In a bed-bug ridden cheap-ass motel room sat a young woman typing away on her rinky-dink laptop. Last night, after a long period of introspection, she had decided to name herself Charlene. This was hardly the first time she had chosen a name for herself, and that was true whatever way you sliced her. She was revising her account of the last few night’s events and listening to Special Herbs vol. 1 on her taped up bluetooth headphones with a broken band. Everything she had typed out seemed accurate, if fantastical, but for the life of her she could not figure out how she got from the highway to this hokey little town. Over her shoulder, she could spot a few thin rays of sunshine through the slats in her blinds. It was a hot, bright summer day and she had a lot of time to kill. She was tired, probably could use a little cat nap, but the stained sheets of her interim bed already had an occupant. This stranger had popped into her bed with a puff of red mist. Whatever had caused this was just more supernatural bullshit, something that was becoming more and more a staple in her life. A few hours ago she had gotten close enough to give them a sniff, and she picked up on a familiar scent. They were a bit more lavender than lilies, but that distinct smell of flowers masking raw meat was clue enough. She could see them stirring up.
Dove peered out from under the blanket at the dim, monotonous wallpaper. A sickly shade of yellow with looping arabesque patterns that screamed out at them like a stadium full of shrieking fanatics. This was clearly not their place, but even entertaining that the nightmare had been real, they had no way to connect themself from there to here. They rose up from the mattress and the comforter fell away. Luckily they still had on their clothes from last night, though the heat and their jacket had made them sweat a small pool into the sheets. They saw that Charlene was in the room too and eyed her with suspicion.
“Ugh, where is this and who the hell are you?”
“Motel room.” Charlene took a mini pretzel out of its polypropylene bag and crunched it with her front teeth, “I’m Charlene.”
“Take off the headphones for a sec.”
“‘kay,” Charlene paused in the middle of Zatar and removed her headphones. “I’ve got great ears, but guess I gotta be more polite. So this is a ramshackle motel room, we’re in Indiana, a town named Blake, it’s got about a thousand citizens and, no, I’ve never heard of it either. Regarding who I am, like I said, I’m Charlene. Ascertaining your next question, I don’t know how you ended up here. It’s one thing we’ve got in common. Now, would you like to return the courtesy and introduce yourself?”
Dove sized up this inexplicable woman. She looked about the same age as them, maybe a little younger, but they had been primed to mistrust appearances. Charlene had platinum blonde hair that she tied back in a high ponytail that went down to her shoulder blades. She wore big, square glasses that were a little scuffed, but still emphasized her striking green eyes. A ratty gray cardigan hung off of her, and she honestly gave off the vibe of a middle-aged lesbian aunt more than a young adult. She seemed kinda out-of-it, weirdly carefree for someone dealing with bizarre phenomena. The disjointed cadence of her words matched with her monotone voice made her sound off-putting, though more in an uncanny than sinister way. The accent she spoke with suggested that she came from somewhere in the south, but it faltered enough that they suspected it could be fake. Still, despite all the weirdness surrounding her, Charlene was probably the best candidate for actually believing them.
“My name’s Dove, a friend of mine…” they paused and chewed their lip, “a bitch that I thought was my friend was doing some fucked up occult shit last night and got me involved against my will. I’m sorry for taking your bed, I just… I can’t really tell what’s real anymore or what she did to me. I mean, I can’t really believe that she made me a fucking…”
“A vampire?” Charlene opened her mouth a little and pulled up her top lip with her thumb to show off the symmetrical wet stalactites pushing out from her gums.
“Fuck!” Dove shifted backwards and stared at her with suspicion and ire, unconsciously baring their teeth, “you’re with Laura aren’t you?! You’re here to guard me, keep me here until she can brainwash me into being her little fucking lapdog!”
“Hey!” Charlene put both of her hands up to show surrender, “I don’t know anyone named Laura. I ain’t anyone’s keeper. You wanna leave, you can leave. I might just suggest you wait a while, ‘less you got some industrial grade sunblock.”
