Radioactive Vampire Read online

  Radioactive Vampire

  Published by Lisa Randall at Smashwords

  Copyright 2017 Lisa Randall

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  Prologue

  It is the year 2190 and the world is boring. The world is constantly changing, yet it seems like there are only minor differences from when I was a child. My name is Helen Grey, and tomorrow will be my 500th year as a vampire. I have been thinking about my 500th anniversary for some time now, and it has brought back some memories from when I was a human. Looking back at it now, I realize how weak I was, and how indifferent I was to the changing world.

  I was turned by a man dressed in black on a stormy night back when I was a human. I can remember that night clearly, even now. It almost seemed like a dream.

  No, a nightmare.

  *****

  It was the night of my 20th birthday, and I was walking home from a friend’s house, breaking curfew. I met her in the barn at her parent’s place and we shared a bottle of liquor her dad kept hidden in the bales of hay stored in the barn. It has been so long now that I can’t even remember her name.

  I was so drunk on my way home that I thought I was imagining things. Eerie noises in the distance, a rustle in the bushes, weird things that you don’t see or hear about happening unless told in a story. I just dismissed the noises as the result of the wind that was picking up. My parents forbid me to go out after dark, saying something about a monster in the woods. I knew they were just trying to scare me, so I ignored them. Back then, women who weren’t married were expected to live with their family until they got married, and were also expected to stay indoors after dark, or so that’s what my parents always told me. Who knows, maybe they were just trying to get me to stay at home so they could ‘protect’ me.

  They always said I wasn’t “proper”. I would sneak out at night to go drinking with friends; I wouldn’t listen to my parents half the time; and I didn’t act like a “proper lady”. I liked wearing pants, which was unheard of for a lady of that time. To my parents, I was considered to be a “wild child”.

  That night my father was out of town on business. He was the night watchman at the cemetery, and he had to go into town that day to pick up some supplies. We were too poor to be able to afford to live in town, so if we needed something, we had to walk to town, which took two days to get there and back.

  Mom was waiting for me at the house, seated by the fire in her rocking chair, rocking my baby brother to sleep. I could see her sitting there in my mind, like she always did when Dad left for town. She once told me she was afraid to sleep in the house without him, but I think she was just worried. That’s just how moms are I guess.

  Since we lived relatively close to the cemetery, I decided to take a shortcut on my way home. It was a chilly night and the wind was quickly picking up. I didn’t mind it though since I actually loved this kind of weather. I could see the light of the fire through the window of our house. It wasn’t too far away so I decided to slow my pace a bit, knowing I would be getting in trouble as soon as I walked through the door.

  There was another rustling in the bushes near the edge of the cemetery, but I didn’t think twice about it, thinking it was the wind again. I stopped moving after I saw a pair of eyes shine in the moonlight, peering at me from the bushes.

  I tried to move, but I was frozen. As the figure emerged from the bushes I could barely make out its form. I could tell it was a man, wearing all black, and as he moved closer to me I tried to raise my voice to ask who he was, but I couldn’t even speak. I was frozen in place where I stood and I must have looked ridiculous. I was starting to get a little dizzy from the booze, and my head was spinning like crazy.

  As the man came closer I could tell by the moonlight that he was sick. He had to be. He was ghostly pale and seemed quite thin, staggering as he slowly moved closer to where I stood, keeping his eyes locked on mine the entire time.

  He was close enough to me that I could make out the color of his eyes in the moonlight. He stared at me for what seemed like forever. Time seemed to stop. Contrary to his sickly appearance, his eyes appeared healthy; they were mesmerizing. They were dark brown in color, with what seemed like silver flecks in the iris. Other than the silver flecks, which made him look either sick or blind, his eyes seemed healthy, no sign of the sickly bloodshot and yellow look that appeared on so many that were sick lately.

  A bird flew out of a tree suddenly, startled by the increasing winds, followed by a flash of lightning, and his gaze flew to the tree where the bird had been. For this one brief second I realized I could move again, but I didn’t have enough time to get away before he grabbed me by the waist, pulling me closer to him.

  What I remembered about him the most was the smell. He smelled like death and decay. As if he had been staying somewhere near corpses. Maybe even in the cemetery, as if he had been buried there.

  My mind tried to rationalize itself. There’s no way you can be sensing anything correctly. I told myself. You are being attacked by some stranger, you’re almost ready to pass out from the booze you had earlier, and your brain is trying to find something familiar to you, to calm yourself down. Yea, that’s it. It has to be.

  My gaze rose to the full moon in the sky, which was slowly being overcome by storm clouds, as he tilted my head back far enough to expose my neck to the night air. I don’t remember what happened next, but I must have blacked out, since I woke up lying in my bed back at home. It must have been a dream. Something as strange as that couldn’t actually happen, unless I imagined the entire thing. I did have a killer headache to add to that theory. And I had been drinking.

