Kill This Venom

She carried an empty duffel bag over her shoulder and marched down the aisle towards the front doors of the church. Her strength amazed me. I couldn’t believe I was the hero; her power and confidence surpassed mine by a mile—my manhood was insulted by that thought.

I looked down at the wooden stake in my hand while catching up with Nessa. Had I really jabbed this through my mother’s and brother’s chests? I didn’t think I had that kind of power.

When I exited the church, I was shocked by the desertedness of the streets. Though Nessa had explained this as an “apocalypse,” my mind hadn’t fully processed the idea of what had happened. The sun was shining brightly, causing the cement sidewalks to sparkle beneath its light, but everything still seemed lifeless, dull, and dark. There wasn’t a single person—or any other life form for that matter—anywhere in sight. Everything was silent except for the soft sound of our feet hitting the pavement as we made our way down the sidewalk; this made me paranoid, expecting something to jump out at me any second. There was nothing, though.

“Never gets less creepy, huh?” Nessa sighed, breaking the silence.

“It’s always this quiet?” I asked.

“Yeah. There’s nothing during the day. The vampires are hiding, or sleeping, or whatever it is they do. No one is alive to make any noise.”

“So they’re all really dead? Not a single survivor is left?”

“Maybe there’s a few out there, but they keep themselves hidden like us.”

“Does the church keep us safe from them at night?” I asked, taking a glance over my shoulder at the church that was now a distance away.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I don’t think it has to be a church, though, it’s more like anything that’s sacred or holy. They can’t near stuff like that.”

“So how do some of us…some of us still get bit if we’re safe in the church?”

My mind was on my brother and mother. The walls of the church looked absolutely weak from the outside. It had obviously not protected them.

“Well, from what we’ve seen,” Nessa began, shifting the duffle bag over to the other shoulder while we walked, “some of the vampires are smart enough to stay away. There’s still some that, I guess, don’t understand what happens, so they break into the church anyways. It weakens them more than anything, makes it easier to kill them. But sometimes they just…get too far…”

For the rest of the walk, we were silent. I had thought surviving against vampires would have been easier if the church served as proper protection, but nothing did. There was no protection against the monsters we were facing.

We had reached a small grocery store and Nessa didn’t take any time to hurry in there and start shoveling cans into the bag she held. Most of the shelves were already emptied out, only a few more items remaining. The windows had been broken. Some of the shelves were knocked down. A few of the lights sparked and faded if they weren’t already completely dead.

I ran a couple fingers against the front counter, covering my fingertips with thick dust, and leaving a dustless trail on the counter.

“Almost done,” Nessa informed me, still loudly throwing can after can into the bag she was holding. “See if there’s any beer left. You look like you could use a few tonight.”

That sounded comforting. The best thing to do in a situation like this would be to drink it all away; that was my solution before, it should still be that way. I wandered around the store, searching for some beer. I was about to turn back and tell Nessa we were out of luck, but my eyes caught onto something at the end of one of the aisles. I couldn’t tell what it was; it just looked like a bundle of nothingness heaped onto the floor.

I inched my way closer, slowing down with each step. I could finally see what it was. It was a body, a dead body. The dry heaves from earlier threatened to creep up on me.

“N-Nessa,” I croaked out, sounding horrible and pathetic, like a completely helpless child.

“What?!” she came running, obviously frightened by the tone of my voice. She stood next to me and eyed me, trying to find what was wrong, but saw nothing except my eyes that were locked in place. She followed my gaze and saw the body. Her hand flew to her mouth, followed by a loud gasp.

The sight would make anyone sick. The body of a man lay on the floor, his left forearm missing, and the rest of his limbs skewed in the wrong direction. Most of the clothes were torn off his body, revealing the chunks of missing skin all over his body, so deep that his bones peeked out in a few areas. There was no blood, though. Not a single drop.

Where the skin wasn’t torn, his body seemed relatively fresh. It hadn’t been that long since he was…attacked, if it could be called that. His face had the least damage to it, and it was definite by his face that it hadn’t been that long since the attack happened.

“They fed,” Nessa whispered. “Drank every single drop of blood they could get. They’re getting hungrier.”

“And there’s not a lot of blood left for them,” I completed her thought.

“Come on,” Nessa stated, the calmness returning to her voice. She dragged me towards the body, and I resisted for a second, before giving in to her pull.

“What are you doing?” I was horrified, watching her step closer to the body.

