Tainted Blood
*****
I never knew the date I was born, nor the day, or the month, not even the year. For that reason, I have never celebrated my birthday. But I would easily find excuses to celebrate anything else.
Most weekends I behave like a party animal, a complete rebel vampire. And then, I spend the rest of the week full of regrets and guilt. It happens the same thing week after week. I can never learn my lesson. I have never been able to understand why my younger brother is the total opposite. He's a rational vampire, careful and reliable. But I don't envy him.
My brother Malachy had been trying to convince me to stop preying on a risky group of people: Drug addicts, homeless, drunks, and prostitutes since they carry all kinds of diseases.
Malachy and I were born nearly three hundred years ago.
My excuse had always been the “taste”. It's just like junk food, I know it's bad for me, but it tastes really good. I would always choose BBQ ribs or a bloody steak over a tasteless salad. Salads are for rabbits. I can assure you, the blood of a junkie is way better than the blood of a lawyer.
I've been sick most of my life because of the lack of attention regarding my diet.
Vampires have never been famous for their healthy lifestyle. We don’t enjoy exercise, we don’t like swimming, and we are zero percent vegetarians. Instead, we enjoy drinking, (especially Bloody Marys) we like violent bloody movies, boxing, and everything related to blood.
People don't always turn into vampires necessarily just by being bitten by a vampire, it rarely happens that way. Most of what people know about vampires is false. We drink blood from humans and animals, but that's not our only diet. We also consume regular food.
We can make new converts out of children and teens for sure, but since the beginning of last century our universal code of ethics began to change, and now, we're not allowed to attack children anymore. With that, our options to recruit new members were cut in half.
The process to turn an adult person into a vampire requires a few weeks. Their human blood needs to be replaced with vampire blood while they remain unconscious. The transfusion it's a slow and methodical operation. Along with their blood, we also suck their memories.
Our numbers are declining for those reasons. But also, we're dying in large numbers because we keep ingesting contaminated blood from sick persons.
Some of the people that are reported missing or disappear are never found because they are abducted by our kind.
My family came originally from France, where my parents had a bakery. In the early 18th century vampires used to live mostly in Europe. Among several typical qualities vampires share, are a good memory and acute intelligence. A good memory could be ingrained in our brain, more like genetics. But intelligence is different than any other skill or aptitude. If you get to live for more than three centuries, the passage of time forces you to be smart. It's more about experience than education in our case.
Being an only child I often felt lonely. I always wanted to have a brother.
There was a ragged little kid that used to stop every day at our bakery shop to buy bread on his way home after school. One day I caught him looking sadly through the glass window in front of the store. He said he didn't have any money. His situation made me feel really sad, so I offered him some bread free of charge.
After that, we became friends.
I made him my brother the day I bit his neck. While I sucked his blood and memories, I kept him in a small room behind the brick oven for a few weeks until he turned into a vampire. We then moved to America. That was the first time I acted on my own. My parents said they were proud of me.
*****
One morning, after a night of extreme depravity and debauchery, I woke up with a terrible hangover and I decided I had enough and told my brother I was tired of being eternally sick and that I couldn’t live another three hundred years the same way. I finally accepted to have a complete overhaul. I agreed to have a full blood transfusion, a two-day illegal operation which had to take place at the local blood bank where Malachy worked. By the way, I admire my brother's restraining power and self-control. I can't imagine myself working in that place. I would feel like a fat kid working at a donut shop.
I need to go back to the night in question where a degrading bacchanal took place. First, I picked up a prostitute, and she took me to a motel room she was using for the night. She was sharing that room with a junkie, a drunk, and a thief. I'm sure they also shared all those different professions. I still remember all I did, but I'm only going to tell you this: I had sex, but not with the prostitute. I shared drugs, but not with the junkie, and I stole money from the thief. I shared a bottle of whiskey and barfed on the drunk. In the end, I bit all of them on their necks. Their blood was my dessert.
That's the story of my life. Now, multiply that story a thousand times. Sometimes, too much of a good thing it's exhausting too.
The intravenous procedure it's time-consuming, as it is required to circulate around twenty gallons of filtered blood to replace a gallon and a half of infected blood contained in my body.
I have to be anesthetized the entire process. The operation has to be done over the weekend when the blood bank is closed. My brother would be in charge during the entire process. The only downside I see is that after the procedure there's a 50/50 possibility that I could end up human.
Having a hundred percent purified human blood is risky too.
One thing that I find attractive about this operation is that I have to witness through my dreams some of the worse life experiences the donors have had during their lives. That weird phenomenon could only be experienced by our kind of people, and nobody can explain how it works or why, but some specialists in the matter say that all traumatic moments get imprinted in our minds and in our blood cells. As if the transfused blood flowing in our bodies was a celluloid film projecting the movie. You have to keep in mind that your worse living nightmares to me, are nothing but sweet dreams. It'll be just like watching movies.
My name is Dario and I like the universal type, I'm talking about blood here. What type of blood are you?
*****
1) In this section, we will include six to eight unrelated short films, four to eight minutes long. Mainly horror stories or unpleasant dreams or nightmares that would make you suffer great mental pains.
2) The main character (Dario) is going to be sedated during the operation, and he'll be watching other people's bad dreams or nightmares. It gives us the opportunity to develop several short films inside the 'main' structure of the film. Stories that would have nothing to do with the 'main film'. In my mind, I already have a possible ending.
Edmundo Barraza
Lancaster, Ca. Jan-8-2017
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