Act like a human being, huh? Oh, what an obnoxious thing to say.

Let’s get one thing straight: I have nothing against humanity. I used to be one of them and feel naught but respect for their bravery and their achievements. Art, science, culture, these are the things that make life worth living, and humanity has mastered all three. How can you not be in awe of such an impressive species? Three cheers for them, that’s what I say!

But can we please dispense with the pretense of mankind being a race of paragons filled with virtue and grace? We know that simply isn’t true. Their history is littered with expansionism and conquest. Murder and destruction. Chaos and war. Debauchery and madness. Endless hatred and greed. Just because aspects of them are as beautiful as sculpted glass, doesn’t make them all angels. Not unless we’re talking about horrifying biblically accurate angels, in which case…yeah, I can see it.

So, Rachel wanted me to deal with these Koler crabs as a human being would, is that right? Fine, I would. And she had only herself to blame for what she would soon witness.

Remember: Vampires started out as human beings. Yes, we’re complete monsters but where do you think we acquired the worst of those traits? It’s like that anti-drug public service announcement they used to run in the 80’s. The one where the father confronts his son about his behavior.

Human Father: “Invasion, assassination, destabilization of a sovereign government and exploitation of the fearful masses? Where did you learn these things, son? Answer me!”

Vampire child: “I learned it by watching you, dad…I learned it by watching you!”

Narrator: “Parent species of nations that engage in ruthless expansionism and conquest may produce monstrous successors who also engage in ruthless expansionism and conquest but on a far worse scale. And they will also eat you. Don’t forget that part.”

Heh, I can be whimsical sometimes.

“So, what are you going to do?” asked Rachel.

“First things first, acquisition,” I replied as I stood over the dead crab. The golden light which emanated from its body informed me that an ability was now obtainable for the Gore Grimoire. One quick bite of its heart later and I now possessed the passive skill, [Fast Regeneration.]

I realize having a second healing factor was a little redundant. If my human form had possessed a little more durability, I would have passed this new skill over without a backward glance. But being as frail as I was, I needed some insurance that I wouldn’t be annihilated in one hit if something caught me off guard in the daylight where I couldn’t access my vampiric form’s blood rejuvenation, and this was it. Once I’d grown stronger, I would replace it with something else, but for now, as an interim placeholder, [Fast Regeneration] would serve me well.

“All right,” I said. “And now, with that out of the way, our second task will be to find a safe place to rest for a few hours.”

“Why?” Rachel asked.

“Because I don’t want to be eaten while sleeping,” I replied as I located a nearby oak that looked good enough for the job. It was a tall, magnificent tree, with thick, strong branches that easily supported my weight as I climbed them and found a space long enough to rest comfortably on.

Below me, on ground level, Schulz sat patiently to keep an eye out for any crabs that wandered too close.

“Are you being serious right now?” Rachel asked. “You’re really taking a nap?”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “What’s the alternative? More scintillating conversations with you?”

“But you already waited all day for nightfall to come,” she protested.

“Yes, I did,” I nodded patiently. “But now there’s been a change in plans, and our success now depends on taking action shortly before dawn.”

“How shortly before dawn?” she asked.

“How many Koler crabs were there again?” I asked.

“Seventy-four remain,” she said.

“About twenty minutes should do it,” I said with an assertive nod.

“Twenty minutes of what?”

“For us? Instant success. For them? Hell on earth in all its malignant awe.”

“…Kyler, what are you going to do?” she asked fretfully.

“I’m going to behave as a human would, dearest Rachel,” I replied. “I’m going to press a big red button to see what happens next.”

“Humans don’t do things just to see what happens,” she protested.

“How old are you?” I asked in exasperation.

“I told you! I’m two thousand years old!” she said forcefully.

“You’re lying,” I said bluntly.

“I am not!”

“You absolutely are,” I asserted. “Rachel, I’ve met beings in the age-range you’ve claimed for yourself. Some of them have been of different species like me, some of them were humans who’d cultivated massive lifespans, others were ancient spirits. Despite our diversity, do you know what we all have in common?”

“What?” she asked in a defiant tone.

“Cynicism,” I said. “Flat out. Once you’re old enough to see how history endlessly repeats itself and how the young never learn from the mistakes of prior generations, you’re left with a persistent skepticism of the good in everything.”

“That isn’t true—” she sputtered.

