Content Warnings: Rape, Bad Shit. Do Not Read, basically.

I stumbled on the side of the highway. Somewhere behind me, the sun was rising and I could not walk fast enough to escape it. There was no shade except for these stringy creoset bushes on an endless plain of sand surrounded by mountains.

My legs ached to stop, but I continued, doggedly pursuing each footstep ahead of me, even as wisps of smoke started rising from beneath my clothes.

At last, I drop down and huddle next to the base of a large thorny bush. It offers scant more shade than the rest.

I scrape the crumbs of blood from my mouth and chin. The taste I gave up on hours ago, rasping my tongue on the cloth to no effect long before dawn. My fingernails were caked with rusty flakes of dried blood. Won't do. I was lucky most of my clothes weren't similarly ruined.

There was nothing I could do for my pale, smoking skin or growing migraine but sit and suffer. So here, hiding in the shadow of a bush with my shirt over my head, I wait for a miracle to occur. Or at least no trouble.

***

I wake up.
My eyes are heavy and my thoughts move sluggishly. I am in a dark room and it smells musty, my sinuses clogged with dust. I wrinkle my nose -- I hate that I can't reach my nose because my hands are tied.
That's alarming, I think. Though I'm more befuddled to think of a class prank.
I lift my eyes to see the pale woman from earlier sitting across from me. Alicia.
I'm tied down to the chair that I'm sitting in.
"Hey." I mumble. "Can you let me out?"
She looks at me and doesn't say anything. She goes back to looking at her phone.
I can't tell what time it is, but I feel really fucked up. I should probably get out of here. I realize I've forgotten about my friends. I ask Alicia about them, she ignores me. I think she's wearing earbuds. Shame.
Try the knots, doesn't work at all. Just rasps on my wrists.
Look around, see a dark indistinct wallpaper with old patterns, stained and torn in places, like the wood paneling and floors. The floors are deeply gashed by I don't know what, I've never seen damage like that. It's like I'm in a small storage room with no light except for Alicia's phone.
"Hey. I need to pee."
"Shut it, meat." So she can hear me.
"What?"
She didn't oblige to answer. I really did need to piss, and my wakening anxiety wasn't helping.
"Meat? What does that mean?"
Quick footsteps rapped down the hallway and the door swung open violently, startling Alicia to attention.
"Put that shit away," a hoary voice drawls in a commanding tone. "Get the meat ready," it says, before abruptly turning and flying back down the hall.
From what I could see there was barely any light in the hallway or in the building at all, but it wasn't pitch black.
Alicia put the phone away, banishing the only source of light and proceeding to untie my hands.
"I really do need to pee."
"Shut up," she mutters.
"Like, what the fuck is going on?" I hissed.
"Shut up! Keep talking and..." She bit back a curse. "Just shut up." She sounded nervous.
Why were we whispering anyways? It hit me that the house was completely silent. Better yet, even through my clogged nostrils I could smell something rotten and coppery.
She unties me and pulls me into the hallway, leading me by some imperceptible light through the darkness into a labyrinth of hallways and rooms and stairs until the floor turned uneven and the walls echoed like a cavern.
"I'm not going in there. That's a fucking murderhole."
"Come on," she insists, as if she were talking to a child.
"Hell no. This is fucking weird and I don't want to die and where the fuck are my friends, Alicia?"
"That's not my name," she says, and some cruel joy comes over her. With little effort, she grabs me by the wrist and drags me like a doll so I scramble to keep up. I don't know how she can see anything at all now. Eventually I can make out the sound of dripping water and a torchlit ritual comes into view.
At the center of the cavern, there is a raised dais with a closed coffin on it and Charlie and Ashley, kneeling next to their own handlers. About a dozen shadowy figures circle the dais, including some of the people from the party before. Jackson is not here.
The metallic smell from before returns as we approach the dais and through the flickering light I make out bloodstains next to the coffin. I heard a few snickers, I must have let my bladder go but I don't know when, my guts are tight as ice. All I could think of was the terrified, silent expressions on my friends' faces. Charlie's face was bruised and Ashley was sore from crying.
Again, with a single hand Alicia pushed me into the ground and held me by the shoulder with an iron grip next to Charlie and Ashley on the dais.
A robed figure I recognized as the hallway voice standing next to the coffin opened it and bent over, whispering to whatever was inside before moving aside as two legs swooped over the side of the coffin, followed by a tall, pale man in a tailored suit with a sullen, sunken face. He had wine-colored almost-black eyes of cold enmity that took in the scant light, played with it, absorbed it, perched behind a stretched alabaster mask.
"Let them feast," he says with a disaffected gesture, and with a practiced movement the handlers draw knives across the throats of their charges, Ashley and Charlie gurgling their last breaths in helpless struggle as the crowd squeals and rushes to lap from the basin, a circular groove in the dais filling with blood.
I watched, sickened, but not as much as I should have been. I was just glad it wasn't me.
"Bring her to me," the vampire says.
Alicia shifts her vice grip and glides effortlessly, dragging me by the upper arm. My heartbeat thunders as he caresses my cheek, unable to move. 
"You've soiled yourself," he says with a touch of pity, and I feel ashamed despite myself.
I won't lie, there was an element of sexual tension, a small hope even, before four inches of cold steel blades buried themselves into my neck.
Poisonous euphoria overwhelmed me as I lay captive and unseeing, disabled, helpless, peacefully succumbing to my obvious death.
Then, gunshots, cracks of thunder shake the caves, and the knives dislodge from my neck swiftly. I sink to the ground like a bag of sand while the cavern rings with gunfire and screams that eventually grow distant.
When I woke up again, I was buried in bodies and blood. The torches had been extinguished. I tried not to think about my friends as I tripped over strewn hands and legs in absolute darkness.
My head was fuzzy. I rubbed the two holes in my neck absentmindedly, they had sealed and scabbed into two neat circles. 
I still couldn't see anything, so I dug through pockets until I found a phone. Turning it on blinded me with a picture of a smiling stranger, then I turned it around to light the way. I didn't hear any more fighting, so I rushed through the darkness, fearing something crawling behind me chasing the light in my hands. I followed the caves upwards until I came to a door. I opened the door and walked into a basement that was chilly and slightly damp while I was covered in dirt and blood and piss. 
I don't know who has a door in their basement to an underground vampire feeding chamber, but I didn't want to know. I got out through a window from the basement and ran off into the desert away from the lone house. I found a road, and followed it to a larger one, and I walked along that.

