"I wanna see your animal side,

Let it all out

I wanna see the dirt under your skin….

I want the guts and glory baby, baby

This town is wasted and alone"

-"Death Valley", Fall Out Boy

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Who ever said that living in the embodiment of an old action-horror movie was a good thing? Silverfox, California was overrun with blood-suckers, and who were the only people defending it? A ragtag group of vampire hunters in their early twenties. Right. We're screwed.

There was a reason that my three best friends and I never go outside at night. We live inside Braeden's house, scrounging food from the abandoned houses around and using the money to buy from the stores when possible. Yeah… it's only a matter of time before we're caught, but we're trying our best here.

I looked up, then glanced back down at my magazine when Di (her name is Diana, but she likes Di better; it's pronounced like the letter D) came back from a short run to the grocery store. She looked almost looked worse than when we were chased by a group of vampires called the Punks (yes, that is truly their name) when we forgot to watch the sun setting.

Her curly red hair was trying its best to be a side braid, but most of it was pulled out and floating around her shoulders like a halo. Her hazel eyes were bare, even though she wore glasses, just like I do. Her clothes were almost strategically ripped at her stomach, shoulders, and knees, only showing bits of skin that you would be able to see if she was wearing a bikini.

"I swear, everyone thinks you're about to suck their blood if you don't smile." She muttered, throwing the groceries in a clump near corner of the open kitchen and dining room area. They made a clattering sound of metal cans being forcibly smashed against each other.

"Another one of those cases of mistaken identity?" I flipped to the next page of the magazine that I was pretending to read. I was so not interested in the things that used to make me go into fangirl-sized spasms. It was a Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary special edition of the magazine, but even Matt Smith or David Tennant couldn't make me smile giddily anymore.

Not when we couldn't read in the evenings because all lights had to be off in case the Skinheads passed by and noticed. Not when our families had skipped town on us, leaving us to defend ourselves. Not when on every corner there was a chance you would either be turned into an undead or at least sucked (for some reason, you could drink somebody's blood without the intent of turning them and they would stay alive and not be a blood-sucking creep) of blood. Most of the vampires didn't care whether you died of blood loss or not; they just wanted their dinner.

Di looked outside, staring at the orange sun, still high enough above the horizon that long purple shadows snuck along the sun-warmed earth outside and the golden light caught in her eyes, making the hazel change to a warm honey color. The was still day outside; no one talked, no cars honked. Even the wind seemed scared to disturb the peace. The trees stood as black outlines against the pink and yellow sky, silently observing the ghost town around us.

"I want to play something." I announced, looking outside. The night was just starting to cool off, and there was about an hour until sunset, so if we went outside right now, we would still be good.

However, Di first looked at me like I was crazy, then grinned too. "I like that idea. It's been too long since we've done anything fun."

I closed the magazine and threw it across the room. "We need to get the guys to join us!"

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Braeden and his little brother, Donnie, were all for it, but we did take some precautions (we're not total idiots). A stake for each of us and a silver dagger we got off a dead vampire hunter were laid beside our field of play.

The boys love outdoor sports, and after much debate we settled on Ultimate Frisbee. If you've never played, the rules are simple: get to the other end goal by tossing a Frisbee back and forth. If you have the Frisbee, you have to stop running and look for someone on your team to pass to. If you drop the Frisbee, the other team gets it.

Donnie was on my team, Braeden and Di the other team. Donnie, while the youngest of our group, was one of the best at games. We made good teammates, although I'm the type of person who just kind of has to learn a game to be a good player (I'm not the best, I'm just kind of a reliable teammate).

Donnie tossed the Frisbee and we ran across the dead grass, it crunching underneath our feet as Braeden caught it and tossed to Di on the right side of the field. I ran up to Di and waved my hands to try and hit it out of the air when she tossed it. Unfortunately, she tossed it high and got it to Braeden, then ran while I was watching the arc of the disk.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Team Hawks (Braeden and Di) were ahead by three before we made our first score, but then we ripped the rug out from under them and scored five before they got another point. But Team Flaming Stuffs (Donnie and I) were tied up with Hawks with seven points and about to make a score when we made our first mistake.

I threw the disk too high and it went sailing into the next yard where the owner had sprung for a solid-board fence nine feet high. Since I was the tallest (the Braeden, Di, and then Donnie) I was elected to retrieve it. Also, I was the one to throw it over the fence in the first place.

"Just beware of dog." Braeden joked.

"Oh, my gosh!" I laughed, running at the fence and running up it. I missed the lip, falling backwards and landing on my back. Nothing hurt, but I was a little sore. Of course, this made everyone else crack up.

"Yeah, well, you try it, Cat." Cat was Braeden's nickname, and Bear was his brother. They had never told me or Di about the origin of the nicknames, but they almost never called either of us by our actual names either. Maybe it was just the way they were.

"Step aside and let the master do it." Donnie stepped forward and ran at the wall, his scuffed sneakers making a scratching sound as he ran up the wall and grabbed the top of the fence.

