VAMPIRE IN PATHOS - CHAPTER 3

Chapter 3: Picnic

-Tina-

The nightmare was real. I got shot. And I remember dying! But I didn’t remember anything after that. Shooting one of them, getting fixed up by Jamie, then Rodrigo. My head felt empty and my heart was racing.

Those thoughts were still with me when we arrived at Rodrigo’s clinic. How the man managed to be available 24/7 was a mystery to me, my first guess was some sort of no-sleep-cyberware though. He was sitting in front of his holo tv watching some documentary about earth’s sharks when we stepped into his apartment.

He immediately paused the hologram and looked up at us. “Back so soon, eh? That can’t be good,” he commented accurately.

“She’s got memory issues!” Jamie immediately blurted out. It wasn’t like her to speak with so little control over her voice. A very egoistical part of me wondered if she cared about me more than she was letting on before.

Rodrigo quickly got up and waved us into the clinic proper. I was ushered over to the medical chair and Rodrigo did a bunch of outside checks, before plugging his datapad cable into my memory port.

After a couple minutes of tapping about on his pad he sighed and spoke up. “So… the good news is you don’t have a concussion at all and most of your body functions are in top shape.” Okay so I am healthy, but… Rodrigo frowned at me uncomfortably before continuing. “The bad news is there is a large chunk of both your brain and your memory core that I can’t access right now. Your heart rate is still below 40 bpm and I took a small blood sample this morning as well as just now. Overnight your iron levels dropped into dangerous levels while calcium is up significantly.”

Great so half my brain is dead and now I need to add iron supplements to my hoard of pills I need to take every day… wonderful. At least I was still alive, even if my blood pressure was terrible. Rodrigo looked down to the floor dejectedly.

“I’ll be honest with you, Tina. Medically, you should be dead. Like there is no natural way to explain how you are alive right now. When you came in yesterday your body was covered in bullet holes and one of them went through your heart. Nobody survives that. Now you’re sitting on my chair with not even a single scar to tell the story. Your memory problems are most likely a side effect of the low heart rate. You don’t get enough oxygen delivered to your brain. But that shouldn’t interfere with your memory core at all. That stuff runs on electricity and you got plenty of energy left.”

He sighed again and looked back up at me. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep you here in the clinic for a few days. That way I can keep an eye on you and monitor your heartrate and brain activity.”

I grimaced but gave him a short nod. It made sense to keep mere here. How I survived a bullet to my heart was as much a mystery to me as it was to him and I wanted to know what happened. Best shot at that was supervision, see what my body is doing.

Jamie offered to grab some clothes and other necessities from my place and after making sure I’ll be alright without her she drove off.

Rodrigo led me over to one of the medical beds in a backroom and started connecting me to some monitoring tech. There was even one of those things with the heartrate graph on it. It didn’t make noises like it did in the holo though.

An hour or so, Jamie was back with clothes and some fried noodles from the Asian fusion place from across the street. The three of us mostly ate in silence, until Rodrigo had to take care of another patient.

The sun was down by now and despite sleeping till midday I felt tired, so Jamie and I said goodbye and she went back home. It wasn’t long until I drifted off to sleep.

*****

The next week went by in a blur. Every day felt the same. Wake up, wait until Rodrigo disconnects the monitoring tech, breakfast, bathroom, physical activity to keep healthy, back to bed and into the monitoring equipment, dinner in bed, sleep.

At night I was always drawn back to the same “nightmare” I had and each time I felt more certain that a part of me did die that night. I felt it, the life slipping out of me. The darkness that crept around me. If not death, then what was it? I wasn’t the first person with a near death experience, so I reached out to a local support group of people with similar experiences.

I couldn’t actually meet up with them, not yet at least, but I spent a good while chatting with them and exchanging experiences. One girl, Risa, even went through almost the same thing, only in her case the bullet only grazed her heart and the damage could be fixed before it could tear open.

I didn’t have any new memory issues at all over the week and my heartrate remained “stable” at 30 to 40 beats per minute. My iron deficiency got a lot worse though and Rodrigo started giving me supplements after the first night. They helped, but didn’t push me into acceptable levels. All this time cooped up inside didn’t help my very fair skin either and by the last day of the week I looked like a ghost, which I felt was very funny considering my condition.