  I sat up in bed and looked around. The sun was coming through the curtains covering my window across the room, highlighting the wooden floor of my room. I pulled my covers closer around me. I was freezing, in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer.

  So it didn’t take a genius to figure out I was sick. The night air must have made me catch a cold after I passed out from the booze. I had myself convinced that was what it was, until I got up and went to the window. When I pulled the curtain back to look outside, the sun was unbearable. I quickly closed the curtain and backed away out of the rays still coming through the curtain.

  I smelled something like burning hair. I didn’t know where it could have come from. I pulled the blanket tighter and caught a glimpse of my arm. It was red and smoke was coming from it. I didn’t feel a thing, but it looked like a first degree burn all over my arm. I looked at my other arm, it was normal. So just the arm that parted the curtain was burned.

  Why? I couldn’t figure it out, no matter how much I thought about it. There was a noise coming from the other room. Our house was very small, and I found out I could hear everything that was happening around me for what seemed to be miles away.

  In the next room I could hear my mother’s quiet sobbing as she slowly rocked in her chair by the fireplace. I walked closer to the door so peek outside.

  My mother was sitting in the corner, the fireplace unlit and by her side. She was rocking in her chair, holding my baby brother who was sleeping. She was quietly crying. Something must have happened. I opened the door wider and walked over to her side. The curtains were all drawn, blocking out most of the light, making the room pretty dark, but I could see almost perfectly.

  “Mama?” I called to her
. She must not have seen me since she jumped when I spoke. She froze, her gaze locked on my feet at the floor. “What’s wrong mama?”

  Her gaze slowly moved up from my feet until her eyes met mine. She choked on another sob, fighting back tears. “Helen…” she couldn’t seem to be able to speak she was so shaken up. I reached my arm out to her to comfort her, but she flinched as soon as I brought my arm up, and she pulled my brother closer to her.

  Did I do something wrong? Maybe she was angry at me for going out last night, or coming home late. It was probably both by the way she looked.

  I noticed my arm again. It was going back to normal, the redness fading as I looked at it. The hair grew back on my arm, just like it had been before. I turned my arm around, looking at it awkwardly. What the heck just happened? Wasn’t I burned? I was so confused.

  Apparently my arm wasn’t the only thing that had gotten burnt, since my mother was gaping at my face, just as I had been gaping at my arm. “I found you this morning, just before dawn,” she finally said, breaking the silence. She was shaking. “You were dead. And cold. You were cold and dead and you shouldn’t be alive now.” That was the last thing she ever said to me before she fainted.

  I took my brother from her arms and put him in his crib across the room. He had been sleeping the entire time and when I picked him up he began to wake up and squirm about. He was uncomfortable in my arms, as if I were a stranger to him. He never moved about like that unless it was someone he didn’t recognize.

  It was getting dark out when my mother started to wake up. I told her I was sorry for going out last night, and for the drinking too. I had somehow managed to convince her I was ok and not dead at all. I hadn’t eaten all day, and I usually eat just before dark, but I wasn’t hungry now. She had told me I was dead, and it had scared her half to death to find me like that.

  I heard the rhythmic beat of footsteps and recognized them as my father’s. He shouldn’t have been home this early, so something must have gone wrong in town. It was some time before he reached the door to the house. It must have been a mile or so when I heard him, which was starting to weird me out. The wind wasn’t blowing now, so it was even quieter outside when he opened the door.

  The look on his face told me right away that something was wrong. He sat down at the table and put his hat on the table in front of him. “Good, you are both here. I have something I need to tell you.” We both nodded. The frightened look on my mother’s face was still there as she kept glancing at me, and he didn’t seem to notice it.

  “I was about a mile from town when I ran into Jack Smith, our closest neighbor.” I knew him as my father’s friend. “He told me not to go into town for a while. Said there was some kind of killer animal on the loose. Three people were murdered the night I left for town. Their necks had been torn open. He told me there was even a reward for the beast’s head. Jack lent me the supplies I needed so I could come back as soon as possible to see if you all were fine.” His story gave me goose bumps on my arms and down the middle of my back.

  My mother’s face went even paler, and I didn’t know it could have done that, she was already so pale. This was no dream or hallucination. It was real. The man, who I thought had attacked me, really did. And he had to be the one from town as well. He was the animal they were all looking for, and I should have been the next victim. But I wasn’t. I was alive. How could this be?

  I had to leave my home soon. Maybe even tonight, after everyone went to sleep. If the monster came back after realizing it hadn’t killed me like the rest, he might want to come back to finish the job. If he didn’t come back, there was a possibility that I might become like him, and attack my family. I could never forgive myself if that happened.

  I resolved myself to leave that night. I didn’t eat dinner, and said something to my parents about feeling ill, so I went to my room, claiming to go to sleep early.

