THE VAMPIRE UNDERGROUND

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The pain intensified with each and every hurried step. She kept waiting for the ground beneath her to rumble again, open wide, and swallow her whole, sending her past the vampire purgatory toward the center of the earth.

Brin knew she only had one more hill to climb and descend, but it felt impossible to conquer. Her feet were hard as stone, and her coughing, which had sprung up unexpectedly in the last few minutes, was out of control. Halfway up the hill, she collapsed and fell against the snowy ground.

“No,” she said to herself, her loud cough echoing across the valley. “Come on. Get up.”

She tried crawling for a minute, but then her hands became shaking nobs of numb sludge. She tried to stand back up, but her feet had minds of their own at the moment and preferred to stay planted on the ground. 

“Come on…”

She tried to push herself up the hill, but it was too steep. She needed more strength. She needed help, but no one was around to give it. 

“Help!” Brin shouted, followed by another loud cough. “Somebody, please!” 

She knew nobody would answer. She was too far away from the ghost town for any of her group members to hear her.

But she tried anyway. “Dylan? Lavender?” The only answer she received was in the form of a whispering wind.

Brin stared up at the winter stars, which were sparkling in the clear black sky.

This is it, she thought. I’m gonna die out here. I’m gonna die out here in the snow, all alone, that is… if another one of those vampires doesn’t find me first.

Her next thought was: Too late.

She heard the soft footsteps behind her. “Dylan?” she said, naively. “Is that you?”

When the red glow appeared over the top of the hill, Brin knew she was done for. There she was, lying in the snow, live bait for the vampires to feed on.

She looked down at her layers of clothing, wondering if the vampire clan liked to munch on that, too, or if they were like zombies, and merely preferred the flesh.

They like neither, she reminded herself. They like blood. They just want my blood.

Her neck didn’t hurt anymore; it was currently numb. But the longer she stayed out in the cold, with no shelter or food or water, the more her everlasting headache slowly turned into an overwhelming dizziness.

“Hello?” she said again, hoping to get some kind of answer, even if that answer was to be a low, ferocious growl.

She looked up. The red eyes stared back at her.

But they weren’t the red eyes of just anyone. Standing before her, a few feet up the hill, was a man, the same one she had seen by the frozen lake when the group initially arrived in the area. He looked ready to enjoy a thick bloody milkshake, yet Brin couldn’t help but notice that he had an innocence to his face; the vampire appeared harmless.

But you’re not harmless, are you? You can’t be.

“Please… help me…” She reached her hand out.

The man, she realized now, wasn’t a man at all, but a teenager, close to her age, maybe a year or two older. The glow of his red eyes bouncing against the fullness of the moon above allowed Brin to get a proper look at his pasty face.

It was surprisingly pleasant, Brin couldn’t help but think, given the repulsive visage of the older creature she had just killed. She looked past the white face and the red eyes. His cheeks were thin, but his lips were plump, and his cute little chin was proud and prominent. His hair was parted down the right side, and the color of the red in his eyes amazingly lessened, not brightened, the closer he moved toward her. 

When his foot came close enough to strike Brin in the face, she braced herself for impact. She didn’t know what this creature of the night wanted from her. When he didn’t move for a second, and instead analyzed her features, she wondered if, miraculously, this mysterious young vampire would refrain from getting drunk off her blood.

She put her arm out. “Please… don’t hurt me…”

He turned his head to the left, and then to the right, like he was thinking about what to do. The fact that he hadn’t pounced on her yet made her confident that this creature didn’t want to hurt her.

Wrong again.

His mouth opened wide, and Brin saw fangs inside his mouth the size of darts. His eyes, which had almost resumed normalcy, shot back to bright red again. She didn’t know what had changed his mood, until she turned her head around, realizing he had caught sight of the blood oozing out of her neck.

He dropped down to his knees and got on all fours, like a wild animal. He crept by her legs, her arms, her torso. He opened his mouth wide, and aimed it straight for her neck.

“Nooooo,” Brin said. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes. She hoped they wouldn’t turn into ice particles.

She closed her eyes and waited for the vampire’s teeth to sink into her.