Chapter 1— The Changing

I was bleeding out on the ground that night, I can still remember it vividly. Elias rushed down to where I was lying. I thought I would be dead by now, but I guess Death is as fast as they say it is.

I couldn’t move, I felt my body cool down a bit from the pain but my heart kept beating wildly like never before. My eyes were wide open, finally Elias was by my side, boy was I glad to see him!

A strange thing began to occur inside me just when I thought it was over. The pain started to grow, only this time it was worse than the bite, there was a fire burning inside me, I began to feel the worst kind of pain I’ve ever felt in all my thirty years of living. It was an excruciating pain— like torture!

I didn’t know how else to feel or what to do, I just screamed; it was an outburst of emotion that I never planned for, I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, I didn’t even want to understand what it is, I just wanted the pain gone; but it lingered on.

I saw Elias and Delia dangling in front of my eyes, I saw some other persons I didn’t know hovering around me. My vision was blurry and I became deaf to the sounds around me— I couldn’t hear a thing!

My body only focused on the pain I was feeling, at this point I was unsure if I was dying or if I was just experiencing something else.

They lifted me off of the ground and I kept screaming and throwing spasms in their arms. My skin was on fire and my body burned from the inside and the worst pain came from the site where the man had bit me.

“Quickly let’s take him to the hospital!”

“Come on! Put him in the truck!”

They lifted me onto a vehicle. I only continued to scream and shout.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?!”

“I don’t know! I found him on the ground like this!”

“It’s as if he’s been possessed or something!”

“Is he having a stroke?!”

“He sure ain’t dying in my truck!”

“A man is dying, and you’re worrying about your truck?!”

“Yeah I gotta worry about something, don’t I?!”

“Just drive!”

Something was definitely happening to me and it wasn’t death!

When the movement of the truck stopped I knew we were at the hospital, a little hope sprang up in my heart cause I knew the doctors could save me.

Elias and the other men lifted me up again out of the truck and I saw us entering the hospital building, I couldn’t see Delia anywhere, maybe she couldn’t come with us.

“Help us, please this man is having an attack!”

“Come this way, lay him down on this stretcher!”

I could see nurses and a doctor around me.

They were rolling me down a passage in the building, I didn’t see the men who had brought me here, only Elias stayed with him, he was holding my hand all through the time. But he suddenly pulled away from my hand and I could see him from only a distance; he was greatly worried for me— the nurses must have stopped him from coming any further.

I was rolled into a room, and I couldn’t stop screaming even when I wanted to. They carried me onto a bed with a white bedsheet and they began to say a lot of things that I couldn’t make sense of.

I believe that they were standing over me and running around me for a long time, yet the pain wouldn’t stop and I was starting to think they didn’t know how to help me as well. At this time I prayed for death to come, anything that would separate me from this pain was all I asked for.

My vision began to fade out and all I could see was darkness, finally my eyes closed for the first time that night, the pain began to subside until I felt it no more. I was finally able to hear the voices in the room.

“Doctor it’s not working!”

Then I heard slow beeps from what sounded like a machine and then a long loud whistle from the machine followed after the beep.

“We lost him!”

“Time of death.... Eleven pm!”

No! No! I wasn’t dead! If only I could just open my eyes or move my body or say a word to them they would see that I’m still here.

The room went silent, they all left me I’m in the room, and I felt total peace, I couldn’t feel a thing anymore— the pains, the struggling, I couldn’t even hear my own thoughts; only silence and the purest happiness. I was finally content with myself.

That was the night I died, I was killed by a type of being I had never seen before, a man but not man, a man with glowing eyes and long teeth, his smell was of death and his skin was ice cold! I felt the hardness of his body on me when he drank from me. I heard his growl when he was about to attack me, I had never seen that face before.

Elias and Delia would be so miserable, they were my only family and I theirs. I’d never get to tease Elias and call him names again.

I would never see them again!

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I knew I would die some day but I wanted to fulfill my dreams first, I wanted to live a full life and die a stubborn old man, but death had a different plan for me.

It would have been better if I was hit by vehicle or I fell from a tree.

But life isn’t fair and death isn’t fair either, we don’t get to chose when and how we’re born or when and how we die!