In the starless dark of night they travel quickly, creating stark and exaggerated silhouettes as they pass briefly through the orange sodium glow of streetlights. She remembers most of this in fragmented pieces: being led in the rain until the little town turned to dirt roads. Mud that caked in the creases of her jeans. A woman grasping her numb fingers, then yanking with a grip like iron, her palm as pale and cold as new frost. The rain grew more aggressive, became needlelike and freezing, though this cold was nothing compared to the cold that made Allison tremble like there was no blood in her veins. The stranger is of little comfort: when Allison falters, she tugs her with sharp finality, refusing to let her stop. Was something after them? No. They were looking for someone. For something, and it was close enough that the hairs on the back of Allison's neck stood at attention.
Or had that been a few evenings before?
When they'd arrived at the graveyard was when her memory began to go fuzzy, become tattered at the corners. Indistinct. She knows they must have dug up the coffin, because in the morning (?) after her nails had hardened dirt under them, gray muck that crumbled easily beneath the pressure of her fingertips, and her shirt was streaked with mud. She remembers being handed the crowbar, the metal so cold that it almost stuck to her hands. She remembers the eyes of that thing opening, as bright and as unnatural as the sodium lamps they'd traveled beneath. The whistle of air behind her ear as the woman drove something sharp into the heart of the creature, and the horrible noise afterward, high and agonizing enough to make her ears pop, as if she were in the pressurized cabin of a jet.
She remembers thinking: good.
After this, she remembers very little at all. Pain most often, which ruled her, a pain like dying. Being cold all the time, feeling empty. Feeling hungry. She thought she should go home, though she could not remember where that was in her current state, because the only place she did know was this old and poorly lit house, where all the furniture was covered in white sheets that reminded her of funeral shrouds. Funny: she could remember those, little snippets of fact and memory, but any attempt at grasping a more substantial thought brought with it more pain, a feeling like hands digging into her skull and pulling it apart. She existed in this state for hours? Days? Weeks, perhaps, the only constant beyond the hunger, pain and confusion being the woman, who would sometimes sit beside her in unsettling quiet, or leave in the night, only to return late in the evening, sometimes dragging something heavy behind her.
In the days before, Allison had refused whatever this was, had been repulsed, but when the woman shakes her awake tonight, her throat is so dry that she can't force out much of anything but a dull death-rattle. She's tired and thirsty, she wants to say. She wants to be left alone. When she tries to push back, she is struck by the sight of what she begins to realize, in a slow-growing dread, is her own hand. Her skin, desiccated,, bruised gray and bone white, the veins beneath her near translucent skin blue-black. It trembles in the moonlight like an old woman's.
Allison lets it fall to her side. Even this slight movement takes incredible effort on her part. When had she ever been this weak? This cold and frail? Had something happened? She tries to ask the woman this, though again the sounds crackle and die in her throat.
The self-loathing is always there and was even before she became as inhuman as she actually felt, finally having a body that matched this sentiment was just oddly comforting.
Getting into the house is easy. All she has to do is use a key.
It's dark inside and since she's managed to come home earlier than usual. So, she indulges; Rose parts the blackout curtains just enough that the moonlight can filter through the sheer curtains in front of them. Thin beams trickle into the dark room and it's not enough to look like anything but dust from glass, but Rose hopes its something to Allison who has not left this house in nearly a month.
The man she brought back with her is still groaning near the living room door, bleeding out slowly on the hardwood floor.
"Shit."
She's frowning, mad at herself for being messy. It was hard to have much restraint in this specific case. Something to deal with later: for now she focuses on Allison, stirring in the nest of old quilts that Rose had set up for her. With her heels still on and her party dress still warm with flesh blood Rose gets on her knees and pulls Allison into her arms, her expression almost quivering at the sight of her. She'd be shitting dust if she could shit at all - seeing her so weak was the strangest of these nightmares.
Trying to fill the gap with other indulgences worked for awhile- sex, desserts, red meat and iron rich food. But the sickness ate and ate and ate, and now it was feeding on Allison.
"Hey." Her voice is quiet. "You're going to hate me after, I don't care." Her hands are as dirty as her dress; Rose presses her fingers to her lips and puckers them, spreading the red all over her mouth.
