by R. A. Nelson
“Vampire bats have heat-seeking sensors in their noses,” the announcer said. “Let’s look at that in infrared so you can see exactly what the bats are searching for.”
The screen suddenly changed from normal nighttime hues to brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds with little dots of white in between, each about the size of a quarter.
“Those white spots are just what the bats are looking for, and their special noses lead them right to it: the most promising locations for easy blood,” the announcer explained.
The bats each found a white spot and dug in, lapping pig’s blood into their wedge-shaped mouths along a groove in their long tongues. Three bats were suddenly fighting over a particularly promising spot. “Like miners who have struck the mother lode,” the voice-over said. “Why doesn’t the pig wake up? Because the vampire bat’s teeth are razor sharp. So sharp, the pig doesn’t even feel it. Vampire bats will feast for as long as thirty minutes on one victim. By the time these bats are done, they each will have lapped up about half their weight in hot juicy pig blood.”
I began to feel sick. I didn’t know why. I’d never had a weak stomach before.
“Okay, that’s it,” I said to Manda.
“But it isn’t over!”
“You know what’s worse than pale green pants?” I said.
“What?”
“Momma if she comes home and catches you out of bed. Get.”
She scooted down the hall and I tucked her in. I put the Sneetches book back on the shelf so maybe she wouldn’t think about the pants so much. When I came back to the living room, I changed the channel. Five minutes later, I felt so sick, I climbed into bed.
I threw up three times before Mom got home. It had been years since I had had any kind of stomach bug. She blamed it on the Italian dressing chicken breasts I had baked for supper, but Manda had eaten them too, and she was fine.
I was afraid it was something else. The worse the pain got, the more cursed I felt, connecting my sickness to the changes in me, as if my new gifts had somehow come with a terrible price.
I felt completely empty inside. I started shivering violently and Mom covered me with blankets. I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. At one point I felt something on my leg, so I pulled the covers back and the old wound on my thigh was open and raw again, oozing pus and blood.
Then vampire bats were crawling all over me, hopping from my knees to my chest to the top of my head. I feebly tried to shake them off, but they didn’t seem to notice. Now six of them were feasting on the wound in my leg, like cows around a tiny pond. On TV they had said the pig couldn’t feel the bats feeding, but I could. I could feel every tearing little bite.
One of them sank its teeth into my scalp. I must have screamed, because Mom came running in after that.
“Emma! Are you okay?”
She swabbed my head with a damp cloth and said she was calling the doctor’s exchange. The doctor called back and told her to give me twice the recommended dosage of Tylenol. All we had was the liquid variety. I threw it up. It looked like fresh blood on the carpet.
Somewhere in the middle of the night my fever broke and Mom left me alone to sleep. When I woke again, the sheets were drenched and the room was strangely cool. I could see every inch of the space so clearly: my glass-topped bedside table, the oak dresser, stacks of clean clothes on a chair, my closet with the poster of David Beckham in his white and yellow LA Galaxy uniform, the square panes of the window. Beyond that a light in the parking lot shone red through the thin white curtains. And I remembered.
A man is standing in the trees.
A tall black figure. He was about thirty feet off the ground, his long legs spread from one slender branch to another. Branches seemingly too small to support his weight. His eyes were open and his arms were crossed in front of his chest like a corpse in a casket.
I stood there looking at him, feeling my blood turn to powder. I wanted to run. Ached to run. I even started moving my legs. Until the man appeared—just appeared—on the ground right in front of me.
I recoiled, dropping the flashlight, and reflexively threw up my hands for protection. The man towered over me. The light was between us, spraying up the tall man’s chest. He was wearing a dirty white linen shirt that looked old-fashioned and buttoned up the middle with what looked like little pieces of cork. Long creased pants and a wide buckled belt. A coat that came to his knees, something like a cowboy might wear in wintertime. He was dirty, but the coat made him look somehow elegant. His face …
“Welcome,” he said.
I started running for the car, scrambling up the slope. The man in the coat just stayed where he was. I got to the top of the low hill, where I was close enough to temporarily blind myself in the headlights. I lunged toward the little stream—
The man was already there, standing between me and the car. I don’t know how. I never saw him move. He was suddenly just there.
I swung my fist with all my strength at his terrible face; his big hand locked onto my wrist. I never saw him move. I struggled, using both my hands, trying to pry myself free. His arm stayed locked. His fingernails were unnaturally long and cut into the skin of my wrist as I fought. I drew back my bare foot and kicked him hard enough to break his shinbone. He laughed and threw me on the ground.
The man knelt, placing one knee on my side and bringing his awful mouth close to mine. His black eyes were blazing in the glare of the headlights. His skin looked translucent and tight. Something was gruesomely wrong about his scalp; part of it was peeled away, hanging like a long flap of skin, making me think of autopsy photos I had once seen of John F. Kennedy’s head after he had been shot. The flap moved a little as the man moved. He couldn’t be alive. Not with a wound like that. But he was.
He got both hands on my arms and pushed them easily to the moist ground. Lowered his face. He was smiling. He opened his mouth and spoke a phrase I couldn’t understand. It sounded like German.
“Geben Sie mir Ihr Leben.”
