried out, his eyes were raised in fright. He tried to beg, to plead, but I wouldn’t be reasoned with. I couldn’t even control myself. The terrified look on his face as I bared my teeth at him is one I have had to look at every single day when I close my eyes and sleep. Tyler was squirming, shaking, struggling to free himself from my grasp; tears were streaming down the poor boy’s face and he had already wet his pants, his urine had dampened the bottom of his shirt and spread down his legs almost to his knees. He screamed shrilly as I lowered my head and was about a second away from sinking my teeth into his jugular.

God, if Emily hadn’t burst into the living room when she did, right when my teeth were literally touching against the side of Tyler’s neck, over his jugular…

That goes without saying and I’d rather not even think about that possibility.

 

We were all in the kitchen and I had already once again regained control.

I sat across from Emily and Tyler. She was comforting the boy. Tyler was crying in her arms, still shaken up by what had happened. I don’t blame him; anyone would be. To have been attacked like that by your own father…God, I don’t even want to begin to comprehend how badly I had to have traumatized him, what the repercussions of my actions and my lose of control had to have done to him. I hope the adverse effects weren’t too severe.

Emily looked at me, but I couldn’t bear to face her accusatory stare. And I was stabbed by an unbearable sense of guilt and shame just looking at Tyler for even the barest second. I could no longer bare the sight of him crying on his mother’s lap, or of the mother’s cold, accusatory stare that burned through me like hot lead. The disgust I felt toward myself was so strong then that looking at them burned my eyes, gave me a headache, and made me sick to my stomach, for it only served to remind me of what I had just done, what I had almost done to Tyler.

“I’m sorry,” I said through tears of my own. “I--I don’t know what came over me. I’ve been…going through some changes, as must be obvious to both of you. But that’s no excuse for what I did.” I was sobbing uncontrollably then. I hadn’t cried since I was a little kid, four, maybe five at the latest. But I was crying then; I was so immersed in shame and remorse that I couldn’t help it. I wanted to drop dead right then and there--God knew I deserved it. But that would probably have only upset them even more, especially Tyler. “You must hate me for what I…for what I almost did to Tyler. I don’t blame you, I really don’t. You have every right to hate me, both of you do.”

I honestly expected her to hate me, to leave with Tyler and never so much as speak of me again. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, she grabbed my hand from across the table and held it tenderly in her own. I finally looked up and saw that the hateful, accusatory gaze in her eyes was gone (I might have just imagined it to begin with; to this day, I’m not completely sure), and that now she was crying as well. “It’s okay,” she said, and that made me feel even worse.

I pulled away from her. “No, no, it’s not okay,” I barked. “You think we can just move on like this never happened? God, after what almost happened tonight, I’d be surprised if Tyler will ever be able to so much as look at me again!” Then I stood up and banged my fist against the table.

The sudden noise startled Tyler, and he looked up again, and for just that split-second, I swear that I could see nothing but pure and unadulterated fear in that boy’s eyes as he looked up at me.

I looked at Emily. Her tears were flowing radiantly down her cheeks.

Then I bent my head in shame and was looking at the linoleum floor of our kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I apologized timidly. I looked up at the two of them solemnly, and then suggested, “Look, maybe its better if I leave. These things that’ve been happening to me lately--”

“No,” she protested, very softly. “Whatever you’re going through, whatever’s happening to you, we can find some way to deal with it. We can work things out.”

“No we can’t!” I snapped at her angrily, but it was myself I was angry with and not her. “I might lose control again. Maybe it won’t be for several months, or several years--I don’t know how this thing works; I haven’t figured it out yet. But at some point, I’m probably going to lose control again. I wanted to drink Tyler’s blood! God, do you have any idea how--” I paused, too consumed with guilt and self-loathing to go on. “What happens if next time, I do more than scare you or Tyler shitless, huh? What then? What if I’m actually successful in biting down into your throats and drinking your blood and killing you?”

“I know you’d never intentionally do anything to harm me or Tyler.”

“Yeah, well what I did to Tyler, I had no control over whatsoever. It wasn’t ‘intentional’ and I wasn’t in my normal frame of mind.”

“We can fight this.”

“What if we can’t? What then?”

“You can get some help,” she suggested.

“I doubt there’s anyone in the world that can help me,” I replied, and I actually believed it too. Hell, I still believe it…maybe now more than ever.

“I could stay here,” I went on, “just as you want me to, and I could try my damnedest to control whatever’s inside of me. But I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be able to do it. And if I did lose control over this thing, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you understand why I have to leave?”

“I love you,” she said to me, coming closer. “So does Tyler.”

“I know,” I replied grimly. “I love you guys too. That’s why I can’t stay. If I stay, I’d be putting your life and Tyler’s in danger every second of every day I’m around. I can’t live with that. I couldn’t bare it if I harmed either of you because I couldn’t keep myself under control. That’s why it’s best if I’m not around.”

She was crying harder now. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her voice was muffled through sobs. I couldn’t understand what she was saying just then.

I cut her off and said: “The house is yours and Tyler’s, as is the car. And the money in the bank, all of it, that’s yours as well.”

“I don’t care about the fucking money!” she snapped at me, still crying, begging, pleading for me not to go. But I just couldn’t stay. “We need you; Tyler needs his Daddy, and I need you as well. And you need us just as badly now. We can get through this together, help each other through all this.”

“I know it hurts now,” I said, on the verge of fresh tears, “but in time, you’ll realize that this’s all for the best, that you’re both safer and better off without me.”

I turned and left, the tears now pouring down my face; I couldn’t stop it.

When I slowly dragged myself out through the back door (it had to have been the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my entire life) I heard her calling my name again and again, telling me to come back, crying hysterically as she did so. I did my best to ignore her. It was all for the best, after all. But it was still breaking my heart anyway; and I couldn’t ignore her, despite my best efforts. I doubt if she’ll ever know this--her or Tyler--but what happened had hurt me as much as it did them.

If you asked me if I ever miss them, I’d say that I do…every day of my life. Do I regret leaving them? Yeah, to be honest with you, sometimes I do. But it’s better this way; I did it for their own good. I don’t know if she filed for divorce on the grounds of abandonment or not--thus far, I haven’t had to make a single alimony payment. But I still send them money whenever I can, in cash and with no return address on the envelope. If they’re still living at the house they were at when I was with them, they’ve been getting it. But if they moved on--well, I’ve been trying not to think about that possibility. But in any event, I hope things turned out okay for them.

 

I moved about as far as I could get from them, not wanting to even remotely endanger them in the slightest. I felt I had already done enough damage, and God only knows how much Tyler’s therapy bills were going to come out to. I think about that a lot, you know, about Tyler and what I had almost done to him, about what kind of adverse effects my actions might very well have had on the poor boy. I try not to think about it, but sometimes I can’t help it; days are the worst for me.

 

I moved on to New York City, deciding it was far enough from where I lived before, and it was pretty damned far, too. I slept during the day, mostly tossing and turning on my bed. I can’t remember the last time I actually had a good night’s (day’s) sleep. I lived in a shitty apartment in a real shitty part of the city. It was a single room apartment on the twentieth story. Just perfect for jumping, don’t you think. A surefire way to end it all, if you were of the suicidal nature, like I was. The first time I moved in, looking at that fogged window with the spider web crack across the pane, I wanted to pull it open and throw myself through, but it was stuck. I then fantasized about jumping through the glass windowpane, slashing up my entire body from jagged breaking glass, and then falling twenty stories, splattering upon the streets below. Death would be absolute. Sure, why not? I thought. What do I have to lose, right? I’m nothing, nobody. I left my family behind for their own good since my very presence puts ‘em in danger. I’m alone and I have absolutely nothing. Nothing to live for, no purpose in life. Might as well end it all. I’m a threat to everyone around me and no good to anyone, not even myself. But then I remembered what had happened during my exposure to sunlight, the way I was fried alive, burnt to a crisp but not killed, never killed. And then I thought of what might happen if I made that jump, what might become of me. It was unthinkable what I might suffer should I survive such a jump. There’d be no way in hell an ordinary human would survive, but it was feasible that I might survive, so I couldn’t take the chance.
I no longer had to worry about the temptation of that window. I had a shade put up, not for the temptation it posed. I didn’t care about staying alive or fighting with the compelling urge to jump out. I had the shade down on that window twenty-four hours a day because it kept the sun out.

The only light in the room at any time was a dim bulb, and that was perfectly fine with me. I can deal with dim light; it’s sunlight I can’t stand. The walls were painted white, but the paint-job was old, it was fading, yellowing, brown and chipping in some spots and riddled with bullet holes in others, and in some, there were a few wads of chewing gum and thick green mucous, which was now dried to the wall and impossible to get out. Cracks ran rampant on the walls and on the ceiling, cobwebs hanging on nearly every corner. Piss, blood, and vomit stains covered about ninety percent of the otherwise beige carpeting. The lock on the thick mahogany front door was busted from when the police kicked the door in and hauled off the last tenant kicking and screaming into a police cruiser, read him his rights, and threw him in the state pen, and the landlord never bothered to get it fixed. I had nothing worth stealing--only a mattress, pillow, and faded blue quilt for a bed, a TV with terrible reception with the sound so often full of static. In my refrigerator were various condiments--such as Heinz ketchup and French mustard--and baking soda but not a scrap of food in the entire room.

The refrigerator itself was breaking down and probably would have been right at home in a landfill somewhere. There was something wrong with the microwave, something that made it so that if you so much as turned the thing on it might set off a nuclear explosion killing not only myself but every other unfortunately tenant living on the twentieth floor of the apartment complex, the ground zero point, so I felt it was best to keep the thing unplugged. And the stove and oven were both useless pieces of shit that didn’t even work anymore.

