Vampire Scene

"Danny!"

"Huh?"

"What is the square root of fifty-five times five?" my math teacher asked.

"Oh, I don’t know," I said and went back to copying my notes off the overhead projector.

"Well maybe someone can help Mr. Lynch figure out the answer?"

I didn’t pay any attention to what the answer was, I didn’t care. I finished copying the notes and decided to draw. I didn’t care about school that much. Most teachers annoyed me because they thought they knew everything about everything. Teachers can’t be wrong, or at least they can’t be wrong when arguing with a student. Most of the time, the student gives in and the class resumes as it was. Other times the student refuses to give in and the teacher writes the student up.

Then there are the teachers who give out useless threats. The really popular kids who do make good grades are constantly told to be quiet and behave. No serious punishment is ever given to these students. It’s the ones who aren’t making good grades and aren’t as popular, these are the ones who get written up and suspended.

I was one of those outcast students. The really quiet ones who make okay grades but are sometimes pretty smart. Or they’re just really apathetic towards everything that goes on in school. A lot of teachers think these students go home and do nothing. This is not true. Some of use go home and play music, hang out with friends that go to other schools or do drugs. I went home and played music and talked to people from different schools. I was straight-edge.

Straight-edge is a way of life that includes: no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking and in some cases no sex. There are varying degrees of straight-edge people, most of them follow the no drugs or alcohol rule strictly, but they don’t bother about the sex part. Others are all or nothing straight-edge. There’s also a really negative stereotype towards straight-edge people, mostly cause other people don’t understand it. That stereotype says that straight-edge people are always preaching they’re way of life and saying that people who are not straight-edge are wrong in life. It’s true that some straight-edge people do this, but a lot of people chose to be themselves and not push their beliefs on other people.

The bell rang and I left class without a word to anyone. I didn’t talk to many people in school. I just didn’t have much social grace. I usually talked to a select group of people that knew me and what I was about. Occasionally I would make conversation with people that I wasn’t exactly best friends with, but these were people I had been acquaintances with for a few years. I just didn’t make friends that easily, unless they were like me in some way.

It was lunchtime, so I was outside with my friends, we didn’t eat lunch for one reason or another. My personal reason was that someone should have copies of The Jungle inside the cafeteria at all times.

"Hey Danny, what happened to you face?" someone asked me.

I turned and it was one of the people that was only a friend of a friend but who I was friendly with, Greg.

"I got sucker punched Saturday."

"Why?"

"My former band mates found out I was quitting the band, got pissed off, tried to kick me out of the band, and got even more pissed when I laughed at them."

Long story short.

After lunch the rest of the day went pretty slow, which is just the way it seems when you want to leave. I drove home and got online. That’s when I got an instant message from Laura.

She broke up with me.

After that I took some of my stuff that I didn’t care about anymore, went outside and smashed them. I felt better after that and went inside.

"What were you doing?" Jessie asked.

"Nothing," I said and went to my room and closed the door.

A minute later there was a knock on my door.

"Go away Jessie."

"Danny, you need to talk to someone," she said.

"Why you exactly?" I asked.

"Cause I’m your sister and there’s no one else here."

I sighed, "Alright come in."

Jessie came in and sat down across from me. She looks like my mom with her long brown hair and heart shaped face. She has my dad’s bright blue eyes.

"So what happened?" she asked.

"Well long story short, Laura broke up with me."

"What happened?"

"She met someone at her school who has more in common with her, she’s also never really been that into the scene and she felt that I was too into it."

"That sucks."

"Yeah it does."

We sat in silence for a while, but it wasn’t an awkward silence or anything. It was a soothing silence. A healing silence.

"You know, you’ll find someone else. You’re a good guy and stuff and things will be better."

As simple as it seemed to be, it felt like the right thing she could have said. I never saw it coming, so it goes.

 

"Hey everybody, we are Oh the Trauma!"

Vince and I both grabbed our mics and started screaming while the rest of the band spazzed out on stage at the Epitaph. During our first practice, I met Jimmy and Shawn our two guitarists, Alec our bassist and Dwayne our drummer. Vince and I figured out that I could in fact scream relatively well. Vince also asked me if I could also play keyboard.

"I thought you had someone?"

"We did but he had to leave for personal reasons."

