Young Forever (8 page)

“Smart girl,”
Aloiki
said and headed towards the front door.

“No,” I said, sensing that something was amiss, and held his arm. “Something is going on in there.”

He glanced over the place and shrugged. “Something like vats of human blood to fill my veins. I’m going in even if I have to crash through the front door.”

“Halt!”
Gerta
hissed at him. “Listen.”

He stopped and we all listened. There was a noise coming from the building, something like an argument.

Gerta
sniffed and looked around. “You’re right. I smell them, too.”

Oh, yes, indeed. There were other vampires around. Were they in the blood bank?
Gerta
and I stared at each other, each considering the situation and what we could do. It was a rare occasion when we ran across other vampires. There weren’t as many in the world as the stories would have you believe. Most times, we would pass each other cautiously, warily. Because we were usually competing for the same resources, sometimes we would be attacked. Other times, when we sensed hostility, we would attack. Vampires are loathsome creatures who will fight and kill at whim.
Gerta
,
Aloiki
and I weren’t as bad as most but we were always prepared to fight to the death, if it came to it.

“They’re in there,”
Aloiki
said.

“We must leave and make our plans before they sense us,”
Gerta
said.

“No, we must stay and fight,” I said. “We have to do this,
Gerta
, we can’t hesitate. If they sense us, they will hunt us and if they hunt us, they might catch us off guard. If they do that—”

“They will kill us,”
Aloiki
said. “Fair enough. What shall we do?”

I thought about it. What should we do? It seemed like the perfect solution to our problem. We needed to eat. It was that simple. We were being too old-fashioned in our approach. This was the new way and we had to adapt to it.

“We attack,” I said. “And then we get some of that blood.”

Gerta
and
Aloiki
nodded. I smiled at them, getting really excited about what was about to happen. We hadn’t been in a scuffle in a long time. The last time I’d even seen a vampire was in the seventies at a crazy party. He’d been a young one, only a few decades old. He wanted to be my friend then had the nerve to try and kill me, to take some of the gold
Gerta
insisted I carry around with me, like it was the 1800s and you could spend it like it was cash. Well, needless to say, I had to kill to him.

“Oh, look what we have here,” someone said behind me.

I turned to see the male vampire who was swinging a baseball bat, of all things. What was he going to do with that thing? Toss me a ball and ask me to throw it at him? But then, another one came out of the shadows and then another and another until there was a total of ten angry vampires. They were a nest, or as
Aloiki
called them, a colony.

So, there were ten of them and three of us. Ten versus three. It wasn’t a fair fight at all. Ten of them? Three of us? I had to chuckle because this was going to be brutal; for them, I mean.

We’d taken on fifty vampires on one occasion and demolished them all. They’d been a group of them living in an old abandoned house’s basement for years. We would have just ignored them, as we do sometimes, because we didn’t like to kill anyone if we didn’t have to. And the mess afterwards was usually too gruesome for words. They either burst into flames—if you pushed them out into the sun—or they dissolved into a mass of blood and innards, which stank. That would eventually turn to this black goopy mess that was impossible to get off a rug. But there was always some remnant of them left behind and it was either in the form of some ashes on the street or a mess on the rug.

But those vampires, the ones who lived in the basement, had stalked us for several days. We knew they were doing it and chose to ignore it. But they persisted and began to threaten us. So we decided to let them “lure” us into the basement so they could make mince meat out of us. So rude. Seriously. But after about five minutes, there were all on the floor dissolved into the black tar looking mess that they were.

And why had we been able to do that? To completely mop the floor with them? Because we were old. We’d been around for centuries. I was old and
Gerta
and
Aloiki
were older than me. With our combined strength, we were as strong as an army. Well, maybe not that strong but as strong as a good-sized group. Humans weaken with age, but vampires gain strength. We get more tenacious, more agile. Our minds get sharper and, soon enough, we can do stuff like run up the sides of buildings—which we rarely do as that would draw a crowd—and, sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can read minds, which I refuse to do because it’s rude and classless and I don’t really want to know what people think of me. We’d been around a while. We had a lot of experience and this wasn’t our first rodeo, as they say. This usually made all the difference in the world because we didn’t make rookie mistakes. We looked at killing other vampires as a necessity to survival, if they posed a threat. If not, we left them alone. We don’t attack every vampire we see, either. No. Some vampires are nice, just let me say. We have vampire friends all over the world.