“I’m just supposed to believe you? Seems much more likely that you’re all just part of some demented sex cult than actual vampires. She probably drugged me or something.“
“Iunno, maybe she is, but I’m certainly not. Far as I know, there ain’t any drugs that can make you teleport. Besides, with that reaction, showing off your chompers, you’ve confirmed my suspicions. You’re the first other vampire I’ve met. Well, ‘cept for the one who turned me. But she’s not around for any conversing.”
“Turned?”
“Yeah,” Charlene sighed and leaned back in her chair, “as in, like, ‘turned me into a vampire.’ Inducted me into the monster mash. As in, I only eat out once a month. Keeping up with the moon cycles. Come on, you’ve seen a movie before, right? The big things are you gotta drink blood and stay out of the sun. There’s probably some other stuff too. I dunno, you’ll have to figure that out yourself, it kinda depends on who turned you.”
They sat there in silence for a few minutes. Charlene put her headphones back on while keeping an eye on Dove. For their part, Dove stared up at the water stain on the ceiling above them and reflected. Everything they had seen and everything that had happened to them definitely felt paranormal. It was not even that hard to accept that Laura was a vampire. How she had dressed, her fucking pointed teeth, the control she had over everyone, and all the goddamn blood definitely suggested it. But what about themself? Dove just could not accept that they were a vampire. For one, they didn’t feel dead or undead, whatever that’s supposed to feel like. They felt perfectly fine. Even their hand felt normal. Actually, that itself was concerning. They looked down at their palm and could not glimpse a single cut. Well, it had not been a deep cut, so maybe they were just asleep for longer than they thought. They knew they did not want to drink blood, the stuff they had drank last night had been disgusting. Their skin was not deathly pale. It was the same freckled olive color it had always been. Something did feel off about their teeth, and Charlene had said something about them ‘proving her suspicions.’ It felt like they had more of an overbite than they were used to, and when they opened or closed their mouth there was a slight scraping sensation. They could not remember how big their canines used to be, but using their bottom set as reference, their tongue indicated that the top pair was about 50% longer. Oh no no, fuck, this has to be psychosomatic or something. They also did not remember any small holes right behind the tips.
Fuck, they just could not make any sense of this. They were not some fucking reclusive baron who wore extravagant cloaks and jewelry and fed off village virgins. Werewolf would have made more sense to them. Fucking off at the full moon, waking up half-naked, scaring their neighbor’s corgi. They could see it. But a vampire? Yeah, they were gay, but they were not the sort of person to manipulate someone’s feelings or enthrall people. They had worked part-time at Subway and lived with three roommates. What were they gonna do, take a customer aside and suck them dry when they complained about too much mayo on their turkey club? Was drinking human blood considered vegan?
At some point, their phone had fallen off the side of the bed. They scootched over a bit to pick it up, but they noticed a thin beam of daylight shining across the screen. Reticent, but desperate for some certainty, they slowly slid their index finger in the way of the shining ribbon. The millisecond it hit, it felt normal. The tip of their finger looked white. Then that whiteness started to spread out, bleeding into their entire finger and making their skin as chalky and dry as a picked-clean bone. They had completely lost circulation in that finger, as if it was clamped by a much-too-small ring. They could still curl and move the rest of their fingers, but the pointer refused to bend. It all came back to them then. The same unbearable pain from the last night, the sensation of burning from the inside-out, was concentrated on just that finger. They could watch their skin bubble and blister from the heat, the keratin of their nail charing black. A high-pitched shriek escaped their lungs before they were even aware that they were making it, and the weight of their body shifted to their left side, recoiling them back to the opposite half of the bed. All of that took place in just over five seconds. The pain left them in less time than that, and their finger returned to normal, but Dove quaked at the thought of stepping out the door into the full light of midday.
“Oh damn,” Charlene brought a finger across their lips, fascinated at the display they had just witnessed. “Jesus, that was brutal! Did you die in an electrical fire or something? I’ve never seen skin burn like that.”
“What?!” Dove yelped, “what do you mean I died?”
