Not Another Vampire Story

Foreword

(Howdy Stranger…

 Firstly, I’d like to point out that I hate vampire stories.  Yeah.  I just want to blow my brains out after hearing about the teenage emo bloodsuckers (Vampires, not high school kids).  No offense to Stephanie Myers and the like authors, I find them brilliant, but now these monsters have become a cliché.  I miss good-old Dracula.  Everything is completely predictable, after successful (and occasionally good) stories like Twilight (I’m not talking about the movies, those are dreadful).  It’s become awfully unbearable.

But none of this changes the fact that there’s a lot of money in vampire stories.  They have hundreds of little girls getting into gang fights over which character they like better.  The government hides subliminal messages in every episode of True Blood so they can create an army of teenagers that obey their every whim.  OK, that may no be true, but you get what I’m saying.  I just want to try my hand at this.

What can go wrong?)

No. This is not another vampire story.

My name is Jacob Sage Ryder. I am 15 years old, I have an IQ of 176, I travel the country in a blue Pontiac Firebird, and, well… I'm a vampire.

Yes, a vampire. First of all, I'd like to point out that I do not, I repeat, do not sparkle in the sunlight.

Real vampires are just ordinary people with a few... differences. For instance, we drink blood. Yeah. We can eat food like regular people, but only for pleasure. We have to drink at least a gallon of blood each month, or else we shrivel up and die. Sunlight won't kill us, unless we spend 6 continuous hours in it. We won't disintegrate right away, but the sun hurts like hell. We’re also faster and stronger than most people. We aren't superhumans, but we... we're in better shape than them.

And perhaps most importantly, we're immortal. Well, not exactly. We can die. As I just said, we need a supply of blood while avoiding the sun. But if we can do that with no problem, we can live to see the end of the world.

Vampirism is a disease.  Literally, in the sense that becoming a zombie is a disease.  It’s a virus that’s transmitted through blood.  It has no name, but I assure you, it’s real.  It stretches our muscles (making us faster and stronger), it rejects the sun’s radiation (burning our skin), and it halts the reproduction of cells (That means we never get older.  We stay the same age forever as long as we abide by it's demands).

As for the blood… Our body needs a constant supply of hemoglobin, a gas in our blood cells.  It’s like fuel, we can’t run without it.  We still need to eat and drink real food, but we need blood.  Lots of it.

I have to drink a gallon each month.  There’s barley more than a gallon in the human body.  And you can’t suck a human dry without killing them.  So to avoid killing anyone, I limit myself to a pint each person.  It’s not easy.  When I drink, I enter a trance.  I can’t stop.  I’m lucky I have someone to help me.

As if it weren’t bad enough for me to be part of this monstrosity, my sister has been sucked in too.

Mikayla Ryder.  12 years old.  IQ of 173, 4 feet and 11 inches tall, and my travelling companion.

Vampire.

She’s just a little girl, but she’s no child.  She’s seen too much to still be considered a child.  She never deserved this.

One pint from one person.  Eight pints a month for one vampire.  Two vampires, that’s 16 people in one month.

We’ve somehow been able to retain our humanity.

It’s the only thing we have left.