The beginning of a life that will never be told...
This is a starter I'd written up some time ago. It was intended for a friend’s Anita Blake RP. Unfortunately, she never did get the site up and running, and I was left with the beginnings of story that would never move any further along. Since I've started this account I figured maybe I should actually use it as a journal and start putting up random work. At the very least, it's a good way to get some feedback on things.
{If you haven't taken the time to read Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels I highly recommend them. They are well worth the effort. This little girl is based in her world, where the supernatural boogie men are real…and they're legal citizens of the United States.}
She blinked open her eyes and found herself staring up at a blinding white ceiling. She couldn’t remember what had happened, or where she was. Just that the lights were too bright and the air in the room left a bad taste on the back of her tongue. She didn’t think that she’d gotten hurt, she couldn’t remember if there had been an accident or not. But she was getting the feeling that she was in a hospital somewhere. Something about the sounds and the smells made her think hospital. They used all those chemicals to mask the smell of the sick and the dying, but it never really seemed to work. Under the sting of disinfectant was the undeniable scent of death. She wondered at the fact that she could pick it up so clearly. Usually they did a better job than that.
When she shifted and felt the cold metal underneath her. ‘Why am I laying on metal?’ she thought to herself as she attempted to sit up. Then a horrifying thought hit her. ‘Oh God, they think I’m dead. They put me in the morgue.’ It was a nightmare, it had to be. She turned her head and looked around, seeing several other metal slabs on either side of her. She began to panic and tried again to sit up only to find herself trapped to the table. Thick metal cuffs covered her wrists and ankles. It was all beginning to look like a very real, very terrifying horror movie to her. She tilted her head up and saw a bag hanging above her. It was filled with a thick red substance. Blood, her mind spit the word at her. Her first panicked thought was that someone was sucking the blood out of her body and into that bag.
Then she watched as drop after drop fell. An IV bag. They were putting blood back into her body, but she couldn’t see where the needle was. Again her mind ran to an accident, but nothing could filter through the panic that still clung to her thoughts. They didn’t think she was dead, that was a good thing. But she couldn’t figure out what she was doing locked down to a metal slab in a cold room alone somewhere. There were no charts anywhere that she could see. No machines were hooked to her to monitor her vitals. Nothing. She was in a silent room that smelt overtly of death and blood with absolutely no idea what was happening to her. She let out a strangled sob as she tried again to pull herself loose. She knew that struggling was probably useless. No matter how much she tugged or pulled she couldn’t break the metal cuffs that kept her trapped there. They just weren’t going to give.
But they did. Just a fraction of an inch, but they moved under the force of her pull. She looked down and stared as she pulled one wrist up towards her. She was still trapped, but she could see the metal shift upwards as she pulled against it. She wasn’t sure how she was managing it, but at the moment she didn’t care. She wanted out of there and the cuffs were keeping her from doing that. She tugged again, this time putting real force behind it and she heard the metal whine in protest. That put a smile on her face as she pulled harder against them, feeling each time the metal gave just a bit. She was going to escape, she could worry about how she’d managed it later. With one last yank the cuff on her right wrist pulled free of the table. It sat on her wrist like a twisted bracelet.
She didn’t worry about getting it all the way off, instead she just reached over and pulled at her left wrist with everything she had. It ripped free easily and she sat up. She grabbed the tube for the IV and followed it from the bag up to the needle that they had imbedded in her neck. With a whimper she pulled it out and dropped the needle to the floor. Blood oozed out and started to pool on the sterile white tile almost immediately. She ripped the metal cuffs on her ankles free of the table as well and then climbed off. She looked around, noticing the square metal doors that lined one wall. She’d seen enough cop TV shows to know that she was indeed in a morgue somewhere. She couldn’t understand it. She just couldn’t wrap her thoughts around what was happening to her.
All she could think about was getting out. She needed to get away from this place. She wanted to go home, she wanted to see her parents. They fought constantly and she hated them most of the time, but they were the ones that broken mind clung to at that moment. She ran across the floor, her bare feet making almost no sound in the still of the room. She hit the door at a run and found it locked. She let out a strangled cry and starting banging on it. She wanted out, she needed someone to come and let her out. But no one came running at the sound. No one moved outside. She could only see a small piece of the hallway outside the window in the door. There was nothing there at all. No one to rush to the terrified girl’s rescue. She slid slowly down to the floor, hitting her knees hard against the cool floor. Then she put her face in her hands and she wept.
She was currently locked in the morgue of St. John's Mercy Medical Center. The staff had found her lying cold and seemingly dead outside of one of the ambulance bay doors three nights ago. They had only decided to hold the body without autopsy because of the very obvious puncture wounds on her neck. It was standard practice now days to hold bodies that died from vampire bites the three nights it would take the new vampire to rise before proceeding with any investigation, autopsy, or funeral. Her parents were in a waiting room a floor up, arguing with one of the doctors on duty. Her mother’s anguished screams and her father’s steady denial could be heard through most of the wing. They didn’t want to except that their daughter was dead. But they didn’t want her to rise as a vampire either. They were trying to push for a cremation in the hopes of destroying the body before she could wake up.
But it was too late, the girl was already awake. And no one had taken notice yet. The hospital was ill equipped to deal with a vampire, they didn’t have the standard holding room for the fledglings like most bigger hospitals did. But once she had been dumped there they couldn’t risk moving her again. So they had taken her in and done all they could to contain her. Earlier that evening someone had gotten smart and started a blood transfusion on her in the hopes that she would wake up coherent and not a slave to the blood lust that was so typical of the new ones. It seemed to have worked, but they hadn’t taken into consideration that she’d be able to break free of the metal restraints. All vampires were stronger than humans, but most didn‘t wake up sick with fear. Most didn’t start their new life with adrenalin pumping through their veins.
She lifted her head up and wiped the tears from her eyes. She wanted out of that room, she wanted away from the hospital all together. She didn’t know what was going on, she didn’t stop to think about it. She had to find a way to break free. Her thoughts weren’t completely coherent yet, they scattered faster than she could keep up. The only thing that remained was the need to escape. She circled the room, looking for something, anything that she could use to break open the door. On her third circuit she felt cool air wash over her. She looked up and a twisted little smile curved her lips, there was an air conditioning vent above her. Had it not come on when it did, she probably would have never thought to check the ceiling. As it were, the vent provided an excellent way to slip out of her morbid little dungeon.
She pulled the desk in the far corner over to rest beneath the vent, climbing on top of it to reach. With little effort at all she pulled the grate off and levered herself up and into the metal chute. Her tiny frame made maneuvering easy as she slid along the cool metal, barely making a sound at all. She stopped at every vent until she came to one that opened over a hallway. She wrestled that grate loose and stuck her head out to look around. When she saw no one in the dim hallway she dropped silently to the ground and took off running through the hospital. Before anyone even noticed her absence, she had escaped outside She didn’t stop running until she came to a desolate park, a single bench sitting in a pool of light. There she collapsed and let the tears fall freely down her cheeks.