After the Fall (20 page)

I know that I promised Alaric I would leave, but he wasn’t specific as to whether I would leave the town or just his house. For some time after my banishment, someone would witness my shadow darting across the rooftops. Parents would scare their children with stories of the Man of the Night, who came to drink the blood of bad little children, and the horde of zombies who would eat their bodies afterward. I don’t know if it made them improve their behavior, but it sure drove the fear into their little hearts. A few guards and drunk wanderers went missing during this time, as I snatched them and drained them of every usable drop of blood to prime myself for the journey ahead of me. 

I had risen to prominence, gaining almost godlike status among them, only to become hated overnight. This place, where I had met a great love, was also the place where I had lost my greatest love. Life held no appeal to me, as I had nothing to look forward to except a life of bare subsistence and suffering. If there truly was a God, I would have prayed for him to take me away now, even if I was doomed to Hell. It could not be worse than this, I thought. I might have been wrong about that.

And so I left Jericho, the town that was once my oasis, in search of another town where I could find solace, but most importantly, sustenance. A man may not live on bread alone, but a Vampire can survive as long as he has a supply of blood. I kept this in mind as I trudged on, forging an inroad into a great reclaimed wilderness, bound for a place that I was unsure whether it even existed. On and on I trekked through the darkness until the town was at my back and disappeared over the horizon.

PART II

The City

Rough Reception

I roamed many nights and slept many days, passing by the dazed wanderers that haunted the land. They ignored me and continued their hunt. There was time, so much time to think, to wonder, to ponder upon my lost beloved. I may have left her body back in that city of solace that became her tomb, but her memory remained firmly ingrained in my heart.

The times of plenty were gone now. I was back to a life of break-even survival. Those people truly had no idea how hard it was to survive out here. Legions of undead traversed the land like a swarm of locusts, razing the landscape and leaving a path of ruin in their wake. It wasn’t only the humans that were in danger of being wiped out. During my travels, I saw many of the larger animals picked down to the bone. This was persistence hunting taken to the next level. These hunters needed no rest. The only hope was to outrun them far enough where they lost the scent or became distracted by something else.

Now I will be able to explain what it means to go feral. A Vampire, like any other animal, has defense mechanisms in place to ensure survival. We may like to think of ourselves as superior, intelligent creatures, but deep within the surface lurks something stronger. It is the primeval mind from which we emerged—the voracious, merciless devourer that is the common denominator between us and the zombies. Our nature’s prime directive was to survive at all costs, even if this meant that someone else had to die.

After several days, I lost the ability to think clearly. My eyesight was not so much a picture as it was a rippling pond. Every moving thing made ripples that called me to it. If I installed a camera on top of a wolf’s head or some other predator, this was the footage I would have seen. There was no thought, no deliberation, only a constant game of seek and destroy. I became like one of
them
, a mindless wanderer ravaging the landscape.

During the day, I would find a burrow or some other kind of shelter to hide. Most animals had gained enough fear of the undead to leave me alone. All of them except one curious bear, that is. I must have been in a deep sleep when he came upon me, sniffing and pawing. Just like the undead, he could sense something off about my scent, something
wrong
. Unfortunately, hunger had overruled instinct. 

He continued to sniff, taking playful swipes to test the waters. After an extended period of examination, he decided that I was dead. Far from being repulsed, this bear delighted in the treasure he found and bit into me. Now I decided to wake up. One beast came face to face with another. He roared and showed me his teeth. I showed him my fangs, fully extended like a pair of ivory daggers, and pounced upon his back.

We played rodeo for a while. He tried running, turning, bucking, but nothing would get me off his back. I buried my nails deep into his soft fur and held on tenaciously. He smashed me into tree after tree, but I was unfazed. At some point, I gained a window of opportunity and sank my fangs into his neck. His fur and protective coat of fat insulated the muscle and veins further down. This required some digging that he did not appreciate. His howls of pain woke the whole forest, but I continued to dig, finally getting at the throbbing artery and piercing it. 

I almost drowned in the deluge that followed. The blood flowed rich and thick. After my extended fast, it tasted better than any human blood. I drank in long, gulping draughts, barely stopping to breathe. My stomach filled past the point I thought possible and continued to expand. By the time I was close to having my fill, the beast collapsed on its side. It let out one final groan of protest before expiring. I continued to drink away until I’d had my fill.

This burrow may have been the bear’s home, but it was mine now, until such time I decided to give it back to nature. I evicted the bear from his former home and went back to sleep. No other animal dared to wake me after that.

It’s hard to say how long I was feral or how far I wandered. It might have been weeks, months, even years. I must have covered the entire continent in my wanderings, eating when I could and hunting relentlessly when I couldn’t.

My hunger may have wrested away my self-control, but it did nothing to alleviate my loneliness. She was gone. I felt it in my heart and deep down the dark pit that might pass for my soul. I felt the abject desolation of her absence, like something vital had been ripped from me. All I could do was pray to the heavens to grant me the mercy of death. It never came. Each day I grew leaner and each night I ran myself ragged in an often fruitless search for sustenance.

At some point, I became desperate enough to start gnawing on the bones I found in search for a bit of marrow that might hold my hunger at bay. That proved to be my undoing.

It was that overcast full moon night that I found myself once again held captive by my hunger. I was able to feel every pang. It was like having shards of glass driven into every bone of my body. I was cannibalizing myself. Even after I collapsed, it might take a painfully long time before I ceased to feel anything and the lights went out inside. Then I would say, “Goodbye, world. It was great while it lasted.” This was the ultimate lesson: nothing lasts forever. Even a Vampire, destined to never die of old age, cannot endure for all eternity.

