A/N: Thank you all for giving the first chapter such great comments and critiques. I hope that this second chapter will be just as well-received. Anyway, constructive criticism is well-appreciated, so sit back and enjoy.

Now, on with it!

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Chapter 2: Human

Though it’s beyond my understanding, Xandra manages to sleep in through my alarm at 8:30 in the morning. I was a gentleman and let her have the bed for the rest of the night, so I had to sleep on the floor. With it being winter, the sun still isn’t up yet, so I leave her in my room with a note saying that I’ll be back around eleven.

I have a Vampire History class that I don’t really need, but I go to it anyway for the hell of it. I don’t need the credits, but it’s still fun. I think that today we’re supposed to go over the events of the Vampire and Human War of 1999. I sit down in the lecture hall, first one in class, naturally, and go over some of my notes. I’m lucky that I wasn’t living on the west coast at that time. Washington, Oregon, California, and parts of Mexico were all influenced by the war that went on. Now that everything’s calmed down between the vampires and humans here in California, what with the walled cities for both species and all, I’m able to attend college freely. There are still fears that rogue vampires who ignore the newly-set laws could get inside the cities, but I’m not too afraid of anything like that happening. Hanna, or Xandra, is a special case.

Let’s see. Studying. Studying.

I read the first sheet to come into contact with my hand when I reach into my binder. Written in my chicken-scratch notes was the sentence: ‘In January 2002, vampire hunters as an occupation was legalized by the United Nations for hunting down rogue vampires outside the cities.’ That was all that I wrote for that day, apparently.

The next sheet. ‘Ford the automobile company, as they have done before in times of war, built special armored cars for transportation of humans and supplies between cities. Because of the sheer number of illegal vampires living outside of the cities, Ford has continued to make more and better versions of the armored cars and trucks.

‘Transportation is still a problem for all walled cities in the United States, so all major highways have walls as well in order to connect the main human cities. Now that many back roads have been abandoned, however, most isolated locations have been abandoned. Because of this, nearly every small town without enough money to afford protective walls has been either abandoned by it’s residents in favor of larger cities, or have been overrun by vampires who are against the peace between their species and humans.’

It’s not too difficult to forget that war, what with it being over in 2001. That’s not even ten years ago. Hell, I watched the reports about it on the news when I was just a kid. I heard the figures, saw the carnage, witnessed second-hand the various shriveled-up bodies covered in blankets. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Can Hanna do that now, too? If she bites me like she means it, will I shrivel up? I wonder what it feels like to be sucked dry. I know it wouldn’t be fun getting bitten, but still. It would be kinda fun to dissect a body that’s been dehydrated that much. I can’t go back to the Medical Center, can I?

“--okay, Jay?” I hear someone say. I turn my head in the direction of the voice and see a man next to me. He has shoulder-length light brown hair and fuzzy, well-defined, jaw line. For whatever reason, he’s wearing a shirt parodying “My Little Pony” with one of them entitled “Punk Rock Pony.”

“Oh, hey, Adrian. What’s up?” I say.

“I just asked if you’re okay, dude,”

“Oh. Sorry, I was just… thinking.”

“About what?”

“What it’d be like to be bitten. You know, by a vampire.”

He scratches his head and says, “Man, you’re getting too into them lately.”

“Hey, you’re taking this class, too.” I open my notebook to a fresh page of blank lines. Nice and pristine.

“Yeah, but I need a history course. You don’t.”

“What’s your point?” I take out a mechanical pencil and click it to see if there’s any lead left. None. I see out of the corner of my eye a few more students entering through the door to the left of the front of the room.

Adrian sighs, puts his bag down, and sits in the chair beside me.

“Nothing to say?”

“Nope.” He takes out a black binder as our professor walks in.

* * *

“You’re shitting me. You‘re ditching?” Adrian says. I open the door to the outside of the building and exit with him.

“Yeah, something came up,” I say, “A friend of mine needs a ride home by the time that class starts, so I just won’t be showing up. Professor Rickard will understand.” I turn my head and smile a little. I never knew that it’s so fun to lie to people. I should do this more often.

