Mortality

III - Starved

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You think that if you were in a movie, this car ride would be played against some very fast, creepy music, the kind that gets the audience all pumped up and gripping their armrests and screaming at you drive faster, Tori, drive faster. But it's not. It's silent. Eerily so. There's no radio, there's no sound from the backseat, and you're doing nothing but breathing through your nose and gripping the steering wheel without enough pressure to bleach your knuckles.

Usually you don't mind driving at night. Your friend, Robbie, who, granted, is afraid of a large list of things, gets panic attacks just thinking about navigating streets in the dark. (He's Jewish, but he owns a crucifix 'just in case'). But you've always found it kind of calming; orange streetlights crawling across the hood of your car, the sky like a black velvet blanket tucking in the sun, the cool California breeze as it whistles through the crack in your window.

However, having a possibly-dead-possibly-not Vampire in your backseat makes driving at night an entirely different experience.

You dare a frantic glance in your rear view mirror, cocked downward so you can see the girl's body, an ancient skeleton rotting on your seat. It looks like you robbed a museum of an unclothed mummy. "Goodness," you breathe for what is probably the twentieth time and then raise your voice a little. "Hey, please, please don't die, okay?"

The girl doesn't respond. A shadow is filling the cave of her sunken eye socket, making her face look like a scooped out skull.

"Goodness." You swallow hard and focus instead on the road, whipping around the next corner. It's almost 10PM – the street is lifeless save for one club that you pass, a neon liquor store, and then a block of white light illuminates on the corner of Ridge and Third. It's a small sun against the sleeping night. The parking lot has a handful of cars in it – employees, probably, and likely a few late-night donors. The building is squat and gray, with a large red stripe going around the middle. The words Blood Bank are in large silver letters above the double doors, which are nothing but big glass windows with handles. As you pull into the nearest empty space and throw your car into park, you see two figures in white coats pass the entrance, holding clipboards.

"Wait!" You shout as you open your door, but no one comes. Vampires are supposed to have super-hearing, right? Grunting, you close your door and yank open the back one, staring down at what remains of the starved Vampire girl lying limp and lifeless. You wait for a moment for no particular reason, staring at her, an anatomy prop for a Biology class. You wonder if dying is different for them – there's still this ongoing argument amongst the religious about whether or not Vampires have souls, if there's an afterlife for the immortal. There are Vampire religious figures – Father George Berghstrom is the most famous one. He has his own TV show (which airs at night, appropriately) who claims to be over two hundred years old. He founded the first church that accepted both Mortals and Vampires and has a surprisingly large following. Your family never really participated in church or any kind of faith when you were growing up and you never planned on starting, but you hope, suddenly, as you stand there staring at a maybe dead Vampire girl, that if she's dead, or if she's going to die, she goes somewhere nice.

Gingerly, like she'll break at any moment (and honestly, you wouldn't be surprised if she did), you pull her out of your backseat and bump the door closed with your hip. As you step up to the Blood Bank's doors, they slide open with a ding, and your pupils constrict with light. The lobby looks like an ordinary hospital one - carpet, a large oval desk, music that no one knows the name of playing over speakers in the ceiling. There's a certain metallic smell to the air that you try to ignore. You adjust the girl's head against your elbow, her entire body feeling brittle and so very, very fragile, and you've always known Vampires to be these indestructible god-like creatures you see in all the movies; Gerard Butler, Angelina Jolie, Leonardo DiCaprio, the scary buff guy from Hellboy - all Vampires. Picture one of them dying. It's not an easy thing to do.

But it is easy to see this paper girl in your arms never wake up again, because she looks like nothing.

A dark-skinned nurse pops up from behind the desk. You stare at him, mouth open, because 1) he's a Vampire, and 2) you don't know what to say. You gesture with your arms, holding the girl out, and he rounds the desk so fast, it's like he's moving in fast forward.

"She, she -" You try to explain, but he doesn't even look up. Muscular arms take the girl away from you and he starts hustling toward a pair of doors to the left. You gape after him, arms still hovering at your waist like you're still carrying her, like she still needs you. "Wait!" You call after the nurse, who is yelling down the hall and disappearing. You jog to catch up, shouldering your way through the door and down a cream-colored hallway. You pass open doors, donors propping books on their knees with tubes wiggling out of their open elbows, employees mixing blood in glass containers with sickening clinks, and you have to cover your nose with your hand to block out the overwhelming scent of iron.

The nurse carrying your - what? Your what? - is whipping around another corner. Vampires are fast. It's what they're most known for above everything else. It's why they're not allowed to compete in professional sports, because they have an unnatural advantage. Not that they could really join, anyway, since most sporting events takes place during the day. You know there are some baseball teams that are exclusively Vamps, but your life had always been separate from theirs and you never bothered to pay much attention.

And then tonight happens.

You're determined not to lose him. The building isn't big, so there's really only so many places he can go before you catch up. He finally stops at a room just as you're turning the corner and you're out of breath by the time you get there, clinging to the door frame as you peer in.

The nurse - his nametag just manages to catch your eye as he bustles about the girl's body, now laying flat on a crisp white bed - Christopher, isn't alone. There's two women assisting him in silence. One pulls two packets of blood from a freezer, pauses, then grabs another one. Your stomach turns at the sight of it, even more so at the needles the other woman - girl, really, for she looks younger than you - rips from a plastic container. The younger one eyes you briefly before turning her attention to the girl on the bed. You stare at her, too; in the light, she looks even worse. A corpse dug out of the grave.

"Is she going to be okay?" You say the words without thinking about it. None of them look at you for nearly a minute, poking the girl's arm with a large needle, hanging a blood bag up on a stand beside her.

"Where did you find her?" Christopher places his hands on either side of the girl's neck.

You blink, stuttering for a moment as you try to gather your thoughts. "She, uh, she came up to me in the parking lot at the Karaoke Dokie." You swallow and ask again. "Is she going to be okay?"

Christopher's mouth is stern. He looks at you, finally, his brown eyes radiating a Non-Mortal glow. "Did you get her name?"

"No."

"She said nothing to you?"

You shake your head. "She just said 'Blood Bank'. That's it. I'm sorry." You don't know why you apologize, why you feel like it's your fault. You look at the girl again, unresponsive, cold and a darkening shade of gray. "Please," you say, stepping into the room. You watch as the older woman punctures the girl's opposite arm, fueling her with another packet of blood. "Is she going to be okay?"

Christopher looks between you and her, sighs, and shrugs. His thumb runs across the girl's forehead. "I don't know. She's been starved for a very long time, by the looks of it. I've seen Infinites pass over that didn't look nearly as bad as this."

You wrinkle your eyebrows at the word, Infinites. You've never heard it before. You think maybe it's like your mother calling you mija, or chica, like they have their own language.

You lower yourself into a white, plastic chair bolted to the wall beside the door. Christopher perks a brow at you. "You don't have to stay," he says, tapping one of the blood bags. "You don't know her, right?"

You shake your head.

"Then go home," he advises.

You only shake your head once more. "No. She needed me in that parking lot. She might still need me when she wakes up."

He stares at you with legitimate surprise. "All right," he says, eyeing you before checking over the various medical equipment in the room.

You stare at the girl's face. If it had been a Mortal girl starving on the sidewalk, you'd stay and make sure she lived. It shouldn't be any different just because it's a Vampire. And you like to think that people are generally good, and Vampires are people, too. Maybe you'll gain a friend.

So you settle in, pull out your phone, and prepare to tell your mother exactly why you won't be home on time tonight.

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