"We're-" The man groans, miserable with the last ounces of his pain. Rose snaps her head around and snarls.
"CAN IT." He makes no more noise. Rose turns her attention back to Allison, face soft again.
"We're gonna' work our way up- too much right away and it'll shock your system. Make you go septic." She props Allison against her so that all of her weight rests upon Rose. Usually, she would struggle to pull such a feat but Rose lifts her like its nothing at all.
She presses her thumb against Allison's mouth, watching as it makes her stir.
"It's going to feel worse before it feels better- no one to blame but yourself for that."
Once her hand drops and her head lolls to one side, Allison isn't aware of much. The warmth of Rose's embrace is felt as if across a great distance — this body heat failing to warm her blue-tinged skin. She smells nice, Allison at least can gauge this much. Like... perfume, and something heady and coppery. It's a sweet iron sharpness that settles pleasantly around the two of them like a fine mist. When she opens her dry eyes, the scene in front of her is uncanny, hard to make sense of in her addled state. Black shadows and white shrouds, with thin shafts of silver-tinted light pouring in through the dusty old windows. There is the shape on the hardwood floor that resolves itself into the prone form of a man lying on his side. In the moonlight she sees the dark, spreading stain beneath him, and again that intoxicating scent washes over her senses, is like the dimmest spark of light in an impossibly dark room. What the woman says is more unusual still. Allison's head bobs slowly. She tries to untangle the words, to think past the constant hum of pain and horrible, isolating coldness. The woman says that she will hate her later (after what?) and she can't imagine why — she holds her so gently, and it's a comfort when she's so confused and weak in a way she's never been before.
The brush of damp warmth against her mouth makes some life return to her: she shifts in Rose's arms, a sigh issuing from her throat like the rustle of dried leaves. When her tongue flicks out to wet her parched lips, she tastes blood, still warm. A pained murmur escapes her, and she manages to tilt her head up again. It's not much. But it's a start.
It's enough of a start that some sort of relief falls over Rose's countenance. A tense and skittish energy pervaded every part of her being for the last few weeks and her victims were the ones who paid for it in varying degrees.
"See? Not worst thing- all those fucking tantrums for what?" She almost coos, would if such a thing was not so far from who she was. Rose realizes its a bit like trying to get a baby to latch, strangely enough. She had to be forward without forcing it.
Rose wrings what she can from her dress, it's difficult with just one hand and how the material clings to her body but she's able to muster enough that there's a shallow puddle of red in her palm. She wets her lips again, this time enough so that the blood drips slowly from her mouth. She kisses Allison- the sound is wet and loud even though she presses without force. Allison's lips are still sluggish and wiping at what they can of the blood Rose rubbed into them, it is little effort to slip her mouth into Allison's all but waiting lips.
Her mouth is warm and soft is Allison's immediate thought, which comes as slowly and painfully as something forced out from under a sheet of ice coating a lake. Tingling heat and wetness that tastes of — well, bitter metal, at first — before it takes on the sweetness of berries crushed and left to ferment in sticky summer heat. Allison opens her mouth into it without resisting. It tastes good. It feels better.
It makes something stir in her: the faintest whisper of the hunger that had wracked her body in the days before... before this sickness that had made her feel so weak and frail. Unbeknownst to her, the stolen blood fills her veins, and gradually, warmth begins to flood her pallid skin and give it life again.
The relief she feels is akin to that of a mother whose child has finally eaten after a long bout of tantrumed induced hunger. She sighs, grateful and then realizes with startled concern that Allison has already cleaned her lips dry. Rose feels her shake from where she lays with her head on her lap and the indecipherable mutterings of pain begin.
Rose is on her knees so quick that Allison's head hits the floor with a thud. She pays it no mind. After all, the pain from being unsatiated was so much worse. She falls on her hands when she reaches the man and he pleads with her. Rose wrinkles her nose in distaste.
"Shut up. You're giving me a fucking headache." And then she dives in, finding a a pretty red jewel of an artery. Rose makes it hurt on purpose, she doesn't suck him dry just yet to ensure she has a steady supply of something warm. He screams first, whimpers after like a whelping pup. A far cry from the man she'd met at that dingy club just a few hours ago who'd so boldly approached her and placed a greedy hand on her backside.
