Chapter 3: Three Strains of The Night

LESLIE

There were stars, billions and billions of stars that spun and danced and careened into great explosions of light that consumed and birthed new life. Leslie Haufman was there, floating in the great expanse, neither large nor small, just a body and a mind attached to a single point in space. It mesmerized her. She could watch the universe expand, watch it curve in on itself, and she could watch every individual quark spin in its own idiosyncratic rotation. She was the universe observing itself, and for the first time in her entire life, she was completely content. At least, she told herself that. She was never alone here because every creature that ever lived made up her being. And yet, she was still solitary. She was alone in kind if not in quantity. The spectacle of her celestial ballet became a nightmare of clashing lights and screams all snuffed out in the neverending void. Why was she the only consciousness here? What, in the terrible furnace of the cosmos, had given birth to her and her alone? Could not an errant molecule bring her some companionship? She could not accept the eternal wait for nothing and no one. She had to become more than just a being, she had to have agency and a will to shape the random odds of fate. She had to become something new. She had to wake up.

The librarian roused from her dream on the steps of her library. Her memory of the past two hours jumbled together in the remnants of a completed game of Jenga. She remembered that she had been getting ready to clock out. The closing shift appealed to her for several reasons. There were less visitors, so she could get a lot more reading done, and it kept her on the same schedule as her boyfriend. It was certainly a nice bonus that the older sections felt like her own little haunted mansion. She was making her final rounds when the clock struck midnight, carrying a few goosebump books back to the children’s section that someone had left on the floor of the romance aisle. Carrying the colorful paperbacks with her brought back memories of her own childhood, and she chuckled to herself wondering how many kids were still getting spooked by the cover of Say Cheese and Die! She knew she was thinking about that, because in the next moment she heard the doors of the reserve room creak open. Fuck, she had forgotten to warn those kids that it was almost closing time. She spun on her heels so that she could get that done before something else slipped her mind, and out from the shadow of the doors walked two women holding each other's hands. One of them was the girl who had rented out the room, still wearing that bizarre yet high-quality cosplay outfit. Leslie had asked if it was any character in particular, and the girl gave this sinister little giggle before saying something like “oh, for once I’m not playing anyone but myself.” Guess she had a real commitment to the bit.

The other woman standing beside her was still hidden, but she was sure it had to be one of the girl’s other friends. Probably the one other girl who had gotten all gussied up for the occasion. Leslie stepped closer to them and was about to say something about the library closing when her voice caught in her throat. She had been right, the girl she had suspected was the other woman, but something felt different about her now. Her eyes started to lose focus when she looked directly at her, but that only intensified her desire to take her in fully. She just did not look real. Her appearance conjured up all the times Leslie had read a bit of romantic poetry, a series of exquisite parts that could not make up an entire woman. Yet here before her stood venus, and she had the silence and the calm of mute insensate things. She felt a bit like a bitch for wanting to bother them, they could have their reign over the library if that was what they wished. The dreamy woman looked at her with doe eyes. The immensity of her gentle gaze felt like it might swallow Leslie whole and she welcomed it. She wanted this strange goddess to caress her face and whisper every fleeting beauty that Leslie had ever caught in the mirror, in the eye of her lover, in her forgotten daydreams. It felt like decades that she stood there, basking in desire, but it must have only been seconds before she felt a stab in her neck that spread throughout her body in a chemical burn. She had blacked out in shock.