“Heh, guess it’s lucky you don’t remember it,” Charlene gave a nervous chuckle. “I mean, I guess it’s not really ‘dying,’ at least, not for keeps. The way it works is that you get some vampy blood in you, either ‘cause you were bitten, or somebody slipped some in your drink, or whatever. That means your blood is infected, and over the course of some time period the virus will spread throughout the rest of your body. Once again, it depends on a lot of variables how fast it takes. If it’s a good, clean bite, then it might take an hour or two. If it’s just a nip, barely breaks the skin, then it’ll take at least twenty-four hours for it to run through your system. Same sorta logic applies to ingesting it. Might take weeks if it's only a drop. Regardless of the timescale, you can’t put a stop to turning once the infection reaches your heart. Your heart will stop while your body’s physiology transforms. Say you die before that happens, then the change still takes place. Don’t matter if you hang yourself, stab yourself through the heart, cut off your head and have all your limbs scattered to the four corners of the globe. The only way I can really imagine you stopping it is if you disintegrated every cell in your body, but even that mightn’t stick.”
“You, uh, sure seem to know a lot about this, didn’t you say that I'm the first one you’ve really met?“
“Yep.” Charlene smiled and kept her mouth shut tight.
“Mhm…” Dove gulped, ”could you explain why the sun did that to me?”
“Well, simple explanation: the sun fucking kills you. Longer explanation: your blood has its own sense of self preservation, and it’ll pull away from any part of your body in direct sunlight so that it doesn’t get vaporized. The skin of a vampire is actually translucent, it just doesn’t look see-through ‘cause of camouflage. When humans do something that’ll fuck them up, they feel pain that tells them to stop. It’s the same for us, and our fucked up little bodies replay the sensation of the worst pain we’ve ever felt in order to get us to back off. Usually that is the pain of dying. It makes a little sense, I suppose, the sun is overall the most consistent way to kill us. If you walked out into the sun right now, all the blood in your body would vaporize to mist in a matter of minutes, and then that mist would dissipate into the air. All the while, you’d be experiencing the agony of your first death simulated 10 times over for every second you refuse to move your ass. Almost makes you pine for a stake through the heart, huh? Sad that it don’t actually work.”
“So we can just never go anywhere during the day?”
“Ehhhhhhh,” Charlene tilted her head to the side as she exaggerated the noise, “there are ways to get around it. If you wear like 10 layers of clothes around your entire body, then you’ll basically be safe. Of course, wearing clothes that thick is uncomfortable and limits your mobility, and someone could just take them off if they really wanted to ruin your day. Then there’s a certain thing that vampires like me can do. It’s, uh, kind of unsavory. I don’t think you’ll enjoy hearing about it.”
“Charlene, I don’t fucking know what sort of vampire I am, just tell me!”
“Jeez! Okay, sheesh.” She adjusted her ponytail and sighed, “I mean, I don’t really think there are any others exactly like me, but yeah, maybe you can do this shit too. So you know how I said that our skin is translucent? Yeah, so it does fuck all to shield us. But… you don’t necessarily have to wear your own skin, at least not all the time. Certain specimens like the majestic woman sitting before you can change their bodies for multiple purposes, including sun protection. Shapeshifting, pretty much. The catch, though, is that you gotta eat whatever or whoever you wanna turn into. Not just, y’know, drink their blood, but devour their entire body. Their skin, their eyes, their brain, their bones, their… ugh… intestines. The blood tastes good, but everything else is pretty much what you’re imagining. That alone is a serious deterrent, but there are two other issues that complicate it all.