His breath stank of rotting leaf mold. For one horrifying second I thought he was going to kiss me.
The man’s ragged lips trailed across my cheek and dropped to my neck instead. I could feel them brush me there. Rape. I’m going to be raped, I thought.
The man lost concentration for a moment, because I was able to slip one arm free. I smashed him in the face as hard as I could, trying to drive his nose into his brain. The man’s head snapped back and he howled in rage and surprise.
He raised his arm and backhanded me so hard that lights flashed inside my head. I heard a crunching sound in my neck and felt an electric pulse shoot up behind my ear and thought my neck might be broken. I fought hard to stay conscious, blinking at the tears in my eyes.
“Was erlauben Sie sich,” the man said, voice spitting with fury. “How dare you.”
He slammed one long arm across my chest, knocking the breath out of me and pinning me to the forest floor. He turned his body so that he was no longer facing me. Began to tear at my soccer shorts.
I felt something in my chest, felt it like my body was filling up with something. Then I realized what I was feeling: my own death. A premonition of it. I was crossing a line into a new place, a place I could never return from. I started kicking and flailing with an insane fury, bucking up in the air, scratching, hitting, clawing, even though I knew none of this was doing any good. In fact, it only seemed to make things worse.
“I would have honored you, Mädchen,” the man said, growling deep in his throat as he easily held me down. His face was turned away as if he would no longer look me in the eye. “And this is how you show me respect. If that is what you want, then this is my answer.”
He drove his teeth into the fleshy top of my thigh and began to tear the skin away. I screamed. I screamed again and again, thrashing my body. The man kept ripping at my leg with his teeth. The pain was indescribable. But the pain was nothing compared to what he did next.
Once my leg was torn open, my ruptured
artery spurting blood into the leaves, the man fastened his mouth there and began to drink.
I don’t know how long he drank. I was too horrified to think, too horrified to do anything but act on animal impulse. The man held my head so that I had to watch as he slobbered and gulped. I was sick to my stomach watching his mouth dipping and raising, his ash-colored teeth stained with my blood, his jaw and cheeks splashed red. The wet sucking and gobbling sounds …
I don’t know why I didn’t close my eyes, but I couldn’t. After a time I started to have the sensation of falling. But not falling on the outside, falling on the inside. As if some part of my life or mind or spirit had broken loose and was dropping inside of me, dropping with no bottom in sight. This man, this creature, was going to drink from me until I was dead.
I remember seeing my bare foot, my muddy toes. That was somehow the hardest moment. It felt like … like I was failing myself. That I had let this happen. That somehow I could have stopped it. All my fault …
My world filled up with light.
Was this it? Was this my death? This nuclear blast inside my skull? Whatever it was, it lifted me away from that place; I could look down now. I was somehow free. I could see my body down there beneath me next to the stream, the headlights cutting a beam across my blood-spattered leg. The man still bent over me, drinking. And then nothing. An explosion of nothing.
The nothing began to go away. I was barefoot on a country road, dragging my hurt leg, one hand clapped over the pulsing wound. The moon had risen, giving just enough light for me to stay on the road. The sharp stones should have been hurting my feet, but all of me, my sensation, my pain, had retreated into my head. The rest was just walking.
Finally I saw headlights and was terrified. Knowing I had a chance to live. That’s when he would step in and take me. Finish the job.
* * *
Mom let me stay out of school the rest of the week. It wasn’t too hard to convince her. Even after my physical symptoms went away, I was still sick. Sick in a way I had never been before. Sick in a way I couldn’t understand. The sickness of trying to process the unprocessable.
I had been attacked by a vampire.
As the hours crawled by, my mind dizzy from too much thinking and lack of food, I tried every other possibility to explain what had happened to me. Someone had put some kind of drug in my lunch at the soccer field. The first seizure had rendered me temporarily crazy. The man in the dark coat was nothing but a psychopath. A flesh-and-blood human being, just one with major issues.
But what psychopath could have done what he did? Who in the real world had the strength that he had? The quickness? The supernatural ability to stand in a tree on the slenderest of branches without falling?
Anything to spare me from staring long and hard at the two most likely scenarios: either vampires existed or I was insane.
When Mom came home each day, I would roll myself up in my blankets and pretend to be gone to the world. It wasn’t so easy to turn Manda away, but at least she understood that I was temporarily out of order.
By the end of the third day, I was finally ready to accept the truth.
No matter how badly I wanted to disbelieve it, vampires existed. I was sure of something else as well: the attack had caused a massive seizure while the vampire was still feeding. The doctors in Atlanta had told me I had had two seizures that day. Now I was convinced the curse had somehow saved me. But I had also been changed.
Transformed.
I felt crazy even considering the idea. Vampire. I didn’t even like saying the word.
But something had happened that night. All the changes had occurred after the attack: strange colors in the dark, superhuman vision, strength, speed, hearing. Only something important was missing: the part where I ran around in a cape after dark, hungrily slurping up blood. The thought of drinking another person’s bodily fluids made me nauseated all over again. Until I had gotten sick, I had been eating stuff like tuna fish and cheeseburgers for days. Also, vampires supposedly couldn’t go out in the daylight without dying or otherwise dissolving into a pile of dust.
