Bitten

         

There was nothing, a black nothing just oozing about.  I awoke at the spur of the moment, gasping for air.  It took a while before I realized that I was encased in a box, a coffin.  My coffin.  Dead. 

It made no sense to me because I couldn’t be dead for I was alive in the box.  I was moving and alert minus not being all that coherent at the moment.  Why would my family leave me this way?  It frightened me.

Did they not care that I was still alive?  Did anyone care?  I guess not or I wouldn’t be in a six-foot box probably buried deep down in the ground. 

The word "how" kept popping into my head.  Vaguely, I remembered opening the door to enter my home followed by fright and a sharp pain.  I forced the thought out.  I needed to get out of the  deathly space. 

I pushed and tugged at the top of the casket lid through the soft lining.  I hated scratching off the blue bird.  Anyone that knew me knew that blue was my favorite color.  My family would have made sure blue would be somewhere around.  Some would ask how did I know that it was blue.  I could see it, even in the dark which something that wasn't on my list of know why at this point.   

I continued on until I scraped my fingers against something solid.  Wood.  It was hard, but not as hard as I thought.  I pushed until I got through.  Then there was something soft, yet still heavy.  Dirt.

Black dirt as rich as the earth could form.  The smell was intoxicating.  It reminded me of when my mother would repot her flowers in the spring.  The various bugs and night crawlers were all around fascinating me.  I wanted to lie there and take it all in, but I forced myself to focus in getting out of the hole.   

I scratched and clawed for what seemed like forever.  Finally, my hand poked through to freedom with air blowing against it.  Struggling, I found a good stable grasp of ground and pulled myself up and out.

Talk about not knowing what to do next, I was that person.  Direction wasn’t in my vocabulary at the moment.  I was a sight standing there in my blue suit that I only wore on business occasions, tattered in a cemetery in the dead of night. 

I looked at my headstone.  Blue birds adorned it with my name, birth and death date.  Death date was right before Thanksgiving.  Damn.  I vaguely remembered now.  I could see incoherent flashes.  I was attacked by something.  I couldn't break through.  I still didn’t grasp my situation.   

I stood there taking in the night air.  It was getting colder.  There was something was missing.  It took me a minute to figure out that I should see my breath as I breathed, but none was there.   

Odd, yet I thought nothing of it and started walking towards the woods.  The sounds were more intense, almost like an overloading sensation.  Some of them I couldn’t thoroughly process.  It was driving me crazy.     
Out of no where, an urge began building with me.  I needed something.  I needed sustenance.  I was hungry.  This overwhelming desire for sustenance was none like I ever had.  I was ravenous. 

At that time a deer caught within my gaze.  The creature was so beautiful, so Bambi-like that I just stared.  The creature nibbled at the ground a little.  Sensing danger, the animal ran away further into the forest.

An animalistic force, feral took over me.  It forced me to go after it.  I couldn’t hold back.  The speed that I had was unbelievable.  The next thing I knew, I was tackling it from behind like some linebacker on a profession football team.  I wrestled it to the ground like a bull rider at a rodeo.  It wiggled, hopelessly trying to break free, but my hold was much too strong to my surprise. 

It’s heartbeat began to throb louder, drawing me.  My gums tingled with my incisors extracting.  I jerked the animal’s neck around and bit down hard sending me into another world.   

His elixir warmed my body with every drop.  The more I drank, the animal, finally succumbed to my will.  The endeavor was most disconcerting, but necessary.  I felt rejuvenated, completely sated.  It was as if I had been hooked to a power grid and someone flipped a switch.  Energy soared through me. 

I finally walked out of the forest still a bit dazed yet full from the discarded deer.  I didn't want anyone to stumble on it so I tossed its carcass further into the brush.  I began to think a bit more coherently after the wildness had left me. 

“What do I do now?” I said aloud.  My voice was coarse like it was full of pebbles with someone having a hand around my neck, tight.  The sound stunned me.       

A name came to mind as I kept walking.  It was like I could see it in my thoughts but not grab it.  Greg?  Grover?  Cary?  Damn.  It just wouldn’t connect. 

I got to a road which was relatively busy.  Across the way there was a store.  On the sign in big green glowing letters that were trimmed in yellow was the name "Grant." 

“That is the name!” I exclaimed, again scaring myself. 

I crossed the road and went through the opened door.  The light inside was bright nearly blinding until my eyes adjusted to the change.  There was a man with his back turned to me on a ladder.

He was white, with mixed gray hair that was long and braided.  He wasn't fat but stocky.  One could tell he could handle himself. 

"I'll be right with you," he said.  I was taken aback.  I didn't know that he heard me.   

I didn't respond even though it was a familiar place.  I was still trying to get through the fog in my mind to grasp it.  I just stood there trying to make some sense of it all. 

In a few minutes he came down from stacking cans on the high shelf. 

“Okay, what I can I do for you?” he asked before he trailed off to stone silence.  He was white as a sheet. 
It took a moment to gather himself before he could speak once more. 

