"Who's your favorite zomenby?" Rellek clapped happily.
Dao looked up from his files and gave them a death stare. "Not even a week ago you bit off my ear."
"Not the point. My point is, you don't even know any other zombie who's an enby. I've got to b...
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They say charity begins at home. But in Dao and Pom’s apartment building, there weren’t any vampires.
As it was, only a handful of the undead population were vampires and they were choosy about their prey. With the introduction of the Blood Subsidy Bill in 1952 and its subsequent revisions over the years, there were fewer and fewer reasons for a vampire to actually go out and feed on live prey. Blood subsidy banks cropped up to make things easier for both humans and vampires.
Vampires were lonesome undead who preferred to live by themselves in a sprawling mansion with zero neighbors in a two-kilometer radius. They couldn’t afford any further than that since it’d mean a scarcity of fresh food, unless, of course, they had a hostage situation going on in the basement.
Dao couldn’t bear either of those arrangements. He hated being all by himself, he’d had centuries to test that out. He preferred getting his share of food from the blood subsidy banks, which were now present in all supermarkets of the undead provinces. But like all vampires, he actually liked his privacy and the quiet.
So, a flat in an apartment building was a good option when that became a thing in Kolkata. A few decades in, even that became so isolating, he began to look for a roommate.
His roommate had to be a vampire for his peace of mind. Zombies would do stupid things all the time, poltergeists were a nuisance in an enclosed space and mischievous entities like nishis liked to brag about their nightly conquests. They simply wouldn’t do.
But as fate would have it, not many vampires were willing to share accommodation with him. Some of them at the neighborhood’s Undead Social Club even looked at him like he had lost his mind when he asked if they wanted to share the same unit with him.
“Just get a smaller flat if all the empty space is bothering you,” they had said.
“It’s not about the space,” Daomir clicked his tongue. He had thought at length about it. “I just want someone’s company.”
“What you’re looking for is just a mate, not a roommate” someone had said with a smirk. “Is that your way of saying that you’re up for some fun this weekend?”
Daomir shook his head and stood up. He would not get anywhere with these ancients. They might as well be as old as him but unlike him, their thoughts were stuck in the times Dao had learned to leave behind.
That was when he had found Pomley. At first he had thought someone had left a bundle of dirty clothes at the door of their club. But then the bundle had uncurled with two scared, beady eyes looking up at him. Dao stepped closer to take a better look at her condition, but Pom flinched away from him.
Her fiery red hair was a dusty tangle of black curls with a scalp full of infections back then. Her nails had broken in the worst ways possible and her fangs were still growing. It had made her gnaw half her bottom lip away. Her broken skin was shriveling up. Those were the signs that she had transformed in the last few weeks. She still wasn’t used to her diet and wasn’t getting enough of it.
