Vampin Book Series #2
Vampin Out
By Jamie Ott
opyright.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used without written
permission, except for where credit is duly given.
Black Crowe (Robert Crowe) Books.
ISBN-13: 978-0615569284
ISBN-10: 0615569285
For all inquiries, please contact passionateprose@mail.com.
Falling Out
Chapter 1
It was Friday night, and she was seriously bored. Never, in her life, had she spent so much time alone. At the clinic, there was always the constant din of people bustling about so that she always yearned for peace and quiet. Funny because, now that she got it, she hated it.
Starr sighed long and loud as she stared at the snow on the old, cracked television in her dim, dark dingy motel room.
Across the room, she could hear something scraping at the floor, but she didn’t bother to get up and see what it was; it was probably another cockroach, anyway. Since she’d been turned, her senses, including her hearing, had improved, dramatically. Before, she would have never heard a bug, let alone a cockroach, digging around a floor.
Starr decided to go for coffee, as she’d done twice already that day.
She laced up her knee high, black leather, steel toed boots, grabbed her black leather jacket, and then turned to leave. But, just before she went to the door, she kicked the little television, which shattered into 100 broken bits against the wall and down onto the carpet.
For Starr, who had become superior in strength, since being turned, shattering the television was the equivalent to a human breaking a water glass.
According to L.S. Credenza, an author and expert on Starr’s condition, each person, who was turned, would experience an increase in their natural abilities. For example, Starr’s ex best friends: Shane, was already kind of a mind reader before she died, and was now adept at empathy as well as telepathy; Marla, was a serotonin deficient insomniac, and now she could go weeks without sleeping; Mica had exceedingly good hearing – even better than Starr’s - , now, and could hear conversations through walls as well as blocks away, since being turned.
Starr couldn’t do any of these things, but she had become so strong that she could take on more than few men at once, and, just last week, in the middle of the night, she ran a few miles in fifteen minutes.
The only thing they all had in common, being what they were, was quicker reflexes, stronger senses of smell, and a thirst for blood. Fortunately, they didn’t have to drink it, like the myths said. They could go months without blood, really. For Starr, if she was really craving it, there were plenty of butchers in the city. Starr found that an uncongealed blood pudding, or an uncooked haggis, was especially satisfying to her red craving.
She walked, quickly, through the hallway and down the steps. Starr didn’t want to be seen by any of the residents of the flea bag motel because they were all bums or drug addicts; that and she, herself, was squatting.
Like she’d done every day, since she’d left the clinic, she walked to the corner of the building and sat outside the fence, for a few minutes, before going on her way. From there, she’d use her superhuman senses to determine who was inside, and what was likely going on.
Starr could have returned to the clinic, but she thought it was best to stay away from Shane, who had confessed to thinking that she was a danger to others.
Last week, when her friends and the kids were held hostage by drug dealers, Starr lost it when she accidentally cracked open a man’s skull. Although they didn’t need to drink blood, like legends say, they did crave it. When she saw part of the man’s brains, visible through a missing piece of skull, it incited fever in her, like catnip to a feline.
Instantly, she went into a psychotic feeding frenzy, and she couldn’t stop.
Of them all, only Starr had this reaction to the sight of blood and body organs.
Starr shivered, not because she was cold, but because remembering the taste of those brains excited her, once more. Of her comrades, she was the most ‘animal’ of them all.
Animal was a term coined by L.S. Credenza in one of the books she wrote. It meant that some people lost part of their humanity after being turned. For Starr, this was somewhat true, for she still had her morals, but she struggled, daily, with her new desires which were, not to drink blood, but to hunt.
Credenza concurred that the fables were wrong; it wasn’t blood that was irresistible to Starr’s kind, but it was the scent of fear, and fear was everywhere, in the city.
“It is the instinct of a lion, or a wolf, to pursue fear, to squash the weak, and to challenge the strong (Credenza, 1955).”
Couple her new animal instinct with her unstoppable strength, and she was nothing more than a lion in a jungle. Starr, who was a natural athlete, a runner, a black belt in karate who could bench press like a man when she was human, was now, potentially, an unstoppable killing machine.
Sitting on the sidewalk, she sensed that Lily, her favorite abandonee, was there.
Despite being the most ‘animal’ of them all, Lily was the only one who incited a feeling of caring, inside her. Lily reminded her of herself with the way she looked up to Starr; she looked up to her sister the same way, before they killed her.
Using her superhuman sense of smell, she could tell that Shane was there, too.
Starr hated to leave Lily without saying goodbye. She depended on Starr the most, but Shane was always there. It was she who chased Starr from the clinic, made her feel disgusting for being who she was, and accused her of ‘vamping out.’
Vamping out was also a term Credenza used to describe when their kind lost human consciousness. The vampire, within, would take over, making the person completely ‘animal,’ but whereas an ‘animal’ was simply devoid of human feelings and human instinct, the vamped out were unable to mimic being human. For example, the minions in the movie, Dracula, were vamped out: brainless, zombie-like creatures that were only driven to drink blood and eat organs, endlessly.
According to Credenza, the effect was usually temporary, but it was possible that one could vamp out long term or forever. In the case of a long term vamp out, it was best to kill the vampire with a wooden stake through the brain, fire or dismemberment.
“Contrary to the myths, smashing a vampire’s heart would do no good because it stopped working, after being turned, anyway.
