The thought bummed me out but not as much as knowing if homeless folks were dying left, right, and center, and no one cared, how many non-homeless people was John Smith killing, undetected?
I started reading the obituaries more closely, looking for sudden, unexpected deaths that occurred in unusual places. I found one or two at first. But as December had rolled into January, I located more.
It was clear to me John Smith must be out there, adding to his collection of victims. And I had a report to do.
When I finally determined it was time to face the music, get on the bus, go to the library and get the information I needed for my report, I figured it was best to be prepared.
I was carrying a couple stakes the night I met John Smith.
CHAPTER 29
When people talk about taking the bus to meet their destiny, they’re usually talking about a cross-country ride.
Maybe they’re hopping a bus to Nashville or L.A., convinced that on the other end of all the bumps, bad food, and exhaust, fame and fortune await them.
I was headed across town.
Winter was in full swing when I boarded the cross-town bus after school and night came early. By the time I got to the library, dusk had settled in.
By the time I emerged from the world of knowledge with two dozen printed copies of information I pulled off of newspaper microfiche, the sun was long gone.
I walked the two blocks to the bus stop, looking around at all the cars in the library parking lot, envying everyone their personal transportation in a well-lit area with a friendly door a ten second run away.
My hands were in my pockets, partially braced against the cold, and partially so I could clutch the tent stakes I planned to pull out if anyone so much as looked at me the wrong way while I stood and waited for my noble, city-run steed to pick me up.
I got to the corner roughly a minute after the previous bus had pulled away and settled in for a ten minute wait. My eyes shifted back and forth, over my shoulders, and across the street, waiting for something to come out of the night and grab me.
I’m still not sure where John Smith came from, or how he managed to avoid my constantly moving glance. Vampire speed maybe. Or a blind spot in my defenses.
All I know is, one moment I was looking for the bus, pulling my hand out of my pocket to check my watch, the next John Smith grabbed my arm. He picked me up by the waist, stuck a hand over my mouth, took a few quick steps and another moment later, I was in an alley with him.
A dark one, naturally.
I started screaming the second he grabbed me but his seal over my mouth was fairly complete, and all the sound that did come out emanated from my nose. Not very effective, when it came to bringing out a knight in shining armor.
I felt a light pinch in my neck, and then no pinch at all, my struggling went from ineffective to nearly nonexistent. Somewhere in my brain I knew I should fight but all I could do was let out a soft gasp. Then another.
I felt light-headed, and realized with almost no fight, I was about to go down for the final time. It was all going to be over in a matter of seconds.
Then Emma entered the alley.
CHAPTER 30
If you know anything about history, you know humans used to be shorter.
There’s a science there, a strange combination of lust and vegetables. Women like big, strong men, and they mate with them. Men and women both will eat stuff that keeps them bigger and stronger if they have the option. Or at least they did until junk food became readily available.
A person born today generally has a couple of inches on someone born a century ago. They’ll tower over someone born a thousand years back.
What I’m trying to tell you is, I paid attention in history class. Emma, my vampire savior, was a tiny little thing.
Which is not to say she wasn’t deadly. Or devastating.
I didn’t really think about any of this while I was lying on the ground, dying. What I thought was man, my dad would kill to see this.
My dad loves movies where two dudes just beat on each other in complicated ways. Old kung-fu flicks. Modern movies that starred people who used to fake-wrestle for a living. And all those random motion pictures from overseas and feature impossible-to-understand plots and fight scenes that take three weeks to film because the directors keep looking for new ways to have people face-punch each other.
All those things were nothing compared to what Emma and John did in front of me.
It was like all those kinds of fights in fast-forward. Think about it this way. Imagine you had a few hundred years to learn how to punch people as painfully as possible. Then imagine doing the punching at five times regular speed.
That was what I was watching, when I wasn’t in the middle of blacking out.
At first, I tried to determine who was winning. But since neither of them ever fell down, I felt like it was too close to call.
The two of them pulled out wooden stakes, and everything sped up.
In the movies, when someone gets stabbed, the world seems to stop so that everyone can see someone is winning and someone is losing. But in real life, that doesn’t happen. I could, from time to time, see what looked like new holes in their clothes , but where the stakes went in, where they came out, and what effect it had on Emma and John were a mystery to me.
After a few minutes, or a few hours, or however long I lay there, I realized the fight was evenly matched. Neither of them was going to fall as long as nothing interfered to tip the scales one way or the other.
Then Wash arrived.
He appeared from nowhere, leaping through the air to smash into John like a human cannonball. Wash hit John hard, and John flew backwards out of the alley while Wash smashed to the ground.
John hit the sidewalk at the mouth of the alley, rolled backwards, popped to his feet like a ninja, and threw his stake directly into Emma’s eye.