She looked down to where her body had been laying and wondered how she had wandered so far after losing consciousness. Did she just stumble out the door? Even if it had only lasted a second, that venomous sting combined with falling halfway down the stairs should have added up to at least a little soreness. But she felt A-ok. Besides it being later than usual, she felt pretty much exactly the same as she always did after closing up: tired and kinda peckish. It was all very mysterious to her, and her inner detective flared her head. She was going to march up the stairs, unlock the library doors and investigate just what the hell was going on tonight. She took a step. And then another. And then another. The doors were farther away now, because somehow she had ended up at the bottom of the steps when she had been trying to climb them. She stared directly at her right foot and raised it to take the first step, she moved it forward and set it down again. Good, first step achieved. She then watched her left foot follow suit, planting itself on the higher step. If she just kept at it she could reach the doors in less than a week. Well, except for the fact that she was back at the very bottom. She had not fallen and she could not remember stepping back, she had just… reset. All of it should have been freaking her out, causing her to question her own sanity, but for whatever reason she was taking it in stride. She was operating on dream logic even though she could swear that her body was one hundred percent awake. Regardless, she reached into her pocket and discovered that the keys were missing anyway. Guess she had no choice but to go home.

Sliding into her car, she turned the ignition as she had thousands of times before, a motion so mundane that she almost missed the inconsistency. It felt the same, the engine turned over and started, she could clearly hear that. The light came on and revealed the interior. Something else was missing. She leaned as far over the center as she could searching for that something. What she found was a complete absence. There was nothing and no one in the rearview mirror. She brought the overhang mirror for a second opinion. Still nothing. She took out her cell-phone and took a picture for confirmation. It was a picture of a mirror reflecting a floating brick of metal. Curiosity raging, she switched to the self-facing camera. Her round face and hazel eyes stared back at her quizzically. Something else was off though… fuck, her glasses were missing! Had she left them back on the steps without noticing? Mere hours ago she had been just shy of legally blind without those glasses, certainly not capable of operating a car, but things looked crisper to her now without them. It still sucked that she lost them, though, because she really liked the frames. At least all the puzzle pieces were falling into place. She made an ‘O’ shape with her mouth as if she were about to get her teeth cleaned. Yep, there they were, just as she had suspected. Fangs. They were long and sharp and curved slightly inward. She ran her tongue along the sides and up to their sharpened point, but some alien instinct kept her from pushing too hard. It occurred to her that she’d have to be careful next time she chewed bubblegum, lest she slice her own tongue out on accident.

“Oh, I’m a vampire.”

All of it made perfect sense, you know, besides the one minute issue that she woke up this morning under the assumption that vampires did not exist. The only reasonable explanation was that she was dreaming, but she could not induce herself to wake up. Therefore, the most practical approach was to operate under this assumption: the cryptic goth girl had bitten her and turned her into a vampire. She could panic about all the uncomfortable implications of that after she found herself a controlled environment to experiment further. It behooved her to figure out her own weaknesses before she accidentally eats a bit of properly seasoned pasta or spills a bag of rice all over her kitchen floor. She could just picture herself hunched down on her knees, her eyes focused on each individual grain as her finger counted them off.

She shot a text to George apologizing that she could not come over tonight. She was not feeling like herself. Despite the hour, it took less than a full minute for him to respond:

A sweetheart as always. She pulled back from her employee parking spot and turned onto Gilman avenue before riding the ramp up to the highway. It was about a ten minute drive from there to her place, a blissfully light commute, but even that little time felt inflated in the face of her thoughts. How long would it be before she lost the perspective to appreciate these short spaces of time? Decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. Perhaps immortality was just a matter of finding the right routines. Would it take her very long to notice when George dies? Sure, that’s a thought. Time to turn on the radio.

There were not many stars in the night sky, but that was usually the case even in a small city like Saperavi. She had once done a history report about the origin of the town and its name. A saperavi was a type of grape native to the country of Georgia that had deep purple skin. As far as she could tell, there was no huge presence of Georgian people here. The town had been a trading outpost before Indiana had entered the union, and from her research saperavi was just a popular kind of wine that the founder had been importing. Since he was also the local priest, he had apparently insisted on using it for sacrament. She had given it a try once. It had been acidic and the cloying flavor had stuck to the roof of her mouth, no matter how much water she chugged to wash it out. Pouring the rest of the bottle down her kitchen sink, the immensity of the black ocean suggested the eye of a wormhole twisting out in an all consuming spiral of infinite density.