“First, you can transform partially or entirely into their bodies, but they’re still dead, so even with the restorative power of our blood they will eventually rot and fall apart the more you use them. It’s… not pleasant… being inside of a body that’s bloated and covered in maggots. Second, you understand how these new body parts are supposed to work because your mind incorporates the memories and at least some of their consciousness into itself. If you aren’t careful, this can cause ego death. You eat too many birds and you become convinced that you’re a crow. You eat too many people and you forget which one is the real you. At that point, the strongest personality of those you most recently ate takes over, and then you go on as them for a few centuries until they get too diluted too, and it all starts over again. If you are like me, Dove, please don’t end up like me. You think you’ll be able to give it up, soaring through the open air or swimming with the ocean currents. You’ll give it up so that you can stay the person you are, whoever you think that is. But that’s the thing, at that point ‘you’ is just another one of the masks you wear, and whatever was once under the masks has long withered away.”
“So is that your real body, then?” Dove winced, realizing that their question was probably just as insensitive as it was bizarre.
“More or less,” Charlene shrugged.
Her voice was unflappable as always, but Dove could see tears running down Charlene’s cheeks. It made Dove wonder who it was they were really talking to. Was it actually Charlene, or just the nameless amalgamation that had swallowed her up? Which one of them was crying? Dove didn’t wanna think about it, or about the prospect of becoming another pathetic, grotesque monstrosity. Of course, maybe it was a mistake to take it all on face value. Sure, they kinda had to accept the vampire thing—their burning finger had not been an illusion—but even if Charlene came off as sincere, they still had plenty of reason to suspect ulterior motives. She may have just brought out the sob story as a rhetorical device. Or, perhaps living as long as she evidently had, fucking around without normal human limitations, it just had the kind of effect where you could easily jump from cunnilingus jokes to lamenting your existential torment. For better or worse, that kinda made it easier for Dove to see themself as ending up like her someday. It wasn’t like they were unfamiliar with the uncanny shadow of a body and mind in dissonance either. Back when they wore a big bushy beard and lifted weights, attending late night punk shows and pining for the girls who had carabiners and mullets, they had been one with that shadow. Their body felt to them less like a home and more like where they were now, a cheap motel where they could rest but never wanted to stay. It had taken years of work and fighting, both themself and the malice of the world, in order to be who they were then and there. Their body belonged to them. They would not forgive Laura for forcing these new hurdles upon them, but they fully intended to stand up against the tide. Charlene understood that too, regardless of the successes or failures in her track record.
“So, how do you do it?”
“Hmm?” Charlene had put the headphones back on.
“How do you shapeshift? Is it more a Don Bluth or Tom Savini kinda situation?”
"Hehe, y’know, I’m starting to like you,” Charlene grew a mischievous grin, “and at this point you should know it’s always gonna be more of a Savini thing. Sadly I’m not packing his kind of firepower. It’s pretty showy, though, can’t really do it out in the open if I can help it. Folks tend to notice when you’re folding a whole lady down into a cockroach. I’d say it’s a bit like the Addam’s mansion in here,” she pointed to herself. “You just gotta open a few doors, take a look around, contain your gasps at all the fucked up little scenes, and eventually you’ll get what you’re looking for. You know, a total farce. Anyway, you’ve got me gushing, so now I have to show off.”
“Wait, right now? In here?!” Dove futilely waved their hands to get her to stop.
Charlene took off her headphones and closed her laptop, turning so that they sat facing Dove. Gripping each of her knees, she closed her eyes and folded her brow in deep concentration. Dove took a number of breaths, preparing to say something else, but Charlene silenced them by raising her index finger. The symbol for patience. Then she opened her eyes and clicked her tongue.
“Okay, got it!”
Charlene began to shake in place, not in convulsions, but like she was sitting in a juiced up massage chair. Each of her fingernails curled upward, revealing the raw, angry pink flesh beneath them before pulling up a layer of skin as well. It looked just like peeling tape up from a cardboard box, and when it reached the sleeve of her cardigan it pulled up a strand of that as well. All ten peelings convened on her throat and rolled over her face, upending thin sections of lips, nose, eyes, glasses, ears, and then hair. Once it achieved the zenith of her head, the strands stood upright and waved about like a sea anemone. More and more layers came up in waves, joining the macabre birthday streamers in their tower of flesh. She was vivisecting herself in varying frequencies, a layer of sinew next to a layer of bone next to a layer of jeans, suggesting more a spectacularly abstract installation in an anatomy museum than anything that should be conscious. The moment she had reduced herself to some arbitrary density, every strand twisted together counterclockwise and spiraled upward. A faint red glow came from the spire as small bubbles scurried up like mites beneath the sheets. Dove’s jaw gaped wide as they took in this surreal display of majesty and horror, only vaguely cognizant that their dumbfounded reaction was exactly what Charlene had been aiming for. Then, with what sounded like a thunderclap, the flesh construct collapsed down on herself and knocked over the chair where she had sat.
