| Chapter Two | All about Insatiable |
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INSATIABLEbyDavid Dvorkin
Chapter Three
What? he asked himself. This isn't right. He struggled to wake up. He had been trapped in some dark, deep place. Light shone high above him, and he felt himself rising toward it, toward the world and life. But even his eyelids felt sluggish and glued together. He rubbed at his face with both hands, numb and awkward hands that felt like someone else's, and managed to open his eyes. He was in a dimly lit room he did not recognize. A faint light shone through thin curtains covering a window off to his left. Venneman pushed himself slowly and painfully into a sitting position. He was hungry and thirsty, and his joints felt stiff and uncooperative. Suddenly, he remembered drinking some beer and that stewardess, Karen, warning him that alcohol affected people more at higher altitudes. This must have been what she was talking about. You could wake up in someone else's bedroom feeling like hell. And, he realized, looking at himself in the dim light, still dressed in all your clothing. That last was a relief, in a way. It meant he had not done anything for which he would have to apologize to Jill. Elizabeth. He remembered a woman named Elizabeth, and he remembered kissing her. Had they done more? He couldn't bring any more memories about her to the surface. He turned and let his legs dangle over the edge of the hard surface he had been sleeping on. Some sort of table, he thought. He had actually fallen asleep on someone's table! I'll never drink alcohol again, he vowed to himself. It was a long, narrow metal table with a raised edge, and it was cold. His clothes were damp, and so was the woolen cap that covered his head and his forehead down to his eyebrows. He pulled it off and ran his hand through his cold, wet hair. He longed for a hot shower, but even more, he longed for food and drink. He slid off the table, onto his feet. His knees buckled, and he grabbed the edge of the table just in time to keep himself from falling. He held onto the table. His legs were shaking, his head swimming. His pulse pounded in his ears. Venneman stood still for a while, bent over, leaning against the table, and breathed deeply. At last he felt able to stand straight. In the dim light, he could just make out glass-fronted cabinets lining the walls and filled with unidentifiable objects. He walked cautiously over to the window and drew the curtain aside. Outside was a snow-covered hillside, gleaming with reflected light. The sky overhead was dark, filled with brilliant stars. Venneman let the curtain fall back into place and walked cautiously across the room to the doorway. He began to feel stronger, more his normal self. His legs had regained their strength, he no longer felt dizzy, and his pulse seemed normal again. His hunger and thirst, though, were overwhelming. Wherever he was, he thought, there must be something to eat and drink in the place. Finding it was his first priority. And then dry, warm clothing. He opened the door and stepped through it. Some light came through the door from the room behind him, but not enough to see anything. Venneman slid his hand around on the wall beside the doorway and found a switch. He threw it, and a brilliant white light came on overhead, showing him another room much like the one in which he had awakened. In this room, too, there was a metal table in the center of the room. Someone was lying on it. The person was asleep on the table, just as Venneman had been, but was covered by a sheet up to the chin. Venneman hesitated. The other person might also be sleeping off the effects of alcohol at high altitude. But Venneman's hunger and thirst were becoming too powerful to ignore. He stepped forward and cleared his throat. Now he was close enough to see that something was wrong with the sleeper's face. Venneman stepped even closer. The sleeper was a young man. His eyes were closed, and one seemed lower than the other, with the eyebrow where the eyelashes should be. His forehead sagged down on the same side. Above that, his scalp had been sliced open in a line running from side to side across the top of the head, and the skull gleamed through the opening. Venneman gasped in horror and jumped back. Where was he? What had he gotten himself into? Elizabeth, the woman in the snow . . . Something moved beneath the surface of his mind, some nightmarish memory involving her, something this mutilated young man reminded him of. Hesitantly, Venneman stepped forward again. He couldn't just run away and leave this injured man alone, much as he wanted to. He reached for the sheet. "Listen," he said, "I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to see if you have any other injuries before I go looking for a doctor, okay?" He peeled the sheet back. The young man had been sliced open from shoulder to shoulder, and from the breastbone down to his genitals. Bone and muscle and skin had been pulled back in two huge flaps, exposing a dark emptiness within. Venneman stood staring down into the opening, unable to breathe, unwilling to move. "Jesus," he whispered at last. "Oh, God!" He leaned over the corpse for a closer look. His first impression had been wrong. There were some organs within the opening. Which was which? he wondered. That one, he thought. What's that one? He reached in cautiously and touched something reddish-yellow with a veined surface. It was cold. He had somehow expected it to be hot. The coldness disgusted him. He pulled back and grimaced and let the sheet fall over the corpse. And then he realized what he had just done. A wave of nausea hit him. It's the cold, he told himself. Hunger. I'm confused because I'm so hungry. That was his excuse. What excuse could the mutilators of this poor