The human brain, a marvel of complexity, has a curious way of adapting to the world. It's resilient, yes, but at times, it can also be its own worst enemy. When pushed far enough, hurt enough, or made to feel helpless enough, it creates defenses—reflexive, instinctual, hardwired deep in the most primal parts of our minds. It doesn’t take much. A word, a sound, the faintest trigger, and the body reacts as though it’s been plunged into immediate danger.

  It’s like the instinct of a wolf, lowering its head and tucking its tail when faced with the alpha. Simple, direct, born from survival. And that’s what it is: survival.

  Andreas Henderson understood this all too well. He wasn’t just some petty bully. He was a manipulator, a man who knew exactly how to break someone down piece by piece. With methods as varied as they were cruel: violence, threats against family, the isolation of peers—each carefully crafted to strip away a person’s dignity, their autonomy, until all that remained was a trembling shell.

  It wasn’t the physical pain that broke them. It was the mental weight of it all, the way it ate away at their sense of self. The victim’s mind would turn on itself, convinced of its own weakness. That’s the real damage, the one that lingers long after the bruises fade.

  Because there are few things as powerful as a young man’s ability to put themselves down. The self-loathing. The disgust at one’s own perceived weakness. Andreas Henderson wasn’t a thug. He was something worse. He was a predator in the making, a machiavellian master of control, a crime boss in their infancy.

  So, when his voice hit my ears again, it was no surprise I froze.

  I’d fought monsters—goblins, orcs, even a centuries-old vampiress—and come out victorious, stronger than I’d ever been. I’d become a predator myself. A vampire.

  But when that man spoke, something in me shut down. It didn’t matter what I’d become. In that moment, it was as if I was still that helpless, broken shell I used to be, caught in the grip of an old terror I couldn’t escape.

  Every. Single. Damned. Time.

  And it sickened me. Down to the core.

  “Well shit man, I did NOT expect you to survive, gopher” Andreas said, walking towards me, twirling that custom-made, gold inlaid Desert Eagle he enjoyed flashing around.

  Bastard wasn’t even looking at me, keeping his eyes on the orc I’d been fighting. The kill he’d stolen.

  He stopped a hand’s breadth away from me and tapped the pistol against my temple a few times.

  “Don’t suppose your worthless ass thought to bring some supplies”

  I wanted to hurt him.

  Wanted nothing more than to send the blood into my hands, turn them into those grotesque claws and then dig them knuckle-deep into his skull.

  But I didn’t.

  I couldn’t even meet his eyes.

  “No…” I began, only to have my next words cut off by him slamming the butt of the handgun in the top of my skull.

  “Like I said. Worthless” he muttered and turned away from me.

  My body trembled with frustration. If ever there was a moment for that dark impulse coiled in the back of my head to be made manifest it’d have been right now.

  Galvanize me into action. Force me into a motion. Let the red haze fall and do the world a favour by excising the canker sore that was Andreas Henderson.

  But it had gone still the moment the second orc had died.

  So I could only stand there and watch. Frozen. Weak. Pathetic.

  “Ten gophers, and not a one thinking about bringing some supplies. Oh but all of you come to good ol’ Dreas for protection, yeaaah, all with hands up your own asses” Andreas continued theatrically, flashing the gun for emphasis.

  It was in that moment, amidst the tension that hung heavy in the air, that I really began to take in the scene around me. Andreas, flanked by five of his usual eight goons, each one armed and bristling with menace, stood at the heart of it all. Surrounding him were nine others I recognized—the "gophers" from his twisted little business meetings. They looked every bit as beaten, as hollowed out, as I felt. Eyes lowered, shoulders slumped, every one of them carrying the same crushing weight of despair. It was a brutal reminder of what Andreas had turned us all into. A sickening sight, to be sure.

  "Mr. Henderson, this is hardly the time for speeches of any sort," came a voice—sharp, precise, and tinged with a thick British accent.

  A shuffle followed as the owner of the voice pushed her way through the crowd, cutting a path toward Andreas with a mixture of authority and annoyance that made even the toughest of the goons hesitate. She stopped just short of him, hands on her hips, her face set in that all-too-familiar expression of mild irritation.

  Samantha Evans.

  The vice-principal of our school—a woman who, despite the chaos of the world falling apart around us, still managed to carry herself with a kind of quiet dignity. Five foot ten, blonde, always impeccably put together, and now, somehow, still standing tall.

