“They won’t stop hunting us, we’re in the Underworld,”

                                                    Michael Corvin

We weren’t strangers to bullet blasts breaking out our windows. We weren’t strangers to running. Running was all we ever seemed to do these days. Michael and I were almost sure we had lost their trail. Hurricane Watson had been tearing through the country for weeks now. It was our smokescreen. To finally disappear. To finally forget the past and start anew. But our enemies were relentless. They wanted her. They wanted our Evelyn. We would not let them.

My hands were almost fists as I held the steering wheel and navigated the wet roadway. I saw through the smearing of the windshield wipers working to wipe away the rainwater beating down on us. Michael was still shooting at the bastards in the back. They had taken out one of our rear-view mirrors and from what I am told, they are aiming for our tyres.

“Shoot them first!” I yelled at Michael, as the car swerved from left to right, to left again and right again with every move my palms made in either direction.

“I’m fucking trying!” he cursed at me.

“Try harder!” I cursed back.

I glimpsed Evelyn sitting beside him in my rear-view mirror, slumped down, hands covering her ears, tears in her eyes and shaking. She always shook when they came for us. I heard the click of another clip being loaded into the glock and pressed hard on the gas. Michael was always better at tearing things apart with his hands and his claws and his teeth, he was never a good shot, but I needed him to shoot this time because our lives depended on it. Even in the midst of this madness I was happy the highway up ahead was empty. Unlike us, humans feared the forces of Mother Nature.

“Selene they’re closing in fast!” Michael yelled through the berating of bullets and raindrops on our battered BMW.

I glimpsed them in my rear-view mirror. One of their vans was almost bracing beside the backdoor on the right. Michael’s muzzle lit up the interior and they swerved back a bit.

“Fuck they’re bulletproof!” he yelled over the roar of the engine.

Another big black van was closing in on my left, almost to the front seat.

“Hang on!” I yelled when the tinted windows began their greedy descent and revealed the muzzles of what might have been AK-47’s.

I stomped the brakes and they two vans at our sides shot past us like trains blazing by a station. We took a hit to the back from another van that was behind us, my chest hit the steering wheel and we veered left downhill into the bushes that lined the roadway. Gravity was guiding us now. I turned left then right then right then left dodging as many trees as possible on the steep incline as we bumped along for dear life. The engine seemed to gargle with every bump and jerk and drop until we eventually slammed trunk first and came to a stop. If I were human, that hit to the chest would have killed me. I felt it all the way in my back as I sat back. Michael had his arms wrapped around her like a big brown coat. She was no longer shaking. I looked at them in my rear-view mirror, now tilted from the impact.

“We’re okay,” Michael said, reading my mind.

“We need to move quickly then, come on,” I said and pushed open the door to the driver seat.

We were dressed for a funeral, dressed for death. Our boots made sappy sucking sounds in the mud as we walked through the trees in search of a path, any path that led to somewhere.

“Smell anything?” I asked Michael.

“Just rain, trees, and dirt,” he said. “We need to get to shelter soon.”

Michael was right. The trees were no protection from the rain. And our coats would only weigh us down in a fight if they caught up to us. I looked back at our Evelyn holding her father’s hand, still quiet, while her dark blue eyes seemingly searched the treetops. In that moment, she looked a lot like her father when I first met him: scared and uncertain of this new world. I realized this was her first time in nature. We had been cooping her up in safe houses as we fled from city to city, looking for sanctuary. When she saw me looking back at her I returned my gaze up ahead. If there was ever the possibility of us having a normal life, I did not need her believing that she was weird.

“Selene you alright?” Michael asked.

“Just thinking,” I said.

“You don’t have to worry about her, she’ll talk when she’s ready.”

“I know Michael, I know.”

“Wait, do you smell that?” Michael asked.

I stopped between the trunks of two trees and lifted my nose in the air.

“Smells like blood,” I said.

“Stale blood,” said Michael, “Coming from up there.”

I followed his finger through the raindrops, through the greenery, to a dark passage up ahead.

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“Looks like a cave,” I said.

We stepped beside one another, our boots still sucking to our feet from the mud. There was a draft at the mouth of the cave suggesting that there was another opening. I was looking into darkness at mounds of stalagmites.  

“This isn’t safe Michael, we need to keep moving,” I suggested.

“It’s almost nightfall, we can’t spend it walking around in the woods. She’s tired, I’m tired and I know you’re tired too,” he said.

My eyes searched the cave for signs of life as the smell of blood hung in the air. Its tangy metallic taste was on my tongue.

