Chapter 1: The devil on vacation

Lynn McCain

It had been close to a month since I moved to Salem and two since I buried my razor-sharp fangs in human flesh and drank their blood from the vein. Trust me. That was like an eternity for someone who had spent an entire century killing, maiming and terrorizing humans for fun and sometimes for sport. You know, tell them to run then see how long it can take to rip their spines out in a single shake of a lamb's tail. Anyway, doing the same thing over and over again can only lead to a couple of things. One is you get better at it and the other one, which was my problem, you get bored out of your damn mind. I got bored with the killing, the screams of my victims and the stench of their fear as they tried to hide from me, and decided to take a forever vacation in a small town called Salem. There, I planned to stay low-key, in the shadows and blend in but to satisfy my thirst for blood hospitals and blood banks were on my hit list. That evening I was parked by the memorial hospital waiting for the right time to pop in and carry with me some blood bags. A suspecting security guard walked towards me, I could already feel the blood rushing through his veins and his scent engulfed my senses. My brutal side wanted to come out and play "heads off" a little game where one of us would end up without a head. On all occasions, I got to keep mine.

"Please move! Can't you see" he angrily pointed at a "NO PARKING Sign"

"I'm sorry, my mum was hurt, and she was taken in there…"

"Hold up, are you even old enough to drive?" He was not the first one to be confused by my teenage looks. This is a secret… I was a one hundred and eighteen-year-old stuck in an eighteen-year-old body.

"Yes, I am seventeen please sir…"

"Okay, get in. It's not safe out here" he said, signaling his colleague to open the gate for me. That's how I got on without showing my ID, I needed to get one. Or maybe not, compulsion was somehow better. At the parking lot, I helped an old man drive his old wife inside in a wheelchair. They were the kind of people I would have killed by simply compelling them to stop breathing. A part of me wanted to do that right there, but the good part won. I left them at the reception and snatched a doctor's robe and mask disguised myself and made for the blood transfusion section, quickly reading through the Black and gold plaques on the door. The blood bank was a few meters away luckily the doctor coming out left the door open wide enough for me to get in with super speed. I was in. With no exit plan, but at least I got a meal. Before packing some bags, I started feeding savagely until another doctor came in and switched the lights on.

"Anyone here?" He asked, looking at the bloody floor. There was a chance I had to break my word and kill someone that evening.

"Come out before I sound the alarm!" He shouted, going for the alarm switch. He looked around as a whooshing sound trailed my movements. When he turned to the alarm switch, I was standing behind him, blood-filled veins protruding around my eye sockets and my fangs out, blood dripping from both corners of my mouth.

"Please" he begged, retreating. Poor doctor. He stepped on the blood and tripped in it, falling flat on his tummy. I swiftly hoisted him in the air with one arm. He shut his eyes, not wishing to see the monster I was.

"Look at me!" I growled, morphing back to human. He needed to trust me first. When he opened his eyes I put him down, maintained social distance and wiped the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand, flashed a warm friendly smile, "am a newly turned vampire, I don't want to kill anyone, so I choose to drink blood without harming innocent people like you doctor. So, here is what we are going to do!" I moved toward him in a blink of an eye. Compulsion was the best way out, "you are going to get me twenty bags of blood in the trash can outside the exit. Forget I was here!" He shut his eyes for a minute, and when he opened them, I had already left through the window in a whoosh. Back in my car, I kept checking the trash can at the exit. Five minutes later the doctor appeared carrying a bag of trash, he threw it in the bin and left.

