by A. P. Wayne
“I don’t have anything,” he said. “I mean, like, protection.”
“Fuck it,” she said. “Jordan’s probably the only person either of us has slept with.”
He wondered if that made her a virgin. He didn’t think he cared. He unfastened her pants and slid them down over her striped underwear and round ass.
She turned back around, unzipped his pants and tugged them down with his underwear. She dropped to her knees in front of him. She ran her tongue around the head of his penis and he knew there wasn’t any going back from this. She took him into her mouth and he was aware of the heat and the slight roughness of her tongue and gentle suction. He became aware of something else.
Here was fresh blood. Maybe that was half his arousal. This whole girl was like a gift, skin wrapped around pulsing, steaming blood.
He felt a fullness in his mouth.
This was the first time he’d actually felt himself change.
The last time, after he’d been infected, he was like a newborn. His consciousness blocked the change and he wandered his farm as a blind, hungry beast.
Now he could see and feel everything.
And he was very glad.
Melanie used a hand to rake the hair out of her eyes as she moved her head back and forth.
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her up to her feet. She looked at him, noticed the change and, perhaps for the first time, realized how real this was, realized the Fangs did exist and it was very far away from a romantic dream.
He moved behind her and pushed her against the railing, peeled down her underwear and entered her.
He thrust against her until she cried out, her fingernails scraping the railing. Then he leaned down and bit her on the shoulder. His teeth punctured the skin easily. He felt her sex contract against his spasming cock and he drank her blood greedily.
Nineteen
Ilya turned into the driveway to the house on Suchling Road. She stopped as soon as she saw a car already parked there. It must have recently pulled up because the driver was just now getting out. A girl. From this distance she looked really small.
This is going to be too easy, she thought.
She drove down the road until she found a chained access road. It was probably something used by the park rangers. She pulled just far enough onto the path to not be seen from the road. She didn’t bother undoing the chain. She popped the trunk and got out of the car. She searched through the trunk until she found something close to what she was looking for. A bungee cord. It wasn’t rope but it would do.
She had a number of reasons for returning to Lawrence and two of those would require her getting close to Walker and Jordan. She remembered them well. They were etched forever in her memory. Inhabiting a fat, boring, middle-aged man was no way to do that.
But, until he died, the body would make a nice meal.
She quickly fastened the bungee cord around her wrists and slid the cord far enough up the tree and down her arms to where she could no longer reach it to unfasten it. Exiting the body was simple for her. She’d done it so many times. It wasn’t so easy on poor Patrick Fishman.
Now a vaporous mist hanging above him, she watched his eyes roll around in his head, heard his mouth jabbering, drool slicking his lips.
She made her way to the house.
And still couldn’t believe her luck.
The girl standing in the door was not Jordan but Ilya could sense she knew Jordan.
And the guy standing in front of her ...
It was Walker.
Ilya didn’t waste any time before swooping into Jordan’s body and feeling the flood of emotions wash over her. Half of her story was already there. This girl wanted to become a Fang. All she would have to do would be to get Walker to infect her and then she would be more complete than she had been in a long time. Instead of immediately taking over the girl’s brain, she let the girl continue on her own.
She was telling Walker things.
They made their way onto the front porch where the girl (Melanie) told Walker what she wanted. Ilya couldn’t believe she’d gained this much knowledge in such a short period of time. She didn’t even have to exert any control until Walker put his hands on her shoulder and the host wanted to back away.
But Ilya let Walker do what he wanted to do. It repulsed her. This guy’s one crowning grain of self-esteem came from assuming he’d rid the world of her. She also knew what the result might be. For a Fang, the connection between sex and full transformation was very strong.
She didn’t think she’d felt anything as sweet as when he plunged his rediscovered fangs into her shoulder.
Now she had him.
It might take him a while to notice, if he ever did, but she had him.
Twenty
The first thing he thought when he tasted her blood was that there was something wrong. He dismissed the thought and kept drinking, though. He was so hungry. Maybe something just seemed off because he’d drunk nothing but Jordan’s for so long and never in this quantity.
By the time he pulled away from her, he felt disgusted with himself. His penis dangled flaccid between his thighs, slick with his and Melanie’s juices. The blood sat in his stomach like milk that had gone sour.
And Melanie now acted like this wasn’t something she wanted at all. She avoided looking at him, bending to pull up her underwear he hadn’t even bothered removing all the way. Plucking the rest of her clothes up from the porch and putting them on. He felt like she would have left right away but there was a boom of thunder and it started pouring.
He pulled up his pants and fought the urge to vomit off the side of the porch.
“I’m not feeling well,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
He didn’t know why, but he went back into the house. It wasn’t like there was anything in there to comfort him. It just seemed like the thing to do.
In the house, the room began spinning around him. He felt kind of scared. He’d never felt anything like this before. Maybe it was the start of the flu or maybe he was just overwhelmed with guilt. He sat down on the floor, leaning back against the wall.
