Change of Life

"Have a safe trip home!"

It was something that they always said as they were heading out the door, and God bless 'em, they meant it. They liked Sherry, and they would not want anything bad to befall her. But they had all been here twelve hours or more, just like Sherry would be in a couple of hours, and they were tired. They were ready to go home.

They often felt a little twinge of guilt for leaving Sherry behind. At least they could walk out to the new parking deck together, but no one else got off shift at the same time she did. Sherry might get out of here on time--midnight--but chances were good that she wouldn't. Any urgent work that came in after they were gone, well, Sherry was stuck with it.

"Ta ta!" Sherry replied cheerfully, not seeming the least bit daunted by the prospect of walking out to the new deck at, oh, two, maybe three-thirty in the morning.

It had not always been this way. Only last year, she had turned as pale as the full moon, thinking about that unguarded deck with all of its blind corners, all of the trash-strewn hidey-holes under the stairwells. Even the men were spooked (why did they have to build this thing way out here in the back forty?) But this was the new millineum, the age of cut-backs, downsizing and layoffs. If you wanted your job, you parked where they told you to park.

Something was different. Maybe Sherry was falling victim to the stresses of the new millineum and was losing her mind. Her coworkers wondered about her.

Occasionally, second shift had heard strange reports about Sherry from her third shift relief. "Last night when I came in there, I saw where she had put on these long, black fake fingernails." Or "Sherry needs to get on hormone replacement therapy. Last night she looked like she needed a shave." But no one took third shift very seriously. They had been reporting their sleep-deprivation hallucinations for as long as anyone could remember, and they had little credibility anymore.

But something was different. Ever since her fiftieth birthday a few months ago, Sherry had undergone some personality changes. Always shy and modest, Sherry was now wearing big, black, feathery faux eyelashes and (everyone assumed) hairpieces (no one could really have a gypsy shag that black, that thick and wild), tighter uniforms, and lots of aquamarine jewelry to match her new aquamarine contact lenses. She looked terrific, but it was all very un-Sherry.

Sherry finished up her work at eleven fifty-nine, forwarded the phone to the section across the hall where third shift was present and gossiping, clocked out and zipped away as quickly as the thirty-somethings could do. Gypsy shag bouncing, she trotted down the increasingly-deserted corridors toward the exit. There was just a short elevator ride at the end of the last hall, and then she would be out into the cool, blessed night...

The elevator made an odd metal-grating noise that Sherry had not heard it make before. But it did not register in her mind that she shouldn't get on it because it could get--BLAM, it stopped suddenly, pitching her to the floor--stuck.

Inside the elevator car, it was as black as Sherry's eyelashes, and dead silent. Mercifully, she didn't know. She was unconscious, with what they would later call a concussion.

They didn't find her until some of the first early shifters tried to use the elevator just before dawn.

"Sherry, you've always been one of my favorite people," said Marcus Wells from Maintenance, who they were allowing to ride with her in the ambulance. "So I'm not going to tell anyone about...you know...what I saw."

Sherry clenched her teeth. She was pretty well oriented now with respect to time, place and person. She knew that she had been in the elevator all through the small hours of the night. Earlier, the maintenance guy was just a blurry movement up above her, something that was slow-dancing with a shop light. Now, he was someone who knew.

She smiled pleasantly. "Aren't you sweet." Sherry was not the least bit worried that Marcus Wells was going to tell anyone. His retirement package was worth somewhat more than a psychiatric disability, and they both knew it.

"Sherry, I've heard tell that...what you have...may be a physical disease, that you can treat. I forgot the name of it, but they think that this is how all the legends and beliefs about...you know...got started. People had this disease."

"Porphyria?"

"That's it."

"Not quite, Marcus. Take away their raisin bran and macaroni pie, and true porphyriacs clear up. I've been doing low carb for two and a half years."

"Have you been doing that to try to cure yourself?"

"I've been doing it to get to a size six, Marcus. I don't want a cure for...you know."

She smiled slyly, not really enjoying Marcus's discomfort with the truth so much as the way it illustrated how difficult it was going to be to "out" her. No one in their right mind believed this stuff, and they couldn't prove anything--her image didn't show up on videocam, and for months no one had sucessfully taken her photograph. Something always happened to the film. She'd always thought it was vampires you couldn't take a picture of, but there it was.

"Well, Sherry," Marcus pressed on, "maybe that isn't all there is to it. Maybe they can give you shots, or pills or something."

"I don't want a cure, Marcus."

"Why not?"

Sherry sighed, smiling wearily. He was a man. He would never understand. He was as sweet and kind as they came, but he would never comprehend. A woman, young or not, walks in fear. Every day of her life on this earth, she is a prey animal, and she walks in fear. But a werewoman? She is afraid of nothing. Everything is afraid of HER.

"Why not, Marcus? Because I'm having the time of my life. You cannot imagine."