young man have? He had to get out of this place, wherever and whatever it was, and find the police and tell them what was going on in here. The room had another door. Venneman went to it and turned the handle. The door was locked. "Damn you!" he shouted. He turned quickly to the corpse. "Sorry." Jesus, he thought, I'm going off the deep end. Apologizing to a goddamned corpse. A sliced-open corpse. He laughed, and stopped short. "I'm going crazy," he said aloud. "Hey! Open the door! Let me out!" He rattled the handle. "Let me out!" he shouted. He threw himself against the door. It shook on its hinges but remained locked. "God damn you!" Venneman shrieked. He took a few steps back, then ran at the door, hitting it with his shoulder. The door split down its middle, and Venneman was free. He stood on a sidewalk in the night. At one end of the street, a quarter moon hung above the mountain peaks visible between the low buildings. At the other end, the horizon was almost flat and the sky was turning grey. There were no human beings in sight. Venneman didn't recognize the building he had just escaped from or anything else around him. Where was his hotel? What had happened to him while he slept? Have to find the police, he thought. The strength and alertness he had felt before now drained away again. Once again, hunger gnawed at him, and thirst made his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. He was cold, shivering. He feared he would freeze to death. He staggered down the sidewalk, choosing his direction at random. Got to find someone, he thought. Got to find help. Got to clear my head. A few blocks along, he saw someone coming toward him on the sidewalk. Venneman stopped and waited, weaving slightly from side to side, lacking the strength to walk further. For a nightmarish moment, Venneman thought the figure walking toward him was the young man he had seen moments before, cut open and lying on a metal table. Then, as the other pedestrian came closer, he realized that it was also a young man covered in white, but the white was a coat covered with white fur and a white ski cap. There the resemblance ended. This young man was filled with life and warmth. Venneman held up a trembling hand to stop him. "Help me," he tried to say, but the words came out garbled and incomprehensible. "Police. A body." He couldn't seem to make his tongue work properly. The young man looked at him warily and kept his distance. "Wrong town for a handout, buddy." Venneman shook his head. He felt a faint return of his anger. "No, no. Police. Murder." The young man's face cleared. "Oh, a foreign tourist, huh?" He started speaking slowly and louder. "You tell me what you need, okay? I help you, okay?" Loud though they were, his words faded away, drowned out by the sound of his beating heart. Venneman could hear nothing else. The young man's coat was open at the neck, as was the collar of the shirt underneath it. Venneman stared intently at his neck. He could see blood vessels pulsating there. Listening with all his being, Venneman heard the faint whisper of the blood rushing through them. How young and alive this man was, how vital! That was what Venneman needed, that vitality. His hunger and his thirst became intolerable, but now they were a force urging him forward, not a weakness holding him back. He took a step toward the other man, reaching for his neck. "Hey!" The other man stepped back. "Watch it, buddy! This is America!" Venneman lunged at him, flinging his arms around the other man's chest, trapping his arms against his side. There was something familiar about this, but he could spare no thought for that. He could think only of the blood now so close to him. His victim shouted, "What the fuck!" He struggled vigorously, but he was helpless against Venneman. Venneman seemed to be watching all of this from somewhere outside. He watched Richard Venneman lower his face to the struggling man's neck and sink his teeth in, deep, down to where the blood flowed. The other man was large and heavily muscled. How, Venneman wondered, watching himself from the side, could the weakened Richard Venneman hope to overpower him? And yet he was doing it. The other man's shouts had turned to weak gurgles, and his struggles were subsiding. He was unable to pull his arms free and unable to wrench his neck away from Venneman's teeth. His kicks against Venneman's legs seemed to have no effect. Venneman snapped back into his own body, drawn by the rush of blood through his mouth. It was honey, it was wine, it was electricity. He had never tasted anything like it before. He had never felt such delight. He had never felt so strong. He was possessed by a strength that had come from somewhere outside. No, it came from the blood he swallowed greedily. That strength flooded his body and his being, suffusing his every cell, filling him with the other man's life and heat. Venneman's victim hung limp in his arms. With some difficulty, Venneman loosened his grip and let the man slide to the ground, where he lay on his back, staring sightlessly up at Venneman. His head was bent to one side, away from the ragged hole in the side of his neck. The edges of the wound were colorless, bloodless. His face was pale. Venneman's hunger and thirst were gone. He was filled with life and warmth. His clothes were still damp, but that no longer bothered him. His mind was now clear and alert. With alertness came horror and disgust at what he had done. With it came memory, too. He remembered everything that had happened with Elizabeth, from their glances at the bar to his death outside in the snow. She had done to him what he had just done to this young man. Understanding came as well. Elizabeth was a creature that, until now, Venneman had thought was only a myth. She was a vampire, and she had made him one.