That was not the usual radio station she had on that macro button. Most nights she listened to some relaxing jazz from the college station that felt resonant with the city environment. She pressed the next button over, but it came up at the same frequency: 99.5. Out of all the mysteries of that night, this one would have to rest at the bottom of the pile for a while. At the very least, it kinda made sense if this really was a dream. Buttons were not known to work all that well in the REM-scape..

She took the off-ramp and in another minute she found herself at her building. It was a good thing that no one was ever up at this time of night. She could just imagine herself reaching her floor, waving to the nice middle aged aunt that lived across from her, and then blacking out. Next thing she knew she would be in the middle of the hallway, clasping a body to her chest with blood staining both her lips and the ugly moss carpet beneath them. Yeah, if this was not a dream, she would have to work out a scheduling system with George to make sure she would not end up eating him. Even if she just turned him, however that might work, that would be pretty terrible. He was a vegetarian, he refused to kill a spider he found in the toilet bowl. Forcing him to suck the life force out of another living being most likely meant a one-way ticket to his self-immolation.

She turned the key to her apartment door and felt a wave of cool relief wash over her. There was a calming atmosphere of the banal familiarity from the yellowing walls and dying houseplants. One of the reasons they fared so poorly was due to her often keeping the blinds drawn, an unexpected favor from her human self to her leech self. She had a few hours to go before dawn. Despite supposedly being nocturnal, she really felt dead tired. Would caffeine even work on her anymore? Well, she could put on a pot of coffee after eating the steak just to make sure. If it did work, she could spend the night checking on the news to see if there were any reports on impromptu exsanguinations, and then sleep through the day. Opening up the fridge door, her eyes were immediately drawn to the vermillion meat. It did look appetizing. She just had to move her mother’s serving dish out of the way, where she had some lasagna plastic wrapped. Move it aside. Rip the packaging open. Drink.

OH JESUS FUCKING SHIT SHIT SHIT

As soon as her skin brushed the tray she was sent sprawling back and hit the door of her sink cabinet with a thud, popping it open. The spot where her hand had touched it emulated the sensation of a deep chemical peel and the flesh there had turned a corpse-like shade of gray against her almond brown complexion. Over the course of a few ticks of the clock the pain dispersed and her hand returned to normal. It was a nice tray, the lip decorated with fleur de lis. It was also silver. If she had not been so tired and famished then she would have thought to look out for that, but at least she knew for sure that silver was off limits. She turned over and got on her knees before grabbing the countertop to shakily pull herself back up to her feet. There was the sound of a quizzical meow. She swung her head towards the source of the sound and saw her cat Franz. The patched tabby sniffed the air a few times, apparently unsure, before making a decision to saunter over and rub himself against her leg. He was definitely a sight for sore eyes.

When it began, Leslie could not tell what was happening. Like the entire night, it was less a switch clicking on in her brain, and more an escalating series of curiosities. For a moment, she mistook the sound for his purring, but the rhythmic pulses just did not fit. She could sense her pet’s heartbeat through his skin. She bent over to pick him up and hold him in her arms. When he looked up at her eyes, he shifted from affection to primal fear. He bared his fangs to hiss and the fur on his back stood straight up in a bizarre mohawk. No, shit, she wasn’t trying to scare him! He knew it was her before. She was still her. She was in control. All she wanted to do was hold him and pet him and let him know that she would never hurt him. She told him this as she stared deep into his eyes, mouthing the words to herself. In one swift motion she bundled him up in her arms and began rubbing his head with her middle and forefinger. His heart rate settled down as they kept up their staring contest. That’s a good boy, calm down. Mama is here now. Let mama kiss you. Let her-