"GAH! Splinters!" He managed to get himself into the yard, though, and soon Di was holding the Frisbee as he made his painful way back over the fence. Donnie rolled over the top and landed on his back with a thump that shook the trees and would have disturbed the birds if there had been any.

I was laughing so hard I could barely talk, and so were the other two.

"Oh my gosh, Bear! Are you okay?" I giggled as I helped him up.

"I think the Bear is just fine." Donnie checked himself over and looked at the palm of his hand in the fading light and picking out the long splinters of wood from his hand. Little drops of blood beaded from the worst of them, but Donnie didn't flinch as I helped him first, then Braeden (who had better eyesight) took over and looked him over one last time before declaring him fine.

While he was checking over his brother for injuries, I moved to the end zone and caught Donnie's attention. Bear looked at me, then asked Di for the Frisbee.

She handed it over, and Bear spun around and sent me a perfect pass. I jumped up and caught it by one finger.

"WOO! YEAH!" Donnie jumped in the air and screamed as I screamed back.

"TEAM HAWKS SEVEN, FLAMING STUFFS EIGHT! Watchya gonna do!?"

Braeden, being a good sport, but pretending to be a sore loser in classic Cat style, replied, "Quiet you!"

"Bear Force triumphs!" Donnie fist bumped me as Di protested the legality of that move.

"That's cheating!" Her freckled face was red and flushed, with little strands of damp hair clinging to her face as she shot an exasperated smile our way.

"We still win." I pointed out. "We have eight, you have seven."

"Whatever." She rolled her eyes as she picked up the stakes and dagger while I swung the Frisbee loosely from my middle finger, then on a whim tossed it to Cat, who caught it, shooting it across me to Donnie on my other side. He tossed it to Di, who dropped the weapons and backed up to catch it, tripping over herself in eagerness to catch it. We all laughed, including her, as Braeden moved forward to help her up.

Braeden and I have known each other almost as long as Di and I have. We had classes together and just sort of…clicked. It's hard to explain. For a while we had crushes on one another, which of course meant Di and Donnie were always teasing us about it and trying to get us together. But I grew out of it and he became my best and one of my only guy friends. I only had five girl friends at the time, so it's that more (or maybe less) impressive that we became comrades in arms or whatever you call members of the 'Bear Force'.

He's the strongest out of all of us and also has the shortest hair that has little spikes in the very front of it and always wears a fleece jacket, Nike t-shirts, sneakers, and exercise pants. When the sun's bright out, he also wears yellow, orange, and red shaded glasses. Cat also loves video games like MineCraft, Golden Eye, and Black Ops.

While I can get into them, I really like writing, drawing manga or cityscapes, or playing piano. My teacher helped me get really far, but I had to stop after she left. I still practice, since Bear and I like to play duets together, but I was having trouble learning anything new. Writing…. oh gosh. I had like ten different notebooks filled with a page or two of different ideas or lists of locations, characters, and so on. Sometimes drawings went into those as well, but mostly I had books I would use to find new techniques and draw it on printer paper.

Donnie wore glasses like most of us, big one that magnified his eyes to bug-proportions and emphasized his bowling-ball-shaped head and almost-shaven blonde hair. He normally wears graphic tees, like me and Di, but he wears exercise pants a lot, like his brother. He was also stronger than either of us girls. We were just wimps before this whole thing happened, and though we are a lot stronger now than we were at the start, the boys had also gotten stronger in the time that we'd been trapped here.

Why didn't we leave the city earlier? Our families left without telling us, for one. We didn't know for quite a few days that we were on our own. By that time, the police had quarantined the city, and no one could leave. We tried, but they caught us sneaking out in broad daylight to get away (either risk getting caught by the police in the daytime or caught by vamps at night. Take your pick). So now we're stuck here, trying to survive. Almost all of us have made it this far, but there were five of us at one point…. That means that we have a 20% chance of dying. Not very good odds, if you ask me.

I had the strangest upbringing amongst all of us as far as I knew. We were all part of good Christian families, and homeschooled (Di went to a public high school, but the rest of us were homeschooled all the way up to junior year, when the vampires first started invading), but I always loved anything dark and bloody. My 'friends' from the church that I went to always looked at me strange whenever I would start talking. I call them 'friends' because I wouldn't normally instigate a conversation with them and only when we were in a scenario when we were forced to be together would we have a pleasant conversation up until I mentioned how much I liked Joker's pencil trick from The Dark Knight. Then all other topics ceased and they would just stare at me.

I always thought my life was just about perfect when I heard about all the other hard stuff other families had been through, but I guess I wasn't counting on karma coming back around and biting me.

I used to have really dirty, almost brunette, hair, but as soon as everything started up, I went a little crazy and died all my hair blue. I hadn't cut it in quite a while, so my hair was past my shoulder blades at that point. I made sure to keep it a nice turquoise/lime green looking color, but it was hard to find the right hair products anymore. And out of all of us, I had the biggest tattoo. Di had a small design on her wrist from the Harry Potter books; the sign of the Deathly Hallows. Braeden had a tiger head on his upper arm and Donnie had the same, only a bear. Me? I had a purple Chinese dragon curled around my left eye and down that side of my neck. Wearing my favorite black and white fedora did much to keep it unnoticeable from a distance, but up close the only thing that kept it from consuming my entire face were my glasses, which I often opted not to wear in favor of contacts.

