Brutalist Stories #40

“Yo, Billy!” Winston shouts at me from across the way. “Yo, Billy get your ass over here!”

I pull my fangs out of the neck I’m chewing down on and turn to him as the blood continues to pulse out of my victim. What the fuck is he doing? Whatever it is, it can wait until I’m done here. A few more seconds, a little more to quell the lust. It’s been weeks since we’ve fed and I’m making the most of it while we have the chance.

“Billy! I’m not going to ask again.”

“What the fuck is it?” I shout over to him, dropping the corpse I’ve just bled dry.

“Come here, let me know what you think of this one.”

I stroll over laughing. The street lights are shining bright and reflecting off the wet tarmac. There’s a concrete wall that has an explosion of red over it. There couldn’t be any more if someone just got a bucket of blood and threw it against the wall. Winston’s been having some fun, and what can I say? We’re all hungry and feeding time always gets messy.

“What have you got here?” I say I as I reach him and look down at the boy he’s got by the collar. Pathetic little thing whimpering and shaking.

“Fresh meat, though, looks like we could make something out of this one. Don’t you think?” he turns to me, face crimson, fangs glistening, wide eyes full of the mania and chaos of a thousand years, maybe more, who the fuck knows how long Winston has been going.

“Looks promising,” I say as I lean in to smell them. “Wait, what’s that?” The boy’s whimpering, he’s giving away all the signals, but there’s no fear. It rises of humans, a haze we can pick up a thousand yards away, but not this one. Not this peculiar little thing.

“Yeah, right,” Winston smiles a manic smile at me licking the blood from around his lips. “I couldn’t smell it either. I think we’ve got one.”

“A true rarity,” I say as I pull them off Winston and lift them up, face to face, looking into his eyes. “I think this one might like it.” And maybe he will; there’s an eternity ahead if you’re turned and that’s nothing to smile at.

They say we’re scary, you know, and shit, I can’t argue with them. We’ll go into a small town or community somewhere, somewhen, every hundred years or so and decimate it, tear thousands of people apart, swim in their blood and viscera; like I said, it can get messy.

What few consider is the scary thing about us, about our make-up, this eternity we have to lead. We come alive when we feed, but we can’t die. If we don’t feed, if we can’t feed, we have to hibernate, and dream a dream of solitude for millennia until another source comes, evolves along the path. It’s not scary being eaten by one of us, it’s scary being one of us. Sometimes a species comes along and reaches a technological standpoint that makes things a little easier. But, eternity, the infinite is not pleasant. Floating through the stars forever, we get lucky sometimes and a planet comes along and we get to live, but you know, a few million years later they’re gone again and sometimes not even that, and then we wait. We dream and wait.

Winston pulls the boy off me and throws him to the floor. “What do you say, kid? Want to live forever?”

“Why not?” he replies.

I smile. “Oh, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

Building inspiration: Thamesmead Subway - London