  Blonde hair tied in a tight bun, a single loose lock framing a high-cheekboned face, dressed in her usual attire of black business suit and elegant glasses perched atop a button of a nose, she was every bit the iron disciplinarian her dress and demeanour projected.

  This would have made her unpopular with the student body, except for the fact that Stephanie Wright had a body and face that would have put fashion models to shame. Consequently, this made her very popular with the male half and very unpopular with the female half of the student body.

  Well, barring some exceptions.

  “I trusted you when you promised you would use the guns only as a last resort. The entire campus must have heard…”

  “Calm down, teach. Is why we got the barricade set up. Doesn’t matter if the deadheads come-a-knocking” Andreas interrupted her, waving his hand flippantly.

  Stephanie sighed.

  “Nonetheless, it was a bad choice. But no use in complaining on what’s done. Regardless, we should barricade the front doors too, like originally planned.

  If we’d done that from the start, those two…”

  She glanced at the corpses of the orcs and visibly recoiled.

  “....things, wouldn’t have entered the main hall”.

  Andreas just shrugged and snapped out an order towards the assembled “gophers”.

  “Oi. Make yourselves damned useful and barricade the front door”.

  He turned back to Stephanie and gave her sneer masquerading as a smile.

  “See teach? Problem solved”.

  It wasn’t enthusiasm that pushed me down the corridor between the mess hall and the main hall. It was the raw instinct to get as far away from Andreas as possible. I needed space—some quiet—so I could think, figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

  Should I leave? Just walk out and never look back?

  It felt like the best option. But it was daylight outside. And knowing Andreas, I wouldn’t be allowed to just sit and wait out the day in the gym. He saw us “gophers” as his tools and didn’t abide “laziness”.

  But no more than three steps in, one of Andreas’s goons—a squat, annoying little prick named Bill—cut me off. He was shorter than me by a good half a head, all puffed up with his wannabe tough-guy act, bearing a crew cut that made him look like a military reject, and was snapping his fingers in front of my face like I was some dog he was trying to command.

  “Yo, asshat, the hatchet” he muttered, holding out his hand in front of my chest.

  “I got this off a goblin, it’s mi…” his open palm cuffed the side of my head.

  “Did I ask where you…” he began to snarl, but I could barely hear him.

  The moment, the very instant his hand had touched me, that dark impulse had uncoiled itself from the back of my head and was howling, screaming for me to tear the bastard’s throat out.

  But it wasn’t as visceral, as all-encompassing as it had been when seeing the orcs. It seemed that this impulse, this, for lack of a better word, “something” in my subconscious recognized the same things I did.

  Namely, that revealing my vampiric nature to a room filled with people in a survival situation, five of which were armed and hated my guts, was a recipe for disaster. This wasn’t some kid-friendly show where everyone suddenly accepts and gets all buddy-buddy with the freak.

  This was real life, and despite the strong-front they were putting, I could tell that everyone, including Andreas and his mob, were on edge.

  The way their eyes shifted as if trying to glance everywhere at once. The beads of sweat staining their foreheads. The way their hands never really left their weapons, fingers hovering over triggers.

  The drumbeat of their hearts thrumming in my ears, so loud I could almost… reach out and tear them right….

  I ground my teeth against the direction my mind was heading, forcing the train of thought down.

  “....gophers don’t get weapons. Simple as that. Now stop shaking like a bitch and give me the damn hatchet.” Bill continued bellowing in my face, jabbing his finger in my chest.

  I realized that I was shaking slightly in my effort to keep the impulse at bay, and the moron was taking it as though I was scared of him.

  No. He was wrong. Other than Andreas, I was scared of none of them. And to my detriment, despite all logic dictating against it, I was seriously considering just slitting Bill’s throat open.

  All it’d take is a little twitch of my claws…

  “You stop that right now, young man” Stephanie Wright’s voice cut through Bill's hysterics before I could say anything and she interposed herself between us, laying the flat of her hand onto Bill’s chest.

  “We will NOT devolve into petty threats and thugisms. I will not have it. This poor boy’s pale enough as it is, who knows what he’s seen out there”.

  Without even waiting for a retort she rounded on me and took hold of my shoulders.

  “It’s fine. You’re safe now. You’re not out there anymore, this place is safe”. She began, keeping her voice just barely above a whisper.

  The hilarity of the situation almost made me want to laugh and the impulse retreated back as if bored by the display. The woman was equating my pale skin with shock.

