Nightlord: Sunset

by Garon Whited

  I called him up. The phone rang six times before he answered.

  “Mrphgm.”

  “Hey, Travis?”

  “Grumph.”

  “Good morning to you, too. Look, I have a problem, and I need your help.”

  “Dgnwtmtz?”

  “A little before seven. I’m not kidding, Travis. This is serious.”

  There was a pause. “How serious?”

  “I need you, Travis.”

  There was another pause. “Do I have time to shower?”

  “It’s not going to kill me before sunset. Sure.”

  “I’m on it.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  See why I’m friends with the man? Do you have any friends that would do that? I hold myself highly fortunate to know him. But it’s a two-way street; I recall a couple of times I got out of a warm bed for him, too.

  I ate breakfast on campus. It tasted much stronger than I recalled food should. All my senses were cranked up. Not as bad as the night before, but still far over normal. At least the food stayed down. I did try a candy bar first, just to make sure, before Travis and I hit the cafeteria.

  I was getting some odd looks from the staff on my third trip through the line. But I already paid for my meal plan; working at the university has its perks. They couldn’t really say anything so long as I ate it right there.

  Travis and I sat well away from most other people while we talked. I told him my story, he listened. About the time I started in on the story of my supposed previous life, he held up a hand. I stopped. Rummaging in his bag for a moment, he fished out a notebook and a pen.

  “Start over.”

  So I did. It took a couple of hours; he asked questions and I kept interrupting my own story to go through the chow line again. When I brought him up to date, he flipped through the pages he’d filled with the odd, multi-directional chaos notes I’ve seen so often.

  “You know I haven’t written this much for patient reports in the past week?”

  “That’s because you type them.”

  “Computers are wonderful. But still… the sheer volume… Okay. So you want to know what’s going on in your bloodstream and such, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “I can arrange for some tests, sure—Herb works in hematology and I can talk him into it. I don’t know what the schedule looks like for the x-ray or MRI machines—”

  “Hold it, hold it. I was thinking more along the lines of old-fashioned medicine, to start. Gross physical symptoms. I don’t feel like crawling into a magnetic bottle or getting irradiated.”

  He nodded. “I can do that. You know we need to come up with a pathology for this thing.”

  “So you’ll take some blood. Okay. I wouldn’t worry. Apparently it requires fluid interchange. A lot of it.”

  “Sex?”

  “No… As I understand it from things she’s said, only the blood is contagious. You have to get infected blood into your system, whether by drinking it or transfusing it.”

  Travis looked at me. “You were drunk, you say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t remember a thing?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  He shook his head. “Okay.”

  “No, go ahead. You were thinking something.”

  “Just wondering, really…”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you nibble a little too hard, or is it just that time of the month?”

  I looked at his slightly lecherous grin, and I chuckled. “You’re one sick man, you know that?”

  “Mine’s psychological. Let’s look yours over. Or do you need to have lunch, now that you’re done with breakfast?”

  I regarded the tray and thought about it. If we’d had this conversation at an all-you-can-eat buffet, they’d have thrown me out.

  “Give me another run through the line and I’ll be right with you.”

  I spent a good chunk of the morning sitting in a drafty gown while being poked, prodded, and stuck. It occurred to me that if anybody got wind of this, I could wind up in a laboratory permanently… and that immortality could be a terrible curse.

  After the basic physical exam, Travis drew some blood. We dropped it off with Herb on our way out of the university clinic. The physical hadn’t found anything innately wrong, as such. My body fat was way down and my weight was way up. My reflexes were sharper, too; the old joke about tapping the knee and kicking the doctor nearly happened with Travis and I. My range of motion and flexibility were about the same or a little better. I was running a slight fever—about half a degree—and had borderline high blood pressure. Everything else seemed to be normal.

  Once the exam was done, we headed over to the university gym and occupied a weight room. During the post-lunch period of a Monday it was mostly deserted, so we went ahead and shut the door. Travis—a big guy; he was born a brick and grew up to be a wall—was dressed in sweats, just to blend in. I think he’d have been more comfortable in a white lab coat and clipboard. We started more tests.

  Things we noted right off: I was a lot stronger. Last time I checked my bench press, I topped a hundred pounds—but only just; I’m not a brawny guy and I have a desk job. Now… my age is in the near neighborhood of thirty, I’m about ten pounds too thin to look average, and I pushed slightly over three hundred pounds up.

  The leg press was really scary. I’ve always been a walker and a climber. I used to go up mountain paths for the fun of it. When the weather’s nice, I still ride a bicycle to work—it isn’t that far, and it’s not that often. Sitting at a desk most of the day may have ruined my endurance, but I’ve got great legs. When I push the leg press or do squats, I reasonably expect to be able to do it—keep stacking weights; I can take it.

  We ran out of weights.

  Doing the math, we totaled up over half a ton. While I thought of it as heavy, I didn’t think we were pushing my limit.

  Which gave us more ideas. We went into a handball court to get some headroom. My standing high jump was considerably higher; I could have gotten a starter position with any basketball team. My standing long jump was equally impressive—call it thirty feet or so.

  Travis just kept writing as we collected data. He never even blinked.

