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Brenda was nearly a decade older than when she graduated high school, but she would probably be carded for the rest of her life. Now that Brenda was a vampire, she could jump high enough to have been the star of her high school basketball team. This came in handy now that she needed to jump high enough to slip the black plastic bag over the lens of the camera that pointed at the hospital’s back entrance.
The first time she had done this, she had gotten lucky and found three units of blood in a small refrigerator in a room off a hallway. She’d spotted them and put them in her daypack and then walked out as quickly as she could without running. She thought they’d last her months and months, but blood didn’t have a shelf life of forever, and it started to taste off after only three weeks, so she’d drunk the last two in one sitting, feeling bloated like a tick but satisfied that at least she hadn’t killed anyone.
But now she was hungry again. If she got too hungry, she wouldn’t be able to control herself, and there would be another Ashlee. Or worse.
If she still lived at Wolfe Ranch, she wouldn’t be in this situation, a little voice told her. If she was still hanging out with those boys, blood wouldn’t be a problem. But Brenda had a sixth sense about some people. It had warned her about the P.E. teacher at her junior high school, long before she found out he’d been molesting girls in his “private training sessions.” It warned her about her sister’s boyfriend before he got arrested for dealing meth. And her sixth sense told her that she didn’t want to spend her days trapped in a house with a kid who smiled like that British kid. There was something not right about him.
At Wolfe Ranch, someone else had made all the decisions for her, and while she didn’t like those decisions, as long as she didn’t think too hard about where her blood came from, everything was easy. Now she made all her own decisions. And she constantly had to think hard about where her blood was going to come from.
Ten minutes later, the EMTs came out the back entrance for their smoke break, and she slipped inside when they weren’t looking. Brenda found the same room again, but someone was in it, so she walked past casually, as if she had gotten lost. Everyone seemed to be rushing here and there, looking at tablets or pushing carts. She walked as if she had somewhere to go, and she was wearing scrubs, so no one stopped her.
“Thought you were off today; you just starting?” a man said to a woman walking towards him. He was an ordinary-looking white guy, maybe in his thirties. Brown hair, maybe hazel eyes and wearing green scrubs. As she passed him, Brenda thought there was something about him that Brenda couldn’t put her finger on, some familiar way of moving. She wondered if she had met him before.
“Hey, Leo,” The woman wore light blue scrubs and had her curly dark hair pulled back into a bun. She stopped to chat with him, holding her tablet up to her chest like it was a notebook and she was chatting with another classmate in the halls between periods. “My trip isn’t until next week. You on for another shift?”
“Just wrapping a few things up,” the man said. “Got a thing tonight.”
Shift change. This was the perfect time to steal. Just like shoplifting lipstick at Walgreens.
Brenda circled back to the room where she had found the blood before, slipped inside as quickly as she could and began to search a refrigerator in the back. She pushed aside the useless bags of plasma and bottles of drugs, searching frantically.
“You shouldn’t be here.” It was that guy from the hallway. He had his arms folded, standing up with a wide stance as if to block the door.
“Oh, excuse me,” Brenda said, as if she’d accidentally walked into a bathroom stall someone else were using instead of having just been caught red-handed trying to steal human blood from a hospital. “Never mind, I guess it wasn’t here.”
She tried to edge past him, but the man grabbed for her. He almost caught her, but Brenda was quicker, running as fast as she could, dodging carts and ER staff and a gurney and someone shouting and flailing his arms while a cop watched, impassively. Brenda kept running until she saw the exit doors, hit them with the side of her body and kept going.
The man in the green scrubs was still behind her. How had he managed to run as fast as her? Brenda put on speed, dashing across the reserved parking lot to the multi-level parking garage. She’d parked her car on the second level. When she got close enough, she jumped as high as she could, catching the railing and pulling herself over. The man would have to take the stairs and she’d be in her car and on the road before he even knew where she’d parked.
Brenda looked to the left, trying to remember if she was near 2-F or 2-G when a sound behind her surprised her so much she dropped her keys.
The man in the green scrubs was pulling himself over the railing to the second level. Before she could run, he grabbed her arm. She stared at him, too stunned to speak.
“Brenda,” he said. “What am I going to do with you? Stealing blood from the hospital? From my hospital? Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you could cause?”
“You’re a vampire,” she said. Up this close, she could smell him. That’s what had seemed so familiar. He wasn’t human either. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. That’s how you knew I was there to steal blood, isn’t it? You had the idea first. Sorry, I didn’t know. Is that your turf or something? I’m new to this and I’m still trying to figure things out. Just let me go, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything."
The man peered closely at her. “Your eyes are dilated. When did you drink blood last? Not recently, and not enough. You’re about two days from frenzying.”
“I could go three,” she said defiantly, though she wasn’t sure it was true. “I drank just a few weeks ago. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. If someone had come in with a gunshot wound and you smelled the blood, you would have frenzied in the hospital. I’ve seen it happen. You’ve endangered all of us.”
“Well what am I supposed to do?” she said. “I’m trying, okay? I don’t want to kill people anymore, but it’s hard! I wasn’t going to hurt anyone, just get some blood, like last time. I’m not in a gang or anything, it’s just me, and I’m doing the best I can.”
“Get in,” he said. He unlocked the car next to them, then picked up her keys and put them in his pocket. “You’re coming with me.”