Citizen Vamp

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

The couch was supremely soft. The velvet of the upholstery was comforting as I laid down for a nap. My body still ached from the attack and I was slowly recovering on sick leave. Back to HQ tomorrow, I thought. My eyes still ached as if I had a bad case of sinusitis, my muscles were sore, and I had a permanent fatigue headache. I guess that's what's happens when you're drained of too much blood.

I stared blankly at the bedrock stone wall above the fireplace across from the couch. Above the fireplace was an oak mantelpiece with a row of pictures, and above that I'd had my flat screen suspended. I turned on the TV for some background noise. In the middle of the pictures was one I stared at as I drifted off. In it I was five years old and I had my Mom and Dad on either side of me. I smiled. The picture was faded, the wooden frame was cracking along the joined corners and the glue in those corners was yellowing and flaking off. I stood there with a statue in my hands, having just won the second of two relay races for our primary school team. It was the first time they'd let a kindergarten student compete. My elderly but tough track and field teacher had demanded we pose for a picture together.

"A child is, after all, a product of her parents," she'd said smiling to compliment my mother. Of course, my parents couldn't say no to a picture after such flattery, who would?

The memory began to change to a more lucid and disturbing scene, slipping into dreamland. I stood between two people, neither of which were my parents. My frail grandmother stood on my left and my large and balding second cousin on my right. We were at the front of a old church's sanctuary. The whole church structure was wood stained black from the combination of the many years of its existence and the humidity of the Vancouver area.

No more than a meter in front of me were two large maple caskets. Neither open. In my dream, unlike in life, I walked up to the first of the two caskets and threw the lid off. My father should have been in the casket but there was nothing.

I began panicking, I ran to the second of the two caskets and threw open the lid, frantic to find my mother. Nothing.

A familiar laugh filled the church and my ears rang. Fear filled my every limb and my feet felt like cement bricks as I tried to turn. Family members were gone and the church was entirely empty. I tried to see his face, but he stood in the doorway of the two open church doors to the outside world. He was a silhouette mocking me.

"Where are they?" My five-year-old voice screeched as I ran at him. I had to see his face this time.

He laughed, turned away and shouted at me over his shoulder "watch them die, child." I arrived outside the church where night had taken the world over and rain filled the silence. I looked at the bottom of the exterior stairs of the church. There, in puddles of rain and blood, were my parents flailed on their backs. Their eyes stared into the source of the rain, blindly. Their throats were not just bitten but flesh had been ripped and my mother was missing her pearl necklace.

Fury and pure loss filled my being. I screamed my pain, trying to expel it out my mouth and send it into that dark sky. My voice was my own adult voice for the first half of the scream, and then it changed until it was unrecognizable.

I awoke with a large damp puddle on my pillow. My throat was tight but my head felt better.

I sat up slowly onto my elbows and pulled myself the rest of the way to lean on the arm rest. I reached over the side of the couch for the TV remote in the side pocket of the couch. Feeling the familiar cool plastic and its shape I pulled it out and aimed it at the TV to turn up the volume.

"-Tonight outside of Parliament," went the female voice. The screen flicked to a group of pale human beings standing outside on the lawns of the Federal Parliament buildings.