Chapter Twenty-six – Jack
Chapter Twenty-six
Jack
I raced to the windows—I could feel dawn nearing, a pressure behind my eyes, like a headache mixed with a freight train—and I grabbed the phone to talk to the front desk as I started shoving my few belongings inside a pillowcase.
I couldn’t get another room in this entire hotel, it was convention season, plus weekend, plus weddings alas and—
“Where can you get me a room?” I shouted into the receiver, standing there, panting.
A sister hotel. Three blocks down.
“Tell them I’m coming—and the room has to be ready when I get there.”
I hauled on clothes and tied two pillow cases worth of clothing to the handles of the wheeled luggage that held my guns and inks, and tossed a wad of twenties behind me for housekeeping before running down the hall.
I could see myself inside the elevator—I looked like an indecisive hobo. No, a tweaking hobo, with the way I was pacing, hoping I could get to the next hotel before dawn. I sprang out of the elevator the instant it opened, and started running, my baggage rattling behind.
The front desk sensed I was in a rush and found my mannerisms worrying—but between my willingness to pay the actual posted room rate for a week in advance, and me using my whammy I got into a new room just in time.
The curtains here didn’t seem as thick—so I grabbed all the bedding and locked myself in the bathroom, making a nest to sleep on in their oversized tub.
I woke up to my cellphone buzzing at me. Paco—wondering where the hell I was. I blinked at his message in the dark.
It wasn’t safe for him to be with me. Not when Rosalie could sic Tamo on me and ruin my life—what little remained of it—at any moment. I flipped my phone over, took off the back and battery, and lay in the darkness with my hunger.
What was I, really? Enough light crept in underneath the room’s door from the hallway and then beneath the bathroom’s door for my other-eyes to see my hands raised in front of me.
They looked like human hands—but I knew I could use them to kill another human, almost without thinking.
Rosalie was right—I wanted to still be human, because I liked what I saw in Paco’s eyes when he looked at me.
But how could I earn that look when I was using him to save me?
Was it possible to save myself?
The first night wasn’t so bad. Just like any night I’d spent with Paco—only without him.
The second night my senses awakened. Even though I had decided not to feed, my body disagreed and began looking for opportunities.
The bathroom I hid in was against the wall, and this room was near the elevators, so I could feel footsteps passing and hear conversations.
The laugh of a woman, the crying of a child.
The room above me ran the shower, I could hear his heavy steps on tile, while somewhere in the room behind me a woman ran a vibrator until she screamed.
It didn’t matter how many blankets I hid under, how tightly my hands were pressed to my ears—there was so much life everywhere around me, except for in me—it was like life itself was begging me to take it. My stomach churned, eating itself up inside, curling me into a ball.
On the third night I think I began to go insane.
What’d started as a hyperawareness of my personal space had gone beyond that—it was like I could feel the entire tower, above and below, breathing.
Waiting for me to act. To do something. My stomach unwound enough for me to stand, so I did, coming out of the tub for the first time, hands clutching at the marble countertop in the dark.
I—hurt. I hadn’t hurt ever since Rosalie had turned me, but now I felt fragile, like if I was brushed wrong I would snap.
My stomach roiled, empty, needles of acid stabbing me inside—and not just in my stomach, but up and down my entire body, a thousand separate torturous pinpricks.
I turned the light on and jerked away as it burned my eyes, then observed myself as I became accustomed to the light—my cheeks were sunken, my eyes sallow—I knew now I’d look dead if someone saw me in the daytime.
But—I couldn’t let it—the hunger—win. I had to prove to myself that I was more than this. That I was in control. That whatever Rosalie had put inside hadn’t poisoned me eternally.
Somehow I let it convince me that the only way to really prove that was to go out and face temptation.
I made my way out onto the strip, grifting twenties—it was a little harder now, as I looked more dangerous, I suspected, with my hunched shoulders and needy eyes—and with the way that I looked at every human I interacted with like I might eat them.
I found myself slinking in shadows more and more, I told myself to protect them from me—but I knew secretly part of me liked it.
It was easier to watch for someone breaking from the herd in the dark.
I sat down on a bench, knowing there was still probably a camera or two watching—I was in front of the Bellagio, and every inch of the Strip was televised somewhere via assorted CCTVs.
I didn’t know what I was waiting for, only that each second longer I waited proved that I was in control of me.
Not Rosalie. Never her again. I clenched my hands into fists at my side, frustrated anew and—hungry.
Goddammit. Starving. Worse than when I quit smoking cigarettes, aching worse than after the football team had beaten me, unable to think of anything but… .
I heard a scream and a splash from behind me. I whirled, and saw everything like the moment was frozen. A mother on a nearby bridge with her hands out stretched, a camera falling from them into the water below—following her tumbling child.
