Red Snow

The Dream

It was incomprehensively cold, yet here I was: breaking curfew and trekking through the snow in the dark, trying to get home.

The warm orange glow of the street light lit my path as I trudged along in my boots. The snow crunched lightly beneath my feet, bringing back childhood memories of playing in the snow with my parents, making snow men, and having snowball fights.

I missed them and wanted to see them badly, but they were on the other side and I would never be able to get there. They wouldn’t want me to kill myself just so I could see them. My mum had passed a couple of years ago because she refused treatment for cancer, and my dad had died defending me from when the new leaders came into town.

These vampires had snatched up most young teenage girls to be sold to rich vampire families as slaves. The older teenage boys were taken to be used as immortal soldiers for their army. If you had the right blood type, you would be taken to have every drop pumped out of you to go into blood bags, and if you were pretty, they would take pity on you and turn you into one of them before sending you to an orphanage to be fostered by a vampire family. The weaker ones were killed within seconds, and those who posed a threat to their kind, or the leaders were hypnotised into working for them. Those that were left were warned into obeying and left alone.

I was one of the lucky ones. They had passed me off as too old to be a slave, and my blood was one too rich for them, so there would be no point draining me, as most would get ill at the taste. Only few had taste for the rich blood, and those few vampires were hard to come by.

Suddenly, I tripped over something and fell face first into the freezing cold snow.

I quickly got to my feet and began wiping the snowflakes from my leggings, whilst quietly cursing about not having gloves on.

When I looked behind me to see what I had tripped over, I froze. Laid in the snow was a man, half hidden by the tree and hedges by the path, and I had tripped over his leg.

I gingerly walked over to him and looked at his face.

He seemed familiar, yet I didn’t recognise him. He was extremely pale and had a gash in his neck, a previous target of a vampire. There was a slight bruise forming on the other side of his neck as if he had to be pinned down before the vampire could feed. The snow nearby his head was red, and the top of his shirt and jacket was also red. I slowly backed up and then turned and started running. If the vampire that was here is still around somewhere, then he’ll probably come and get me.

I ran past the children’s’ park filled with swings and slides, heading straight for the back of the entire park because there was a road that overlooked the park that my friend lived down. She’d understand if I turned up now, and told her about what I’d seen.

I turned back and looked at the body under the tree. It was unmoving, scary, and even from a distance, it still looked like something out of a horror movie.

I quickly turned and started running, but I was knocked off my feet when I collided with something that made me feel like I had run full-speed into a brick wall.

I looked up to see what, or who, I had bumped into.

Looming above me was a pale vampire in a dark suit. He had unsettling, red eyes and black hair. His lips were pink, and curved into a sort of smile – alluring yet dangerous.

He held out a pale hand to me, expecting me to take it, but I scrambled up and started running in the other direction, hoping to get as far as I could be away from him.

Suddenly, his ice cold hand grabbed my wrist, and he span me around to face him, holding me still with an arm around my waist.

I was so scared that tears had started to escape my eyes, yet I hadn’t realized that I was crying. Fear paralysed me and stopped me moving.

Then his voice broke the almost unbearable silence.

“Sienna, you must wake up.”