In the case of vamp out, destruction of the brain’s cortex is a must, to ensure death on the spot (Credenza, 1955)”
Starr hated to think of it. What if Shane was right? What if she was capable of vamping out? Deep inside, Starr knew that what happened with her and the brains could happen again, and that’s what kept her away from the clinic. She didn’t want the others to know what she was, and especially didn’t want to disappoint Lily.
She would have given anything to be more feeling. Not that Starr couldn’t feel love, hate or anger but she hadn’t felt complex human emotions since being turned. Feelings like anxiety, nervousness, sadness, excitement or surprise were nearly impossible, for her. According to Credenza, it would take a large memory jolt for a person, like Starr, to feel love, to remember it, which was probably why she went out of her way for Lily. Lily made her remember her sister; she made her remember love.
Maybe, she supposed, she was more ‘animal’ because of what she went through, right before she was turned. If Marla was permanently conditioned by lack of serotonin in her brain, making it so that she now never needed to sleep, then what would being turned at the peak of a psychotic break do?
What would being turned after finding one’s sister dead and lying in a pool of blood, on a street lord’s bed, do? What if the shock, the numbness she felt at that moment, would be with her forever, just like Marla’s insomnia?
It wasn’t that crazy, she thought to herself. After all, it was the balance of a brain’s chemicals and synapses that were responsible even for feelings.
To that day, though, Starr still wasn’t sure what happened after she’d discovered her sister’s body. She stood there, feeling numb yet, at the same time, a desire to kill so deep, so furious, and unlike anything she’d ever felt before. She could feel the pressure of wanting to hurt someone welling up, pressing against her chest, raising the hairs on her scalp, making her eyes bulge out, when something, too quick for her vision, swooped around the room.
She turned around, and, though she couldn’t see them, knew there were a few people in the room with her. There was a brief pain, on her lower neck, and she passed out.
Starr supposed that that’s when it happened; that’s when someone turned her life around forever.
Starr? A voice whispered into her mind.
Another thing Shane could do with her telepathic ability was communicate with others, mentally. She’d tried to talk to Starr several times since she’d left the clinic, but she ignored her, and walked on.
Come back, Starr. We need you; this is your home, too.
That was for certain. It was Starr who first found the abandoned clinic and it was her idea that they should stay there; that they should bring Danny and the others who were either abused, or had nowhere else to go. So why was she leaving? She should kick Shane out?
Because she knew, deep inside, that Shane had something on her. She saw, and probably told the others, what she’d done with the drug dealers; how she’d torn apart their bodies, and how, like cracking an egg, she cracked their skulls open so she could feel the brains, soaked with blood, run through her fingers, feel the soft sweet salt and spongy texture of the meat slide down her throat.
She wandered into the Bean Buck Café for, what would be, her twentieth coffee in the last two days: it was all she could do. She was bored, concerned about cutting off her friends, and she needed a job.
She ordered her usual double mocha.
The fables would have you believe that vampires only drank blood, but it just wasn’t so. In fact, there was something about chocolate and coffee that was just as fever inciting as blood. One time, when she’d passed a Godiva’s, she broke out into a sweat. She went inside and purchased over two dozen chocolates, and then proceeded to shove them into her mouth the way she ate the brains, like a dog.
She could control these behaviors around these substances, but it was very hard when the substance was especially pure. A bar of dark Hershey’s would make her sweat, but a Nestle chocolate chip was negligible; a Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee bean would make her shiver, but a handful of Folgers was like a handful of dried soil.
She sat down and started reading the morning paper, which she’d already read twice that day. Another advantage of being turned was the quicker reflexes and mind. For example, she could now read three times as fast as she did when she was human. She could read the entire newspaper in ten minutes or less, or do all her homework in less than thirty.
Someone sat down across from her.
“Hey,” said a guy with bleached out hair.
It was Antony from her school. Only, last time she’d seen him, he was avoiding her for some reason.
She sighed, loudly, and said, “What do you want, all of a sudden?”
“All of a sudden?”
“Don’t pretend. You know something about me, and that is why you acted strangely toward me at school; that’s why you’ve been avoiding me.”
“Wow, Starr, always so direct. If you want to make me uncomfortable, I’d prefer if you just punched me in the stomach, really.”
He was silent for a moment. Starr wasn’t going to be the one to speak first, so she just stared unblinkingly into his crystal blue eyes.
“Well, I,” but Starr stood up and walked off. She wasn’t going to be lied to; it was one of her pet peeves, and she could sense by the bitter sweet air of pheromones that he was about to spew some random nonsense. She didn’t think he was, necessarily, a threat to her, but until she was sure, it was best just to stay away.
The second she exited the shop, she knew someone else was anticipating her. Unable to pick up a scent, she continued, cautiously, along the street, looking about for the source.
“Hey, Starr,” said a girl.
To her left, standing in a space between two walls, stood a tall brunette with a shaggy hair cut and heavy black eyeliner around her marble blue eyes. In her hand dangled a cigarette and, the other, a flask.
A few weeks back, the girl helped her out when she was corned by two girls from school, not that she needed her help. Starr was simply engaging in a game of cat and mouse with the girls, or should it be mice?
Starr hated cigarettes. To her preternatural sense of smell, it was worse than a toilet.
Normally, she would have kept on walking, but she was so bored that she decided to engage the girl.
“Hey.”
Starr grasped for some conversation to make, but all she could think of was, “Have you been painting graffiti on all the walls at school?”
“Why would I do that? I don’t even go to school.”