“What the hell?  Why are you doing this?  Who told you to dress up like Gilly?”  he exclaimed.  He came toward me and shook me like a rag doll, trying to make the answers fall out of me.  “Answer me, damn it,” he further exclaimed. 

I opened my mouth causing him to back up in horror and collapse on the floor.  I bent over him and rubbed his face.  I recognized him.  It was John.  John Grant.  He owned the store.  I was a regular customer of his, damn near family.  We had eaten at each other's homes on many occasions.     

The more I looked at him, I was drawn to him.  His neck seemed to pulsate.  That is when I knew he had something that I wanted, needed.   

I bit down into his flesh tasting more elixir.  It was not like the deer.  This was sweet nectar.  It was life. 
I began to drank heartily, feeling more of my strength.  I was oblivious to my surroundings until a voice distracted me. 

“You there, what are you doing?” shouted the man.  He stood there in a deputy's uniform along with two others. 

Leaving John Grant lying there, still alive, the animal in me took over more, refusing to be cornered.  What little reason I had was gone.  I hissed at him, attacking him before he could draw his gun.  My speed was uncanny.  I knocked him out and bowled over his two cohorts in a blink of a eye, going straight out the door. 

One was lucky enough to scramble back to his feet, firing his weapon at me as I vaulted over one of the deputy’s SUVs, landing across the road.  I took off back into the woods.  The guy was a good shot because he hit me a few times.  They didn’t harm me, but they felt like a bee and stung me.  It was not something that one would want to happen to them on a regular basis. 

With the animalistic fury in me lessening, I started to take back control of myself.  I should have been out of breath because I had ran deep into the woods.  That is when I looked up in the moon light and saw Hilltop Mountain. 

In my hazy memory that was showing some signs of clarity, I remembered trekking up there once.  Everyone I knew had done so because it was considered a right of passage before going
off to college or out into the world. 

I looked back and saw the dawn breaking out across the far trees causing instinct to take over.  A panic engulfed me.  It told me I needed shelter and rest. 

I ran like an animal running from a forest fire.  I couldn’t remember being consumed by fear such as this as I sprinted towards the open mouth of the cave at the first flat base of  ‘The Hilltops’ as they were locally known.

My memory made me remember of my trek up here where I and my friend Celeste stayed a few days here, reading, laughing and telling of the aspirations of our future.

I entered the cave and went to the very back and sat down curling myself up in a ball.  It was dark and damp.  I drifted off into some sort of hibernation.  It didn’t seem like sleep but a dream. 

My mind slowed, showing me people, languages, different things as well as a ‘movie’ of my life plus more that I didn’t recognize.  Some things were put into perspective.  I guess finding one's self buried tends to make one scrambled for a while.   

I awoke suddenly feeling a million times better.  I knew my name and my life.  It was Gillian.  I sat there wondering what happened to me.  What would make them bury me alive?

I got up off the ground, still in my tattered attire and walked toward the exit.  The light from the sun fell upon my face.  It started to smoke and sear.  The sensation made me growl and howl in objection, forcing me to retreat back inside the cave.  The darkness made the pain ease up with the charred flesh healing quickly.   

I kneeled down beside the little river of fresh water that ran through it and splashed my face with some of the water.  Looking into the water, the revelation hit me, right between the eyes. 

I was full-blown wildness.  Instead of dark brown eyes looking back at me, yellowish-green eyes looked back at me.  Two sets of sharp incisors protruded from my gums.  I could see blood that had drizzled down my dress.  It must have been from John Grant, from the store.  The sight was ghoulish straight out of any normal human being’s nightmares.  That’s when I knew for sure that I wasn't normal.  I was something else.

A revelation came to me.  Using the water as a mirror, I checked my neck.  Sure enough there were two holes there. Then my head was flooded with memories where I saw my demise.  I had been bitten by a vampire.  That was the attack.       

I fell away from the water and hugged myself tightly, crying for what could have been.  What I use to be.  Alive.  Human.  Fate had played a nasty trick on me.  It should have been my choice, my choice to have a family, a life, a real life or be a fiend if I want that. 

I wasn’t sure how long I laid there mourning my life.  The woman who had been Gillian Ayers, librarian, was dead.  May she rest in peace.  A new one had been created three nights before after a cocooning in a coffin.

I  moved slowly toward the mouth of the cave since sunlight had died behind the mountain top.  It was safe to leave the cave now.  I could easily distinguish the sounds of the night.  The owl hooting, preparing for the hunt.  From deeper inside the cave, the rustling of leathern wings from a colony of bats.  The baying of a timber wolf, signaling that the woods of  Hilltop Mountain were his domain.  I closed my eyes, letting my new senses absorb the night’s embrace. 

As a child I had always been terribly afraid of the dark.  I smiled at the thought realizing now that darkness held no fear for me anymore.  I reveled in it’s sway as one of the things that ‘go bump into the night.’  And yes, I was hungry once more.  What else will get a vampire going at night?