This would not be the case for these vampires, the ones on front of us now. We couldn’t make nice with them. They were, in a word, just plain dumb. They had no idea what they were up against. They thought they were going to bully us. They were young and too used to dealing with humans. They thought they were invincible. They thought they were going to be our undoing. They were dead wrong.

After we got started, it didn’t take any time at all to do what we did best. The baseball bat came in handy and one hard swipe to the head of a large thug and he was out, as were his friends, one at a time. Stake, stake, and a few more stakes and we were done. (Most of the time, we all carry a small, wooden stake with this. It’s like a gun for vampires.) It wasn’t that hard. We just used our cunning and our strength to overcome them and we even took a prisoner, a younger girl with red hair who begged us for mercy, who told us that if we spared her life then she would show us how “they” did it. She told us that if we worked together, we could get even more blood by posing as nurses for hospitals and, in her words, “stuff like that.”

“What do you think?”
Aloiki
asked us, holding fast to her arm and not allowing her to run away.

I glanced at
Gerta
, who shrugged. “She could be helpful,” I said. “And, really, what choice do we have?”

“Yes, let’s spare her,”
Gerta
said. “She is small and looks frightened like a feral cat.”

I stared at Janelle. She did, sort of, remind me of a cat, a feral one at that. “So, how do you do this?” I asked and jerked my head towards the blood bank.

“You go in and eat,” she said. “But that’s not the easiest way to get blood. In fact, that’s one of the hardest ways to get it.”

I was intrigued. “What can you do?”

“It’s easy,” she said and removed her arm from
Aloiki’s
grip. “You can do all sorts of things. You can take people’s blood like you’re a phlebotomy tech.”

Like a what? Then I thought about it.
Oh.
Ohhhhh
!

“What an intriguing idea,”
Gerta
said and smiled at the young woman up. “What is your name?”

“Janelle,” she said.

And that’s how we got stuck with her.

* * * * *

One good thing about vampires is that they don’t hold grudges. We’re usually a pretty well laid back group of paranormals. Janelle seemed to fit this mold pretty well because she didn’t seen too broken up over her boyfriend, the one I took the baseball bat from and to. For some reason, I thought she’d be pissed. But she wasn’t and over the next few months, Janelle, who repeatedly reminded us that she had been a business major in college, showed us the ropes of getting blood from hospitals and blood banks. There were many ways to get what we require—and what we needed most—and quite simple, too, and somewhat hassle free. Why we didn’t think of this decades ago was anyone’s guess. It was probably because we were too stuck in our ways, too hung up on the hunt. I was getting excited about having an endless supply of blood and I even began to toy with the idea that we could open our own blood bank. How cool would that be? However, Janelle quickly squashed that plan.

“No, no, no,” Janelle said quickly. “Running a blood bank is out of the question, you know? There’s too much room for error and, really, it would be a hassle. Too much paperwork and all that. There are other ways to get blood without doing that.”

She talked so fast my head spun a little. “Why couldn’t we run a blood bank? It just makes sense,” I said, getting very disappointed.

“No, you can get blood from there, but no, you don’t want to,” Janelle said, shaking her head.

“Then how do we get the blood?”
Aloiki
asked.

“There’s all kinds of ways,” she said.

‘Well, tell us,”
Gerta
said excitedly.

“First of all, you know, there’s the nurse angle.”

“What the heck is that?”
Aloiki
asked.

If you dress up like a nurse,” she said. “You can enter a hospital, mesmerizing your way through then just pick a patient, enter with your kit—don’t forget the syringe, that’s the most important thing—then draw some blood, then leave. That’s one way to get blood.”

“Wow,”
Aloiki
said.

“Also, you can dress up like hospital personnel and visit blood banks,” she said. “It’s easy. Just show them a sheet of paper with the number of units you need and most times, they release it to you. But you have to do this sparingly. You can’t be selfish. If you do, then it’s over.”

