CHAPTER 23: DISNEYLAND (7)

1

This place was simply and plainly hell on earth.

Matthew was just one of the hundreds of people trapped in that hell. He was nothing special. It would be easier if he were special. If he could explain why he had ended up in this horrible situation, if there were a true justification. But no. The only thing that had happened was that he had bad luck. It wasn't even a cold comfort. It wasn't a comfort at all.

Strange growls and screams.

Sounds of chewing.

The screams of the dying rose at the same pace as the flames of hell. The smoke filled his eyes with tears, blurring his vision even more. Everywhere he looked, he found only a vision of true hell. The river of blood and entrails was getting bigger. It seemed to be chasing him as it dragged him along. A completely insane thought, of course, but everything that was happening before his eyes he would have considered completely insane until about five minutes ago.

He didn't care if those people were sick (or were vampires) or whatever, the point was that he wanted to get out of here.

Matthew was not special. He hadn't done anything particularly good, but neither had he done anything particularly bad. He didn't deserve to die in a place like this. So horribly. He just wanted to escape and leave this city behind forever. He didn't have much money, but he would move to the other side of the world if necessary.

He found a car in his path. It was nothing special, it was in the middle of the road after all (no matter how hard it was to remember that this was actually a place built by human hands and used by humans every day). The problem was that it was right in the middle and upside down.

If he could stand up, he would go around it and continue on his way, but his legs didn't obey the orders of his brain. Rather, the order couldn't get through. Something was wrong. He didn't even remember how he had broken them, but it wasn't just a matter of fear.

When it overturned, all the glass in the car had shattered. So he didn't have to take a long detour. Matthew decided to crawl inside, over the broken glass, over the blood of other people. He passed under the corpse of a man hanging only by his seatbelt. What security it had provided him at the moment of truth. The airbag deployed at the last moment was painted red.

The blood fell on him inevitably, he felt the broken glass scraping him, cutting his clothes, his skin too. Not too much.

He regretted his decision as soon as he felt the pain, but not too much. Much better than taking the detour while exposed to any of the beings perpetrating the massacre on the road. The overturned vehicle at least provided him with cover. He briefly thought about stopping here, hiding, and hoping for the best.

Maybe if the man had flown through the glass, but he was still here, his blood spilling even though he was already dead.

It would attract those things and they would find him.

Because he had seen them.

He had seen them drink blood as if it were the elixir of eternal life. He had seen those animals moan with pleasure with their chins stained with blood.

Matthew tried not to think about what those creatures obviously were, as it went against common sense. Nor about how he intended to get off the road with both legs broken. He couldn't think about those things because otherwise, he wouldn't take another step, so to speak. Desperation would take hold of him.

For now, he was having luck. While others were being turned or devoured around him, he was escaping by crawling like a worm.

"I'm so thirsty, so thirsty..." one muttered even as he drank all the blood escaping from the aorta of some poor bastard, broken and twisted like a rag doll.

There was only one word that came to mind contemplating such a spectacle. No matter how much it defied common sense, it was something he was seeing with his own eyes. And smelling. It filled his lungs, practically choking him.

But he resisted accepting that word that explained everything.

Although he would undoubtedly prefer to be transformed into one of those things rather than die torn apart. They were nothing but animals. Who they killed and who they turned into one of them was not a conscious decision, but pure animal instinct. If they caught him, his life would be in the hands of fate. Only if they caught him.

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Matthew was not a special man. That included his inner strength, but any living being would draw strength from where they thought there was none when faced with death. The end of all things. Living beings were made to flee from death at all costs.

In the end, however, he stopped. It was a miracle he had been able to get this far in the first place, despite the state of his legs. Broken was an understatement. They no longer had the shape that legs should have, as if they were made of rubber, not skin and flesh.

He knew. It was something else to add to the list of things he didn't want to admit, but he knew.

Despite the luck he had had evading the attention of the monsters and the willpower he had shown, he wouldn't advance another millimeter. There was no more gas in his tank. In short, he was done.

"It's not fair. I don't want to die."

Crying tears of blood, Matthew lamented his fate.