“I thought you liked that class?” He kicks a rock out of his way as we walk down a sidewalk towards the dorm. The campus has a very much plain layout. Square-shaped buildings with sidewalks between them, almost completely in-synch with the rest of the city. This pattern continues until it gets to the north-eastern corner where there’s a nice patch of green grass, plenty of benches, and some fountains. That area is called Corner Park, and I think that it’s the best spot in the city.

“Yeah, I like it. I mean, I correct other peoples’ work, so that’s always fun, but that doesn’t mean that I can just deny my friend a short drive.”

“Fine, whatever,” he says, and shoves his hands in the pockets of his black studded jacket. “Where is this guy, anyway? Why does he need a ride?”

I knew I forgot something. “Oh yeah, uh, he got drunk last night, so he has a hangover, and he’s asleep in my dorm room.”

Adrian scoffs, “You’re too fuckin’ nice, man. If he gets his ass drunk, then that’s his fault.”

“Yeah, but you’ve had a hangover before, so you don’t really have any room to say anything.”

He laughs, “Yeah, but at least I get my ass home when I need to.”

We come upon the steps leading up to the dorm, open the automatic glass doors with our cards, and parted ways. He only lives on the second floor, so he just uses the stairs, while I go ahead and take the elevator. I notice some new things in the elevator that I missed last night. Several new cigarette butts have crowded themselves into the back corners of the stained floor, and another old piece of gum has been flattened by the steamrollers that are the feet of my peers.

After a few seconds, I reach the sixth floor, and the doors part. Several people are waiting to get in, so I speed-walk out of the way so that they can get into it. I don’t recognize any of them, so I continue on into the hallway until I come upon my room. My keychain chimes a gaggle of notes before I find the correct one, and open the door with it.

I close the door and pause, looking around the room for Xandra.

“Hey, where are you?” I whisper, dropping my book bag next to my desk. The blinds are closed, and the comforter on my bed is missing, as is the brown sheet. The blinds, however, have those very brown bed sheets covering them, nailed to the wall by what look like huge nails. “What the fuck…?” I say, and walk up to the blinds, only to find out that the “nails” are in fact normal #2 pencils. Pencils are digging into the solid, sound-proof concrete wall with cracks radiating out from them!

I can’t believe that I forgot all about the whole sunlight thing with vampires! Leaving the sheet up there, though some sunlight is still filtering through, which casts a hazy glow around the room, and whisper, “Xandra! Hey! Where are you?” Now I’ve raised my voice to the level of normal conversation, but I don‘t care. The area underneath my bed is empty, but the comforter is still gone. She isn’t under my desk, either.

A mumble is heard from near the entrance. I turn my head, and see the door to my closet closed tightly.

“Shit,” I say, and grasp the handle to the closet.

I turn the knob and pull it open.

“No!” Hanna’s voice sounds from the depths. The door is yanked back closed before I can even see in, the knob slipping out of my hand as if I had no grip on it at all. I hear sobbing from the other side of the door. “Don’t open it,” she says, her voice shaky.

The corner of my brown comforter sticks out from the closed door. She’s covering herself with it to keep all sunlight off.

“H-Hanna--!”

“Don’t call me that!” she shouts, followed by another sob.

“O-okay. Xandra,” I pause, “I’m sorry, I completely forgot about the sunlight.”

The closet remains silent.

“Are you okay? Did you get touched by it at all?”

Still no answer.

“Shit. Yeah, I’m really sorry. But, uh, you should be fine as long as your skin hasn’t turned a dark black color. Are you okay?”

There is a shuffling of the comforter from inside, followed by a slight, “Yes.”

A sigh of relief escape my lips, “Okay, good.” I sit down on the floor with my back against the closet door.

Another sob escapes through the wooden door and reaches my ears. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“Why‘re you apologizing?”

“I put holes in your wall,” she says, her voice shaky and uncertain, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that it would work, I just--”

“It’s okay. It’s my own fault for not putting something up there for you in the first place. But more importantly, I think that we should wait until about six o’clock before we leave today.”

She doesn’t say anything, but I think that she must’ve nodded instead.

“Where will we be going, anyway?” she asks, sounding more composed than before.

“A shelter for vampires who have just been turned by some rogue ones. They’ll take you and some others to a vampire city up north in a few days. I think. I‘m not up to speed on their schedule.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Until then, you should rest a bit.”

