I am a Vampire Who Works Night Shift (Part 1)

I don’t think that I’m alive anymore. I mean, I can feel the keys of the laptop beneath my fingertips. I’m conscious, but there’s no blood in my veins. When I lift my fingers to my neck, there’s no pulse. Let me explain. It’s best if I start from the beginning.

 I was standing in the hallway leading to the break room at work, looking at the poster showing open positions in other departments. “Overnights” hung there in large bold letters.

“You aren’t really thinking about it, are you?” Greg asked me. He was a cart pusher, just like I was. He was this acne ridden scrawny teen, a couple years younger than me, with a complete lack of filter. He was also a very good friend, and despite his mouth, not terrible company.

“More than thought about it. Didn’t I tell you? I start tomorrow.”

Greg frowned a little. “Leaving me so soon?”

“Come on, you know it’s not like that. Do you know how much of a pay boost I’ll be getting?”

“Everyone on overnights quit at once, except Dave, and he’s been here longer than I’ve been alive. Is that really what you want to get into?”

I scoffed. “Everyone quit because the last manager had a toddler level meltdown. Dave’s the manager now. I’m not too worried.”

As we were talking, I almost didn’t notice her. She would have passed me straight by had she not stopped.

“Alex?” I heard a familiar voice say. I turned and saw her. My voice caught in my throat. She was pretty. Short dark hair, a sweater with the angriest and most incomprehensible death metal logo I have ever seen, and…

“Carrie?” I asked, bewildered. She nodded. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Yeah. Had a bit of a makeover since high school. I’m glad to see you again.”

“Me too.” I stammered out, maybe a little too loud. “W-what are you doing here?”

“Job opening,” she replied, her thumb pointing to the poster I was just looking at. “Me and Mark broke up last week. Rent’s getting harder to pay so…” she waves both arms.

“Cool,” I say, then immediately regret the decision. Cool? Her boyfriend dumped her and she’s having trouble paying rent. What’s cool about that? You’re an idiot. She’ll know you’re an idiot. “I-I’ll be starting overnights tomorrow actually. Maybe we’ll work together?”

“I’d like that,” she said. I melted. She giggled and walked past me towards the break room. “See you tomorrow, Alex.”

“Who was that?” Greg asked.

“Carrie. She was my high school crush. She looked way different back then though.” I had actually known her since elementary school. Something happened in middle school with her mom, and a month later it was like she was a totally different person. The person I saw today looked far more like the one I had grown up with than the one I knew in high school.

“Sounds like she’s available. Do you need a wing man?” Greg nudged me. I laughed.

“Greg, I don’t think you’d be helping me,” I teased. The loudspeaker let out a jingle.

“Courtesy Clerk needed to the front for customer assistance,” the voice said over the speaker.

“Rachel is up there. She can handle it,” Greg said.

“It wouldn’t hurt to check. After what happened last time I- “

Rachel burst through the doors and down the hallway towards us, whistling and smacking her hip hard enough to hurt. Rachel had Tourette’s.

“He’s back,” she said, her tone urgent.

“Who?” Greg asked, as if we didn’t both know the answer.

“The old- perv!- old guy from before.”

“Did you say what you did last time?” Greg asked. Rachel shrunk a little.

“You didn’t mean it then and you don’t mean it now,” I said. “I’ll handle it, like I did last time.” Rachel smiled a little. The spastic smacking of her arm against her stomach slowed.

The word “perv” may have been just a verbal tic, a misfired synapse, but it was damned accurate. Rachel was 18, a year younger than me. Around this time of night, an older customer who looked to be around 70 years old would request her to help him pack his groceries in his car. This wouldn’t be so concerning if he didn’t also spend nearly the entire time shopping staring at her, grinning every time she let out a verbal tic. She let out a particularly dirty string of words last time, completely against her own volition. He just smiled wider. It gave me the creeps.

I helped him to his car last time. He seemed gravely disappointed. I was sure he would be just as unhappy to see me this time, but I didn’t care. I walked out onto the floor, down past the home goods section, towards the front-end registers. There he was, in his shriveled, wrinkled, frail glory.

“What can I help you with?” I asked. Bill, the front manager, scowled at me.

“Actually, he wanted Rachel,” Bill said not hiding the annoyance in his voice. Bill never believed Rachel had Tourette’s. Bill was one of those special people who didn’t believe in any disability that wasn’t physical.

“Well, he’s getting me today.” There was an awkward silence before the old man nodded. I took his cart, and we walked together into the cold dark parking lot. He was parked in the spot with the dead camera and the dead streetlamp, which did not improve my opinion of him in the slightest.