“It smells like someone is bleeding to death,” I said.

I stepped into the dark. My boots crunched on the dirt from the mud that was still sticking to my heels. I followed the scent through the stalagmites jutting from the floor like Miniature Mountains when I saw it. It was big, it was brown, and it was dead, but beneath it, someone was still breathing. I felt their breath on the tip of my lips as I stepped closer to the brown bear.

“What the fuck,” I heard Michael curse.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked.

“She’s 16,” he said.

“And she hasn’t spoken, I don’t want her first words to be what the fuck Michael. Come and help me lift this thing.”

Together we cupped our hands beneath the beast and titled its big broad body on its side, allowing gravity to roll it on its back. The bear had been lying on this poor man, how long? We couldn’t be sure. His chest had claw marks the size of a spare tyre and from the wounds on his neck and shoulder, he had been bitten.

“Pl-please, he-help me, he-help me,” he begged.

“He’s a hunter,” said Michael, pointing to the hunting knife in his hand.

I looked back at Evelyn who was staring and shaking. I wiped the blood of the bear on my damp trench coat, walked over to her and held her face in my hands.

“Don’t be scared Evelyn, it’s going to be alright,” I said.

I could hear him begging for his life with what little air remained in his lungs. I could hear the weakness in his voice getting softer and with every word. He was straining just to get the words out of his mouth. I closed my eyes and kissed my daughter on the forehead.

“We don’t have to kill him,” said Michael. “You can turn him.”

“I don’t want to turn him Michael,” I said, standing up again.

“Why not? You turned me,” he said.  

“And now look where we are. I don’t want to give someone else this life of ours. Neither of us are happy. If I turn him, he has look over his shoulder for the rest of his life.”

“He wants us to save him Selene, he’s not ready to die.”

I looked from Michael to the broken man in his tattered red plaid jacket, bleeding all over the ground from his exposed chest. He was begging for his life. Even in his world of pain he still clung to hope. I knelt beside him and held his neck, still warm and very much wet with sweat.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I said and sunk my fangs into him.

He let out a low moan like a dentist patient having their mouth cleaned as I tasted the tangy metallic flavour on my tongue. I lifted my fangs from his neck and felt a surge of energy blaze through my body. Using the soggy sleeves of my trench coat I wiped the blood from my mouth and stood up. I watched the hunter convulse, his chest rising and falling, his legs kicking about wildly as the venom rushed through his body. His low moan became a heavy scream that boomed through the cave and sent bats swirling past us. Michael hugged Evelyn as she was shaking again. Her eyes lingered on the hunter as he jerked about on the ground. His gold wedding ring caught and held my attention as he slowly sat up like a lazy worker getting ready for the Monday shift.

“Wh-what-what did you-what did you do to me?” he stuttered as he held his blood stained chest.

“I turned you into a vampire,” I said, too tired to care whether or not he believed.

“A what?” he asked.

“Listen to me, you’re a vampire now,” I said, dropping to one knee before him. “There are some things you’re going to need to know. I see you have a wedding ring. Do you have children?” I asked.

“Y-yeah, two sons and a daughter,” he said.

“I’m so sorry, you’re going to have to say goodbye to them.”

“Wait, what, whaddya mean goodbye? Who are you? What did you-?”

“As a vampire you’re going to need to feed and when that happens your family is going to be in serious danger. You can either turn them like I turned you, or leave them alone, the choice is yours. I’m really sorry that this happened to you.”

“Wait, wait- I don’t understand. Vampires are a myth.”

“I’m sorry, I wish we were. I just saved your life,” I said.

I only just noticed the hunting rifle lying beside a stalagmite a few feet ahead. I surmised that the bear probably gave him one hell of a hit that knocked the rife from his hands. As usual, the fledgling was curious about his new state of awareness and was asking a thousand questions that I did not have the energy to answer.

“Do other people live out here?” I asked, recognizing that the rain was beginning to subside outside.

“What?” the hunter asked with one brow raised and probably offended that I did not answer his questions.

“Are there more people living out here?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of them in this area.”

“Michael we’re leaving,” I said.

“Wait what am I supposed to do now?” asked the hunter.

I stopped at the cave mouth, looked back at the blood stained red haired man and said with as much honesty as I could muster, “I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry man,” I heard Michael say as I walked out of the cave and into light raindrops tapping on my head. When I heard his footsteps beside me I reached for his hand and held it. I could feel his eyes on me, probably wondering what this gesture meant.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For believing that I’m anything other than a monster.”

We both stopped dead in our tracks when the gunshot rang out from the cave.