Diary of an Addict

My cart of cans rattles like dragging chains as I move it off the street and behind the house. The moonlight hunts my shadows, too big for the sky, threatening to cast itself upon me.  The building is boarded up and delipidated, as forgotten by society as I am. The inside is not much better, but it serves its purpose. A patchwork quilt of tarps has been set up to keep everyone dry. The walls have long been set upon by a pack of vultures; stripping clean the bones of the structure into anything of value. It is a hollow void, drenched in darkness, yet the place we call home for now.  I sense movement as I enter and realize Monica has already made her way back. She will be hungry.  I move the boards close behind me and allow my eyes to adjust. The area is littered with clothes and cast away furniture, reminiscent of a rebellious teenager’s bedroom. Or it could be, if not for David’s decaying corpse in the corner.

The days have blurred together, and I no longer remember when he died.  He is a rotting carcass, so bloated from the previous rains that his face is unrecognizable. His smell is battery acid, lingering in the air, putrid enough to make you unable to recognize the pleasant scents of the street, garden flowers or spices flowing from restaurant doors. How he died, though, is burnt into my mind. Blood poisoning, the result of shooting up laced blood for our kind. Tomorrow I will push his body into the red sunrise, and the smoldering ash that remains will keep the vials I brought warm for the day.  A low guttural growl pierces my thoughts, like a wolf marking their territory, and I respond with “it’s me”. As quickly as it started, the sound silences, and Monica steps out from behind a hanging sheet. We embrace for a moment, and I feel how much she missed me. I eye her over, and what I see makes me seethe with rage. She is wearing a piecemeal assortment of street camouflage, designed to make her disappear in a world full of vagrants and vagabonds. Her once vibrant skin was now marred with the potholes of addiction, despite her superior healing. Jet-black hair matted and unkempt, and her eyes were opaque, pools of restrained savagery. She needed to feed. I was not faring much better, with tattered clothing stolen from lost and found and donation bins and desperately needing the mobile shower unit to make its weekly appearance nearby. She didn’t seem to mind, though. “Did you bring it,” she asked hoarsely, and I flashed the blood and clean needles, much to her delight, as she cried out with glee, the veiled begging betraying her happiness. She was starving, so was I, but injecting the blood was the only way to subside the thirst. We were fledgling vampires still, only recently turned, and we needed to learn control before we made our home a hunting ground. As I heated the blood on a small butane stove, she took her shoes off.

She was running out of injection sites, settling for the webbing between her toes. I filled the vial, praying to a God who was not listening that the blood was the O negative I purchased and nothing else. We injected at the same time, like always, and lay down next to each other as the euphoria washed over me and I no longer thought of anything else. As my world faded to black, I heard a small thud, and my senses peaked for just an instant. Someone was on the roof watching us.