She shrieked, and fell to the ground. Wash turned to help her, and Emma pointed to the place where John had been standing a moment ago.
John was, of course, missing.
“Get him,” said Emma, as she pulled the stake from the gore that used to be her eyeball.
Wash didn’t argue. He just ran, faster than I could track, and vanished from the alley.
I looked at Emma, whose eye socket was now a slowly sealing hole.
“Sorry about your eye,” I managed to gasp. Then everything went black.
CHAPTER 31
Everyone always says they want to die peacefully in their sleep but that’s a lie. No one really wants to die at all.
That’s what I found myself thinking as Emma picked my body up in a fireman’s carry and started running towards the nearest hospital.
Or what I thought was the nearest hospital.
In all honesty, I was, at best, only partially aware of what was going on around me.
The library was in the affluent center of the city at one time. Over the course of 150 years, the city expanded outward, the houses on the edge of town got newer and the houses in the center of town got older. And cheaper. The people who moved into them became a little less affluent.
The bad part of town started to crowd around the library’s well-lit parking lot.
You might wonder how Emma managed to carry me nearly ten blocks in the early evening two blocks from a major hub of activity. People in that area knew they needed to mind their own business, stay indoors, and call 911 if something looked amiss outside.
Did anyone make any calls? Did anyone try to play the hero, attempt to chase down the five-foot-nothing woman with another woman slung over her shoulder? Did someone offer to call an ambulance?
I don’t know.
I could see sidewalk. I could see snow. Sometimes I heard my blood sing in my ears. Other times, I saw a big sheet of gray, and all I could sense was a pressure against my belly and legs and on the small of my back where Emma held me.
Mostly, I felt cold.
Then I felt some warmth, and heard word
s. Parts of them.
“…going to die…”
“…take her to a hospital?”
“…time…”
“…save her?”
“…choice…”
“…doesn’t deserve…”
“…ambulance…”
“…now…”
“…call…”
“…or never…”
I felt a hand over my mouth. Something oozed into it, and a memory flickered across the haze inside and outside me. The time I fell off my bike and bit my tongue.
Then I died.
CHAPTER 32
This is what it feels like to die: First, everything goes black. Then, everything goes white. I assume that’s the white light everyone always talks about, the one where the dead relatives wave. I don’t think they’re waving. I think people who come back from the dead confuse the dead relatives with what you see next.
Everything that ever happened to you. Conception to death. Whatever came into your eyes, ears, nose and mouth, whatever touched your five senses, there it is again, just the way you saw it the first time.
The moment you became aware, in the darkness of your mother’s womb.
The first time you saw light as you came out of the birth canal, cold and wet and needing to cough out the goo.
The first time you saw your mother and heard your mother’s voice. The first time you felt home.
The first time you cried and someone hugged you. The first time you walked and everyone praised you.
Your grandparents are there again, younger and stronger, the way they were when you were a baby and they never wanted to stop holding you. And you wanted to be held, while you drank your formula and fell asleep.
There are no skips in the road. You live through that entire first year again, and turn one, and then two.
Those people who come back from the dead, talking about feeling an infinite love? I think they came back during that part.
You keep aging. You get to remember what it felt like to potty train.
You turn four and you have a birthday party with your first friend from preschool.
You turn six and go to kindergarten. You learn to read again.
You get to reread every book.
You get to scream when you don’t get your way.
You get older, and start to notice the opposite sex.
Your parents age around you. So do your grandparents. You start to worry about death, really worry about it for the first time.
The fact that you’re dead now, really dead, or almost dead, never occurs to you.
Middle school happens. Puberty happens. Your body and voice change.
You have your first kiss. Your first dance. Your first slow dance.
Your first broken heart.
Every moment happens again, in real time, right up until the moment you died.
Then the black comes again.
CHAPTER 33
If you’re a vampire that’s when you wake up.
So I did.
I opened my eyes, and then my mouth to scream, only all that came out was a strange, hoarse honk.
The light in the room was the cause of my honking. The light vanished.
Only it didn’t, completely.
My eyes flicked across the room, and even though my brain felt full of sludge, I knew exactly where I was. Wash’s hidden chamber.
I was behind those bookcases, lying on his bed. The light that had hurt me so badly was from the lamp on his table. Wash stood next to it now, his hand on the switch. He turned it off.
“Sorry,” he said. I thought he meant for turning on the light but then more of the sludge pushed itself off my thought processes and I knew what he really meant.
As the next few seconds passed, I experienced other sensations as well. My hearing was, by turns, getting better and worse. So was my sense of smell.
The room kept going black. I itched all over. Everywhere, inside and out. I’m pretty sure that if I could have reached into my own belly and scratched my appendix, I would have.
Wash spoke again. “You’re going to feel strange for the next few hours. Pretty soon, you’re going to have to go to the bathroom worse than you ever have in your life. Let me know when that happens. I’ll put a blindfold on you and carry you.”