And then there was the bathroom…you could probably find a few portojohns cleaner and more sanitary than my bathroom. There was so much black mildew on the bathroom floor you could actually see it growing in between each of the tiles, sometimes overlapping the tiles themselves. Looking in the mirror was sort of like looking at a mosaic of myself, there were so many cracks in it. On the washbasin of the sink was a very thick film of old and decaying hand soap mixed with a previous tenant’s dry nasal discharge spilt upon it many years previously, with a few hairs and dead insects littered over various spots. The toilet had piss and shit splotches over plenty of areas of porcelain, some even on the seat (I always made sure to put toilet paper on the seat whenever I had to move my bowels, just like in a public restroom). It was probably the most unpredictable toilet I had ever encountered in my life, sometimes getting clogged for no reason, often times overflowing; very often times it was damp from condensation, and had pipes that would occasionally drip. It might have even shot up raw sewage for no apparent reason, once or twice, while I was urinating. In the shower stall was mold and mildew growing lightly on the glass, on the shower walls and floor, with the drain stop in a cocoon of rust. I always wore shoes while showering, fearing that I might get athlete’s foot or tape worm or something of that nature if I stepped in there barefoot.

The rent on that place was $500 a month.

You’re probably thinking that only a totally sick bastard could voluntarily live in such a place as that and that I’d have to have been completely insane to even step foot in such a dump. Who knows, maybe you’re right about that. But I wasn’t complaining. I had cringed in disgust, nauseous and ready to vomit over the sickening sights and pungent smells within the bowels of that biohazardous cesspool on the first night I had moved in. But once I had gotten used it, I dwelled in those deplorable living conditions without giving it a single thought. I suppose that back when I was a normal human being, an average joe with a wife and kid, living in a nice house, with a mortgage, and driving a nice car instead of driving that rust-bucket I now owned, I wouldn’t have even considered living in such a pigsty. It was more than a mere pigsty, but that’s beside the point, I guess. Of course, a lot had changed since my little “accident” at Seven-Eleven in 1995 and I wasn’t exactly the same person anymore.

I’m not even human anymore.

I bounced around from job to job during that period-all night shift jobs, mostly security guard.

I was in a very deep depression most of the time, overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame. I became suicidal, but nothing I had tried worked. Shooting yourself in the head is not always a surefire way to kill yourself, as many doctors and other health experts will tell you. Anything can happen, but I always figured that I wouldn’t be one of those strange cases where the bullet would just orbit around the skull and get lodged there and I didn’t care if I died right then and there or was put in a coma for the rest of my life. I was happy as long as I was out of it. What happened with me precisely when I tried it, I cannot say. I pulled the trigger, and fell unconscious, I guess. When I came to, I had a concussion and was bleeding heavily from my head, but still alive. I tried cutting my inner wrists. They bled profusely as I sunk the dull and rusty blade deep into them, but healed, leaving behind some really hideous scars, but the veins regenerated themselves somehow and I still have full use of both my hands. I chugged down a whole thing of Tylenol, was sick for weeks afterward-it really did a number on my digestive system--but of course, I recovered from that as well. I drank a beaker of cyanide once and that didn’t do a damned thing to me. I even threw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge in January 1997, expecting to go into hypothermic shock and finally die in the murky, freezing waters below. Swimming in those waters I was freezing my ass off, but other then that, all that happened to me was I got wet. I didn’t freeze to death. I didn’t get frostbite or go into hypothermic shock. I was cold, wet, shivering uncontrollably on my way home, but still alive.

After my various failed suicide attempts, I felt like even more of a freak of nature, a subhuman, like my existence was both a waste and something that just couldn’t be disposed of in any way. My depression, guilt, and shame grew worse and I hated myself all the more.

I tried drugs as an escape--such as marijuana, cocaine, that sort of thing--and quickly gave those up once I realized they had absolutely no effect on me either.

I was trapped in this world of shit, with absolutely no way out, all the exits completely blocked off.

My social life was pretty much nonexistent; I had no friends, no family.

I frequented nightclubs on my nights off, and that was about all that I had passing for a social club. None of the women wanted to dance with me; they all seemed repelled by my ugly, disfigured mug, the direct result of what exposure to the sun had done to me (but I guess the sun’s rays aren’t really good for anyone anymore, are they?). Like I said, I was presentable--I don’t have to wear a mask every time I go out in public--but I’m far from being any kind of a stud or heartthrob. The clubs were a cure for my loneliness, or at least a temporary treatment. I would never have anything to drink for fear that the alcohol might make me a little more susceptible to the overpowering control of the craving…and in a place with that many people in it, that would be very bad indeed. Of course, it would be bad anywhere, under any circumstances. I just stood around, listening to the music, occasionally dancing with myself (I’m not much of a dancer, really; Emily would testify to that, I’m sure), and sometimes talking with people if they came up to me and said anything. As an escape from the living hell that my life had become, it really sucked, but it was all I had.

And it was at one of these clubs (I don’t remember which club it was) that I met Lila Vincent.

 

It was a cold night in December of 1997--about twelve more shopping days left ‘til Christmas. At the time I was thirty-one and she was twenty-three. On a scale of one to ten, she was about a five, maybe even a six. Not as beautiful as the pretty young girls you’d see in the movies or on TV, but not grotesquely ugly either, and certainly a lot prettier than a few of the forty-year-old hookers I saw working at some of the street corners. She was cute in her own way, I suppose. With her long dark hair falling to the small of her back, and her dark eyes and white skin, I at first had thought it was Emily, having found me after sixteen long months of searching, and was now going to drag me back home, against my will, kicking and screaming if need be.

She just approached me that one night out of the blue for no apparent reason. I was sitting there, my chin resting on the arms which were on the table I was sitting at, brooding, with a mug of beer I had ordered an hour earlier that was just sitting there, untouched since then, a layer of condensation forming over the glass. My first impulse was to flee the scene immediately, to jump out of my chair, knocking over my full mug of beer if need be, and then bolt through the nearest exit. I couldn’t face her, not after what had gone on between the two of us. Even after over a year apart, I still couldn’t bring myself to face her. My legs were ready to do that any minute, when I realized, as the woman came closer to my table, that it wasn’t Emily at all, but a stranger, a woman with a very similar appearance of my ex-wife, only a few years younger.

She pulled up a seat and just sat down next to me without asking.

At first, I wanted to shoo her away, to tell her to get the hell out of here, this seat’s taken. But I said nothing; a part of me wanted her to stay. What the hell, I was lonely and really could’ve used a friend. I had no sexual attraction to her whatsoever, no desire for a long-term romantic relationship. I hadn’t abandoned my wife and son the year and a half before just so I could get shacked up with another woman, after all. But I was lonely and wanted a friend, some form of companionship; so I let her stay.

“What’s your name?” I asked her; perhaps not the best way to break the ice, but still…

“Lila Vincent,” she answered. “What’s yours?”

I told her my name.

She lit herself a cigarette and offered me one, but I declined. “No thanks,” I said to her. “I don’t smoke.” A short pause, and then, “I quit a few years ago.”

“Really?” And her eyes lit up with a spark of eager curiosity.” How’d you do it?”

“Never mind. You don’t want to know,” I replied grimly.

“No really.” Even more of that eager curiosity there now, and she almost begged me to tell her how I did it. “I’ve tried just about everything to kick the habit.” She took another puff from her cigarette, and blue smoke jutted from her nose. “I’ve been trying to quit for five years now and nothing works.”

“You’re not gonna like this method.”

“Well, I’m open-minded. I’ll try just about anything to kick the habit.”

“Yeah, well, in this case the cures about a hundred times worse than the disease.”

She said nothing; she just frowned as she snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray, extinguishing the flame in a final upward jet of blue smoke, and that closed that subject for good.

We talked for the next half-hour--I’m not going to bore you with the details of that conversation because they’re not important here. She did most of the talking and I honestly don’t remember most of the content of the conversation anyway. She just told me about her life and what was going on with her at the time, that sort of thing. She told me how she had broke things off with her last boyfriend, Brandon was the guy’s name, a few weeks earlier, just as things were starting to go steady because she had found out that Brandon had slept with another woman. I said I was sorry to hear that, and I really was. I told her very little about myself, not mentioning a single aspect about my wife and son, my “previous life,” or any of the changes I had been going through those past few years.

Finally, she asked if I wanted to come down to her place for a while. “This place is okay, but sometimes it gets a little too wild in here and really starts to give me a headache after awhile.”

“Sure, I’ll come,” I said. The way I was back then, I would have done anything anyone asked of me. If someone requested that I go down to Washington DC and shoot the President, I would’ve done that, too. Sure, why not? What’ve I got to lose?

We left in her car--mine was a worthless piece of shit and I honestly didn’t care in the slightest of what might become of it.

 

Her apartment was about a thousand times nicer than mine, and she lived in a much nicer part of the city than I did as well. I suppose that isn’t saying much about her place one way or the other, considering that a giant cardboard box would probably make a nicer home than the dump I had been living in. But really, it was a nice place, sort of glamorous, and definitely nice and neat and tidy, unlike my place of residence, which probably wouldn’t pass building inspection and could no doubt be considered a biohazard. Her white walls looked as though they were just painted, her beige carpeting had not a stain on it and all of her furniture and appliances were in excellent working order. And looking out through that giant window in the living room, I just couldn’t get over that astonishing view of the city (her place was on the fortieth floor of the apartment complex). Her rich parents paid the rent of the place every month so she lived here for free (and here I was paying $500 a month for the shithole that I now graciously called home). Her roommate had been out of town and wasn’t due back until Friday of that week, so it was just Lila and I.

I wasn’t naïve; I knew full well what she wanted, why she had brought me to her place, what she had planned for the night. She had been in her bedroom just now, changing into something that was “a little more comfortable,” as she had put it.

The guilt stabbed at me just then, and in my mind, I could see the still image of Emily’s face as thought I were looking at a photograph I was unable to take my eyes off of. I tried to imagine what it looked like at the beach I used to go with my folks when I was a kid. The filthy, rodent infested kitchen of that fast food joint I worked at when I was sixteen. Even things not from my past, such as a Timex watch, a Gateway computer monitor, a white moth fluttering its wings in a graveyard in brilliant daylight. Anything, anything to get my mind off of that haunting photo of Emily’s face, judging me, cursing me, damning me for what I was about to do.

