Minions

Garlic

The first thing I saw when I walked into the kitchen was Damien chewing the end of a pencil, trying to finish a crossword. He had dark rings under his eyes and looked like he'd slept in his clothes. I cleared my throat.

"Oh. You're up," he said, barely looking up from his crossword.

"Good morning to you, too," I grumbled. He ignored me and wrote something on his newspaper. I rolled my eyes and walked over to the fridge. I was about to open it when I saw the calender. There was a big red X over the number 24.  "Uh, dude, it's the 18th, not the 24th."

"Actually Chris, it is the 24th," he set his crossword down. "We were beginning to worry you would never wake up."

"Wouldn't wake up?" I scoffed. "Aren't you forgetting the whole vampire healing thing? Where are Master and Vincent?" Damien just stood up.

"Follow me," he said softly. He started heading towards the main lab. He waited for me at the threshold of the door and then walked a few steps ahead of me.

"So is this all an elaborate joke?" I asked. "Is Vincent trying to get me back for when I cut his hair off?"

"No," Damien turned and gave me a small smile. He was about to say something more when we walked into the lab. Large pieces of lab equipment lined the walls. ALong the farthest wall were empty cages that Vallery used for her experiments.In the middle of the room was a 3-D hologram of ... me.

"What the crap?" I turned to Damien. He wasn't where he was a second ago. I did a quick 360 and found he was at the controls of the hologram machine. I walked over and tried to poke my holograms leg.

"Okay, let me explain. It seems that something essentially turned off your immune system. It made it so your white blood cells could barely fight anything off, let alone heal an attack as near-fatal as Vallery's. After you fell into your coma, I did some blood work. There was a small .01% purity garlic water in your system. Small enough to not kill you immedietely, but large enough to turn your immune system to mush." he took a long breath. It was like he was speaking another language. Near fatal? Garlic? Coma? He began again. "I isolated where the garlic got in. A small pinprick on your right index finger." I snapped out of it.

"Oh no," I moaned, cradling my head in my hands.

"What?" Damien asked.

"I was going through Master's drawers after I put my teleporter on her desk and something pricked my finger. I looked, but nothing was there." Damien blanched.

"Do you know what this means?" He almost yelled.

"Vallery just tried to kill me," I breathed, not wanting to believe it.

"We've got to get out of here!" Damien said frantically.

"She can track us!" I said despairingly. Damien looked up at me and grinned.

"Maybe not," he said secretively.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, a glimmer of hope poking through the darkness of despair.

"When a vampire like Vallery has more than two minions, they give up their ability to sense where their minions are," Damien said, moving to the computer and typing frantically.

"How did you find that out?" I asked, trying to figure out what he was doing with that spaztic typing.

"Read her mind," he said simply. I pretended I hadn't heard that. I was pretty sure that was against every law ever.

"Okay, I did not hear that. So how does she know where we are then?"

"A small microchip in each of our arms," he said. He pointed to the inside of his elbow. "It's not even that deep inside. I should be able to take it out without any problem."

"Dude, you're WAY too scalpel happy. I'll do it." I said, shaking my head. He scowled at me. I smirked and walked towards the operating table in the back of the room. "Where does she keep the antiseptic?" I asked while searching through her neverending drawers.

"I don't know. Just do it. I'll live," Damien said, rolling his eyes at me. He plopped onto the silver table and held his arm out.

"Roll up your sleeve and hand me that scalpel," I commanded. He did but tried to slice my hand with the scalpel.

"It should be right in the main vein," he said a little nervously. He liked to do the cutting, not be the one cut. I grabbed his arm and felt the inside of his elbow for any protrusions. There.

"Ah," It was literally INSIDE the main artery of his arm. I cut directly above it. Blood immedietly started gushing at me. The chip was too small for me to grab with my fingers, so I looked around for the tweezers. "Where are the tweezers?" I asked frantically. Damien shook his head solemnly. He was losing alot of blood. Why wasn't it healing? I thought to myself as I ran down the long hallway to the nearest bathroom.

Usually, I would have had to have made five cuts before the wound stopped healing itself. His healing wasn't working. I knew this should have concerned me alot more than it was, but Damien was bleeding out and I needed some tweezers. Then a dreadful thought occured to me. I stopped running. What if Vallery had poisoned him, too? I started running again and pushed that thought out of my head.

The nearest bathroom was Vincent's. I knew he'd kill me for going in there, but Vincent wouldn't be the only one, apparently. I opened his medicine cabinent and started throwing all of Vincent's hair gels and crap onto the floor. He had hidden his tweezers on the top shelf! I silently cursed and ran back to Damien. I just hoped I wasn't too late.