Conquest of the Horde

February Fifteenth-
I remember like it was yesterday. We all do, I think. It’s the one moment in our life we can never forget. The sickness sets in, and we start to forget things. We never forget the pain, though. The feeling as inch by inch, our skin goes cold, losing any warmth it ever had. Any warmth it would ever have again. That isn’t the worst of it, though. I would suffer the cold and pain a thousand times over, if only the sickness would have stopped there. The changes that came after the cold were so rapid. I guess that is what causes it. The body can’t handle all these changes, especially after the cold. It doesn’t always happen the same for everyone. For me, it was my mouth. It just suddenly became so dry, as if I had been sucking on cotton. Nothing I drank seemed to wet it, either. Between the dryness, and the sudden thirst for something I couldn’t find, I thought I had come to the worst of it.

Or at least, I hoped.

I knew what was coming. The moment I felt the Cold, I knew I had caught the sickness, and knew what lay in store for me. The thirst grew, as my body seemed to begin aging. Day by day, I felt my life shortening as if year by year. I grew frail, and wrinkled. My strength slowly left my body, until even lifting my eyelids seemed a chore. I was nineteen when I caught the sickness. I hadn’t had a chance to live yet. I hadn’t had a chance to see the world, and already, darkness was brought to me. I spent four years in the darkness. My family wept for me, as I didn’t have the tears to weep for myself. They took me to a hospital, where so many others like me had the sickness. They had managed to save one person, to prevent the sickness from fully taking the boy. It’s different for each person, though. Their one success was followed by hundreds of failures. By the time I was twenty three, the sickness had done so much to me. I was unrecognizable.

So young, yet I looked as if I had to be hundreds of years dead, and buried. My skin was a grayish green, and seemed to be more muscle than skin. It was folded, and wrinkled over itself so many times; it could be pulled forth from my frame. My hair was long, and gray. Had they not cut it weekly, it would have been more than enough hair to fill several homes, I think. I hadn’t seen the light of day in so many years. Nor had any seen my eyes themselves in just as long. Had they been seen, they would have greeted their viewers with a pale blue, unlike my natural green color. If I had been able to open my mouth to speak, if indeed my vocal cords could produce sound, they would have seen fangs. They knew what was happening to me. It happened in some form to everyone who caught the sickness. Those four years were spent with nothing but hope that they could cure me.

I wasn’t alone, though. I was in a syndicate of twenty nine other people, whose symptoms progressed like my own. Thirty of us had the sickness, and were progressing at much the same rate, following a pattern of symptoms. They thought we might connect somehow. We did, but not like they had hoped. We couldn’t talk, physically anyways. But to each other words passed seamlessly without words. We spoke in images, somehow. If I thought of myself as I was before the sickness, somehow the others in my syndicate could see, and supply their own former appearances. I could imagine the taste of something before all things lost taste, and the others in my syndicate would taste it, and share their tastes with me. I could picture my feelings, and in turn know theirs. We spoke often, learning of each other. I was one of ten males, the other twenty being females. We were all around the same age when we contracted the sickness, too. We bonded over the four years of darkness, a family away from our families. That was, until it came time for them to attempt a purging.

They had whispered about it for months. We heard them talk of it daily. They performed a purging whenever a syndicate showed no signs of being cured after a period of trial. They wanted to take us to their incinerators, and destroy us, and our strand of the sickness. My family wouldn’t see that happen, though. It was because of my family that my syndicate hadn’t already been purged. Our safety would be guaranteed by my father, perhaps one of the only things my father would ever do for me. He spent a small fortune on the building of a sanctuary of sorts for us. It was meant to be the grave of my syndicate. Moved there, the thirty of us would be given a burial ceremony of sorts. Sealed away from the rest of the world, the sanctuary would be lowered one hundred and eighty feet below the ground, six feet for each person. We would know our last days living no different than we had the last four years. We lived in suffocating darkness.

I was the first to slip into the grasping arms of death, the last images of the others in my syndicate mourning the loss of one of their own. I would die, and finally be rid of the sickness. At least, I hoped I would be rid of it. Truth be told, I had only just woken up to it. This was three hundred years ago, when I had been alive, and contracted the sickness. They called it ‘Vampirism’. They call us Vampires, and say we are abominations.