She had wanted to kiss him, square in the middle of the little M on his forehead, like she had done thousands of times before. Once her mouth was only an inch from him, though, she caught a whiff of it through his skin. It was warm, running, and alive. She could remember how blood used to smell to her. A horrible, metallic assault on her olfactory neurons. That copper scent had transformed into aromatic sweetness. It tasted hot and rich with a hint of spice like Mexican chocolate. Wait, no. When did she divert her course to his little frail neck? But it was so good. Stop! She screamed at herself to quit, to leave him alone, to find someway to patch up the terrible gash she had made. She tried and tried to will herself away, but she could still feel her lips sucking, her tongue lapping, her throat slurping. Maybe everything could be okay. Maybe her body would get enough of this nectar and she could pull herself out of its intoxicating haze. Franz would be okay if she just rode it out. Yesssss. NO! Her little cat only had so much blood in him and she had already drank so much. Every muscle in her body tensed up as she willed her mouth to freeze and her fangs to loosen their grip. She would not be just a hungry beast. This was not meat. She had taken Franz in as a kitten. Her brother’s old cat had given birth to him and Leslie knew that he was the sweetest of the whole litter. He had been there for her when she lost her mom to breast cancer, before she met George. He was her dearest companion and she could not betray him like this. Prying her neck back, she opened her eyes again to survey the damage.

There was still a faint heartbeat in him. A slow pendulum that swung across his inner cavity and each second brought closer to still equilibrium. He was emaciated, his fur wild and shedding slightly with each small, strenuous breath. Franz looked a bit more like a half-assed taxidermy job drained of its sawdust, rather than a living cat. A small trickle of his remaining, sangria blood pooled on the white tiles. Following one last silent wheeze, Franz’s heart gave out. Leslie’s burning tears cut across her cheeks. She panted and groaned. The salinated water intermingled with the drying dregs around her lips, dribs and drabs of cherry red speckling across the floor. Reality forced her to admit that the nightmare had settled in. It had followed her through the door and spread itself out upon her hearth. She was a monster. Regardless of how she compartmentalized and legislated things in her own mind, her body would always size up her friends and loved ones as variant cuts of meat. Her cat chuck, her brother skirt steak, her boyfriend tenderloin. She was still there, still cognizant, but the life she once cherished was spoiled and ready to ripen in the heat of the summer sun.

Then she felt it again. The rhythmic beat of a heart sputtering to life. It sputtered and sputtered before purring like the juiced up engine of a lawn mower. Or, more apropos, purring like a cat. Franz had reinflated to his former healthy size, and he was nuzzling his head against the crook of her arm. The only hairs she could see out of place were matted with blood around the two puncture wounds she had given him. Oh, welcome back Franz. Guess it’s time to switch you over to the wet food. She giggled to herself and put her little undead kitty back down on the floor. Lovely. What a lovely night. She wondered if she had any wine to pair that steak with.

ANDY

Andrea was staring straight down the neck of the piss swill bear that she had been nursing all night. She was a social drinker, which translated to her hating the taste of alcohol, yet still preferring a light buzz to the atmosphere of a sports bar. She was looking down into its belly to spot… yep, there it was. There was a little tiny Frito floating around on its back, its little corn fibers slowly dissolving into the amber vat. Great. Honestly, it might have improved the flavor if it had not been flung from the mitts of a greasy computer programmer. Sure, Bernie was a nice enough guy, had a sorta playful dad personality, but weren’t gay guys supposed to be fastidious. Well, maybe that was just twinks. She could not relate to her old frat brothers anymore, regardless of how many of them turned out queer. Only twenty-seven and Andy was already desensitized against reliving her college years. The only real question on her mind the whole night was how she could start turning them down easy. Perhaps this was just her fate as a trans woman who only found herself in the twilight of youth. Simultaneously stunted and weary with the world beyond her years. Accelerated girlhood experienced as a woman, the foregoing years of boyhood just a distant, hazy dream. Looking to her girlfriend and other chicks online for the tips and tricks of shaving, bathing, dressing, stewing. The one-eyed leading the blind. At least she had some sense to her now.

