Sorry for the delay, but here it is: chapter three. Constructive criticism is appreciated, and I hope that you enjoy it.
Rated for violence.
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Chapter 3: Vampire
The scratching starts again, this time right against the inside of the door. “I’ve been trying… not to bite something… for awhile…”
I search around my room, as if trying to find a way out of the situation-- a magic doorway that will lead me out of this. There’s nothing here to help me.
I stutter, “Sh-shit, um…” I place a palm on my forehead, wracking my brain on what to do.
“Jay,” she says from the other side of the door.
I can’t think straight, my heart pounding and my mind racing.
“Jay!” she shouts. I can see her nails grating away through to my side of the door as well. It only gets louder and she continues to call out my name.
“Just calm down, Xandra,” I say as calmly as I can, though my voice is shaky.
“I can’t! It won’t go away!” she shouts. Her fingers gouge all the way through the door with a sickening crack. I fall back onto a pile of clothes and crawl away from the claws. “It won’t go away!”
All I see is an explosion of splinters as the bottom part of the door is virtually split in half. I cover my head with my hands and turn away. Several of the pieces of wood get near me, but don’t graze me at all. When I turn to look back at the gaping hole in the door, her deranged face looms inches from mine. Covered in tangled brown hair and staring at me with white blood-shot eyes. Her lips part, revealing a pair of protruding fangs, and bears a crescent smile.
“Jay…” she breathes. Her cold breath on my face smells like a corpse. I try to turn my head from her and cough, but I can’t look away-- I can’t recognize her anymore.
“X-Xandra,” I say, “c-come on, stop it.”
I scarcely see her hands move before she pins me against my dresser by the shoulders, crushing my back against it. I let out a small cry of pain and try to struggle, but her grip is so strong that there may as well be a car pinning me down. Her breathing gets heavier, drenching me in that graveyard stench. She tears the collar of my shirt down over my shoulder, revealing my bare vulnerable throat. I realize that she’s now holding me with just one hand, but I still can‘t move for the life of me.
“Shit,” I say as she leans in over my neck, her jaws wide open. “Shit!” I bring up a foot, plant it against her midsection, and push off with all my might, doing my best to grind my foot into her gut. She still progresses, and all I’m accomplishing is crushing myself against my dresser. A gasp escapes me once I feel the pin-pricks of her fangs on the skin covering the artery in my neck.
Like two nails being hit by a hammer, my neck is punctured, the two teeth jostling around inside me, stretching my skin with every little movement. I let out a scream, snarls are heard from the mouth of the beast feeding on me, and my arms and legs flail about. Her lips clasp over the wound, and I feel myself being drained into her mouth. Torrents of blood flow out of me in tandem with my heartbeat.
“Damn it! G-get off!” I shout, my hand searching along the floor for something--anything that I can use. I can’t think straight enough to know what I’ll use it for. My fingers clasp around something long and hard on the floor. Whatever it is, I feel it, looking for something. One end is sharp.
I can’t feel either of my arms anymore, but I see it move by itself, raising my clenched hand above the beast and run through her arm with a pencil. She lets out a banshee scream and throws her head back, her eyes wide and stained with blood. Her jaws are stretched open, showing that the rest of her teeth have sharpened as well, red liquid streaming out between each tooth and down her already-drenched front. I have no time to look, and break free by kicking her with the foot that had failed so miserably before. She falls back with a hand over her arm, still wailing, and I lunge for the window while holding a hand over my neck. I start to feel lightheaded, my tears filling my eyes from the pain and fogging up my sight.
She grunts and stops screaming once she notices me holding onto the sheet that’s covering the blinds. Her teeth grit, and she leaps at me with a snarl, all of her teeth showing. With one final pull of my hand, the sheet rips away from the blinds. Flat lines of light from the westward sunset cut across the room.
She lets out another howl and covers her head with her arms, the pencil still jutting out of her arm at an odd angle. Already I can see her skin darkening along the lines of light. My back supports me against the wall as I lean against it and slump to the floor. I take my shirt off and wrap it over my neck and tie it under the opposite arm. It’s hard to even swallow without stretching out the skin around the wound.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I hear her cry out. She’s wallowing on the floor in agony, her stabbed arm trembling, and her eyes no longer all white. Instead, they are full of tears.
Vampires can cry?
After a few seconds, I let myself slide against the wall and lie down on my side, panting. My eyes feel like they have weights holding them down, and my arm on the side of the bite feels like it’s about ready to fall off. My vision begins to fade, but before it does, I see the lines of orange light around the room disappear, leaving the room in black.
* * *
Hanna’s open mind was what attracted me to her when I met her for the first time. She may have been pretty cute, but I never went out with someone only for looks. I was the only guy on that floor of the dorm who still watched cartoons. Their subtle connections to current events always made me laugh-- they still do, actually. She caught me watching them on my TV one day in our freshman year, and I struggled to change the channel before she saw what I was watching. We ended up going through a two-hour block of kid’s shows before we called it a night.