Is this why you left your wife, so you can fuck around with some slut you met at a sleazy nightclub? I kept thinking over and over again, almost echoing it in my mind. I couldn’t not think it; it was beyond my control, like someone else was saying it entirely, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to tune him out, nothing I could do to shut him up.

I suppose that when she stepped out of her bathroom, wearing that slim, sexy outfit of hers, I could have told her a lie right then and there to get out of this situation and keep a clear conscience. I was leaning toward the I’m-gay excuse more than anything else, and wondered then just how she’d react if I had said that to her.

And now, I wish I had told her I was gay. I wished that I told her that I was gay and that she went completely hysterical over it, crying and screaming insanely at me, even slapping me like a total lunatic for leading her on the way I had, and then finally throw me out of her apartment. At least that would be the end of it and she would still be alive.

But I said nothing. I just stood there gawking at her like an idiot.

And although it shames me to admit it, even now, she was really giving me a boner just then, as she snapped off one of her spaghetti straps, revealing her left breast, swaying in tune with her respiration, with the nipple staring right back at me with something really dirty and kinky in mind. And again, I thought of Emily, her face staring at me with contempt and damning judgment for abandoning her as I did, just so I could go fucking around with a total stranger that I had just met in a sleazy nightclub in New York.

It was then that the craving hit in its most irresistible incarnation.

From there, everything happened fast, very, very fast; it seemed that my body had taken control, as it did when I had attacked Tyler just one year before. I was just a passenger inside my own body; whatever had taken over had full control of what had happened next.

What I remember most vividly was how she had screamed as I lunged forward and bit into her neck, draining all of her blood from her jugular vein, how her shrill shrieks had pierced my eardrums, and even then how I could not stop until she was drained of every last drop of blood. She stopped screaming long before she had been completely exsanguinated. And when exsanguination did occur, my jaw loosened its grip around the side of her neck, releasing, and she fell limp to the ground, dead, her blank eyes staring up at me, and I shuddered in revulsion and immediately turned away.

The craving had been satisfied, the thirst quenched, so by then I had regained full control over my mind and body, and I was totally disgusted with myself for what I had done. I was so overwrought with fear and guilt that I didn’t even think to wipe the blood dripping from my mouth. Christ, I had just killed her, just exsanguinated her. It was then that I realized just how lucky Tyler had been a year earlier, when I had attacked him. He could have been lying dead on the floor, drained entirely of blood, just like Lila was on the ground, dead, and completely exsanguinated now.

I supposed that the responsible thing to do, the right thing to do would have been to remain at the crime scene, call the police, and wait until they had arrived. It would be then that I would have told them exactly what had happened, giving them a full confession, letting them cuff me and take me away. I would have taken full responsibility for the horrific deed that I had just committed and faced the consequences like a man. That was exactly what I should have done.

But instead, I panicked, and I fled.

 

I don’t know why I had returned to the nightclub afterward, but I did.

I ran the whole way, my tendons burning and with battery acid pumping through my veins, until I reached the nightclub. I came to a halt by the doors, hunched over and panting hard. When I finally caught my breath, I went inside.

And it was there that I had met Max Kruller.

 

First, I went into the Men’s Room to wash the blood off my face (I had calmed down a little after going in, and logic and rationale had dominated once ago, more or less). It was when I had come out of the Men’s Room that I saw him, sitting alone by a table with a mug of beer held loosely in his left hand, his features hidden behind loosely transparent shadows, as was everything else in the place. Still, I don’t think I ever did get a good look at his face, and if I did, I no longer remember what he looked like. But that’s irrelevant; I’ll never forget the man.

I walked past his table without giving him so much as a second glance, and he called me back when I was but ten feet past him. Against my better judgment, I responded. I went over. “You wanted to see me?” I asked.

“Take a seat,” was all he said, and I complied to the order without even thinking about it. “The names Max Kruller,” he told me, “and I get the sense that we’re kindred spirits, in a sense, with the same deep dark secret, linked by the same wretched curse.”

“You don’t know I damn thing about me,” I said. “You don’t have the slightest clue what I’ve been through, the slightest clue what I’ve done. You don’t have a fucking clue!”

“Yes, I do,” he said, smiling warmly. “You’ve gone through some changes, radical changes. You’re life has been ruined by this curse, this bloodlust. Most of the time you can resist it, but occasionally, you can’t. It takes over, takes over you, and you’re forced into attacking them, whoever is at your immediate disposal. It doesn’t matter who it is, friend or foe, a loved one or an enemy. The bloodlust doesn’t discriminate. You drink their blood, exsanguinating them, most likely killing them.”

I was stunned and speechless, unable to utter a sound. I sat there, looking at him with wide eyes of amazement and my jaw hanging open.

“We’re vampires, you and I. We have no purpose; we’re nothing more than parasites, really, a threat to all those around us. A lonely existence really, one you would just prefer to end, but find most likely you are unable to.”

“The craving?” I finally managed, hissing it out through a gust of air.”

“Excuse me?” he replied, looking at me strangely.

“The craving,” I said again. “It’s what I’ve been calling it.”

“Yes--I’ve been calling it the ‘bloodlust’ myself. But whether you call it ‘the craving,’ the bloodlust,’ or ‘the urge,’ is irrelevant; it all amounts to the same thing, the same dark curse that has ruined both our lives.”

“But how did you know I--”

“When you’ve been a vampire as long as I have, you develop this sort of sixth sense that allows you to feel the presence of other vampires.”

“Vampires? But vampires aren’t real.”

“They’re real,” he responded. “It’s just that the myths and stereotypes don’t necessarily apply in real life. We can see our reflections in the mirror and eat garlic without any problems. Churches don’t ward us off, neither does the sign of the cross or any other Christian artifacts and running water does nothing to us.

“You may have read books like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. You may have seen a few vampire movies. And I’m sure they’ve had an episode or two about vampires on The X-Files. They’ve imparted upon the public an image of vampires, and like any other stereotype imparted by the media, it’s very much a distorted image, which is putting it kindly.

“Vampirism is nothing as it is perceived to be.

“You may think that vampires need to be invited into your house, but they can get in just as easily uninvited. Some of the best burglars are vampires, in fact.

“And we don’t need to drink blood to live; it’s just an urge we get every once in a while, an urge we can control most of the time, but sometimes gets control over us as well. When that happens, there’s no fighting it. It has us completely under its control, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“We leap out at the nearest human available, no matter who it is, we bite their neck, and we drain their blood. If we exsanguinate them, they die, and that’s that. If they somehow escape, then the curse is passed on to them as well.”

“I…I just killed someone twenty minutes ago,” I told him.

“The curse at work,” he replied. “Well, whoever it was, it’s better that you did kill them. The last thing we need is for this curse to be even more widespread than it is. I try as hard as I can to resist ‘the craving’ when it hits. But when it becomes overwhelming and irresistible, and I end up biting their neck, I let go and go all the way through with it.

“I’d advise that you do the same.”

I nodded, and then asked: “Are we the only vampires, for the most part?”

“No,” he answered, “but it is a moderately rare phenomenon, and very low-profile, which is why nobody knows of us. It’s best that we keep it that way.”

“Would anybody actually believe us if we did tell them?” I asked.

“Probably not,” he replied. “There are some that believe in UFOs, and psychic phenomenon, and even ghosts of all things, but I doubt anybody believes in vampires anymore.

“But it’s best not to take that chance.

“While some of the aspects of our existence might seem far fetched; such as how we’re so unbelievably difficult to kill--”

“I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge last year and nothing happened,” I told him, not sure if he would believe me or not. Sure, we’re a tough crowd to kill, but could we really be that tough? “I also drank a beaker full of cyanide, and shot myself in the head. Gunshot wound barely gave me a fucking concussion.”

He nodded, believing every word I was telling him. “Yes--those things wouldn’t be fatal to us; the only potentially fatal blow out of the three would be the gunshot wound to your head. And even that’s not one hundred percent effective even in humans; and given that we are vampires--

“But anyway, there are some aspects that might be a bit more believable.”

“Such as?”

“This bloodlust that afflicts us and makes us do those horrible things.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, and I really didn’t get it…not at the time anyway. But that’s no longer accurate now, I guess. For unfortunately I understand it perfectly well, better than I would like to, anyway.

“It’s a disease, okay. Vampirism is a disease the way alcoholism is considered to be a disease. The way you could consider a drug addiction to be a disease. The person who bit you in the neck had this disease, and he passed it on to you, so now you have the disease.”

“That son of a bitch,” I muttered bitterly, cursing the carjacker for bringing this curse onto my doorstep. I wanted to see him again sometime; I wanted to see him so I could tear his fucking heart out. I hadn’t seen the man in about two or three years, I didn’t know who he was or why he had chosen me as a target, if it was a conscious decision at all. But at that moment, I hated that man, the one who had given me this curse, this “disease” more than I had ever hated anyone else.

I slammed my fist against the table and said it again, louder this time and with even more venom: “That son of a bitch--I hope he rots in hell!”

“I take it you’re referring to the one who gave it to you.”

“You’re damn right I am, Max!”

“Don’t hold it against him,” he said to me, and I almost wanted to strangle him right there; he was almost just as bad as the carjacker as far as I was concerned--he was sitting here defending the bastard. I wanted to lash out at him; he was trying to help me and I wanted to tear his head off. And to be honest with you, even if I had done that, even now, I still probably wouldn’t feel too badly about it. He had no business defending the carjacker like that.

“Why shouldn’t I, Max?” I snapped at him. “After everything he’s done to me, everything he’s cost me?

“I spent a whole year of my life in a glass tube on full life-support, because of him. A year, Max, lying in some glass tube, a freak show, unable to even breathe without help! Do you have any idea what it’s like, to have your wife and your parents come and visit you and see you like that almost everyday, what seeing me like that must’ve been doing to them? To deny my son the right to visit his daddy in a hospital because God only knew what seeing me the way I was would have done to the poor kid? And you want me to forgive the carjacker, is that right Max? You want me to forgive the wretched bastard?

