Vampires: The Recent Undead

by Harris, Charlaine; Russell, Karen; Kiernan, Caitlin R. ; Smith, Michael Marshall; Armstrong, Kelley; Caine, Rachel; Sizemore, Susan; Vaughn, Carrie; Black, Holly

  I have to choose. Go on like I am, a defect, a loser—at least in other people’s eyes. Or be like Apples, full of life and vigor, and live forever. Except to do that I’ve got to drink other people’s blood and everybody else I care about will eventually get old and die.

  What kind of a choice is that?

  This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to try to work out.

  I get Mom to drive me to the mall the next day. I know she worries about me being out on my own, but she’s good about it. She reminds me not to overexert myself and we arrange what door she’ll meet me at in a couple of hours, and then I’m on my own.

  I don’t want to go shopping. I just want to sit someplace on my own and there’s no better place to do that than in the middle of a bunch of strangers like in the concourse of this mall.

  I watch the people go by and find myself staring at their throats. I can’t imagine drinking their blood. And then there’s this whole business that Apples explained about how she only feeds on bad people. That just makes me feel sicker. When she told me that, all I could think about was that time at dinner when I announced I was becoming a vegetarian and the look on her face when I told them why.

  You are what you eat.

  I don’t want the blood of some freak serial killer nourishing me. I don’t even want the blood of a jaywalker in me.

  After awhile I make myself stop thinking. I do the people-watching thing, enjoying the way all these people are hurrying by my little island bench seat. But of course, as soon as I start to relax a little, some middle-aged freak in a trench coat has to sit down beside me, putting his lame moves on me. He walks by, once, twice, checks out the leg brace, sees I’m alone, and then he’s on the bench and it’s “That’s such a beautiful blouse—what kind of material is it made of?” and he’s reaching over and rubbing the sleeve between his fingers . . .

  If I was Apples, with this vamp strength she was telling me about, I could probably knock him on his ass before he even knew what was happening. Or I could at least run away. But all I can do is shrink away from him, feeling scared, until I see one of the mall’s rent-a-cops coming.

  “Officer!” I yell. They’re all wanna-be-cops and love it when you act like they’re real policemen.

  The pervert beside me jumps up from the bench and bolts down the hall before the security guard even looks in my direction. But that’s okay. I don’t want a scene. I just want to be left alone.

  “Was he bothering you?” the guard asks.

  I see him take it in. The leg brace. Me, so obviously helpless—and damn it, it’s true. And he’s all solicitous and pretty nice, actually. He asks if I’m on my own and when I tell him I’m meeting my mom later, offers to walk me to the door where I’m supposed to meet her.

  I take him up on it, but I’m thinking, it doesn’t have to be this way. If I let Apples change me, nobody will ever bother me again. It’d be like my own private human genome project. Only maybe I’m not supposed to be healthy. I keep thinking that maybe my asthma and bad leg are compensating for some other talent that just hasn’t shown up yet.

  I think of people throughout history who’ve overcome their handicaps to give us things that no one but they could have. Stephen Hawking. Vincent van Gogh with his depressions. Terry Fox. Teddy Roosevelt. Stevie Wonder. Helen Keller.

  I’m not saying that they had to be handicapped to share their gifts with us, but if they hadn’t been handicapped, maybe they would have gone on to be other people and not become the inspirations or creative people they came to be.

  And I’m not saying I’m super smart or talented, or that I’m going to grow up and change the world. But it doesn’t seem right to just become something else. I won’t have earned it. It’s just too . . . too easy, I guess.

  “There’s a reason why I am the way I am,” I tell Apples later.

  We’re sitting in the rec room, the TV turned to MuchMusic, but neither of us are really watching the Christina Aguilera video that’s playing. Dad’s in the kitchen, making dinner. Mom’s out in the garden, planting tulip and crocus bulbs.

  “You mean like it’s all part of God’s plan?” Apples asks.

