Kill This Venom

I woke up in a church. I never thought I’d find myself saying that. I hadn’t entered a church once in my life and yet I had slept in one. The night before was either a wild and unforgettable one, or absolutely boring. I was sprawled on the floor, and based on the soreness of my back, I figured I had previously been laying on the pews.

I pulled myself onto the hard wooden bench, rubbing my aching head. The church was strangely empty. The sun was shining brightly through the window, illuminating the blood red aisle. The church, which I guessed was supposed to be a bit louder, was coated with a silence that made me jittery.

“Uh…hello?” I called out, my voice sounding louder than usual in the eerie silence.

“You’re finally awake!” a voice piped up, but I couldn’t see where it came from, until a girl sat up a couple rows ahead of me. “How you feelin’?”

She smiled and tilted her head, her greasy black hair cascading messily across part of her face. It seemed like it hadn’t been washed or brushed for days, and judging by her dirt-covered and torn up T-shirt, I was probably right. Through the ragged, and possibly homeless, appearance, she still seemed very familiar to me. I had no idea who she was, but my mind told me I should have—that didn’t make any sense.

“Hello?” she sang, waving her arms above her head. I had become too engrossed in my random thoughts that I forgot to answer her.

“Uh…I’m good,” I mumbled. “Why am I here? What happened?”

“Well, where should I start? The vampires? Or you being a dumb ass and hitting your head?”

“The what?” I laughed. Not only was she dirty, but she must have been a drug addict. Or alcoholic. Or both.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I think you should ask yourself that,” I snorted.

She stood up from where she was sat, and slid into the row I was sitting in. She sat right next to me, uncomfortably close for a stranger.

“Did you hit your head that hard?” she asked, placing her fingers against my temple that suddenly throbbed with pain.

“Shit!” I flinched at her touch, replacing her hand with my own.

“Sorry,” she sighed, an apologetic look gracing her features. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

I didn’t answer her because I didn’t know how to. What was I supposed to remember? I was in a church with a stranger who apparently knew me, but also believed in vampires, so I wasn’t sure how great that acquaintance was.

“You don’t remember the vampires…” she mumbled.

I replied to her with silence. When she saw my confused look, she let out a loud sigh and took my hand. I flinched a bit at the sudden touch, but she seemed so comfortable with it that I didn’t question it or reel away from her. She pulled me off the bench and I followed her down the aisle towards the front of the church.

“I’m about to show you something,” she said slowly, stopping before the end of the aisle. “Maybe it’ll bring back your memory, but just try not to freak out, okay?”

I nodded hesitantly. She pulled me further down the aisle, closer to the altar, and stopped, taking a quick glance to her right. I followed her gaze.

I don’t know how I managed not to scream. Or cry. Or yell. Or say anything. The sight before me drained the blood from every part of my body and left me completely voiceless. There were bodies, dead bodies, lying next to each other, each with a wooden stake jammed deep into its chest. As if that wasn’t shocking enough, two of the five bodies belonged to my brother and mother. The girl standing next to me released my hand and I dropped to my knees, every muscle in my body losing its purpose and functionality. So many questions rang through my head, but none registered past my lips. All I managed to do was stutter mindlessly while staring at my mother’s and brother’s lifeless bodies. My body began shaking, stuck in a dilemma of whether to move closer to the bodies, or run away from them.

“How?” I finally managed to form an actual word, but now it was clouded with sobs that erupted out of my throat suddenly. “H-How… Wha-WHY?!”

The girl knelt down next to me, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. Having her anywhere near me was suddenly repulsing because of her presence among these corpses. I backed away from her, finding the strength to move, smacking her hand away from me.

“You!” I yelled. “You did that?!”

The accusation seemed to carry a certain amount of weight with it, because even through the dirt and grime, the pain was written all over her face when my words hit her. I immediately regretted saying it, though I shouldn’t have, because as far as I knew, she was the only other person here. She must have done it. But still, I felt guilty.

“You need to calm down,” she said, not allowing the pain to show in her voice.

“M-My mom…my brother…” I gasped. “Calm down?!”

“You really don’t remember anything?” she asked, keeping her eyes off of the dead bodies, and also off of me. “The other three…they’re my family. So, no, I didn’t do it.”

I took a minute to take a closer look at the bodies that accompanied my family’s. There were two men—an older man and a teenager—and a young girl who resembled the girl kneeling before me.

This was all too much. What the hell was going on? How were my mother and brother lying dead just feet away from me?

“What the fuck is going on?!” I groaned, burying my face and my frustration into my hands, allowing the tears to fall freely into my palms.

“I told you,” the girl said. “The vampires.”

“Vampires?” I snapped, looking up at her. But her face looked so sincere. “Seriously? Vampires?”

“Why else are there stakes in their hearts?” she argued calmly. I couldn’t understand how she kept herself so calm. “You think I would do that to my own family?”

“But...” I shook my head. “No, vampires don’t exist.”

“They do,” she insisted. “They’ve been existing. It’s basically like a vampire apocalypse.”