  We tried a few endurance tests, too. Let me say right off that I can walk forever, but I’m not a runner. I hate running for running’s sake. If I’m running, it’s to get from point A to point B that much faster. Jogging always struck me as a sweaty waste of time. But I made four laps of the quarter-mile track in slightly under four minutes and broke a sweat.

  Travis shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “I’m—what?” I asked, taken aback.

  “You’ve a perfect specimen, as far as I can tell. If you’re not at the limits of human capability, you’re close. Aliens kidnapped you and replaced you with an android. I’m envious as hell.”

  I grinned evilly. “Wanna arm-wrestle?”

  “No, thanks. I want to keep my knuckles. How about a swim? Jogging with you androids is tiring. Have you ever heard of ‘pacing’?” he asked and headed for the showers.

  “Yep. That’s what you do when you’re nervous. Involves a lot of walking back and forth.”

  Travis made a rude noise at me, then smiled. He decided a nice float in the pool and a trip to the steam room would be just the ticket. I decided to hit the high-dive and then join him.

  I like to dive. I’m not good at it, but I like stepping off the twenty-meter platform and plummeting. It’s the free fall; I love it. I like roller-coasters and hang gliding, too. I even jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, once. With a parachute. It’s not quite flying, but it feels like it. So, while Travis floated in the shallow end, I went up the ladder. There were a few other people in the pool, but they were all at the shallow end, playing what appeared to be a game of drown-your-buddy, involving a ball.

  I stepped off the platform and fell like a brick. I hit the w
ater, heels together, nose held shut, and probably with an idiot grin on my face.

  I sank to the bottom like a brick, too. And stayed there.

  I would have sighed, but I needed the breath. I tried to swim upward and only managed to thrash a lot.

  Not good.

  The pool ladder—the water was twenty feet deep—went only about three or four feet into the water. I’m six feet tall, with maybe another couple feet of reach. Somehow, to reach that ladder, I needed to grow another eight feet, minimum.

  I wasn’t even coming close to floating. It occurred to me that my weight problem might be about to kill me. I resolved to never again get into water deeper than my chin once I got out.

  If I got out.

  So I did the only thing I could think of: stay as calm as possible and walk as fast as I could toward the shallow end. It had a sort of nightmare quality to it. I had a sense of infinite hurry, backed by my decided need to breathe, along with a creepingly slow uphill struggle.

  I’ve never noticed how long an Olympic-sized pool is. I noticed then. About fourteen thousand miles, give or take a few hundred yards.

  I made it. I had red flashes behind my eyelids and bright spots dancing before my eyes, but my head finally broke the surface. I blew like a whale, I think, and kept walking, getting my head completely above water and gasping. Then I realized Travis was right there. Lifting me and hauling me forward—he was completely underwater, lifting and shoving while holding his breath. I think he saved my life. I know they’d never have managed to get me out of the pool for mouth-to-mouth in time.

  We made it the last few yards to water shallow enough to stand in and still breathe. We both gasped for air and slowly walk-drifted to a corner with stairs.

  “You okay?” he asked, panting.

  I nodded, still too out of breath to answer.

  “You must’ve been down for four minutes, man. What happened?”

  “I can’t swim,” I gasped.

  “Well, yeah, you’re a lousy swimmer—”

  “No,” I broke in, then coughed for a moment, “I don’t float. I can’t. Sank like a stone.”

  We reached the three-foot deep corner and the stairs. I sat down and put my head down on my knees.

  “So you sink?” he asked. “Interesting.”

  “Yeah. Remind me to buy a lifejacket.”

  “Sure. How about one of the inflatable kind?” he suggested. “You know, we should have seen this coming. You weigh too much for your build.”

  I just nodded. I never floated well anyway, but I could at least swim. Now I was trying to swim with a hundred-pound weight strapped to my back. No wonder I nearly drowned.

  “Jacuzzi?” Travis suggested.

  Relaxing was a good idea, but I really didn’t want to have to deal with water at all.

  “Sauna,” I countered. Travis nodded and helped me up. No wonder vampires had that running water phobia.

  We were in the university clinic that evening, waiting for sunset. It was a slow night in the clinic, which doubles as an emergency room for the campus; the local hospital staffed it. I was sitting in a quiet spot, wired to an EKG and EEG and a bunch of other acronyms, wondering what Travis hoped to learn from this mess of wires. I thought to ask him about some of the things he was adjusting but had an interruption.

  The sunset started. I settled back on the bed and tried to relax.

  A horde of ants crawled out of my skin and started to mambo. Just as they got going good, they set fire to themselves and switched to the lambada. I was not appreciative. At least my guts weren’t cramping up this time; I felt nauseous and ill, but not like some sadist with a penchant for knots had been handed my intestines.

  It turned off. Again, it was like someone turned down a dimmer switch to off—not instantaneous, but a rapid fading to zero.

  I sat up and noted I was soaked in sweat again; not as bad as the icky goo the last couple times—I’ve smelled as bad after a long afternoon in the dust and heat, mowing. But it was definitely not pleasant.

  Travis was staring at me.

  “What?’

  “You’re pale, and your EKG just flatlined. Are you feeling okay?”