“Hell, I had to leave my family, for their own safety, because that bastard decided to hide beneath my car one night while I was getting milk and cigarettes at Seven-Eleven, and then jump out and bite me in the neck, Max! If it weren’t for him, Emily and I would still be together, still married and I would still be living in that nice house I had with her and Tyler instead of a shit-hole apartment that should probably be considered a Level 4 Biohazard area and paying $500 a month for it! I would be able to be there for my son, to watch him grow up and--”

Tears were welling in my eyes, but my voice remained clear, growing louder every second, with every venomous syllable I uttered until I was literally screaming. “HE RUINED MY LIFE, MAX! He cost me my marriage, my family, my home! I LOST EVERYTHING TO THE BASTARD, UNDERSTAND, MAX? EVERYTHING BECAUSE OF WHAT HE DID TO ME!” I wasn’t aware that I had been standing for some time until I finally finished my little speech by bashing both my fists against the table, almost knocking it over with the shear force I had put into it.

“Calm down, man,” Max whispered very quietly and discreetly (as discreet as he could be, considering I had drawn us the attention of nearly everyone in the building) as I was getting back on my seat. “You’re starting to draw attention. We vampires don’t like publicity, you know.”

I looked around, and he was right. Almost everyone at that club was staring at us. The music had still been playing, I was faintly aware of, although I was barely paying attention to it. But everyone in the entire club was gawking at us. I supposed I would have grinned and waved at everyone there, blushing all the while, but at that moment I was too infuriated to feel embarrassed.

It was silent there for a few minutes, except for the music in the background, and Max and I just looked at each other, still sitting at that table, saying nothing at all. One by one, the other people stopped gazing us over, went back to their own business, whatever that happened to be, and Max and I were eventually given the privacy we required to resume our conversation.

I guess had I not been so angry, it might have been a very awkward ten minutes.

“The carjacker that infected you,” Max continued, making it a point to speak in a much lower tone this time, as was I, “he might not have been acting of his own accord. You have to take that into consideration…uh…what did you say your name was?”

“Don’t worry about my name, Max,” I said, unsure if I had even given him my name, and not really caring much about it either.

“Whatever. Just keep in mind what I told you,” he went on, but at that point, I was seriously considering the option of just getting up and walking out of the club. I honestly didn’t want to hear what he had to say anymore. Why I stayed there, I’ll never know. To this day, I don’t even know why I had returned there after killing Lila in the first place.

“The man that bit you might have been taken control by the ‘craving’ as you had put it earlier,” he said, as though I should consider that as an excuse for what the carjacker had done to me and what he had cost me.

“Look, Max, he was hiding under my car, okay? I’m not an expert in this sort of thing like you are, but that seems to be a little cunning, a little too well-planned to me to be an act of insanity in which the individual wasn’t responsible for his own actions at the time. Do you see where I’m getting with this, Max?”

“Yes--and for all anyone knows, you might be right. Not all vampires try to fight their predicament. Some accept it all-too willingly. Different people react to circumstances and conditions differently, and everyone has a different outlook on any one particular life.

“But you haven’t seen that man since he had attacked you that night, have you?”

I shook my head.

“Do you honestly believe that there’s any realistic chance that you will ever see that man again?”

“Probably not,” I said truthfully and matter-of-factly.

“Odds are, you and I will never meet again after tonight.”

“What are you trying to get at, Max?”

“That since you have no idea what was going through the man’s head, if any conscious thought was going through his head at all at the time, and you don’t know if he was acting on his own free will or not. So it’s probably best that you let it go, not hold it against him, since you will probably never know for sure if he was indeed responsible or not for attacking you.”

But regardless of Max said, I still hated the carjacker. And to this day, I still can’t help but hate the man’s guts for what he did to me. He cost me my life, and regardless of what Max or you or anyone else says, I hate his guts for him and I’ll never forgive him for what he did to me. I know about what I did to Lila that night, and if that makes me a hypocrite for hating the carjacker for doing the same to me, then so be it. As far as I’m concerned, it was the carjacker’s fault for what happened to Lila. Had he never bitten me, I never would have exsanguinated Lila and she would probably still be alive. Therefore, vicariously, it was the carjacker that had killed Lila. He’s just as guilty of the crime as I am, if not more so.

“So what you’re saying, Max, is that once the craving gets to a certain point, you have to drink the blood of whoever it is that’s available to you? Is that it?”

“Precisely.”

“Okay…now I’d understand if this was twenty or thirty years ago, but this day and age, with everything that’s out there-AIDS, Hepatitis-that someone would still want to drink the blood of a complete stranger?”

“That’s irrelevant to the ‘craving.’ Once it gets to that certain point, you have to have that persons blood, and nothing else crosses your mind. You are a slave to ‘the craving’ at that point, and it will force you into that horrible act no matter how great your morals are or how great your fears are of catching a disease. The craving just doesn’t care.”

“But what if it’s someone you do know, and you know he’s been diagnosed with AIDS or something of that nature? Even then…?”

Max nodded. “What we’re dealing with doesn’t consider the consequences. It just acts--it forces us to act--to satisfy the need. No forethought as to whether or not the person has AIDS, Hepatitis C, or anything else they got floating around these days is taken into account. Like I said before, it doesn’t discriminate once the craving reaches a certain point.

“But that’s just as well, really, since vampires aren’t affected by human disease.”

“We’re not?” I asked, sounding more surprised by this revelation than I probably was…or I probably should have been. Since I was released from my yearlong “vacation” in that glass tube, I hadn’t had so much as a bad rash. Amazing when you think about it, considering the decrepit hellhole of an apartment room I was now living in after leaving Emily.

“No,” he replied morosely. “There are a few diseases that can affect vampires that all normal humans are immune to. They’re almost always fatal, and most of them are slow and painful deaths that can drag on for weeks or even months before--”

“I don’t care!” I interrupted; excited over the things he was telling me. “I don’t care if it takes ten years to do its thing--it’s better then nothing!”

“But they’re all very rare and virtually no threat to anybody whatsoever,” he finished with a dejected sigh, and this last I found incredibly dispiriting. I had such high hopes that I might have found a way out after all--There are a few diseases that can affect vampires…they’re almost always fatal --only to have my hopes crashed to pieces--But they’re all very rare and virtually no threat to anybody whatsoever. I thought at that moment that Max had to have been the cruelest man alive for what he had done to me just then, and again I had wanted to kill him. But like Max himself had said, vampires are the toughest creatures on the planet to kill.

“So, what…what, are we immortal, Max, is that what you’re trying to tell me?” I asked, starting to believe that I might very well be immortal.

Another possibly is that I could also be dead as well, and that scenario had also occurred to me for the first time while talking to Max. I thought that perhaps the carjacker might have actually killed me, and I’m now condemned to hell for all eternity. Was he just a psychopath and not a vampire, just some freak who liked to hide beneath people’s cars, attack them, and then bite their neck? Maybe I didn’t survive that attack in 1995 after all. Maybe this life, this existence is my own personal hell, and I’m paying for sins that I committed in life that I can’t even begin to comprehend.

I guess there’s really know way I’ll ever know for sure.

And that still haunts me even to this day.

But I still wanted answers, just in case I was still on earth and still alive…if you could call my not-so-new existence “still alive.”

“Am I doomed to live this wretched existence until the end of time?” I asked bitterly. “Is this what I gotta live with ‘til the sun blows up in the earth’s face five billion years from now? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, that there’s absolutely no way out, no way to even kill myself?”

“I honestly don’t know if we’re immortal,” he answered, and I found it ironic, since he seemed to be such a fucking expert in the phenomenon of real life vampirism, but didn’t know this. Oh well, nobody’s perfect, I guess. “I’ve helped other vampires just as I’m helping you tonight,” he said. “But like most vampires, I have no close friends, whether human or vampire. I’ve never seen one grow old and die, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.

“However, vampires are very tough to kill, and their aging process is much slower than that of humans. I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but I’m actually 117 years old.”

I looked at him incredulously, not believing it. He didn’t look any older than fifty; there was no way in hell he could have been 117 years of age, I kept thinking. It just wasn’t possible. “No way.”

“I was born Max Kruller on September 12, 1880, given this curse sometime during the First World War. I won’t bore you with the details, but I was given this curse in a way that was similar to how you were given it. Someone had attacked me--I don’t know who it was…for all I know, it could have been the same guy that passed the curse onto to you.”

“I guess it’s possible, but I doubt it,” I told him. “If you’re as old as you say you are, and you were infected around World War I, ‘The Great War,’ as it was known at the time…I mean, the guy that infected me…well, he wasn’t that old.”

“Like I said, vampirism slows the aging process.”

“I guess it does,” I acknowledged. “But we don’t really know if the guy that ‘infected’ me was the guy that ‘infected’ you, now do we?”

“No, I guess we don’t,” he agreed. “But it makes you think, doesn’t it?

“But whether he is or not is irrelevant,” he went on. “Anyway, he attacked me, probably in a similar fashion as the carjacker had attacked you, and he bit me in the neck. He tried to suck me dry, and I shook him off and ran away before passing out, sure that I would die (now I wish that I had died). I came to, and the cut was healed. I spare you the details of what had happened and the thoughts and emotions that floated around in my head-they’re probably the same as those that floated through your head.

“I came by my information the hard way. I’ll probably sound like a bitter old man now--you know, that whole ‘In my day, we had to walk fifteen miles to school every day in a blizzard of fifteen feet of snow, completely butt-naked and barefoot,’ deal.”

I suppose it was my cue to laugh (it was the first joke I had heard out of the guy since I had met him), but I guess becoming a vampire had extinguished my sense of humor. In fact, come to think of it, to this day, I don’t think I’ve so much as chuckled at anything since I had left my wife all those years ago.

Max didn’t sound like one of those bitter old grandpas on TV or wherever the vision of that sort of grandfather had originated, but only because he didn’t go into any details of how he had come by this knowledge, only that I was lucky that I had him to give me all of this information, as were many other vampires, and that he had to come by it the hard way. How he had come by this knowledge, whether through scientific research or purely through speculation, I haven’t the slightest idea.