I tried to speak. I felt like my entire body was sedated. I couldn’t form a word. All I said was, “B-b-b…”
Wash nodded. “The blindfold will keep your eyes from freaking out when you see the light. You’re still adjusting. Once all your cells replace themselves, your senses will straighten out. It’ll still be weird, though. It takes a while to get used to.”
I tried to talk again. “W-w-wh…”
Wash shook his head. “You don’t want water. It’ll hurt going down, and you’ll just have to pee it back out. It won’t make you feel any better.” He paused. “Sorry.”
I lay there, feeling my body rebuild itself. When my brain didn’t feel murky, I had questions I couldn’t ask. When it did feel murky, the itching increased. If the two things were related, Wash didn’t say anything about it.
After what felt like hours, the lower half of my abdomen started to tighten. My eyes widened, and my jaw clenched from the sudden pain and pressure. Wash said, “Bathroom?” and I twitched my head the tiniest bit to let him know he was right.
He put a blindfold over my eyes and carried me to the bathrooms. Emma followed, and when we got to a stall, Emma took down my pants and placed me on the toilet.
Everything that was ever food came out.
When you’re a vampire, your body uses blood as its basic building block. There’s science to it but it’s hard to explain, and frankly, most vampires don’t understand it either.
The point is your body can’t use food to build new body parts. It can only crush it up and send it on its way. When you first become a vampire, you have to get everything you can no longer use out of your body, all at once.
It’s not pretty.
Emma carried me back to the room when I was done. Wash was on cleanup duty.
How long did I lay there, exactly? I have a general idea. I left the library somewhere around six at night, and by the time my body finished converting every last cell, dawn was about to break. During that entire time, I never had control of my senses. It was like having all your years of puberty crammed into half a day.
When it was finally over, and I could talk again, I asked my first question.
“What do I tell my mom?”
CHAPTER 34
Emma started laughing. “That’s an excellent question.”
I sat up in the bed, and discovered I was, for some reason, naked. I wondered when that had occurred. “That’s not funny. And why am I naked?”
This made Emma laugh harder, and I waited for the moment Wash would join in. It didn’t happen.
“Emma, go get her clothes,” said Wash. Emma continued giggling as she pushed aside the bookshelf door and retrieved them from the other room. Everything I owned, from my socks to my coat, had been freshly washed and dried.
Emma closed the door behind her, and Wash turned his back. Emma did not.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
Emma turned away and I slipped out of the bed and into my clothes. I left my jacket lying on the bed.
“Okay,” I said, and Emma and Wash turned back to look at me. Something didn’t feel right but it took me a second to determine what it was. I didn’t feel hysterical. I should have. I just died. And un-died. I was a member of the undead. But for the life or death of me, I couldn’t feel any kind of panic in my chest. Or anything in my chest.
I wasn’t breathing. My heart wasn’t beating. My muscles weren’t contracting to send a message of panic to my brain. My fight-or-flight response had been turned off.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” said Emma. She extended her hand. “I’m Emma, by the way. No last name.”
“I know,” I said, still feeling the sensation that was the lack of sensa
tion in my body. “Actually, I didn’t know you don’t have a last name. What’s that about?”
Emma smiled. “I’m from a time when women weren’t much more than property to be traded, and names were more often than not, a form or function. Bob the Red. Frank the Great. That kind of thing. I don’t have a last name. I’m good with it, really.”
“I need to go,” I said, and picked up my coat, heading towards the door. No one tried to stop me.
I opened the door and walked into the laundry room, then out into the lobby. Emma and Wash followed me but made no attempt to keep me from walking out.
When I reached the front door, I realized I was missing something. I turned around to face Wash and Emma, who were standing just inside the doorway. Wash was holding my backpack. He tossed it to me lightly and I put it on in one graceful motion.
It was odd. I could tell it still held all my books and papers, nothing was missing, and yet it felt lighter than it had just half a day ago.
Somehow, I thought being a superhero would be more awesome, but I was stuck on one simple idea.
I needed to get home.
So I opened the door. The sun struck my face, and my skin turned to ash.
CHAPTER 35
I released the door a second later, and it swung closed of its own accord. I patted furiously at my face, trying to put out the fire there.
Ash flaked off of my cheeks and floated to the floor. I ran my fingers over my cheeks, the seared skin had grown back.
I turned to look at Wash and Emma, and they both started laughing.
“That’s not funny,” I said. They kept howling. “I could have died!” Their laughter increased.
I tried to be mad at them. I really did. But once again, my muscles seemed to refuse to tense, my heart stopped pumping the minute I was healed. There was no adrenaline in my system.
And once I exhaled the air required to yell at the vampires who had saved me, I didn’t need to inhale again.
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 9