“Yes, it is,” I said, ignoring her protest. “And this isn’t a perspective one develops from living for a thousand years. Its growth begins far sooner than that. It starts seeding itself in your thirties, but it really takes root when you hit fifty or so. And by the time you’re in your seventies, I guarantee you, you’re well on your way to becoming a cold, bitter thing who may pray for the best but will always expect the worst. Haven’t you ever wondered why it’s so easy for the old to send young men and women to die in foreign lands for profit and power? It’s because age eventually takes away the capacity to care. And why should they? Very few people live to a great age, but there are young fools every which way you turn. They’re an endlessly replaceable resource to be harvested.”

“So, I’m lying because I still believe in the best of others?” she said.

“Yes, you absolutely are,” I said. “Rachel, you’re too soft. You may as well have an uncut umbilical cord. You aren’t convincing anyone with your silly deceit.”

“I’m not lying!” she insisted stubbornly.

“I could order you to tell me the truth, and you’d have no choice but to obey,” I reminded her.”

“S-so, you’d just casually violate the sanctity of my mind to confirm your petty suspicions? Is that right?” she asked heatedly.

“Well, yes, if you had any secrets worth stealing,” I replied honestly. “But I’m beginning to suspect you don’t. You’re like a weird transfer student desperately pretending to have a mysterious past so that the other kids at her new school will think she’s interesting. But you come across more like a home-schooled person interacting in a public setting for the first time.”

“I AM TWO THOUSAND YEARS OLD!” she shouted.

“But what does that mean outside of scientology?” I asked.

“Bastard! You’re a mean bastard and I—”

“Shush,” I said. “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you up when it’s time to enact my plan.”

Rachel struggled to defy my order, but a command from her maker was impossible to ignore. After offering some feeble resistance, she passed out and I placed her in my storage, so that I could rest against the tree with my hands behind my head.

She was such a strange creature. The more of her personality she revealed to me, the more amusing I found her.

I wondered if there’d ever come a day when she would be honest with me of her own volition. Was I someone who could still inspire that level of trust from another person?

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Probably not. Time had definitely changed me for the worst.

Those were my thoughts as I stared at the night sky which was beautiful and filled with the splendid light of the stars. As I fell asleep, I felt blessed to have gazed upon such wonders.

The dark isn’t always a terrible thing. Its glory may be shadowed, but it still existed.

I woke up feeling refreshed about a half hour from dawn.

I guess it was time to get started.

“Wakey, wakey,” I said to Rachel as I summoned her from storage.

“You sent me to bed like an irksome child!” she said angrily as soon as she awoke.

“I did, didn’t I?” I replied. “That nap made me feel pretty good. How about yourself?”

“Are we going to get this done or what?” she said.

“No rush, no rush, let me stretch first,” I said before climbing down the tree. “What we’re about to do is going to happen very quickly. So, keep that in mind. Staying alert will be important.”

“How important?”

“Very important!” I said cheerfully. “Wouldn’t want to get caught off guard, yeah? That could end badly for us. For me especially.”

“Kyler what are you about to do?” Rachel asked worriedly.

“Shhh. Rachel, just close your imaginary little eyes and focus,” I said. “I want to take you back to a simpler time, a better time, when the world was divided by territorial lines denoting what was good and what was evil. The West was the best, and the East was the least.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“RACHEL. Let me finish setting the scene please,” I said. “Now as I said, the West was the best. You could eat a fast-food burger at seven, watch a movie at the drive-in at eight, close out a bar by three, and terrorize your family by noon the next day when your kids woke you up with all the noise from their playing. Meanwhile, in the East, they were all eating gruel and watching black and white television in their cement block apartments before marching to their tank factories to pray to Lenin-Jesus for the destruction of wall street. Obviously, they were all hopelessly insane. Defending our rights from such madness took two things: resources and resolve.”

I gestured towards the pond. “Behold,” I said. “The necessary resources for the continuation of Tradesman Calford’s slice of sweet cherry pie and baked Alaska. Oh, but what’s this? It’s been occupied by a hostile faction of unproductive invaders. Look at those shameless Koler crab bastards taking what isn’t theirs while promulgating their vile San Francisco values. Doesn’t it make you angry?”

“You’re just rambling pure idiocy,” Rachel said after a short pause.

“Oh, come on, let me have some fun with this,” I said with a frown. “Be a better audience! Take a note from the dog, he’s entranced by my story telling. Schulz really appreciates me, don’t you boy?”