Our years in high school were spent in other groups, so we never got to see each other very much, but she and I became a friends of a friend. We were both friends of Nataly, to be exact. The favorite spot in my room for Hanna and I to rest was against the wall by the window, usually with a pillow or two to sit on. It was she who asked me out, which was a first for me, and from then on we just got closer and closer...
* * *
The moment my eyes crack open, I use all the strength those little eyelid muscles can muster, and pry them open. I’m pretty sure that it’s the floor that I was staring at before I passed out, but all I see on the carpet is the color red. The muscles in my neck manage to lift my head high enough to see the rest of the room. The ceiling light’s on, and there aren’t anymore lines of light coming from the window, from what I can see. A glance at the dresser tells me that she really grinded me into it-- there’s a imprint of my back on the cracked faces of the drawers.
A piercing pain hits my left side, particularly around my neck and shoulder. I try to bring my right arm up to feel it, and manage to reach it. The only thing that I accomplish with doing this is hurting myself even more and covering right hand in blood. I could barely move before I passed out, but some feeling is starting to come back. My eyes look around the room until it falls upon the door. It’s open, but I can’t see outside from my angle.
“Xandra, you in here?” I manage to say in a pathetic voice. Of course she isn’t. She’s probably run away by now. I would have run if I were her. Then again, I may not know her well enough to try to put myself in her shoes. A soft laugh wisps out of my lungs, letting the back of my head fall back and thump onto the wall.
“Jay!” My head automatically jerks back forward, my eyes doing a double-take around the room before falling upon the person who just spoke. Xandra, her chest and chin covered in blood, comes rushing towards me. I’m offset by all of the red on her, though her demeanor tells me that she’s no longer in batshit vampire mode. She falls to her knees in front of me and looks at me with teary eyes. I notice that she has several burns on her face and arms. “It‘s not my fault! I didn’t do any of it on purpose, I--”
“Whoa, whoa,” I say. I bring up my arms as if in defense to stop her from talking. “Calm down a bit and just…” I sigh. “I don’t know what to make of this whole thing.”
“Jay, I never wanted to be a vampire! I never wanted to--”
“God, shut up already!” I feel the skin on my neck stretch out the wounds, causing me to flinch and clamp my eyes shut. “Just bring me to the medical center or something, and they‘ll patch me up, okay?”
“I can’t!”
I look up at her. “Why not?”
Her gaze begins to move towards the door.
Fear begins to build up in the pit of my stomach, and my lungs become short of breath. “What did you do…?”
Her arms fall to the floor at her sides, tears falling down her face. “I’m sorry…”
Only now do I notice a spot of red on the door. Without thinking of my injury, I push myself to my feet and stagger across my room to the exit. She stands up and lends me her shoulder, which I accept. I look down at her face, and she closes her eyes once we come within view of the hallway. It takes me a few seconds to actually look up at the corridor, but I do. I can’t shake the urge to look. Like when you know when a scary part of a horror movie is about to come, and you close your eyes. You always want to look so that you can see what kind of horrible thing will happen.
I wish I was born blind.
All I see before I look away are three people. The two of the floor wore blue and black uniforms, so they must have been policemen. All of them had some form of blood spatter on them, but I didn’t look long enough to be able to tell what kind of injuries they have or if they’re alive or not. The last person-- Oh, God, her-- has been literally gored in the back by the doorknob of a neighbor’s dorm room. It looks like her jaw is about to fall off, too. On the wall next to her face are two or three splatters of blood on the same level as his head. Was her face hit against the… ugh, even when I’m looking away, I can’t get that image out of my head.
I keep looking away from both Xandra and the hallway and cough a few times to suppress a gag. What’s wrong with me? I’ve been dissecting dead things for the past three years of my college career! Why am I getting queasy over a few hurt people? “Xandra,” I say. “What happened?”
She stutters. “Th-they pulled out their guns when I opened the door, and, uh, I-I just panicked, and…” She trails off.
Great, she’s probably considered a rogue vampire by now. “How long was I out?” I rub my temple, lightheaded from the blood loss. My head tilts in different directions on it‘s own as if out of dizziness.
“I-I don’t know, uh, maybe half an hour? And hour? Maybe? They got here only a little while ago.” She pauses. “Are they… alive?”
I glance back at the cops, and then at the person lodged against the knob of the other door with her jaw gaping open and her tongue hanging out. I‘m just grateful that I hadn‘t ever seen him on the floor until now. If she was somebody that I knew, I doubt that I‘d be able to take it. It’s all I can do to keep myself from shaking and hold back lurches from deep in my throat. “I think that the police guys are still alive, but I don’t know about that girl…”
A bright flash fills the hallway, followed by a high-pitched screeching noise. I flinch the first time, but by the time the second flash and screech come, I remember that it’s just the fire alarm. Somebody must’ve set it off when they saw the blood or something. At least it knocked me out of my dizziness a little.
“What’s going on?” she yells over the echoing noise.
