Death Becomes Her

by Michael Anderle

  His daughter was going to die.

  —

  Michael followed Kevin out of the office and changed to myst. He had watched Bethany Anne talk with Patricia and studied what he could about her.

  With a sigh internally, he decided to swing by Carl and sent him a message to go back to the plane, he would meet him there later.

  The plane had everything they would need to stay the night. There were only two of them, and Michael didn’t need much room to sleep. In fact, there were two ways to get to the area that Michael slept, and both of them were so small that you couldn’t fit a hand into the pipes which, after a couple of twists and turns opened into a small area in the back of the plane underneath the bedroom. It actually was part of the bedroom really, it is just that there was a metal plate between his section and the bed up top. While he couldn’t myst into the area from outside the plane normally, there was a way to release a small hole for his entrance and exit while the plane was on the ground. If he ever left the plane and failed to get back on before it took off, it would automatically close before the plane hit 100 mph and he would have to get back to where ever he needed to be some other way.

  He had the modifications done after he took possession, and none of them were shown on the plane schematics. Those that had made the upgrades had their memories changed, they couldn’t remember doing anything but a few touch-ups to the interior bedroom in the back.

  That was where Carl or William would have slept, normally.

  Michael was a sun-walker, as was one other of his immediate children. However, by the second generation the sun would hurt a grandchild of his very painfully. It would only be a few minutes before they would die. By the third generation they couldn’t allow it to hit their skins, lest they burn and die in seconds.

  Most of them could stay awake in the day, but they weren’t superhuman, they needed sleep like anyone would. Since most were affected by sunlight it was more convenient that they sleep during the day.

  For Vampires, blood would help them but it wasn’t quite a ‘drink or die’ situation. The ability to use any special capabilities relied on the energy blood afforded for every vampire. Those that they fought, the Forsaken, they would harvest humans and drink at least weekly. The more they would drink, the more their changed bodies craved it until it was almost all consuming for them. They were the true vampires of old, the evil monsters the tales were told about.

  Michael had been fighting for so long already that he would often sleep. His body aged about one year in ten for every year he was awake, and perhaps one year in twenty for every year he would sleep.

  The belief that vampires were forever young was inaccurate. If you consider a normal person would age fifty years; a vampire would only look five years older. If he slept, then the vampire might only have aged a couple of years.

  There was one way for a vampire to roll back the time on their body. They had to create a new vampire. When the process was finished, their body would become about the same age as the new acolyte.

  This was never a problem for those they fought. They had no concerns on who they turned and whether they died or not. If they made someone change who failed, they would shrug and walk out years or decades younger leaving a dried-up husk up behind.

  Just another missing persons’ case.

  Michael had only turned six so far in his life and none since he had come to America.

  He didn’t have a sire. The story of his turning was unique and certainly more painful than most turnings he had been privy to.

  He had come to a pretty early end of his human existence in the mountains back in what is now called Romania. The alien essence which created vampires seeks to ride a human’s body, changing it into something more like their original hosts he believed. Michael had never figured out if it was something from this universe, or elsewhere.

  The virus was part of him. If he drained a human, the exchange of his blood with the human would allow the virus to overcome the hosts ability to protect itself. Michael believed it was at this time the challenge to a persons soul occurred.

  The first stage brought agonizing pain through the nervous system. The body wasn’t physically hurt, but every nerve felt on fire, rough and raw. It was as if the body had been dropped into a pool of acid being eaten from both inside as well as the outside of the body. A lot of humans would die at this point. Why keep on living when you had no idea how long the pain would last?

  Michael had seen some of the strongest give up at this stage, and some of the most physically frail persevere.

  The human’s thinking brain would be offline, all it could do was feel the pain, there was no thinking at this point in the conversion.

  Slowly a person would regain the ability to think through this pain and it was at this stage that the most insidious attack of the virus would happen.

  It would tempt the host. Once the change had occurred, the host has already mutated enough that the virus would be able to continue living and seek blood in an unquenchable desire. Here the virus would start whispering into the host’s mind that they have become gods. How,if they would just allow the virus the ability to take control a little while, it could stop the pain that was forever causing them to scream and gnash their teeth, and give them rest.

  Oh, but the lie it told. If the host would agree, the virus would be able to lock the host’s self will and they would be a passenger in their own mind while the virus became the monster of legends, only listening to their desire for flesh or the commands of their maker.

  They would become Nosferatu. No humanity was inside this body. With incredible strength, a cadaverous grey skin and red eyes the host would rise up to start killing and drinking any who they could hear, see or sense. It would go on an eating and killing frenzy until the being was satiated and could find a place to safely hide while it finished the transformation. When the host woke up, the original soul was no longer in possession, and would never be again.

