Less Than Living

It’s funny how quickly things can go wrong. I frantically pushed my way through the crowd towards Damien, my sluggish pace spurring yells of protest from around me. I ignored it, I’m used to the yells by now.

“Damien!” I called out, my gravelly voice perfectly masked by the honey dew mixed with marjoram I had drank this morning. Or…tried to drink this morning. Damien didn’t turn, he stood there, leaning against his locker as he glared at some unknown enemy. As I got closer, I saw that he was staring at a couple across the hall: Stacy Radford, and Lucifer Desdemona the head vampire. Of course, none of the humans knew that. They all just thought his name was Luke Desmond.

“She deserves so much better than him,” Damien grumbled. “he only wants her for her body, her blood. Whereas I like her for what’s inside.”

“You mean you like her for her brains?” I joked, giving Damien a playful nudge.

“Ha, ha. How hilarious. Seriously though. I would be so much better for her. It’s a new school year. Maybe she’ll see sense…”

I sighed, running my hands through my raven hair as I stared up at him. Damien’s face was broad and stern, as he stared with hatred at Lucifer. I grabbed his head in my hands, and forcefully yanked it around so that I could see him face to face.

“Why don’t you give up on her already? It’s much better to find a nice zombie girl for you to fall in love with! Besides, then you won’t have to worry about constantly battling the urge to devour her.”

“Yeah, well you know you’re the only zombie girl that I can tolerate. And even then I could never have romantic feelings for you Blair. You’re like a sister, and I’d rather have a bullet through my head than fall in love with you,” he smirked. Although I could tell he was joking, I could still feel my dark heart twinge with pain.

Before you start freaking out, yes. Damien and I are zombies, and so are about a sixth of the students at Barracuda Bay High. But not the kind that your probably thinking of. Let me clear up a few things:

1)      We aren’t brain dead creatures that drool at the mouth and have body parts falling all over the place. Actually, we look pretty normal except for slight dehydration in our skin. To deal with this we use special herbs and mixes. The honey dew mixed with marjoram for example helps to mask our gravelly voices. As for our reflexes, we are slightly slower than humans. However, it’s only enough to make us look a little clumsy and get us a ‘C’ in gym (unless we’re doing a sport that only requires strength like weight lifting. We’re actually insanely strong, just extremely uncoordinated).

2)      We don’t go out killing everyone. Here, we’ve made a pact that lets us only feed on animals. And don’t you dare compare us to those freaking idiots in Twilight. Those lifeless vampires are just pansies.

So just fix that up in your head right now. Done? Good.

With my mood dimmed slightly, I grabbed Damien’s arm and roughly pulled him down the hallway and into the janitors closet.

“Look, I need to talk to you. I don’t know how true this is, but during the summer Nyx told me that someone had been attacked, and had the blood drained from them. The police assumed it was some kind of an animal, but Nyx reckons that it was one of the vampires here. I-”

Damien sighed agitatedly before clamping a hand over my mouth.

“Shut up a sec. Now listen, it probably was just an animal. You and I both know that years ago every vampire in this school made the same pact as we did: lay off the humans, conceal our secret, and no one would get hurt. Even if it was a vampire, it couldn’t have been one from our school. They may be pig-headed, ugly, snotty, uptight, and generally disgusting, but they’re not stupid. Or…at least not that stupid.”

I whacked his hand away and frowned. “Yeah, but what if it is?”

“Then you don’t have to worry about it. Just relax, it’s the first day back at school. Enjoy your final bits of freedom before class start,” he sent me a sideways smirk that made my heart flutter before walking slowly out.

***

I had gone the entity of the first day before something bad happened. I was packing up to go home after school (I had a detention for ‘causing a commotion in class’. It’s not my fault that the guy sitting next to me was so damn cocky), when I heard a rustling from the janitors room I had been in earlier.

“Damien? Are you still here? Jeez, what are you-”

I paused and my mouth dropped open. Inside the closet was a blonde haired, blue eyed vampire, sucking the life out of a petite, brown haired girl: Stacy Radford.

Time slowed down as I froze, staring at the culprit who simply stopped feeding and smirked slyly at me. As soon as she removed her mouth from Stacy’s neck, the entrancing aroma of bloody flesh overwhelmed me and snapped me out of my daze. Quickly, I clamped my hand over my mouth and nose and glared at the girl.

“What are you doing?! We have a pact!”

“Yeah? Well if humans didn’t want to be eaten, they shouldn’t taste so damn good. Besides, you don’t think I’m the only one whose violated your little ‘pact’ do you?”

I growled menacingly at the girl and she simply sneered at me,

“I see our little zombie’s got a wild side,” she laughed. I took in a few deep breaths, and immediately regretted it when the tantalizing scent wafted up my nostrils once more. I gasped in shock as I felt my body warm up, as if struggling for me to get to the food. Food? No. Stacy isn’t food. She’s Damien’s crush for gods sake!

The vampire seemed to notice my discomfort and slinked closer towards me. She leaned in and breathed into my ear, “You know, I once watched this dismal human movie called Dawn of the Dead. It was really fake and cheesy. Only, there was one quote that stuck out to me: ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth’. I bet the director had no idea just how right he was.” A shiver ran down my spine as she continued, “Don’t you see? The humans deserve this! For years we’ve just sat back, trying to be normal. Trying to be the very being that despises us. We’ve already infiltrated their schools, so why not make our move? It’s our new year! Our time!”

She stepped back and flipped her hair over her shoulder, sending me one more sickening smile before turning to walk out,

“Oh, and feel free to finish that up for me. You’d better hurry while she’s still clinging to life. After all, dead flesh is no good is it.”

I barely registered the door close as I stared at Stacy’s body. It’s been so long since I had tasted human flesh. So warm, salty, tantalizing.

I knew what I was about to do, before I even opened my mouth. It was only the first day, and yet everything was changing. A lone tear rolled down my cheek as I stared regretfully at my blood splattered hands.

It’s funny how quickly things can go wrong.