Rose stands with her cheeks full of liquid. She straddles Allison's ailing body and leans down, face hovering just an inch above hers. Allison's lips part on their own whether on accident or through instinct. Rose starts with just a few drops, letting the blood spill from her lips in a measured trickle.
She wonders if she's dreaming, a blurry half-thought as her head rests cushioned in the woman's lap. This and the blood loss (was it blood loss?) feel like some bizarre delusion built out of leftover scraps of memory. Her head thumping against the floorboards brings her back to reality. Starbursts behind her eyelids. A dull and radiating pain that was unlike the cold pain she was beginning to get used to. She opens her eyes and sees the ghostlike figure of the woman standing above the dark shape that she has begun to realize is another person. Dark liquid drips from the fringes of the pale woman's dress. Blood on snow, thinks Allison, deliriously. The figure on the ground screams when Rose leans over them, and Allison feels something that is not simply cold misery: she is cognizant enough to wonder, though not awake enough to be afraid.
She's too weak to resist and too grateful for the warmth when Rose straddles her. She tries to say something, but the murmur is indistinct, and at the first drop of blood into her mouth, she realizes at last what it is. But it's strange, alarming: the repulsion she expects at the taste of blood, sticky and clinging to her lips and teeth, is absent. Instead she is so hungry that she would weep at the sustenance after being deprived. The effects are slow but dramatic: color filling her cheeks, life returning to her desiccated skin and withered muscles. Finally, her eyes open, her eyes unnaturally bright and distant in the shadows, still not all there. She feels fuzzy, feverish.
She knew this woman she realizes. Had met her... before. Before what? Before whatever this was had happened, this horrible change. This disease eating away at her.
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Or had that been a few evenings before?
When they'd arrived at the graveyard was when her memory began to go fuzzy, become tattered at the corners. Indistinct. She knows they must have dug up the coffin, because in the morning (?) after her nails had hardened dirt under them, gray muck that crumbled easily beneath the pressure of her fingertips, and her shirt was streaked with mud. She remembers being handed the crowbar, the metal so cold that it almost stuck to her hands. She remembers the eyes of that thing opening, as bright and as unnatural as the sodium lamps they'd traveled beneath. The whistle of air behind her ear as the woman drove something sharp into the heart of the creature, and the horrible noise afterward, high and agonizing enough to make her ears pop, as if she were in the pressurized cabin of a jet.
She remembers thinking: good.
After this, she remembers very little at all. Pain most often, which ruled her, a pain like dying. Being cold all the time, feeling empty. Feeling hungry. She thought she should go home, though she could not remember where that was in her current state, because the only place she did know was this old and poorly lit house, where all the furniture was covered in white sheets that reminded her of funeral shrouds. Funny: she could remember those, little snippets of fact and memory, but any attempt at grasping a more substantial thought brought with it more pain, a feeling like hands digging into her skull and pulling it apart. She existed in this state for hours? Days? Weeks, perhaps, the only constant beyond the hunger, pain and confusion being the woman, who would sometimes sit beside her in unsettling quiet, or leave in the night, only to return late in the evening, sometimes dragging something heavy behind her.
In the days before, Allison had refused whatever this was, had been repulsed, but when the woman shakes her awake tonight, her throat is so dry that she can't force out much of anything but a dull death-rattle. She's tired and thirsty, she wants to say. She wants to be left alone. When she tries to push back, she is struck by the sight of what she begins to realize, in a slow-growing dread, is her own hand. Her skin, desiccated,, bruised gray and bone white, the veins beneath her near translucent skin blue-black. It trembles in the moonlight like an old woman's.
Allison lets it fall to her side. Even this slight movement takes incredible effort on her part. When had she ever been this weak? This cold and frail? Had something happened? She tries to ask the woman this, though again the sounds crackle and die in her throat.
no subject
The self-loathing is always there and was even before she became as inhuman as she actually felt, finally having a body that matched this sentiment was just oddly comforting.
Getting into the house is easy. All she has to do is use a key.
It's dark inside and since she's managed to come home earlier than usual. So, she indulges; Rose parts the blackout curtains just enough that the moonlight can filter through the sheer curtains in front of them. Thin beams trickle into the dark room and it's not enough to look like anything but dust from glass, but Rose hopes its something to Allison who has not left this house in nearly a month.