“It’s just the fire alarm, calm down.” I have to raise my voice more than I thought, and catch myself looking around in case anyone heard me. “Anyway, I doubt that any of the shelters would take anyone considered a rogue vampire, so…”
She snaps, “What? Why would I be a--”
“If you’ve bitten someone in a human city, then you’re considered to have gone rogue. We humans are really careful about it, so I doubt they’d make an exception. If the cops get you, then they’ll probably shoot you on sight.” My feet have regained a little bit of their old balance, and I walk back into my room without her help.
“Oh, come on! That’s bullshit!” She follows me back in and closes the door, wiping a few leftover tears from her eyes. I sit down in my desk chair and rub the wound on my neck through my bloody shirt. Staring at her with a blank expression, I see that she knows that I’m not kidding. “So… what do I need to do?” She leans against the wall near the door. “I don’t want to die…”
I rub the bite marks a few times and shrug my shoulders, “Hell if I know. Your best bet would be to get out of the city, but you’ll need to get outside the walls.” My gaze turns to my window. I can see the nighttime cityscape between the blinds, dozens of skyscrapers jutting out of the horizon until the red lights lining the top of the walls tower over them all. We’re a city mainly centered around technology, so we were able to afford the best kind of walls: big ones.
“How do you expect me to get over that thing?” She must’ve been looking out the window, too.
I turn to her again and say, “I don’t know, but it’s only made of concrete, so you might be able to scale it. Vampires have been known to try.”
“Have any gotten over?”
“No. There are snipers all around the perimeter. I heard that they’ll be installing more cameras soon, too.” I start to bite the nail of my thumb with the knuckle of my index finger resting on my upper lip. Come to think of it, the shelters have been known to break the law to protect some vampires that simply couldn’t control themselves the first time they bit someone. There are sometimes big protests against both the police and the shelters, but some of the shelters were closed down by the time they were over. It would be great if some of the same people from one of the old shelters were working at the one I’ve been planning to bring Xandra. Then again, we don’t know if the girl in the hallway is dead or not. Even if the people in the shelters are pretty lenient, they couldn’t just answer to the dead guy’s family with, “Sorry, she just lost control, but everything’s fine now.” No way in hell would that fly in court, either.
I need to check.
The thought rings in my head like a bell. Forget the fire alarm, just the thought of having to check that poor mangled body for life is too much for my head to bear. I’m supposed to be a doctor! I shouldn’t be flinching at the sight of something like this! I just have to go up and feel his pulse-- that’s it!
“Jay, you okay?” Xandra asks. She walks over to me and puts a chilly hand on my shoulder.
Will the girl in the hallway be this cold? I nudge her hand away with my good arm, glaring at her. When I make eye contact with her-- damn it, that face-- and notice that her clothes are still covered in my blood, I have to put my head between my legs to keep from vomiting.
“Put something else on already,” I force myself to say through a cough.
“What?”
“Clothes, damn it! Do you want to walk around like that?” I’m not even trying to hide my frustration anymore. Why did someone have to do this to Hanna? And why turn her while she’s already been dead for two years? This whole thing is too fucked up for words!
While Xandra is changing, I face the other way and dig the first aid kit out of my destroyed closet. Every dorm room has one, and I started out by dabbing my neck wound with rubbing alcohol. Though painful as all hell, it was dampened a little by the vampire saliva that numbed me when I was being bitten. The kit has enough gauze to cover both holes in my neck quite well, though it had stopped bleeding awhile ago, so I put about three patches over the wound and wrapped some tape lightly around my neck. By the time I was done and had put on a new shirt, Xandra had changed into a pair of my shorts plus another t-shirt that’s too big for her. She’d also wiped a lot of the blood off of herself with the shirt that she was wearing before.
She faces me and says, “Okay, so… now what?”
I take a deep breath. “I need to see if the people in the hall are alive.”
“Okay,” she says. Her gaze averts from mine until she says, “I’ll help you.”
“Fine,” I say. Walking is still a bit of a chore for me, anyway.
I hobble into the hallway, making sure not to look too hard at the blood, and kneel down next to the closest policeman. He has blood all over his right side as if he’d been cut or stabbed. With a few false starts, I manage to lean down and put my ear to his chest to see if I can feel his heart beating, the fabric shifting under the slight weight that I put on it.
Besides me, this makes one other person alive and counting.
“Alright, this guy’s okay. Well, not okay-okay, but, uh-- y-yeah, next one!” I use Xandra’s shoulder to help me stand up and walk over to the next officer. This one has what looks like a broken arm and a big, black, swollen eye. I have no doubts that he’s still alive, too, considering that I can see he chest heaving up and down with each breath.
“The last one is…” I trail off, still trying not to look at the girl propped up on the door just a few feet away. By this time, the fire alarms have numbed my ears, but I know that I’d be able to feel a pulse if she still has one. Her mangled head is still on the top edge of my field of vision, and I turn my head so that I don‘t have to look at her too closely. I grasp one of her pale thin arms and put my fingers to her wrist.
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I had some trouble with this chapter, frankly. It's one of the reasons this took so long to get typed. Oh well.
Anyway, sorry for the length, but it just kinda came out that way. Anyway, hope that you enjoyed it, and constructive criticism is appreciated.