  “No. I don’t know that I believe in God. But I believe everything has a purpose.”

  Apples shakes her head. “You can’t tell me you believe your asthma and your leg are a good thing.”

  “It might seem like they weaken me, but they actually make me strong. Maybe not physically, but in my heart and spirit.”

  Apples sighs and pulls me close to her. “You always were a space case,” she says into my hair. “But I guess that’s part of the reason I love you as much as I do.”

  I pull back so that we can look at each other.

  “I don’t want you to change me,” I say.

  Apples has always been good at hiding what she’s feeling, but she can’t hide the disappointment from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  “Don’t be,” she says. “You need to do what’s right for you.”

  “I feel like I’m letting you down.”

  “Cassie,” she says. “You could never let me down.”

  But she moved out of the house the next day.

  Three: Appoline

  Life sucks.

  Or maybe I should say, death sucks, since I’m not really alive—but everybody thinks death sucks because for them it’s the big end. So that doesn’t work either.

  Okay. How about this: undeath sucks.

  Or at least mine does.

  I had to move out of the house. After four years of waiting to be able to change Cassie, I just couldn’t live there any more once she turned me down. I can’t believe how much I miss her. I miss the parents, too, but it’s not the same. I’ve never been as close to them as Cassie is. But I adore her and talking on the phone and seeing her a couple of times a week just isn’t enough.

  Trouble is, when I do see her or talk to her, that hurts, too. Everything just seems to hurt these days.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about Sandy Browning, my best friend in grade school. We were inseparable until we got into junior high. That’s when she starting getting into these black moods. Half the time you couldn’t see them coming. It was like these black clouds would drift in from nowhere and just envelop her. When I discovered she was cutting herself—her arms and stomach were crisscrossed with dozens of little scars—I couldn’t deal with it and we sort of drifted apart.

  There’s two reasons people become cutters, she told me once, trying to explain. There’s those that can’t feel anything—the cutting makes them feels alive. And then there are the ones like her, who have this great weight of darkness and despair inside them. The cutting lets it out.

  I couldn’t really get it at the time—I couldn’t imagine having that kind of a bleak shadow swelling inside me—but I understand her now. Ever since Cassie turned me down, I’ve got this pressure inside me that won’t ease and I feel like the only way I can release it is to open a hole to let it out. But it doesn’t work for me. The one time I ran a razor blade along the inside of my forearm, it hardly bled at all and the cut immediately started to seal up. Within half an hour, there wasn’t a mark on my skin.

  Sandy had been completely addicted to it. Her family moved away the year before I became a vamp and I don’t know what ever happened to her. I wish I’d been a better friend. I wish a lot of things these days.

  I wish I’d never talked to Cassie about my wanting to turn her.

  Sometimes I wonder: did I want to do it for her, so that she could finally put aside the limitations of her physical ailments, or did I do it for me, so I wouldn’t have to be alone?

  I guess it doesn’t matter.

  I’m sure alone now.

  I live in a tiny apartment above the Herb and Spice Natural Foods shop on Bank Street. I like the area. During the day, it’s like a normal neighborhood with shops along Bank Street—video store, comic book shop, gay bookstore, restaurants—and mostly residential buildings in
behind on the side streets. But come the night, the blocks up north around the clubs like Barrymore’s become prime hunting grounds for someone like me. All the would-be toughs, the scavengers and the hunters, come out of the woodwork, hoping to prey on the people who come to check out the bands and the scene.

  And I prey on them.

  But even stopping them from having their wicked way doesn’t really mean all that much anymore. I’m too lonely. It’s not that I can’t make friends. Ever since I got turned, that’s the least of my problems. It’s that I don’t have a foundation of normalcy to return to anymore. I don’t have a home and family. I just have my apartment. My job at the coffee shop. My hunting. I can’t seem to get close to anyone because as soon as I do, I remember that I’m going to be like I am forever, while they age and die. Sometimes I imagine I can see them aging, that I can see the cells dying. It’s even worse when I’m back home, seeing it happen to Cassie and my parents, so it’s not like I can move back there again either.

