Sorry this one is so short, first week of classes is nuts. Thanks so much for the support everyone! Please review and enjoy :)
Chapter 4:
Brittany could hear her pulse in her ears, ragged and insistent that she was still alive, though, she was sure this was what dying must feel like. Her bones howled in protest at each step, and the angry gash atop her head ached persistently. She was too sick to care, but she could feel the eyes of every passerby appraise her disheveled appearance with disgust and fear. Her neck drew most of the attention, still blistered and oozing from the blonde vampire's assault. Her cheeks were sunken and hollow, exhaustion making itself known in deep, purple bags under her eyes. Had she lifted her shirt, anyone within her vicinity could have visibly counted her ribs. Her skin had become pale and and dry at her lack of sustenance, flaking off in powdered flurries when she climbed from bed each morning. Stumbling blindly, she slumped into the Bakersfield Diner and collapsed in the nearest booth, her body forcing her to ignore the smiling hostess and the sign that read "Please wait to be seated". A concerned waitress came to her table,
"Honey? Can I get you something?" Brittany inhaled, trying to intake enough breath to form an audible response.
"Water. And a steak. Rare." She managed in halting sentences that she regrettably acknowledged sounded rude.
Time floated around her as she waited, focusing on the expansion and compression of her lungs, on keeping her eyes open, on not physically crying out when the wind accompanied a customer through the door and assaulted the raw meat of her neck. Finally, the waitress returned, and slid a large pitcher of water and a plate in front of Brittany. The steak was as rare as they were legally allowed to serve it, although, Brittany would have preferred it be completely raw. She threw manners to the wind, cutting off huge flanks of meat and bolting it as fast as her withered state would allow. She could feel her stomach greedily clench around the food, desperate to squeeze the nutrients out, pump them through her system. When she had finished the steak without touching her water, she turned her attention to the pitcher, neglecting the empty glass placed beside it and instead gulping desperately from the half-gallon plastic container, draining the contents in a single go. She felt relieved. She felt full. She felt sick.
Slamming a twenty dollar bill onto the tabletop, Brittany hurtled from the restaurant as fast as her trembling legs would take her and fled blindly to the dark safety of an ally just around the corner. Safely out of view of pedestrians, she hit her knees behind a large dumpster and wretched. The entire hold of her stomach spattered onto the pavement, and the bloody meat looked as though she were vomiting her insides onto the ground. And that's what it felt like. She couldn't help but cry out in pain as the muscles of her abdomen, exhausted from keeping her sagging body upright all day, contracted viciously, pumping out the last ruined pieces of her meal. And then she felt the burn. She felt the latent vampire venom surging through her veins once again, scalding her from the inside out, wrapping through her body like a hot poker in her blood. The torturous heat washed over her brain and she clutched the pounding gash in her skull pleadingly, willing it to stop its throbbing. She needed to Change. She needed the canine blood to scourge her system, scrub clean every last inch of her being. But she didn't think she could do it. She was sure her head would split open or her body, waif-thin as it was, would snap under the force of the Change. But surely, she couldn't survive like this. That demon liquid within her refused any solid food, and Brittany was not about to bring herself to turning some poor soul into her human juicebox. She needed to eat, and to eat she needed to purge, and to purge, she needed to Change. Standing tremulously, she set her jaw and pushed her feet into action, plodding towards the woods outside Bakersfield, determined to make it, and so tired and focused on her goal, that she took no notice of the doe eyed, raven-haired Latina that shadowed her every step.