THE FALL Read online

  The boy was afraid. The vampire had never heard of sharks.

  The boy tried staying hidden during the brightness and heat of day. He only ventured out when night fell, feasting on rats by the dozens. An occasional cat or kitten helped to tide him over. Cats were kept aboard to keep the rats in check.

  The vampire boy did a better job.

  One night, after many uneventful weeks at sea (were they going to the ends of the Earth?) he glanced from his plump warm rodent, heard a sound. That"s when he saw the lone sailor.

  The sailor stood by the edge, his right hand full of penis. The uniformed lad pleasured himself, the calm sea keeping the ship"s deck level. The vampire watched him, while sprouting long fangs. He looked from side to side and, as silent as blood flows through veins, he fell upon the sailor.

  The vampire grabbed the boy"s lusty golden curls and pulled him down in one fluid movement. The sailor hit the deck hard. crushed the sailor"s trachea hammer- fist.

  With his prey incapacitated but still alive, the vampire dropped to both knees. He drank deeply the sailor"s neck.

  Pleasant fire rippled throughout the predator"s body. He got caught in the moment. He focused solely on the luscious human blood, and had lost sight of his surroundings. He failed to notice that other dangerous animals were approaching.

  The vampire lost consciousness without ever feeling the blow. He didn"t even know he"d been hit.

  The vampire boy with a downward

  The boy"s head still hurt, broken skull fragments tangled his hair. When he probed the injury, the boy could trace easily the convoluted bendings of his own brain. The blood trickled out of his broken head, cooled into the sea surrounding him on all sides. The sharks circled even faster.

  Cold water revived the vampire. He stared into the eyes of the Captain. He stared back, quizzically. The Captain had hands clasped behind him. He rocked back and forth on his heels. He had a cross hung on a chain around his neck. The jewelry was a gift from the Queen. The cross danced a little with the rocking motion. The vampire tried to look away, but too late. The hands of the vampire began to burn.

  “What manner of creature is this?” he asked. ”It"s a devil, Captain,” a crewman stated,

  “Nosferatu, a blood drinker.”

  “He certainly looks a devil,” he agreed. The Captain bent at the waist, got a closer

  peek at the vampire. He"d never seen one before. The boy stared back, frightened, in pain.

  Columbus noted eyes, teeth and talons the boy used

  to scratch his own palms. Grunting, he shredded

  them to a bloody pulp, still scratching.

  The Captain gave the boy a fleeting glimpse,

  then to the dead sailor and back again. The

  Captain"s eyes rested on the vampire as he stood

  straight.

  “What shall we do with him, Captain?” was

  asked.

  “Give him back to the devil from whence he

  came,” without hesitation. “Throw the imp over the

  side.”

  The sailors snatched up the half-conscious

  boy, heaved him overboard. He landed with a

  painful splash in the icy water.

  When the boy came to, the ship was

  shrinking into the distance. He was alone, treading

  water. His hands no longer bothered him, but the

  pain in the back of his head was searing and

  unrelieved.

  Two dorsal fins split the ocean surface.

  Being hit by a running shark propelled the boy forward, into waiting jaws of another one. That shark tore away most of the boy"s left arm, and a good chunk of hisrib cage. The boy didn"t even have time to scream before the frenzied sharks latched onto him. Their powerful jaws pulled him beneath the waves. More sharks converged on the scene and the boy was eaten.

  All the while the night sky was silent. It watched without protest.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  "m in the parking lot of the main building of Harborside District Hospital, watching it. I"ve been in my car who knows how long, wrapped

  in another vision. They are getting rapid-fire now. Strange lives lived. They are going backward and it feels like I am spinning back to the beginning.

  I wonder how many live s I"ve had. How long have I been around? And just what was the fuck in my knowing this, in remembering.

  Dark sunglasses shade my peeps and I have the air-conditioning set on high. I am parked in the shade and eyeing the entrance. As soon as it gets dark, this motherfucker"s going in.

  Officially, I"m on assignment. The Pharisees made me an offerthey knew I"d find hard to refuse. Even though I"m not hungry for blood, I need fuel. I need high octane. I am going into Clarkston next. And then I must do the Pharisees bidding.