  That’s when I decide it’s time to track down the woman who turned me.

  It’s harder than I think. I don’t really know where to start. Because she found me outside a concert at the Civic Centre, I spend most of December and January going to the clubs and concerts, thinking it’s my best chance. Zaphod Beeblebrox 2 closes down at the end of November, but Barrymore’s is still just up the street from where I live, so I drop in there almost every night, sliding past the doorman like I’m not even there. I can almost be invisible if I don’t want to be noticed—don’t ask me how that works. That’s probably why I can’t find the woman, but I don’t give up trying.

  I frequent the Market area, checking out the Rainbow and the Mercury Lounge, the original Zaphod’s and places like that. Cool places where I think she might hang out. I go to the National Arts Centre for classical recitals and the Anti-Land Mines concert in early December. To Centrepoint Theatre in Nepean. Further west to the Corel Centre. I even catch a ride up to Wakefield, to the Black Sheep Inn, for a few concerts.

  This calls for more serious cash than I can get from my salary at the coffee shop and the meager tips we share there, so I take to lifting the wallets of my victims, leaving them with less cash as well as less blood. My self esteem’s taking a nose dive, what with already being depressed, making no headway on finding the woman, and having become this petty criminal as well as the occasional murderer—I ended up having to kill another guy when I discovered he was raping his little sister and I got so mad, I just drained him.

  It’s weird. I exude confidence—I know I do from other people’s reactions to me, and it’s not like I’m unaware of how well I can take care of myself. But my internal life’s such a mess that sometimes I can’t figure out how I make it through the day with my mind still in one piece. I feel like such a loser.

  I have this to look forward to forever?

  Cassie’s the only one who picks up on it.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks when I stop by for a visit during her Christmas holidays.

  “Nothing,” I tell her.

  “Right. That’s why you’re so mopey whenever I see you.” She doesn’t look at me for a moment. When she does look back, she has this little wrinkle between her eyes. “It’s because of me, isn’t it? Because I didn’t want to become a . . . to be like . . . ”

  “Me,” I say, filling in for her. “A monster.”

  “You’re not a monster.”

  “So what am I? Nothing anybody else’d ever choose to be.”

  “You didn’t choose to be it either,” she says.

  “No kidding. And I don’t blame you. Who’d ever want to be like this?”

  She doesn’t have an answer and neither do I.

  Then one frosty January evening I’m walking home from the coffee shop and I see her sitting at a window table of the Royal Oak. I stop and look at her through the glass, struck again by how gorgeous she is, how no one else seems to be aware of it, of her. I go inside when she beckons to me. Today she’s casual chic: jeans, a black cotton sweater, cowboy boots. Like me, she probably doesn’t feel the cold anymore, but she has a winter coat draped over the back of her chair. There’s a pint glass in front of her, half full of amber beer.

  “Have a seat,” she says, indicating the empty chair across from her.

  I do. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I don’t know where to look. I want to stare at her. I want to pretend I’m cool, that this is no big deal. But it is.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” I finally say.

  “Have you now.”

  I nod. Ignoring the hint of amusement in her eyes, I start to ask, “I need to know—”

  “No, don’t tell me,” she says, interrupting. “Let me guess. First you tried to turn . . . oh, your best friend, or maybe a brother or a sister, and they turned you down and made you feel like a monster even though you only feed on the wicked. But somehow, even that doesn’t feel right anymore. So now you want to end it all. Or at least get an explanation as to why I turned you.”

  I find myself nodding.

  “We all go through this,” she says. “But sooner or later—if we survive—we learn to leave all the old ties behind: friends, family, ideas of right and wrong. We become what we are meant to be. Predators.”

  I think of how I wanted to turn Cassie and start to feel a little sick. Up until this moment, her refusing to be turned had seemed such a personal blow. Now I’m just grateful that of the two of us, she, at least, had some common sense. Bad enough that one of us is a monster.