  “I’m fine ma’am” I answered coldly, gently pushing her hands off my shoulders and handing Bill my hatchet.

  He took hold of it but I didn’t let go just yet. Even when he tugged I kept an iron grip on it, not letting it move an inch. For a moment, it was a silent standoff, a subtle tension between us. I wasn’t about to make it easy for him.

  For all that I KNEW it would come to bite me in the ass, I’d always had a smart-mouth on myself. So I was going to make a point. Petty though it was.

  “Take good care of it, yeah? Got a few zombies and goblins with it. Popped their heads off real nice like. Maybe I’ll show you how good it cuts later” I murmured with a sneer letting the implied threat hover in the air.

  Considering how Andreas was speaking to Miss Wright, he was most likely trying not to show his real self just yet, and it felt good to watch Bill’s livid face turn from me to the vice-principal, his desire to make me “show respect” at war with what were most likely standing orders to keep the violence on the down low.

  I finally let go of the hatchet and Bill shoved it into his belt, stink-eyeing me throughout. With a curt nod to the woman, he turned and left, a vein pulsing at his temple.

  “Young man, that wasn’t necessary” Miss Wright chided me.

  “Dick-measuring contests aren’t necessary ma’am, they’re just fun” I answered back, my eyes still on Bill.

  “Language please” she retorted, voice brimming with disapproval.

  “The loss of discipline is the first step to devolving into…”

  “With all due respect Miss Evans” I interrupted.

  “I get what you’re trying to do. I really do. But it won’t work”.

  She crossed her arms, glacial eyes narrowing behind her glasses.

  “Oh? And what is it that I am trying to do, Mr…?”

  “Jon”

  She sighed, clearly displeased with me not giving my last name.

  “Very well Mr. Jon. Illuminate me. What am I trying to do, and why won’t it work?”

  “You’re trying to prevent a mass panic by keeping up the illusion that the rules, regulations and hierarchy of school still apply” I answered.

  Something vindictive inside me sneered as her eyes widened.

  Gotcha.

  “We learned this in basic psychology ma’am. Best way to keep the peace in a survival or stressful situation is to introduce a recognizable routine to the group in said situation”.

  She held my gaze for a few moments more.

  “And why would it not work?”

  “Because the only reason you’d want to do that, is because you’ve been holed up in here. I’m right, no? Have you been outside since this whole mess started?”.

  “.....Is it really that bad?” she asked, a glint of fear edging her eyes.

  “The walking dead, infected, rotbloods, call them what you want, are the least to worry about. Slow and brain-dead. On the way here, I’ve seen goblins and some sort of reptilian dogs too. And if the orcs are anything to go by, more kinds of monsters are going to show up”

  “Goblins? Orcs?” Samantha asked, quirking a brow.

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  “They’re…”

  “I have read my fair share of fantasy, Jon. But I don’t think we should make light of our situation by calling them such silly things”.

  “Oh, silly’s the last thing I’d describe them as. The goblins at least, are organized enough to have hunting parties out in the woods. And they fight organized too”.

  “...” Samantha opened her mouth but said nothing for a second.

  “Do…. Do you think those hunting parties are for us?”

  I pushed the thought aside. It didn’t matter. Not now.

  “You’ve seen the corpse mound in the mess hall, Ms. Evans. The orc’s larder. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume goblins are flesh eaters too”.

  Samantha bit on her thumb nail, eyes closed and brows furrowed in concentration. After a few seconds she fixed me with her gaze.

  “Jon, our group has taken refuge here two hours into… whatever this is. There’s another thirty students barricaded in the amphitheater upstairs. No one’s gone outside since. We’ve only seen the monsters you call goblins from the windows, but no one knows just how organized they are.

  Please make no mention of this. It will cause mass panic. The others were already bordering on just that when the… orcs?... took this floor, and…”

  “Yo, do I gotta ask nicely?” Andreas’s booming voice cut Samantha off. Even from this distance I could notice that telltale twitch in his eye that foretold he was getting annoyed.

  And Andreas’s annoyance usually precluded violence.

  I expelled a sharp breath through my teeth.

  “Right ma’am. I’m gonna keep quiet about it. Now, if you don’t mind, I got a job to do” I said, making ready to go. But that vindictive, cruel thing in the back of my mind reared it’s head once more and I couldn’t help but give one last jab.

  “After all, we both know how Andreas gets when he feels slighted”.