How easily he had picked it up and carried it! He was something more than he had been before Elizabeth. No, he thought, I'm only superior physically. Morally, I've become a beast, a killer, a predator. I've murdered a fellow human being. But he could no longer speak of fellow human beings. Those old movies he had watched on television as a boy had taught him that much about vampires. He had become a nonhuman, a creature of night and nightmare. He had died and come back as one of the undead - soulless and beyond salvation. What good had all his years of going to church and believing in God done him? Through no fault of his own, Venneman was now cut off from God, from Heaven, from any hope of an afterlife. This was his afterlife: to lurk in the shadows and avoid the light and kill innocent human beings. This would be his eternal life, until the world ended. Venneman raised his face to the lightening sky and shouted, "No!" He would put an end to this. Vampires could be killed. So the movies had told him. He considered driving a sharpened stake into his own heart, but the idea horrified him, and he doubted if even this new vampirish strength filling his body would be sufficient for that. He had felt weakened by his hunger and thirst, so perhaps he could simply starve himself to death, but he couldn't remember seeing anything in a movie about vampires dying that way. Nor was he sure he could exert enough self-control to starve himself. He remembered how little control he had had over himself when his victim's blood had called to him. The blood had been in control, not Venneman. What chance that he could hold back from feeding again, when the hunger and thirst struck, and the blood sang? That left sunlight. A single touch of a sunbeam was supposed to make a vampire burn and shrivel and steam away into nothingness. He had seen that scene often. It looked like an agonizing way to die, but didn't he deserve a painful death for having committed a terrible murder? Venneman stepped back out onto the sidewalk and stood still and waited for the sunlight to find him. Overhead, the grey was turning to blue. On the horizon, the blue was tinged with red. Any moment now, Venneman knew, the first golden edge of the sun would appear, coming over the horizon to destroy him. He felt gripped with panic, with the need to run and seek a place where he could hide until nightfall. That's not me feeling the panic, he thought. That's the vampire inside me. I'll defeat him. But his panic grew. His body vibrated with the need to move. He clenched his jaws and held himself stiff and still. His right foot began to slide along the sidewalk, moving in the direction of the dark place where he had left his victim's body. "No!" Venneman said. He forced his feet together and squeezed his knees against one another, willing his legs not to move. The edge of the sun glared above the horizon, and Venneman shut his eyes. His face was on fire. The sun rose higher, and the furnace heat moved slowly down over Venneman's clothing, seeking a way in, to his skin. It caught his ungloved hands and set them ablaze, too. Venneman yanked at his coat, pulling it open, trying to expose more of himself. But it was intolerable. He couldn't control his need to escape any more than he could have ignored his earlier need to kill and feed. He broke and ran, diving head first into the dark, cool space between buildings where his first victim lay. He landed on the corpse, rolled off it, and lay half conscious beside it. When the first pedestrians passed by an hour later, their voices echoing from the walls to either side of him, Venneman roused himself enough to crawl further back into the shadows, dragging his victim's corpse behind him. Well back in the dark, safe from the eyes of the living and the light of the sun, Venneman curled himself into a ball beside the stiffening corpse and slept. In his sleep, he shivered with fever. He dreamed dreams of blood and fire and pain, of a sea of blood that choked him with its smell, and lakes of fire that burned his ever-renewing skin off him over and over. He dreamed of agony that filled the universe, inescapable, that chewed him and swallowed him and spat him out so that it could chew and swallow him again. Slowly, the pain and fire disappeared. Only the blood remained. Rivers of blood rushed and pulsated through his dreams, emptying into a sluggish red ocean. The smell was a perfume. Venneman drifted up into wakefulness. He opened his eyes and stared into the empty eyes of his victim. He jerked away and sat up. Above, visible between the buildings, the sky was fading into darkness again. The brilliant stars of the high altitudes gleamed down at him. Each one is a sun, Venneman thought. Why don't they burn me? Distance. I'm far enough removed from their light. Distance from the light means safety, distance from the light that powers creation. He rose to his feet. He felt strong again. He ran his hands over his face. The skin felt smooth and unharmed, and he felt no pain from his own touch. But his mouth was dry, and in his stomach once again he felt the beginning pangs of hunger. "No, please," Venneman whispered. "Not again. I can't do it again." He