  In each successive generation the virus would be weaker, and the challenges to overcome would be less. This would help some to make it through the transformation with their soul intact, but the power of the vampire could never match that of their sire. If a host were to overcome the virus and then fall into a mental exhaustion, they would fail to retain their memories and possibly lose their knowledge and wake up as but children. They would need to be taught all over again how to eat, how to walk and how to talk.

  Those who were barely able to overcome the virus would be weak as vampires. Still stronger than most humans at this point, but certainly more useful in supporting roles which didn’t require them to think out of the box, they would follow orders very well.

  The longer the host fought the virus, the more of themselves they would retain. Should they make it all the way through until they woke up, then they would be as strong as possible and would remember everything before their transformation.

  Even with the careful selection Michael required of any of his family, to have a candidate make it all the way without failing the conversion was still a case-by-case basis.

  So, he required any in his family to only select from those who were going to die. If the selected were to choose death over the pain, then at most they lost six months of their life. If the virus was able to persuade them to allow it to take control, then when it opened its red eyes the head would be decapitated before it blinked once.

  Michael’s family never allowed a Nosferatu to live, it is what they fought against and what they have been fighting against for ages.

  There were two sides to this struggle between the vampires. Those of Michael’s family, and everyone else.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Military Base, Colorado Mountains

  Bethany could see so many emotions going through her dad’s face. It was rare that he didn’t keep a shield up, and she knew he was hurting.

  It had been a long time, but she let her professional demeanor down and laid aside the mask of toughness she wore while ou
t in the world.

  “Dad, what is it?” She reached across the desk and took one of his big, calloused hands.

  He looked into her eyes. “How long do you have?”

  She stared at him, blank faced for a minute while her mind raced. It was obvious he didn’t know when she got here that she was sick. He wouldn’t have hugged her and gotten straight down to business. In fact, until he heard the orders, he wasn’t really even thinking about her being here much at all.

  So what had changed? Why had her orders upset him so much and how had it tipped him off to ask her about it? And should she answer the question? Lying was out. He didn’t lie to her, she wouldn’t lie to him.

  She might, however, not answer the question.

  Her indecision reached her eyes.

  He asked her again, softly, “How long?”

  She sighed, “Six months. I think that the doctors could be wrong, they don’t understand how my blood cells are so messed up and they can’t find any problems with me. I’ve been to four specialists so far.”

  Lance straightened up a little in his chair and his eyes lost their unfocused look, “Then I guess we will go to a fifth, and a sixth. If we have to see another ten doctors, Bethany Anne, we will see another ten doctors. I won’t let this take you.”

  “Dad, I have worked with some of the best. I asked Martin for a couple of favors and he was able to let me see some highly placed specialists...”

  “Martin knew about this and didn’t tell me?” Lance’s face started to color red again and he had an outlet to start focusing on.

  Bethany Anne stopped that cold.

  “He had no right to tell you! It was my request and I asked for his promise to tell no one. If I didn’t need him to make the requests for me, I wouldn’t have told him, either. This is my fight, my battle and I will make it happen my way.”

  She stood up and started walking back and forth in front of his desk, causing his head to swivel like he was watching a tennis match.

  “I am my own person, Dad. I have as much a right to live my life how I intend to live it. By the same token, I have as much a right to decide how I am going to die as well. I have had my grief, and while it may come as a shock to you right now, I carefully considered what happened with Mom and I think at some level she knew something was wrong. She made her decision to do as much for me as she could before she died. You always said that she was with me morning, noon and night and now I understand why. I don’t have children, and I’m thankful for that right now. However, I want to help those who can’t help themselves and if that means finishing my cases until I don’t wake up one morning, then that is how it is going to happen. I’m not going to run from one doctor’s office to the next, one lab to the next, with so much blood taken that I can’t even get out of bed. That is not a life I want to live and I won’t go down that path. You have told me that Mom never was seriously bed-ridden, right?” She stopped her pacing to stare at him.

  He had so many emotions going through him, could she be right? Could Merideth have known? Why wouldn’t she have told him? “That’s right.”

  His attack on Martin was a passing thought.

  Bethany Anne reached down to his desk and picked up a rock paperweight she had given him on her sixteenth birthday. She told him then that it represented the rock he was in her life.

  “So I might as well continue working until the day God takes me home. If I can help one more person, it beats waiting on Death.” She put the rock down and took a seat.