Dove sat on their knees and crawled forward to spot Charlene over the bed. There was no trace of her around the chair except the faint smell of lilies and raw pork. Then they heard a small, high-pitched whine come from the left side of the bed. A short-haired black cat with emerald green eyes jumped onto the comforter. Dove stuck a wary hand out towards it, and the little creature did not hesitate to nuzzle its head against their fingers, purring as it planted its forehead in their palm. They rubbed it for a minute before the cat parted its lips.
“Fuck,” Charlene’s voice came out from it, though slightly higher and phlegmier, “I missed this.”
“So, uh,” Dove grimaced but kept petting the Charlene cat, “you ate this cat?”
“Yeah, I ate this cat…” She curled up on the bed and folded her paws beneath her before she continued to speak, “well, to be more accurate, a previous version of me ate her. Charlotte. Rosa here was her cat and she was dying from stomach cancer, so Charlotte thought the best way to deal with that was to eat her. Gotta say, my opinion of the lady has really gone down now that I share a lot of her memories. And trust me, she’s eaten a lot weirder things for much less heart wrenching reasons. It seemed appropriate to use Rosa for this lil’ demonstration, though, ‘cause she tends to be a lot less fussy about it than the others. Probably due to her affection towards Charlie, and by extension me. She’s still pretty fresh too, and likes to be pet.”
“Was she the one who turned you?”
“Yeah, I guess so…” Charlene laid her head down and sighed, “it ain’t exactly a pleasant memory, and it was really just a matter of luck that I ended up driving the ship, rather than stuck on the inside like Rosa.”
“I’m sorry for asking,” Dove darted their eyes away from the cat, “seems you’ll hafta teach me etiquette next.”
“Heh, you’ll need someone else for that.”
The incredulity that Dove had desperately clung to had now long shattered across the floor. That must have been a testament to the plasticity of the human brain, that it was able to witness a sporadic procession of impossible things that pulled and pulled at its folds without ever splitting. Well, it already had a split down the middle, so maybe the brain had been broken long long ago. Regardless, out of the two of them, Charlene was a much more affable bloodsucker than Laura, so it was probably best to stick with her. Dove was gonna need some help if they were gonna tear that bitch a few hundred new assholes, afterall. Speaking of which… Careful to keep all of their skin out of the sun, they pinched the corner of their phone and brought it up so that they could turn it on. It was about halfway charged and there were near two unread messages from Marcus on top of their wallpaper. Despite making three attempts to open their phone with the usual method, it simply refused to take their fingerprint. Great, was it shitty software or more vampire bullshit? They turned on their phone flashlight and stared intently at their thumb. Ah, of course, more bullshit. There was certainly a print there, but the normal concentric pattern was now interspersed with independent spirals that spiked outward along the edge. Ugh, fine, they thought for a few seconds and entered their passcode. During this mini escapade, Charlene had been idly grooming herself, licking away at one of her hind legs. She raised her head up when she heard Dove’s breath catch, spotting a few scant beads of sweat dripping down their forehead.
“Charlene,” Dove wiped the sweat away, “are there any night buses out of this town?”
“Pff, I dunno, if there was then I would’ve already taken it. I mean, shit, I’d happily drive you out of town myself, but there’s more than just the sun getting in the way here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Something’s wrong with this town,” Charlene rose up from the bed, “don’t matter what road you take, don’t matter how long you run through the woods, you can’t even fly without just coming back to Blake. Whoever sent us here probably wants us out of the way for a good while.”