Corbin had been a physician for five years when his Vanessa hung herself in the garage. It was a Thursday, and his wife had left the car out on the street rather than pulling in to her normal spot. It’s strange, what you remember about these things.
Fuck the car and fuck you, Ness, he thought bitterly, hooking up Ellie’s IV for what could have been the last time. It wasn’t the last time, but it definitely could have been – vCJD was the last piece of Vanessa left to him. Cruztfeld-fucking-Jakobs, human variant, handed down from Ness to her daughter like a diamond should have been, or a favorite recipe. Ellie’s brain was rotting, but how do you tell a nine-year-old that her brain is rotting from anything but television? How do you explain to flesh and blood why all the lines and needles and shiny gallows-y IV stands are better than the searing pain the poor kid’s mother must have felt, and had most likely driven her hang herself?
“G’night sweet pea, daddy loves you.” Ell wheezed a little in her sleep, one leg shuttering perceptibly under the covers. Kuru. Mad cow. He tapped the bedside lamp to life, flipped the switch to the ceiling light, reflexively adjusted the door so he could see her fair little face from the recliner (more for his sake than hers, he knew,) sat his ass in the LaZBoy, and fell asleep watching the news. Corbin’s brain, too, was rotting.
——-
6:30 the following morning, Ellie’s hospice nurse arrived. Yelena hadn’t slept any better than the little shuddering doll in the bed, limbs all akimbo and trembling, fine sandy hair tacked to a spot of slobber on a cheek, sunken cheek. Back in the old country, Yelena would have stood her up, helped her walk, played a game in the fresh air. Yelena of the new country resisted the urge to yawn, brushed the lock of sticky hair from the sallow cheek, and yelped when Ellies’s little milk teeth sank into her wrist, cutting nerve and vessel, tearing to the bone. Yanking her arm away tore the flesh out of the wound as Ellie, once cherubic, snapped her little jaws with alarming vigor on the morsel, still connected by a tendon and a rose-hued string of saliva. The nurse pulled away, speechless and unable to scream, unable to breathe. The tendon snapped off at the gnashing teeth, and Yelena bolted.
“Mighty bitey,” an unkept Alabaman in an oily baseball cap had described an encounter with an unidentified assailant on the previous night’s 10 o’clock news. “Mighty bitey, came outta nowhere.”
The strigoi, as Yelena had chosen to call them, had dominated the news for the past few nights. She knew it was being blown out of proportion – this is America, after all – but surely every legend has a seed of truth? Surely the zombies, as her neighbors called them, lusted for blood? This was an especially pervasive trait of America; had the sopping wound on her arm been the product of a dream cultured into Ellie, a Pavlovian response to the beating heart of a foreigner? The steering wheel swung before her eyes in the car, probably shock, the snapping tendon echoing in her ears, where is Ellie? What have I done?
What has she done?
——-
Corbin’s keys landed on the counter with a clatter. He was on the edge of fuming. Where the fuck is Yelena? Is this tomato some-damn-thing on the linoleum? Looks more like… Is this trail going to, from…? Oh, fuck…FUCK….
Ellie, in a staggering motion some would call walking, stepped in perfected profile view past the kitchen island. The plastic lines dragged behind her, still taped to pallid forearms, needles torn from their careful placement. One lock of sandy hair had blackened with smeared blood, stuck to a once-rosy cheek, all grown cold since roughly 1:20 am. The watery green eyes, so like his own, had paled over in death, same as the bit of skin hanging by gristle from Ell’s lips. She wheezed a bit as her face lolled over the rigid shoulder, locking eyes with her daddy. Corbin was frozen.
She no longer trembled, but for the first time since the disease set in, since the prions punched holes in her little brain, since she found Mama “flying” in the garage, since the Alabama broadcasts, Ellie screamed.
——-
Yelena hadn’t left her apartment since she gave her statement to the Sheriff. The crusted wound, throbbing and necrotic, had spread over the forearm and hand, now limp and useless. Between her fever dreams, or when she was capable of thinking at all, she thought only of her grandmother’s stories of strigoi, the iron stakes they put through her grandfather’s belly, and of red, red meat. One option left.
Auspiciously, her aged but well-kept apartment was neatly situated above a garage in the older part of town, and while her landlords had intended to gentrify the property with vinyl fencing, they simply haven’t gotten around to it. Good for me, the thought seeped through the mental fog as the screen popped out, clattering two stories down. Is not aesthetic, but it will do. The fence, wrought iron and seven feet tall, looked a thin black line to her as she balanced her trembling self on the window sill. Paint chips and dead moths crunched under calloused feet, unnoticed, and remained stuck as she leaped, clearing the eves, arms spread wide. Iron bars crashed through flesh and bone, punctured her torso, and swayed slightly under the burden of a bleeding body. Yelena watched her blood trailing down the posts, feeling only hunger as her vision darkened.
END.