Dark Moonlighting (24 page)

“Help me,” she said meekly.

My heart sank as I pulled away from her head.
I knew there was nothing I could do to save her. She was too far
gone. There was another way I could help her though, and I made
that decision quickly. I turned back towards the door to make sure
no one was watching before leaning towards her throat.

She did not make a sound as I started to suck
the blood out of the huge gash in her throat. I do not know if she
had lost consciousness or was simply too out of it to understand
what was happening. Perhaps the strange sensation did not register
in comparison to the pain that screamed out from most of the nerves
in her body. The bloodlust took over as soon as I started to drink,
and I quickly lost any reservations I had about the mercy killing.
She had already lost a lot of blood, so it only took a few minutes
to drain her. I was still licking the last few drops of the
precious liquid off of my teeth when I heard a tray fall behind
me.

My fangs were still extended when I turned
around. Lara stood just inside the doorway to the examination room
with her mouth wide open. The look of horror on her face made me
feel like a knife had been jammed into my stomach. She started to
back towards the door and stumbled on the tray of medical
instruments she had knocked over.

“Wait, I can explain,” I said to her
desperately. “It’s not what it looks… ugh!”

I steadied myself against the patient’s table
as I struggled to open my fly. Lara ran out the door as I let loose
a heavy stream of urine. I tapped my foot impatiently as my eyes
darted between the now empty doorway and the growing puddle on the
floor. There had not been much blood to drink, and so the expulsion
did not take as long as it normally did.

I tucked my naughty bits back into my pants
and started off after Lara. I looked around desperately as I
entered the hallway, and I was able to spot her as she disappeared
around a corner to the left. I pushed through the dense crowd of
patients and medical workers as I took off after her. I ignored the
pleas for help and the sound of pathetic sobbing coming from the
supply closet I passed. The crowd thinned out as I rounded the
corner. At the far end of the hallway I saw Lara climbing a flight
of stairs. I ran at full speed to cover the distance. When I
reached the second floor she was nowhere to be seen. Fear shot
through me for a moment before I heard the distinctive click of a
door being carefully closed. The sound had come from the first door
on the right side of the hallway. Hoping not to frighten Lara
anymore than I already had, I pushed the door to the women’s
restroom open slowly.

Lara backed towards the far end of the
bathroom as I entered. She looked around desperately for a weapon,
but had trouble finding anything in the room that was not a
permanent fixture. She grabbed a stack of paper towels and heaved
them in my direction. Most of them traveled about three feet before
harmlessly floating to the ground.

“What are you?” she questioned as she brushed
against the far wall of the bathroom. “What… what was that?”

“I’m a vampire,” I responded, even though I
was confident she had already come to that conclusion. “But that
wasn’t what it looked like. She was a goner, and I was just putting
her out of her misery.”

“You’re insane,” she responded. “Let me
guess, you were a loser in high school? You got a little too into
the whole Goth scene, snapped and decided you really were a
vampire? We had a LARP kid like you at my school who had to be
committed because he thought he was a high elf.”

“It’s true,” I tried to explain. “There’s
nothing fantastic about it though. You see, vampirism is caused by
an ancient virus that—”

My response was cut short when something
heavy slammed into the back of my skull. Pain shot through my head
as I collapsed onto the ground. I pressed my hand against the
source of the pain as I rolled onto my back to identify the
attacker.

“Allahu Akbar!” my assailant shouted in
Arabic.

The man was wearing blue jeans and a flannel
shirt. The red bandana tied around his head covered most of his
face. He was holding an AK-47 assault rifle with both hands. To
most people he would have seemed like the quintessential Muslim
terrorist. However, I had spent some time in the Arabian Peninsula
after developing a taste for oil sheiks. The man’s accent was
terrible, and it was obvious to me that he was not a native speaker
of Arabic.