brushed the snow from his clothes and walked out onto the sidewalk. The glow of sunset was still fading in the west, where the mountains were a jagged silhouette against the orange afterglow. Venneman looked in that direction, squinting against the brilliance, and then turned away. He walked toward the darkest horizon. The sidewalks were alive with vacationers, the same gaudy peacocks Venneman had sneered at before. But now, as he walked, they didn't ignore him. Their eyes seemed drawn to him, and yet they moved aside for him, leaving him walking in an island of loneliness. And now he saw them differently, too: not as a superior species, looking down at him, but as a herd of cattle, walking repositories of a life that was by natural right his to take when he needed it. Their blood pounded in them and filled the air about them with its sound and smell. I will not, he told himself. I will not do it again. I will not. To keep that pledge, he had to avoid these creatures. Their blood and his hunger would overpower him. Venneman walked as fast he could, desperate to leave the crowds behind. The street and the sidewalk ended abruptly. The town had been planned and built as a ski resort. Beyond its designed edges, the original landscape reasserted itself. Venneman found himself in a snowy field surrounded by tree-covered hillsides, with the light and life of the town behind him. Here, the snow came up above his knees. Yet the cold didn't bother him, and he had so much more strength than before that he could plough his way through the snow with little difficulty. Off to his right, he could see a steep hillside. A wide swath running from its top down to its base glowed in the remnants of twilight and the man-made lights strung along its length. Around it, the hillside was dark. It was a ski run, Venneman realized, and a familiar one. He was not far from the place where Elizabeth had made love to him and killed him. Drawn against his will, he made his way through the snow in that direction. The place of his death was still hidden from him by the shadowy bulk of a snow bank when he heard a last faint, gurgling cry, dying away, and then a slurping, sucking sound that lasted for minutes more. Frozen in place, his heart pounding, Venneman listened. The sucking ended, and then he heard a sigh of satisfaction. Then he heard Elizabeth's voice, clear and loud in the darkness. "Come, Richard. Come here."
"Come here, Richard." Louder, deeper, thrilling through him. His legs moved. Control of them had been taken from him. He pushed his way forward through the snow, breaking through the head-high snow bank as easily as if it had been mist. The powdery snow floated in the air and drifted slowly away. He could feel it faintly on his face, cold little points of ice. He could see it sparkling in the air, reflecting manmade light. Elizabeth knelt in the snow, looking up at him. She was a dark figure against the white. On the ground before her lay another dark figure. "Come closer, Richard. Look." She lowered her head toward the still figure on the ground. Venneman stepped forward. Her victim this time was a middle-aged man. He lay on his back, his head tilted to the right. His heavy coat was pulled open at the throat. The left side of his neck was a huge wound, its edges pale and bloodless. His eyes were open, staring over Venneman's shoulder. His face was slack, expressionless. "He has his clothes on," Venneman said. "So do you." Elizabeth smiled. "Of course, Richard. Did you think I make love to all my prey? You have a lot to learn about what you are. I have a lot to teach you. Look." She gestured again at the body in the snow. "He was prey, that's all. A sack of blood, a reservoir of life that I needed. I didn't want him after that. Not like you." She rose to her feet. She was as graceful and strong, he thought, as a lioness. She stepped over the corpse, not even looking at it. "You came because I called you," she said. "You'll learn to do that, too. You can keep your prey alive for your future use. You don't have to kill them. You can take just some blood from them. You'll learn how to do that, too. I think we must have something in our saliva that stops their bleeding and encourages their wounds to heal quite fast, even a deep bite that would otherwise be fatal. So they live and become healthy again - and filled with blood again. And then you can call them to you when you need them again. Always, for the rest of their lives." Venneman stepped back, filled with disgust. "I'm not going to be a parasite like that. I won't live that way." Elizabeth smiled and stepped forward, stopping inches away from Venneman. "You can't live any other way, Richard. And you won't want to do anything but live." He tried to protest, but he couldn't speak. And now he couldn't move. Elizabeth put her hand up slowly and stroked his cheek, as she had done before. Venneman's heart raced and his knees felt weak. "I can hear your heart," Elizabeth whispered. "I can hear your blood. Oh, Richard, it's so much stronger than it was! Come, Richard." She stepped back and undressed slowly. She laid her clothes out on the snow and stretched out on them and held her arms up to him. Venneman