ICHOR

Dreams, Nightmares

Isaac never really liked the dark. He had long since gotten over his fear of the dark as a child, but most 15-year-olds don't like falling asleep in a dark, dead room, especially not with so many rumors of strange murders running around. Isaac may have been tall for his age, 5' 11" is a bit above average, particularly for a 15 year-old, but he wasn't confident his 150 pound frame was going to scare anyone off. His hair was a rich brown, kept very short and clean on the sides and top, and his eyes were a haunting yellowish-brown. While some found it unerving, many felt it as a prime opportunity to make fun of him.
One thing could easily be said about Isaac, and that was that he did enjoy his isolation. Being a third-year at his academy, he skipped a grade in preparatory, albeit at the cost of his social life. What few friends he had kept in his school life were very close. Adam and Seamus, the twins who he'd known since he was little, were expert duelists from so many years of sparring with each other, though he'd gotten ahead of them despite their smarts, their love for pranks and money led them down plenty of interesting roads to keep themselves occupied. His half-brother Jeremy was really the only nearby family that he had, with his father and younger siblings living closer to his dad's work. Jeremy was the younger of Isaac's two half-siblings, the other being his sister Marianna living in the downtown city. Despite them only being half related, Isaac felt closer to them than most of his actual siblings, not just by proximity, but that certainly helped.
And yet Isaac was still alone from time to time. Jeremy worked odd hours, and there was a limit to what Marianna could do half an hour away, even as much as she liked to visit.
Then there was Cade. Isaac's friend since middle school, Cade Stanton was tough, though he didn't look it. Cade was freakishly tall at 6' 4", a scrawny muscled redhead from the countryside, with a surprising knack for getting both in and out of trouble. Cade was the one person Isaac could pour his heart out to, and vice versa. The two were nigh inseparable confidants, and perfect partners in crime. Cade lived alone in the city, but he was in a good neighborhood with good(and armed) people, so Isaac didn't worry about his safety too much. And anyways, Cade was neither an idiot nor a pushover. He knew how to get out of sticky situations(lord knows he's had plenty of practice).
The last of his true friends was Sarah, a girl from his childhood, introduced to him by his old friend Perenelle, who he hadn't seen since he moved to the city for high school. She was an interesting character, certainly introverted and a bit of a closet weeb, but she had a certain charm about her. They'd been in the same grade until Isaac skipped a grade in middle school but she'd made an impressive effort to stay in touch, and it worked. Isaac had to wonder, maybe she did like him, but he couldn't bring himself to think about it most days, dating someone he'd known for so long didn't quite sit right with him.
The shrill whooping of sirens cut off his train of thought abruptly.
Isaac bolted up in his bed in the corner of the apartment, slapping on his glasses as he clambered to the windowsill. A few blocks over, it seemed there had been a huge crash. Firetrucks rushed to the scene and smoke billowed up from the highway. So close by, so near to Halloween, and with nasty rumors of meta-fueled murders floating around, Isaac was on edge. Adding to the unnerving atmosphere, the city skyline was so dark, with the nearly full moon hanging ominously overhead.
"The perfect birthday present, existential dread," Isaac mused aloud.
The 27th of October, 2124, two days ago, was Isaac's 15th birthday, when Marianna nearly got into a wreck and Jeremy broke his wrist and miraculously nothing else after falling from a ladder at work. Combine that with Cade's girlfriend of 3 years getting grazed by some stray gunfire hitting her house, and you have a trifecta of misfortune to grace a supposedly happy day.
The clock read 11:02 PM. Not as bad as some sleepless nights, but it'd still be hell getting to school the next day.
He opened his phone, confirming his safety with the automatic responder system. As he scrolled through, Sarah messaged him. A very simple, "heard some sirens nearby. Are you okay?"
Despite the uncomfortably familiar question, he gave his reply some thought.
"Yes, I'm fine. Looks like a crash from here. A bad one."
Some long seconds passed with no acknowledgement, before he noticed a strange request.
"Can you turn on you holo" The text scrolled.
Puzzled and somewhat worried, he glanced up to the holodisplay, its smooth 40 inch frame hung firmly on the wall, the layered display almost invisible through the near pristine screens.
Isaac tapped a key on the headset resting on the coffee table, and the screen erupted to life.
Isaac drew in a sharp breath, taking in the jarring scene of the accident.
The city block was entirely trashed, ripped up blacktop and unearthed concrete littered the roadside, a ruptured metal beam leaned away from the grill of a large truck, and what used to be a windshield was now a field of shattered glass coating what was left of the sidewalk, but the ghastly environment was hardly the worst part of it.