I guess he could have been a delusional nutcase and that I could have been a desperate fool for believing him. New York’s full of a wide variety of crazies and psychopaths. Since the New Millennium was so close upon us at that time, I saw plenty of nutcases preaching about repentance and ranting about the Apocalypse, Final Judgment, Armageddon, The End of the World, whatever they were calling it. Obviously the New Millennium came and went already, so those crazies were quite delusional in my mind at least. And maybe Max was, too. Or maybe he was getting off on this somehow. But I believed him anyway, and still do. I don’t know why, but deep down inside, I believe every word of it.

“When you became a vampire,” I began to ask; I suppose the man was starting to warm up on me at that point, I don’t know, “did your wife and kid…?”

“They would have died regardless,” he answered grimly. “I had a wife and two kids, two sons…and they died of the flu, as had everyone else at that time, it seemed. They either died in the war or they died of the flu. The only thing that might have been different is that had I not been a vampire, I would have probably died with ‘em.” He said this last part in such a way that I had gotten the feeling that he wished that he had gotten the Pandemic Flu and died with his family. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

Then he bent his head sorrowfully and said: “I’d rather not talk about my family anymore.” And without further ado, the subject was closed.

“I suppose if you were at the ground zero point of a nuclear detonation, that’ll do the job,” he said, abruptly changing the subject. And I liked that idea a lot. Unfortunately, while ending my existence was something I wanted more than anything else at the time and now as well, I’d go it alone and not take anyone else with me. And while I was and still am crazy enough to actually consider it as a possible avenue, I don’t think I’m crazy enough to actually go through with it…not if I’ll be killing a hundred million other people with me…people who don’t have a reason to be suicidal like I do.

“Is there any surefire way of killing myself without taking anyone else with me?” I inquired, and if he had only given me a feasible answer, I guess I wouldn’t be here telling you this story now (the story I’m sure Max doesn’t want you to hear, since he would have preferred that vampires remain low-profile and considered nothing more than a myth by the general public. But I no longer care about that. From where I am now, it doesn’t make one speck of difference to me whether vampires remain low profile or under public spotlight. I’m just getting my story out in the open between the two of us, that’s all).

“Decapitation would work,” he replied. “But I doubt you’ll have an easy time cutting your own head off…unless you had access to a guillotine…”

I didn’t have access to a guillotine. I’ve never even seen one of those things except on TV and in photos from history text books in high school. “So in other words, I’m doomed to walk the earth a vampire until the end of time, or until Death finally decides to take me…which may or may not ever happen?”

He said nothing, just looked at me grimly and nodded.

“Is there anyway way out at all?” I asked; a stupid question, which he probably thought was extremely redundant as well, but I asked anyway. “Is there any cure…or at least some kind of treatment that keeps the craving away?”

Again, he said nothing, just looked at me grimly; only this time, he shook his head, no.

“Just one more question, Max, before I go: You said earlier about knowing that I was a vampire. How…how did you know?”

“Easy,” he retorted. “It’s been a while since I drank human blood. The urge has been getting stronger lately, although for the time being it remains at controllable levels. But its still there, and a part of me wants more than anything else to drink the blood out of someone here, anybody here. Every time someone walks by my table, I get jolted with the desire to attack him and drink his blood.

“When you walked by, I had no desire whatsoever to drink yours.

“Ergo, I deduced, you must be one of us.”

“But…but I have no desire to suck the blood of anyone in this building, and a lot of people have walked by since I sat down.” It was true, although I was only half-aware of everyone walking by, more compelled by the conversation I was having with Max than by anything else; I saw no reason to mention this before, and certainly didn’t want to mention every single time someone walked by. It didn’t seem important enough compared to everything else I’ve been telling you. But someone would walk by our table every so often; I never gave it much thought and it didn’t occur to me until much later as to how much of our conversation that person might have actually heard, how closely he might be listening, or how much of it he might remember later on.

But I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?

“I haven’t been hit by the craving once since coming in here,” I said again.

“That’s because you’ve already had your fix,” he replied, and I looked at him, perplexed. He explained: “Think of it in terms of a drug addiction; once you’ve had your fix, you’re okay for awhile. The craving for it will return again, but for the time being, the thirst has been quenched.

“Or better yet, think of it as ejaculation. You get turned on, aroused, whatever you want to call it; your penis gets hard. And let’s say for the sake of argument that in this case you do have sex with what’s turning you on, and then you orgasm. You ejaculate, and your penis returns to its normal state in what is known as a refractory period, where no erection will result from stimulation. Like in the refractory period, how long it takes for the bloodlust to return is different for everyone. For some, it takes mere hours. For others, days or weeks. It might even be several months yet before a noticeable return of the bloodlust takes place.

“But rest assured that it will return eventually, and the dreaded cycle will once again be repeated.”

 

I never saw Max Cruller again after that night.

And when I left that club, I left for the very last time, never to return there or to any nightclub ever again. I decided it was best to get as far away as possible from the nightclub scene and from human contact in general. I was too much of a threat to others to risk it, so I shied away and lived a lonely existence at my work and at my apartment, not having any kind of life at all but at least not hurting anyone in the process.

I came out better only in that I finally had answers to what was going on. I now knew exactly what I was and exactly why those changes had taken place, and I was once and for all convinced that I had made the right decision when I left Tyler and Emily. This was how Max Cruller helped me. He allowed me to know, regardless of how much it hurt to find out about this stuff, exactly what was going on.

Otherwise, I was no better off now than I had been before.

Ignorance is bliss…but it’s not always ideal.

I guess vampirism has its pros and cons, like almost everything else. You don’t have to worry about ever getting sick. You’re much tougher to kill than an ordinary human. The nightlife isn’t so bad once you get used to it--hell, the sun’s no good for anybody these days, right? And you can still do things you could do when you were a human, such as eat, drink, sleep, and watch TV, get turned on by hot women. Most of the myths about not being able to see yourself in the mirror and not being able to stand garlic and crap like that are all a big load of crap people use in the movies and novels, with no basis to the reality of vampirism. Hell, I love garlic and always have ever since I was a kid! And when you look at it that way, you might think: Well then, what’s so bad about being a vampire?

But there’s still the bloodlust, for one thing, and what it can sometimes make you do…how you can’t control yourself once it gets to a certain point…the guilt and self-disgust you feel afterward. The bloodlust alienates you from those you love the most; you have to stay away from them for their own safety, and words can’t describe how much that hurts me sometimes, and the loneliness I feel because of it. And the worst of it is, there’s no way out; you can’t even kill yourself.

I stayed in New York, having nowhere else to go. And the nice thing about New York is that people generally know how to mind their own fucking business. It’s not like a small town where everyone’s gotta gossip and speculate about why someone never comes out of their house during the day and then ask you all sorts of stupid questions about why you do what you do or whatever and don’t give you any privacy or anything. New York may be a cesspool of crime (although the crime rate there has gone down over the past ten or fifteen years), and their might be a lot of air pollution there and a strong chlorine taste in the tap water, and the environment and people there might be the most apathetic you’ll ever meet, but it’s the ideal place for keeping a low profile. People mind their own business in New York; no matter what you do, no one ever notices.

I stayed in the same cesspool apartment and kept on paying $500 a month year after year until I was brought here. I suppose I could have found a better place to stay, and I even considered it a few times, but in the end, I never got around to it.

I bounced around from job to job over the years; all nightshift jobs, all were jobs in which I could keep a low profile, remain anonymous to almost everyone, and with little or no contact with humanity. When I wasn’t working, I stayed at my apartment, watching TV or on my refurbished computer that I eventually purchased from the back of someone’s trunk in June of 1998 and had gotten a good deal for. It was probably stolen equipment, but I didn’t care. The price was right so I went for it. It allowed me some contact with the rest of the world via chatrooms, email, and that sort of thing. Going online was the only reason that I had a phone line installed in my apartment, the only reason to pay a phone bill each month. I originally started with Edgenet, and then switched over to Net Zero when it came out in 2001 so I wouldn’t have to pay any Internet fees except the monthly phone bill. On the Internet, I was my email address. For the rest of the world, I was nobody. An anonymous figure whom nobody knew and nobody cared about either. Sometimes an anonymous figure even to myself.

On December 31, 1999, while everyone else was awaiting midnight and the coming of the New Millennium either by partying and watching for the ball to drop in Time’s Square, or standing guard of their essentials, medical supplies, canned goods, etc. in the basement, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, awaiting y2k nuclear meltdown, I was outside, alone, on top of a tower inside a maximum security prison. At the time, I was a night guardsmen at a maximum security prison, standing on some tower outside, ready to get my gun and hit the alarms should I catch one of the prisoners trying to escape through the search lights. When midnight hit and December 31, 1999 switched over to January 1, 2000, I felt a brief melancholy upon figuring out that all of that stuff about y2k messing up the computers and setting off nuclear missiles from wherever, targeted for every square inch of the earth and consuming us in one big global nuclear detonation and ending the world and thereby my existence as well was all an empty promise with little more validity than that “War of the Worlds” radio segment back in the thirties. Oh well, life goes on. As much as that thought depresses me, life goes on.

I thought about Emily and Tyler a lot, more than I wanted to. I missed them, I even regretted leaving them even though I knew at the time and now more so that I had made the right decision under the circumstances. I wondered what they were up to know, how they were doing, what they thought of me. During the day, I would often dream about them and of the good times we had had together before the carjacker had ruined my life. You have no idea of the level of depression I would experience once I woke up from those dreams, only to find myself back in this old shitty mattress in this old, filthy apartment room. I wanted them more than anything, knew that I could never have them again. Sometimes I even wondered how they would react if I were ever to come back into their lives again, but I guess I’ll never have any way of knowing for sure.

It was a lonely existence--no friends, no family, no life--but on the bright side, I didn’t have to worry about hurting anyone else or spreading this curse around…as long as I kept a low profile, and as long as I shied away from any direct human contact whatsoever. When you’re a vampire like me, complete and total isolation is a good thing. I had learned early on after my conversation with Max Cruller that if I’m not around people, I don’t have to worry about the craving hitting me. It remains dormant, because no humans are currently available to suck dry.

Human contact awakens the craving, the bloodlust, as Max had called it.