The stars in the sky seemed to burn so bright and the biting wind was welcome and I thanked God for the sound of crickets and whooshing gusts and a crescent moon and most of all that which I was not in that terrible place.

***

And then I was on the side of the highway.

Eventually, the whistling drone of a semi brought me out of hiding, and I ran into the street waving my arms over my head like a lunatic. I didn't think it would stop. But it screeched to a halt.

The driver didn't immediately get out, so the truck stood there, halted a few measures short of me.
I covered my head and walked over to the window, feeling uneasy next to the massive hissing beast.
The passenger window rolled down, and I saw a cautious, pudgy man in flannels behind the wheel next to a small pile of snacks. He wasn't morbidly obese, but the endless hours of sitting had done their work.
Most noticeably, the cabin was full of an immense human odor in a way I had never experienced it before. It was overwhelming, layered with sweat, and hormones, and dust, and breath, and waste -- strangely alluring and sickening. The cabin and he driver appeared to be tidy and well-kept though. The sum was incongruous.
He noticed the hesitancy and took his own time to absorb my pale appearance and wasted pallor.
"So, you need a ride?" he said.
"Yeah," I croaked. I felt like shit.
"Where are you going?"
"I don't really care, I don't - I don't fucking know."
"Uh huh. If you're on any junk, lose it. I'll take you to Benson."
"I'm not on anything."
"Sure," he says, handing me a water bottle. "Christ, you look spectacularly terrible. Did you sleep on the side of the road or something?"
"No."
"All right, I won't ask," he says, throwing up his hands.
I open the door and slide in, the door thudding behind me. The smell grows stronger.
I sat and enjoyed the ride for a while before I made small talk. His name was Vern, he was a senior truck driver, and he didn't usually drive alone. He did not have a family. He may have said some other things, but I wouldn't know, the conversation drifted off, and then so did I.

