The Beached Whale

I Killed The Man Who Turned Me

Vampires have two laws: never expose our existence, never kill another vampire.

Go figure. I broke both.

I never wanted to be a vampire.

The man who turned me killed my wife and son in front of me. He spared me because I was, "a pretty little thing."

How I wished he killed me too. That I could've died in my wife's arms.

It took me a hundred years to get strong enough to kill the fucker who turned me. It was messy, and very public.

You don't get away with something like that. The vampire lords quickly murdered the entire town where it happened. Massacres come easy to them.

Their next step was my abduction.

I was tightly bound in silver chains and placed in a grotesque coffin. I spent several days there, unaware of my location save for the incessant rocking. We were at sea.

At last, the coffin cover was cracked open. Several thralls removed me and brought me above deck. Below the main mast and rippling sails, a vampire lord was waiting for me. Lord Umber.

"My little whale," he said.

I spat in his face, and warned him he better kill me.

"There's only one lawbreaker here. Tell me, do you know what becomes of the beached whale?"

Oh great. Here came the monologue. These fuckers loved to yap.

"It's a curious thing when a whale finds itself on a beach. A hostile place they were never meant to be. Whales are mammals. They have to breathe air just like humans. Yet, when they get stranded on a beach they wither away. They dehydrate, suffer, collapse under their own weight. The tide can come in and cover their blowhole, drowning them. A sea creature drowning! Isn't that horrible? Simply macabre! Now, as for you. I am going to send you to a place you were never meant to be."

The thralls locked heavy lead weights to the silver chains confining me.

"A vampire can't drown. But you will find it still hurts like hell. I have chosen a special location to dump you overboard. Below us the seabed isn't for over a thousand meters. The sun won't find you down there. You will sink until you hit the bottom, and you'll suffer an eternity begging for death."

The thralls threw me overboard. I sank fast.

The black sea consumed me.

Water filled my lifeless lungs. I writhed against the compounding pressure.

I thought of my wife and son.

I knew what I would do.

The depths would not be my final resting place. In a thousand years the chains would corrode and wither. I'd return to the surface and swim to shore in a single night.

I would kill that vampire lord. And then the rest.

And I wouldn't stop until I murdered every vampire.

I'd cleanse the earth of this curse, and walk gently into the morning sun.

So if you wake up in a world without vampires, know that these chains didn't hold.

The weights thudded. I reached the bottom.