Rodrigo and Jamie didn’t think so, though. They were a little concerned about it, even though my vitamin D levels were good thanks to the pills I’ve been taking since my teens. After taking one last blood sample to confirm everything was still the same as the nights before, I was finally released from bedrest.

I was given a heart rate monitor that wrapped around my arm and then Rodrigo said his goodbyes chased me out.

“So, where are we going?” I asked after Jamie and I climbed into her car.

“We’re going to get some sunlight and fresh air,” she replied before typing Mary Fletching Park into the navigator. It was a little outside the city in a cosy suburban neighbourhood. I’ve never been there before, but it was a regular hangout spot for families and university students. The park was nestled in between an offshoot of the river and a shopping promenade.

Luckily it was a Tuesday, so it was fairly empty when we arrived after a one-hour drive. There were a handful of kids playing in the river and some people were having picnic in the shadows of the large clover-like greenwood trees. To my surprise, Jamie pulled a picnic basket out of her car as well. When she noticed me staring, she just wiggled her eyebrows a little.

“You actually prepared a picnic?” I asked in disbelief, in spite of the blatant evidence.

“What? It’s great weather for picnic!” she protested with a grin.

“I just didn’t take you for the picnic type, you know?”

“So just cuz I make a living as a gunslinger, I can’t like picnic?” she wiggled her eyebrows again.

Well, I mean, yea kinda. The kind of work we did had the side effect of numbing the parts of us that appreciated the soft and comfortable life. Picnics, restaurants, family outings, that was all stuff that regular people had. People that fit into society and did their part. Not… criminals like us, outcasts, outsiders and such. We kept sane with stuff like nightclubs, drugs and the occasional romp with a hooker.

Yet, sitting here under the shade in a soft breeze and sipping some iced tea… it felt so peaceful and heartwarming.

“Here have a cupcake,” Jamie said, handing me a little obviously self-made muffin with pink glazing and cute little sugar hearts sprinkled on top before taking a bite out of her own.

I couldn’t help but giggle at the absurd cuteness of the situation. I already knew Jamie had a bit of a sweet tooth, but self-made muffins were something I never expected from her. Like, I could easily imagine her standing in the kitchen cooking up something delicious like pancakes in her lazy morning-self but properly baking something was a whole different level.

Once I calmed down from my small giggle attack, I took a bite from the small pastry. It tasted absolutely heavenly. The dough tasted of vanilla and citrus while the frosting had a strawberry flavour and the little hearts added some crush to the whole thing.

It was only after I savoured the last little bite of it that I noticed that Jamie was staring at me with a soft smile plastered over her adorable, freckled face.

“I take it you like them?” she asked, her smile turning into a wide idiotic grin.

I let out a little laugh at the sight and replied truthfully. “They’re probably the best cupcakes I’ve ever had!”

“I’m glad then. Seeing you smile and laugh again after all that happened makes me happy.” Her expression grew a little darker. “When you… when that stuff happened. I thought I lost you. I thought you were gone. It was such a terrifying thing I still can’t believe you just walked away from that. It all made me think a lot about some stuff.”

She took a deep sip from her iced tea before continuing. “I was a bad partner, Tina. I let you down, didn’t pay enough attention and you got hurt because of it. I will do things differently from now on. I don’t want you to get hurt again. You’re… too important to me for that.”

I caught my breath at the end. That almost sounded like a confession. I knew that’s not how she meant it, though. She was my mentor after all. It was probably meant in a partner in crime kind of way. The same way a cop would care about his cop buddy.

Still, it felt nice to know that she cared about me. She was pretty great as a mentor so far and I wouldn’t want to have anyone else. Honestly, if she loved me back it would be pretty problematic, even if we ignored the mentor situation. Our age difference was pretty big. I just turned twenty in spring and she’d been complaining as long as I knew her that she was turning thirty in December.

“Thank you. It means a lot to me… to know that you care. I think you’re pretty great yourself, you know,” I replied, first sincerely, then with a massive grin on my face.

