by Rook, Rowan
Blood.
He shook his head, scratching at his brow with sweaty fingers. If only he could just yank the memories out.
He’d witnessed a murder. That was the simple fact of the matter. He’d witnessed a murder outside the general store, the killer had given chase, and he’d managed to lose her and make it home. There was no point in exaggerating or exasperating the affair. That was the situation.
He gasped in another deep breath.
What should he do? Should he call the police?
He shook his head to no one but the quivering figure in the mirror.
No – the police didn’t care about alleyway murders anymore. It was over. Letting it stay that way would be for the best. He needed to pretend it’d never happened.
That’s right. He forced himself to smile and watched his lips curl in the glass.
He’d never witnessed a murder.
****
Mason waited until he could breathe normally before leaving the bathroom. His first instinct was to dash off to his room before Martin noticed, but… His eyes wandered to the door nearest the stairs. Merril’s room.
He cracked the door open and peered inside. It was dim, like usual. For whatever reason, she’d always felt most comfortable in low light. He squinted. “Merril?”
A silhouette stirred beneath the blankets and sat up with a tired smile. “It wouldn’t hurt to knock first, you know.”
“S-sorry.” He scratched the nape of his neck and stepped inside. “I was…distracted.”
He knelt by her bed and forced his mouth into a grin. Something about her casual, quiet voice put him at ease. “How are you feeling?”
“The same.” She answered simply, meeting his eyes through unkempt strands of long blonde hair. Her rounded features gave her an almost child-like appearance that was especially noticeable when she smiled. “Did you get the apples and milk?”
An apple slipped from the bag and landed with a dull splash, rolling towards the gutter.
He flinched, quiet for a while. “Sorry. I got sidetracked, and…”
“It’s okay.” She released a small sigh. “You don’t need to apologize so much, all right? It gets old.” Her disappointment was obvious, but she didn’t voice it. “I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow, so come with me to the store then and we’ll get some.”
Mason forced another grin. “Sure.”
He found his eyes wandering to the room’s sole window. It was locked, good.
Merril blinked, studying his torn sleeve. “Did something happen?”
He stiffened, covering the rip and shaking his head. “N-no. It was raining pretty bad out there. I slipped and caught my arm on…err, something.” Real convincing. “It was dark, so I’m not quite sure what it was.”
She tilted her head, like she didn’t quite believe him. “Was it Martin again?”
“No.” He flushed. “No, just a stupid accident. It was nothing.”
She frowned. “You look awfully shaken for nothing.”
He grimaced, not sure how to argue. Merril was the one person who could read him. Sometimes, he was glad there was someone out there who could, and other times, he wasn’t. “It’s fine.” He insisted louder than he’d meant to. “It’s fine, all right?” His mind swam, searching for a convincing story or excuse. Why wouldn’t she just let it go? “Just…a hard day at school.”
She smiled sadly, eyes skeptical. “I’ve known you since second grade, and lived here for two years now – do you really think you can lie to me that easily?”
He stared at the floor. “Wow. It, uh, really has been two years, hasn’t it? It doesn’t feel like it.” When all else failed, it was time to change the topic.
She sighed, eyeing the tear a few moments longer before giving up and looking at the wall. “It’s going way too fast. I can’t believe it’s been two years since I last saw my parents. And the farther I get away from them, I…”
Mason tensed. Okay, maybe that hadn’t been the best topic to shift to. “Memories are memories. They don’t get farther away.”
“I just don’t get it, I guess.” Merril chewed her bottom lip. “I’ve been sick since I was born, but Mom and Dad were always healthy, much healthier than me. So why did the plague take them first?”
“Aren’t you glad it did?” He stiffened. “Erm, not that your parents died, I mean!” He corrected quickly. “Just…aren’t you glad you’re still here?”
“Yeah. It’s just…” Something sad darkened her emerald eyes. “I wish we didn’t have to spend our last years like this. I wish we could get away, you and me. Without Martin. Without these stupid sicknesses. I wish we could just…live.” She swallowed. “This room feels like a cage.”
He stared, quiet. He knew he needed to say something, but he had no idea what. What could he say? She spent so many hours tucked inside that room with colds and flus and every seasonal illness that it sometimes did seem like he was visiting her in a hospital. It was a shame, but that was simply how it was. She’d been born with a weak body. That the plague hadn’t taken her yet was a miracle in itself.
“Hey, I waste all my time in my room too, you know.” He reminded with a forced smile. “What else is there, really? You aren’t missing much.”
She frowned, opening her mouth to speak, but what emerged instead was a series of ragged coughs.
“Hey, hey!” He leaned closer. “Lie down again – you don’t want to overdo it.”
“No.” She heaved another cough. “I’m sick of lying here. I want to get up!”
“Doesn’t matter – you still have to rest.” He insisted. “After all, we’re going out tomorrow, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right.” She slowly lay back down, resting her head on the pillow. “Seems my memory isn’t much better than the rest of me.” She exhaled a weak laugh.