Being around you right now, telling you my story for the past few hours or however long its been has really awakened the bloodlust, I have to admit. I don’t mean to scare you, Doc., but right now, a part of me, a more primitive unconscious part of me that is the vampire within wants nothing more than to leap up, bite your neck, and exsanguinate you.

But don’t worry; I’m trying my damnedest to stave off that urge.

And as long as this straight jacket holds, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.

 

Anyway, I guess that brings us to the night of February 27, 2002.

 

Or, to be more precise, the very early morning of February 28, 2002, 1:27 a.m.

I guess a time like that could be considered either late night or early morning, whichever you prefer, I guess. Take your pick.

At the time I was a nightshift security guard at Wal-Mart. It was mostly automated; I won’t lavish on all the details here--that’s not the point. Basically, what I did was sit in front of a video monitor all night until about 5:00 a.m. (one of my stipulations upon being hired was that I be let out of work at least an hour before sunrise and was sure to make sure that they understood that exposure to sunlight just isn’t good for me, without getting into all of that vampirism stuff, which they probably wouldn’t have believed anyway). It was one of the most boring jobs I had ever had (as were most of the others between 1996 and now), but it was quiet, nothing happened, and I was able to keep a low profile, which, as you know, was very important to me.

I don’t know how unbelievable this is all going to sound, but through all the years that I had lived in New York, in that same crummy and unsanitary apartment in the same rough urban neighborhood, I had never once been the victim of any crime. No one ever attacked me; and if they did, I would have surely killed him without any problems whatsoever. Never the victim of any armed robbery. Nobody ever broke into my apartment--what would have been the point? It’s like I said before; I had nothing worth stealing.

But more importantly, no one had ever broken into the Wal-Mart…not on my shift anyway. On anybody else’s, I wouldn’t know. When you live an anonymous and insolated nonexistence like I did, you usually don’t do well to keep up with the lives and experiences of anybody else…but the thing is, you don’t give a damn about that sort of thing either. But on my shift, no one had ever broken in, and with the exception of a few rounds around the store just make sure everything was in order, all I really did was sit on my ass in front of the video monitor and looking at the same black-and-white images of other parts of the store all night long on the same video screen. The only on-the-job hazard there was boredom, and by then, boredom was something that I had gotten very used to over the years.

That all changed on the early morning of February 28, 2002, 1:27 a.m.

According to police, the man’s name was Howard Baron. A male Caucasian in his late twenties, of approximately six foot two in height and weighing at around two hundred pounds with a medium build, he had short maroon hair, brown eyes, and looked as though he hadn’t shaved in a good couple of days. He was dressed in a pair of brown work boots, blue jeans that were an almost perfect fit on him, and an unzipped black leather jacket over a white tee-shirt with a holstered .38 caliber handgun hidden in his inside coat pocket and a small cylinder flashlight in hand just bright enough so he could get a reasonable look at what he was nabbing. According to police, etc. he had been divorced, with a daughter of about four years of age; he had also had a bit of a record on him as well, possibly one of the factors leading to the divorce. He was arrested for drug possession in 1993 and again in 1997 for home burglary; he had just been released from that latter charge, and after five years in the slammer, I guess he decided to advance all the way up to breaking into and robbing from large retail stores during closing hours.

The place had been closed for several hours when I had finally learned of his presence, and as the police would report later on after their investigations, there was no sign of a forced entry anywhere in the building either.

I think what happened is that hid inside one of the ventilation shafts within the men’s room until he felt the time was right. I figure the time he would’ve entered the vents at around 8:45pm, fifteen minutes before closing time. Throughout the store, announcements that Wal-Mart would be closing in fifteen minutes would be heard on every speaker on the store intercom system, and while everyone else is scrambling to make their last minute purchases in the checkout lanes, he’s over in the men’s room, scaling the walls of the toilet stall, his lucky night at its full peak at that moment.

Then he’s at the top and looking at one of the grates covering the ventilation shaft in the men’s room. He probably shoots the screws off with his .38 caliber handgun; he had had a silencer screwed onto the barrel, so the shots are muffled and no one walking by the doors to the men’s room hears them. Then he tears the grate off and discards it carelessly, making it so it lands with a loud clamor on the gray tiles bathroom floor. It would be then that Baron crawls deep into the vent until he is satisfied with his position. Then he waits awhile until he thinks the night crew had finally cleared out and whatever merchandise he wants to steal is his for the taking.

The surveillance camera in the Men’s room had been malfunctioning at the time and needed repair. He wouldn’t have known about that-according to later reports, he was not currently employed at that particular Wal-Mart location or any other for that matter, but I doubt he would have thought about surveillance cameras anyway. He didn’t seem too bright to me, but what do I know? I only met him for about ten minutes really.

I doubt he was a professional; otherwise, he would have been careful where he stepped and been aware of motion trackers, that sort of thing. These days, it’s amazing what we got in the line of security systems. But it didn’t look like he knew anything about that. Like I said, I don’t think he was very bright.

So anyway, here he is, waiting in the vents until midnight or whenever he thought everyone, customers and employees, would have finally cleared out of the joint. While he’s in there, he may even doze off and fall asleep waiting, snoring loudly, but with no one bothering to be observant enough to hear him, myself included.

Whoever was responsible for turning out the lights in the bathrooms probably wasn’t the observant type; otherwise he would have noticed the grate lying in front of him. More than likely, he probably just reached his arm in blindly through the door and flipped the light switch off, having done it so many times he had had the entire anatomy for that restroom memorized by then. And the light switch was located so close to the door. You just reach in and flip the switch, simple as that.

During my midnight stroll around the store, I probably missed the grate being in front of the stall in the men’s room. In the beginning, when I had first gotten that job sometime in June of 2001, I had been thorough in my nightly patrols of the store, but very quickly, I became lax about that sort of thing, no longer be as thorough about it, no longer caring. Sometimes I would forget to do it altogether--not on that particular night, if my memory serves me correctly--but sometimes it did happen, and I never felt too guilty about it either. On a few occasions, I had even fallen asleep on the job and hadn’t woken up until my shift was almost over. Hey, let ‘em fire me; I’ll just find another job and the dance will begin anew.

After a while, Baron wakes up in the vents, groggy at first and perhaps wondering how he got there in the first place. Then realization and recollection sets in a few seconds later; and (aha!) he knows his great mission. He’s here to loot and pillage the Land of Wal-Mart Merchandise. He then crawls back out of the vents, plummeting a short distance, the soles of those work boots he has on his feet landing in the toilet bowl, splashing water explosively over himself and the walls of that stall. He trips on his way out of the toilet over the rim, falling on his face onto the filthy bathroom floor and bringing up a great big tidal wave of toilet water slapping down upon the gray tiles and over him as well. I’m guessing this is about 1:10, 1:15 a.m. Anyway, he gets back up, soaked in cold toilet water, and leaves the restroom, leaving behind a set of watery footprints in his path.

He then grabs a shopping cart and heads straight for the electronic aisle as far as I can tell. And then it’s off to work he goes.

I probably should have seen him clear as day on the black-and-white monitor screen, but as was often the case when I worked there or anywhere else for that matter, my attention was diverted elsewhere. I guess I was too engrossed in an article I was reading in Time magazine to even bother looking at the damned screen, but oh well, doesn’t matter now, does it?

I got off the swivel chair and left the office only to out of the sudden urge to urinate, bringing my .22 only because it was still in its holster and the holster still tied around my belt, bringing my own flashlight only so I could see where I was going. I didn’t even bother glancing at the monitor screen before leaving, just got out and left and shut the door behind me.

It wasn’t until I actually went into the men’s room and saw the grate that was supposed to cover the ventilation shaft lying, a heap of torn metal with a .38 caliber bullet hole in each of the four corners, did I finally suspect that something wasn’t right, that for the first time in the entire year that I had worked here had a burglar actually broken in here. Did it hurt my pride knowing that I could no longer claim that no one had ever tried to break in during my shift or that I had never had any problems whatsoever? Absolutely not. I had never actually taken pride in that standing or anything else for that matter. Pride, you see, had left me a long, long time ago, Doc, and has been completely alien to me since I’d been bitten. I didn’t take pride or joy in anything I did anymore--like I really need to tell you that--and I didn’t care about anything. I saw that torn metal grating lying on the floor in front of the toilet stall, in a huge puddle of toilet water that flooded the floors and was kicked and splashed and still dripping off of the walls. I wasn’t shocked by what I had seen, not angered or appalled or afraid or tense or anything else. I was solely indifferent. I felt absolutely nothing.

Instead of feeling it imperative to scout the entire store in hopes of locating whomever it was that had somehow broken in, I instead did what I had originally come there to do. I stood in front of one of the twin urinals, unzipped my pants, and urinated. I guess that tells you how much I really cared about keeping the job or of what happened to some of the fine merchandize at that particular Wal-Mart location. I just didn’t give a shit. After I was done pissing, I zipped up my pants and washed my hands.

Then I decided it was best to start looking for the burglar.

I found him in the electronics aisle, the man whom would later be identified by police as Howard Baron. He had that shopping cart in front of him, his small cylinder flashlight in hand as he dumped several videos for both VHS and DVD into the shopping cart, filling it in a hurried, helter-skelter fashion. It is my guess that Baron planned on hauling the cart out once it was full, throughout wherever he planned on making his exit, dumping the merchandize in a truck or whatever he had, and then taking the emptied cart back into the store and starting the cycle over again, eventually moving onto another aisle when he was done here and seeing what he could find. Then he would sell all that he had stolen at these insane discounts, and no matter how low his prices were, it would all be profit.

(No, I don’t remember ever buying anything from the late Mister Baron.)

At first, he was so engrossed in what he was doing that he didn’t even see me coming; and I wasn’t one bit afraid of him. I knew full well that while he could hurt me, he couldn’t kill me. And deep down inside, I was kind of hoping that he could kill me. There was still a part of me that held out some hope for a way out of the mess I was in, and that could still hold out for some hope that the burglar could actually find a way to kill me so that I would finally be done with this fucked up life for good!

I flashed the beam of my flashlight, and he squinted his eyes, startled, and his flashlight slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor, rolling on the darkened floor, away from his feet, and retreated beneath one of the aisles out of reach.