I had no time to dwell on the peculiar man.
My eyes were still blurry from the blow to the head, but I could
see the supposed terrorist raise his rifle to his shoulder and take
aim at Lara. I swept my leg out immediately and knocked him to the
ground. I lunged forward and came to my feet in a single motion.
The attacker reached for the gun, which had fallen to the ground a
foot away from him, but was too slow. I grabbed the man by the
throat, lifted him to his feet and threw him into the first open
stall. Consumed by rage, I followed him into the stall and ignored
Lara as she darted past me. The man seemed to be unconscious when I
found him crumpled up in front of the toilet. I grabbed his throat
with both hands and, with little effort, crushed every bone in his
neck.

I removed the man’s bandana, hoping to find
Lance Flowers’ face staring back at me. Unfortunately, as I had
expected, I did not recognize my attacker. His white skin and blond
hair confirmed in my mind that it was unlikely that he was really
an Islamic terrorist. A quick check of his pulse revealed that he
was not a vampire either. The injury to his throat had killed
him.

I snapped back to reality when I heard the
gunshots. The familiar sound of automatic weapons seemed to start
all at once and come from all over the hospital. I ran out of the
bathroom, consumed by the need to find the woman I loved. The
hallways were mostly deserted. While a fire alarm would have sent
people running for their lives, gunshots told them to get inside a
room and hide. I bumped into a radiologist as I turned a
corner.

“Can you believe it? A terrorist attack on
the hospital!” the radiologist exclaimed between deep breaths. He
started to jog away but shouted back over his shoulder, “What an
incredibly unlikely thing to happen!”

I ignored the man’s comment and kept moving.
It did not take long to find Lara. As I turned down a hallway I saw
her sitting in front of the entrance to the hospital’s chapel. Two
“terrorists” had her cornered and were leveling their assault
rifles at her. I let out a primeval roar as I charged down the
hallway towards the attackers.

They were startled by my war cry, and they
took a few seconds to react. Given how quickly I could move, this
proved to be a fatal mistake for them. The terrorist closest to me
managed to fire off a short burst from his rifle, but it was not
until I was almost on top of him. Two bullets tore through my right
thigh, but I barely noticed the pain. I grabbed the first man’s
rifle and slammed it up into his face. A satisfying cracking noise
told me that his nose, and possibly more bones, was broken. A
stream of blood erupted from his face as he fell to the floor. The
second man swung his rifle towards me and caught me in the
shoulder. I grunted in pain and fell to one knee. As he cocked his
arms back to launch another attack, I sprang up and caught him by
the throat. He flailed at me wildly as he gasped for breath. With
one hand, I slammed the second man against the wall of the hallway
and snapped his neck with a quick rotation of my wrist. Lara,
having partially recovered from her fear, fiddled with the doorknob
behind her and scooted back into the chapel. I returned to the
first man, who was groaning in pain on the ground, and
unceremoniously smashed his head in with one stomp of my foot.

I turned towards Lara as she picked herself
off the ground and retreated farther inside the chapel. As the
adrenaline of the brief fight wore off, I realized that my fangs
were extended. I closed my eyes, forced myself to take a deep
breath and waited a few seconds for my face to return to normal. I
held my hands up submissively as I followed Lara into the
chapel.

The chapel was not really called a chapel
anymore. Since the dawn of the era of political correctness it had
been renamed the multifaith spirituality, meditation and reflection
room. It had not, however, been redesigned. It was a small room
with three rows of pews in the back and several tables full of
candles in the front. Surprisingly, no one had sought refuge in the
room when the gunfire started. Lara, again finding herself alone
with me, instinctively looked around for a weapon with which to
defend herself. She dashed to the back of the room and found a
number of small wooden statues representing the symbols of the
world’s great religions.

I tried to calm her down in a reassuring tone
of voice, but she ignored me. She launched a Star of David statue
at me, but her aim was poor and it smashed harmlessly into the
wall. The crescent and Buddha statues were thrown more accurately,
however I managed to deflect them away easily with my hands. When
she grabbed the cross statue, Lara got a wicked look in her eyes.
She held the Christian symbol in front of her and advanced towards
me confidently. Assuming she was merely trying to repel me, I was
unprepared when she jabbed the statue against my forehead.

“Ow!” I shouted. I snatched the cross from
her hands and tossed it towards the other side of the room. “Stop
that.”