A meow answered from somewhere near her feet. It was Tilly – one of the few things she’d brought with her from her old house. The cat climbed atop her lap and let out a purr when she scratched behind its ears.
Merril grinned fondly at the lithe black shape. “Hey, what do you think will happen to them – Tilly and Molly – when we’re gone?”
Mason stammered, not sure how to answer. “They’re still animals. They have wild blood in them. I’m sure they’ll be fine.” He didn’t believe that at all – they’d likely starve to death or get picked off by larger predators – but he told Merril what he figured she wanted to hear. She was much closer to the family pets than he was.
For a while, the only sound was the quiet motor of the cat’s purr. It lifted its tail as she stroked its spine.
Merril smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Do you think animals know? What happens after death, I mean. They see everything so much more simply than we do.”
This time he didn’t say anything at all. What could he say to that? Sometimes, she said the oddest things.
He watched her face. Her eyes were dim and red, bony edges pressed against her round cheeks, her blonde hair was a stringy mess, and her skin sat sunken on the fingers running through the cat’s fur.
He grinned as confidently as he could. “It’s not like we’ll find out anytime soon, either. Don’t think about those things so much.”
Her green eyes shivered. “Soon enough. If two years have gone by fast, so will four. And I…I’ll probably be finding out a lot sooner.”
“No.” He assured with the firmest voice he could manage. It wasn’t a tone he used often. “You’ve lived this long. There’s no reason to believe it will get you any sooner than anyone else.”
“We don’t know. We have no way of knowing.” This time, her eyes didn’t stare back at him – they stared at nothing. “We could live another four years, or we could die tomorrow.”
“Or they might find a cure.” Mason interrupted. He regretted it as soon as he spoke – saying words he didn’t believe left a bitter taste on his tongue. Giving comfort was sort of like a game, devising a strategy and finding the right
words to lift the other person up regardless of their honesty. And like all lying, he sucked at it.
“Stop it. Just stop it!” Merril spat. “I know you don’t believe that. Countries have emptied their fortunes in search of a cure and come up empty! The researchers all say they aren’t going to find one, anyway. Don’t you get it? This is it! It’s over…”
He bit his lip when he saw the water welling up in the corners of her eyes. “I know.” He admitted. “Just…calm down, okay? There’s nothing we can do about it, so worrying won’t do any good.”
The plague had already wiped out three thirds of the population since its birth four years ago, and scientists predicted that within another four years, it would claim everything left. The human race would soon be extinct. Again, there was no need to exaggerate or exasperate the situation. That was simple fact. False comfort served no purpose.
No one was certain what had caused it to be begin with. Some claimed that it resulted from a failed biological weapon, while others blamed birth by pollution. Others still heralded it as divine retribution. But all the same, it'd spread to every corner of the planet. Every single person still alive was already infected. It was only a matter of time. The disease progressed at different rates for different individuals, for causes equally unknown. Those who remained may as well have just been lucky, as far as anyone understood. The disease was prone to bouts of rapid, aggressive progression that could take a person out in under eight hours. Those still living had simply learned to live with that constant shadow over their heads. That shadow of impending, imminent death.
Merril nodded weakly. “It’s just…” Her throat bobbed. “I’m scared, Mason. I’ve lived my life on the sidelines and tucked into bed. I don’t want to die that way.”
Mason swallowed, too. She really was scared. He could see it in her gaze and hear it in her voice. She was an expert of brave faces, but all her masks were off tonight. Maybe she’d fed off his unease. He took her hand and held it tightly. “I’m scared, too.”
Their eyes met, shivering green orbs reaching desperately for brown. She inhaled a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I…” Her cheeks flushed white. “I’ve just spent too much time in this damn room.”
He held her gaze a while longer. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She assured one last time. “What about you? Will you be okay when I’m gone?”
Her words sucked the air from his ribs. He let go and rose to his feet, but she held on to his wrist.
“Hey.” She started before he could argue. “Stay with me.”
He looked down at her silently.
Her fingers clenched so tightly that her nails dug into his skin. “Please?”
He surrendered, sinking into the bed beside her. Who knew how many nights together they really had left?
****
Mason paced across his white carpet until foot-shaped imprints dented the fiber. The adrenaline lacing his veins wouldn’t let him rest no matter how drained and exhausted he was. Every nerve stood on edge.
He’d crept out of Merril’s room as soon as she’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t the type of night when their clothes came off and they enjoyed the evening away from Martin’s watchful eyes. It was the type of night when they slept beside each other because they were afraid to be alone. But he couldn’t sleep. How could he sleep after what’d happened earlier? Images of empty eyes and bloodied teeth played across the back of his eyelids each time he closed them.
He allowed himself to think of what he’d seen, just once.
The girl raised her chin and stared his way with blue-gray eyes. Raw puncture marks oozed red from the man’s neck.
He bit his lip.
“I have a friend who knew Elsie well, and you know what she said? She said that Elsie’s family found her behind the house with stab wounds in her neck. It wasn’t the disease, it was murder!”