The squeaking of the cartwheels halted as we approached the trunk of his vehicle, a white windowless van. Real sketchy, I thought to myself. The old man, hunched and decrepit, put one shaking hand into his pocket and produced a set of keys. The keys rattled in his shaky hands as he inched them towards the lock. He turned the key and the van’s doors swung wide open. It was one huge empty space, dark and foreboding. A shiver went through me. I quickly composed myself. I wasn’t the target, and anything short of him pulling a gun on me would be something I could handle. The man looked like he could barely walk.

I put the groceries in one bag at a time. I couldn’t help but notice that there was no food in the cart. It was all toiletries and housewares. Something felt terribly off about that. As the last bag entered the van, I turned around and almost didn’t recognize the man standing behind me. He was no longer the slouched decrepit old man. His posture was different. His back was straight. His hands were steady. His eyes shone red in the moonlight.

“I…I think I’ll go now,” I stammered, my earlier bravado quickly dissolving. “H-have a nice night sir!”

“I don’t think you’re going anywhere,” he growled in a voice that should not belong to a human being, let alone one so old. He lunged at me, biting down on my neck. I wanted to scream. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I felt the skin of my neck break. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation of blood leaking out was horrifying. His tongue pressed against the wound, lapping up every crimson drop. I grew faint, then fell unconscious.

:

My head was pounding. My arms dangled somewhere beneath me. My neck felt wet. My hair was drenched. My eyes refused to open. My ankles burned, constrained by something I could not see. Something sweet and coppery assaulted my nostrils. I was so very cold. I lifted a hand up to my neck, the movement much harder than I anticipated. It occurred to me then that I was hanging upside down. As my fingers brushed my throat, I felt a gap where the liquid was spilling out. It was deep, so much so that I felt bone. I inhaled and felt liquid in the back of my throat. I could taste it spilling down into my tongue. It was sweet, savory, delightful, a cold contrast to every other sensation.

The heavy lids of my eyes began to part, and I took in the room. I was hanging from my feet by a rope in a dingy basement. Beneath me was an old porcelain tub. It was filled with blood, which dripped down from the ear-to-ear open wound on my neck. Why am I not dead? It was the only thought in my head. Even it would be silenced as I heard a door creak open. Light poured down from the staircase in the corner of the room. The sole of a shoe clacked against the top wooden step. It creaked. Another step followed, then another… then another… then another. Each time the wood steps screeched.

I could barely see as blood had run into one eye, and the other was completely devoid of moisture. My whole body felt dry, save for the blood which had slowed its flow considerably. I didn’t need to see to know who it was.

He stood straight up; his hands folded behind his back. His eyes glowed in the dark room. The shadows obscured his expression.

“Six hundred years,” his voice echoed, deeper and healthier than the frail old man he had presented to us when he shopped at the Super-Mart. “That’s how long I waited to find her.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out. My questions, which were numerous, would soon be answered anyway. I felt a slow tickling itch across my throat.

“You turned,” he said with a sigh. “Thought that if I slit your throat you’d just bleed out and die before you turned. Honestly, I never understood the science or the rules behind it.” He walked over to a table, where a number of objects lay. My vision was still too blurry to make out the specifics. “Over six hundred years ago I wed a woman, wonderful and sweet. Profanity, at random, exited her mouth.” He picked up what looked like a wooden mallet. My vision began to clear some. “People whispered that she was possessed. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. The understanding wasn’t there yet.” He picked up a wooden stake. “I went to war. I took an arrow. They left me for dead. Something else found me before then, turned me into this. I went back home, and they had burned her at the stake.” He looked down at the instruments, then up at me. “My sweet Marie had an episode in the presence of a rival nobleman, and dead in the eyes of the kingdom, I no longer was there to save her. I took that nobleman and did to him what I have now done to you.”

“Wha-“my voice sounded before I cut myself off. My hands flew up to my throat. The wound shrunk considerably. I was healing, much faster than I should. Really, a wound like mine shouldn’t have healed at all. I should have just died.

“Then came your friend. Same condition. She even looks the same. When I was on the verge of having my Marie back, you happened.” There was much vitriol in the word ‘you’. “Take it to your grave you mongrel dog.”

He placed the wood stake up to my bare chest. The sharp point dug into the skin around my sternum. He lifted the mallet and hit the stake. It grazed off my sternum, tearing skin as it went. I cried out. My body swung back and forth from the ceiling.

