Creep

Tom was awkward, to say the very least. He was quiet and it seemed as if he hated the very idea of me. I literally could not fathom why, and certainly didn’t plan on asking. I only hoped he would give me a short tour, then deliver me back into the safe arms of my mother. Back at the house, I felt like he wanted to get at me but couldn’t, because she was there. Now she was gone, and we were all alone, and it was one of the scariest moments of my life.

“Mum is great, huh?” I said as we approached the town square on foot, trying to ease the tension. My voice cracked, and I thought I saw him smile menacingly. I thought there would be more people around, but there were less than when I had gone inside. We walked into the middle of it the square, which was a small park with tall pine trees, lots of benches, and an old fountain right in the middle that had no water in it. All around the fountain were statues of angels, but instead of looking heavenly, to me they just looked as angry as Tom.

Maybe they were trapped here, too.

He nodded. “I’m grateful for her. I would probably…” he trailed off. “I don’t know where I would be without her.”

“I feel, I mean, I should have visited sooner. It’s just that my father, you know, he didn’t want me to.”

“Why?”

I sighed. “Well, him and mom have been divorced for a long time and he thinks it’s dangerous here. He doesn’t understand, I guess. He thinks…” Now, I trailed off. I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“He thinks we’re monsters. I know. We’re the pariah’s of society. We’re less than humans.”

I shook my head. “You’re not. My mom, she’s still my mom. She’s just, different now.”

He nodded. “But you’re scared of us.”

I looked at him. He had stopped walking and was just looking at me.

“I suppose I am.”

“Why?”

He was staring right into my eyes. I felt bad lying, so I told him the truth. “You’re different. That’s why we’re all scared of you. The idea of vampires, you know, before, was never that scary. Now it’s real, and people act as if nothing has ever been more horrifying.”

He looked down, and then sat on a bench that was just a few feet to his right. Now that he wasn’t looking at me as if I was the embodiment everything detestable about his life, he was much more attractive, and much more of a real person to me, though still the scariest real person I’d ever met. “At least you’re honest.”

“You’d know if I lied, wouldn’t you?” I wanted to sit down next to him, but I was still a little frightened. Not only of him, but this place in general. I had never heard a positive thing about it, in the year since it had been here.

It didn’t seem like a year, really. It seemed like ten. Twenty; my entire lifetime. The virus started out slowly, when I was almost nineteen. Over the next year it spread. It seemed as if you couldn’t talk to anyone that didn’t have a family member who was sick; who had been taken away. The whole world was in a state of panic, easily fifty, maybe even a hundred times worse than any bird or swine flu.

My mother was taken away just before my nineteenth birthday. She was sick and in the hospital and had been forever. I had noticed her skin getting paler and her eyes were always closed, even when she was awake, she couldn’t open them. Then, one day, I went to visit and they told me she was gone. She went with the rest of them, and I would probably never see her again. My heart broke, and I became quieter and more reserved from my life. I lost friends, who weren’t really paying attention anyway because they had their own crisis to attend to, all as bad or worse than mine. I had my father, who was no help at all.

By the time I was twenty, these communities were popping up everywhere and it couldn’t be hidden from the general public anymore: vampires. They were real, but they were being contained. My father, who had hated my mother for years anyway, was part of the vast majority of the population that hated the vampires. Even people who had family members who were living on the reservations were filled with such hatred. Somehow, they were deluded into thinking that these were no longer their family members; the disease had replaced their family members with horrible monsters. I knew, through the letters I had been writing a couple times a month with mum, that this was incredibly false.

But to tell someone else that? I would be as good as the vampires. I kept my mouth shut. I knew it was wrong and I knew I was a coward, but I was driven by what we all were driven by: fear.

With that thought in mind, I sat down next to Tom.

“Yes, I would have known,” he said, staring up at the sky. The clouds were clearing up and the moon was shining down brightly. Everything was lit up and in that light, the world around looked quite beautiful. I turned to Tom. He was staring at me.

He sighed. “I’m really angry,” he said.

I thought about replying that I had definitely noticed that. “Why?” I asked.

He leaned back on the bench, putting his elbows up behind him, and looked up. “This isn’t fair. I had a life before this, you know. I had a great life. I had a career and a family and a fiancé. And then this happened, and now I’m forced to be here because I’m dangerous to society, because they haven’t figured me out yet. Do you know they’re doing tests on some of us? I bet some of them are dying. The ones they’re testing on, I mean. I’ve just got all this inside me and one of these days, I’m going to explode.”

I had nothing to say, so I sat in silence. He was quiet for a long time, and then he stood up and began walking again, with more purpose than before. I jumped up, a little surprised, and followed. We walked all around and he told me more about his life before he got sick. It was a month before his wedding. His mother was the only one who stood by him until he was taken away. His bride-to-be killed herself shortly after.

It was the saddest story ever told, said by the angriest man I had ever met. He took me all through town until I realized we had absolutely no idea where we were. The street we stood on was empty; no lights. The clouds had come back.

He stopped once more, very abruptly, and looked at me.

“I just wish… I just wish I could make you all feel the way I do,” he said, nearly growling the words. I thought his jaw would break if he clenched it any harder.

I cringed; I was included in this.

“I wish that just for once, someone else could feel my pain.”

I shook my head. “Everyone around you does.”

“But we all came into it the same way. We all had the world before, and now got the worse part of the world after. You on the outside, you look down on us, don’t you?”

I nodded.

His voice was getting lower and lower, yet angrier and angrier.

He stepped closer to me. He put his hand around my wrist.

“If just one person could feel what I feel,” he said, rolling his neck around as if it was sore. When he looked down at me again, his eyes were redder than before.

My heart pounded in my chest and my vision got a little blurry. “Tom, I want to go back to the house.”

He nodded. “Okay.” Even as he said it, his other hand clasped my other wrist and he pulled me to him.

I tried to shove him off. “Get off me, you creep!” He was too strong for me. He wrapped his arms tight around my waist. No matter how hard I pushed, he got closer and closer.

He growled real low, right into my ear. I felt his lips brush just below it. “I am not a creep.”

It stung at first, when his teeth sunk into my shoulder. And then the whole world went black, and I felt nothing.