  While I sit there recovering from bullshit visions of lives lived, I plait myself two fat braids. I lift sunglasses and check the muted reflection in the rearview mirror. Stony face staring back at me is as hard- looking as my insides feel. I am ready to kill. Hell, I"m looking forward to it. I shit you not.

  I want to cut, slice and pull the skin from Herod"s body in one immense sheet like removing window tint. I longto stroll about Herod"s compound, his flayed skin wrapped around my shoulders. I will sport it as a cape.

  I am going to yank free every single one of Herod"s teeth while the bitch-nigga is still alive. Then I will string them on a chain, and wear them around my neck. All the while Herod"ll be screaming and begging for his miserable life.

  I will sit upon the throne of Herod, claiming it.

  The reflection staring back at me sprouts teeth deadly. I never wanted to kill anyone so badly. The thought makes me ache.

  I turn off the engine and exit my car. I walk quietly and unassuming toward the employee entrance. I dash in through the sliding doors.

  The hospital staff, patients and visitors feel a cold breeze pass and that"s it. An unexplained sense of dread makes them frown. No one sees a thing.

  Outside, the sun falls.

  Once inside the hospital, I find a private bathroom. I go in and quickly lock the door. I sit on the commode, shaking to beat the band. Then, just as I knew it would, all goes grey:

  PHYSICIAN

  1350, anno Domini

  T

  he smell was the worst.

  It assaulted you like it was a living, breathing thing. The smell hung on clothing and hair. If you stepped out of the hospital, down to the shores of Mighty Thames, the cloud would stay with you. Not even the cold and bitter wind washed it away.

  The vampire didn"t care about the stench. The dying came to the London hospital in droves. He cared for them as best he could. He was a physician honor bound to treat the victims of this vicious plague. And then he would eat them.

  The physician was rotund. He was of normal girth before the scourge came. Then the floodgates opened. The Black Plague brought an endless stream of blood- filled vessels. Very few survived. The Plague was deadly like that.

  The vampire bled as many as he could. Sometimes twenty a day died in this manner, all but dried husks. They were cremated in great funeral pyres. Flames licked the sky and the heavens turned a blind eye to the suffering below.

  The physician was plump, flushed pink, and growing more so by the day. The more blood he drank, the more he wanted. After a time, he could no longer fit into his clothes. He had to have another suit made. He grew out of that one too. And still they came.

  He finished her off with one last gulp. The physician dropped her to the rags-covered pallet. Her cooling body settled with the ankles crossed, and the arms slung out on either side. He looked at her a moment. She reminded him of– something.

  The vampire settled back on the stool and studied his hands. They"re burning now. They were bright pink, almost red. The fingers were as hard and rigid as plump over-stuffed sausages. The hands felt on fire, and his fingers were coarse to move. Each subsequent attempt became more difficult.
He sweated all the time. The bloody sweat stained his latest suit of clothes, those that were already ripping at the seams.

  He stood slowly up, legs cramping. His knees were sketchy from the improbable weight. Crimson sweat popped out on his forehead. It made him look like he just swatted away a swarm of biting insects.

  His eyes began to tear. The tears were slow at first, then fast. The great drops poured forth from his bulging eyes. His swollen face cascaded saltbloody tears. He slapped the tears away and both of his ears spurt. Ejaculates of blood shot out of his ruptured eardrums.

  Pain dropped the physician to his knees, leaving splatters of fluid on the floor. He clawed at the ears and shrieked. Clots of blood exploded from his mouth. It sprayed out pond ripples, splattering the floor ten feet in front of him. Because of ruptured eardrums, the vampire/physician couldn"t hear the drops as they hit the swept-dirt floor.

  The chest pain was next. Shortness of breath began, caused from a dirge of blood cells that were damming up the arteries and veins. Skin split from excessive internal pressure.

  The seams of his pants parted. Solidified blood pushed out the vampire"s rectum in a long, solid, bracken cylinder. A blood-snake seeking sunlight, it was followed rapidly by fresher blood from the torn stomach.

