CHAPTER 8
Reginald awoke pain-free, feeling good, feeling strong. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten to wherever he was, but one thing he knew was that he was sitting in a pool of red liquid so large that it had to be some sort of gross practical joke.
“What is this?” he asked Maurice, holding up a dripping red hand and spreading his fingers. Something seemed to be wrong with his eyes. The liquid appeared pearlescent, as if lit from within.
“It’s blood,” said Maurice, who was sitting on a rock a few feet from Reginald and looking off into the distance. He turned to Reginald. “Your blood.”
“It can’t be my blood,” said Reginald. “There’s gallons. I’d be dead.”
Maurice turned to look forward again. “Yeah, you would be.”
Reginald looked around himself. “This is disgusting.”
“You should have seen it before,” said Maurice. “Wait until the police find the puddle behind the bowling alley. It’s much bigger than this one.”
Reginald looked down. He was on a concrete pad at the top of a hill. There was nobody around. It looked like it might be an observation patch used by hikers who came up through the woods, but if that were the case, then the police would be alerted to a second large puddle of blood when the hikers came through. Quite the busy night.
“You brought me up here?”
“Couldn’t stay at the bowling alley. Too much noise. People were coming.”
“Where are we?”
“The park. The big one.” He pointed. “That’s I-17 down there.”
Reginald wondered why he wasn’t woozy, especially if he’d lost as much blood as Maurice had said he had. But he wasn’t woozy. In fact, he felt sharp and clear-headed. He did the calculation in his head.
“The park is an hour from the bowling alley by car. And you didn’t have a car.”
“I ran. Carrying you.”
“What time is it?”
“Eleven thirty.”
“You’re missing work,” said Reginald.
“Yes,” said Maurice. “But it’s allowed. I’m on paternity leave.”
Reginald didn’t understand that, but it was no more bizarre than claiming to have run forty miles with a three hundred and fifty pound load in an hour, so he let it go.
Reginald strolled away from Maurice, taking in his surroundings. He’d never been up this far, but he realized that he knew where he was. He knew there was a trailhead a bit farther down the hill, near a picnic area that was reachable by car. His mother had taken him to that picnic area a dozen times throughout his childhood and into his adulthood. No, wait. Fourteen times. The last time had been on April 28th. He remembered that very clearly.
There was a square post in the ground twenty or thirty feet away. Reginald walked over and touched it. There was a blue metal arrow nailed to the post, and the arrow pointed to a gap in the woods. Reginald reached back in his memory until he could see the other end of the blue trail near the picnic ground in his mind. That end of the trail left the area almost vertically. Impossible to climb without getting down on your hands, in fact.
He marched back to where Maurice was sitting. Reginald realized that he could see a webbing of veins in Maurice’s face and neck, and on his hands. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before, because it looked sickly. Perhaps painful. He gasped.
“You’ve noticed the change in your vision,” said Maurice.
“Did I hit my head?”
“No. This is something else. Tell me, can you read that billboard down there?”
Reginald looked where Maurice was pointing and was able to make out a yellow billboard with an advertisement for a lawyer on it. He read the words on it aloud to Maurice, then gasped. It had been easy and natural to read it, but now that he looked again, he realized that the billboard was only an inch across in his field of vision. He could hold his arm at full length in front of him and the billboard wasn’t much larger than his fingernail. It had to be miles away.
“Sorry,” said Maurice. “I meant that one.” He pointed again. “To the left.”
“Which?”
“The blue one.”
“I don’t see a blue one.”
“Almost directly to the left of the one you just read, then higher up.”
Reginald squinted into the distance. He could see a blue speck, but nothing that looked much like a billboard. Nothing within reason, anyway.
“All I see is that blue speck above the two red lights, near the horizon.”
“Yes. That one.”
It was easily ten times as far away as the yellow billboard. He couldn’t even tell that it was a billboard, let alone read it.
“Of course I can’t read it,” he said. “It has to be ten miles away.”
“Probably about fifteen,” said Maurice, standing. “From this height, the horizon is nearly twenty miles off. I can see a sign on top of a gun store near Harvest Street, which has to be fifteen miles at least. I could read farther, but the curvature of the earth prevents it.”
Reginald decided to let that go too. Too much was odd right now, and he decided he should pick his battles carefully. So he asked something more pertinent.
“How did I really get up here?” he said.
“I told you. I carried you.”
“I weigh almost three hundred and fifty pounds,” said Reginald. “And that trail back there? It comes out of the lower trailhead at a forty-five degree angle.”
Maurice walked over to Reginald and wrapped an arm around his legs. Before Reginald could protest, Maurice lifted him in the crook of one arm as easily as Reginald lifted his 2-year-old niece. Then he set him down without comment.
“What are you, some kind of circus strongman?”
“Oh, come on, Reginald,” said Maurice, suddenly looking nothing like his usual, young goth self. He looked older. In fact, he looked almost amused. “Stop being so obtuse. You saw what you saw, if you’d let yourself believe it. I’m a vampire, and now so are you. You’ve figured that out by now.”
“Ha ha.”
Maurice opened his mouth in a sharp, fast motion. Fangs descended from his upper incisors.
“Neat,” said Reginald.
“You have them too.”
Reginald felt his teeth. No, he didn’t. Then something happened and suddenly he did. They had descended somehow, spearing his finger and drawing blood.
“This is always the lamest part of any supernatural story, where the person refuses to believe it all,” said Maurice. “I’d love it if we could skip the drama.”
Reginald, strangely unafraid, thought about the proposition in front of him. It made sense. Supernatural feats. Fangs. Blood. He’d seen the movies. Part of him wanted to protest and recoil, but another part — a part that felt new, and making itself at home inside of his head — told him to man up and be the first person ever to see what was right in front of his eyes. His new, vampire eyes.
“Okay,” said Reginald.
“You’re on board?” said Maurice.
“Yeah, sure. Why not?”
“You understand that you’re done with daylight. You can only be out at night, or you’ll need to stay inside all the time. You’ll need to call into work and change your shift so that you’re working at night, like me. And if they won’t change you over, you’ll need to find a new job.”
“No problem,” said Reginald. He wasn’t big on natural light anyway, and this would get him away from Walker and his clones. Win freakin’ win.
“You’ll never age.”
“Good deal.”
“You’ll never die unless you get staked or get stranded in the sun. Or unless you go tanning. No tanning, Reginald.”
“No problem.”
“And you’ll need to drink blood to live, of course.”
That was gross but not in the least unexpected. He’d already thought about it, and he guessed he’d get used to it.
“Can I still eat pizza?” he asked.
Eventually Maurice said, “I guess.”
Then something struck him, and what struck him made him suddenly excited.
“Wait,” he said, holding a finger up to Maurice. “Check this out.”
He turned back toward the blue trail and, new vampire nature running through his veins and nerves, ran as fast as he could. The trees blurred around him. He felt wind against his face. His arms pumped. His legs thundered. He wasn’t tired. He felt exhilarated, the world seeming to swim by as if in a dream, the horizon rotating like a record on a platter, and then it rotated end for end, the ground above and then the air above, and again and again and again until his face hit a rock and he heard his nose break.
He rolled over onto his back, panting, his breath trying to climb out of his chest. Then his stomach clenched and he rolled to the side just as he exploded into fits of vomiting.
The last thing he saw before blacking out was blood — probably Maurice’s blood — in a pool of something that looked like oatmeal.