Everyone else had already left after the customary offers to drive her home. Oh no, she lived plenty close, she did not mind walking. She could defend herself. She liked to be the first to arrive and the last to leave for every event. These buffer zones she gave herself meant time to think, to be alone with herself, a very precious commodity in her life. Photoshoots, streaming, dates with her girlfriend, it was all as glamorous as it sounded. She finally got the chance to be the princess, and never could she appreciate the allure of quiet anonymity until she lost it. That was one nice thing about hanging out with her college buddies. Despite handling her a bit more tactfully, and the occasional glances to her chest, they still saw her as good ‘ol Andy. It was funny that she had once fantasized about leaving all of them behind. Stupid little brat. She had to hold onto those vestiges of the familiar as long as she could take it.

It had been 30 minutes since she put in the Uber request. Okay, well, looks like she really was walking home then. It was already one in the morning and her apartment was only a few blocks away. That was fine, she could handle it. Saperavi was by no means a dangerous city, the crime rate had been low for the past four decades and it was still steadily declining. That did not stop the local police from siphoning away a bunch of teacher’s pensions for the latest in tactical vests and assault vehicles. It was a peaceful night, probably the best candidate for an evening stroll. There were few cars passing by that could pose a disturbance to her, not least of all her lost chauffeur. She stood up from the booth and took her little purse out with her into the cool air of a dark June. Leggings, a black skirt, and an oversized sweatshirt made up her ensemble. If she was going to wear anything at all, it was either gonna be lingerie or something comfy. She never really got the impulse to dress one-hundred percent ultra-feminine. She was confident in her appearance. If anything, dressing up too much to go out was gonna draw unwanted attention.

Saperavi was not her birth city, she originally came from a lil hamlet in Brevard county Florida, but it felt like her hometown. Andy hated the hot, swampy environs in her state of origin, and she had jumped at the opportunity to split when a middling liberal arts college in a random city offered her a full ride. After two aimless years bouncing between majors, she eventually settled on getting a degree in philosophy. Her focus being existentialism, the sexiest school of philosophy. Once senior year rolled around, she found her own little nest and a lucrative career streaming games in a low-cut top. She did not get many chances to discuss Simone de Beuvoire nowadays. That was fine, though, Andy was honestly happy to have had an education that did not inform her career and to have found her own niche in a town with cheap rent and a decent local queer scene. It was a little cheesy, but it did make her smile to see so many polychromatic flags hanging up around the overhangs of local businesses. The sky above was cloudless and the distant sound of crickets chirping accompanied her on her stroll. This whole night was awash with the bittersweet tang of reminiscence as the few preeminent scenes of her life played over and over and lapped one another on the spinning wheel that projected her life.

She rounded the corner onto her block, a series of squat brick buildings that made up Cavendish street. Her girlfriend, Lucy, had told her once or twice that the street was named after Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth century playwright who had written one of the earliest science fiction novels. A lot of the streets in Saperavi were named like that, taking the last name of some once prominent sci-fi or horror novelist that little-to-no-one ever heard of outside of a literature department. Chambers drive, Gilman avenue, Le Fanu road, Jackson lane. She was not really sure what to make of it. She had never heard of another city with that sort of quirk. She kinda suspected it had something to do with the creepy library she occasionally had to walk past. What, exactly, she could not guess. It was just gothic and eerie and stuck out like a sore thumb everytime she spotted its twisted steeple. She knew Olivia liked to hang out there a lot, so maybe she would know more about it. Olivia was a mousey, straw haired girl that Andy sometimes hung out with to smoke weed and who she heavily suspected to have some kind of crush on her. She had on a couple of visits mentioned tuning in for Andy’s streams. But it was fine, Olivia also knew that Andy had a partner and was only interested in a single committed relationship right now. Speak of the devil, it appeared that she was sitting on the stoop to their shared apartment building. With a few tentative steps on the arches of her feet, Andy gave a timid wave to alert the other girl to her presence.

