Charlie (Bloodletting Book 1)
Page 11
Someone was shaking her. Some sadistic asshole grabbed her legs and was yanking them, pulling her back and forth. Her arms were stiff and wooden at her sides, her hands clutching the sheets in tight fists. The cramping in her stomach blurred into a constant screech of pain. Her head was a throbbing strobe light of pain.
All of a sudden everything stopped. The shaking, the cramping, the clutching, the pain in her head. No one was pulling at her legs. She'd had a seizure and it just ended. Something really awful was happening to her. She felt Caroline gently take her arm and roll her onto her side. That’s when her stomach released and she vomited. Her eyes drifted open and she realized that her body was pointed over the edge of the bed and Caroline was holding a plastic bucket near her face, ready. There was so much coming out of her. It seemed impossible. As far as she could remember, she had barely eaten in days. How could there be so much inside her? It kept coming in dark, chunky waves. The smell was putrid and the material in the bucket was black and red with blood and god knows what else. The taste in her mouth was like spoiled meat.
When the last of it finally dribbled out of her, Caroline wiped her mouth with a warm, moist washcloth. Her stomach insisted there was more and she dry heaved for what felt like hours, brown-tinged saliva hanging from her cracked lips.
“You’re almost through. You’re almost to the other side. Just a few more hours,” Caroline whispered. Her voice was like honey, the sweetness spreading through her body. Charlie was just glad her stomach and head finally stopped hurting. Her arms and legs were like stone. She tried to say thank you but her mouth wouldn’t work.
- 4 -
Charlie’s tongue was dry and she was starving. She opened her eyes and found that she was in what appeared to be a child’s bedroom. A lamp sat on the nightstand next to her and it cast a warm, yellow glow in the room, which was decorated with a peculiar, outdated cowboy motif. The strangest thing was that for some reason she was certain that she’d been in that room before.
The floor was cold and she wasn’t surprised to find that she was naked when she stepped out of bed. Her body felt different somehow. Tighter and leaner. She expected to be weakened after the experience she’d just gone through, yet she felt vigorous. Hungry, but healthy. It had been a really long time since she felt healthy. She had a sense that she was weightless, as though she could leap up into the sky and drift away on the wind. She ran her hands over her stomach; no tenderness, no pain. She pressed at the area just above her pubic line where the doctor pulled the baby from her belly. Nothing. It wasn't even sensitive. The scar was there, but it wasn’t the bruised, angry mess it had been in the hospital. It was like just another old scar. Her stomach also felt pulled together and compact again, like it was before she was pregnant, not like the flabby, loose skin it was when she left the hospital. The soft layer of baby fat that had been on her tummy before she’d gotten pregnant was back, but that was it. How long was she asleep?
There was a taste like copper and old, stale water in her mouth. She licked her lips and swallowed. The metallic flavor spread across her tongue. A pulling in her stomach made her anxious, like hunger but without the cramping or digestive gurgling. It was more of a thirst. She looked around the room for her clothes. Hanging over the back of the door was a cute dress on a wire hanger. Surely one of Caroline's, as it looked like something Donna Reed or Patty Duke would wear. To her right was a child’s desk and draped over the chair was a fluffy white robe. She picked it up and wrapped it around herself. The puffy fleece was soft and clean. She was trying to decide what to do next when the door opened and Caroline poked her head in.
“I thought I heard you moving around in here. How are we feeling?” Caroline asked in that bouncy way she had of speaking, like a character in a musical who hasn’t quite found her song yet. She was carrying a towel and a glass of something dark and red. Tomato or cranberry juice perhaps. Perhaps not.
“I feel —” Charlie narrowed her eyes and looked down at herself. “I’m not sure, honestly.”
“It’s going to be strange for a spell, but I’m here and I can help you through it.”
Charlie smiled and nodded. Caroline handed her the glass.
“You'll want to drink this. Slowly. It will make you feel better.”
Charlie took the glass and looked at it. It was room temperature and didn’t smell like juice.
“What is it?” Charlie asked, holding the glass up to the light. It was opaque and deep red. Still, a light seemed to shimmer deep in its color, like stars blinking far away.
“Drink,” Caroline said.
Charlie put the glass to her lips. It wasn’t tomato juice or cranberry juice or any kind of juice at all, it was something else entirely. A distant voice in her head whispered what she already knew – it was blood. It looked like blood and smelled like blood, but her rational mind told her that this couldn’t be true. As soon as the liquid hit her lips, something inside her turned over. It was as though a sleeping animal in her chest awoke and was clawing at her insides, trying to get at the contents of the glass. Charlie sipped and a thousand flavors sizzled and popped in her mouth. Sweet and savory. Spicy and fruity. The tang of fresh mango. The smell of hot buttered toast. The salty richness of breakfast bacon. Every taste she loved hit her mouth at once and before she realized what was happening, she tipped the glass back and drank its contents in great, greedy gulps, red rivulets running down her chin and neck.