pulled his clothes off and fell on her, hungry in a different way, in a way he had felt only once before, and that with her. But now he was stronger than Elizabeth. He could feel strength and vitality surging through him, growing with each thrust into her, each grinding of body against body. He was unaware of the cold snow beneath, of the cold sky above, of the cooling corpse beside them. But when they finished, hours later, he was drained and weak again. He rolled off Elizabeth and lay on his back in the snow. "I need . . ." he gasped. "I need . . ." Elizabeth raised herself onto one elbow and looked down at him, stroking his face. "You need blood. You need it most at the beginning of your life. You have to feed frequently, now, to build and grow properly, to complete the process. The need diminishes later. I usually feed once a month or even less. Here." She leaned closer. "Just for now, just to give you a bit of strength, take a little sip of mine. Vampire blood is so much stronger than human blood, it only takes a little bit." She bent down over him and pressed her throat against his mouth. She whispered, "Just a tiny nip, Richard." Venneman tried to turn his head away, to take his mouth away from her skin, but the sound and smell of her vampire blood overpowered him. He bit carefully into her skin, making only a tiny wound, and sucked. And pushed her away and rolled off the clothing and into the snow, coughing. Her blood was sour and bitter and nauseating. He spat it out again and again, unable to get the disgusting taste from his mouth. "See how well evolution works, Richard?" Elizabeth said. "We can't take blood from each other, only from our natural prey. I could have told you, but this way, you'll always remember it. We never attack each other. Come, now. Let's go into town and find you someone." Venneman scooped up a handful of snow, stuffed it into his mouth, and let it melt there. He swished it around in his mouth and spat it out. The taste of Elizabeth's foul blood was almost gone. Only a faint, stomach-churning hint of it remained. He struggled to his feet and stumbled backward. He picked up his clothes and pulled them on clumsily. "Evolution? This doesn't have anything to do with nature! We're not part of nature, we're something unnatural!" She shook her head. "We're the top of the food chain, Richard. Whether you like it or not, you're very much a part of nature. You've never seen a lion take its prey, have you? Or a bear or a tiger or any of the other great predators? It's magnificent to see, Richard. Thrilling. Now you're the same as they are. And you have to learn how to live the predator's life properly, just as they do. You must have felt that when you encountered humans on the way out of town. Didn't you?" "No," he lied. "All I could feel was that I was something unnatural and evil and that God hates me now." "God?" Elizabeth repeated. "Oh, my. Richard, if God exists, and if He's all-powerful, then He created us, too. He's responsible for our needs and our deeds, isn't He?" She thought for a moment. "Perhaps our victims deserve what they get. Perhaps we're their punishment for some sin, and we're helping to fulfill God's plan, whatever that is. If one believes in God." "I believe in God," Venneman said. "But He didn't create us. The Devil did." "While God wasn't looking? God must have allowed the Devil to create vampires for some impenetrable reason of His own. So, once again, everything's as it should be, and we should just get on with enjoying our lives. Our very long lives. Richard, this is the sort of theological silliness college boys argue about late at night. We have pleasure to concern ourselves with, and that's far more important than religious arguments." "There's nothing more important than this," Venneman said. "Because of you, I'm going to spend eternity in Hell." He stopped, struck by a new idea. "I think I'm already there, God help me." Elizabeth smiled. "You'll change you're mind about that. Come. Let's go into town, and I'll show you that for us, this world is Heaven. Your mind isn't working properly because you need blood. You'll see how much better you'll feel after you feed." "You mean kill another innocent victim?" Venneman said. "I'll die first. I'll die," he repeated. "I'll do it somehow. I'll kill myself." "You'll try, perhaps, but you won't succeed. Forget the stake and the cross and the silver bullet. They don't work. And you might as well forget God, too, Richard. If God does exist, He didn't raise a finger to help you, and now He'll shun you. We're immortal, and we have dominion over mankind. That makes us the true gods." "Damn you," Venneman said. "You and your smooth tongue. The Devil has a smooth tongue, too." "Come and see again how smooth mine is, Richard." Venneman snarled at her. "You're going to Hell, but I can still redeem myself." He staggered away from her. His feet were almost too heavy to lift, and he gasped for breath. His belly shrieked with hunger, and his tongue stuck to the dry roof of his mouth. From the darkness behind him, Elizabeth said, "Don't go too far away, Richard. I'll be calling you later." Then she laughed. |
| Chapter Two | All about Insatiable |