Chapter 3: river problems - and worse
This time my undead sleep went uninterrupted. No dreams, I think.
I snapped awake as the red sky in the west dulled, beginning my second night. My thorny thicket had given me solid darkness, but my rested eyes sliced through the gloom and my ears were alert too. The thorns grazed my face and hands as I righted myself, but I didn’t feel them – glancing, I saw tiny red lines scrawled on the back of my hand forming and then disappearing just as quickly, each scratch vanishing like a lit fuse of dynamite in a cartoon. Cool.
But my mouth was starting to burn with thirst, and the thirst grew as the cuts disappeared.
Crawling like a soldier under barbed wire, I got out of the thicket and stood up, scanning mostly with my ears. A few late birds chirped, and the frogs were raising a chorus from a distant swamp. The ultrasonic squeak of bats was now quite noticeable to me as well – they would be very easy for me to find on this night. I sniffed the air. Traces of chipmunk, squirrel, leaf mulch, the coppery smell of a slightly-polluted stream. The fading sunset still made me wince as I moved up the land to survey at a greater distance on a granite ledge. Had the danger I had sensed before drawn closer?
Indecisive. The same direction still made my skin crawl. Maybe I was just eating too many scampering, whiskered, panicky creatures. A time would come when I chowed down on a human, I knew – I forecasted this with detachment. It was like knowing that you would eventually have to sleep, or drink, or masturbate. Make your vows, you’ll have more than enough time to fail. I had come to not mind the taste of the wild game, but would a human taste richer? Good enough to mean never going back? That would be like the hard stuff for an alcoholic, who finally graduates away from teenage nonsense that they can scrounge or sneak out with.
Enough rodents. I wanted something bigger.
I knew that there were deer in these woods, but so far I had not detected even one, for all my running around. That struck me as odd – was there some rule about animals? Dracula could command ‘creatures of the night’, even transform into them. Might there be ‘creatures of the day’ that were off-limits, protected from my hunting senses?
Never one to believe in magic I thought simply in terms of rules for now, rules that were effectively physical law. Running water basically meant increased gravity. That crone in the student dormitory had hit me amazingly hard – enhanced strength? What was she, exactly? An angel, a ghost? Did her powers only apply to the kind of being that I was now? So many questions, so many rules still to be worked out.
I had clearly taken echolocation from the first bat I had eaten – so could I take other abilities in time? A viper’s heat vision? A bear’s strength? But how could that information come from the blood? And more fundamentally – how could there be so much power in mere blood? It wasn’t a condensed energy drink, and I hadn’t counted any calories yet, but it seemed like I was able to go far on just a little sip from each tiny meal so far.
A deer would be good, one meal for a whole night at least. If I would work out where they hid.
But I didn’t find one that night.
Driving these roads on the way to and from school had shown me the occasional piece of roadkill, so I paced the roads and then the highway for a smashed carcass. A poor porcupine was the only find that retained some blood, thick curdled stuff that filled my belly but clotted in my throat, nearly making me gag. The other little creatures that had been crushed had dried out in the sun, already resembling the remnants of my feedings. My fangs were not quite so cumbersome, and if I had had someone to talk to things might have gone better this time. Had they changed, or was I adapting?
Eventually the highway passed over a larger river, the bridge high above the running water. If the extra weight was proportional to water volume then this could be an inescapable trap for me. But did the distance above the water matter? The barrier of cement and steel?
I edged closer, weighing each step, slinking away when a truck roared across the bridge. I thought about simply jumping on top of the truck and letting it carry me to the other side – but what if the phantom weight did more than just immobilize me? What if it was real enough to squish me, to burst me like a balloon at the point of the river’s maximum depth? I would have to come up with a careful experiment later.
Letting the truck pass, I decided on a slower approach on foot. Touching the seam in the cement sidewalk where the bridge began, my toes started to feel pinched. I retracted my foot, and then extended my fingers over the line.
