by David Salkin
Adam walked back into his bedroom and squatted back in his corner. He didn’t really need to eat yet. He had been gorging himself. But he also didn’t want to risk losing control around Sara. He thought about how many victims he had eaten recently in the city. He continued to squat in his corner, and allowed time to pass. He played a frequent mind game, and began counting backwards from his most recent meal. He rarely got beyond a few months. And then, of course, there were those special ones—the ones that would stand out forever. The killing fields of Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. His days during the Great Wars—both of them. There had been so many bodies. So much blood. Everyone was living in the same un-dead world withhim for thoseyears, with dead bodies too numerous to count. He could gorge himself for months and no one would even notice. The bloodlust of those days were almost like the sexual promiscuity of young people in their college days, where “anything goes”.
Adam smiled in his trancelike state. Beyond his glazed eyes, he could see battlefields with corpses as far as the horizon. He could smell the burnt flesh, the bubbling blood. He remembered putting on the arm band of a Medic once, and feasting on the wounded for weeks during one of his lazier periods. He was eventually discovered eating a wounded soldier, and had to kill several soldiers and all of the wounded within earshot to prevent being caught. He had covered those tracks with a few grenades which were blamed on the enemy. How many years had he lived on the fringe of the battlefield? Dozens? Hundreds? They were too many to count. And it was always the same, anyway. The uniforms and weapons changed, but the misery was constant. Humans loved to kill each other, and those that were only wounded were such easy meals—and so plentiful. The bloodlust from the battlefield was intense because of its quantity, but it was the quality of the bloodlust that changed when he tired of the noise of battle and switched to the blood of females.
From his beginning days in Jena, Adam had survived by staying near the battlefields and finding those easy meals “on the fringe”. Because of the huge quantities to be had there, he fed primarily on soldiers for years. It wasn’t for almost ten years that he drained a woman of her blood, and he was amazed by the difference.
When feasting on soldiers, he could taste their fear, their intensity and adrenaline from battle. The endorphins from their terrible wounds, and the over oxygenation of their blood as their lungs worked overtime in their panicked state. The strong soldiers had made him stronger, and kept him full of fearless, animal-like energy. When he fed on his first female, it was at a house he had found shelter in shortly after the wars had ended. A family of farmers had allowed him to stay at their barn for a night, taking pity on his bloody uniform. That night, when the father came out to bring him some water and leftover food, Olmer ate him without a moment’s hesitation. It had been almost four days, and he was beyond control. Once the animal was out, Olmer moved quickly to the house and ate the farmer’s son who was fast asleep. He then moved to the daughter’s room. She was asleep as well, and Olmer entered her room to find the pretty teenager under a large comforter. Olmer crept close and smelled the girl. It was so different from all the men he had eaten. Soldiers were a stinky lot—sweat, fear, weapon grease, weeks of grime and bad food, dysentery—he had never known any differently. But this girl, she smelled like flowers and hay.
Olmer had lifted her heavy quilt and slid in bed next to her, then smelled her hair. He moved closer behind her and ran his hands over her body, and that was when she woke up. It was dark in the room. While Olmer could see quite well in the dark, the young girl could not.
“Papa?” she exclaimed. She couldn’t imagine who could have slid into her bed. She called her brother’s name. Olmer watched her face in the dark. She looked so afraid. He could smell it in her. Fear. It made him need to taste it. When he buried his fangs into her throat, she exploded into his mouth and he made gurgling noises as he slurped and ate her flesh. She tasted wonderfully feminine, and Olmer was delighted with this new sensation. It was that evening when he got rid of the Prussian army uniform, and took the father’s clothes. He piled up the family, took whatever was useful or worth money, and burned down their house with them in it. For the next two hundred years, not much changed in his “M.O.”.
Adam came back to 2011 with the ringing of his disposable cell phone. Sara. He felt uneasy, but picked up the phone and said hello.
“Hey, you! I thought you were going to call me. Whatcha’ doing ?” Sara asked, sounding chipper as usual.
Adam watched the farmhouse in his mind collapse under sparks as flames shot towards the heavens. That young girl had been so delicious. What would Sara taste like…?
“Adam? You there?”
Adam snapped out of his visions. “Sorry, bad connection. Are you working all week?” he asked.
“Of course, unless you are taking me to St. Lucia for the week.”
Adam thought about that. Traveling with Sara.
“Adam! I was
kidding . Hello?”
Adam came back to the present. “It would be nice to travel with you,” he said, almost to himself.
She giggled. “Yeah, the beach sounds nice, huh? I’d even wear my teeny weenie bikini for you.”
Adam had seen people lying on the beach for hours, burning their skin. While he understood the desire to feel that warmth, there were better ways to get it than burning your skin. “What time do you get off work?” he asked.
“Five-thirty,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet my friend Sharon for snacks and a drink after work. I told her all about you. Want to meet us? We’re going to Brodsky’s right by my office?”
