March 10, 1983

Somewhere in Kansas

The little pocket knife in his hand suddenly felt very big. Bigger, even, than the steamer trunk had felt when he and Abby carried it off the train through the dark, just after sunset.

Owen sat on an ugly floral pattern couch. It hugged the living room wall, opposite a small table and a TV set, inside the empty house. The pair had found the place some minutes' walk from the train station, nestled in a little neighborhood of similar houses, and settled on trying to spend the night and day there after the trunk's weight had become too much for him to carry.

It was a small brick house, like one he'd had seen in one of his mother's magazines - Homes of Today and Tomorrow - which had been sitting on the kitchen table when he had come back from school once, next to a half-empty wine glass. A single story house with a basement. Probably three bedrooms. A family home. He had leafed through the pages out of curiosity, then promptly become bored and left the magazine on the table.

But that already seemed a lifetime ago, and as for this home of today, its owner was probably still at work. Or maybe on some vacation away from the cold weather, Owen thought No one had responded to their knocks, nor to the ringing of the doorbell. He and Abby had spent a few seconds peering through the dark windows, looking for any sign of life inside. There had been no car in the drive way.

The house had been easy enough to enter, once they had been satisfied it was empty: just like in the movies and books, the owner had put a spare key underneath the doormat, centered underneath the design of a flower in black silhouette. He had entered first, nervously, cautiously, sure that each shadow was someone waiting, lurking about to catch the intruders. But the shadows remained shadows, and once it was clear the house was presently empty, he made sure to invite Abby in behind him.

And now Abby was sitting next to him, looking at him with a hint of sadness (or was it pensiveness? - Owen had once read that word in a book in class) and he felt the weight of a tremendous decision.

After a few more moments, Abby spoke, breaking the silence.

"You don't have to, if you don't want to," she said, like a suggestion. The silence settled back into place. She was scared. Of what? That he might go through with it, and that she would be dragging Owen into her life, making him kill to survive - making him like her? Or that he might not, and that he would grow old and melancholy and sad and rot away with age before her eyes? Like Thomas? And still, he would kill, but only for her. She knew he was considering the same things.

Those same two options.

Owen turned the knife over in his hand, round and round. It felt so heavy for something so small. He thought of his mom and dad, of Kenny and his brother, of the pool and the policeman. He thought of the sun and the moon and the stars above, moving in great, slow circles.

"You said you wanted things to stay like they are," Owen replied. Slowly, thoughtfully. "I… I want to be with you. To stay with you."

Abby nodded. She held his hand and squeezed lightly. Owen squeezed back, then removed his hand and brought it against the knife's blade. He knew she was still full from feeding back in Los Alamos. It wasn't the threat of her hunger that scared him.

He took a deep breath, and made the cut - a single slice at the center of his right palm, under the ring and middle fingers. A thin sliver of blood trickled out, but the pain was dull. He gave the knife to Abby.

When she had finished, she reached for Owen's hand and he reached back. For several minutes, the two children held their hands together, fingers intertwined. Snow fell lazily outside the window. It seemed the whole world was asleep in the chill night.

Owen awoke to the sound of footsteps on the floor above. He listened in nearly pitch blackness.

The pair had moved to the windowless basement to sleep, avoiding the daylight. It was a decently furnished basement with wood-clad walls and some furniture arranged half-heartedly, and some spare blankets and comforters in a closet that made sleeping on the carpeted floor more bearable. He had no way of knowing what time it was, but something about the sound of the footsteps gave the impression of morning. Maybe it was the rushed way they sounded, like someone hurrying off to work.

Owen laid on the blanket, which he had folded over to provide extra softness on the floor, and kept his gaze trained on the single wooden staircase that led to the house's kitchen. The stairs were illuminated by a thin glow of light - from a lightbulb, not the sun, judging by the color - that came from underneath the door that sat at the top. He was wrapped in a plaid-patterned comforter he'd pulled from the closet. Now the plaid seemed like a bullseye at that moment - as if it screamed "Here! Intruders here! Murderers! Runaways!" - and Owen could only wait, vulnerable. He was tense, a pressure building in his chest that almost felt like he was drowning again. He prepared to throw off the comforter that covered him and - and what? Owen wondered what he would do if he heard that thin wooden door creak open and if the footsteps began coming down the stairs. In the dim light, he saw the pocket knife lay beside the makeshift bed, still thinly crusted with blood.