  “What if I don’t want to be a predator?” I ask.

  The woman shrugs. “Then you die.”

  “I thought we couldn’t die.”

  “To all intents and purposes,” she says. “But we’re not invincible. Yes, we heal fast, but it’s genetic healing. We can deal with illnesses and broken bones, torn tissues and birth defects. But if a car hits us, if we take a bullet or a stake in the heart or head, if we’re hurt in such a way that our accelerated healing facilities don’t have the chance to help us, we can still die. We don’t need Van Helsings or chipper cheerleaders in short skirts to do us in. Crossing the street at the wrong time can be just as effective.”

  “Why did you turn me?”

  “Why not?”

  All I can do is stare at her.

  “Oh, don’t take it so dramatically,” she says. “I know you’d like a better reason than that—how I saw something special in you, how you have some destiny. But the truth is, it was for my own amusement.”

  “So it was just a . . . whim.”

  “You need to stop being so serious about everything,” she tells me. “We’re a different species. The old rules don’t apply to us.”

  “So you just do whatever you want?”

  She smiles, a predatory smile. “If I can get away with it.”

  “I’m not going to be like that.”

  “Of course you won’t,” she says. “You’re different. You’re special.”

  I shake my head. “No, I’m just stronger. I’m going to hold onto my ideals.”

  “Tell me that again in a hundred years,” she says. “Tell me how strong you feel when anything you ever cared about, when everybody you love is long dead and gone.”

  I get up to leave, to walk out on her, but she beats me to it. She stands over me, and touches my hair with her long cool fingers. For a moment I imagine I see a kind of tenderness in her eyes, but then the mockery is back.

  “You’ll see,” she says.

  I stay at the table and watch her step outside. Watch her back as she walks on up Bank Street. Watch until she’s long gone and there are only strangers passing by the windows of the Royal Oak.

  The thing that scares me the most is that maybe she’s right.

  I realize leaving home wasn’t the answer. I’m still too close to the people I love. I have to go a lot farther than I have so far. I have to keep moving and not make friends. Forget I have family. If I don’t have to watch the peo
ple I love age and die, then maybe I won’t become as cynical and bitter as the woman who made me what I am.

  But the more I think of it, the more I feel that I’d be a lot better off just dying for real.

  Four: Cassandra

  In the end, I did it for Apples, though she doesn’t know that. I don’t think I can ever tell her that. She thinks I did it to be able to run and breathe and be as normal as an undead person can be. But I could see how being what she is and all alone was tearing her apart and I started to think, who do I love the best in the world? Who’s always been there for me? Who stayed in with her weak kid sister when she could have been out having fun? Who never complained about taking me anywhere? Who always, genuinely enjoyed the time she spent with me?

  She never said anything to me about what she was going through, but I could see the loneliness tearing at her and I couldn’t let her be on her own anymore. I started to get scared that she might take off for good, or do something to herself, and how could I live with that?

  Besides, maybe this is my destiny. Maybe with our enhanced abilities we can be some kind of dynamic duo superhero team, out rescuing the world, or at least little human pieces of the world.

  The funny thing is, when I told her I wanted her to turn me, she was the one who argued against it. But I wouldn’t take no and she finally gave in.

  And it’s not so bad. Even the blood-sucking’s not so bad, though I do miss eating and drinking. I guess the worst part was those three days I was dead. You’re aware, but not aware, floating in some kind of goopy muck that feels like it’s made up of all the bad things people have ever done or thought.

  But you get over it.

  What’s my fear? Fuzzy animal slippers. I used to adore them, back when I was alive. Even at sixteen-years-old, I was still wearing them around the house. Now I break into a cold sweat just thinking about them.

  Pretty lame, huh? But I guess it’s a better weakness than some you can have. Because, really. How often do you unexpectedly run into someone wearing fuzzy animal slippers?