“Hey Liv! I guess we had similar ideas about enjoying this peaceful night and all.”

She shifted her gaze from the cold concrete sidewalk over to Andy. Olivia looked the same as always, shrunken and hunched over with a bent straw of a spine. Her irises were still the same icy blue and magnified through her corrective lens, but they felt sharper. She was focused, unbound from her usual hazy scatterbrain. Had she been waiting here for Andy? That wild look in her stretched almond eyes suggested as much.

“Hey Andy dear, heh heh,” Olivia chortled and rose from her seat, “just got back from studying at the library. Thought I’d see if I could still catch you.”

“Oh, okay, well I’m just heading to bed, been a long day.”

“But the night is still so young, doll,” Olivia tilted her head quizzically. “You said it yourself, who would want to let such a beautiful night go to waste? Don’t you wanna explore it with a kind companion?”

Was she drunk? Andy could not smell any booze on her, but Olivia was definitely acting amiss. Even at her most bold, Olivia had always been sheepish around Andy. Before this night she had acted like an attention-starved puppy, sticking to Andy’s leg and prodding for any means to garner her favor. Though she stood upright, the woman approaching her at that moment moved like a wolf. Each step she made was confident, calculated, slow and methodical and yet ready to break into a bounding stride at the slightest hint of resistance. And Andy was stuck there, dumbfounded like a doe caught in a copse. Could she not just run inside? Why did she think that this diminutive and scrawny girl could ever overpower her?

“Mmm, Andrea, and I thought you smelled sweet before…” Olivia’s teeth glinted against the moonlight, “you smell like a fresh baked pumpkin pie set out to cool. It’s making my mouth water. This is your fault for being so delicious, Andy, so why don’t you take responsibility and let me have a taste?”

“Liv, you’re cute and all, but…” Fuck, how could she get out of this? “I’m tired and really not in the mood, okay? Could we give this a rain check?”

“Just trust me, pumpkin,” Olivia snatched up Andy’s wrist, “let me lead you in a dance for just a little while and soon you will be awake to everything.”

Andy could not understand what was happening, what might be possessing this woman she considered her friend, but she was familiar enough with the act to keep her guard up. She kept darting her eyes away from Olivia’s, trying her best to find any possible escape route. When Olivia came close enough for Andy to feel her wet, panting breaths, she closed her eyes. In a deliberate motion, she used her one free hand to reach into her purse as Olivia guided her to tilt her head with grasping fingers. That breath was against her neck now. If Andy had been just a little too slow, then her flesh would have been torn. If she had been a little faster, then Olivia might have caught her other wrist. Through some mad ingenuity, Andy managed to grab onto her taser, charge it, and ram it straight into Olivia’s rib cage. Under normal circumstances, an electric shock directly to Olivia’s heart could have easily killed her, and Andy would have never dreamed of risking that. This Olivia eluded even her wildest nightmares. The only thing that could plausibly incapacitate her was lethal force. For her part, Olivia dropped her iron grip on Andy and fell to her knees, clutching at her heart as she felt its beat disappear. That would have been all she wrote, but the hunger inside of her was not willing to let Olivia go that easily. Andy did not waste this momentary reprieve. She huffed up to the door of her building, swiped her card, and slipped inside.

Another stroke of luck was the fact that Andy lived on the first floor. Had she been forced to climb up even a single flight of stairs, Olivia could have easily caught up to her and broken the arm holding her taser. Andy just managed to make a mad dash to her door, unlock it, and turn around just in time to catch Olivia running towards her. Her gait was not that of an athlete, but that of a predator with her haunches bent to the ground, her chest pointed forward, and her mouth coated in spittle. Andy slammed the door shut, and before she could lock it a thunderclap knocked her face first onto the ground and likely bent the hinges. She braced herself for Olivia to tear through the wood with her claws. There was no pounding after the initial strike.