Caroline stepped forward with the towel and attempted to run damage control. She pulled the white robe down from Charlie’s top half to keep it from getting splashed by the drink. Charlie guzzled, oblivious, while a strange woman wiped the sloppy mess from her neck and naked breasts. She didn’t care. The drink was the most amazing thing she’d ever tasted. With the glass empty, she stopped and took a jagged breath. She felt like she’d just run a mile in the middle of summer and was unable to get enough air. Caroline looked at her, one eyebrow raised.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked, holding the towel out to Charlie. She took it and wiped her mouth and chin. Caroline took the glass and placed it on a coaster on the bedside table.
“Amazing,” Charlie managed to get out between breaths. She closed her eyes and focused on what was happening inside her. She expected to feel her pulse thumping in her neck and behind her eyes, but she only felt a warm sensation spreading through her body from the center of her chest like a sunrise.
“Will you be able to keep it down?” Caroline asked from a million miles away. Charlie slowly nodded yes as she felt the warmth run out to her arms and legs. It made her skin ripple with excited goosebumps. Her fingertips and the roots of her hair tingled, hot and overstimulated.
When Caroline put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, her entire body responded, shivering and crawling at her touch. Caroline guided her to lay back onto the bed. Charlie squirmed out of the robe and kicked it aside. It was weighing her down and she needed the air on her skin.
Caroline lay down next to her on the bed and put her hand on Charlie’s stomach. The touch made Charlie’s breath quicken. It was as though every pore in her skin was alive and singing. The sheet under her back, the moisture on her lips, the light breeze in the room gently moving every hair on her body, and Caroline’s hand, lazily dragging cold fingers across her stomach, tracing the line of her scar, it all combined into a whirlwind of tactile stimulation.
Charlie took Caroline’s hand and put it to her face. She wanted to feel that cold against her cheek. It gave her a center in the storm to hold onto. Caroline spread her fingers out, cupping Charlie’s cheek, resting the pad of her thumb against her lips. Charlie tried to suck air through her nose in shuddering breaths but couldn't find her footing.
“What’s happening to me?” she managed to whisper. Caroline placed a gentle kiss on Charlie’s shoulder and whispered in her ear.
“You’re coming back to life. Like a desert flower in the morning sun. How do you feel?”
“I feel everything. It’s too muc
h,” she struggled to get out, unable to regulate her breathing. The sensitivity was overwhelming and her body shuddered. Caroline pulled the blanket up from the bottom of the bed and over Charlie and herself. She turned Charlie on her side, facing the wall, and pressed against her back, her arm around her waist. Charlie took her hand and held it against her stomach as she tried to get some semblance of control over her body.
“It won’t stop. It feels like —” was all Charlie was able to get out before sucking deep, painful breaths of air.
“Stop trying to breathe. It won’t help you,” Caroline whispered in her ear, soft but stern. “Just let it flow through you. It will get easier, I promise.”
“What did I drink?” Charlie whispered through chattering teeth. She wasn't cold but her body was shivering, going into shock.
“Blood,” Caroline said, matter-of-factly. Actually hearing it out loud frightened her, so Charlie stopped asking questions. She could feel the strange woman snuggled up beside her naked body. Every button down the front of Caroline’s dress pressed against her back. The ridges of her fingerprints and the fine hairs on the underside of her arm draped across against her belly. It was good to be held.
Nothing about what was happening seemed sexual, though perhaps it should have. She was naked with a woman pressed against her under covers, but the only thing she felt was protected. There was something maternal about being held this way, overwhelmed with a physical sensitivity. Caroline whispering to her. Reassuring her. Taking care of her.
More than anything, she felt alive. For the first time, perhaps ever, she felt truly alive. She was grounded in the natural world. Somehow, fundamentally, she understood that she was made of the same kind of earth and water and air as everything else in the room. If they were to lie in that bed for a thousand years, their bodies would collapse into the same dirt, the electricity of their life bouncing off into the ether together. It made her want to get up and run naked into the night and run her fingers over everything. Touch every plant and animal and person. Taste everything.
The more she thought about it, the idea that she just drank a glass of blood made perfect sense. Blood was the river of life, flowing through your body in an endless loop, carrying nutrients and oxygen and antibodies and white blood cells to every part of you. Blood was life and in drinking it, she tasted life. All life. History and emotions, love and hate, and lazy afternoons basking in the sun. Riding bikes through the desert and looking up at the night sky and knowing that you're one speck among billions of other specks on a little blue planet that is a speck among billions of other specks. Understanding that, because nothing you do matters, you have perfect and complete freedom.
More than anything, what she felt surging through her body was power, in every sense of the word. Physical power. Her body felt strong and vital and vibrant like she could leap up through the ceiling like Superman and throw a train off of its tracks with her bare hands, as well as personal power. A righteous awareness that man’s laws no longer applied to her, because she was above humanity, greater than man.