“Stay still,” he said, agitated. I thrashed around, making me an impossible target. He put down the would be instruments of my demise and grabbed a knife from the table. He pulled out a stool from the dark corner of the room and stood up on it. He cut the rope that tied me, and I fell into the blood-filled bathtub.

My own blood filled my nostrils, clogging, burning, choking. I thrashed around hard as blood splashed around the tub. Some entered my mouth. The taste was sweet, savory, like a steak with a side of fruit punch. I found myself gulping up large bits of it involuntarily. My hands gripped the edge of the tub, and I pulled myself out. I looked up at the old man, who was still on the stool. I kicked the stool. He fell to the ground with a tremendous thud, his head smashing against the side of the tub, cracking the porcelain. I leaned down, my hands frantically working at the knot that kept my feet bound together.

I worked the knot until it was loose. The old man was back on his feet, approaching me fast. I got my feet freed just in time for the old man to pounce on top of me, knife in hand. My hands flew up, colliding with his face with a surprising force, throwing him off me. I stood up, nearly stumbling back down on my face. I raced towards the stairs. I could hear him behind me. His steps echoed behind me in quick succession as I scrambled up the staircase.

I reached the door at the top of the stairs. My blood covered hands gripped the doorknob, sliding off uselessly due to their crimson lubrication. Even as my grip firmed, I found that the door was locked. I looked back down the stairs and immediately regretted it. He was a few steps away, rage in his eyes, baring his fangs. I threw myself at the door and the wood cracked.

I had never been particularly strong or fit. Had it not been for the adrenaline I would have found my newfound strength quite out of place. In that moment though, I could form no coherent thoughts. I threw myself against the door once more. The wood gave way, and I crashed onto the white tile floor of a well-kept kitchen.

I scrambled to my feet, rushing towards the counter, searching for anything to defend myself with. I found a knife block. I gripped the handle of the largest knife on the block. I pulled it out and turned around.

He was standing at the doorway, silhouetted by the moonlight that poured out of the window in the middle of the kitchen. His eyes glowed yellow and catlike. Moonlight glimmered off his fangs. The blade of his knife, much larger than my own and designed for killing, gleamed bright.

“I’ve killed far more experienced men than you,” he said mockingly. “You don’t have a chance.” He spun the knife around, holding it in reverse. He inched towards me. I backed up until my back was up against the counter. My shadow lay on his chest as the moonlight shone against the back of my head from the window… The window! I thought.

I turned around, climbed up the counter, and leaped through the window. Glass shattered, slicing into my arms as I rolled onto the soil of the outside yard. I stood up and ran, paying no attention to where I was going and not daring to look back.

:

My heart was still racing when I reached the front door to my apartment. My thoughts, which had previously been solely on the terror that I had just been subjected to, now were erratically going through what explanation I could possibly give my mother if she were still awake.

She sometimes stayed up late reading her Bible or some book, usually religious. If I was lucky, she’d be in bed before I was set to come home. As my shaking hand, on which the blood had begun to dry, turned the doorknob and the door swung open, I was relieved to find that it was the latter. She was not in her usual spot on the couch.

I stumbled into the entryway and down the hallway. The blood on my feet had dried so I left no trail. I walked straight to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, threw away my blood-soaked clothes, and jumped into the shower. Crimson waves of water poured off me. The cut around my throat had healed, but the bite marks on my neck remained. The water and soap stung as it brushed against the twin marks on my neck.

I scrubbed. I scrubbed until it hurt, trying to take off the trauma of what had transpired in that awful basement. The fear dissipated as I collapsed into the shower, exhausted. Adrenaline left my body in waves until it became difficult to stand. I shut off the water and wrapped the towel around myself.

I looked in the mirror at my reflection. My skin was deathly pale. My irises had a yellow tinge that glowed slightly in the dimness of the bathroom. My tongue brushed against my upper canines and found that they were sharper than I had remembered. I opened my mouth and looked in the mirror. Fangs. I had fangs. What am I becoming?

I left the bathroom and was immediately confronted by the cross on the wall next to the door to my bedroom. In that moment I was seized by the largest migraine I had ever experienced. My heartrate skyrocketed and my only thought was to flee. I barreled into my room, slamming the door behind me. I threw on some clothes, crawled into bed, and closed my eyes expecting to wake up from this nightmare in the morning.

I sit here now, typing and recollecting my thoughts. I don’t know what I am becoming. My shift starts at 9pm tomorrow. I could call in, but I think I’ll go just to grab some normalcy from all this.