  The physician threw up more blood. He could no longer see because both eyes lay dangling astride his nose, suspended as they were by the optic nerves.

  His heart burst. One could see from the way busted ribcage pushed outward the he"d had a strong one. The vampire/physician lay still in the everspreading pool of his own blood. His patients" blood. His victims" blood.

  A small crowd gathered to gawk and they were disgusted by the scene. But what they saw was not the worst.

  It was the smell. That was the worst.

  Chapter Eight

  T

  he ho spital"s Intensive Care Unit has enough space and equipment for ten critically ill patients. Four beds are occupied. I sniff the

  air, locating the one I want. The patient smells delicious. He"s the one.

  I enter the room, still slightly dizzy from my latest seizure and vision. The patient is unconscious. He is attached to a wide array of life support equipment and monitoring devices. He has a tube in his nose. A bigger one feeds his lungs with pressurized oxygen. The oxygen is delivered by a mechanical ventilator. The level on the overhead monitor shows a steady 100%. The patient"s blood is completely saturated with oxygen.

  I can smell it. The patient has polycythemia. Long-term emphysema forces the increase of a patient"s red blood cells. This assists attracting the small amount of oxygen left from his trashed and overstretched lungs. The ventilator fills every bit of increased capacity in the blood with blessed oxygen.

  I go to the bedside and make double-damn sure I stay out of camera view. It"s bolted like a sentry above the doorway to the patient"s room. The video framesthe patient"s torso and head.

  I turn off the heparinized pressure bag to the arterial line. It"s secured to the femoral artery, deep in the apex of the groin. I undo the little cap, peek at the doorway, and open the stopcock. A hot, salty-sweet stream shoots from the port like a fountain. I bend swift to it and sup from the stream as fast as it spurts out.

  Blood pressure flat-lines on the monitor. Vital signs dump as I feed. The stream is thick and steady.

  I am filling up with the super-juice. My skin is flushing, my muscles swelling, my toes curling. The heady scent fills my sinuses. Oxygen is pulled directly from the blood in my stomach and jejunum. A unique form of osmosis, the swallowed blood is absorbed directly into my bloodstream. Then it rides the crimson byways to my wretched vampire heart.

  Once there, the oxygen will go up into my aorta, then pumped under pressure out of my heart, and then down and out through the various arteries to feed all my organs and tissues.

  Fuck me if this isn"t such good blood! It"s premium. It is, hands down, some of the best I have ever had. There"s so much oxygen in it. Drinking this deep cherry blood makes me feel like I am swallowing sunshine. It feels like the moment before ejaculating. Tasting it is waking up to Christmas morning, or the first day of vacation. It is having a head full of coke and a pocket full of more.

  It"s liquid power and I am lit up.

  Then I hear a noise.

  The ICU nurse is standing there at the

  doorway and he gasps. He sees the man slurping up blood from the arterial line portand he"s in shock. I raise my head from the blood line, and see the nurse staring back at me. I swallow all the red salty power and then tear past the startled nurse with a whoosh of cold breeze and a splattering of bright red blood.

  The nurse blinked. The man with the yellow eyes and two long braids had vanished. Just like that. It was so fucking weird, thought the nurse: a solid gone vapor, an ignored thought, gone.

  A trail of blood splats dot-dot-dashed a long thin line across the stark white floor. Then it squirted up scrub pants to the nurse"s t-shirt. He felt dizzy, wanted to sit down.

  “I know I saw,” he told himself. He stared at the blood and knew he saw.

  The nurse stayed like that, staring blankly at the tiny spots of blood. Mumbling, he held on to the life preserver of his sanity with a death-grip.

  A few moments later, the nurse snapped out of it. The patient had slid into cardiac arrest. The symptoms suggested a root cause of sudden, acute hypovolemia: massive blood loss.

  No one could determine where the missing blood went. The Code Team suspected internal bleeding. The surgeons opened him up, and an exploratory laparotomy showed not a drop puddles the abdomen.