Jagged glass lined the opening where the windshield used to be like shark teeth in a gaping maw. A lone body lay across the passenger's side of the opening, bloodied and mangled, where streaks of blood trailed out and up a the nearby wall of a skyscraper from the driver's side. The truck itself had other stray pieces of metal wedged in its frame, some from nearby cars that it had plowed through, others seemingly foreign, gleaming twists of chrome that seemed to almost sparkle in the harsh moonlight, the police strobes and reporter cams bathing the horrific and eerie scene in attention.
A semiprofessional journalist stood stuttering in the limelight, as in the back firefighters and rescue workers tore away at the broken hulk of a vehicle. EMTs poured from ambulances to tend to the wounded, many being carried off in stretchers, as men in trenchcoats peered up the wall and at the nearby rubble, accompanied by seemingly doctors in lab coats doing their best to stay out of the way and get their job done, albeit with little success.
The journalist lady continued to blabber on, and after much hesitation she said something catch the attention of one of the trenchcoats from offscreen.
The journalist straightened up as the mountain of a man stepped into the view, with the top of his head nearly going out of frame as the cam crew tried to get a clearer shot of his face.
This seems to be the famous imvestigator Friedrich P. Johnson," a familiar name, Isaac thought, "here at request of both the Governer and Chief of Police Hamish Grundy, working with the FBI to solve these mysterious murders. Mr. Johnson, could we please have a few words? Mr. Johnson!"
The man turned without saying a word as other camera crews began to arrive, a handful of reporters clamoring over each other to get comments from the man. He towered over even the burliest of his present colleages, easily over 6' 8". His wide jawline was studded with fiery red stubble, and an old-fashioned cigarette hung out of his mouth. His eyes shone a cold, piercing blue that only the cams only caught once in a long while.
A slightly rumpled beige fedora sat crooked on the man's giant head, managin to hide his eyes only by revealing his messy, bright ginger hair.
Another detective came over to answer the first reporter's questions, first stating that he could not provide details on the current crime scene, nor could he get any comment out of Special Agent Johnson.
"Special Agent, huh?" Isaac chuckled.
The man continued on, mostly words to sway the conspiracy theorists and extremists back away from the Police and their investigations, though the man took care not to use a specific word.
Vampires.
It was all over the nets, recent rumors that the strange murders with odd marks left on the necks, the corpses drained of blood, and no eyewitnesses for miles.
The mainstream news was generally more reluctant to cover those murders, save for particularly conspiratorial tin foil hat brigades and obscure channels. There was simply no hard evidence, and more alarmingly, no suspects to speak of. They were too careful, too clean. Everyone was thinking it, but no one wanted to be the first reputable source to claim that vampires and boogeymen were the reason they couldn't crack the case.
Isaac wondered if such a thing could exist as he scrolled through a forum on the holo. More of the same, what-ifs and wild conspiracies with no basis in reality. Hyper-advanced space aliens abducting new subjects to examine and probe, the Illuminati getting rid of thise who would be a threat to their super secret society, and plenty of scattered cult ramblings. Then a post caught his eye. An anonymous live feed, but still very real. It pointed towards a pair of faint glowing red dots in the looping security footage from a news outlet, flashing briefly for a moment, before vanishing into nothing.
Isaac flipped on the newsfeed, scrolling through until he found the channel, and sure enough, a pair of red pinpricks burned into his soul from the other side of the screen.
The faintest sillouette became apparent, just before the red lights dissapeared again. Then they moved. Closer to the cam then before, now visibly pulsing with an almost respiratory rythym, slowly creeping closer and closer...
The cam suddenly cut to static, a choppy audio feed the only sign to what was happening beyond the screen. Isaac nearly jumped out of his skin, but that wasn't the strangest part of it.
Barely audible through the static and distortion were yelps and screams of agony, bloodcurdling shouts that were over as quickly as they began. Several gunshots rang out, met with a few return shots, ringing much deeper, as if from a larger weapon.
"Outgunning the police? That doesn't just happen," Isaac murmured quietly, and he knew the forums would be going ballistic over it, but the anticipation was killing him.
Then an eerie silence fell over the feed. A very partial video feed returned, revealing the cam on its side in a growing pool of blood from behind the shot, through a heavily cracked screen that may have been pushed in on the top side. Several lumps that appeared to be corpses lay around a tall figure in a large coat, blood trailing between them as the figure slowly turned around, a single red gleam appearing befire the cam lost signal.
Isaac briefly thought about the bible that sat untouched on his living room table, and the rosary that hung on his bedside. He grasped for it absentmindedly, not taking his eyes off the holo.
Clutching it in his hand, he curled up as the horror of it all sank in, as he watched the quiet, dead screen.