To his relief, the sound of the footsteps slowly receded, vanishing completely with the opening and closing of the front door. He looked at Abby, sleeping beside him now that it was day. She didn't need the cover of the comforter to stay warm. And she didn't breath when she slept. As he watched her, so still in the dark, he became aware of how cold it was in the basement. His breath was coming out in fast puffs of white, almost matching the pace of his racing heart. His stomach rumbled, and he suddenly felt as hungry as he felt cold.

Owen waited a few more minutes, until he was sure there would be no more footsteps to surprise him. He slid out from under the comforter, making as little sound as possible, and crept toward the stairwell. The house remained silent as he carefully tiptoed up the stairs, wincing at each minor creak.

By the time he reached the basement door at the top of the stairs, he was confident the house was now empty and that its occupants were away at school or work or whatever they might be doing during the day. What normal, non-runaways did. Non-vampires.

He opened the door and walked - not crept - into the kitchen, taking care to close it behind him. Now, in the dim, overcast daylight, he took in all the details he'd missed the night before. A small framed family picture sat on the kitchen table, images of a balding middle-aged man, a smiling wife of about the same age, and a daughter, perhaps six or seven. Probably off visiting relatives while the man worked, he guessed. He looked around. The kitchen was nice, nicer than the one his mom had in Los Alamos, and well furnished too. He checked the pantry, and found several loaves of bread, some canned beans and luncheon meat, and a few candy bars.

That morning, Owen had a couple slices of bread, a Milky Way candy bar, and a tin of spam for breakfast, pilfered from the pantry. He washed the meal down with a glass of water. He was full, but his stomach felt just a bit off, a bit skewed from normal in a way he couldn't quite pinpoint. He wondered how long it would take before he could no longer handle normal food.

Before I can only drink, he thought, chewing absentmindedly on the candy bar. He finished it off and put the wrapper in his pocket.

He took another sip of water, then dumped the rest in the sink and dried the glass, careful to put it back exactly where he got it from. He remembered all the stories of serial killers and murderers he'd collected in his scrapbook and read at night. The survivors, said the stories, had always known something was wrong when they saw things out of place just one time too many. It always was a hint (said the stories) that came just a little too late to avert tragedy. Owen thought about how he could wipe his and Abby's fingerprints from what they had touched, ways they could hide their tracks. He thought about how they'd hide the bodies - there would be bodies - and how Abby's friend (Thomas. Thomas was his name) had been so sloppy. He thought about the policeman.

He took another couple slices of bread and some bologna from the fridge that would be his lunch, and returned to the basement, carrying the empty spam tin with him. This time he made sure to bring a tissue to wipe the door handle. He felt proud of himself for thinking of that.

That night, when Abby woke, they played a game of Battleship. He'd found it in the living room, tucked away on the bottom of a bookshelf beside the TV set. He hoped that whoever was home wouldn't notice it was missing. It was, after all, a game that required two players.

As he and Abby set up their pieces, he asked her about how she fed. How she could fly and slice bullies up with inhuman sharpness and strength, like when she'd pulled him from the pool.

"I'll teach you!" She said, with happiness in her voice. "It's fun when you learn how to fly."

"And hunting?" Owen asked, with some hesitation. Hunting. A word like he was fishing or going to go shoot rabbits. He considered his choice of word with a degree of self-contempt at how it seemed to dance around the actual subject.

Her demeanor changed slightly. The smile faded from her face. Owen turned his gaze downward. It was something he'd had to ask, something they both knew he would need to learn, but still. He was sad to see his question affected her. He felt a twang of guilt in his stomach.

"And hunting," she replied, quietly, looking at Owen. She thought about how it was easy to ambush people, if you played injured or hid out of sight. She thought about Thomas, and how much he had shouldered for her. How many he had killed for her. He had hunted for her.

A few more moments passed. Owen broke the silence.

"How do you move so fast?" he asked.

Abby's smile returned. "You'll see," she said. He was glad to see her smile.

"So, who gets to go first?" she asked.

When the footsteps came back, an hour or so after nightfall, he and Abby were playing their third round of Battleship. Abby had won twice so far.

She was also the first to notice the new sound, to smell the scent of human life returning from wherever it had gone away to for the day. She put her finger to her lips in a silent shhh. Quietly, the pair packed up the game and retreated next to the wooden paneling of the stairwell, hidden from sight in the basement's corner. Quietly, Abby moved to the base of the staircase and hit the light switch.

