Pilot Chapters

Bloodlust

It is there, every night. 10 o'clock on the dot. The cameras wait for the world. Every platform, the same stories, a different voice.

A murder down the street, drugs over the road. The deliverer on the screen keeps a straight face as families mourn their loved ones. The news, your regularly scheduled parade of misery. Of course, they share some joyous facts with us too, enough to encourage us to place the razor back down on the side and walk away, leaving it for another day. Every day, we pour ourselves a drink and settle in to be shown the horrors of the world. That was at least when I was growing up.

Nowadays all our news comes through social media platforms, a vibration in our pocket and the information is right in our hands, more accessible than ever. It doesn't even come from the correct platforms anymore. One of our neighbours sees something, reaches for the computer in their pocket and uploads it to the internet. The loss of someone is known before the body is even cold.

Just yesterday my phone went off, I checked it immediately. Instead of having received a message like I had hoped, I had been told of the death of two pet cats on a nearby street. One black and white, another a tabby. They were taken to a nearby vets, just so their owners had closure. A car had hit them as it sped down the road. One would think that the message was in hope to find the owners, but instead in a matter of minute it had split off into a newly made page to install speed bumps on the street.

Our criminals face cameras, courts and criticism from the public eye, although you don't even need to be a criminal to receive the latter. Anything that would make a great feature episode on a true crime documentary skip straight over the local news and community pages and go straight to the national news, if you are lucky and you are a victim of something gruesome, then you will get your 15 minutes of fame on a global scale. All the highlights are still waiting on the big screen before we turn in for the night.

In 18th century England, the victim of the crime would be the police, the prosecutor and the social media presence. They would gather the evidence, the criminal and tell anyone who would listen of the heinous acts that they were witness to. Any crimes were brought in front of a clergy, which could either pardon the criminal or sentence them to hanging.

The justice system is nothing like that nowadays, but at least they had one. It gave people a chance to prove their innocence before people took things into their own hands, although much like nowadays, the criticism from people who used to be your friends can sometimes be worse than the punishment you are sentenced with.

I was never one for history, my head was forever in the clouds. I always preferred to look forward to the future, rather than look back. However, when you run out of things to dream about, sometimes you find yourself looking into the past to see how far you have come.

It was 1725 when the blood-stained streets haunted the townsfolk in England. A violent gang were travelling from village to village, slaughtering people in the night, leaving a path of bodies up and down the country in their wake. News spread quickly, but much like the social media warriors of today, the stories were embellished. Piles of bodies wasn't enough excitement for the people left standing, and with no witnesses to the crimes, people needed someone to aim their anger at.

People came to conclusions, some reasonable, some completely outlandish. Much like when the Salem witch trials occurred, the outlandish won. Word soon spread that vampires were the cause of all the bloodshed. A semi-logical conclusion considering the nature of the deaths. Blood loss was the primary cause of death, had the bodies not been completely drained, the gaping wounds on their necks would have finished the jobs.

It took a while for most people to come around to the story, shows were put on in the town centre, trying to prove that it was not a serial killer, or a violent gang, that had taken the lives of people they were close to. Bodies were displayed, like an exhibit in a museum, allowing people to make conclusions for themselves. Eventually everybody was on the same page.