He writhed on the ground pathetically, as if he were already being torn apart. The tears didn't stop. Soon he would see the world through a scarlet red curtain.

Good. He didn't want to see anything of what awaited him.

He had to bite his tongue before the animals pounced on him. If he was going to die anyway, the logical thing was to seek the least painful death possible. Matthew swallowed. Even so, it wasn't so easy to take that step. Committing suicide and being killed were completely different things.

He wasn't able to gather the courage to die on his own terms.

Even when one of the vampires (why not admit it at this point?) approached him with an open mouth, blood and saliva dripping between its animal teeth.

Better this way.

He couldn't believe what he saw next in the best possible sense. A girl carrying a spear bigger than herself jumped over the cars as if nothing and impaled the abomination to the ground as if her weapon were a stake. Maybe it was because of the blood loss, the tears, and the smoke. But the weapon seemed transparent. As if it wasn't really there. Matthew couldn't help but laugh. Maybe he did have something special. The heavens had smiled on him even in the midst of absolute despair.

He had been rescued at the last second by a slender girl who was the age of his daughter, with a weapon so large it could flatten a car.

Everything was so unreal.

But he was alive, and that was all that mattered in the end.

2

"Another one bites the dust," said Dracula, grimacing. He had more or less returned to his territory. He and his new friend were leaving the airport. "Seriously, I don't get it. I transformed them, gave them a good explanation of how things would be now, and left them safe in my house. And somehow they managed to die one after another."

Not entirely. Mark was left, but at this rate, he would bite the dust too.

He knew they were dead because the connection had been cut and vampirism was an incurable condition. That was all. He had no way of knowing what situation they had gotten into so many kilometers away. It didn't work that way.

"It's not my fault, right?"

Davy Jones looked at him in surprise.

"Of course not!"

"That's true," he replied, nodding. "You're a good friend. You always know what to say."

3

Daniela took a deep breath, taking a moment to observe the situation.

There was no need to pay attention to the details to understand the situation. A first glance was enough to understand that it was hopeless. The superiors had sent them to stop the tide with their bare hands.

"What a disaster."

Daniela was standing on one of the cars. The rising flames framed the silhouette of her small body. And the shape of the enormous spear, whose tip touched the roof of the vehicle.

She had been working as a hunter for too many years and had never seen anything like this.

The reason was very simple. Vampires couldn't transform people just like that, it required a complicated and long blood ritual. It was common sense. If they could reproduce in an act that took maybe ten seconds, humanity would have gone extinct shortly after they dared to come down from the trees and they would always have been the masters of the planet.

However, that seemingly impossible act was happening before her eyes over and over again.

The vampires on this road were transforming poor innocents just by drinking from them, transmitting the curse.

Daniela had accepted it from the beginning, but this proved it beyond any doubt. The creature they had encountered in the cannibal forest was who it claimed to be. Only the subjects transformed directly by the master of the night could spread vampirism in that way.

Her companions continued advancing down the road, giving their all to stop this madness. Meanwhile, she just frowned.

This was the end. An impossible mission. She would save as many people as she could, execute the abominations against nature, and strive to clean up this mess along with her companions. She would follow the orders received as the professional she was. But it would be to no avail.

They couldn't stop the approaching storm, shaking the foundations of the modern world.

Daniela sighed.

She jumped off the car. Only about twenty seconds had passed. Even so, she had lost too much time lost in her thoughts.

She shot forward like a bullet with the spear in front.

A knight who couldn't even believe that the battle she was about to fight would be of any use. The lives she could save should mean something to her and they did. She hadn't lost her human heart, but she couldn't help but wonder if she could really save anyone. I mean, how long would they last?

Human civilization was on the brink of the abyss.

Dracula was the herald of the end times.

By that logic, she shouldn't be here in the first place. She should have used the spear against herself and ended this once and for all.

As pessimistic as she was, she supposed there must still be a spark of hope burning in her heart. A spark she had to protect so it wouldn't go out.

Daniela dove into hell once more to save complete strangers.

Disneyland (7): FIN