Gerta
and I nodded at her.

“It’s a great way to survive,” she said. “That’s what we were doing, me and Butch.”

“Butch?” I asked.

“The big one you hit with the baseball bat,” she said.

I nodded, feeling uncomfortable. I wondered if she held a grudge over it, but then let it go. If she did, she did. There was nothing I could do about it. And I was beginning to, sort of, like her a little. It was nice having someone new around, though she was annoying and there was just this little something I didn’t quite trust about her. But I let that go, too. It does not pay a vampire to be overly paranoid.

“Yeah, it was just us for a while then we, you know, decided to bring in some more guys, you know, turning them here and there, so we could have some time off. They’d bring us enough blood back. We still liked to hunt occasionally, too, you know? You know, before, you know, you guys killed him.”

She said “you know” way too much. I groaned inwardly and asked, “You were in love with this Butch?”

She nodded. “He was my first real boyfriend.”

I sighed and felt a stab of jealousy. I really wanted a boyfriend. Well, another one. A good one this time. Someone I really, really liked.

“How long have you been a vampire?”
Aloiki
asked.

“About five years,” she said, nodding proudly and smiling widely.

He laughed. “Five years? Why not say five minutes? You have so much to learn it is not funny.”

The smile disappeared from her lips.

“Yes, she is young but valuable. She is more at home in today’s world,”
Gerta
said. “What else can you teach us?”

“Well, there’s not much to teach, you know. It’s pretty cut and dry,” she said. “It’s all in the execution. Act like you belong there, you know, in the hospitals and blood banks, and they, you know, don’t care. Everyone’s always so busy.”

“Impressive,”
Gerta
said. “Impressive how you have devised this plan.”

“You’re right, it is, you know?”

She almost made me laugh. “You say that a lot, don’t you?” I asked, smiling. “You know?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to get on your nerves.”

I was slightly taken aback. I hadn’t meant it like that at all.

“I’ll do better,” she promised. “I don’t mean to bug you,
Isotta
.”

“But that wasn’t what I meant,” I said, feeling suddenly exasperated. It’s like she was turning this around on me. “Forget it,” I said. “It is fine. I am still a little hungry and I get grouchy when I am hungry.”

She smiled at me and I was forced to smile back. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something up with her. I sensed these things. For a moment, I thought about taking her out, just to be safe. But then again, I couldn’t succumb to my paranoia. Maybe I was feeling insure because she was new to our group and it had been only
Gerta
,
Aloiki
and I for so long. But I couldn’t harm her, not yet anyway. We had to have her. I knew that, in the end, she would prove valuable. We could end up with an endless supply of blood if we played our cards right. And we wouldn’t have to hunt as often, if at all and we certainly wouldn’t have to look for shady doctors to sell us blood on the side. We were adapting to the new world and this was the way to adapt, even if I had to put up with Janelle.

“The trick is in the mesmerizing,” she said. “That’s all. And you get what you want.”

Obviously she was right. Over time, we were able to initiate Janelle’s plan and became quite well fed. And because we worked at night, it was easy to get past just about everyone. And we didn’t have to kill anyone. Well,
Aloiki
got a little too excited one night. But, in his defense, the old man he ate was about ninety years old and probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

And that’s how I met Otis. He was doing his residency and was working the night shift in the ER. He had just come onboard and was very new to the hospital. Just as I was walking through, an ambulance arrived with some people in some need of some major help. Otis saw me and said, “Nurse! Come on! We’ve got work to do!” And I just,
kinda
, went along. I didn’t know anything about being an emergency room nurse, but I winged it. While all of this was going on, I kept staring at him, and then he’d stare back, smile slightly, then duck his head like he was shy. His was so handsome, tall, well built. He was muscular and strong. His blue eyes were like gazing into the ocean. He made my heart flip-flop and then race madly. All the while, he made the people better, stitching them up and setting them straight. I was in awe of him. It was a match made in heaven. He saved lives while I took them. Or, rather, like I used to take them.