“Andy?” The small voice of her friend had returned, “I’m sorry, I… that wasn’t what I wanted to happen… that wasn’t what I meant to do…”

Andy could hear remorse in her words, and genuine confusion as well. None of that meant that she was safe.

“You’re smart, Andy, you can probably tell there’s something wrong with me…” Olivia whimpered, “I saw these two women at the library, they were both beautiful, almost as beautiful as you, and one of them did… something to me. She said something to me, she said to be honest. I thought about you, how beautiful you are, how much I want to make you moan my name and take your… I really, truly, was only gonna tell you the truth of how I feel. I was too honest and lost control.”

“Shit,” Andy groaned from the floor, “shit, shit, shit Liv! I gave you 50,000 volts to the heart and you’re right here, right as rain. So I gotta say, things seem pretty fucking messed up.”

“Yeah, I…” Olivia’s voice caught in her throat, “I think I wanted to… bite your neck to taste… your… blood…”

“Huh, yeah?”

“Yeah…” Olivia fessed up like a precocious child who had stolen her mother’s lipstick.

They sat there for about ten minutes, their backs only separated by the wood of the door. Each one could hear the other breathing. Andy sighed and decided to speak up again, making some attempt to roll with the punches.

“So I’m guessing one of the rules for this is that you can’t come in without my invitation?”

“Yeah… I guess,” Olivia choked the words out, her voice cracked from her crying. “When I hit the door and almost broke it, my blood felt… cold… and something pulled me back. I think the shock of it… heh… snapped me out of it. I just feel like… I can’t believe I could ever act like this… treat you like this… I’m so so sorry Andy.”

“Okay.” Andy was curt. “If you need my invitation, then I can go and get some sleep, right? Are you still gonna be there when I wake up?”

“I… yes… I probably will be.”

“Well, then,” Andy sighed, “I guess we’ll just have to table this until tomorrow.”

Andy did not take off her clothes. Andy did not take off her shoes. She simply fell onto her unmade mattress and slept. She would work through this situation when she could see the dawn and know the nightmare was weakened. For a few hours, though, she would just embrace the comfort of a dreamless oblivion.

STEPHEN

Today had been a good day. Stephen had got up early, taken a hot shower, and packed an extra sweet and sour pickle with his lunch. The commute to his shift was a nice, sunny drive and he got a chance to car karaoke along to City By The Bay. It had been a slow day, so no stolen books or teenagers trying to sneak into the exclusive wings. The Reds had scored a homer on the Marlins. He had finally found his calling in life. And here he was, enjoying a smoke and a juicy cheeseburger paired with an ice cold beer.

Sometimes life really has a way of falling into place. The one thing that caught his attention that whole night was the four twenty-somethings that took over the conference room. He got to extend his cigarette break a few times over to keep an eye out for them. Stephen was not really expecting much, it was rarely the gay kids that ended up defacing anything but copies of the bible. It did pose some interest for him when they came out down two members and one of the remaining looked high off of her ass. Had those fucks been hotboxxing in the library? He was just about ready to hop over the bannister and chew them out, but luckily Leslie stepped in for him. Leslie always seemed a bit out of it, so it made him happy to see her taking some initiative. Then, for whatever reason, she stopped dead in her tracks. The girl that had some wits about her ran behind Leslie and looked to have bitten a chunk out of her neck. Or, well, she did not “run,” exactly. Her stride was casual, but she was on Leslie in less than a second. It resembled a sped-up motion effect in a very old film. The frame rate around her specifically was so low that he could only see every few motions of her body, creating the illusion that she was teleporting from one point to another. Leslie held a hand to her bleeding neck and stumbled over to the front doors of the library. Apparently, that strange daze was contagious.