He agreed to meet her, and she gave him directions. Adam was in a deep quandary. He would enjoy traveling with Sara. He found travel interesting, and had seen so much of the world. He had been content to live in New York, and the food had been plentiful and the lifestyle an easy one. It was easy to simply disappear into the sea of humanity, even if he wasn’t human. Sara would be such a good companion. They could live together and he could show her the world that he lived in. If he had a heart that beat with his own blood, it might have ached.
Thirty-Two
VWX
Doug’s Office
Roy and Doug had spent hours in Doug’s tiny office. Roy had called in to the Midtown North Precinct and told him he was working with Doug out of the precinct, and the LT had excused him from roll call. They had been weaving together evidence from decades of unsolved cases that all had DNA, fingerprints, or other evidence that one way or the other overlapped other “mysterious” cases. When Roy and Doug agreed not to accuse each other of being crazy, and to open their minds to strictly the facts of the evidence as it occurred, they could more easily follow exactly what was actually occurring. It was like a “handoff” of DNA from one crime scene to the next.
After almost four hours without a break, the two of them had constructed a timeline that went case to case in a most bizarre fashion.
• 184 • Normally, DNA from an original case would appear at a second or third case and the investigator would link the cases together based on one original suspect. In this strange set of circumstances they were assembling, DNA from multiple, seemingly unrelated cases, linked dozens of cases together, even though there should not have been any direct links between those cases or victims.
In the process of their investigation, they apparently solved an ageold, unsolved gang rape and brutal murder. In a terrible crime that occurred in 1995 in New York City, a young woman had been gang raped, sexually assaulted and then brutally dismembered. Based on the crime scene evidence at the time, in particular the DNA evidence recovered from a rape kit and from under the victim’s fingernails, it was assumed that four men had raped and then viciously murdered the woman. A week later, when the bodies of two male gang members were recovered at another crime scene, their DNA matched the that of the deceased. It was assumed that these two men had been part of the gang that raped and killed the victim, before being violently murdered themselves. Becaus
e the other two contributors of DNA had yet to be found, the case remained “open and unsolved”, even though police thought they had found two of the four assailants.
Roy read the same report three times. Finally, he built up the nerve to say what he was thinking to Doug. “Okay, man. Just me and you in this room, right? I want to say what I’m thinking, and not have you give me any shit, all right?”
“Roy, I told you, I have been questioning my sanity for almost two years with this case.”
“All right. Let’s just pretend for a second, okay? Just humor me. Let’s say that this man isn’t really a man like you and me. Let’s pretend he is some fucking vampire monster. I don’t care what you call him, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that he’s a vampire.”
“Okay. He’s a vampire,” said Doug with a calm voice.
“Okay. So he eats and drinks human blood and shit because he needs to, to stay alive for food. So—he consumes the blood, and along with it, the DNA of that human. Then, at the next crime scene, we find that DNA. It’s our vampiresame guy—but with the DNA from someone else. He’s just passing it on. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy,” said Roy, almost exasperated.
“I reached this conclusion almost nine months ago, so no, I don’t think you’re crazy. And I am so happy to hear another human say that out loud I could cry. It’s the only thing that makes sense, and trust me, Roy, I have spent a thousand hours on this. The only thing I have a harder time with is the rape kit. The DNA wasn’t just in the blood, it was in the semen, too.”
“So? Maybe vampires need to get laid, too. And if they do, and they have bodily fluids shooting out of them, it makes sense that it is the same DNA as the stuff in their blood.”
“I’m not sure I would use the phrase, ‘making sense’ anywhere near this investigation,” said Doug. “But yeah, I see your point. If we are going to accept that this creature ingests DNA into his body, why not also in his blood and semen. You realize this means we need to pull every unsolved rape case in the city that had a rape kit collected and check it against the data base of every one of these cases.”
Roy rubbed his face. “Yeah. Maybe after lunch. My eyes are going to fall out of my head.” He looked at his watch. “Shit, man. It’s after one. Want to grab some chow?”
“Yeah,” said Doug. “But I am thinking of turning vegetarian.”
· · ·
Roy and Doug walked down the block and sat down in a small pizza joint that had a counter by the window overlooking the street. Roy spoke between bites of pizza. (Neither of them could even think about a bloody hamburger after all the pictures they had seen that morning.) “You think we’d notice him if he walked by?”
Doug shrugged as he burned the roof of his mouth on his first bite. He wiped his face and drank coke to put the fire out. “I wonder about that. Whether or not he looks like everyone else out there.” They spoke in very quiet voices among the loud lunch crowd.
“It would be so much easier if a bat flew by and turned into a guy in a black cape that sounded like Bela Legosi,” said Roy. “And I prefer to picture him, because that fucker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula would have me shitting my pants if I ran into him.”
“Yeah. Think this will be like Abbott and Costello meet Dracula?” asked Doug.
“As long as
you are Costello,” said Roy. “Seriously, man. Let’s say we get lucky and catch up to this thing. How the fuck do we kill it? And notice I didn’t say arrest it. Fuck that…”
“Okay, since it’s just us, I’ll tell you—I looked into buying silver bullets,” said Doug.