I woke up when he shook me by the shoulder and thrust a bag of donuts and a coffee into my hands. The truck was parked at a stop, but it was now firmly night. I gnawed on the cold sough with something else twisting my stomach.
"Hey Vern," I said, "we must've passed Benson, right?"
"Yeah... my route is to Chicago, and you said you didn't care where you went, so I figured you wouldn't mind." He didn't meet my eye.
I saw hardly any lights or cars as we returned to the road, so we must have been parked at a remote station.
Then he pulled off the road, muttered something about needing to piss despite just leaving a gas stop.
Whatever was in my stomach was now writhing. All the alarms were going off, but I was still hoping that maybe  I was just overreacting. 
Yeah, that's it. I'm overreacting.
Alone. With no idea where I am. In a stranger's truck.
I looked out the window to see where he was, but I couldn't find him. 
Then the door opened, and there was fat Vern with a gun in my face.
"Put your hands on your head. We're going for a walk."
"Okay." I sounded so small while the truck still hummed. The ground was glowing orange from the LED strips on the side of the truck illuminating the dirt and the cuffs of Vern's jeans until he marched me into the dark past the barbed wire and far into the bushes until I couldn't see the truck or highway anymore.

I could smell the anticipation off him, acrid perspiration mixing with the cool night breeze. He prods me forward with the revolver, cruelly jutting into the small of my back. Far off, I could see a few specks of light, but they were no closer to helping me than the stars in the sky. I don't know what I was thinking. What I thought would happen. I didn't think I was going to survive this. I also didn't really care. My heart had turned into ice with my insides, but it was running like a motherfucker, my adrenaline-addled body processing details in high clarity for my befuddled mind to ignore in a perfect trainwreck of fist-to-mouth alignment.
"Stop," he grunted. He pats my pockets with his left hand, keeping the gun in the right poised at my chest. He takes out the phone, huffing.
I hear coyotes howl, their voices bleeding into the wind.
"Turn around." I did. I could see his clammy, ugly face clearly in the moonlight and his fat hand holding a tiny revolver. Strangely, he reminded me of sausage. How deliciously human the cabin had smelled.
"Get down on your knees." I did.
He unclasped his belt and zipper, and I was met with an even more enticing smell of roasted meat. What the hell? What in the actual fuck?! I should be crying, I think, but something in me is eager, even in the danger.
"... Sick fuck. You look like you *want* it." He considered for a moment, his erection hanging in the wind. He presses the gun into my forehead. 
"Suck it."
Now, I felt violated. Now, I felt sick. I opened my mouth -- I've never done this before, ever, and I did it. I felt nauseous. Yeah, I sucked it.
"No teeth!" he groans. "I'll fucking kill you."
I felt the gun hovering next to my head. I knew I could grab it. I could see what would happen. My senses were sharper, faster -- something clicked, and I was not afraid. 
I would not be the victim here.
My left hand swept up and clasped the muzzle, wresting it away towards the sky while my teeth sank through flesh and severed his penis at the base. I yank my head back and tear off the last shreds of skin, blood spurting freely into my face as his gasps of pain finally give way to screaming. He hadn't even pulled the trigger once and I mangle his hand, pulling the gun off his broken fingers.
He fell and twisted away as I spat out the flesh embedded in my throat, then turned the gun around and fired into his left side until there were only empty clicks.
I was lucky, I barely held onto the revolver and it stung like hell in my hand. My ears rang from the explosions.
I rocked in the night wind, swaying on my feet. I felt like retching. But the sweet smell of blood carried to me.
I drank like a pig from his prolific blood, quietly seeping into the desert sand. It didn't even pool, the desert was so eager to receive.
I thought of how it would look, one scrawny figure feeding from a corpse in the moonlight, black blood scattered in the dirt. I thought of the rich, fatty taste dribbling down my throat, and how just the night before, I had been called "meat." 
"Well," as I sucked the last drops from my fingers. "Guess who's food now?"
When I finished, the coyotes had ceased howling. The gunshots probably scared them off. Or drew them.
I faltered on my feet back in the direction of the truck before I remembered that I needed the keys. I walked back to the body, then took his wallet and keys. I couldn't shoot him again, so I kicked the shit out of his rigid corpse, then ripped off his jaw and threw it into the bushes. He was already a mess of blood from the bullet holes and the groin but the missing chunks of stomach fat, empty eye pits, collapsed and splintered rib cage, a caved-in skull, and no jaw or teeth really completed the picture. The vultures and maggots would have a nice buffet tomorrow.