“Don’t move!” I shouted, my .22 aimed at his head from twenty feet away, the beam of my flashlight still illuminating his face and making him squint, although it appeared that he was starting to get used to sudden bright flash of light now.

I saw him raise his hands slightly, as though he were giving up without a struggle, but they only reached the point to where his nipples probably were on his bare chest, and then reached his right hand into his leather jacket.

I fired off a shot. Despite some of the other jobs I had had during the past five years, and how most of them had required that I carry a weapon, and also the fact that I was living in New York City (still high in crime, although the crime rate had been declining), I had never once fired a gun, never in my entire life other than that time I had shot myself in the head several years before. I was surprised at the force of recoil, how it had shaken up my entire arm, surging a painful ache from my hand all the way up to where my shoulder met my ribs and I let off a groan muffled by the loud gun blast. I was pushed back an inch or two, and my flashlight slipped from my other hand and fell to the floor as the entire room was lit up briefly by the sudden flash of the gunshot before being blanketed in darkness once more.

But like I said, that had been the first time I had ever fired off a gun (and also the last), and, unfortunately, my aim wasn’t true. I had missed him by about three or four inches and instead the bullet whistled onward, eventually hitting and shattering the store’s last copy of Seven, the platinum edition on DVD.

He then surprised me with his Colt .38 caliber handgun, which he produced from his inside coat pocket. I flinched back as he aimed it at my face--it was a reflexive move entirely; I had no control over it. Then I squeezed my right hand tighter around the butt of my .22, my finger still poised at the trigger.

“Drop the weapon!”

But he only laughed at me, his gun still twenty feet from my face.

And I learned something at that particular moment, as I had my gun aimed twenty feet away from his head and he had his twenty feet away from mine. I learned that while the bloodlust lay dormant as long as I remained completely isolated from human contact as I had for four years, it still had an accumulation effect. In other words, once I came into contact with another human after four years of isolation, the bloodlust would return a hundred times stronger than before. I had one small iota of control over it, but that was all I had and I struggled to keep just that. The urge to leap across the room, tackle him, bit his neck, and exsanguinate him was eating away at me, but I fought hard not to give in this time. If I had to kill him, I would have rather had the cause of death be a gunshot wound to the head or to the body, but not by exsanguinations. I’d be damned if I was going to give into this damned bloodlust a third time.

“Goddamn it, I said put the gun down now, asshole!”

Instead, Baron squeezed the trigger, and a silenced gunshot whispered in the darkness with a small flash, and the next thing I knew, my bicep was screaming in agony. My .22 flew from my hand across the aisle and then landed on the butt of the handle; the hammer was tripped off on impact, and another thunderous gunshot went off, the round whistling upward and then ricocheting off the ceiling. I clutched my left hand tightly against my right bicep, trying to apply pressure, but the constant blood flow out from the wound was making it way too slipper, and I couldn’t get a good grip.

I looked up at him, hissing and screaming in pain through clenched teeth as tears streamed down my face. I began to gray out, but for reasons I can’t even begin to comprehend, I fought against the pain, struggling to remain on my feet as I looked at my profusely bleeding right arm; it had really made a mess out of my bicep.

And the bloodlust was intensifying faster than ever.

Baron took another shot at me, and this time the round hit me square in the chest, puncturing my right lung, and my breathing became erratic, especially as the blood began to clog the bronchial tubes, this is after the lung collapsed, and now the blood was climbing my throat, all the way up my windpipe and then dripping from my lips. I was hunched over, my left hand now clutching the chest wound and disregarding the wound on my right bicep even though that still hurt like hell and the blood from that wound had already soaked through the sleeve and raining down my hand, dripping from the tips of my fingers. And the wound on my chest was still bleeding profusely no matter how hard I clutched at it with my left hand. It was a wonder I was still able to stay on my feet.

I looked up at him, writhing in pain and choking on the blood rising to my throat, and despite the amount of pain I was in, I could still feel a faint and distant throb of the bloodlust burning within my veins, the desire to drink that man’s blood, and even after what he had done to me, I still wouldn’t allow myself to give in.

He still had the gun pointed to my chest, a look of bewilderment on his face that I could still be standing, and then…spak!…spak!…another two shots were fired off, driving themselves deep into my chest, and some of my blood splashing over him in crimson dabs running off his face and jacket.

I was pushed back by the shear force of the bullets, miraculously still on my feet but staggering drunkenly. And it was now, as I stood there, stumbling dizzily, my field of vision becoming a darkened blur, hunched over with both arms-even my bad one--wrapped tightly around my front to keep my insides from spilling over to the floor, I both feared and hoped that the bitter sweet release of death would finally come and I would be set free from all my misery.

I was also distantly aware that the bloodlust was reaching nearly uncontrollable levels, and if this didn’t end soon, the only thing that might save this man’s life is the amount of pain I was now in and how weak I was now feeling…as well as my impending death should that ever arise.

I opened my mouth, wheezing and coughing up clumps of blood that seemed to cling to the back of my throat, groaning and hissing in the great agony that he had just left me in.

And then he fired off another shot.

And I screamed shrilly as yet another bone-shattering round burrowed its way through my rib cage, demolishing whatever was left of my internal organs. He fired off the sixth and final round in his Colt .38 and again it went into my chest, only this time it passed right through me, bursting out through the my back in a crimson explosion of blood that caked against the wall behind me. I was screaming even louder and in an even more high pitched tone, staggering backward on my feet until my back hit the wall, and then my legs finally collapsed under the weight. I fell slowly to the ground, my back sliding against the wall and smearing a great deal of blood against it as well from my exit wound, which was probably at least the size of a grapefruit.

I sat against that wall, bleeding, already having lost several pints of blood, my head lolling to and fro a bit but mostly resting against the wall as I looked up at the burglar armed with the silenced Colt .38. The bloodlust was this close to overwhelming and uncontrollable, and I didn’t want to give into it. I hated that man for what he had done to me, the amount of pain he had put me through. In the back of my mind I was also thinking about how whoever had said that a paper cut was the worst amount of pain you could ever feel had obviously never been shot before. I hadn’t been in so much pain in my entire life except for my final exposure to the sun back in ’95. I also found it sort of amazing that something so tiny as a bullet could make me feel so horrible, as though I had been savagely torn apart, my body ripped open and innards torn out and thrown halfway across the room. And I’ll tell you this as well: it certainly didn’t hurt anywhere near as much when I had shot myself in the head several years before.

He could have just as easily left me alone right then and there.

Five gunshot wounds to the chest plus the one that went through my right arm, covered in my own blood, my uniform totally drenched in it, sitting in a large ever-expanding pool of my blood, feeling it wash over every inch of my body, that warm, thick, purple fluid so vital to life itself, and it was pumping out of me at a gallon a minute through six newly sprung leaks. I had at least one punctured lung and God only knows what else--my vital organs had to have been a complete mess by then. And that fifth round into my chest, the one that passed all the way through had narrowly missed my spine by about a quarter inch-that was how close I came to having my lower spinal column shattered and spending the rest of my life or the rest of eternity crippled in a wheelchair. (But then again, I’m a vampire, so given that status, who knows? Maybe my spine would have just knitted back together again just as any other fractured bone eventually would in time, the nerves reconnecting and everything now working as it had before. With everything else the way it is, I can definitely see it happening.) Of course, being crippled might have been somewhat of a mercy in that it would have spared me at least some of the pain I was in. The pain was the worst; I was in a world of agony. Had I still been a mortal this would have been one of the slowest and most painful ways of dying; but since I was a vampire, it was seemingly unending torture, as though I were in Hell, an eternity of pain and suffering foisted upon me by this man with the gun, my designated tormentor. I was in so much pain I couldn’t even move without crying out to the top of my lungs so that anyone in New York could hear my hoarse shrieks. But that would have only served to give me a sore throat eventually and thus compound my suffering even more, setting my throat on fire as well as my entire chest and right arm.

He could have easily just left me there for dead, and why not? By all rights, I should have died there, and had I still been human I most certainly would have died. I was fatally wounded--I’m sure of it. The only thing that had kept me alive was the curse, that cruel trickster who just wouldn’t let me die; no way am I gettin’ off the hook that easily. But Baron would have had no way of knowing that I was a vampire, would he? Some of the best burglars are vampires, Max Cruller had said, so maybe it was true. Maybe this burglar was a vampire after all. But Max had also said that vampires don’t crave the blood of other vampires, so that automatically ruled out the possibility of vampirism in this case, for despite the pain I was in, the bloodlust was still very strong. And if this burglar wasn’t a vampire, he would have no way of knowing about it. Therefore, he wouldn’t see me as a threat any longer. I was as good as dead to him. He could just go back to what he was doing before, leaving me here to die in a great wave of pain, choking and gagging on my own blood while at the same time laying in a purple cocoon of it as well.

It was getting so I couldn’t even lift my head to look up at him. I was beginning to lose consciousness. A wave of darkness was swirling around me, and I welcomed it. I welcomed this oncoming loss of consciousness as a secret lover for it would free me of the pain, both physical and emotional, and instead replace it with a blissful and peaceful nothingness that would be all my own. Free from my turmoil, from my grief and guilt; complete and total freedom from all of the pain and misery that had centered around my life for all those endless years, if only for a little while. I would take what little solace I could get-a temporary death was better than no death at all.

I was of no threat to Baron whatsoever.

But he apparently thought it prudent to make sure I died. I don’t think any surgeon in the world would have been able to fix me up after what I had been through…if I were human, mind you. Even as the vampire that I was, I still wouldn’t have been able to hurt him had he not gotten so damned close to me the way he had. But I guess he wanted to be absolutely sure I died. Good, I thought, seeing him reload his gun. Just shoot me in the head…shoot me in the head a whole bunch of times ‘til it’s nothing more than useless meat blanketing shattered bone. Completely demolishing my head’s gotta be as good as decapitation, if not better, so I say go for it! I want you to finish me off, buddy; I salute you for it!

