Good morning and Happy Hump Day ! If it's Wednesday, then it must be time for more flash fiction from the Wednesday Briefers! We're a group of authors who bring you our finest flash fiction every week, 500 to 1000 words, inspired by one of our prompts.
Charlemagne has ended his brief and very strange interaction with the cannibal named Tyrone after receiving an important message about something he's searching for. Find out what's going on in this week's chapter of An Unholy Alliance. Don't forget to visit the other Briefers and see what they're up to! Their links follow my tale! Enjoy!
In hindsight, I wished I’d just taken the damn car
and been done with it, illegal meat in the trunk or not. I’d intended to steal a
vehicle the night before anyway, but I’d been so hungry that I’d focused on my
desire for blood rather than any need for transportation. Of course I’m
perfectly capable of traveling under my own power, and sometimes I have no
other option. But I disdain expending energy unnecessarily. To do so would have
been a foolish move on my part, one that would have led to a need to feed again
sooner rather than later. Which also meant I’d be at risk of embroiling myself
in another ridiculous predicament such as the one I’d just extricated myself
from. No thank you to that.
Now, I know what the burning question on the tip of most
everyone’s tongue is right now—you’re a vampire, you have abilities, why would
you even worry about such things.
Why? Because I am here to tell you that what you
think you know about vampires… you don’t. Erase those fanciful visions from your mind of
supernatural creatures who stalk the night, wreaking fear and panic among
mankind. Forget your image of us as hypnotic villains who suck the lifeblood
from hapless victims, incite terror among the general human populace, and yet
remain sexy and seductive individuals, with incredibly hypnotic gazes, who
manage to accomplish all that with not a hair out of place and yet oozing charisma
from every pore.
Balderdash. The sad fact of the matter is that the
stories you’ve grown up on are wrong. Carefully crafted wishful thinking on the part
of imaginative writers. So put away your
fond adolescent memories of Dark Shadows and Vampire Diaries and all the rest
and listen to what I’m saying. At the end of the day, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is just a novel. What I am
living here and now is real life. And has been for many years.
Vampires are not immortal, although we do have
longer life spans than most people … because reasons I don’t feel compelled to
explain. We can be killed with a wooden stake, that part is true. But then
again, most people can be. How many people do you know who could survive being stabbed
in the heart? Exactly. Ditto with cutting off the head. And no, I don’t cringe
at the touch of silver, or quiver at the feel of holy water being splashed
against my unwilling flesh. Be serious, there is nothing the least bit holy
about that water. And as for being terrified of crosses, do you see what I have hung around my neck? Enough
said.
Furthermore, we are not able to turn ourselves into the creatures of the night. Not wolves
or bats or rats or anything else you can think of. Can’t even summon them,
though that would be a useful ability to have. Our senses are heightened, true,
but I think that has to do with the blood we ingest as much as anything. We can
see and hear better, run faster. But that lasts only so long, and when we need
to feed, those abilities dwindle in proportion to that need.
So yeah, these are all good reasons why we don’t
want people to know the truth about us and how vulnerable we really are. We
want them to keep believing the wives’ tales, if they choose to believe in
vampires at all. Because then they leave us the hell alone. Most people don’t
even believe we exist and that’s a definite plus.
As for being Undead, we call ourselves that because
in a sense we are, since our lives span more than the average person’s,
although technically we haven’t truly died. Take me, for example. I was born
during the 1860s but I appear to be no older than my late twenties. Must be in
the blood.
Be that as it may, and moving on…
I swiftly wound my way through the woods, keeping an
eye out for possible predators I had no time or desire to tangle with. Once I
deemed myself sufficiently removed from Tyrone, I paused just long enough to
verify on my phone the information I hoped to find. Something was indeed
waiting for me, something I’d been expecting. I wasn’t sure how helpful it
would be, but I had to take the chance that I’d found what I was looking for,
or least some kind of clue that would lead me there. Documentation from the era
I was researching was not easy to come by, as not many people found it
important to chronicle the lives of slaves, especially before and after the
Civil War, and particularly in rural Missouri.
And yet that was what I wanted, what I needed to
find. For many reasons. Thank the gods, I’d found a valuable ally in my voyage
of discovery. Their name was Casey, and I didn’t know what I’d have done
without her knowledgeable assistance.
Casey was the head of a small library in a small
town outside of Springfield, Missouri. Less than five thousand people lived in
Mason Springs. Definitely small town living at its finest. Casey had once
worked at a larger library in another state, but had moved back to their home
town in order to care for an ailing mother. She was an ace researcher, someone who
could find out anything, given enough time. I had certainly given her a tough
assignment, but so far she’d found more clues than I’d been able to unearth on
my own.
Still, despite my faith in her, I’d never revealed
the reason for my quest, and I’d never told her what I was. Not relevant in any
way.
The library was some thirty miles from where I was
now. But luck was with me in the form of an old Chrysler.
to be continued
Now see what the other Briefers are up to!