We say we were just sick.

Dying was just like falling asleep at that point. I let go, and there I was. Though I died, I am not so sure I experienced the true afterlife. There was no long tunnel with a light at the end. I was never surrounded by flames. There was just… Nothing. No darkness, nor light. No time, nor space. Perhaps I no longer existed. No, that’s not right. I had to have existed, because I recall something. A feeling, only not. I remember the sickness spreading still. Though I was dead, and no longer connected to the syndicate, I could still feel them. I knew when one would pass. The first to pass after me was Brian. In life, he had been an aggressive one. During the course of the sickness, he had not lost his passion. He only gained resentment of humanity. Of the way they treated those with the sickness. When Brian passed, I felt a strange feeling, in my state of nothingness. I felt a bond, much like that of when I was alive, with a being that didn’t exist. I knew it was Brian, yet I could not communicate with him. I could only know that he too existed in a state of nonexistence. One by one, I felt more nonbeings come into my non-awareness. Until I knew twenty nine other non-beings.

My syndicate was whole in death. I wondered if it would be like this for all of eternity, a state of being, and a life of nonexistence. But like death had been falling asleep, I would soon find myself waking up. It wouldn’t be the same as being alive, though. I woke, and I knew I had indeed awoken, my awareness was different. The first thing I noticed was that, for the first time in years, my eyes were willing. With great effort, I opened my eyes, and saw what was meant to be our final resting place. Around me lay twenty nine bodies, wrapped in hair, decayed to nothing but muscle and bone. This was what death was. Only, it couldn’t be. For if it was, I wouldn’t be there to see it. Nor would I feel the others of the syndicate. And I could feel them, as if they were in the room themselves. I walked over to each of their bodies, looking at the grotesque forms that lay on a carpet of royal blue. I looked from the bodies, to the walls, taking in the size of the mausoleum that I stood in. My father had spared no expense in his last gift to me. I found myself walking the entirety of the place, as there was nothing else to do. The thirty of us could have lived there, and indeed could have then had families at least four members in number, and still rarely seen each other. It was a grand gift to give the dead, and for it, I would thank my father during the years to come, even to this day. My journey through the resting place of thirty people would take me weeks. Not because it was that large, but because my body was not accustomed to travel. I found a mirror in my travels, and knew that day what had happened. As I looked upon myself, I cringed. Where there once had been flesh, I was now nothing but emaciated bone, with corroded muscle attached to it. My hair had become long and grey, straight and dead. My eyes were shrunken hollows, the pale blue of a blind man, with the sight of perfect vision.

I made my way back to the room in which I had passed into death after another span of weeks. How much time had passed since I had died, I wondered. I looked at each of the others in turn, until I rested in the spot where I had woken from. As I lay there, I felt that odd hunger again. It was more than a hunger in my stomach, the emanations reverberating within my bones. My vision blurred, the color of the world around me suddenly fading into black and white. There was no color anywhere to be seen. Until I looked to the roof, upwards to the world above, a world surely I would never see again. It was there I saw a faint color. A wisp of red smoke seemed to float across my field of vision, a scent of something I had never experienced before temping me. I found myself drawn to it, moving to the wall, the obstacle preventing me from reaching it. I reached towards the roof, pressing my arms against the smooth wall, my legs aiming to carry me up them. When I was alive, I would have ended up falling backwards. Only, I wasn’t alive now. I no longer existed in the world of the physical. I moved up the wall, as if it were the flat ground in front of me. I moved with a startling speed, my hunger drawing me up in frenzy. I reached the roof, and found my head surrounded by the pale red mist. It was intoxicating, and taunting, as I stood there on the ceiling. I found myself looking beyond the ceiling, following the red smoke up through the ground. I had to find the source, to sate my hunger. I pressed my hands against the ceiling, and pushed upwards. Where before I would have been met with resistance, now I easily slid through the roof, leaving no mark.