  Samantha’s eyes widened and she went pale.

  “Jon, I’m so…”

  She didn’t get to finish as I simply walked away.

  Was it cold? Yes.

  Rude? Undoubtedly.

  But not unwarranted. And the fundamental reason for cold calousness I had showed her throughout the conversation. After all, for all her prim-and-proper, rules-are-sacred, disciplinarian facade, Miss Samantha Evans had done the same thing as every other teacher in the school and turned a blind eye to Andreas’s abuse of the “gophers”.

  She had known what was happening.

  Just like everyone else.

  And had chosen to ignore it.

  I wasn’t being blunt and dismissive of her because I was some wannabe edgy tween trying to look cool. I was being like that towards her, because she deserved nothing more than that.

  As soon as I reached the hallway, Andreas smacked a hand on my shoulder in a parody of a friendly jab and walked the rest of the way by my side. The moment we left Miss Evans field of view, that hand became a grasping claw, fingers digging into my shoulder, and he snarled into my ear.

  “Taking your sweet ass time to do what I say. Talking back to Bill. You getting uppity on me gopher?”.

  “No” I whispered back, that sickening sense of powerlessness falling over me like a cold shower.

  “Good. Cuz in case you haven’t noticed, the world’s gone to shit. And all rules have gone with it. So, you mouth off, don’t do what I say, hell, you even look at me funny, and I’mma put a bullet in that fat gut of yours. Get me?”

  He turned me around and pressed the barrel of his gun into my chest.

  “Do.You.Get. Me?”

  He asked again, emphasizing every word with a jab to my chest.

  “Yes” I muttered again.

  Andreas leaned in, a finger to his ear.

  “Yes, what?”

  It made me almost want to retch as I said it.

  “Yes, sir”

  Andreas smirked and tapped my temple with the gun.

  “Good. Glad we got an understanding gopher. No go do what I told you to do”.

  Head down, cursing under my breath, I moved down the corridor toward the main hall. The others were already at work—those nine gophers, scrambling to stack anything they could get their hands on in front of the double doors. Old chairs, broken tables, any scrap of furniture that might slow down whatever was coming next.

  It was a futile effort. I knew that. After fighting the orcs, I could tell one of those beasts could reduce the whole pile to splinters in a single swing without even breaking a sweat. But I joined in anyway, grabbing the nearest chair and stacking it on top of the teetering barricade.

  Might as well look busy, even if it was just for appearance’s sake.

  The others were in their own little worlds. Heads hung low, eyes shifting nervously from corner to corner like startled prey. It was the same as always, the fear that seemed to suffocate the air around us. But today, something else caught my eye. More than half of them had fresh bruises on their faces—ugly ones, deep red and purple, the kind you get when something hard and metallic slams into the bone beneath.

  They didn’t just get hit. They got hurt. Badly.

  One of the gophers, a wisp of a kid with messy hazel hair and a faded green hoodie that had seen better days, stepped up to me. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, eyes wide and bloodshot.

  "Help me with the closet over there," he said, voice a shaky whisper, eyes darting nervously to the shadows.

  I nodded without a word, stacking a second chair and moving towards the closet with him.

  As soon as we got to it and started pushing it audibly across the old hardwood floor, he whispered again.

  “Don’t let them see you not working. It’s worse than ever, and we’ll all get in trouble”.

  “What do you mean? It’s always been bad”. I whispered back.

  “Not like this. Andreas’s gone off the deep end. He shot one of the other gophers when this all began. Right in the stomach. Left him screaming as bait for the zombies”.

  That took me by surprise. Andreas was a violent psychopath to be sure, but cold blooded murder? That was a line he hadn’t crossed. Yet.

  But, something was not adding up.

  “Then why’s he pretending to be… y’know… normal in front of the vice-principal?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “No idea. But ever since we all grouped up, he’s made it a point to beat us only out of sight and earshot of Miss Evans. And he’s doing that more than usual. Doesn’t even give a reason”.

  “Probably just stress-relief for him. Makes him feel like he’s still in control or something” I muttered grimly.

  “Either that or he’s a psycho”.

  “Well, that’s been established already”.

  We spent the next few minutes pushing the closet into place. It was boring , tedious work, made all the more so by the fact that I was having to hold back. Having me just up and pick up the 100 kilo hardwood furniture by myself would bring about questions I didn’t want to answer.

  Plus, I needed some more info.