The confidence drained from Lara’s face. “I
thought crosses were supposed to hurt you.”

“It did,” I responded as I rubbed my sore
forehead. “Let me hit you with a big hunk of wood and see how you
like it.”

“But isn’t it supposed to… burn your skin or
something?” she asked as she started to back away.

“That’s a common misconception,” I lectured.
“Vampirism is actually a medical condition. I’m glad you finally
believe that I am a vampire though.”

“Well,” Lara started as she continued to back
away. “Seeing you dash down a hallway with superhuman speed and
tear two men apart seemed like pretty damning evidence to me,” she
said with a forced smile. She pointed at my wounded leg. “Plus the
fact that you’re still standing.”

I took the opportunity to inspect the bullet
holes in my right thigh. One of the bullets had gone clean through,
but the other was embedded in the meat of my leg. I dug my finger
in the wound and winced in pain as I retrieved the remnants of the
bullet. Tears welled in my eyes as the jagged metal scraped across
my flesh. I let out a moan of relief as I finally pulled the bullet
out of my leg and let it fall to the ground. Lara, despite being a
medical professional, put a hand to her mouth and gagged at the
sight.

“That hurt,” I tried to joke. “You can stop
edging away from me, by the way. If I wanted to kill you I could
close the distance and snap your neck before you even realized I
was attacking you.”

“Then why don’t you?” Lara questioned. “I’ve
discovered what you really are, and—”

“Who,” I interrupted. “Who I really am.”

I spent the next few minutes explaining
everything to Lara. Given the chaotic situation, I chose to present
the abridged version of my story. I told her about the virus,
admitted I was a serial killer, explained my philosophy about
hunting and briefly mentioned Lance Flowers and his gang of
sluts.

“It’s a compulsion that has to be satisfied,
and I do it the most moral way I know how to,” I concluded. “It’s
just like Dr. Condo’s addiction to crack. Only instead of crack,
I’m addicted to murdering people and drinking their blood. Do you
understand now?”

Lara nodded her head. “Yeah, you’re a
murderer,” she said angrily. “You kill innocent people and justify
your crimes through your twisted philosophy.”

“No,” I said, stunned that she did not
understand. “They’re not innocent people. I kill people who
deserve—”

“What gives you the right?” Lara demanded.
“You’re old and experienced and stronger than any other person. So
what? That doesn’t give you the right to be judge, jury and
executioner. You’re a lawyer… apparently. You of all people should
know that.”

Before I could respond, the whole building
started to shake violently. Lara and I steadied ourselves, but the
tremor only lasted a few seconds.

“Now what?” she asked in exasperation.

“Felt like an explosion,” I answered
simply.

Lara, full of contempt now rather than fear,
shot me one last dirty look before slipping past me and heading
towards the door.

“Wait,” I said desperately, my voice
cracking. “I love you.”

Lara stopped in the doorway and scoffed at
me. “You love me? You barely even know me.”

“So?” I argued. “Love doesn’t take months of
familiarity… especially when vampires are involved. With vampires
it always seems to happen inexplicably quickly.”

Lara sneered as she inspected my scarred
face. She was disgusted by what she saw on the surface and what she
knew was beneath it. To her, I was a monster in every sense of the
word.

“I’m going back to the E.R.,” she said
simply.

“But the terrorists—”

“I haven’t heard a gunshot in ten minutes,”
she said dismissively. “I’m guessing that explosion was the finale.
There are people down there that need my help. We’re down to one
real doctor now, assuming Dr. Berkowitz even survived the attack.
My first duty is to the patients. Once things settle down, I’ll be
informing the police that I know who the Urinator is. And I’m only
giving you this head start because you just saved my life. Goodbye,
Dr. Whittier.”

Lara left me alone in the quiet of the
multifaith spirituality, meditation and reflection room. I stood
there for a moment, not knowing exactly what to do. Feeling more
guilt than I had in centuries, I collected the wooden statues and
put them back in their appropriate spots. I took the stairwell down
to the basement after completing the task.