I didn’t ask what the reason were and I agreed to play keyboard as well as sing/scream. I really enjoyed that first practice, everybody was really good at their respective instruments and we came up with at least five different songs. After that we had a practice once a week during the next month and sharpened our sound and Vince and I came up with some really good lyrics. Soon enough we booked a day at the Epitaph and we played our first show. We went through our set with very few mistakes, and the ones we did make weren’t exactly obvious to anyone outside the band.

"Thanks guys," I said as Vince hyped our Myspace. We all went outside and sipped water as various people came up to talk to us about some aspect of our music. I felt for someone as anti-social as me, I sure was getting quite a bit of attention. It was weird. I felt awkward and at ease at the same time.

"Danny, I want you to meet someone," Alec said pulling me away from a group of guys who were talking to me and Vince about our vocal techniques. I followed Alec over to his truck and saw two girls leaning against it. One I recognized as Alec’s twin sister Talia. Like Alec she had dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes, but she tended to apply make-up and basically dress up for any outing, whereas Alec perpetually looked like he had just rolled out of bed (made worse by a twenty-five minute set). The other I did not know, but I recognized her as one of the many girls that were at shows every now and then again. She had dark brown hair, stunning green eyes and was slightly tan. She was beautiful and looked like a doll.

"This is Natasha," Talia told me.

"You guys were awesome," Natasha said, her voice was what I imagined an angel would sound like.

"Thanks," I said lamely. "It wasn’t bad for our first show." I suddenly noticed the absence of Alec. He had gone to make out with his girlfriend in the shadows behind the Epitaph.

"So," Natasha said. "Wanna go get something to eat?"

I wasn’t all that hungry, but said yes. We wound up going to some fast food place down the street with Vince, Dwayne, Talia and my sister Jessica, who had turned up just before we played apparently. Natasha and I hit it off immediately and by the end of the night we were making out in the back of Dwayne’s van. I gave her my number and she promised to text me sometime. I smiled and said okay and kissed her goodnight.

 

Natasha and I had been dating a month when the s**t hit the fan. Everything was going great. The band was getting lots of attention and we started making darker and heavier music. Natasha and I were happy and winter break was coming up soon. Then Vincent and the guys invited me out for a night on the town. I had no idea the night would change my life forever.

I met up with Vincent and the guys downtown near the river.

"Hey guys, what’s up?"

"Danny, you and I have been friends for a long time and seeing how great you’re fitting in with the band I figured there’s only one thing left for us to do," Vince said.

"What’s that?" I asked confused.

Vince smiled and led me over to where the other guys were. As I got closer I realized they were huddled over something. When I was next to them I realized it was a dead body.

"What the f**k!?" I yelled in surprise

"Shut up man and calm down," Alec said to me standing up with blood around his mouth. When he smiled I could see two fangs protruding from his teeth and he licked the blood from his mouth.

"What-what is this?" I asked in fear.

"It’s time you join our covenant," Vince said behind me. I stood there frozen as Jimmy and Shawn each took a wrist from the dead girl and started drinking the blood. Dwayne stood next to Alec some blood still dribbling from his chin.

"You-you guys are v-vampires?" I stuttered.

"Well that would be the obvious answer," Jimmy said wiping up some blood.

"We think it’s time you joined us as creatures of the night," Alec said putting an arm around my shoulder and leading me closer to the body.

"You see Danny, there’s a reason why you were invited to join the band. I’ve known you for a long time and I knew you’d fit in with the rest of us, so we disposed of the guy you replaced," Vincent said.

"Disposed?"

"Yeah, turns out he wasn’t into the whole vampire scene," said Shawn, "Threatened us with wooden stakes and crosses."

At this they all burst out laughing.

"Man, it’s not like we’re f*****g Dracula or something," Vincent said laughing. "The truth is...well maybe we should turn you first before we tell you all our dirty little secrets."

The others agreed to this as Vince rolled up his sleeve and cut his right wrist. "You’re right handed right, Danny?"

"Uh...yeah. Hey!" Alec had grabbed my right wrist and was rolling up the sleeve.

"It’s gotta be your dominant hand, makes the transformation quicker and smoother, of course there’s still going to be quite a bit of pain," he explained cutting my wrist open.

I started to panic and tried to break free, but it was like hitting a brick wall. I wasn’t going anywhere.

"Calm the f**k down," Jimmy said to me. "You’re gonna lose blood doing that and the whole thing is going to be more of a b***h."

