Free write 5/18/2014
When all was said and done there wasn't
much to say. I stared at my partner's widow, and she stared back at
me, pale and blood-splattered, her normally dark skin ashen gray. “I
hate you,” she said, and she said it so simply as if it was nothing
more than a statement of fact. My lips and fingertips tingled and I
could feel myself growing cold as the blood flowed out through the IV
and onto the floor. I was going to bleed to death, right here in this
death chamber than until a half an hour ago was a Red Cross
blood-mobile. She stared at me, her face perfectly expressionless
even as she raised end of the IV to her mouth and sucked, like a
child sucking cherry juice through a straw. It wasn't her fault, I
knew. It was mine.
And her husband's. My partner's.
We really didn't mean of any of this to
happen, but intentions and the road to hell and all that.
I licked my lips, feeling incredibly
thirsty, but there wasn't a chance in hell I was getting cookies and
juice now. “What did you do with his body?” I asked. He was dead,
I knew that for a fact, no one but no one survives having their head
hacked off and placed on a pike. But I had no idea where the hell the
rest of him was. I suppose, given the current circumstances, it
shouldn't really matter to me, but it did. It really did. “Did you
have him cremated?”
She pinched the IV shut, folding it in
half and squeezing tight. The flow of my blood stopped momentarily
along with my death. A temporary reprieve.
“I know you and Rich thought I was
stupid,” she said to me, her calm hatred lashing me with a hundred
million whips. “But I'm not. His blood was contaminated, and he
contaminated me. Of course I had him cremated, I wasn't going to let
him be chopped to pieces in your lab.”
My lab. Our lab. She put the IV back to
her lips, unfolding it and letting the blood flow once more. I knew
was she was doing of course, and despite what she may have felt me
and Rich never thought she was stupid.
You infected me, you pieces of shit,
she'd spat at us when we realized what had happened to Rich, and
Mary. And it had been true. But in our defense we hadn't meant to, we
hadn't meant for the virus to go wild, or for it to have the effects
that it did. But again, intentions and the hell and roads and so
forth. Rich had been quivering in the final stages of the disease as
he pleaded with his wife, he hadn't meant any of this.
I strained briefly
against the straps. The Red Cross doesn't strap anyone down, but that
hadn't stopped the phlebotomists any this time around. They'd looked
at me with dead eyes the moment I stepped out of the little
questionnaire room and grabbed me, unnaturally strong for a bunch of
middle aged health care professionals. Then Mary stepped out and
stared at me, and I knew there was no going back.
“Rich had the
virus,” she said calmly. Unlike the movies her teeth looked normal.
Her canines had not lengthened, her incisors had not sharpened. The
virus did not attack the teeth one bit, even as it drove the
metabolism insane. “He gave it to me. But you don't, and I wondered
why. Why did I get it, and you didn't? You fucked him as much as I
did. You should have gotten it.”
Again, truth. She
wasn't stupid.
She took the IV out
of her mouth again. The blood in her mouth turned her teeth slick and
red. It flooded out of the tube for a moment, then she pinched it off
again. I felt cold and short of breath, and I wondered how much I had
bleed already. The other donors had already left, the phlebotomists
with their dead eyes had taken their donations as if everything was
perfectly normal and not a single one of the other donors had been
hurt or killed. I was relieved in a way, Mary's anger had been
directed solely at me. The virus had not driven her insane with
bloodlust, like we thought it would. Perhaps everything would be okay
in this new world Rich and I had created.
Even if we didn't
get to see it.
“So I wondered,
was the vampire virus the only one you created? And the answer was of
course not. You were playing God,” and here she snarled. “God!
And I know you scientists, you worked with a variety of strains, not
merely one. You're infected too. Just, you know, with something
else.” She laugh humorlessly. “And you're such a cowardly shit
that you'd rather I bleed you to death than save yourself.”
Muscles knotted
under my skin. It was true. It was equally true that I was letting
her kill me. Mary had proved that the v-virus was safe in the modern
world, relatively speaking. She would only kill those who had wronged
her, and only at the level of betrayal that I and Rich had cast upon
her.
Too late, my bones
turned to dust and cracked, cracked, cracked beneath my skin, my
muscles rippled. I licked my lips again.
“You better kill
me quick,” I said, my voice dim and distant in my own ears. My
muscles were tearing inside me, my skin was turning purple with the
bruising. I didn't know I had that much blood still left in me.
She laughed and
pressed a bit of gauze against the needle in my arm, pulling my arm
up above my head. She pulled the needle out with a jerk and pressed
the gauze tight, and smiled at me. Chilling.
“No,” Mary
said. “I want you to become your own monster. You've done this to
me, and you killed Rich, so I get to watch.”
My muscles clenched
again in one spastic cramp, rending and tearing myself from the
inside out. The w-virus was tearing me apart, one cell at a time.
And Mary got to
watch.