In response to my saying his name, Schulz ran over to me and stood on his back legs so that I could scratch his neck and receive a few enthusiastic licks in return. He really was a good boy.

“Could you just get on with it?” Rachel demanded.

“Okay,” I said. “Now where was I? Right! We’ve identified the enemy. Now we need to determine how to eliminate them. I’m taking the role of America because that was a country that was notorious for fighting proxy wars through the destabilization of enemy governments by supporting insurgencies. They bathed entire nations in the friendly fire of freedom fighters. For the free world.”

“Didn’t those disastrous policies destroy their reputation abroad and lead to worldwide chaos that years later tanked their own economy with a terrible recession and bogged them down in decades of meaningless fighting?” asked Rachel.

“No, shut up,” I replied. “Okay, fine, it did, but in their defense, they didn’t know all those bad things would happen. And according to their elected officials, not being able to predict a terrible outcome is the same as not doing it. Not if your intentions are as pure as western democracy.”

“A notoriously exclusive enterprise.”

“They’d prefer you call it selective,” I said. “Anyway, now that we’ve established who the bad guys are, let’s create a hero for our narrative. And I choooooose him.”

I spun around and pointed the spear at the corpse of the Koler crab we’d killed earlier. Luckily it was still there, waiting to be used. In hindsight, I was lucky something hadn’t come along to eat it while we were sleeping.

“What are you going to do with that?” asked Rachel.

“What else? I’m going to recruit him and use him to start an insurgency. The good kind, that is.”

I sauntered over to the dead monster and lifted it by its neck. Then I opened my mouth wide as I felt my teeth slowly extend and sharpen, transforming my smile into a gaping piranha’s lunatic grin. Then I bit deeply into the neck of the corpse and began sucking out its lifeless blood.

Ugh, disgusting.

“Why are you doing that?” Rachel asked, dumbfounded.

I waited until I finished draining the body, before grimacing and giving my mouth a good wipe, before replying. “Well, Rachel, what you’ve just witnessed is a basic power employable by any ordinary vampire, yourself included, although I imagine you’d have some troubles utilizing it in your current form.”

“Which is?”

“I’m getting there!” I snapped. “Actually, just see for yourself.”

Having said that, I activated my stealth ability and from a cloak of invisibility, I tossed the dead Koler crab deep into the territory of his brethren. As expected, those nearest to it immediately began tearing away at the corpse and greedily swallowing its flesh.

“Did you poison that corpse?” Rachel asked. “Why? You already know that poisoning alone won’t be enough to kill them.”

“Did I poison them?” I asked with a sly little grin. “Of course, not. I told you we were recruiting. I evangelized that fellow to the wonders of Western thought and in turn he’s now going to proselytize to his friends. The good news has come to the pond. The gospel has been spread like a virus.”

As the other Koler crabs crowded the dead one, I saw its body begin to violently twitch. Then I beheld it rising and screeching a maddened cry of absolute unhinged horror and hatred. It roared and attacked with a brutish frenzy that the others couldn’t match, tearing open the abdomen of the one nearest to it and pulling out its innards to feast.

“WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!” Rachel shrieked.

“Oh, calm down,” I said to her. “You can’t be that ignorant of your own heritage, Rachel. Wait, you actually might be. Okay, let me fill you in. If a vampire wants to create another of his kind, he needs to feed from a living body. More specifically, he needs to drain a living body completely dry and then insert some of his own blood into it. There, I’ve just taught you how to become a new mother. Use your knowledge responsibly.”

“But that Koler crab wasn’t a fresh body!” Rachel exclaimed. “It’s been dead for hours!”

“Yes. Yes, he was,” I nodded. “And trust me, his blood tasted like it too. I’m really going to need something to rinse my mouth with. My tongue tastes like fuzzy jambalaya.”

“You made a ghoul,” Rachel said in sudden terrified realization. “Draining blood from a dead body creates ghouls.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I did,” I agreed. “I made a ghoul. And now he’s making more ghouls.”

It was true. Every Koler crab my little insurgent bit was infected with his curse and they in turn began seeking fresh blooded prey. Soon, what had been one became a dozen. Then more. A war of attrition had come to the pond. A war that the crabs were slowly losing.

“Are you insane?!” Rachel said. “Ghouls can’t be controlled! They’re ravagers, annihilators! Worse than zombies, worse than vampires even!”