Gradually I stopped struggling. There just seemed to be no way out of the inevitable. I was about to become a vampire.

"Don’t worry," Vince said smiling, "there’s no neck sucking or anything like that. We just simply mix my blood in with yours, by pressing our wounds together like so."

A shock ran down my spine as I felt a bizarre sensation coursing through my body. My vision became blurred and I felt the world falling away from me. In the distance I could hear someone screaming in agony. It sounded like me. Then the world was turned off and all I saw was black.

 

My eyes snapped open to a blinding white light. I screamed out as the light felt like it was burning my skin and brain. Somebody started dragging my body and I was moved away from the light. I opened my eyes to see my band mates sitting and standing around me.

"Looks like you made it Danny," Vince said to me. The others all congratulated me even thought I had no idea about what.

"What’s going on, the last thing I remember was..." I snapped a look at my wrist and saw a long scar healing up. "Oh f**k."

"Don’t worry about it dude, you’re just still in shock," Alec said.

I looked around and noticed we were underneath a bridge, not five feet away from me was the dead girl they had been feeding off of. I must not have been out that long, her corpse looked about the same as it did before.

"Hey Vince, you and Alec want to explain everything to him? I have to get going," Dwayne said, Jimmy and Shawn agreeing.

"Yeah sure, we’ll get him straight," Vince said.

"Later guys," Dwayne, Shawn and Jimmy said walking off.

"Alright Danny, let’s fill you in on what being a vampire is all about," Vince said.

"Okay, well I can’t help but notice it’s daytime, why don’t you start with that."

"Ah excellent starting point. Despite urban legends concerning vampires, sunlight does not kill us. It merely weakens us to a point of being normal humans, while we are able to function as normal humans we are also more susceptible to death. During night, we are pretty much invincible. The only way to really kill us is to cut off our heads."

"So crosses, garlic, wooden stakes, holy water, they don’t actually work on you...us?"

"That’s right," said Alec, "those are just inventions of normal humans to give them less to fear about us, the truth is they have a lot to fear from us during the night."

"What about having to be invited inside to get into people’s houses?"

"Totally made up," said Vince.

"Okay so we can’t die from sunlight, so why did it feel like my skin and brain were burning out there?" pointing outside the bridge.

"Well that’s just a side effect of being turned. You see after being turned, you’re in a very weak state due to lack of blood. So you might want to get feeding soon."

"I don’t know how I feel about killing people for their blood, man."

"You don’t have to kill, but it’s much easier to get things done."

Alec added, "Also you don’t have to worry about blood diseases from people you drink from. Our immune system cancels out all diseases so we’re pretty much always healthy."

"Except during the day?"

"Basically."

"The rest of this stuff, you’ll just learn as you go along," Vince said.

"Alright then," I said.

Vince dragged the dead girl over and gave me a wrist. "There’s probably not as much as you need, but there should still be enough to get you on your feet."

I nodded and taking the wrist I put it inside my mouth. A twinge of pain went through my gums as fangs extracted from inside. I could smell her blood, it smelled good. I bit down on an unmarked place and started sucking. It took a bit to get the blood to start flowing up but because of my new powers I was able to drain the blood from the body and into my mouth. F**k, blood was great.

I must have drained the corpse of what was left because soon I could tell there was no more blood coming out of the body. I looked down at it and could see how pale the body was because of lack of blood.

"Well, now that everything’s sorted out let’s get going," said Vince.

"Okay," I said wiping the blood from around my mouth. I had a date with Natasha that night.

Author's Note

This is part one of a vampire triliogy of short stories I'm planning. Hope you like it. :]

Reviews

[blackcat]

its good wonder whats going to happen next

[Brooke, this is the oth..]

(:

[Starting Over]

GOD I LOVE THIS!

[Kaitlin W. Blaylock]

wonderful story liine. you really pieced everything together, and tied up your loose ends. I only found one error "The other I did not know, but I recognized her as one of the many girls that were at shows every now and then again"
you either say now and then or now and again. combining them the way you did confuses the reader, and is incorrect. Otherwise, fantastic job

Yh its a good story it kept me reading all the way through
=D

[lAcEy_LoO's Poems Site]

Straight-edge... I'm a Straight-edge all the way... and it sucks to get dumped through text or im. OMG I'm in love with your story.... I couldnt stop reading it when i started!!!! Keep up the great job