Part Six: Purgatory V.2

It was slow, but without anything going wrong his recovery was inevitable. Chris did catch the scent of someone coming towards his room, a scent that was now familiar thanks to daily visits. It pulled him up and out of the murky sea in which his mind had been floating like leaf. He felt as though he'd been half asleep all along.

 

Uh? Scattered over his body and the bed, piled on the little table to his right, were small packages of food wrapped in clear plastic. There was also a new hospital outfit, a pair of leggings and a shirt in that same chalk-green material. When Chris sat up, he realized the reason for it once pieces of burnt fabric shifted off his body. With a sense of calm that was so strange to him, Chris brushed them off and got out of bed long enough to put on the new outfit. He sat on the bed again to eat the packages of food one by one.

 

His stomach suddenly clenched and relaxed with a noisy growl. His throat muscles did the same more silently. Even so, Chris avoided the foods he had never liked because of the taste and feel on his tongue. He did eat everything else. Bread, sandwiches, applesauce, soup cups, freshly made stew left to marinate, mac and cheese, dried pieces of fruit, packages of sliced ham, slices of cheese, pickled radish, dry pieces of pie that he ate before realizing how much they tasted like paper, and plastic bowls of salad that he first drenched with packets of Thousand Island dressing. At the end Chris was a little thirsty, but it was nothing he couldn't ignore.

 

What am I doing? He didn't know. Fear, confusion, and consciousness crept back into his head. Chris finally realized how much he had eaten, so much more than he had ever been able to take. What was he to do with the remains? Chris reached out to the mess of plastic littering the bed and his hand shook. Something had surely changed, and he was already too late to change it back.

 

 

A change plucked at his senses like a finger on a harp string. Chris looked over his shoulder and saw a closed door, but he knew that on the other side the hospital was oddly empty. There was no nurse at her station, no doctor catching a minute of sleep while he could, no technician in the labs. There were patients sleeping in the various rooms of the hospital, and most of them were asleep. One or two were comatose and far beyond any degree of awareness.

 

Jack's nearby. Chris could feel a slight pressure against one side. None of his conscious self wanted to go, but he found himself at the door and pulling it open. His bare feet gently slapped the floor as he stepped out into the hallway.

 

He smelled a sharp infusion of drugs. It began to pull at his mind and swish it about, but Chris shook his head once and the feeling cleared away. Inside his body, an immune system rejected any outside influence over its cells. Others may swiftly succumb to sleep, but not him. Far more powerful drugs were necessary to put Chris to sleep.

 

 

He smelled sickness. A blood sickness....

 

A door banged open and made him jump. Heavy footsteps came his way and stretched a shadow across a hall before its source came into sight. Though her back was to the moon and the streetlights, Chris saw the features of the woman visitor very well. She looked like someone who was trying to fit in with the punk rock crowd, but could only work on how she imagined it to be. Her hair was short and spiked, her clothes were small and made of shiny black leather, with numerous piercings that would set off a metal detector until it burst.

 

She saw Chris and smelled only human blood. Her dark lips parted in a hungry sharp-toothed smile.

 

Her eyes, however, were different. They were highly unfocused and seemed to look off in different directions. Her arms flopped and hung loosely from the shoulders as though she'd forgotten that they existed. She wasn't the only source, but that dizzying, drug-like stench was coming very strongly from her.

 

“ What...”

 

The surface of her throat rippled upward, and the woman began to salivate. A thin line of drool seeped out from a corner of her mouth, and the other trembled in and out of a smile. Her eyes shook with the effort to stare in the same direction. Both sides of her mouth finally lifted in a ongoing grin, pushing a clean cut through either cheek to show every tooth in her skull. The woman's arms flopped as she threw herself into a head-long run.

 

Naturally Chris panicked! But there was the smallest bit of anger tucked inside his fear. His legs were paralyzed and his vision shrunk down to the woman speeding towards him with the intent to kill and drink. Crimson spilled into the irises of his eyes. Chris opened his mouth and showed a glimpse of pearly-white fangs.

 

“ No! Back off!” he cried out. His heart was ripping itself out of his chest.

 

Something in the woman's mind snapped, and the foggy cloud around it was suddenly swept away. Her body jerked hard to move in the opposite direction, breaking bone and cartilege in the ultra-human effort. She ended up tumbling over in a somersault and banging on the floor like a doll. Slowly, as she eventually became aware of herself again, the woman blinked and wondered where she was. She winced as her legs and neck crackled during self repair.

 

Nauseous bile rushed into Chris's throat. He shut his eyes, unable to watch bump after bump push against the woman's skin from under it, rolling and sliding about her legs until they were smoothed into place. He turned his head away as the elevator doors went ding and slid open. A small group of young men stumbled out of the cab and spilled themselves over the floor. Coordination and balance was definitely not on their strengths.

 

 

The smell of drugs became more intense. They mixed with the scent of diseased blood coming from these people who couldn't control themselves. The woman who had tried attacking Chris first looked at him hungrily, then she too was distracted by the young men raising themselves up from the floor. Their clumsy, heavy movements were perfect for a zombie film, but wide open mouths revealed sharp fangs and throats aching for a drink.

 

 

What...? What was Chris supposed to do? Fight? Kill? Tear them apart? But this wasn't a classic monster movie! And he certainly didn't have powerful guns and shiny black leather outfits as most vampires did in Hollywood. He didn't have the guts or the body strength to fight anyone. The very thought of it frightened him.

 

Why was he thinking those things at all? Chris was not a fighter.

 

“ 'Oh, good grief. You're such a disappointment!'” Following that cry, Chris heard the rip of heavy fabric. Then he looked over his shoulder, yelled, and ducked as body parts went flying. The part that made the loudest thump and smack against the wall rolled towards Chris and revealed itself to be the woman's head. He was too horrified to shout.

 

“ 'Come on, come on!'” Jack must be waking every soul in the hospital with his frenzied shouting, but Chris was too paralyzed to turn his head. He hadn't seen exactly how these people had been torn apart and he didn't want to! “ 'Being a vampire means drawing blood and enjoying the hell out of it all! Don't just stand there and cringe like a mouse. Get up!'”

 

Leave me alone! I don't understand you!

 

Jack swept around Chris like a dark beast and charged into the midst of the young men lifting themselves from the floor. Sensing an imminent threat, they whipped their lank bodies into a wild assault. Their snarls were cut short by Jack's first strike and the swift ones that followed. Blood splashed in instant curves and specks on the off-white walls, becoming instant paintings and no different than any of the ones Chris had seen before. Internal organs splattered and slid along the floor tiles. He almost reached for them to put it back together before realizing what they were. Outside of a horror movie Chris had never seen literal guts before.

 

 

***

 

That's not true. I've seen it before, sort of recently.

Some of it was mine.

 

***

 

 

Chris squashed the urge and wondered (of all things!) where security was, and why no one was coming around to investigate the noise. He tried to squash that thought too, because anyone who came would be running to their deaths. They just wouldn't know it.

 

 

“ 'For the love of hell!'” In a fit of impatience Jack shoved a hand through his hair. “ 'And here I thought I wouldn't have to deal with Draculas anymore but I'm still seeing them everywhere. You! Why aren't you taking care of this yourself? Take responsibility for what you've done!'”