The Vampire's Rival

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I discarded the last plastic bag of blood.

Ten years.

That's how long ago the last human in Juginta's giant Warehouse had died and been disposed of by the automated system. That's when I'd had to resort to the frozen stuff. It was awful and I almost gave up on it after a few months that first year, but I got used to it.

I had to.

Thanks to the Scavenger attack and theft of the embryo generator more than a century ago, The Warehouse had stopped birthing any new humans, and Juginta had abandoned it. When I had stumbled in here after my breakdown at The Hotel, I had fully locked the building down, preventing any other being from ever being able to get in here, and swore to stay here until I turned into a ghoul. I'd taken the lesson from Miss. Trudy.

Locking myself in here was my insurance.

My way to stop a Venom ghoul from ever roaming the world!

My last memory was that Hadley had survived. But humans didn't live long. A hundred and ten years was a good estimate to guarantee that she was dead. That I wouldn't have to face her ever again. My heart couldn't take it.

Not after that night.

Like every other morning, I was surprised that I was still lucid and not a raging Venom zombie bashing my head against the Warehouse's glass doors. Hadley had been a human and her natural death should have caused the snapback that a mind-bonded vampire fledgling's death would have. Maybe it was because I'd died again in that ballroom and when I came back, I was alone this time, surrounded by dead bodies and ghouls – one of those bodies belonging to Jamila bleeding out at the jagged edge of that window...

I pushed the memory away.

What had happened that night was more than a century in the past. It didn't matter. Not to the world. Not anymore.

What mattered was that I was still alive.

I wasn't supposed to be!

I was also still surprised that no one had come to The Warehouse for all this time. True, Juginta had decommissioned it after the Scavengers had basically destroyed it, but there were still humans here. There was still blood, as disgusting as it tasted. Or at least there had been blood, before I'd drank it all for over a century. The absence of anyone checking in on the Warehouse for over a century was an omen. A sign of how bad it really was out there.

I had failed to save the world.

Being alone for all that time meant that the world had ended.

Again.

I stood up and walked around the facility like I had done for the past a hundred and ten years. Like I had a million times before, I contemplated upon this strange existence, alone in this cocoon when the world had once bent to my power. They'd known about me in every Enclave, both in fear and awe, but now the world was closed to me as I waded through a thick blanket of ghosts from the thousands of unfulfilled, brain-dead humans whose blood had kept me alive. These ghosts were my only friends now. My comfort. My undying companions. The ones who had saved me from the nightmare I called 'myself'.

But I didn't deserve it.

I was worse than a lost cause.

The ghosts were wasting their time.

I sighed and brought my thoughts back to my daily walk – the last I would go on.

It had been ten years since the last live human body had been cycled out of the Warehouse system and everything had slowly shut down except for the blood freezer, but the stark emptiness still got to me. Hit too close to home as a mirror for my heart. I was happy that this would be the last time I would walk past these desolate isles. The last time I would look up at the empty hooks and tubes. The last deep breath of ten thousand ghosts that I would take. Sadley, it wouldn't be the last time I would feel the sharp stab of loneliness that was a screwdriver to my heart, twisting deeper every day for more than a century.