One of my old friends used to tell me it was a shame I covered up my eyes with glasses and bangs, because, and I quote: "they were the color of the sea". I was really impressed that she had complimented me that way, because she was the prettiest girl I had ever met and we weren't even really all that close, so it meant a lot that she would tell me that. So now the glasses and bangs were gone, but a dragon had come by to steal its place.

Di tossed the disk to Cat, and I took off at a running start, raising my hand to get Cat's attention. He noticed and threw it to me, and I caught it low, spun, and threw a terrifically bad toss to Bear. As Bear ran after it, he gave me a look that clearly of exasperation. The disk had flown off the street where we were standing on and onto the driveway of a bright blue house on the side of the street where we'd been playing earlier; on the opposite side of where our house was.

The Frisbee swooshed through the air with a distinctive wobble to it as Di ran after it. She didn't catch it before it hit the ground, but she picked it up and sent a straight toss to Braeden. Even though he didn't need to, the show-off leaped up and caught it. Again, he and Donnie could jump higher than us girls could anyway. It was actually quite frustrating how they would always ask us why we couldn't do something they could do, no problem. One, we were never as athletic as them. Two, we're females. We're never going to be stronger than a man who's fitter than us.

He tossed to Bear who shot a quick toss back to him before shooting across to me. It went above my head and I couldn't catch it, but I made a valiant effort of reaching up to brush my fingertips against it.

"C'mon, Quinn! You can do better than that!" Donnie gave me a fake disappointed look. "You're embarrassing us!"

"Well, how can I help it if you keep shooting it over my head? I'm not as tall as you think I am." I jogged over to the disk and picked it up off the gray cracked asphalt, where it had landed near the faded yellow line. There was no relief to the repressing heat that had permeated the day, and we were all sweating hard. Di and I had both shed the button-down tops we had been wearing in the house in favor for tank tops. I was wearing a sunset colored one, with stripes of orange fading into yellow in between oatmeal-colored strips. She was wearing a white one with stripes also, but it had sky blue, navy blue, and scarlet stripes with stars in silver sprinkled across it.

I could see the damp places on all of our backs from the hard exercise and the hot day. It was uncomfortable, but I was having to much fun to give it much thought other than an occasional tug to try and find a dry place to soak up the sweat with no luck.

I couldn't hear anything around us but the scratching of our beaten-up sneakers and in Di's case, flip-flops, on the asphalt and our exhilarated screams and laughs echoing down the empty lane. We were standing in the shade in front of the blue house, because the sunlight was getting in our eyes when we stood in the middle of the street where there was access to the field we'd been playing on.

Suddenly, a hand brushed my arm. "Tag! You're it!" Donnie blew past me, running up the street. Oh, so that's what we're playing now. I ran after him, my breaths and heartbeat pounding my skull.

I'm not the fastest runner, but I'm good at anticipating where people will go. Bear was running in a curved L shape, so I was ready and tagged him when he turned on a dime to run in the opposite direction, then ran before he had time to reverse his direction.

Breathing hard, I stopped next to Di as Braeden dodged Donnie's first attack and ran, Bear following close behind.

"Hey." She was breathing hard, too, and pulled her hair out of the braid to redo it in a ponytail. "What's new?"

"Nothing much." I just barely saw Bear's hand and darted sideways. He got Di and Di immediately tagged me. "I thought we were friends!" I yelled after her, laughing as I chased Cat around the parking lot. He shot under my arm and I turned and kept after him. It was a hard game, with me getting the longest time as 'it'. Finally, we sat on the concrete in a square and just tossed the Frisbee back and forth.

"So Quinn." Bear started. "We're heading into town for new clothes soon. You comin'?"

I caught the disk and threw it to Di as I replied, "Yeah, sure. Why wouldn't I?"

"You've almost become a blood-sucker yourself this last year." Di tossed it to Cat. "You almost never leave the house and don't like the sunlight. Did you get bit and we didn't know it?" Her tone was joking, but she looked very serious. I glanced at her bare arms, covered with pockmarks. No wonder she was cautious.

"Nah, just haven't really been feeling all that well. But I'm here guys." I gave a thumbs up with a grin. "I'll be back to normal soon!"

"You'd better be." Donnie tossed the disk to Cat, then rolling back and laying on the concrete. "The Bear Force isn't complete with out our Q."

"Don't worry about it!" I leaned over and tugged hard on the Frisbee, though Braeden refused to let go. I tugged harder and the disk flew up, away from both of us.

"Nice job." Bear snickered as I got up to get it. "You seem to have a lot of trouble for just catching a plate and then throwing it again."

I stuck my tongue out and ran over to get the disk from where it rolled onto our lawn. I picked up the chipped, off-white Frisbee and wiped my hands on my shorts. Suddenly, I saw him.

A man with a leather jacket sat in the shade on our porch. For a second, I waited for him to move. When he did, I screamed.