The hunger took over, and in an instant I was chest deep in frigid water, hoisting a wet toddler overhead by the straps of their denim overalls.
“Oh my God!” the mother screamed from up above. Twenty people leaned over, holding out cell phones to film me. “Teddy! Is he all right?”
His screaming said his lungs were fine—it had a tinge of terror, and the way he was twitching—and the way I was paying attention to that—the way I couldn’t stop paying attention to that—if the water hadn’t been so cold as to shock me when I jumped in, the people filming might’ve filmed something very, very different.
I trudged to the edge of the artificial lake handing him up to strangers before pulling myself out.
“Where did you even come from? You’re an angel!” Teddy’s mother shrieked, pulling me in for a Midwestern hug. “Thank you—thank you!”
“You’re welcome,” I said, freeing myself from her as quickly as I could, slinking away.
After that, I walked, trying not to see anyone around me.
My wet clothes and shoes chafed, but that was nothing compared to the growing knowledge that I was going to do something bad tonight, whether I wanted to or not.
There was no time to make myself look good and head out to a club, and I wouldn’t trust myself to fuck anyone in my current state.
I didn’t want to fuck-kill anyone accidentally-on-purpose.
I just needed…space. To make decisions. To figure out who and what I was. Before the hunger made them for me.
I passed Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay, like temples named after forgotten gods.
I took a right on Hacienda and left the laughing tourist temptations of the Strip behind for the businesses and warehouses that served them, looking for what I didn’t know—until it found me, right outside the Desert Meats processing plant. The irony did not escape me.
A night security guard. Same as Paco, just a different place, a different shift.
“Hey, what’re you doing?”
My body was going unerringly toward him. I was more conscious of it now than I had been at the fountain—it was like I was a rider on horse with no reins.
“Stop!” he shouted, reaching for something on his belt, a gun, a radio, it didn’t matter—I leapt on him. We fell together to the ground, me on top, on all fours. He struggled, which only made the parts of me I couldn’t control thrill in anticipation—
“Stop!” I shouted at myself, just as he shouted it again at me. The shouting, the fear—as he punched me to no avail—the way he wriggled beneath me, the scent of him pissing himself—the hunger smashed his head to one side with one of my hands and brought my mouth to his neck.
Only the last vestiges of my humanity stopped me from leaving his neck a bleeding hole—but I bit him nonetheless.
I knew redness welled inside my mouth, the taste of copper, the stuff of life itself, more heady than any wine had ever been.
I worked his neck with my mouth at the holes my teeth had torn, siphoning it out of him, his breath like a freight train in my ear.
His pulse went from a pound to a tremble and—I rocked back over him, mouth open with the height of my fangs.
My hunger wanted more but I had had enough.
Through sheer force of will, my fangs began to retract.
His face was glazed, his body shocky. “I’m sorry,” I whispered at him.
“I’ll go get help,” I said, without thinking, then realized how impossible that could be.
I knelt again and caught his jaw, twisting his head back so his collar would help staunch the flow. “You didn’t see me,” I said with the whammy—and as I said it, I knew he’d agree, it was like I was speaking with the voice of God.
“What—who?” he whispered weakly.
I undid his belt and wound it around his neck tight enough to help things clot, but not so tight as to choke him, and then I ran back for the Strip.
“Give me your phone. Now,” I commanded the first solo male tourist I saw.
They threw it at me, then looked at their hand, unable to comprehend why they’d done so.
I dialed 911 and called an assault at the warehouse, then handed the phone back to the man.
“Get over to the Desert Meats plant. There’s a man on the ground there—stay with him until help arrives. ”
The man stared at me blankly and I wondered if it wasn’t working—then he started using his phone to look for directions to help him obey.
I watched him curiously, then realized he’d be one more loose end. “You never saw me. You don’t know why you’re going there, but you’re compelled. Hurry.”
He stared past me like I did not exist and then turned and ran following the directions his phone began narrating at him.
I watched him go, and then I sagged like I’d been punched in the stomach—with relief.
The starving pain that’d consumed my body was gone and—now I felt free. Wild. Omnipotent. Unstoppable.
It was a good thing I’d done coke before, or I’d have let the sensation go to my head.
As it was, I shouted, “Goddamn!” and jumped up to punch the air. Tourists parted like the Red Sea, avoiding my clearly drunken antics.
This was what blood was like—how had I forgotten, for almost two months?
I’d been so traumatized the night I’d rescued Thea that I thought I’d never wanted to taste it again, but now—I ran my tongue over my teeth and gums, remembering the feel of the guard’s pulse quivering beneath me and—oh God, how easy it would be to just become this thing, this wild thing that drank with abandon and did whatever the hell he pleased?
I spun on the sidewalk, staring at everyone else around me, trying to remind myself what it meant to be human—and I knew the only man that could help me was the one man I couldn’t see.