He thought it was kind of odd that Melanie never came in to see how he was doing.
Right now he felt sick but he didn’t know how to feel about the whole Melanie thing. Had she really slept with Jordan? Walker didn’t even know Jordan was or ever had been into girls.
This was too much.
He’d have to think about it later.
Twenty-one
Jordan had just put on her work clothes and was ready to head back out to the car when she got a text from Melanie.
“You around?”
Jordan texted her back and said she was on her way to work. “Pick you up around 11?” she added.
“Sure.”
Jordan couldn’t help smiling.
Twenty-two
Ilya turned the display on her phone off and thought, “Easier and easier.” Now she just had to kill a few hours of time. There was a guy in the woods who needed tending to, she thought.
Twenty-three
Hunter stood at the edge of the woods holding his shriveling dick in his hand and wondering what the hell had just happened. He watched the guy go back into the house and the girl get back in the car and drive away.
Hunter had fled when he’d first seen the guy in the woods but it was shortly after sprinting away that he’d regretted it. He should have asked the guy what the hell he was doing on his property, even though he wasn’t sure this was his property or not, advanced on him, and beaten him to a pulp. But by the time he’d returned to his senses, stopped abusing the woods, and doubled back around, the guy was gone.
Hunter thought it was even possible that was the guy who’d been making the woman make all those horrible screams.
But that theory was mostly debunked when the girl in the car pulled up and went around to the back of the house.
Now Hunter realized his current vantage point wasn’t the best. He could only see the
front door. He circled around the perimeter of the woods, trying his best to stay out of sight until he would be able to see if anyone left from either the front or the back doors. Unless he’d already left, the guy was still in there.
The girl and the boy had then come out the front door. Hunter had some voyeuristic tendencies and, okay, so he hadn’t slept with a woman since Alison had kicked him out. He was a little hard up. The Internet provided as much porn as he could tolerate but there was something about seeing a real girl in the flesh that he didn’t have the money to buy. Not that he thought what happened would actually happen. But perhaps that was just the mindset of someone who had been practically raised on porn. Sex could break out at any given time under any given circumstances. That was one of the reasons he always kept a condom in his wallet. It was true that never in his thirty-plus years had sex actually happened that way to him or that he’d observed sex happening in that way but, well, maybe it was the one grain of optimism he still had left.
So when the guy started unbuttoning the girl’s shirt, he was immediately hard.
Being that he was in the woods and the only other people around were preoccupied, he undid his pants and pulled his penis out.
The couple started going at it and Hunter came faster than he had in a long time.
And then the guy had changed.
Even from this distance, Hunter thought it looked like he grew slightly taller and more sinewy. His mouth filled with teeth. Hunter almost cried out when the guy lowered his head and bit the girl. He tried to tell himself he would have stopped it if the girl didn’t seem to be enjoying it so much. Then, just like that, it was all over. The guy staggered around and went back into the house. The girl put on her clothes and left.
This was all too much.
Hunter sat down on the ground and leaned back against the tree. He checked his phone for the time and messages he didn’t have. He thought about calling Major but knew that would just make him sadder than he already was.
He’d give it a few minutes and, if the guy never left, then Hunter would assume he already had. Then he would go take a scan around the house to make sure the guy wasn’t in there.
No he wouldn’t.
Who was he kidding?
He’d just seen that guy turn into a monster.
Hunter had grown up in Lawrence where rumors of the Fangs abounded. He’d written a book about vampires and referred to them as Fangs.
Until a few minutes ago he’d never believed in them.
Now he did.
He wished he’d turned his camera phone on. He had it in his hand now. He was ready. He knew it was pointless. No one would think a vampire video coming from him would be anything but a hoax.
But he wasn’t going to sit here and fool himself into thinking he would do something he wasn’t.
He didn’t mind the occasional thrill but if, you know, actual death were involved, he tended to avoid it. That’s why he never went into the military.
And despite writing about vampires, he couldn’t see why people romanticized them like they did. To an extent, he supposed being a vampire would cure a lot of humanity’s fears. Being a vampire, one would have power and eternal life. No one wanted to die and no one liked being at the bottom of the food chain.
However, he assumed most people were still basically moral creatures. For one thing, vampirism was a slap in the face to God and Christianity. Here were, essentially, humans with godlike powers. Humans who had to sacrifice other humans to stay alive. Which was another moral issue. If humans were made to kill other humans that easily, he didn’t think a police force, no matter what its size, could provide adequate protection.
Hunter continued to watch until he dozed off.
It was the longest he’d slept in a while.
