:It's a part of town most vampires avoid because the food is tainted. Drugs. Alcohol. Despair. But it's here that the blind, undead artist, born with no optic nerves, comes to fill a hunger that has nothing to do with blood, though blood will be spilled...
A DIFFERENT HUNGER
a short story by
Terry Hayman
Copyright © 2010 by Terry Hayman
Published by Fiero Publishing at Smashwords
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A Different Hunger
Terry Hayman
I touch the taxi driver beside me and tell him to pull over. He does and I roll down my window.
Will I get out here again?
The rain has become a fine mist against my face. I stretch my nose out into it.
On such nights as these, they say, the streets here shine like floating ghosts in the street lamps. The boarded-up buildings groan over them as if about to collapse into soggy cardboard, mix with the slush of wrappers and needles and forgotten foods and used condoms that wash along the gutters.
It is a graveyard of concrete and glass, they say. Except those who live here are worse than undead; they are unclean. They shamble in and out of alleyways, collapse down against the bricks to spike needles into their veins or gulp the last of their bottles, scream at the cars, stagger against the weight of the rain, and look around too lost to move.
They say.
But I, born with no optic nerves, cannot see these things. Instead I reach my dampened face and nose out the window and smell the blood of the unclean, the pathos, the painful, feeble beating. And because I have already fed until my face is flush and warm, I know it is not the lure of easy kill which calls me. It is a different hunger.
I open my door and step out.
“Hey! $18.50, bud!” says the driver.
I turn to him as a rush of darkness. He has leaned out after me and my hands snap around his head. I begin to tilt it back, exposing a neck I’m sure is pocked with shaving nicks and hair. It smells unwashed but the vein of this man’s life beats strong in my ears. Clean blood.
“I have no money,” I lie. Clearly a lie, for the sports jacket I wear easily costs double this man’s monthly rent.
“O-gh...ay.”
The second I withdraw my hands, he jams foot to gas and his vehicle leaps away. From me. From this unclean place.
I turn and glide into the shadows of the buildings then, feeling the drip of the rain on the brick, the way it weighs down even the people inside the walls. I pass by open windows and windows that open for me as I pass. “You?” says a yearning voice inside one, perhaps one who has seen me here before, or knows what I am.