Vampire Days

Chapter 35: Home? Home.

There are times when you're immediately faced with the consequences of your hard-headedness. Just like my mother always say, "Karma is instant." Maybe if I had just stayed home and pretended to be busily doing my reports (and do it seriously anyway) just to keep Champion off my back, maybe I wouldn't be roped into this kind of predicament.

Or if I should've just kept myself from imagining gruesome scenarios, maybe I'm having fun with Lorenzo right now, talking about silly stuff and referencing pop culture while staring at the ceiling. I mean, I could've just faked it, because I could never help my own instinct from encouraging me to hunt. Right then, I really believed that he could see the things I've seen and he saw how horrible I really was.

Why are emotions so complicated? I claim to be devoid of conscience but I was clearly sensitive about how my friends really see me, as if how they really thought of me mattered at this point. They have short lives. They'll die sooner or later anyway, taking their impressions of me with them, so what's really bothering me? Why is the present so fucking important, or so fucking important to me at least?

"Why?!" I said with gritted teeth but nobody answered me. None of these men bothered to talk to me, so I guess they're pretty smart. 

It wasn't the muzzle biting into my cheeks but my own stupidity that drew tears to my eyes as I stared at the combat boots marching in sync while carrying my limp body, facedown, across the church out into the courtyard. Four of them held me on each limb and a fifth man pulled on the chain connected to the steel collar they fastened around my neck. The old man named Oscar held the door open and when we passed by him, he was muttering something that I initially thought was a prayer. But he was staring hard at me, rapidly talking under his breath like an expert ventriloquist.

"Think hard, punk. Think hard. Where you want to go, where you're supposed to belong. You have it in you, you know that, boy. All you have to do is think really hard. If the want is strong, you will manifest."

I heard him clear but I had no time to think about what he meant, or if he really intended for me to hear it. But who else could hear him muttering but me?

Outside, an armored truck painted and fashioned like an ambulance was waiting for the cargo, me, with the doors wide open. It was like a living animal, a crocodile perhaps, waiting for the meat to land into its mouth. Two men wearing white hazmat suits waited inside, holding what looked like a set of restraining equipments that made me chuckle pathetically as I remembered BDSM paraphernalias.

"I'll get away though," I declared weakly when they strapped me into a gurney before pushing it inside the waiting truck. Inside was too warm and I struggled to blink away the bright light overhead. "I swear, if I get away, you won't ever catch me again."

Nothing. No reaction from them. True pros, I suppose.

I tried flexing my fingers, although I had already expected to feel no sensation on my limbs, like the only thing about me is my severed head. My body was as dead as a plank. I guess this is how I'm supposed to feel, being a corpse and all that.

When the doors slammed shut, the two persons sitting with me inside peered at my face with expressions as neutral as factory workers doing mindless work of sorting screws. All I could see were their eyes but those "windows of the soul" as they called it gave nothing away. Even their heartbeats were as regular as Austin's period. 

One pried my eye open as wide as he could, shining a penlight on it for several seconds before moving on to the other and did the same until he seemed content with what he found. The other tore my clothes, Champion's shirt, off and felt me up from my chest to my fucking testicles, as if looking for hidden compartments inside my body. Their gloved hands pressed and probed while I resigned to the fate that must have been long overdue, as what movie characters say.