I felt the earth around me, and found I was suddenly weighed down. I tried pushing up with the speed I had moved along the wall in the home, but found I could not. My body seemed to catch bits of earth, the rock and mud merging with my broken frame. My journey upwards was slow, taking weeks as my walk through had. I didn’t know it, or understand it then, but I would later reflect on the reason I had been able to move along the wall, avoiding the natural physics, yet was unable to do so in the earth. I was dead. I was no longer a slave to the physics of the living. The laws of those alive meant nothing to me. I knew only the rules of death. What did that mean about my journey upwards? The earth was the last law the dead knew. Buried within the ground, restricting movement. It was a physic of life I would come to envy during my initial journey upwards. To have been the earthworm, so easily going through the ground as if it were air. It would be a negligible rule, though, soon. When I made it to the surface, I was so crazed by the sight, and smell of this odd red mist. I burst through the ground, arriving in the dead of night, a strange feeling suddenly coming over me. It was the feeling of death entering the world of the living.

As the cool air hit my decayed body, I couldn’t help but flinch in pain. It clawed at my exposed body with such ferocity, the likes of which I had never known. I pushed through the pain, though, for the mist of red within my black and white vision was deepening. I could see the building ahead from which the mist came. I moved towards it, my body suddenly moving faster than it ever had in life. I leapt up, following the trail, finding my body practically floating up onto the roof. I landed with no more sound than the soft patter of my feet. I moved along to the vent that the mist was coming from, and tore into it with a vicious hunger, lunging down the chute into the room below. I heard a shout as I lifted my body from the ground, and felt an odd sensation strike my shoulder. It wasn’t pain, but an oddly cold sensation. I looked at my shoulder, and then up at the source of the mist. Before me stood a man, a gun clutched in his hand. I saw every detail of the gun, including the faint smoke rising from the barrel. I had been shot. But I was already dead, so it meant nothing.

I moved forward, feeling that cold sensation on several more spots along my corpse, including twice in the head. I moved forward, and lunged. My body had deteriorated over a length of time I knew not. My hair had grown long, and pale, contrasting the deteriorated body it grew from. And from my mouth, sharp fangs drove themselves into the man, piercing skin, and ravaging him. I bit at his arms, and his neck. I bit at his face and his stomach. I drew blood with each bite. I tore flesh with each lunge. I wasn’t myself, at that moment. I held no civility within me, as I acted on impulse. I pulled away once I knew that he too was dead, and looked at his gnarled form. His blood was spilling forth, spread along the floor, and I saw then what it was the red mist symbolized. I dropped to my knees, and lifted some blood to my mouth in cupped hands, drinking it down. From the moment it hit my tongue, to the time it spread along my stomach, I knew that this was what I had hungered for. Blood. Again, this was something I didn’t know then, but would learn later; I hungered for blood, because I didn’t have any of my own.

That was perhaps the downside of no longer living by the laws of the living. I did not need blood, no. I could go an eternity without, at a cost. My appearance would grow more and more inhuman. I would lose all sense. I would become a mindless beast. If I consumed blood on a regular basis, I would retain my senses. I would retain my body. It was something I felt as I drank the blood of the man I had just killed. The more I drank, the stronger I felt. I soon had consumed all of the blood from the man, licking the floor clean, a sense of ecstasy upon me as I licked the remnants from my fingers. The color had returned to my sight. Oh the color I saw. It was more than I had ever seen before. There were colors that surely I could not give name to. One of which being that red mist I saw. For, though color had returned, I could still see the mist in my vision, and could now say that it was a color I could not name. It seemed to carry red, and blue, purple, and white. Yet, it carried none of them. I found I could follow the trail of color, and see its source, even though it came from another room. I saw the faint outline of a woman, her heart racing from the sound of bullets I assumed. I moved forward towards it, lifting my hand to feel the wall. What I saw when I lifted my hand was not the disfigured claw it had been. Rather, it seemed to resemble what once was a human’s hand. It had bits of flesh upon it, the tips of nails forming. I think when I saw that, I gained an inkling of what drinking the blood of others would do. It made me wonder how long I had been dead. Recalling being able to move through the ceiling at the site of my burial, I pushed forward against the wall. My hand seemed to vanish into it slowly. Now that I was thinking, I could feel it. As if my hand ceased to exist, and then my arm, and then my entire body all at once. I moved through it, and then stopped when I came into the next room. I saw a woman shrieking, as she cowered against the opposite wall, but I did not move to her. For, at that moment, I began feeling sensations come to life in my mind. Awakenings into the world once more.