  I nudged the lad and pointed to the door for the gym.

  “More stuff we can use there”.

  The boy went livid and shook his head violently.

  “No. Andreas and his guys haven’t secured it yet. There could be more…”

  “It’s the way I got in” I interrupted.

  “It’s clear”.

  “Y-You sure man?” he asked again looking at that metal door like it was the opened mouth to hell itself.

  With a reassuring gentle slap on his back I took point and went ahead, hearing him follow me.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Y’know Anreas doesn’t let gophers share names” he answered, hovering in the doorway and scanning the area before actually mustering up the courage to enter.

  “Yeah well, he ain’t here right now is he?”

  He hesitated for a few moments more, throwing furtive gazes around, as if expecting one of Andreas’s goons to just pop out from nowhere.

  “Tim. It’s Tim”.

  “Jon” I replied, picking up one of the weight disks and moving it to one of the discarded sheets I had made use of.

  “Got stuck in the second bathroom when everything went tits-up. What happened?”.

  Tim made his way to try and pick up one of the 30 kilo disks himself, trying to dig his fingers under the metal crooks and get a proper purchase.

  “You got lucky then. It was a bloodbath. People got… massacred by those damn flies. And when they started rising….”

  He looked green in the face, as if about to puke.

  “Got worse. Like in the movies, zombies tearing and ripping people alive. Andreas had a gun on him, don’t ask me from where, took a few shots at the dead to get people’s attention.

  It worked, people rallied to him. About fifteen of us gophers, Miss Wright and a whole lot of other people. Lots more than are left now, either way”.

  The poor lad took a sleeve to his nose. The things he’d probably seen. Hell, I’d know better than anyone.

  “How’d he get everyone out?” I pressed him. Despite feeling sorry for the guy, compassion had no place here. Not if I wanted to be in the know.

  “Had the guys grab desks, chairs, brooms—whatever we could find. We made a big group, formed up like we were gonna push through. Then we just… powered through, shoving and hitting…”

  His voice faltered, and his words trailed off as his eyes glazed over, staring into nothing, hands still fumbling with the disk, mind clearly somewhere else, somewhere far from here.

  Ten seconds of silence passed before he shook his head, like trying to shake off a nightmare. Fear and doubt were written all over his features.

  “I don’t remember everything,” he muttered, voice hoarse, like it was hard to pull the words from his chest. “It’s all just… you know... trying to stick with the group, shoving at the dead so they wouldn’t get to me… screaming…

  People started getting picked off… Some of ‘em panicked when they saw it happening, tried to bolt, tried to run from the group… and they got overwhelmed… torn apart…” He swallowed hard, the words choking him, but they were already out.

  Again, he stopped and I waited. I knew he’d continue telling the story.

  Sharing something bad is cathartic, most people instinctively want to talk about it, get it off their chest. Misery loving company and all that.

  “I think… we lost half the group, by the time we got out of the school building. Andreas yelled something about the old school campus… I just followed the group man… I just…”

  “You just wanted to live” I ended the sentence for him.

  Tim just nodded mechanically.

  “Yeah. It was bad… man…. It was really, really bad”.

  He lifted his gaze and looked at me with an uncharacteristic fire in those timid, empty eyes.

  “It’s when Andreas shot Jason. He was the only other gopher from my class.

  The stunt we pulled attracted an entire… herd…. of the dead behind us. Andreas just shot him. Point blank and in the gut, then pushed him into the herd…

  Y’know the worst part? I… didn’t say anything. I… was actually thankful that Andreas did that. It distracted the herd enough for us to escape in the woods. Jason was my friend, man…

  The hell is wrong with me… I…”

  “You just wanted to live” I finished his sentence again, as if the words explained everything.

  “Yeah” he muttered behind me, voice choking up, blowing his nose into something.

  I knew what he meant. I sympathized with the poor guy. There were things a normal person didn’t think themselves capable of, until they had their back to the wall. Things that roiled the stomach and made you reevaluate your entire moral compass.

  Just like when I had torn the vampires’s throat open with my all too human teeth, even though I would have never thought myself capable of such brutality. But, here I was, still very much alive, in a sense, exactly because I had been capable of it.

  So I didn’t judge the poor bastard. I understood him.

  Minutes dragged by in silence as we busied ourselves with the task at hand, hauling whatever heavy objects we could find onto the thick linen sheet, and slid them across the floor, the sound of scraping against the old wood echoing through the hall as we moved them toward the entrance.