My fingertips also felt pinched, just as hard as my toes, which were retracted but still smarting. Looking at my fingers, nothing seemed wrong – the crushing pressure was, it seemed, all in my head. But even if it was merely psychosomatic it was definitely stronger at the edge of this wide river. I had managed to escape from the trickling stream, but still with a brief moment of panic in which I had felt totally pinned – this river’s ‘magical’ weight would pin me to sunrise and kill me, no doubt. If I hopped on the back of another truck to force myself across I might live to the other side, but the residual pain that still throbbed in my toes would be across my whole body, and it would be applied for much longer. And this was just the power at the river’s edge. After crossing I would probably still be pinned by the agonizing shock of it, then dead at sunrise when light hit the top of the truck.
The rivers would confine my movements for now. I would have to think of something, find out how Dracula was said to do it.
The porcupine meal had filled most of my emptiness tonight, so I had nearly five more hours to explore the land and my new self. That danger-sense from the east hadn’t grown stronger or weaker, but the move west was now blocked by this river. North, or south?
The city of Sherbrooke was south. More blood, more trouble. And if the pale bitch who had bit me was still nearby, she’d probably be down there, enjoying the dining options.
North then. I’d find a deer, and work out whatever rules were keeping them safe from me for now. I’d eventually find a way to get across running water. Going north at a pace far beyond an Olympian’s sprint felt as easy as a casual jog, and I noticed that I wasn’t breathing beyond the occasional sigh. The human rules concerning exertion and oxygen had slipped away, and this was a fun creature to be in some regards.
I decided to push myself, wanting distance, wanting that danger-feeling on my imaginary whiskers to diminish behind me. When lights from a car came on a road I retreated to the woods without losing speed, weaving easily around trunks and hanging boughs with my eyes and ears alert. A touch of my humanity started to creep back – tiny burning in my side, and then in my thighs as I ran and ran.
I claimed a skunk trundling along inside a ditch before it could turn and spray me, crushing the surprised beast’s skull in my fist before it knew I was there. Breaking an animal’s cranium was now about as difficult as breaking a Christmas ornament, and I tore away the hindquarters when the rear glands contracted in death to release a hiss of stench, which hit my nose like a glancing punch. The rest of the creature tasted fine, and I ran and drank, feeling another change creeping into my being.
When I next ran through the woods to avoid a car’s headlights, and brushed by twigs and bark, there wasn’t even the brief red line of a cut that would seal away instantly. I wasn’t just healing – those glancing blows that would give a human minor scratches couldn’t injure me at all now. Later I’d work out something of an explanation: skunks are a primary predator of the honeybee, with fur and hide resistant to their stings. The raw power in the skunk’s blood hit me, whatever it was – not just calories, surely – and the stitch in my sides and the minor aches in my legs faded.
I ran even faster, now leaping high into the trees when a car’s headlines approached. The chipmunks and squirrels I had claimed made my grip on the bark solid, and I was amazed by how light I felt, and how balanced on even thin branches. I was soon leaping over the canopy between treetops like a bounding ape, thrilled by my own speed.
But I had lost track of time. One great leap showed me a greyness to the east that would become the sunrise all too soon, and I had to find a dark space again. Diving down below the trees I soon discovered an ancient well that served my purposes, with a rotten wooden cover and damp darkness inside. Exploring with an extended hand, there was no pinching weight: as I had suspected, still water had no effect. Climbing carefully, the well’s bottom was stony and squishy, the mud churning slowly as I set my weight down, a scattering of old coins rusted green.
The need for a living man’s bed was starting to fade from me; darkness mattered most, and the indignity of hiding in a hole in a ground seemed trivial. But I thought that I might abstain from groundhogs for a little while.
I had traveled more than thirty kilometers, surely, more than four times the distance of my first night after the change. But that feeling of being chased didn’t go away. And when I dreamed again during the next day, my dream was not a dream at all.
In my daytime vision I saw the bridge again; I saw where I had stood and tested the magical weight of the running water, and there were blurry shapes standing there now where I had stood in the night. And before I awoke again to confront the next night, my third full night as a vampire, I saw those mysterious hunting shapes in my dream’s eye pointing north.
Chapter 4: The Deer’s Scream
Image credits: Jodie Wilson, Kevin Collins, Hornet97