The cold moon had worked its way to the zenith by the time I returned to the truck. I changed into some of his spare clothes in the cabin, bathing me in the human odor again. They were obviously oversized, but my clothes were now completely ruined. Eventually I figured out how to run the semi, slowly, and stopped about fifty miles away.



***

The hunger is gnawing at my stomach, so I stuffed myself with carbs on sugar, but my organs seem intent on dissolving, so now I just feel bloated and puffy, hungry and full but empty.
But one whiff and the sharpness returns, eyes widen, pulse quickens, the obsession returns, discarding my sluggishness with a flash of urgent purpose.
So I hide in the house in a patchouli filled haze, trying to drown out the scent until it's time to leave. Then I can pick up some medication at work.
Night falls, and I have a bad feeling as I get in the car -- but what days don't I feel bad now?
Carla looks relieved when I arrive. Her face is ugly and bruised from cigarettes and what I imagine is bad sex. Still, she's not the worst. Very kind and forgiving, actually. 
She disappears and I rifle through the pills to begin my shift, when a sharp-looking young guy walks in the door and stands by the counter. I stare at the colorful packets and the price tags for a moment and throw up my hands.
He's waiting at the counter when I arrive. I take him in and feel faint at the scent of blood, far richer than the perfume he's wearing, seeping throughout his pores. He may as well be bathing in a pool of red mist. Maybe the patchouli was a bad idea, I think, the hairs on the back of my neck bristling and cold.
"20 on 2," he says, plainly, innocently.
"Is that it?"
"Yes."
I find myself leaning over the counter to get a better smell and he takes a step back reflexively.
"Are you okay?" he asks with concern.
"Yesss," a voice comes out, sultry and foreign as goddamn incense.
"I'm just thinking... you and me... later..."
His face relaxes and his eyes take on a dull sheen. He nods, dumbly, without resistance.
It would be so easy. He would never make it to my house. Dumped in a convenient alleyway. The bloodlust beckons to me -- and I catch myself.
"No! No... no. Um. Have a nice day."
Just like that, he shakes it off, and hurries to the pump like nothing happened. The car drives off, and I remain, tortured by the smell and my choleric innards.
I chew gum relentlessly through the night and it seems to help with the customers, but fortunately none of the regulars have the same attraction as the young man from earlier.

Maybe you wouldn't understand, but the cashier's position becomes saturated with many odors over time: tobacco, sweat, desperation, anxiety, unpaid bills, alcohol wipes, stucky fingers, fluorescent lights. Compared with that, the sharp reek of city rot and sirens in the crisp night air is soothing. One is dull, one is sharp, one is full, one is empty, but neither are entirely separate, just different types of pains.
Both of them are ugly though, the ugliness of a city never escapes you. But some parts of that ugliness are more aesthetic than others, whether taken taken together or individually or in contrast -- and you can delude yourself that you can look at any one part of a city, but really it's still missing its context, still part of a whole.
And everything I see now is in the context of a hole in my stomach, a hole in my heart, two holes in my neck. 
I am an empty sore, but is the emptiness also a part of the whole?
I wanted to cry myself to sleep that morning, but I couldn't find the tears.