“Who the hell came up with a vampire apocalypse?!” I snorted. “Zombie, okay. But when did that become a vampire thing?! No, all of this…all this isn’t possible!”

“Well, it is,” she stated. “I know it’s a lot to process, but you have to believe me.”

“My mom, my brother,” I sighed, wanting to deny any explanation of their death. I wanted to deny it for as long as I could. Without explaining their dead bodies just feet away from me, maybe I could deny their existence entirely.

“And my dad, and my brother, and my sister,” she sighed back, her tone of voice the same as mine, but without the cracking of escaped sobs. “And a lot of others. We’ve watched a lot of people die. The vampires—”

I groaned loudly, interrupting her. I didn’t want to hear it. It was impossible. Vampires were impossible. Their death was impossible.

“You have to listen to me,” the girl said, taking a seat next to me, blocking the dead bodies from my view. “Whether you listen to me or not, it’s not gonna change the fact that they’re gone. So listen. You need to know. You owe them that much. ”

I let out a defeated sigh. She was right. Nothing was going to bring them back. The least I could do was understand how they died, even if the story I was waiting to hear seemed like it would be completely ridiculous.

“Ok,” I gave in, “fill me in.”

The girl hesitated before she started, taking a quick look at the corpses, then snapping her eyes back to me, smiling to cover the grief on her face.

“I honestly can’t remember how long it’s been,” she began, “since they took over. I used to count the days, but at some point, you get tired of that. There aren’t that many survivors. You and me, we’re the last of our group. There used to be a lot more of us, but it’s hard to keep everyone alive, or keep them from turning. They,” she nodded her heads towards the corpses without actually looking at them, “got bit a few days ago. We were able to save them before they got eaten or something.”

“That’s why they have stakes,” I muttered, mostly to myself, but she nodded, confirming it.

“We all would rather die than turn into one of them. That’s something we all agreed on from the start. If one of us gets bit, we’d rather be staked before we turned. So that’s what we had to do.”

I shuddered when she said we. Had I staked my own mother and brother? Was their death at my hands? I stared down at my hands that lay shaking in my lap. Did their blood cover them at one point?

The girl noticed my eyes locked on my trembling hands and slipped her own hand into mine, giving it a comforting squeeze.

“It’s what they wanted,” she said in a soothing voice. “They begged us to do it.”

I nodded, trying to process what I was hearing. It all seemed too impossible, but there was no denying the sincerity and grief in the girl’s voice. If what she was saying was true, I had to be stronger. I had to numb out the pain of the situation, like she had obviously done. It was the only way to handle it all and still survive.

“It’s daytime,” she said, standing up. “This is the only time we can go out. The vampires come out as soon as the sun goes down.”

“What happens if they catch us?” I asked.

“They suck the blood out of you. But if you manage to get away with one bite, you might be able to fight off the change. It’s really hard, but you can fight off one bite, but if they get more than one bite on you, you’ll turn in just a few minutes.” I couldn’t believe I was nodding like a student, as if all this was real. I took it all in, allowing this new lifestyle—or whatever it was—to sink in. “Come on, we need to bury the bodies.”

She walked over to the corpses of our family members and gestured for me to help her. I had to be strong. If this girl could stomach all of this, so could I. We started with the body of her father. There was an obvious inner struggle with the emotions that threatened to spill out of her at any second.

She took him by the arms, and I followed with the legs as she took the lead towards a small door at the back of the church. The sun outside was blindingly bright. What looked like an endless field of dirt stretched on behind the church. I could tell that we had buried a few bodies there, some of them obviously recent since the dirt around some of the graves hadn’t completely settled. There were five empty holes already dug out, side by side; these graves were the closest to the church, close to us.

We went to the first hole and put the girl’s father in gently, then followed the same routine with the rest of the bodies. When it was time to carry my mother’s body, I could barely manage to carry her lifeless legs without bursting into tears. This was the closest I’d seen her body and it was too close for my comfort.

Her unruly curly hair surrounded her face, shielding most of her calm and peaceful expression from my view. Her body looked a lot skinnier than I remembered, obviously worn out by whatever events had taken place before her death. She was wearing her favorite cardigan that had endless drapes of fabric on the sides; she loved this cardigan so much and would wear it with anything, whether it matched or not. It hardly did match anything since it was a bright shade of orange, but that didn’t faze her. It was torn now, though. The brightness of the orange had dulled down and the front was stained with dried blood that made me nauseous as soon as I saw it. I kept gulping loudly, trying to suppress the gags that were pushing at my throat. When we put her body into her gave, I ran far from the graves, to the side of the church, and let the cooped up gags and sobs spill out of me. On my knees, I sat awkwardly dry heaving and sobbing for a couple minutes.

The girl came to me once I had composed myself. She didn’t say anything. She just smiled, rubbed my shoulder, and walked back into the church. I mentally slapped myself for not being able to stay as calm as her. But it was all too much. She had the memories to give her strength and I didn’t. I was starting completely anew.