Twenty-four
Jordan closed down her register and left work as quickly as she could. She wanted to get to Walker’s, let him drink from her, avoid any major arguments, and get to Melanie’s as quickly as possible. She needed to see if she could enlist her help in finding out who was leaving the offerings. Of course, after talking to Amber and a few of her other friends throughout the day, Jordan thought she had a pretty good idea of who it was. In which case, it was probably a lot more stupid and harmless than she had originally thought. And if Melanie was going to confess, Jordan thought a nice warm period of post-coital bliss would be the perfect time for her to do that.
She reached Walker’s house in record time. She wondered if she could get him to drink a couple days’ worth so she wouldn’t have to fool with coming tomorrow. Of course, he would want to know why she wasn’t coming and that would probably start an argument, which was on her agenda to actively avoid.
She pulled up into his driveway, not even bothering to take the keys out of the ignition. She gave the door her customary two knock warning before opening it and going in.
The house was quiet, but it always was.
“Hello?” she said.
Usually he called out from somewhere in the house, but this time she didn’t hear anything. Maybe he was in the shower. She didn’t know how he could stand to take cold showers, even in the summer.
She walked upstairs to the only bathroom with a shower in it. The door was wide-open. It was, of course, dark, but no darker than the rest of the house.
She went into the bedroom to make sure he wasn’t asleep. He usually just slept on the couch, but she wanted to make sure. She went through the rest of the rooms to make sure he wasn’t there. Nothing turned up.
This was the first time he hadn’t been there.
She didn’t know if she should try to find him, stick around to see if he came home, or just leave. This latter option wouldn’t have even entered her mind if they hadn’t been arguing so much lately. She knew Walker was not a confrontational person. This was exactly the way he would do things. Just avoid her long enough for her to worry about him and then come back after she’d spent a night wondering if he were dead or alive, what it would be like to really lose him. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for more than a day or two or he really would die. He needed her way more than she needed him.
She went out on the front porch and yelled his name, waited for any type of response but all she heard were the insects and the peepers.
She texted Melanie. “U home?”
Jordan could leave tonight and not feel too badly about it. If there still wasn’t a sign of him tomorrow, she would put more effort into looking for him.
What if the person who’d left the offerings had found him?
What if it really was Melanie?
Her phone vibrated in her hand and she almost dropped it.
It was just a message from Melanie that said, “Yes.”
“Okay,” Jordan announced to the darkness. “If you really are here and are just being an asshole, I’m leaving. If you’re here tomorrow, I think we’re going to have to talk. If you’re not here because you’re still being an asshole, then I’m done. I hope you understand that. I didn’t have this much time to waste.”
If nothing else, saying those things made her feel a little better.
She texted Melanie back: “Be right there.”
She still felt slightly guilty when she left.
Twenty-five
When Ilya got in the car, she knew instinctively where her home was. Many of her kind shunned modern amenities but she thought that was probably just because they were overwhelmed. The only reason to be overwhelmed was because things were so different than they had been. There was certainly nothing difficult about new things. They were so easy to operate it seemed like everything was designed for a six-year-old. She thought a child could probably drive with relative ease if their legs were long enough to reach the pedals.
Driving back to her house, Ilya had gleaned from host Melanie that she was in school and hadn’t gone today because she was panicked about something at that house. She had been as shocked as Walker to run into him there.
Ily
a wanted to go back to the host’s house and spend some time with her memories and feelings before they died away completely. Not surprisingly, as with almost everything else in Lawrence, this girl seemed rich and complex. Unlike that Patrick guy.
When Ilya left the house, she’d gone back to where she left Patrick’s car. Having had Walker feast on her had made her hungry as well. She had ventured into the woods to feast on Patrick. As Patrick, back in the hotel room with the whore, whatever morality he’d had had been overridden by his surprisingly fierce and intact sexual drive. But if she had eliminated that, it would have been very difficult to get him to do the things he’d done—especially that early in the transformation.
But she was able to use this girl to eviscerate and feast upon Patrick with relative ease.
Ilya almost thought it was like she’d done it before.
Or maybe she just knew all about survival.
Regardless, Ilya thought there was a lot to know about Melanie.
When she got to Melanie’s house, she unlocked the door and went quickly and quietly to the bathroom. She washed the blood off, wrapped a towel around herself, and went to lie down in Melanie’s bed.
In her spirit form, Ilya was able to focus on breathing, expanding above her physical locale and taking it in, even focusing on specific parts of it. Of course it wasn’t really breathing, vapor didn’t breathe, but that was the closest anthropomorphization she could think of.
Inside the girl’s body, she was able to do much the same thing. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and evenly. Let herself expand into Melanie’s brain and viscera. Ilya had found there were almost as many memories in the muscle as there were in the brain.
She didn’t know if she got the complete story, but the pieces she did get were scary enough. Well, scary to a normal person. Ilya found them exhilarating. It was always refreshing to see the power of the Fangs at work on the young, especially when people like her didn’t even have to do anything to provoke it. Unless turning Walker would have been considered provoking it.