  “How do you know that everything has been tried? I know that we could have found something to help Mom if she would have just confided with me. I wasn’t the man your mother needed and I won’t let you go.” Lance’s eyes were hooded in memories and pain.

  He was feeling the pain of the past, she had seen him do this from time to time. “Dad, you have never let me go, you raised a hell of a woman, one I am proud to be. You allowed me the opportunity to become who I could be. Whether it was for ninety years, or just twenty-nine, I am proud of my life. There are many who make it to seventy and can’t say that much. I can. I’m sorry that I waited this long to tell you. I couldn’t face hurting you, I didn’t want to see the pain in your eyes, to bring you the pain that I see in your heart right now. I’m sorry, I’m not proud how weak I’ve acted in this. I wanted my life my way and if I didn’t have to talk to you right now, I could just keep on until close to the end.”

  She leaned back into the chair, she said her piece the best she could. No parent should go through the death of one of their children, and she had to be the one to tell him. If she could have run away from this, the temptation might have been too much.

  She spied the orders, still sitting on his desk. She wanted to know what they meant, and how it affected her. Like she thought before, she had a hard stop and time was wasting. Maybe this could get her dad to come up for air.

  “What are your orders, General?”

  Lance looked up and followed Bethany Anne’s eyes to the forgotten orders she had handed him.

  ‘Orders?’ he thought. His orders were for her to go see more doctors. His orders were for her to not accept this result. His orders were to, well, to live.

  And, to a point, Lance realized she was living. She hadn’t allowed this death sentence to stop her from doing that. She was living what time she had left her way, on her terms. Just like Meredith had. Meredith hadn’t lost faith in him, Meredith had total faith that he would carry on like the soldier she had known him to be.

  A tear formed in his eye. His wife had total faith in him and spent every minute she had been able to with their daughter. She was the rock that his family had been built on, not him. Now, his daughter was the rock and he was just figuring this out. Why is it that we never see the obvious when it is in front of our face?

  The old man’s voice came back to his thoughts. “We are the ones who protect the protectors, we are the ones who nightmares fear.” Tom’s comment that maybe they were doing scientific experiments on those who were going to die soon came to mind as well.

  They all knew it. Carl, the spook in Washington, and the old man. They all knew that Bethany Anne was the person to be interviewed. Frank had tried to tell him that the family worked for the protection of people. Carl had told him that the operative would officially ‘die’ in the records. Just like Bethany Anne was really going to die in just a few months.

  Finally, the man had told him that his family wasn’t created like a normal family. That they used those in the military and others. They came calling for someone very special, unique. They had come requesting Bethany Anne. And they wouldn’t have done that if they felt she was just going to die in a few months. They knew how to fix this blood issue, but they weren’t saying so. He felt a little hope. But how to reconcile that he would never know what happened?

  He tried to gather his thoughts on everything that had gone on today, his intuition guided his decision. He didn’t know all the answers, but he did believe one truth, Bethany Anne’s best chances were with her orders.

  He might not ever try to find out about the family, but if Bethany Anne disappeared tomorrow night in that vault, he sure as hell would continue to search for his family. If that pissed off Carl’s boss, well then he could just come talk to him about it. It’s not like he would be hiding anywhere.

  —

  Carl nodded to the soldier on guard duty outside of the plane and stepped up into the aircraft. They had connected power to the airplane so that the engines didn’t have to run. He went ahead and hit the button to close the door after letting the guard know to be careful when it came up.

  He wasn’t really sure how Michael had gotten into the Base. He never felt him during the trip, and he wasn’t aware of him getting on the plane ahead of him. While he hadn’t gone back into the rear bedroom to see if anyone was in there, he was pretty sure that the pilot would have mentioned something about it when he got on the plane.

  If Michael needed Carl to open the door for h
im, he would certainly know about it.

  Carl went over to the bar and poured a small amount of Drambuie into a glass. He didn’t like it on the rocks, it just watered down the liquor. Carl had never actually been drunk, but he did enjoy a small amount after an operation and right now he was wound up tight enough to feel like he had been in an operation.

  He sat back in one of the luxuriously upholstered seats. There were only six seats in this plane, plus the bedroom. You could sleep in any of them, they all laid back and there was a small kitchenette and bathroom up front. They were good for a few days of eating on the plane.

  Michael typically didn’t interact much with anyone when he was awake. When Bill was working, you could toss a coin sometimes to figure out if he would talk with the humans around him. Carl had studied him for a while and realized that if it was a new group, he probably would. Then, if they worked with that group within the next few years he would again. It was only after about five to seven years that he would stop fraternizing with them.