I followed her into the church, knowing we had one more body to take out: my brother. My mother’s body should have been the hardest to deal with, but when I saw my brother, a more varied mix of emotions hit me at full force. He was my little brother, the annoying little idiot that always got himself into trouble and forced me to get him out of it. Now he was dead. I had failed to protect him the one time he needed me the most.

Trying to keep my eyes averted from his dead body while I carried proved to be impossible. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his clean-shaven head, which came as a surprise to me because he always refused to shave his “luscious locks” as he called them. His band T-shirt, which was so torn and battered and coated with blood, that I couldn’t tell which band it belonged to. The gauges were still in his ears. I remembered how angry my mother had gotten when he decided to put them in, but he “compromised” by keeping them small, though that didn’t make her any less angry. He could always get away with things like that; he had a smooth way of speaking to people. I could never understand how he did it. But now he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say something stupid and sarcastic to make his death any easier to handle.

I shut my eyes when we put his body into his grave, unable to handle the sight of him lying in a dirt hole. I moved away from his grave, keeping my eyes off of him so that I didn’t go into another series of dry heaves and sobs. The girl handed me a shovel and without saying anything, somehow communicating in our heads that it would be much easier, I covered her family’s bodies with dirt, and she did the same for mine. It didn’t stop me from picturing their faces as the dirt fell onto them…

The girl finished before me, and just stood at the graves she’d just covered, closing her eyes and mumbling some words under her breath.

“We should go restock on food,” she said, opening her eyes, but not daring to look at the grave I was finishing—her sister’s. “I’ll go get our stuff ready.”

I nodded, but she didn’t bother wait to see that. She needed to get away from me, I could tell, to release her sadness alone. I could understand that, so I let her go without a word.

“Hey, David!” she called out when she got to the opening of the church. I looked around me, wondering who she was talking to. There was no one else but these corpses and me, and she was looking right at me. “Don’t forget to bring the shovel in when you’re done!” With that, she disappeared into the church.

Who the hell was David?

I finished filling her sister’s grave with dirt and went back into the church, shovel in hand. The girl was sitting at the altar, a wooden stake in one hand and a cup of water in the other. She stared aimlessly down the aisle of the church, taking small sips of the water.

“Who’s David?” I asked, bringing her attention to me.

“You,” she shrugged.

“Uh, my name is Shane,” I said matter-of-factly. I knew I had to remember that much. I couldn’t have forgotten my real name, too.

“Oh, you forgot that, too?” she laughed.

“Huh? My name?”

“No, no,” she laughed, shaking her head. “Your name is Shane, but I call you David. It’s my nickname for you.”

“How the fuck does Shane equal David…” I muttered to myself, but she heard it.

“Hey, no cursing, you’re in a church!” she snapped, her face serious. I stuttered awkwardly, not forming any words. The seriousness of her expression was cracked through with a laugh. “I’m kidding. We’ve done a lot worse in this church. It’s not holy anymore.”

I smiled weakly. “So…David?”

“Like David from David and Goliath,” she explained. “That’s my favorite story. I was never a, uh, devoted reader of the Bible or anything, but I always loved that story. You’re David. The vampires are Goliath.”

“Me? Why me? Aren’t we all like David?”

“Damn, you really don’t remember anything,” she shook her head, gulping down the rest of the water. “You pretty much led this group. You were like our hero in a way. Before I joined you guys, me and my family were pretty sure we were gonna die, but you saved us and helped us survive. You taught me never to give up, not to let the vampires win, and promised you’ll never let them hurt me.”

“Wow,” was all I could say. A second ago I was sobbing like a child while she comforted me, and yet I was the hero. “So if I’m David, and they’re Goliath, who are you?”

“I’m Nessa,” she smiled, “the best character in the story who never got her shining moment because she was too busy comforting David in the background.”

“Haven’t heard of her,” I laughed.

“Ungrateful hero,” she shook her head, and stood up, handing me another glass of water that had been sitting next to her. “Drink up before we go out.”

I took a couple sips of water, not wanting much, and set it down.

“Hey, finish that!” Nessa protested. “You need it.”

“I’m not that thirsty, it’s fine,” I shrugged.

“It’s holy water,” she explained. “We might need it.”

“Why the hell am I drinking holy water?” I asked.

“It’s a theory I think we should test out,” she shrugged. “Maybe it’ll keep the vampires away or make turning harder, I dunno.”

I eyed the water strangely. It looked and tasted like regular water. I wasn’t sure what it could possibly do for us when the time came for vampire attacks, but I had to admit, I felt weird about drinking it now.

“Come on,” she persisted, nudging my arm. “I don’t know how long it’s been around and if the holiness wears off or whatever—I don’t know how that stuff works. But water is water, just shoot it back like it’s cheap whiskey.”

I smiled at the statement, wishing I had some actual whiskey with me. With that metaphor in my mind, I gulped the water down.

“See? Not so bad!” She put the cup on the floor and handed me a wooden stake. “Now, let’s go.”