She giggled a little and lightly punched me in the shoulder, before flushing my brain beet-red by leaning against it.

“Mia’s searching for the guy, by the way. The one who shot you,” the adorable redhead mumbled.

“Are we gonna kill him?” I asked dryly.

She nodded.

-Luis…?-

For a whole week I awoke strapped to a bunch of measuring equipment. I was in a backroom of Rodrigo’s clinic. He even came by sometimes to check up on me and to tell me to get some more sleep. Apparently, I’d returned here because of memory issues and was kept for surveillance.

The second night I found the containment runes on my ancle. I knew the only way to escape this body would be to kill it, once again, the same way as with the urn. I even considered that for a while, getting rid of it while I was in control and then slipping to freedom. But to be perfectly honest, I didn’t mind it all that much. I got to be a girl and potentially live out my biggest fantasy, become a deadly femme fatale.

I was already building her cover. Well, honestly, I’d been building her cover ever since I was a kid. To the public I was going to be Maria Almeida. Born in Bilbao, Spain, finished high school at the top of her grade, joined the military in hopes of getting her higher education paid for by the state afterwards. Except she excelled in the military and quickly got scouted by a private intelligence agency.

To my surprise, the agency was run by vampires and part of the job entailed being turned. I gave my consent to be turned and signed the contract. I worked for them for two decades before my contract ran out and I became a private mercenary for another decade. Then I got hired by the CIA to kidnap Penelope Bauer and you know the rest.

Wait was I still talking about Maria? Well, okay her cover is basically my entire life story, down to the name, just without the male parts, but it’s not like anyone would be able to trace me to my old safe and calling myself Luis Maria Fernando Almeida would look weird with the body I had now.

So I was just Maria Almeida, for now. As a cover of course. At some point I’ll have to return to being Luis again. The thought made me incredibly sad, but that’s just how covers worked. They cover up who you really are, beneath it all.

It took me a couple nights to figure out that Tina was still very much alive, if a little traumatised by her near-death experience. There was an entire section of her mind that I couldn’t interact with at all. First, I tried to escape her body again, but I was trapped in the same way as with the urn. That also cemented my decision to keep this body, rather than destroy it. I didn’t want to take the girl’s life just so I could reform my stupid old body. That felt like a terrible thing to do and would be a bad deal for both sides either way.

After the sixth night, another thing happened that changed things significantly. When I fell asleep in the morning, instead of my usual dreams about some random obscure mission where I was a girl, I found myself in my family’s small old living room in Bilbao.

A couch, a loveseat and an armchair sat in a U around a small wooden coffee table. A massive bookcase stretched across the right wall behind the armchair. It was filled with dad’s old books. I never got to meet him, he died before I was born, but I spent lot of time here as a child reading. The couch was pushed up against the back wall and the left wall had the door to the dining room and the loveseat, where mom usually sat on her days off. The front wall was a massive glass sliding door that usually led to the garden terrace. But now I was looking at Rodrigo instead.

He carefully removed all the cables and such before I got up out of the bed. Only, I didn’t do anything. I still stood in the living room. I was watching Tina, from Tina’s perspective. The sliding door led to her eyes.

This was a serious game changer.

Then a thought crossed my mind and I looked down. I didn’t have Luis’ body anymore. I was still in Tina’s body, but in an un-tattered version of the clothes she had on the day she died. Black jeans, push-up bra, white shirt and leather jacket.

I held a strand of hair in front of my eyes and to my surprise it wasn’t pink like Tina’s, but pure white. I could also feel the familiar sharp teeth in my mouth that I didn’t have when I possessed Tina’s body.

With a happy smile and a step I threw myself on the couch and watched Tina go about her day.

It was rather cute, she finally got out of the clinic and Jaime took her out on a date. Except Tina didn’t realise it was a date and I kept hearing her internal monologue going on about how or why Jaime couldn’t be into her.

This poor girl lacked so much confidence; I thought with a smug grin. I could probably teach her a lot now that I thought about it. She was obviously pretty bad at the whole gangster thing. And the flirting thing.

Good thing I was here now to take care of her.