The man she brought back with her is still groaning near the living room door, bleeding out slowly on the hardwood floor.
"Shit."
She's frowning, mad at herself for being messy. It was hard to have much restraint in this specific case. Something to deal with later: for now she focuses on Allison, stirring in the nest of old quilts that Rose had set up for her. With her heels still on and her party dress still warm with flesh blood Rose gets on her knees and pulls Allison into her arms, her expression almost quivering at the sight of her. She'd be shitting dust if she could shit at all - seeing her so weak was the strangest of these nightmares.
Trying to fill the gap with other indulgences worked for awhile- sex, desserts, red meat and iron rich food. But the sickness ate and ate and ate, and now it was feeding on Allison.
"Hey." Her voice is quiet. "You're going to hate me after, I don't care." Her hands are as dirty as her dress; Rose presses her fingers to her lips and puckers them, spreading the red all over her mouth.
"We're-" The man groans, miserable with the last ounces of his pain. Rose snaps her head around and snarls.
"CAN IT." He makes no more noise. Rose turns her attention back to Allison, face soft again.
"We're gonna' work our way up- too much right away and it'll shock your system. Make you go septic." She props Allison against her so that all of her weight rests upon Rose. Usually, she would struggle to pull such a feat but Rose lifts her like its nothing at all.
She presses her thumb against Allison's mouth, watching as it makes her stir.
"It's going to feel worse before it feels better- no one to blame but yourself for that."
no subject
The brush of damp warmth against her mouth makes some life return to her: she shifts in Rose's arms, a sigh issuing from her throat like the rustle of dried leaves. When her tongue flicks out to wet her parched lips, she tastes blood, still warm. A pained murmur escapes her, and she manages to tilt her head up again. It's not much. But it's a start.
no subject
"See? Not worst thing- all those fucking tantrums for what?" She almost coos, would if such a thing was not so far from who she was. Rose realizes its a bit like trying to get a baby to latch, strangely enough. She had to be forward without forcing it.
Rose wrings what she can from her dress, it's difficult with just one hand and how the material clings to her body but she's able to muster enough that there's a shallow puddle of red in her palm. She wets her lips again, this time enough so that the blood drips slowly from her mouth. She kisses Allison- the sound is wet and loud even though she presses without force. Allison's lips are still sluggish and wiping at what they can of the blood Rose rubbed into them, it is little effort to slip her mouth into Allison's all but waiting lips.
no subject
It makes something stir in her: the faintest whisper of the hunger that had wracked her body in the days before... before this sickness that had made her feel so weak and frail. Unbeknownst to her, the stolen blood fills her veins, and gradually, warmth begins to flood her pallid skin and give it life again.
no subject
Rose is on her knees so quick that Allison's head hits the floor with a thud. She pays it no mind. After all, the pain from being unsatiated was so much worse. She falls on her hands when she reaches the man and he pleads with her. Rose wrinkles her nose in distaste.
"Shut up. You're giving me a fucking headache." And then she dives in, finding a a pretty red jewel of an artery. Rose makes it hurt on purpose, she doesn't suck him dry just yet to ensure she has a steady supply of something warm. He screams first, whimpers after like a whelping pup. A far cry from the man she'd met at that dingy club just a few hours ago who'd so boldly approached her and placed a greedy hand on her backside.
Rose stands with her cheeks full of liquid. She straddles Allison's ailing body and leans down, face hovering just an inch above hers. Allison's lips part on their own whether on accident or through instinct. Rose starts with just a few drops, letting the blood spill from her lips in a measured trickle.
no subject
She's too weak to resist and too grateful for the warmth when Rose straddles her. She tries to say something, but the murmur is indistinct, and at the first drop of blood into her mouth, she realizes at last what it is. But it's strange, alarming: the repulsion she expects at the taste of blood, sticky and clinging to her lips and teeth, is absent. Instead she is so hungry that she would weep at the sustenance after being deprived. The effects are slow but dramatic: color filling her cheeks, life returning to her desiccated skin and withered muscles. Finally, her eyes open, her eyes unnaturally bright and distant in the shadows, still not all there. She feels fuzzy, feverish.
She knew this woman she realizes. Had met her... before. Before what? Before whatever this was had happened, this horrible change. This disease eating away at her.