In the silence, broken by the occasional muffled footstep, Owen became aware of a sensation in his stomach, like something between hunger and thirst but different - deeper - than either. He felt something else, too. A sort of energetic tenseness in his arms and legs. It seemed to trace the patterns of his veins, as if it came from within them. Abby noticed Owen tense up, recognized the change in his demeanor, the change in the way he smelled, ever so slightly. She took his hand and held it in hers. He leaned beside her and felt her warmth, and the sensations subsided just a little, but enough that he could push them away from his mind, make them bearable.

The next day, Owen slept in. A dark, dreamless sleep. He didn't wake for breakfast, nor for lunch.

When night fell again, Owen awoke. The sensations he'd felt before had grown - become overwhelming. He curled into a ball and tried to squeeze away the feeling. Abby was awake as well.

"Owen…" she said, gently. She didn't try to approach him. She thought back to her first time adjusting to the sensations. How painful and confusing it had been. And how uncontrollable the hunger was.

"Abby…" Owen whimpered. He lay on his side now, gently rocking. His breath came out in fast puffs, along with noises that now alternated between whimpers and growls and fusions of the two.

"Is someone there?" The voice sounded like a man's. There was a hint of nervousness in his tone.

Abby remembered Owen had mentioned a family lived there. The footsteps approached the basement, and a shadow appeared under the bottom of the door. She didn't feel scared, she realized. She felt a sort of detached sadness, like she was watching a movie play out or reading a story whose tragic end was apparent many pages before it unfolded.

Owen's hunger and thirst had grown to unreal proportions. He didn't feel like himself anymore, but as though he were a spectator. His awareness had shrunk, dwarfed by the hunger and the thirst and strange sensations that he couldn't name even if he had the capacity to try at the moment. As if from a great distance, he heard the basement door open and the footsteps, without hesitation, began to descend the stairs. The lights flicked on.

"Who's there? I'll call the po-"

The process was automatic. Owen was barely conscious of how fast he climbed up the side of the stairs and leapt at the man, how he knocked the man into the wall and then pulled him the other direction, off the staircase and onto the basement floor. It was a feeling like the inevitability of gravity, a gravity that drew his teeth, now sharp and at odd angles, into the man's neck with such speed and savageness like he'd never imagined coming from himself before.

When Owen's awareness came back, like cold water pouring into his head, he felt a distant horror. The man was gurgling wetly, barely moving on the ground. Abby was taking her turn to drink, crouched over the man's neck, his face hidden from sight. Owen looked at his hands. He thought for an instant back to school, back to that 4th grade art class years ago, when one day when he'd gotten his hands covered in paint, paint so thick he couldn't see any of the skin beneath. But he knew this wasn't paint that stuck to his hands in a thin, uneven layer, that covered his mouth and dripped down his chin. He knew exactly what it was.

Owen looked on as Abby finished. He thought back to the policeman, how he'd closed the door and covered his ears and tried to drown out the screams. This time, though, there were no screams and there was no struggling. This time, he made himself watch.

This is what you are now, he thought. From now until eternity this is how you'll live.

He wondered if any of the killers and the murderers and the slasher villains in the movies had had similar moments of clarity and resignation. He thought, detachedly, about the family, the mother and the daughter. How'd they come home, sooner or later, and what they would find waiting for them. He wondered what the news would say about this, what signs the articles would say the man had missed. How the stories would talk about how he could've survived if only this or that had happened, or how terrible and horrifying and senseless the killing was. Owen wondered if they'd attribute it to a wild animal that got into the house, or to a human killer. What a serial killer would do to cover their tracks, to not get caught.

Abby shifted her position, and soon Owen heard a dull, wet snap as she twisted the man's head. As she finished, Owen realized he'd been sitting on the ground, staring blankly, lost in thought.

"Is it… are you ok?" Abby crawled over and sat next to him. She cuddled against him, gently holding his arm.

"Yeah. Yeah. I'll… I'll be fine…" Owen replied. It felt like he was staring down a cardboard tube. Like watching the carnage from a distant TV screen. He saw Abby next to him, looking at him with concern. With sadness and with love. His vision came back, the distance closed. He was a spectator no longer.

"Is... Is this how it is?" He asked quietly, looking at Abby.

"Yeah. This is how it is." she said. She paused. "I'm sorry." She held Owen's hand in hers, squeezing gently. He looked her in the eyes, and unspoken communication passed between them. He gave her a soft smile and hugged her.

She smiled back, softly, gently, and rested her head on his shoulder.

From now until eternity this is how you'll live.

And Owen was fine with that.