“Okay, but before that,” she says all of a sudden, “are you sure that I’m the Hanna that you knew, like you said last night?”

I frown. I knew that I would have to show it to her. “You know what today is?” I ask, taking my wallet out of my back pocket.

She scoffs, “I’ve been dead for awhile, Jay. Of course I don’t know what day it is.”

I brandish a piece of old newspaper from my wallet, the ink slightly faded, and slip it under the door. “It’s November fifth. The second anniversary of Hanna’s death.” On the newspaper is a picture of Hanna with the headline “College Student Dies Mysteriously.”

She takes it the rest of the way into the closet, and I hear her unfolding it. Vampires have excellent night vision, so she should be able to read it even if she‘s in the closet.

“You see that birthmark on her cheek?” I ask.

A pause. “Yeah,” she forces out, sounding short of breath.

“You have it. Your hair’s the same length and color, you have the same face, you’re the same height, and you look like you’re eighteen or nineteen. She was eighteen when she died, so you fit the bill.”

The sound of my comforter shifting is heard, and I see the newspaper clipping slide back out from under the door. “Could you tell me about her?”

I turn my head and look back at the door, “Why?”

“I want to see if I can remember anything from,” she pauses, “Y-you know, her life.”

I sigh once again, “It’s a lost cause. People have tried for years to bring back memories that a vampire has forgotten about his past life, but so far there’s been nothing.”

“Does this happen a lot?”

I look up at the ceiling and say, “Yeah. Nobody knows for sure exactly how it works, but a professor of mine said once that, ‘For every human turned, one vampire is born with a blank slate.’ I think that the vampires keep the general knowledge of the human, though, like language, math, common sense, and the like. It‘s not really a blank slate, in my opinion, though. I think that he was just trying to sound cool.” I try to stifle a soft laugh, but to no avail. “Hanna didn’t know anything about vampires, either. She refused to study about them for some reason. Anyway, she and I went to the same high school, but only started going out when we both started going here. She majored in psychology because she wanted to, you know, help people with their problems and all that.”

After a moment of pause, Xandra says, “What else? What was she like?”

“She was good at philosophy, logic, and math, but she sucked in just about everything else.” I laugh a little. “Hanna was really nice to everyone, and wasn’t like any of those bitchy, slutty sorority girls. Not like you, you’re kind of a bitch.”

“Shut up.”

I ignore her, “Actually, she was a nerd just like me!”

Xandra laughs, “No fucking way!”

“Yeah, she was. We watched sci-fi movies, read the same novels, and even--” before I finish, the ceiling fogs up a little. I bring up a hand and rub my eyes to correct it, only to find my fingers damp. “Heh. What the?” I chuckle meekly and put a hand over my eyes. Despite my soft attempts at laughing, my vision keeps blurring.

“You okay?” Hanna asks.

Wait, Hanna? She’s not Hanna.

“Y-yeah, I’m fine, Xandra. I’m fine.” I rub my eyes with both fists clenched over them, wiping all of the tears away with a vengeance. “Remembering her is a little harder than I thought, that’s all. It‘s just… it‘s like I‘ve been talking to her this whole time instead of you.”

“Oh, sorry,” she says.

“I’m fine now, though. Seriously.”

“Whatever.”

“I am!”

“Uh huh.”

I leave her to her rest, and pass the time by finishing my homework and watching TV. It’s now a few minutes after three o’clock, and Xandra is fast asleep inside my closet. At least that’s what I am able to tell from outside. Around now, Professor Rickard should be cursing his brains out about his missing cadaver. I’ll have some explaining to do for him, but he’s the one who’ll have to answer to the cops about why the stolen cadaver is still undead. As long as Xandra is still a vampire, I’ve got him pegged if he comes to get me.

“Hey, Xandra,” I say. There’s no response. “Fuck. Won’t get up till exactly six o’clock will you?”

I flip through the channels. Clips and snippets of various talk shows, sitcoms, and documentaries wiz by before I let it reach the Discovery Channel. They always have something good on.

