Monster

I found myself back in the lot behind the abandoned warehouse, a place where a vicious showdown took place only hours earlier. The purpose of my return was morbidly curious: to examine the bodies, to get a closer look at the vampires. The brush crunched underfoot as I made my way to the pile of the dead... or undead, rather. It was all so surreal. Not strange, per se, but definitely unsettling to acknowledge aloud. I had always known I was a monster, but vampires were the stuff of films and grocery store romance novels. Accepting their reality was another level of bizarre.

There was a time when I thought I might be one of them. The need for the kill, unsure of how exactly my beast was sustained. The idea left my mind when I obviously noticed how effortlessly I moved through daylight. Back then, I didn't fully understand the rules, but it turned out my daylight wanderings were evidence enough. At least that’s what I’d find out for certain here shortly.

The three bodies lay exactly where we had left them, slumped beneath a small, gnarled tree. They were just waiting for the sun to rise, waiting to be incinerated out of existence. At least, that’s what the hunters had assured me. But I wanted to witness it myself.

As I approached, the scent of the bodies hit me—a concentrated, sickly sweet amalgamation of countless blood sources. It was overwhelming. In that moment, I felt as though I was surrounded not by three bodies, but by a host of restless spirits, each one a ghost tethered to the remains before me.

I looked at the woman who lay like a statue. I pulled her frozen lips back to look at her teeth. Just as I thought, her fangs were still protruding. I compared them to what I remembered mine looking like from the reflections I saw of myself as the monster. They were shorter, which was no real surprise, I guess. I was a lot bigger than any normal man, woman, or vampire once I transformed. I was a colossal, dark grey mountain of dense muscle and tissue. I stood ready to maul and massacre anyone with massive talons and fangs.

I pulled open her eyelids. Her irises had lost their crimson hue, but the whites of her eyes were still bloodshot. She had green human eyes. I wondered what she was like as a human, how old she was when she was turned?

Then, I realized that I didn’t ask one of the questions that I had been thinking about the whole time I was with the hunters. Were vampires immortal? That’s what all the movies and books said.

I stood up from my crouching examination and was about to take a look at the other two and compare their features to hers. But, I was interrupted when I heard a metal clicking noise. It was the same clicking that I had heard earlier when I was there for the first time. I turned around to the clicking, unafraid.

"Hello," a voice slithered through the thick silence, a man leaning nonchalantly against a tree. His eyes glinted with an unsettling curiosity as I examined the bodies.

He reeked of the same potent, cloying blood scent as the others. A vampire the hunters had missed. Tall and slender, with dark hair and a narrow face, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and sixty pounds.

He must have been hiding in the warehouse, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment. And he had seen everything, including his friends’ demise.

In his right hand, he toyed with two small metal balls, rotating them around each other in a rhythmic dance. Every few turns, he clacked them together, producing the sound I had heard earlier that night. He had been there all along, watching.

"Hello," I replied, my voice steady but filled with underlying tension.

"Where are your friends?" he asked, his lips curling into an arrogant grin, as if he held all the cards.

"Oh, don't worry about them," I said, my tone laced with a hidden threat. I tried to mirror his smug smile, but my need to transform and kill, fueled by the night's gruesome events, simmered just beneath the surface.

He chuckled, a chilling sound that echoed through the night.

"Oh, I'm not," he said with eerie calm. "Not yet, anyway. I'll pay them a visit after I finish with you."

Fear for my new friends pierced my mind like a stray bullet. He noticed.

"I followed you after you all left," he said, his tone disturbingly casual. "You piqued my interest. Most people are afraid of us, even at first glance. It’s a subconscious pull we have on your kind."

My kind? Oh... he meant human.

"We are always looking out for hunters , but I wanted to see if you were worth the effort. Turns out, I was right. You are strange. I lost you for a while, not sure how that happened, but I followed your scent and, even stranger, you came back here... alone. Very unusual, and quite the error in judgment," he said, his voice dripping with mockery. "No matter. I'll make this quick before the sun rises, and then I'll wait to kill your friends tomorrow night."

His words hung in the air like a death sentence, the casual cruelty sending a chill down my spine. The night seemed to grow darker around us, the shadows deeper, as if they were closing in, urging me to act. He stepped closer, the metal balls in his hand clacking rhythmically, a sound that now felt like the ticking of a countdown clock. Each step he took exuded a predatory grace, his eyes never leaving mine.

I could feel his gaze, cold and penetrating, as if he could see right through to my core. He was enjoying this, savoring the anticipation of the kill. The air between us crackled with tension. I knew how this would usually go, what he expected. My heart should pound in my chest, a drumbeat of impending doom. He was trying to toy with me, like a cat playing with a mouse, and the realization would send a wave of anger through me. There was just one problem… none of that was happening. I was too focused on what he could do to the Chasse family.

I pictured it, him busting into the Chasse’s house, rampaging through like an unstoppable killer. I imagined him ripping Carter’s throat out, snapping Frank’s neck, and drinking Eleanor’s blood. I saw Autumn running up the stairs with Delilah, hiding underneath her squeaky bed frame, terrified. I saw him finding and overpowering her, forcing her against the wall as he sucked the blood from her gushing throat.

No, I wouldn’t let that happen to her. I had to see her again. I knew it was wrong of me to think that, but, at the moment, I didn’t care. I kept imagining the scenario. Then, he would turn on the little innocent Delilah.