“She was stabbed? Like, with a knife?”
“Maybe, she said the holes were small, though…”
“Wait, you don’t mean like a bite, do you? I’ve seen people talking about it online. Err, vampires, I mean. You don’t actually think that…?”
His eyes stopped on his computer desk.
There were rumors online. Plenty of rumors. But he’d never taken them seriously. After all, vampires? How could he waste thought on something so blatantly ridiculous?
His skin crawled, something shifting in his mind as he considered the rumors. In the end, he plopped into his computer chair with a defeated groan and took off his distance glasses. This was the final time he’d acknowledge what he’d seen.
His computer was easily his most treasured possession, and also his most valuable. He’d built it himself, and it could run any game out there with precision and speed. All in all, it’d cost him well over two-thousand dollars. It was a bit excessive, perhaps, but on the other hand, it’d given him something to do.
When he wasn’t tinkering with or updating the hardware itself, he whiled away his free time with games and the web. Sometimes, he wondered if he spent as much time in the virtual world as he did the ‘real’ one.
Real. He’d always hated that term; the virtual world was ‘real’, it was simply made of data instead of material. The logic behind it was as authentic as anything comprised of flesh.
And in the virtual world, it was much easier to forget how quickly their last days hurried by. Message boards still existed, and even though activity lowered by the month, they remained a way to connect with the rest of the world. People still talked about things besides the plague there: films, television shows, video games, and music.
Classic media – entertainment produced before the pandemic – made for an even greater escape. Characters there never mentioned the plague. They didn’t shove messages about enjoying limited time to the fullest down consumer’s throats. Publishers hadn’t scrapped the bottom of the barrel.
Media was still produced, but the quality and quantity were lower. The post-plague mindset left its mark on everything. It wasn’t the same. The only way to escape it was to return to the past, where the characters and creators both believed they had a future.
When he’d believed that, he’d wanted to be a programmer – a software engineer. He’d still tinker with code now and then, but…what was the point?
He grimaced into the monitor. What was wrong? It wasn’t like him to be so nostalgic. He jiggled the mouse to wake his machine from sleep.
His face flushed as he typed the term ‘vampires’ in his browser’s search bar. Giving the idea even a slot in his head was humiliating enough, and acknowledging it with his fingers was worse. But, after what he’d seen…
Even if it hadn’t been a real ‘vampire’ – which it hadn’t, of course – the incident still fit what he could remember of the rumors. There had to be some kind of connection there. Something was going on.
Plenty of articles and forum topics came up in his search results. Nothing official – it was all user-generated, and he’d come across most of it before in his many online hours. He clicked a few links and read them more thoroughly. Generally, he’d lent them little more than quick skims before rolling his eyes and closing the tab.
The details behind the various rumors coincided almost eerily well. The consensus seemed to be that people had discovered bodies with small puncture wounds – they were typically located near the neck, which is what’d spurred the use of the term ‘vampire’ – or in some cases, witnessed incidents similar to what he had. He shivered.
A few of these people reported what they’d seen to the authorities, but very few incidents were ever investigated by law enforcement or reported by the press as anything other than a typical alleyway murder or plague death. Some writers suggested it was a large scale cover-up to prevent panic, or hide some new impending doom. None of it was surprising.
There were a few posters who took their claims further, saying they’d witnessed the dead or disappeared lurking by their old houses and haunts. One claimed to hav
e seen a friend get bitten and die of violent, almost plague-like symptoms, even after they’d managed to fight the assailant off. There were also posts made by people claiming to be these ‘vampires’, before they vanished and stopped responding to comments and questions.
Cold fingers crawled up Mason’s spine.
The puncture marks. The way her mouth kissed the victim’s neck. The blood framing her lips.
He ground his teeth. It was perfect. It all fit the rumors perfectly, which wasn’t actually what he’d hoped to find. All he’d wanted was to put his mind at ease, but instead…
It was hard to know how many posts weren’t simply written by copycats and trolls looking for attention. He reminded himself of that almost too desperately. It could still be a coincidence. Some of the more outlandish details, certainly, were exaggerated and fictionalized. Such was the case of all rumors.
After all, the idea of these ‘vampires’ being the deceased was…
He froze, an image of the girl’s face flickering through his memory. Her icy eyes. Her pointed features. Her dark brown hair and the way it’d curled behind her ears. Had he seen that face somewhere before?
Following an impulse, he searched up a page listing death and disappearance reports for the last couple of years in his area. He scrolled through a thick chunk of articles and pictures, not finding anything.
Then he saw her.
Her face peered out from a report filed two years ago. She stared back at him with a smile, her ponytail hanging over a lacy white blouse and her eyes a sunnier sky blue.
The details were brief. Her father found her dead one morning, lying face down on a sidewalk not far from their house, after she’d failed to return home the night before. But at some point between the initial investigation and when the body would’ve been taken to autopsy, the corpse vanished. The article mentioned no supposed cause of death – it closed with a comment asking readers to call the authorities with any information that might lead to the arrest of their resident body-snatcher.