The mysterious woman in red returned to the side of her partner and whispered something into her ear. The dreamwalker lifted her head and looked straight at him. It was clear that whatever was happening here was well above his pay grade. He wanted to turn tail and run, but the eyes of this strange girl kept him glued to the spot. She didn’t look like anything special, just a girl in a pink hoodie she wore over a black sabbath shirt tucked into a flowery black skirt. Definitely not his type, and yet he kept staring at her, desperate to find something hidden within her. It must have been something in those huge green-blue eyes. They kept glinting from some unseen light source, like gems with an infinite number of facets. Those eyes looked straight past him, but he needed her to see him. Why could she not see him? Why could he feel a sudden, cold dagger stuck into his neck? With an infinitesimal nudge, those eyes stared just to his right and burned with a deep affection she could never afford to him. He heard a soft, smooth voice that told him sweet nothings. It lulled him to sleep. Next thing he knew, Stephen was slumped in the driver seat of his car in front of the diner he now occupied.

He took another puff of his pall mall as he surveyed the damage of his last few memories. A waitress was laid out on the linoleum floor right next to his booth, half her face stuck in the glue trap of her own pooled blood. The other half was stuck in a silent scream. One of her arms was twisted back at a ghastly angle that disrupted her immaculate fetal position. Stephen had never been known for his excessive subtly, and the long, twisting serpent of a wound that just peeked out at the nape of her neck was another testament to that. The big line cook was draped over the counter and dripping onto a bar stool, pinned to that spot by the steak knife stabbed clean through the back of his skull. God, what an excellent sound it had made. The brittle crack of bone and the squelch of greymatter followed by the satisfying ka-chunk of split marble. At this angle he could not see her, but he knew that the main waitress, Janet, was reclining like an abandoned Barbie doll under the bent order wheel with its lazy, creaking spin. All the way across the diner was a young couple sitting across from each other in a booth perpendicular to his own. Their hands were outstretched towards one another, scouting for comfort. The man’s head was floating in a bowl of cold chili and the woman was hooting at the ceiling, her neck turned around a full 180 degrees. He had been a bit too zealous to get a good taste of any one person. They were all just a potpourri of flavors that sat snug in his stomach. It was his first time trying out that lady’s little speed trick, and while he certainly had not mastered it, he felt like he had a good handle on the fundamentals.

Turning on his phone, Stephen browsed through the local news feed (heh) for Saperavi. A bit disappointing, really. There were not any stories of random murders or victims rising in the morgue, but he had a feeling that would change all too soon. He was a shark and the current was moving fast. It was his job to follow it. He could not say exactly how many miles he had driven from the city, or the direction for that matter, but it must have been a few based on the time. Five in the morning! He knew that he was cutting it close, but damn did he feel wired.

He could feel a hand grip onto the toe of his loafer. He leaned over to watch as the waitress’ dislocated arm writhed and twisted itself back its socket. There was a low, rumbling cough that escaped her throat. Some life had returned to the lost temple of her body, and he could spot it in the sparking awareness of her exposed eye.

“Rise and shine, birdsong,” Stephen chuckled to himself, “your eggs are getting cold.”

While that waitress began to pull herself up in a stupor, he watched the chef’s left arm shoot out on its own accord and grip the knife severing his brain stem. The thick muscles beneath his skin rippled as they summoned up the strength needed to extract the knife in just three attempts. It did not sound as nice coming out as it did going in. The female lover’s head slowly rolled back into its proper orientation, while her partner raised his groggy head up. A squashed tomato fell from his forehead back into the bowl. Janet made the quickest recovery, shooting up from behind the counter and looking straight at Stephen. The deep grimace she wore evidenced recognition, terror, and revulsion. Whatever, she was fine, and she would get over it. He extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray and clapped his hands together to get everyone’s attention.

“Okay ladies and gentlemen,” He pantomimed checking his non-existent wrist watch, “unless these big windows got blinds, it looks like we’re all gonna be piling into the bathrooms until dusk. We’re gonna have us a little sleepover before I get back on the road.”