  I was just stacking another weight disk onto our makeshift barricade when the unmistakable sound of boots on old parquet floor drew my attention. I turned slightly to see Miss Wright, Andreas, and his goons emerge from the corridor. They were making their way toward the grand staircase, but not before Andreas paused long enough to bark one final order at us.

  “After you’re done, I expect you all upstairs,” he said, voice grating.

  I turned my head just enough to catch a glimpse of Samantha. Her eyes met mine for a fleeting moment, pity plastered across her face as she glanced at the group of us.

  "Make sure you don’t overexert yourselves," she said softly, before turning to follow the others up the stairs.

  . “Miss Evans is nice” Tim said as soon as their footsteps faded.

  "Hot too," another gopher piped up, struggling with a large armchair that was missing two legs.

  "True. She’s also a hypocrite," I muttered, more to myself than anyone else.

  The comment hung in the air, and the others fell silent for a beat. Then Tim broke the quiet.

  "Yeah, but… I mean… y’know..."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know. She probably got cowed by the principal or the mayor into letting Andreas do whatever he wanted. Still a hypocrite," I grumbled, adding another piece to the barricade.

  "And still hot," Tim shot back, his grin wide and toothy.

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “You’re not wrong there,” I said, pushing the last disk on top of the pile.

  Despite the weight of the situation, despite the looming uncertainty of the apocalypse, some of the others joined in, chuckling along with us. It was a brief, fleeting moment of normalcy in the middle of chaos—one of those moments that reminded us, for just a second, that we were still human.

  “One last thing, Tim” I began, leaning against the wall where all ten of us were taking a few minutes of unsupervised rest, before we were going to have to go upstairs and fall back in line.

  “Yeah, what’s up?” he answered, rolling his head, popping his vertebrae.

  “Where’d Andreas’s guys get a hold of the guns?”

  Tim shrugged.

  “Dunno. Andreas had his on him, but the others got theirs only after we all holed up here”.

  One of the other gophers, a heavy-set blonde guy a head taller than me, spoke up.

  “I heard Andreas tell Bill about a stash for his dad’s “friends” that he’d hidden here for pickup. After that I dunno, Bill and two others left for about 15 minutes then came back with a duffel bag full of guns and ammo.

  Dunno where they went though. I only heard it because I was in the john and they were speaking in the hallway. It was 2AM I think, they probably thought everyone was asleep”.

  “Huh” I said, scratching at my chin.

  “Arms dealing? Seems the good Mayor Henderson was more the entrepreneur than we thought”.

  “Yo, gophers” a voice rang out from upstairs.

  “Andreas wants everyone upstairs, stat. So you better be done with the barricade or I’mma…”

  I didn’t bother listening to the empty threats. Whatever good cheer was blooming between the group shadowed immediately as everyone began lifting themselves off the wall, the sound of shoes shuffling against the floor cutting through the brief silence as we reluctantly began making our way upstairs.

  More important than the peacocking of Andreas’s goons, something else began to settle into my mind, pulling my attention away from the annoying posturing of Andreas’s thugs. It had been subtle at first—just a gnawing sensation, a growing itch beneath my gums, something I’d relegated to the dark impulse and the remnants of friction between myself and our would-be “superiors”.

  But that had been just wishful thinking.

  A drumming noise, barely noticeable at first, steadily growing in volume. The steady, rhythmic pulse of hearts, beating in time to the slow shuffle of their footsteps. A thumping that seemed to fill my ears, louder with each step I took.

  I’d been afraid of this. Anticipated it. But anticipating something and experiencing it were two different things entirely.

  The hunger. The thirst.

  For better or worse, it wasn’t some all-consuming impulse, robbing me of mind and sanity, forcing me into a blood-letting animal, like some works of fiction had portrayed it. And for that I was more than thankful.

  But it was constantly, consistently present. And becoming more so with every passing minute.

  It was there, in the air around me, thrumming like an unspoken invitation. It wasn’t just the pounding in my ears. It was in the scent of the room, the subtle tang of sweat and fear that clung to the others. The noise of blood travelling through their arteries. My senses, sharper now than they had ever been, were picking up on things I didn’t want to acknowledge.

  Like an addict, jonesing for their next fix.

  The persistent feeling that something was missing. And all I’d be needing was to feel it running down my throat. Everything would be right with the world then. I’d be comfortable then.

  Blood. I wanted blood.