“We need to take his body.”

“Why?”

“To bury him,” she said dryly. “Every body deserves to be buried properly. Especially since he didn’t die properly. You would always tell me that.”

She was right. It’s the least this man deserved. I nodded silently, and took hold of his legs, while she took hold of his arms. He was light, sickeningly light. There was almost no weight in the body that we carried out of the store and back towards the church. We didn’t bother going through the door, going around the church towards the graveyard in the back. We lay his body down on the floor and Nessa went back inside to get the shovels.

I stared at the corpse before me. His skin—what was left of it—was a sickly ashen white without any blood in it. He looked young, possibly in his twenties, and yet he died a death worse than anything I could imagine. How slow was it? Did he die instantly? Or did he feel his body being torn apart? I looked down at his arm that was half torn off. Did he feel that?

Nessa finally came back out with the shovels and I tore my eyes off the bloodless corpse. She searched around the long and open field for an opening. I wasn’t sure how she knew if there was already a grave there; she simply tapped her foot along the ground of certain areas, and moved on, doing the same thing until she found a spot a few yards away from where our family was buried. She shoved her shovel into that spot, leaving it to stand out from the ground, then came back over to me, ushering for me to pick up the dead man’s body. We carried him to that spot and began silently digging his grave. It took longer than I thought to finish digging it deep enough to put his body in.

“We need to hurry,” Nessa said, tossing a couple more shovels of dirt over our shoulders. “The sun’s about to go down.”

I climbed out of the grave, feeling jittery in that small space—it could have been my dead body in there. I shook the thought away and turned around to help Nessa out. She took my hand and crawled over the edge. She looked up at the sky. Nighttime was getting dangerously close.

“Will we be done in time?” I asked.

“I think so.”

My hand mindlessly patted the stake that was in my back pocket, making sure it was still there. My fingers wrapped around the top, becoming more familiar with it. If the time came, I wasn’t sure if I would really have the ability to use it the way it was supposed to be used.

“Hurry,” Nessa said, snapping me out of my wandering thoughts. She was already bent over, holding the arms of the dead body. I joined her, taking the legs, and we gently placed the man in his grave.

Once he was in there, it didn’t look like a new grave. It looked like a grave that had been dug out before the body had time to fully rot away and decompose. The idea that this disembodied person had been alive just a day or two ago was enough to make my stomach turn. I was too weak for all of this. I’d zoned out again until I noticed Nessa refilling the grave, covering the man with dirt. His pale skin contrasted against the piles of dirt that now littered his body. It almost looked like he was glowing.

I joined Nessa, keeping my eyes off the body as I threw more and more dirt back into the grave. The grave was almost full when Nessa froze in place and looked around, her eyes wide in panic.

“What?” I asked, looking around but seeing nothing. “What? Are they coming out already?”

“I-I don’t know,” she said, her voice shaking. “It’s almost dark. Shit. It’s almost dark, we took too long.”

We both looked up to the sky at the same time. The sun was barely visible now, peeking at us from past the church, and the sky was covered with blotches of misty orange and dull gray.

“We gotta go,” she said suddenly.

“But the sun—”

“Won’t touch them here!” she exclaimed, allowing panic to infiltrate her voice for the first time since I’d woken up. She pointed at the church that was completely covering the light of the sun, keeping it from hitting the area we were in. We were in the shadow of the church. “The sun’s hidden! Let’s go!”

We both dropped our shovels and started running towards the church. I was faster than Nessa, so I held her hand as we ran, keeping our paces the same. Our palms were coated in sweat when we realized how far the church was. Our breaths were heavy and labored from running and from panic. Our hope was lost when we heard animal-like snarls coming from behind us.

I didn’t want to look back and see what was coming after us. I didn’t want to see what kind of creature tore apart the body of the man we had just buried. I could tell that Nessa was looking back when her pace slowed and I could hear her small whimpers in between short breaths.

I tugged on her hand for her to speed up, but she continued to slow down. I finally looked back to see her staring at a blur of black coming towards us. There was no fixed shape to this blur as it continued to get closer and bigger. It was completely transparent but never stopped moving.

“Come on!” I yelled to Nessa, bringing her gaze back to me. Her eyes were wide and filled with tears. All the strength she’d held before was completely gone. “Don’t slow down!”

She started gaining speed again. When I took another glance over my shoulder, I could see the black blur had broken up into parts. There were smaller winds of black moving all over the place, all around us.