  “I feel fine, aside from being wired like a Christmas tree.”

  He examined the machines, hands trembling slightly. He watches me heft three hundred pounds, break world records for jumping, and defy human biology by sinking like a rock—but the graphs had him all a-tizzy. Go figure.

  “This is unbelievable! You have no heartbeat—no heart action at all. And your EEG altered markedly,” he said, examining a strip-chart. “I haven’t seen a brainwave graph like this before.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I said it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Now, can we get me unwired? I’m hungry.”

  “Sure. Can I take a couple of x-rays first?”

  “Fine. Irradiate away if you feel you must. But hurry. I’m not kidding. I feel starved.”

  He hurried.

  Back at his place, he was frying up a steak; we’d stopped to pick up a lot of meat. After draining several pounds of it for me, he was cooking some for himself.

  It wasn’t enough, but it took the edge off.

  “So, what else do we know?”

  “The lab report on your blood came back; you’re O positive, you didn’t eat recently, and you have no identifiable pathogens. No dice.”

  I frowned while he turned the steak over in the skillet.

  “Shows what they know. I’ve stuffed myself all day long.”

  “And you were hungry again when we took the blood sample.”

  “Okay. I see your point. So how do we find an unknown pathogen?”

  “Search me. Without having a clue what we’re looking for—or telling someone about it—we’re out of luck.”

  “Great. What else?”

  “Well, when the sun went down, you did a fine job of becoming dead. I’m still wigging out about that.”

  I looked at him as he calmly added salt and some butter to the skillet. Wigging, indeed.

  “So I’m dead?” I asked.

  “Well… technically, no. You have brain activity—a lot of it, too, in ways that people generally don’t. It’s downright weird.”

  “I gathered. Go on.”

  “You don’t breathe, you don’t eat—except to drink blood. You don’t have heart action, nor can I hear any sounds of digestion or anything else with a stethoscope. Your x-rays show your flesh as being a lot more dense than normal—but your bones are more transparent to x-rays than usual—and your mouth has some peculiar dentition.”

  I ran my tongue over the sharp teeth, upper and lower. They slid out, lengthening slightly; I worked on it for a moment, concentrating, and managed to retract them. It was like concentrating on moving just one toe, or learning to wiggle your ears, but I was getting it. It explained the pains in my mouth during the first three days, anyway. The fangs have to retract somewhere.

  “Which leads us to what conclusion?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d say you’re a vampire, but you apparently get better during the day. Since you don’t fry in the sunlight, that shoots down the vampire idea.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s unreasonable,” I countered. “There are legends about vampires that walked in daylight; they were just weaker during the day. Could be the ultraviolet, maybe, or other solar radiation.”

  “What about the night-stalking, day-fearing, bloodthirsty fiends of evil that haunted mankind and wantonly slew anyone they wished, killing mercilessly in their nocturnal orgies of blood?”

  I looked at Travis. He grinned. I grinned back.

  “Well, nobody’s perfect,” I replied.

  “Good to see you still have a sense of humor.”

  “I may be dead, but I’m still good people. So let’s assume I am a vampire, a kind that doesn’t toast in sunlight.”

  “Okay. Are we postulating
vampires exist?”

  “Yep. Let’s go ahead and add most other supernatural beasties as well, just to be safe.”

  “Great. Can I be a werewolf?”

  “You’re hairy enough. You need sharper teeth, though.”

  “I’ll talk to my dentist. Go on about vampires.”

  I thought about it, remembering all the mythology and folklore I’ve read. I have an eclectic library stuffed into boxes. Someday, I’ll have shelves for it all.

  “All right. There are a lot of legends and folklore about vampires. A common thread to most of them is blood drinking. ‘Why’ varies from culture to culture, but it’s pretty universal.”

  “What are the exceptions?”

  “Female vampires—succubi—sometimes fed on seminal fluid.”

  “Wow. Lucky guy.”

  “Not considering the fact it also sucked the life out of him.”

  “Ouch,” he replied, wincing. “What a way to go.”

  “Male versions of such creatures—incubi—would feed on the sexual energies of women. In all these cases, it’s a symbolic consumption of life energies, really. Blood, semen, sexual power—all just forms of energy, when you come down to it. The energy of life.”

  “So you could get laid instead of drinking blood?” he asked.

  “Or both, if I really wanted to be unkind. I’ll skip that for now; I’ve got too much on my mind. Besides, I have no idea how to feed on sex—and no smart remarks, please.”

  Travis looked thoughtful and sat down at the table with a plate. “You mind if I eat in front of you?”

  “Not so long as I can eat in front of you, someday.”

  He nodded and started in. “You know, with no heart action, I’m not sure you can engage in sexual intercourse. With no blood flow to fill the erectile tissues, you’re probably rather limp.”

  I thought about it and realized he had a point.

  “Could be. That would put a damper on the evening, certainly.”

  Travis chewed and looked thoughtful for a while. I had some thinking to do, myself. This could be doable. If sunrise and sunset were as bad as it got, slurping down restaurant meat drainage could be done. I’d regret not being able to swim. I’d regret not being able to watch a sunrise. But…