“You shitting me?” asked Roy.
“Yeah, I’m shitting you. No silver bullets. No stakes or garlic or crosses. Just a nine millimeter hollow-point that I would love to use to remove this fucking thing’s head.”
“You remember that midget uptown? The Voo-Doo priest?” asked Roy.
“I am going to send you to sensitivity training, young man. Father Eduardo is vertically challenged, and he is an ordained Catholic priest.”
“Yeah, right. Then you never met him.”
“I did meet him. He actually was the one who convinced me that I wasn’t totally off my rocker. I figured if a few million other people believe this stuff, I must not be so crazy after all.”
“Well, I went to see him with Tim. And we asked him about killing this thing. Know what he said?”
Doug looked at him seriously. “No—what did he say?”
“He don’t fuckin’ know.”
Doug threw his pizza on the paper plate. “Great. Then I’ll stick to my original plan with my nine.”
“And what do you do when you fire a full clip into him and he ain’t dead?” whispered Roy, leaning in very close.
“I shit my pants and hope he finds me too disgusting to eat,” said Doug with a small grin.
Roy chuckled. “Yeah, well, I want to go back and talk to the vertically challenged little dude with the bad-ass hat. Somebody out there in Voo-Doo Land must know how to kill this monster.”
“Finish up and we’ll take a ride,” said Doug.
“I’m done—and don’t think I didn’t notice you putting tons of extra garlic on your pizza, you pussy.”
Doug shrugged. “It’s like chicken soup—it couldn’t hurt.”
Thirty-Three
Brodsky’s
Adam had the afternoon to prepare himself for meeting Sara and her female friend. He made himself push away thoughts of eating them both, even though his lust for blood seemed insatiable these days. Adam thought for several hours about traveling with Sara, and in the end decided he would take a short trip with her out of the city. Maybe if he had a few days with her, to really spend time with her, he could convince her that she wanted to be just like him. It was a conversation that would be difficult to broach to say the least, but he would think of something.
It was early fall. Upstate New York would be beautiful this time of year. He’d find them a romantic place, secluded, but close enough to other humans lest he need to feed to avoid eating his companion. Adam decided that he would look into it. While he didn’t own a computer
• 189 • himself, he did know of an internet café down the street. He would surf the net like a twenty-first century human and find a romantic getaway. By late afternoon, Adam had located what looked like a very beautiful, upscale B & B in upstate New York. At almost seven hundred dollars a night, it would be enough to impress Sara. He smiled at the thoughts he was having. “Worrying about impressing a woman”. It was so human. It was charming in a way, to actually care what someone thought or felt. He normally only worried about what they tasted like when he sucked their blood out of them. Adam was starting to believe that he actually felt the human emotion of “happiness”, something he hadn’t contemplated other than when associated with a meal.
Adam dressed in a nice pair of slacks, and even put on a tie and sport coat to meet Sara and her friend. He had considered feeding before he went, but had been overeating so much lately—he really had to keep that under control. The last thing he wanted was to have a bunch of policemen in New York City looking for him. Adam walked across town to meet Sara and her friend at the pub known as Brodsky’s. He entered the crowded place. He was surprised at how many business people were rushing to a bar on a Monday right after work. He moved through the crowd, listening to the din of pumping hearts and boring conversations. He spotted Sara and an attractive woman about Sara’s age standing by the tall bar.
Adam approached the pretty pair and smiled, and gave Sara a light kiss hello. He shook hands with Sharon as Sara introduced them.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” said Sharon with a knowing grin. Apparently, Sara had bragged about Adam’s special talents in bed— there was no mistaking Sara’s slight blush.
“I hope it wasn’t too bad,” he said, in his most charming ‘I-won’teat-you’ voice.
“Actually, I think Sara likes you, likes you!” she said with a laugh. “She wo
n’t shut up about you!”
Adam smiled. The girls had apparently had a cocktail or two already and were feeling a bit loose and silly. Sara was laughing at her friend, and play punched her arm with an exaggerated “Shut up!”
“Well, I like her very much, myself,” said Adam, then put his arm around Sara’s waist. He could feel her body heat and tried to ignore the urge to open her throat.
“Oh, look at you two already! It’s disgusting!” joked Sharon.
“You’re just jealous,” said Sara with a dramatic toss of her thick hair. Adam smelled her shampoo and conditioner, and recalled lying on it.
“Maybe…” she replied, now playing sexy, and put her arms around Adam’s waist to tease Sara. Adam smelled Sharon’s liquor laced breath as she leaned in closer, but also something else. He breathed her in deeper and made a mental note of it.
They bantered back and forth for a while, and Adam easily won over Sara’s friend, who was half convinced he must be wonderful before she ever met him. After an hour or so, Sharon excused herself, told Adam she was delighted to meet him, and left the bar to head home.
“She seems nice,” he said. “She’s a good friend?”
“My bestest buddy,” said Sara. “You have any single guys for her? She needs a man like Adam Priest.”