I called my syndicate to me. I had weeks to wait, I knew. But I also had this new food known as blood to keep my occupied.

It would take them longer than it had taken me to rise. The woman whom I had entered the room with would provide something more than the man before her had. Whereas with the man I felt the sating of such a hunger I had never known, this woman gave me so much more. As my fangs pierced the skin of her shoulder, and the first trickles of her blood danced within my mouth, I felt a passion deep within my body awaken. Where I had ravaged the man, tearing him apart until he was unrecognizable, I found I held my mouth in place, having only pierced the woman once. I felt her blood being pulled to my thirsting mouth. My mind flooded with an explosion of colors and feelings, my decrepit hands sliding along her shoulders, the warmth of her skin being drained into my dead fingertips. The moment was sensual, if ever I could label it. By the time she was drained, blood spilled along my chin, and along her shoulder, down to her bosom, shouts were issued from the room where the gruesome remains of the man that had been my first meal lay. An alarm would begin sounding, and footsteps would begin thundering towards the room I was in. I knelt, laying the woman down gently, tearing her shirt from the neck, sliding the strap of her bra along her shoulder. Wiping the blood from my chin along the back of my hand which now held more flesh, I would lick it clean, and then stoop low upon the body of the woman. I could not leave her with the splatter of blood desecrating her beauty. Perhaps in life I would have found her homely, taken her for granted or ignored her entirely. In comparison though, I looked upon her as the first true beauty I had ever seen. Her blood flowing through me, I knew the type of woman she was in life. My tongue would slide delicately from her shoulder, slowly moving along her breast, lifting the last of her life away. My hand would reach up and slid her eyelids down, my eyes rolling up into the back of my head as I let the heat of the moment die down.

The crashing of the door behind me would bring my eyes front again, eyelids opening slowly. I felt my muscle growing, sheets of skin settling into place. I could smell the fear of the four people behind me, voices shaking as they attempted to command that I lift my hands, and turn to face them slowly. I laughed. In so many years I had not issued a sound and now I laughed. A cold mirthless chuckle as my hands rose as commanded. I turned to face them, and saw looks of horror don the faces of four men dressed in the uniform of police. My half formed body brought shock into their scent, though their trembling hands would have told me what this new strange power of smell did. I didn’t bother listening to their mumbled orders; instead, I focused on this new knowledge I seemed to have. Being dead, I found there were more feelings than I could recall having in life. My mirthless laugh continued as their guns were lifted, and aimed at my head. A warning shot was fired, meant to go by the side of my head. What should have happened in an instant seemed to span the length of minutes. I saw the combustion within the chamber of the gun, the rushing smoke billowing out of the barrel as the bullet was pushed forward. It twisted the smoke in a horizontal tornado of ill intent. I found myself walking forward with the sounds of their fearful heart beats amplifying. I reached up, taking the bullet from the air with my fingers, time speeding up to come to the moment where I was. I dropped the bullet, a sly smile pulling at the exposed muscles of my mouth. Fire was open by the time the bullet hit the floor. Each of them emptied their clips towards me. Thirty six bullets were practically frozen in the air in front of me. I moved past them, past the men who seemed to be frozen along with the bullets. I stopped, closing the door, and turned to face them. The feeling I had looking at them would revert my vision to that black and white view, the mist of blood around the thick, my hunger suddenly great. Their shouting, as they looked over their shoulders to see me, would suddenly die. Their blood called out to me, and I called to it in return. I lifted my hand, uttering the first words I had spoken in years.

“Come to me.”

What ever I had done to get to the building was contradictory to the laws of physics. My very life in this deathly state went against the laws of man. With the uttering of those three words, my voice hoarse from lack of use, I would find that I could forego free will for my own desire. It was a slight buzz in the back of my mind, and a light blue mist seeming to exude from me, and wrap around the red mist of their blood. The four sets of eyes would glaze over, bodies going rigid, guns hitting the floor. With hesitation, their legs carried them forward to stand before me. I lifted a hand, and as if responding to my very thoughts, one of the men moved directly in front of me, and lowered his head to be looking at my half formed chest. Ravenously, I sank my fangs into his throat, pulling back, taking a chunk of his neck with me. The blood sprayed forward, covering me, painting the wall beside me. The other three stood with blank eyes staring at the scene before them as they waited for their turn.