  The moonlight shone through the window in my room. I could see perfectly in the dark. The air was sweet as it flowed through my open window. The wind was blowing again, and I could hear the leaves on the trees move gently in the breeze. The beating wings of an owl as it hunted its prey. I even heard the beating hearts of my family through the wooden door as I leaned into it.

  I could feel the energy in the air and it gave me strength. Now I was hungry and I didn’t crave any food we had in the kitchen. I listened to the heartbeat of the horses in the barn. The rhythmic beating of their hearts filled my ears. The rush of blood as it ran through veins. I was breathing faster now, and I was feeling really weird. More than when I had gotten up. It was almost like animal instinct. The way an owl hunted a mouse in the night. I wanted to hunt something. I didn’t know why or how I was going to do such a thing, but I opened my window and leapt out.

  I ran into the woods, leaving everything I cared about behind. I just ran as fast and as far as I could. What a birthday this was turning out to be. I had been attacked by a man who I thought was going to kill me, but instead he gives me some whacked out virus that changed me forever.

  Chapter 1

  Looking back to when I was still a human, I realize now how weak I was. What I am still unable to understand today is why the man attacked me. Was it intentional? Was it an accident? Unless I can find him again, I will never have my answers. And that, just simply will not do.

  I have traveled the planet for almost 500 years, searching for that man. The one who made me who I am today. There were times when I thought I was getting close to catching up with him, but then he would always disappear suddenly, and I couldn’t pick up his trail for years. It was very difficult tracking him down, since the only thing I could remember about him were his eyes. The way they seemed to glow in the moonlight, like a feral wolf hunting its prey. The way he smelled that night didn’t lead me anywhere either. I followed that smell before, and every time it led me to cemeteries. All I had to go on were his eyes.

  The night he attacked me, he seemed to have left a mark on my soul. I know it sounds strange, but sometimes I can sense when he is near. I never find him though. He always seems to know when I am near and escapes me every single time.

  It’s the year 2190 now, and people are becoming even more violent and destructive than I could have imagined.

  Its only natural I suppose, since humans evolved from animals. Some say humans don’t carry the genes for destruction, that they are ‘civilized’. After being on this planet for so long, everyday life seems to be getting even more boring by the day. I have seen many important days of history, so much that now it is easy to tell what will happen. The pattern always stays the same. Slowly accelerating into something worse every time it repeats, gradually becoming more destructive over time.

  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any special powers like future telling, but I am faster and stronger than a human, and heal a lot faster. I can tell when certain things are going to happen, but only the large occurrences though. Like wars and other major events in history. It’s usually something concerning the rest of the world, though. Nothing about one single country is easily predicted, but if something affects the entire world, I can usually tell when it’s about to happen. I predicted the wars, the rise and fall of dictators, and Hitler. I can’t believe no one saw how murderous his intent upon the world was. It was there for all to see, yet many ignored it until it was too late. Humanity has begun to sicken me to the point where I just want to go sleep until the end of time.

  I believe I am only able to see this pattern of humanity because I have lived so long. If I was still merely a twenty year old human, I don’t think I would be able to recognize the pattern, since it would all be new to me.

  Tomorrow marks the 500th year of my existence as a vampire. Five centuries I have hunted that man. It’s time to give myself a little break, I thought. To celebrate, I plan to sleep. Hopefully for all eternity, or at least until the humans quiet down and begin to act less like violent brutes.

  With any luck, the next time I wake up, the humans
will be rid of their violent ways.

  My only fear of sleeping for so long is that I will shrivel up and be unable to move when I wake up, if I do at all. Although it is risky, it’s a chance I am willing to take. For the sake of my sanity, I will risk death.

  Chapter 2

  By the time the sun had risen, I had finished making plans for my long sleep. While re-checking my mental list of things to take care of before I ‘celebrate’, I find I keep remembering everything that happened over the years. My new beginnings and learning on how to control my new powers, all while trying to forget my family and friends, and avoid being caught and killed for what I am.

  I found I can live by taking energy from people, but if I can’t get that in a certain amount of time, I crave blood, which still grosses me out. Since I can’t stand the idea of taking someone’s blood, I try to get energy from people. It’s actually pretty easy to do.

  Every living being emits a certain amount of energy. All I have to do is find a person or group of people that have a large amount of energy and take a few deep breaths of air. The best places I found were in clubs in the big cities. They always seemed to be packed with people with large amounts of energy to burn, and a normal person couldn’t even guess what I was doing unless people started to drop like flies onto the floor, which they never have.

  I can’t have any true loves or friends because they will never know the real me. If they did, I would be forced to watch them age and die, since I refuse to make someone like me. These 500 years I have lived alone, traveling the earth for my maker. I want answers more than anything right now, but I am tired from my search.

  It’s been so long since I slept. I had tried to avoid sleeping these 500 years, because of what happened to me when I was a new vampire.

  Sleeping is just a way for our minds to take a break. When I was a new vampire, the first few years were the hardest. Not to mention the first week.