The end of my insanity came that night in the form of a large, fresh skeleton. It was human and recently deceased by the looks of it. It had been picked so clean there wasn’t enough for this body to reanimate. The skull had been broken open and its contents cleaned out. Still, the large bones were intact and I hoped to find some marrow.

My teeth cut into the bones and cracked them. The sound reminded me of a time long ago, when I was sitting on the verandah at my family home, eating walnuts with my father. It was such a simple memory that brought tender feelings to my heart—a sharp contrast to what I was doing, gnawing on bones like a common dog.

There was marrow inside the bones, and even a tiny bit of blood inside that had somehow not grown infected, not that I would have cared at this stage. It must have been quite the sight, to witness me feeding on a corpse like a scavenger.

Thunder echoed through the night. I looked up at the sky and saw nothing. Usually lightning preceded the crack of thunder. That was when I felt the pain burning in my chest. I looked down and saw the bullet wound. Out of pure instinct, I began to run, but I was a far cry from my supernatural speed at this point. I took another gunshot to the leg and fell over. My captors gathered around me.

“You got yourself another one, Ray?” asked one of the men. “That’s the third one tonight, save one for us!”

“If you want it, you need to be able to take the shot! What’s with all this hesitating crap?” exclaimed the woman’s voice. She sounded forceful and
confident.
One command issued from that voice might have been enough to send thousands of men (or women) to their deaths. I looked up and tried to make out what might be the last thing I would see. She had wavy black hair that gleamed in the moonlight. The light casting down from above sharpened her features. She had high cheekbones and eyes dark as night, with a light tan that suggested non-European ancestry.

Yes, her face would do just fine for being the last thing I would see. If it weren’t for the fact that I was still alive, I might have thought myself to be staring at an angel, all except for those eyes that stared at me like twin enigmas, reluctant to give up their secrets.

One of them kicked me. I writhed and growled in protest.

“Damn, these things are getting skinnier every day. This one’s barely even worth it,” said a second man.

“Don’t be jealous just because you didn’t tag anything yet,” quipped the woman with a slightly chastising tone. There were some oohs from the others.

“I’ll get this one,” he replied, aiming his rifle at my head. Everyone looked at him in disapproval, but the woman named Ray seemed like she could care less who killed me. She looked down at me with something that might have been pity when her eyes grew a little wider.

“Don’t shoot!” she shouted, slapping the rifle away from my face.

“What’s the matter with you, Ray? You going soft on us?”

One look from her was enough to silence all of them. I must have grown lighter in my starvation, because she picked me up as easily as a bag of bones and held me up for inspection.

“You see him? Tell me if you find something off about him.”

“Well, he’s not trying to take a bite out of you, for one,” said the first man.

“And?”

“And he’s ugly as sin! Good Lord, he looks like he’s been dragged halfway around the world. We might as well put this one out of our misery.”

“Anybody else?” she asked, tapping her foot with growing impatience. Everybody stammered. “He’s a living Vampire, you idiots! Can’t you see it? He’s alive and starving. That’s why he was feeding on these bones.”

They all let out a collective, drawn out “ooh.”

She scoffed. “You guys are hopeless sometimes. What am I going to do with you? Here, carry him back and load him up in the Jeep.” They took me and carried me at shoulder level.

“Damn, you weren’t kidding, Ray. This guy weighs about eighty soaking wet, I would think.”

“Yeah, looks starved out of his mind, too,” added the other man. “I don’t think there’s much of him left to save. Even if he lives, his mind will be gone for sure. Might be more merciful just to put him down now.”

“How about you let me decide that?” asked Ray. The men went quiet and she caressed her chin. She was actually considering putting me down like a rabid dog. True to form, I gave her a snarl and she seemed to make up her mind.

“Get him in the truck. Hurry up, I want to get home sometime today.” The men walked to the back of the Jeep and threw me in the back like a load of cordwood. “Be careful, you idiots!” she snapped. They muttered an apology and got in their seats. She rode shotgun, with the second man at the wheel.

“Everyone ready?” he said, flashing a gold fang that gleamed in the moonlight. They all said yes, and he floored the accelerator, taking us all back to wherever they had come.

Intensive Care

I opened my eyes and found myself having a déjà vu moment. The room was bathed in painfully bright fluorescent lighting that reflected off the clean white walls. In fact, everything was brilliant white.
Fluorescent,
I reminisced.
How long since I have seen this much fluorescent lighting?
There were tubes glowing up and down the room, not a single one of them broken or flickering. This couldn’t be. It had to be a dream, or a figment of my imagination. I must have been dreaming of the pre-Fall world, my last hallucination before death, or maybe I had died already and it was the start of one neverending dream. There were too many thoughts racing through my head, and my mind felt overwhelmed and shut itself down.

The next time I came to, I felt so much better. I was still weak, but almost back to my old self. I looked up and saw that I had been dressed in a gown and placed on a hospital bed. There were two intravenous taps with blood bags going into me. Then I remembered that hospitals make our kind nervous. Places like these can quickly expose us, make us vulnerable to hunters or worse, doctors who might experiment on us out of “scientific curiosity.” I couldn’t have that. I had to get out of here.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the nurse who entered the room as soon as I reached for the IV inside my left arm.

“And why is that?” I asked. My hand curled up into a fist.

“You need that blood to recover. Just lie down and rest. We’ll get you right in no time.” She smiled and her ruby lipstick-painted lips parted, revealing white teeth with long, sharp canines. Now I understood. She was one of my kind. I was in good hands. “Excuse me, but I have to continue my rounds.” She was back out the door, leaving me with nothing to do but explore the room. I looked around and found a remote for the bed and decided to incline it so I could sit up comfortably.