It was then that she understood what Caroline meant when she said that she was over a hundred and thirty years old. It wasn’t a joke or a metaphor or the ravings of a lunatic. Feeling the raw power rushing through her body, she truly believed that she could live forever. That the sixteen years she’d been alive so far was a blip in what could be thousands of years. That she would walk the earth in a new age after man and animals are burned from the planet and only she and those like her survived.
Everything she’d ever loved or cared about was meaningless. Every rejection and disappointment and cutting remark, completely irrelevant. Her life before that moment was dirt under her heels. Charlie’s body shook and shuddered as these thoughts and feelings burst into her mind like a fireworks show. These realizations and understandings and the feeling of every cell in her body changing and evolving.
After what seemed like hours (though Charlie suspected it was only a few minutes) the barrage of sensations and ideas slowed into a manageable current. She opened her eyes and looked at the wall in front of her. A line of identical stenciled cowboys on bucking horses stood in a permanent posture of celebration, one hand in the air, horse hooves held up like a boxer’s mitts. Charlie rolled over and looked at Caroline, who seemed to be examining her face.
“Do you feel it?” Caroline asked her in an excited whisper.
“Yes,” Charlie said, looking into Caroline’s eyes. She reached down and took Caroline’s hands into her own.
“I want more.”
An excited grin spread across Caroline’s face. It was the most emotion Charlie had ever seen from her. She nodded and stood, holding Charlie’s hands and pulling her out of bed.
“Then let’s get you some more.”
- 5 -
The man was old, unconscious, blindfolded with a bandana and tied to a chair in Caroline’s kitchen. The image was startling and upsetting to Charlie, who had only moments earlier rejected the laws of man and become one with the universe. That all seemed kind of silly when she saw the white-haired old man, a sagging pile of skin in an ugly brown suit, a line of drool hanging from around the belt pulled into his mouth and strapped around his head. A red tube ran out from the brown sleeve of his jacket and was pinched off with a plastic clamp. Caroline picked up a worn leather wallet from the kitchen table and opened it.
“His name is Reginald Mathis Donahue, though he tells people his name is Francis when he’s on the road. Born in 1912. Fought in World War One and Two. He has a wife and five grown children and a whole mess of grandkids. Currently, he makes a living selling kitchen knives to small-town department stores around the southwest. His hobbies include collecting antique guns, carving hideous looking animals out of wood and picking up young hitchhikers and taking advantage of them,” Caroline said, dropping the wallet back on the table.
“How do you know all that?” Charlie asked, looking down at the frail old man tied to the chair.
“The blood,” she said. “The blood tells me everything I need to know.”
Caroline grabbed another chair from the table and dragged it next to the bound man. She sat and looked up at Charlie, her legs crossed at the knee.
“The blood also told me that what he does to girls now is relatively tame compared to what he used to do to girls when he was a younger, more virile man. Including his own daughter.”
Charlie stared at him. Something familiar about his face was making her uncomfortable. Just like that nagging feeling that she’d been in the bedroom before, she felt as though she’d seen this man at some point.
“The question now is what to do with him,” Caroline said, putting her arm around him in an imitation of jovial friendship. Charlie only shook her head.
“I have no idea,” she said, genuinely too confused and scared to have anything to contribute. “Was it his blood I drank?” she asked after a long moment. Caroline nodded.
“Where did you get him from?”
“I plucked him out of his motel room, simple as can be. I’ve had my eye on him for a while now. I’ve got a few people I follow for just these kinds of special occasions,” Caroline said with a grin that was both frightening and beautiful.
“Are you going to kill him?” Charlie asked.
“No,” Caroline said, still smiling, darkness falling over her face. “You are.”
Something behind her eyes told Charlie that how she responded at this moment could put her in a very difficult and scary position.
“I don’t think I can,” Charlie finally managed to stammer out. She was no murderer. Even if this guy, whoever he was, had done the things Caroline claimed he’d done, that didn’t justify killing him. Caroline stood and took her hand.
“It’s too late to make another choice. This is who you are now. That’s done. I know on some level you understand that this man’s life is worth less than yours. He needs to die for you to live. That’s the nature of what we are. What you are now.”
Maybe he was a creep. Maybe he did exploit and abuse people. Children even. Charlie believed everything Caroline said was true because Caroline had no reason to lie to her. After drinking the glass of blood and feeling the flood of ideas and memories and abstract concepts, the notion that Caroline could simply know these things about this man by tasting his blood wasn’t so outlandish. Not after what she’d been through.
He was an old man. A dirty old man with no more right to live than any of the tens of thousands of people who died every day. What’s the loss of one pervy ant in an anthill full of billions? Especially when the loss is for the benefit of a creature as rare and exotic as they were?
Charlie tried to imagine herself drinking the old man’s blood. The image of Bela Lugosi as Dracula with his cape and his arched eyebrows and widow’s peak, clamping onto the neck of the beautiful Mina Harker popped up in her mind, and she laughed out loud. The pieces fell together and all of a sudden the absolute absurdity of it all hit home.