So what did that make me?
I also knew I wasn’t dead. In fact, I had never felt more alive. The man in the dark coat wasn’t dead either. At least he didn’t seem that way. Flappy head wound aside, that was not a walking corpse who forced me to the ground and drank from my leg. It was a living, breathing human being of some sort. Maybe a genetic offshoot, runaway science project, you name it, but I was sure he was a living man.
I tried to remember the German-sounding phrase he had said to me just before I had smashed my fist into his face. Gaybin zee meer ear laybin. I spelled it out phonetically and plugged it into Babel Fish. No luck. I would have to try it on my grandfather, Papi, the next time I saw him.
As I started getting better, I spent more and more of my time researching vampires on the Web but almost instantly got tired of the subject. I found a million and one sites on vampires and vampire lore. Depending on the site, they were gross, silly, ridiculous, shocking, stupid, you name it. But most of all they were contradictory. There were the purists who deferred to Bram Stoker on all things bat. Historians who preferred Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, the infamous Romanian prince who loved to invite guests to “stake” dinners. Then every imaginable variation when it came to powers, from flight to shape-shifting.
Honestly, and I knew this was sacrilege in some corners, I had never found vampires all that interesting. Finally I just told myself that whatever I was, whatever I was becoming, I would have to figure things out for myself.
But what if I started manically craving blood? Was I doomed to spend the rest of my life … feeding off other human beings?
Oh no. I spent so much time alone with Manda.
I cried off and on for hours, consumed with horror at the possibility. If I noticed even a hint of a bad change, I had to leave, I decided at last.
But where would I go? What would I do?
That week felt like a whole year. I started having nightmares where I had grown fangs. The scariest was a dream about Manda. My little sister sprouted wings from her back that looked like knobby bits of bone splitting their way through the skin. Once they got large enough, she opened them like a huge bat and flew away. I jerked up in the middle of the night, a scream catching in my throat.
After I finally hit bottom, it took forever to climb back out of the poisonous hole of fear and confusion I had found myself in.
But climb out I did. By the end of the week I was sleeping better and keeping my food down, and as far as I could tell, there were no new changes. The nightmares stopped.
But my whole world had been wrenched violently out of joint. I could never look at the “real world” the same way again. I had to question everything I had ever known to be true. If vampires were true, then maybe a tree could suddenly start talking. Maybe the ground under my feet would open and swallow me up.
And if vampires really existed, that meant they were still out there.
I got my chance to talk to Papi sooner than I expected. The following weekend Mom decided I was well enough to drag me out of the house. She drove us to my grandfather’s place in the country so she could “spend a little time with myself.”
It was always interesting to me that Mom never “spent a little time” with her own father, but she always told us she had gotten enough of that growing up. “Fondness skips generations,” she liked to say. Which I took to mean that she and Papi didn’t get along.
But today I was much more interested in other things. Like on the trip there I couldn’t help thinking how long it would have taken me to run it. Bet I could have beaten this Kia.
My grandfather lived in a tiny one-story stone house in the nowhere town of Pineville, Alabama, population 302, give or take a stray dog or two. The only landmark was a BBQ joint called the Pig Stand that served Papi’s favorite white sauce. “The reason I came to live in Alabama,” he liked to say.
“I’m not sick, Papi!” M
anda said, skipping up his wide stone steps.
Papi swept her up in a bone-smashing hug. “Sehr gut,” he said in his thick German. “But I did not expect my Liebling would be.”
Papi was wearing what looked like a mechanic’s blue uniform, but without a single smudge of grease. His wispy comb-over was perfectly in place, as always.
He put Manda down and turned to me, touching his left temple with his index finger the way he always did when he was “puzzling a little problem out.”
“You … you are different,” Papi said to me, leading us into the kitchen. “Don’t tell me. Let me discover it on my own, Enkelin.”
Enkelin is German for “granddaughter,” which is what he called me, not because it was cute—Papi was not into cute—but to remind me who my elders were. Papi was German to his toes and bumpy and prickly and precise and loving all at the same time. It worked for him. I loved him more than any human being on earth. Other than Manda, of course. My grandmother died so long ago, I didn’t have many memories of her. But Papi was my sun and moon.
The kitchen smelled of apples. “I have heard it has been you who have been the sick one,” Papi said as we sat down to a snack of cheese and crackers and Apfelwein, a kind of German cider he made from trees in his backyard. He had his own cider press in the garage.
“I’m fine now, Papi,” I said. The lie of the century. Like Papi, I hated liars.
“But that is not the difference, this sickness,” he said. “I will have located it by the time we finish supper.” He smiled so broadly, his thick eyebrows came together.
We went in the backyard. Manda was glued to Papi’s side the whole afternoon and he threaded his way around her the way you walk around a cat. I wondered if I was ever going to get any time alone with him, hoping I wouldn’t chicken out when I finally did.
We ate BBQ on Papi’s rolling front lawn. Not one inch of his small lot was level, but the grass was cropped like a golf course. His garage was just as neat. I could see his old-fashioned rowboat and fishing tackle hanging above his Buick.
