Revelations

Pain pounded at her head, filling her senses, uncaringly seeping into every fibre of her being. As she sat up her head spun, and her vision was swimming with tears of pain, sadness, and despair.

She didn't want to face the reality that stared her brutally in the face. She clutched her head, letting out a little whimper.

Her pathetic sobs of emotional and physical agony were the only sound filling the vast room, echoing emptily in her chest. She felt very lonely. But she knew, instantly, like a blow in the gut, that she wasn't alone.

She squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to look at those staring faces, eyes hollow. She gritted her teeth, reaching deep down for some shred of strength, of confidence to open her eyes and take in the scene before her. Her breaths were shallow and uneven and her eyes were filled with a kind of insanity, one that comes from suddenly realising that you're all alone. Her eyes opened.

The room was filled with bodies. Lots of them. The girl supressed a scream and bit her lip so hard that it bled. Her stomach lurched as she took in the sight of the blood, so much blood. It decorated the walls like a morbid artwork of death. The stench hung thickly in the air, causing nausea to rise up in her.

The first face she saw triggered a name. “Nate?” She was trembling now, as tears streamed in a steady flow down her cheeks.

She dragged herself across the ground, which was slick with blood. It stained through her jeans and she cringed, trying not to breathe through her nose. She took in the sight of her good friend, at his endlessly staring eyes, and slowly closed them. She couldn't stand him staring at her like that, even if he was dead.

She checked his neck and saw the bite mark made by two sharp incisors. She felt sick to her stomach, and put a hand to her neck. She was bitten too, to her immense disgust. The blood had caked over the side of her neck and felt prickly and uncomfortable. She froze immediately, when she saw blood on the frozen lips of Nate.

“Please no,” the girl whispered.

She tore her gaze from her dead friend's face and looked around the room at the dozen or so bodies that filled it.

She stumbled over to the door and pulled it open, breathing in the air, clean from the smell of blood and terror. She knew what she had to do. Her heart thudded against her ribcage painfully, and her face was wet with tears of sorrow.

Her eyes scanned the small room until she spotted the cupboard in the corner, with the huge lock on it to keep certain people out. She reached into her right pocket and procured a ring of keys. There was a slight jingle as she found the correct key and shoved it into the lock.

When she opened the cupboard her eyes immediately locked on the can of kerosene and she drew in a deep breath.

“Relax, Eliza, you can do this,” she murmured to herself. If she didn't do anything, in a couple of hours there could be a roomful of hungry vampires.

She tried not to look at the faces of the people who had been her family for the past five years. She clenched her jaw and poured kerosene until the can was near empty. After that she left a trail leading out of the room and into the deserted street.

Sobbing, she struck a match and it flared up.

She stared at the run-down building and her whole body shook with her heart-wrenching sobs. She shut her eyes briefly, and dropped the match.

The flame travelled toward the house, and as soon as the flame snaked its way inside the door burst into flames and the windows shattered as an inferno blew outward.

Eliza winced and covered her face, feeling the warmth of the inferno on her frozen features. Her eyes were filled with pain, and beneath her eyes were dark shadows betraying the fact of her sleepless nights.

“Goodbye,” she murmured through numb lips.

Feeling very lonely, she turned around and made for the city, where one of those tall buildings would doubtlessly give her shelter for the night. She checked her watch. Sunrise was in four and a half hours. She sighed.

Somewhere at the back of her mind, Eliza knew that it was insanity to go into the city alone. Each city housed more ten times more vampires than the countryside, where most humans hid in terror. But somehow she didn't care about anything. Everyone that she loved had been brutally, thoughtlessly, taken away from her all in an instant.

Eliza had woken up surrounded by the bodies of her loved ones, the ones who had taken her in at the age of twelve when her family had been viciously murdered by vampires and she was next. Nate had been there to save her from the monsters that plagued the earth. The monsters that crawled like termites through the lifeless streets, like leeches attaching themselves to their prey and sucking until the life was drained from the body. And their eyes when they fed, a ruby red colour that sparkled with bloodlust and a total nonchalance for the destruction surrounding them. The destruction they had wrought.

She could feel the warmth of the backpack on her back. Now, everything she owned was stuffed within a small bag on her back. She didn't know if there were any humans near the city. Really, anyone would be insane to dwell so close.

“Then why were we here?” she hissed to herself. She had asked that question countless times, but the question would continue to linger in the air, unanswered.

Eliza was certain that they had ventured close to the city for a purpose. So that was where she was heading.

Looming in the distance were the skeletal remains of Sydney, a city once thriving with people. But without the heart, without humanity, the city stood there like a lost child, wondering where the people had shrunk to, which corners of the world they were hiding.

Waiting for that day when they could seize back the power, the control.

That day isn't anytime soon, thought Eliza.