“Heeeey, not nice,” I said sadly.

“They’ll run amok killing everything and everyone they come across!” Rachel said urgently. “Why have you done this?! You’ve murdered this town!”

“Hey, you’re the one who said to handle this like a human,” I chided her. “Well, this is how humans do things. The greater nations kill from a distance using proxies for plausible deniability. They’ll also resort to exotic methods to see their goals accomplished, sometimes just to see what would happen. Didn’t I tell you I was going to press a big red button?”

“That’s not how people do things!” she said once again.

“Bzzzzt,” I replied. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki have entered the chat.”

The Koler Crab civil war now entered its frenzied apex as the desperate living made their final stand. The strongest of them with the thickest armor had bravely set themselves up as the last line of defense, while the weakest supported them by intercepting any ghouls that broke through. It was an incredible display of cooperation that genuinely surprised me. I had thought these beasts were supremely selfish, but I guess that amid a genuine tribulation, their instinct was to work together for survival.

It was genuinely touching. Too bad it didn’t save them.

The ghoul crabs with no instinct for survival, no fear of pain, and with only their maddened lust for living flesh to guide them, threw themselves heedlessly against the defenders until they finally managed to overwhelm them. Once the shield wall was broken, it ended very quickly. The morning air was filled with desperate cries of “M’AWK! M’AWK!” which eventually died down, filled instead with the hideous sound of chewing.

Then came the final act.

When the ghouls had dispensed with the last of the living crabs, they suddenly began swarming the pond. I was curious as to why that was, when suddenly I saw massive bubbles beginning to rise to the surface. Then, with an explosive surge of water that threatened to drench me from all the way over there, I saw a gigantic Koler Crab the size of a two-story house erupt from the pond, bellowing an echoing cry of “M’AAAAAAAAAAWK,” as it desperately tried to make its escape with dozens of ghoul crabs crawling all over it, tearing at its shell.

“What the hell?” said Rachel in a daze. Even Schulz, who was normally the calmest being in the room, was greatly disturbed by the sight of the giant shellfish monster as it struggled to survive.

“Okay, I think I figured out where they were all coming from,” I said to no one in particular. “I think that’s one part of the quest we can safely check off.”

Like its brave children before it, the Koler crab queen put up a spectacular fight as the ghouls swarmed her. Each swing of her massive pincers sent them flying, and her feet easily crushed them beneath its titanic stride. It roared its defiance with thunderous force, refusing to go quietly to its death.

Five minutes later it was screaming in almost human intonations, as the ghouls that were once its progeny made a feast of her.

“From the day we arrive on the planet until we step into the sun,” I sang.

“You’ve damned this entire place,” Rachel said accusingly. “This is ground zero for the end. These ghouls will spread like a plague! They’ll reach Gardenia in a matter of days and turn the city into a charnel house. Damn you, Kyler Stragos. I knew you were evil, but I never realized until this moment just how black your heart truly was.”

A few minutes later, the Koler crab queen stirred. Then she rose listlessly to her torn legs and roared with mindless unending hunger, now as much a ghoul as her spawn.

“Look at that creature,” Rachel continued. “Look at it! It’ll smash through the fortified walls of the city in no time! A perfect siege weapon for its children! Are you proud of yourself, Kyler Stragos? Does the coming slaughter of all those innocents bring a deranged smile to your face? Well? SAY SOMETHING!”

“Okay,” I replied. “Uh, the sun is rising.”

And with that said, I quickly assumed my human form and waited for the ghouls to disintegrate. It didn’t take long.

Not long at all.

“You waited until near sunrise so that the ghouls wouldn’t have time to escape or seek shelter,” Rachel said quietly a few moments later.

“Uh huh,” I said.

“No one was truly in danger. You knew exactly what you were doing.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“All of that insane chatter about insurgencies and western values. It was just your way of making fun of me.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“The only button you were pressing was mine.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“You’re a cruel bastard, Kyler Stragos,” she said in an exhausted tone of voice.

“That’s been said before,” I replied. “Oh, look at that! I just leveled up. I’ve reached level 12. Isn’t that nice?”

Once again, Rachel refused to speak with me.

Honestly, I didn’t blame her. She’d just been through the wringer.

Heh. Busting the new kid's chops and taking a little of the wind out of their sails?

Definitely something a human would do.