  Thenurse wasn"t surprised. He knew where the blood went. The man with yellow eyes and long braids has got it. And the nurse never said a word about the man with the yellow eyes and long braids to anyone. Not once in his long, long career.

  No fucking way.

  I do a tight turnsqueal out of the hospital"s parking lot. I am heading toward Clarkston to get my emergency money-stash. But my progress is cut short once more by these visions that are becoming increasingly irritating and rude. Just like guestrelatives that never leave, they just keep getting worse. Good fuck:

  TORTURER

  1253, anno Domini

  He was an assistant to the Inquisitor. Also he was a member of the tribunal for that part of Germany. The tribunal was quartered in a large, old castle. The castle was drafty, cold and wet. It was gloomy, smoky and dark. In short, it was perfect.

  The call had been sent out, far and wide. All heretics and accusers thereof must be presented to the Inquisitor for decree. In the Holy name of Pope Innocent IV, torture was endorsed for those foolish enough to try hiding the truth of their heresy. Torture slated for the unjust, truly stubborn sinners.

  The Inquisitor"s assistant was especially diligent in this regard. It"s said the assistant enjoyed delivering torture. He had a taste for blood. He preferred the unjust and truly stubborn ones.

  The Inquisitor used the growing infamy of his assistant to strike fear, encourage blind obedience in all who stood before him. In the end, truth tumbled over tongues of the wicked. The assistant never failed to secure a confession.

  The assistant stood quietly, watched the heretic cry out in pain as he was stretched on the rack. The assistant turned the wheel. He heard the human"s body pop and crack. The heretic passed out.

  The vampire left the wheel and fetched a bucket of human waste. He poured it over the heretic"s face. The sinner came to, spitting bucket contents. He gagged and choked on the wastes, tried to spew out the big pieces.

  The assistant went back to the wheel. He was alone with the heretic. He didn"t care about the truth, whatever that was. He didn"t care what was coerced, what was not. Nor was he interested in the motivation of the accusers. The assistant cared only for blood. He experimented with different torture techniques to determine which would produce the highest quality blood.

  Tortured blood almost always tasted better than blood hunted.

  All his life, the
vampire followed tragedy like a camp whore. He lived and prospered off misery humans caused themselves. They filled, fed and amused him.

  The assistant had hands on wheel, readying another quarter-turn. He had a change of mind, a better idea. Let"s see how long it takes for the rack to separate head from neck.

  He took pride in his work. He always strove for craftsmanship and ingenuity in torture. He never failed to secure a confession. He knew some admissions were influenced by the pain. That was fine by him. They all confessed in the end.

  The assistant loved the stubborn ones who refused at first to confess. Somehow the fear and pain of those lovelies made them taste all the better. He didn"t know why, but it was so. The longer they lasted questioning and subsequent torture, the richer their blood. The greater the agony was, the tastier the meal.

  The vampire detached rough leather straps from limp unmoving arms. The heretic"s a delightfully intractable sinner, loudly proclaiming innocence. The assistant let the heretic thrash about, carry on. The sinner was sweetening the blood with his insistence.

  The vampire secured straps tightly to head and chin. He made sure it was tight. The slack was taken out with a couple quick partial turns of the wheel. The vampire made sure the tool he needed next was right behind him, ready to use.

  The heretic panicked. He realized what would happen. The vampire smiled, allowing his true self to emerge. The heretic saw teeth puncture torturer"s lip. Blood drops bubbled out, mixed with saliva, and inched lava slow down his chin. Talons dug in wood of the wheel, splintering as they split the surface. Thevampire"s yellow eyes assessed closely the accused.

  “God in Heaven,” the heretic cried when the torturer changed. “By the Cross of Jesus,” the sinner shouted, “I confess! I confess!”

  The heretic"s eyes wide, horror dominate. Fear his mask. The vampire smelled sinner blood ripening beautifully. He was ready to be plucked and savored.

  “I confess!” the heretic repeated.

  “Tell God your sins,” vampire muttered as hishands burn, “In person.”

  Bending slightly for purchase, the vampire spun the wheel. The sinner"s neck split and his head tore free.