The church was close, though. I would be inside after just a few more strides. I had hope, imagining the safe confines of the church walls surrounding us. My hope was torn when I felt Nessa’s hand slip from my own as soon as I stopped at the opening of the church. Before I could turn to look at her, I heard her screaming and crying in a voice that was so unlike hers. I had to force myself to look back and see her being shrouded in ghosts of black. She was crouched on the floor, covering her face and screaming as they got closer to her.

Slowly, the blurs came to a standstill and formed the shape of human bodies, appearing in pairs. They stood around her as she screamed, but none of them went forth to attack her. There were men and women, old and young, tall and short, dark haired and light haired. The only thing they all shared was the sickening color of their pale skin. I could still see Nessa heaped on the floor.

Without thinking, I took hold of the stake in my back pocket and made my way over there in a steady walk, unsure of how well this one-man attack would go. But I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t let Nessa end up like the man I’d just buried. And she told me I’d promised to keep her safe. I couldn’t let them hurt her.

Before I reached them, none of them noticing my presence, Nessa suddenly looked up and saw me, barely catching my gaze in between the vampires’ bodies. She shook her head fervently, but I shook my head right back. Did she really expect me to leave her? I continued my slow walk towards them.

“No!” she finally screamed when I was just feet away from one of the vampires. “They’ll kill you! Just go!” She kept her head down as she yelled, and all the vampires’ eyes were still locked onto her blood-filled body.

I froze for a second, but none of the vampires moved, so I continued. Nessa interrupted my movements again.

“DAVID! GO!” This time she snapped her head up to look straight at me. Some of the vampires still stared at her, while others followed her gaze and saw me. I could feel their eyes scanning every part of my skin, knowing that with just one puncture, my blood would fill their mouths.

My body acted before my mind could interfere and I found myself running straight into the church and shutting the door behind me. The vampires didn’t hit the door, didn’t do anything. These were the ones that knew there was no touching me as long as I was in there.

Just as relief was about to wash over me, I processed the situation. Nessa was still out there. I was in here. I was safe. She wasn’t. I dropped to my knees and stared down at the stake in my hand. Useless.

I was supposed to protect her and I had abandoned her. I had left her to be eaten…I couldn’t allow myself to picture them tearing her body apart, lapping up each drop of blood like a dog deprived of water. My mind went numb with the thought, but my heart ached, with every sense of the word.

I hadn’t remembered who she was and didn’t hold the memories she held, but for her, I was David the hero, regardless of what I could remember. I laughed at the name she’d given me. I was no David. I was Shane. Useless Shane. Even before all this, I wasn’t strong enough to handle anything. Drowned out anything I felt with whatever could drown it out. Beer and drugs were my greatest friends. Everyone wanted me to be what they hoped and dreamed, but I wasn’t sure who I was. I didn’t want to be anyone’s idea of “perfect” but by the time I could form thoughts of my own, I was already the perfect image of an addict, and there was no turning back.

I should have told Nessa not to rely on me.

I pressed my sweaty palms to my ears, wanting to drown out any screams that would erupt at any second, though I hadn’t heard any yet. I wouldn’t give myself time to hear them. To remind me of how badly I failed her. I wished more than ever that I had been able to find beers at the store.

I didn’t know how much time had passed before I finally moved my hands from my ears and got up from my spot on the ground. The church was completely dark and I clumsily made my way over to the pews. I stared out into the darkness. I could hear snarls outside, like animals, every few seconds. Could one of those snarls belong to Nessa? Maybe she had survived and ended up turning. But then I would have to kill her. I wasn’t sure if I preferred her death to be at the hands of the vampires or at my own.

Nessa wasn’t there to pull me out of my zoned out state, so I did it myself. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to outline a few objects in the room. There was a cluster of candles thrown on the floor next to the altar. I searched around for a lighter, instinctively checking my back pocket first, because there used to always be one there. But there wasn’t. I patted the floor around the candles and still couldn’t find one. I became frustrated easily, so I tossed the candles aside, making my way back to the pews. I lay my head down and shut my eyes, blocking out the animalistic noises coming from outside the church walls.

I was able to fall asleep for a few minutes at a time before I was forced awake each time by thoughts and images of Nessa. I wished I at least knew what time it was, to give me an idea of when the sun would be up, and when I would have to go out to look for her body.