A couple nights later, I woke up on the bathroom floor with dried blood on my hands, and lips. I don't know whose blood, but I never saw that man again. I hope it's just a coincidence. Big city and all.
That night, I managed to cry. With a full stomach.

***

It's not bad enough that I got turned into a corpse, now everybody wants to kill me for it."
I don't know who I'm talking to. I think I'm losing it. I keep thinking at any moment Rasputin's going to knock down my door and execute me with a crossbow, or some feral vampire will savage me right here on the couch.
Someone's going to get me. It's not safe here. Home is not safe.
I sit and nurse cup after cup of sweet milky tea, the lips of the cups forming a stucky crusty, mugs littering the table, forming a miniature army of ceramics. Too paralyzed to get up and move them back.
The yellow kitchen light seems ominous now. Though it'd be equally awful without it. Everything is deathly still. Of course it is. I'm the only one here. Right? I don't know. I don't know anymore.
Only when the pale blue light creeps past the curtains do I relax, look outside. Street lamps are still on and heavy clouds reflect the damp concrete with a sullen, swollen grayness.
My fear crawl back under my skin with a shaky breath, a clipped laugh. One more night survived. But against whom?
Lay on the bed, humid with sweat, mixing with the dust, and the discomfort clings to me until I pass through the gate of consciousness. 
I know I should keep vigil, but with daybreak I've passed the threshold of caring. Let them have me.

***

"I feel jittery, like I'm not really -- exactly -- real? Or alive -- I don't know, maybe this is the feeling that I've done nothing and contributed nothing and I'm just going to die in a hole or or or... What are you doing?"
Joel gave me a hard look while jotting down a list on a large paper cup in sharpie. "You know, you're not the first bohemian to walk through those doors. What you need is four shots of espresso and to calm the fuck down, then come back when you're not having an existential crisis. It's on the house."
"Oh. Thanks?"
"I mean it, I don't want to see you here again until you get a good night's sleep."
And with that, I meekly awaited my caffeine dose, trying to hide beneath the hissing metal coffee machine just slightly too short to provide cover. Sure enough, after a few sips of black syrup, the world slows its whirling.
I turn to ask, "How did you..."
And Joel gives me another intimidating glare intimating murder with the strong impression of "I don't have time to speechify, I'm talking to a customer now," so I took the hint and fled to walk the city streets not populated by feral baristas.
Past the main street howling with urban fanfare, behind the coffee shop it quickly forms an industrial area of warehouses and semis, empty pavement and gravel. I wait for a trucker to clear the street before proceeding alone, sipping the iced drink carefully to avoid mixing the inner cold with the outer cold.
I can't stand to look at the vibrant red semi. But it reminds me of that sunrise in the metal coffin. If I avert my eyes though, all I see is a sea of gray pavement and telephone poles, with one or two loading bays open being serviced by workers in thick clothing.
It feels like a winter day that should be a winter night, the hours haven't aligned yet. Or maybe my internal clock is just permanently damaged. I feel sorry for breaking down in front of Joel, he probably didn't need that. But it's a nice place to be, right now, with the sparse sounds and wide clear spaces. The gravel crunches underfoot as I walk a mile, maybe more. When I get back to the house my nose is running and my cheeks are cold, but something inside feels peaceful. Fluttering quietly in its cage and resting for now.



***

"Mmmm. I feel woozy," she says, leaning into me heavily with a tipsy smile. "You're so warm."
"That's ridiculous. I'm a vampire."
"Hah. You're funny."
"No, really. It's a long story. I'll tell you someday. Or maybe never."
She shifted on the bus seat next to me. "You're so serious and so worried all the time, but like, stars turn and wheels burn. Do you know what I mean?" she asks, articulating her hands in free spinning motions over her head.
"I think I get it."
"That's good," she murmurs. "You get things."
She leans her head on my shoulder, and I'm uncomfortable with the contact, but I find it funny that Katya has turned into a big drunk cat. I drop her off at her place and take the bus back to mine before flopping on the mattress and staring at the wall until I pass out.