When I finished with the four men, I would search for a mirror, despite the sirens still sounding throughout the building. When I had finished draining them of every last drop of blood, I felt a strange sensation. Or rather, the sudden loss of a sensation. I didn’t thirst. I had thirsted since I had contracted the sickness- never escaped the dryness of my mouth. It was so strange to once again know satisfaction. With that satisfaction, I would look down at my hands in disbelief, and see skin once more. I reached up and felt my face to be met by the same sensation. When I finally found a mirror, I was surprised at what I saw. I could vaguely recall what I had looked like in life before I had contracted the sickness. I had been thin, with short black hair. My eyes had been green, and I had had a taught face. But when I looked into that mirror for the first time… I was taller. At least six foot ten. My body was muscular, and well toned. My hair was long, dragging the floor in an excess of four feet, and was a grayish white. I didn’t like it long. I would have to find scissors, or a knife, and cut it soon. I looked over my features, which had filled out considerably. Then I would note the color of my skin. I was as white as marble, and as cold as it as well. It was the biggest shock of all. How could my skin be so pale? My first thought was that it was new flesh, grown from the blood I had drunk. But I knew that was wrong. It was a reflection of the time I had spent deceased. Just how long had I been asleep…?

I would move through walls, going from room to room, until I would come to a door that had to be the entrance to the place. I would grip the handle, and feel an odd sensation, another to add to the many that day. As I turned the handle, and let the door creak open slightly, my vision would become pure white, and my skin would be set ablaze figuratively speaking. My vocal cords would get quite the workout as I screamed in pain. With such an effort I could not recall exerting before, I pushed the door closed, falling into a heap on the floor crying out in pain. It had been so long since I had seen and felt the light of day. So long it caused me pain. I felt tears flowing from my eyes, leaving a burning sensation along my cheeks. I didn’t know it then, but my body had been deprived of water for so long it caused me the same pain as the light. I curled up, my pain transmitting to my Syndicate, warning them of the light. Feelings of thanks, and confusion returned to me. Likewise, a longing to see me after knowing each other for so long rose within most of the syndicate. I too longed to see them, whole. I knew what they would look like now, before they ate. I knew what they had looked like before death. But as the changes in me had occurred, I was sure they would happen to the others. I would not have long to wonder, or to weep in my pain. I forced myself from the floor as I heard sirens outside. For however long I had been dead, I still understood what the sirens were. Or perhaps I didn’t. The information seemed to rise from nowhere, just filling me with understanding. My vision was blurred, making it almost impossible to see where I was going. As I rounded a nearby corner, I would hear a crashing behind me as there was a sudden pain on my back. They had broken the door down, sunlight pouring in, striking out at my body. I shouted, falling to the floor once more, pressing down upon it as if it would save me from the light.

Then I realized it would. I pressed down against the tile of the floor, pushing down with all the strength I could muster with the shouts, and the sunlight hitting my back. I heard steps running towards me, and then felt them as I began to become the floor. Their shouting turned into commands, then warnings, until there were sensations all along my back, nearly catching ablaze from the heat that I felt. They had opened fire as I attempted to escape. When finally I would be beneath the building, inside the earth, the pain would cease to exist. I would crawl through the earth, away from the building as fast as I could. There were a few moments where my hands would pass before my eyes, and I would see them decaying, the skin and muscle falling off of my bone with the greatest of ease. I did not dwell on it, though. I would put as much distance as possible between myself and the building, between me and the light of day. I don’t know how far I had gone, or for how long I had traveled, but I knew I was hungry.

It would be near two months before my syndicate would breach the earth, and rise. Near two months where I could feed, could learn. Two months where I could learn what had happened since I was Nineteen, and was stricken down by the sickness known as Vampirism.

Two months, near fifty years after my death.