The emotions Delilah brought out in me, the thoughts that I kept locked away, deep in the bowels of my being, fought to get out again. The things I couldn’t think about, but also the things that drove me, made me want to slaughter this creature without hesitation. The change started to grip me.

“No,” I said in a low, deep voice.

“No, you say? But I’ve made up my mind, and who is going to stop me once I’ve made up my mind? Besides, your friends killed my friends, so now I kill them,” he said like it was only fair.

“You’ll never make it there,” I told them.

He cocked his head to the side. Unsure of why I was so confident.

“Why is that, human?”

“That’s just it,” I said, my eyes turning into black voids, my voice deepening into a low rumble, “I’m not human.”

My body twisted and cracked, grew, and hardened. My skin darkened into the deep grey flesh. The only other thing in nature that shared the same hue as my skin was the darkest of storm clouds.

The vampire watched in confusion, but rested on his heels, ready to run at a moment’s notice. He was too confident and too intrigued to run away like he should have. It was quite the error in judgment.

I laughed a monstrous chuckle at that last part.

My fangs shifted and set into place as my black talons ripped out of my hands. My muscles locked into place. The change was complete.

He was a shorter man now. After the change, I was even bigger compared to him. He didn’t know what to do as he looked upon the hulking creature that stood in the shadows before him. I recognized the look on his face. It was the same look I had seen on countless criminal’s faces, right before I killed them. It was a look of terror and uncertainty. He had no clue what I was.

I sprang forward, running as wild and fast as this body would allow. I smashed into the small man with tremendous force. He tried to brace himself and lean into me with all his strength, but it didn’t deter me a single bit. I heard bones snap the moment I touched him. He flew back about fifteen feet until his back met a large oak tree. More bones crushed and splintered under his skin. He ricocheted off the tree and flew another five feet through the cold air.

I didn’t leave any second open for him. I was already running to him. I grabbed him by the throat only seconds after he hit the ground. He hadn’t even got another breath in yet. I held him off the ground, so he was level with my fanged face. Terror gripped this so called predator of the night.

“What am I?” I asked. I spoke slowly, hoping his mental faculties were still functioning.

He scrambled over thoughts as my grip cinched down more and more on his throat. He gasped at the pain, unable to form full sentences.

“I… I… I don’t know,” he finally got out. People were so honest when they felt death’s cold grasp reaching for them.

No answers. Useless.

I spoke in my deep throaty voice that accompanied this form, and I said the same thing I said a few moments before, “You’ll never make it there!”

I reared back with my free hand, feeling the raw power coursing through my veins, and with one savage motion, I drove my claws, sharp as razors, through his chest. Flesh and bone yielded to my assault, tearing apart with a sickening crunch. His eyes widened in shock and pain, then rolled back into his skull as the undead creature died... again.

His shredded heart, now a ruined mass of tissue and blood, oozed in my grasp. The viscous warmth of it coated my clawed hand, dripping down in thick, dark rivulets. His body, devoid of any remaining spark of life, went limp, sagging against my hold like a grotesque marionette whose strings had been violently severed.

Blood poured from the gaping wound in his chest, pooling at my feet, the metallic scent of it mingling with the night air. The scene was a macabre mishmash of corpses, painted in crimson and shadow. The silence that followed was heavy, punctuated only by the slow, steady drip of blood from my claws.

I carried his body over to the pile of vampires from earlier. I threw him like a ragdoll and left his corpse beside his friends.

I walked off a few feet and willed my human mind to come back. I felt my body pulling itself back together. My skin returned to its standard color as I shrunk back down. My ligaments and joints popped and snapped back into place, muscles compacted, and fangs receded. I was me again, but my clothes were tatters.

I stayed there for a while, thinking, and calming myself. I couldn’t get the images I had created out of my head for a while. I just sat on the ground and tried to relaxed. I hated seeing my new friends being killed, even if it was just a fake reality I had concocted in my mind.

I was stronger than these vampires, I now knew for sure. My strength was much deeper than the blood-feeding monsters. I could feel their power. The resistance was noticeably more robust than the humans I slaughtered, but not enough to matter to me. He was just as defenseless to me as they were. I wondered if they were all this impotent, or maybe there were stronger ones.

The sun was coming up finally, and I didn’t even notice it until I heard strange noises behind me. I turned to see the bodies smoldering, cracking and popping like wood on the fire. They were smoking like coals when you try to douse a fire with water. I could see embers glowing beneath their skin, their insides burning first. It resembled a fire being put out but in reverse. Suddenly, they all ignited in a nightmarish blaze. Flames erupted violently, their malevolent tongues twisting and writhing as they climbed into the air. A monstrous column of fire shot up into the trees, devouring branches and turning them to blackened, skeletal remains. The roar of the inferno was deafening, a chorus of destruction that drowned out all other sound. Within a few agonizing seconds, they were gone, consumed by the darkness of the flames, leaving only a grim silence and the acrid scent of death hanging in the air.

I was actually surprised. Carter told me this would happen, but seeing it was unreal. Even the blood on the ground was gone, burnt away like gunpowder. It was a good thing that I cleaned the blood off of my arms when I changed back. I wondered what would have happened. Maybe it was a bigger reaction since all the bodies were piled together.

I stood from my resting place, content with my new friends’ safety.

I took a deep breath and then bounded off in a sprint of inhuman speed through the trees. I had to get back to the factory. Back to my lonely, desolate exile.