Blood & Grunge: A Vermillion Strain Story

Chapter 29

Less than three months after her brother's rise from the dead, Miranda was somewhat used to what she was, although she couldn't give it a name. No matter how obvious it was, she couldn't give it a name. She gave a faint smile as she perused her new home and how nicely she'd fixed it up. It had been an abandoned drug house when she had entered it, a far cry from the empty house it had been when she and her friends had played there as children. 

But now they had made a house out of this broken down home. Still, they didn't talk about what happened or about anyone or anything that had been part of their daily lives and conversations before the sickness.  

"I'm sorry I bit you," she'd said at one point.  

"I don't want to think about it," was Lane's reply. 

"I'm sorry you were stuck down there for so long," Lane said at another point. 

"I don't want to think about it," was her reply. 

And so they didn't. They didn't discuss the food that rotted and went untouched in their dilapidated fridge or the raw meat they wolfed down like dogs. Nor did they talk about the animals who flocked to Miranda, oddly devoted creatures she brought home to drink from and release once she and Lane were satiated. They didn't mention their lack of heart beats or their inability to tolerate the sun, either. They talked as if all of this was normal and spent their days playing with electronics, reading, and discussing what they would do when 'the sickness', as they referred to it, ended and they could return to their normal lives. 

Until Lane started biting off his fingertips. They would regenerate within hours, which somehow made the sight even more disturbing than it would have been had he been left with ten bloody stumps.  Miranda increased the amount of animal blood and raw meat she made for them, but it was no use. The last straw came when an innocuous brother sister hug was interrupted by him biting her neck.

"What the hell are you doing, Laney?" she demanded. "That stings." 

Her words were backed up by their pet dog, who growled at Lane. Within two weeks of Miranda taking him in, they had stopped drinking from him and fed from other animals instead. He even had a name now, and didn't react well to any perceived injury to Miranda.  

"Calm down Kurt, she'll live," Lane told the dog as he continued sucking the blood out of her neck. 

She rolled her eyes and decided to wait it out, but he stopped within seconds. "You taste horrible," he gasped as he jerked away, his face contorting in disgust as if he had just swallowed rotten milk.

"Well, good, now you can stop tearing my flesh out like a psycho," she muttered.

"You're one to talk," he said. She burst into tears without warning and he immediately hugged her again. "Jesus, Miranda. Don't cry. Please. I was only kidding." 

"No you weren't," she sobbed. "You weren't kidding. You hate me because of the incident."

That was how they talked around things, giving generic words for things that they could never forget. The night at the cemetery was the incident, and what had happened to their bodies was, of course, 'The Sickness'.  

"I could never hate you. You're my sister," he replied. "But this diet is making me sick and I need blood." 

"We have plenty." 

"Human blood, Miranda," he clarified, although she already knew what he meant. "When someone gets within ten miles of this place I want to run out and suck the life out of them." 

"So do I, but we have to control what we want," she countered.

"I don't think it's a choice, though," he said. "I'm getting sick. Look at me." He held out his hands, and she realized that his fingertips weren't regenerating to perfection anymore, they were scabbed and ripped and looked like wounds whose healing processes had been hijacked. His eyes had lost much of their glow, and he was as white as porcelain. His lips were cracking the way hers had been the night of the incident.