Part Nine: No Candy From Strangers

If someone were to ask 'Are you insane?', Chris would readily answer 'I'm nutty as a fruitcake'. It was a line he'd heard somewhere on TV, and it was the perfect explanation for why he was riding an elevator down to the morgue. What other possible explanation was there!

 

 

He shuddered and couldn't stop. There was blood on his feet and one arm, both of his hands, and it was becoming sticky on his skin. There hadn't been a bathroom within sight and nothing that Chris could use without having to wade through a spread of bloody remains. Chris had done his best to wipe off what he could, but that just turned his one clean hand red.

 

His insides rippled at the sight of blood slowly shrinking along his skin, leaving behind clean flesh. That might have been amazing if Chris wasn't able to see it so easily, and if he hadn't felt the warm stuff seeping into his skin. He could feel it! The blood was seeping in through the miniscule pores of his body, soaking them up like a sponge. It might have been his imagination when his body twitched, but a faint surge of warmth emanating from his arms and feet was not. Chris felt less tired, and he had been so exhausted before from fear.

 

When the elevator went ding!, ever so cheerful, Chris wanted to smash the cab to a pulp. He took a shaky breath despite the thick stench of blood, and it cleared his head, lightened his body, mimicking the effects of good clean air. He gagged at the thought that he'd find blood enjoyable, but not as hard as he thought he would. What was WRONG with him?

 

 

By now the elevator doors had completely drawn apart. With his head down Chris couldn't see what was splashing and clicking its way towards him but Jack was shouting. No, he was cursing. At Chris? What'd he do! Yes, he was stupid to come down here, but that didn't warrant heavy-duty swearing. Chris threw up his head in a rage. His eyes bulged and his body shot backwards to the back of the elevator. Jack yelled at him to shut the doors before the skeletal creature got down the hall.

 

 

Chris rammed a foot against the Close button as Jack grabbed the skeleton's arm only to have it split into running threads of blood. They pierced through Jack's fingers to get past them.

 

The elevator doors, the damned elevator doors that moved so slowly, had only begun to slide shut. Needles of warm, concentrated pain pierced the sides of Chris's neck, cutting off his airway by splintering through his windpipe.

 

The skeleton was a creature of few instincts, all of them primal and wordless. Words could not describe how its liquidified brain began to realize that it had become infected through contact with Jack's blood. Now that infection froze, then abruptly intensified at a extreme level.

 

Before the skeleton had a few hours before the infection took over, and now it had no time at all.

 

***

“ 'So you're here...idiot? Thought you were a coward that can't even stand on his own feet.'”

Shut up! I don't know what you're saying!

“ 'Get out of here if you don't want to be chased by nightmares!'”

I...I only wanted to help. I'm...sorry I even tried.

“ 'What a nuisance!'”

Stop it! Stop all of it! I want to go home!

“ 'What're you crying for? There's nobody that cares. Do you think it'll get you some attention?'”

I don't care if people ignore me. I just want to stop feeling like this!

“ 'Ha ha ha! The world's full of monsters, and the worst of them all look like completely normal people!'”

I know that if you really want something to change, you can't just sit there and wait for things to get better. They won't. I know that.

“ 'Pitiful soul.'”

But people have to realize that shyness isn't something you can just 'get over'.

“ 'Jump out a window or something!'”

They have to realize that it's a fear. Of people.

“ 'It takes a monster to kill one!'”

I'm scared.

***

 

 

Chris remembered hallucinating, because no nighttime sky should be glowing a bright aquamarine blue. The stars shouldn't be diamond dust. He remembered feeling the blood sliding towards the holes in his body and then pooling widely beneath it. He almost thought that his blood was alive and leaving him now that he was dying.

 

Then his throat had abruptly crunched in on itself and he threw his head back in a silent cry of thirst. Crimson had pooled into the irises of his eyes and his upper canine teeth had painstakingly grown themselves out, adjusting the inside of his gums and jawline to create hollow sheaths for the fangs when they were retracted. Chris had felt the agonizing twist of muscle cramps before, but he didn't know it was possible to feel it all at once in every inch of his body. He hadn't known that it was possible for his bones to feel as though they were twisting too.

 

 

“ ...What're you doing here?” For a boy who had a dozen splinters of blood throughout his neck, Chris spoke surprisingly well.

 

 

“ For the fun, obviously.” Jack didn't have to move when the skeleton did. The splinters were pulled out and drawn back into the crimson bones. With only a single light rattle the red skeleton rose and put out its arms to hold the elevator doors open. The overhead lights reflected off a hanging cord of blood that dangled from the skeleton's hand to one of the puncture holes on Chris's neck. All but that one smoothly closed up and healed.

 

 

“ You honestly thought that being around me would be fun?”

“ Once I saw that you weren't human anymore, at least not a normal one, anyway.”

 

“ That's right.... I almost killed that guy.” Chris remembered. There had been a blond young man who had fired a shot at Jack, seeing him only as a dracula, but Chris had gotten in the way. Ah, that was it. That's how Chris had gotten shot. Like a fool he'd put himself in the way.

 

“ Hey, don't just take responsibility for that!” Jack exclaimed, annoyed. “ Though I guess being turned into an extension of a real vampire isn't a bad thing. I don't burn in the sunlight anymore and whatnot.”

 

“ Extension...?”

 

“ That's right. Extension. You blacked out and soaked me with your blood, a vampire's blood, turning my body into an extension of your own. Now, if and whenever you wanted, you could control me like a puppet.”

 

“ ...Don't want to.” Chris shuddered at the idea of manipulating others body and soul. He feared he'd fall down a hole that he couldn't climb out of, because after a while he just wouldn't want to.

 

 

“ Lucky for me then. Now drink up,” said Jack. “ This nightmare isn't going to end, but it looks like you and I are stuck with each other from now on if we want to live on. I think the science people call it symbiosis.”

 

The red skeleton collapsed and swept into a smooth current before it could spill into the space between the elevator cab and the hallway floor. Chris dropped his head forward as the last of the blood rushed into the puncture holes at his neck. Suddenly the veins of his body grew flush.

 

" ...You should've just let him kill me," said Jack. " It would have been better for you if you had."

 

 

His hair thrust out past his shoulders, which waited until then to grow a little wider. Arms, legs, and torso seemed to grow out of themselves, adding lines of definition to lean muscles that hadn't been there before. Molecules multiplied in a frenzy to lengthen the bones and grow the organs underneath the skin. They didn't stop until the body had aged a couple of years, then the growth stopped. Heat died down as the flesh was settled. Jack took off his large coat and tossed it over Chris, almost drowning him in the dark material.

 

 

A glassy sheet of red swept out across the floor beneath his feet, spreading to the walls and ceiling overhead. The edge of Jack's coat slipped down to reveal open crimson eyes.