When he finished loading his gun, he stepped forward, coming closer and closer until the soles of both work boots were dipped into the pool of my blood so after he killed me he would be tracking bloody footprints over every placed he stepped, leaving behind yet another piece of forensic evidence for investigators to pick up and trace back to him once my body was found the next morning. Although I doubt he bought that gun of his legally. More than likely, he had gotten it off the street like any other good criminal with half a brain would, and hence, it wouldn’t be registered in his name.

He lunged forward, and I felt the barrel of his silencer digging at my forehead. He seemed to have it in that position for an eternity, but that’s only because I was waiting in eager anticipation for him to finally pull the trigger and put me out of my misery. But in actuality, it couldn’t have been longer than a second or two.

I think that once the bloodlust reaches those overwhelming levels where you can no longer control it, it becomes its own separate entity, its own sentience, completely separated from your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own pain. It’s got to be more than just an adrenaline charge; no sudden jolt of adrenaline could have powered me up in such a way, so abruptly, at the exact nanosecond Baron was about to pull the trigger…not in the condition I was in. This thing can’t be any more than a separate sentient entity with a life of its own and one single mission in life: to drink blood at any cost.

It literally felt like I had been lifted off the ground just then, now that I look back at it. There’s no way I could have gotten up on my own, not even as an automatic reflex. No--I was lifted off the ground, lifted into the air and then literally thrown over Baron in such a way that it looked like I was pouncing him. He fired off a single shot that whistled past my ear and then ricocheted off the ceiling, and then the gun leapt from his hand as I took him down, my knees pinning his shoulders to the floor, me looking down upon him with my teeth bared at his general direction.

He had time for one last scream and had obviously made the most of it with that shrill, piercing shriek he let off as I quickly sank my teeth into his jugular vein and began guzzling down his blood as though I were in the desert and dying of thirst, nearly dehydrated and just now offered a glass of water. I thought of Max’s advice, about how I should do whatever is in my power to try and resist the bloodlust whenever it strikes. He had also said that if I fail to resist, and I had already bitten someone’s neck and began drinking, that I should just finish him off rather than letting him live and allowing this wretched curse to spread further. I reflected on this briefly, and then I finished him off.

With my thirst now quenched and with Baron now dead and completely exsanguinated, I withdrew from my attack. I rolled off of him, now in full control of my body once more. I tried to rise to my feet, but instead the pain and weakness overcame me once again and I immediately collapsed to the ground, lying on my back, staring up at the white ceiling, and finally passing out entirely.

 

I came to at around 3:29 a.m. not fully recovered but healed enough so I could get by. I had a splitting headache, but I would have taken that over the intense burning pain I was suffering before, which was now dulled significantly over my knitting ribcage and regenerating right bicep. I was once again looking up at that same shadowy ceiling up above, still in Wal-Mart, and for the first few seconds of consciousness, I was actually spared of the bitter, painful memories of who I was and all that I had been through. But then the memories rushed back into me like a speeding freight train and after that I longed for the blissful amnesia to return.

I grew lightheaded as I rose to my feet, and then stumbling back down as the partially regurgitated and now coagulated blood on the back of my throat irritated my throat. I fell once more to my hands and knees and went into a massive coughing fit. Afterward, I looked down upon blood-drenched uniform, the blood now dried to a darker shade of red, and my wounds scabbing but still a bit moist; I knew that any wrong movements would surely reopen them.

I looked down upon Baron’s dead corpse, horrified by what I had done. I flinched away at the ghastly gaze of his dead eyes peering up at me, making my skin crawl. I looked downward at his neck and saw teeth marks there from where I had bitten and exsanguinated him only hours ago. Not two nice, neat little puncture wounds near his jugular or his carotid artery like in Dracula or any of those movies. Instead, it was as though I had chomped down upon the side of his neck and bite a whole chunk of skin and artery right off…hell that’s exactly what I did, I won’t lie about that. I had killed this man as I had killed Lila, as I had very nearly killed my son all those years ago, and I was absolutely horrified looking down upon my handiwork.

“No!”

A murder had taken place here, a heinous murder; but this one wasn’t done by some anonymous psychopath, not some serial killer getting a few perverse sexual thrills nor someone else taking up vampire rituals in hopes of becoming a true creature of the night. For the second time ever, I had taken a life. I was the monster. I was the freak. The subhuman degenerate. He wasn’t innocent in the way Lila was innocent. He was trying to kill me, and perhaps had I only shot him, it wouldn’t have been so bad. At least it would have been a clean death…much cleaner than what I had done to him anyway.

Hot tears began streaming down my face; my heart began racing, my temples throbbing, and my blood boiling inside my veins. I hated that man for breaking in here on my shift and forcing me gorge upon him, tempting him with his precious life fluids as he had so callously done so. But most of all, I hated myself for giving into the bloodlust for a third time, resulting in death once again.

“Oh God…NOO!”

I turned away and ran, ran across the store, blindly through the darkness, knocking over whatever was in my way, just plowing through everything until I reached the front of the store, where the main entrance was. Naturally, it was locked, so being consumed with rage over what I had done, not thinking at all, I plowed through that small gaming area they had in between the entrance and exit doors and leapt into the air, diving head-first right through that window they had had there. I felt my head bash against the pane of glass and heard the glass shattering, and then all I was aware of was that it was cold and dark all over. I landed on the hard sidewalk on my stomach, facedown, breaking my nose upon impact and seeing red as blood squirted in my eyes.

I looked up, my shredded face now a mask of blood, and realized that it was now suddenly dark because it was nighttime and I was outside; it was no darker out here than back in there. And it was cold out because it was February. But I was hardly bothered by the cold or by the darkness or by the fact that my entire body was burning painful, my uniform now not only irreparably stained in my own blood but now nothing more than tattered shreds of fabric matted to my cleaved torso. I was lying on jagged shards of broken glass; I could feel the splinters of glass through my skin all over my body, that all-encompassing burning itch. I was on my hands and knees, slashing my palms and fingers again and again on a jagged edge of broken glass as I slowly rose to my feet, fatigued, winded, bleeding, and once again in a whole world of pain, but able to move around nonetheless.

None of that stuff was of any concern to me.

What I had done to the burglar, the way I had killed him, the way I had once more given into the bloodlust was still fresh on my mind. I was still enraged and my blood was still boiling through my veins and nothing else mattered. I could hear the alarm being set off from when I leapt through the window. I could hear it blaring and warbling through the cold night air, and I completely ignored it as I ignored the intense pain now burning throughout my entire body.

I was at my feet once more and staring blankly across the empty Wal-Mart parking lot for a few seconds, my rage still very fresh, consuming me entirely, mind, body, and soul. There was nothing left within me but the rage.

If I hadn’t already reopened my bullet wounds by that point, than I had done so now with what I did next. I raised both my arms into the air, my hands tightly clenched fists, and then looked up into the night sky, up at the full moon hovering above me, and let off an endless cry of rage, howling and screaming like madman up at the full moon. It was just one long, drawn out cry of fury. My right bicep ruptured open once more, as did the five bullet wounds on my chest, shedding even more fresh blood to rain and patter upon the sidewalks, and I didn’t care one bit. My blood-curdling screams weren’t cries of pain but of intense blood-boiling rage. My screams lasted long into the night, mingled along with the constant blaring of the alarms of Wal-Mart’s security system, and soon to be joined in by the distant warbling sirens of police cruisers.

 

I guess what happened next should be fairly obvious.

Under normal circumstances, I could have easily gotten away with killing Baron. I’m sure it was a justified homicide. I mean, I’m not a lawyer or anything, but odds are, I probably could have made a good case for self-defense. He did break into the store armed with that Colt .38 of his.

But by the time the cops arrived, I was little more than a rabid beast, growling savagely, foaming at the mouth, my spittle mingled with my blood, with several medium-sized shards of glass jutting from various parts of my body. Given my condition, along with the five bullets I had taken to the chest and the round that tore open my bicep, they still had to jolt me with 50,000 volts of electricity from their air TASERS three times in order to take me down.

And within a month, believe it or not, I made a full recovery.

The doctors were amazed at how quickly I healed after taking five bullets to the chest. I wasn’t at all amazed by my recovery, nor did I think of myself as any kind of medical miracle, nor did I consider myself to be lucky to be alive, but I’m sure you probably already knew that already. But yes, once again, I was considered another medical miracle…ooh wow, lucky for me. They had put in over a thousands stitches throughout my entire body during that month of recovery, and through intense “touch-and-go” surgery, as they had put it, although I don’t think my life was in danger for one second, they removed all four bullets from my body and blew my right lung back up so I could use it once again.

And after my little recovery, I was then sent to the institution for those mentally unfit for society, or to put it more bluntly, the loony bin, where I’ve spent the last year of my life detained and kept in this straight jacket because I’m such a threat to society, because of all the things I’ve said about believing myself to be a vampire, plus my little hissy fit outside of Wal-Mart on the night of my apprehension last year.

And that brings us to now, doesn’t it, on the date of March 23, 2003.

And you know something, Doc? I don’t even know how many times I’ve told you that exact same story without changing one lousy word of it. I’ve lost count many, many months ago. I just keep telling it to you, and you keep me detained here until I stop with all of these delusions of being a vampire and all that other bullshit

But I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m glad I’m detained here in this asylum. It keeps me off the streets and away from other people…people I can potentially harm should the bloodlust get out of hand a forth time. So I’ll do whatever it takes to stay here. I’ll keep telling you and all the other doctors the exact same story if you want--I’ve already got down in procedural memory now; I don’t even have to think about it anymore. It’s like driving or walking or laying down on your bed to go to sleep; I just do it. I actually don’t have to think about much, Doc, other than the past, reminiscing about my family, wondering how Emily and Tyler are doing, hoping they don’t hate me for what I did all those years ago, but most of all hoping they’re doing okay.

Do me a favor Docs--I don’t know if you have any way of finding Emily and Tyler--but if you can, don’t. Don’t try and find them and don’t tell ‘em of my whereabouts. I don’t want them to burden them further than I already have. It’s best that I stay out of their lives. Their lives and everybody else’s.

 

The End

August 17, 2000
January 20, 2001