“--Grills, the host of Human Versus Wild, will no longer be on the show.” The narrator says at the beginning of the hour-long block. I remember that the host and cameraman of this show were both bitten by a vampire while they were on their most recent trip through a jungle in Africa. Thus, the show was cancelled, and their block replaced with reruns. Serves the stupid fuck right, in my opinion. Walking outside a city like that so often and acting like her owns the place, he‘s just asking for it. He must’ve had some really pissed off the vampire anti-fans. Vampires being what they are, they can easily overpower any human and get away with a lot of things. Even vampire hunters have problems with them these days. According to the internet, however, a lot of vampires have been really pissed off about it, calling the culprits an insult to their race. It’s also nice to know that there are some nerds like myself amongst their species.

I flip it to the news, and see that they’re showing a clip of what looks like an aerial view of a flaming building, spewing fire from its windows and collapsing an instant later. The headline reads, “Arson Outside Walls.”

“Last night, outside the walls of the city, an old house in which a vampire has been residing near the old suburbs has been burned to the ground. The damages to the surrounding area are minimal, but three bodies have been found inside after the fires were put out. Authorities are unwilling to disclose the identities of these individuals, but they will say that two of them were humans, and the other a vampire. We asked the firefighters if they could tell us anything about the cause of the blaze, but they refused to answer any of our questions.”

Some people really are disgusting. Who would go out of their way and go to the outside of the walls just to set a vampire’s house on fire? I turn the TV off and lie down on my sheetless bed, hoping to have a nap before we need to go. My bed is near my window, so always within my sight are the two pencils jutting out of the wall. A piece of cracked paint chips off with the movement of me on my bed and falls onto my leg. It’s always amazed me how strong vampires are, even though they’re dead. It’s like magic. Then again, the very existence of vampires can barely even be described by the world’s greatest scientists as anything other than, “magic,” so I shouldn’t dwell on it too much if not even they can figure it out.

I let my mind wander. From vampires, to weight-lifters, to football player, and finally to how Hanna and I never went to football games for the school. Every Saturday, one of us would go to the others apartment to either play video games, watch movies, or do homework together. The dorms were almost always empty during football games, so we eventually began to invite other friends over and use an entire floor for a giant game of spoons. To play, each player is given five cards, and the dealer will give the top card of the deck to the first person in the circle. The goal is to get four of a kind. If the first person in the circle doesn’t want the card, then he passes it on, face-down. If he does want the card, then he has to pass an unwanted card instead. The main object of the game is that once someone gets four of a kind, he needs to grab a spoon from the middle of the circle without people noticing. After that, everyone else has to notice this and grab the rest of the spoons. There is always one less spoon than people, so the person left without a spoon is out. Our group, however, placed the spoons halfway down the hall while we all stayed in the common room. It was a battle to the death for most of us to climb over each other through the tight halls to get to the spoons. Even our pseudo-friends like Nataly came to play the game, so even she had a good time. Our range of activities was much larger than just playing spoons, though.

On one occasion when I had an art project due for an art class that I had to take that semester, everyone helped me to finish it. The assignment was to paint an aerial view of an area of the city and make it look like something else. I chose the campus, but I was stuck in a rut at the time. Once everyone came to play spoons, I had to sit out and work in the corner. The moment Hanna found out that I was painting the college, she and everyone else jumped in to help like a bunch of kindergarteners doing finger paints. We transformed the map of the campus into a checkerboard with coffee spilled over the top right corner, representing the park. No matter how odd it looked, we all were confident that I would pass that class with flying colors.

I got a C on the project.

A soft laugh makes its way to my lips when I hear something like a scratching. I sit up and search for the source of the sound. It’s coming from the closet.

“Hey, Xandra, you okay?” I ask.

The scratching stops, and the knob of the closet door begins to turn.

“Whoa, wait! You can’t come out yet! The sun’s still out!” I say, taking long steps towards the door, and leaning against it once I get there. It latches, but I continue to lean against it in case she tries again.

I hear a mumble from the other side of the door.

“What was that?” I say, putting my ear to the door.

Since she’s using a raspy, uneven whisper, I am barely able to decipher what she’s saying.

I rip my ear away from the door and back up a little from the door, scuttling over discarded pieces of clothing, pencils, and loose sheets of paper. Swallowing as I feel a cold sweat develop along my spine, I say, “How hungry?”

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A/N: I love cliffhangers.

Again, constructive criticism is appreciated, and I hope that you enjoyed this chapter.