****

Back in my house in the suburbs, I packed the blood bags in my underground freezer. It was a perfect house for the likes of me, who had two lives to live. Apparently in Salem neighbors would knock on your door to tell you to keep the volume down or just check on you, bring their pie for you to test-the one they tried to cook with YouTube tutorials. A fire in the neighborhood would get police knocking on each door to check on the well-being of the occupants. There was a chance someone would have seen the blood bags. It was just a precaution. After keeping my blood away, I came back to the upper part of the house. Shut the doors and turned the music on, then hot the shower. It was around eight in the evening, and I was running late for the party. Another thing I loved about the creepy small town, the party never stopped. A blood-cuddling shower calmed me down, and the music brought a soothing feeling. I was lying naked in the bathtub, my nipples standing erect, Goosebumps sprouting all over my body. Still in the tab, I grabbed the towel dried my body and tied it around my breasts. My wardrobe was stacked with different weird clothes. I call them odd because a century and eighteen years back we never used to leave massive chunks of our body outside but for some reason humans found it appeasing sexually, to blend in I settled for a pair of tiara black shorts, a white tank top that left my navel exposed and black boots. I finished my look with a black leather jacket, a popular fashion for rock stars back in the eighties.

"Mirror, mirror…am the fairest," I said applying some lip gloss, a pair of sheds completed my look and I matched outside to my Audi R8. The only good thing with human evolution was cars. That one on the road was like a snake in the grass. As usual, my annoying neighbour waved at me and I learned that not waving back got them snooping around my door asking if am okay, so I waved back and drove off. Playing some country music in my car, the windows wide open as it glided on the tarmac. The town was lit up from a distance with neon and argon lights, looking like a distant galaxy. With less traffic, I was in the CBD in a record time of ten minutes. In super speed, I used fifteen since I could only teleport for short distances before needing some rest. It got my cells burning up.

"ID please" The massive bouncer groaned tilting his neck less head to look at me. That was one disadvantage of my teenage looks. I showed him one, just too quickly, before he realized it wasn't mine. He let me in.

The nightclub was buzzing with the electricity of hundreds of revelers clumped together like a bunch of penguins on the ocean shore, their heartbeats were making my ears ache and so were their annoying whispering and the sounds of their phones. My eyes roved across the crowd to the counter. There was an empty stool, a perfect spot close to the bartender. When he saw me, he didn't even ask.

A glass of tequila hit the table and I just nodded giving him a hundred-dollar bill before I sipped it. Initially, I used to drink in a single gulp but realized it was not the way humans enjoyed it. The nightclub with all that noise was more comfortable than my lonely house. The noise helped me shove at the back of my mind the thousands of souls of my victims wailing in my brain whenever I was alone. It also gave me a chance to know more about humans I had spent an eternity killing.

"Refill!" I said banging on the counter.

"You're getting better," he said without looking at me.

What was the point of drinking anyway? A single glass of that tequila got the average humans blabbing and weak on their knees, ten or twelve of them made no difference to me. I never got drunk, I had learned to face it though, just to blend in and not raise any suspicion. Honestly, I never wanted to get drunk after seeing what they did while drinking. Anyway, my eyes were glued to the TV. There was some breaking news. It was about the missing blood bags.

"Who in their right mind would steal blood, are we being serious in this town?" The bartender asked.

Another boring human trait.

They didn't have to ask you if you were in the mood for a conversation, they just started talking and expected you to answer without demur. Nothing less than that. If you didn't answer, then you were rude.

"They say the police are on it, but this is the third hospital in a span of one month this has to stop," one of the guys beside me said in a typical drunkard sound.

"Am starting to think we are living with the beasts of the night among us, they are back after a century of living in the shadows"

Yeah, he got my attention, but I didn't look at him. I really wanted to décolleté him. My sharp nails were protruding, and my blood was boiling with anger.

"You're too quiet," the bartender said, referring to me this time. He had a weird moustache and a towel on his shoulder, his hair was dyed copper red you would think he was on fire.

"They should hunt the perpetrators down," I said emptying my glass, "Keep the change, thank you for the drink," I said squiring myself through the crowd, pretending to miss a step.

As I walked out, I could feel their eyes on my ass… perverts. I wouldn't lay with any of them anyway. And I heard everything they said until I was meters away. They called me awkward, peculiar. But I was just the devil on vacation. On a working day, they would be dead already. I wish I knew that was the last time I was having fun.