Flesheaters and Bloodsuckers Anonymous: A Dark Humor Read online

  Chapter Two

  When he walked into the warehouse for the first meeting, Harold laughed at life’s sense of humor. FEBS met within a dry goods warehouse, surrounded by tons and tons of food for which he had no appetite. Held at night, of course, in a large, creepy warehouse made even spookier with the only lights being twenty feet above and other creatures wandering freely through the high-loaded pallets. This did not bode well for the diversion program’s success.

  There were werewolves here too, snuffling around the pallets, searching for some doggie biscuits and dried pig’s ears to gnaw on. He’d never seen a person infected with Abeos Lupictus before, unless you counted B-rated horror movies. Curious, Harold wandered over to one.

  Patches of fur poked out of his skin and slightly snoutish face. He seemed, trapped almost between a half-man, half-wolfish transformation. The ears twisted and turned of their own volition. He stunk of sweat and something else, shit. It occurred to Harold the wolf man may roll in it on a regular basis. Perhaps to smell of his prey?

  He could not imagine where the wolf man found large enough quantities of it to roll in, unless he collected it himself during those other days of the month when he was most fully human. An unpleasant image burst into Harold’s mind of the wolf man taking craps into his bathtub, saving up the foul mixture for times when he believed he needed it the most, those times when he was fully a werewolf. A bad enough practice by itself, Harold didn’t want to think about what the wolf man might do to obtain other people’s crap.

  The strong smelling man turned from ripping into the plastic sheeting around a pallet to jump, snapping at Harold. He backed up in a hurry, not wanting to become vampire tartar. Something slithered across his flyers in the darkened alley. Harold clamped down on the small hysterical cry forcing its way up his throat. A sign of fear was a very stupid thing, especially amongst other infecteds, especially when they were hungry. The irony of having these meetings in a large warehouse of food struck him again. Food they could never eat, never digest, never again partake of, even if some of these people had been normal at one point in their lives, they certainly weren’t now.

  This is all some terrible joke. Fighting the infection through willpower. The desperation involved.

  He wandered further into the warehouse, past moaning things and others which looked mostly normal, except weak and wasting. Many here exhibited those traits. Harold cringed from them, sought out the comfort of the dark and kept moving forward.

  He found the meeting area in a cleared space amongst the pallets and assembly lines and silent forklifts. A banner hung against a wall of pallets announcing with words in blood red, someone’s funny sense of humor, the name of the group. Thirty or so metal folding chairs filled up rapidly as flesheating and bloodsucking creatures poured in from the darkened spaces. They pulled the chairs into a lazy circle, not quite round and not quite closed. If Harold weren’t standing there, biting the tip of his thumb with a fang, he might have gone right into group and started pulling the chairs into a more equal and uniform semi-circle. He stifled the urge by biting down harder.

  Those jokesters down at the courthouse just wanted to yank his chain. No way, creepy crawlies like him hated themselves enough to waste away for humanity. He knew self-disgust, it gnawed at him the way hunger drew at his belly after a long night. This, this was emotion blown up, transfigured, a stark and pitiful, pointless action.

  Give it a chance, Maria cajoled right after picking him up at the courthouse in his 1965 Phantom. The cops impounded it after picking him up and Maria caught the bus downtown to bail it and him out. She was his one phone call and boy did he need someone friendly to talk to after meeting with Agent Bergstrom and Potts. She got to the courtroom in time to hear him pleading with the judge as per orders. Surprising how swift the justice system is when you’re the one in trouble.

  Harold should have bitten her in the car. Put an end to both their miseries, killed her, gone to jail and burnt to a crisp during yard time. Oh, but he hadn’t. He sat in good natured astonishment while she brought up all the faults he had and suggested maybe this cloud had a silver lining. He should have told Maria about the feds, but was really surprised how easily she agreed with the court’s ruling. He didn’t know Maria as well as he thought.

  He listened to the speech and even, even managed to feel remorse. He apologized for staying out all night and being reckless and not being home much and yes, even eating people. After all, there is something to being discreet. Certainly, Harold had not been discreet. Sure, his victims had shown up on the news a couple of times and okay, the sleep biting. He defended himself there, Maria used to enjoy that sort of thing. Said it tickled.

  Suddenly, it was inappropriate. Suddenly, she wanted him to change his ways.

  Harold glanced at his phone. What was he doing here? He could skip out of here and go grab a bite to eat in less than fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes and he’d be fang deep and the blood lust would take over and he’d not give a damn about the outcome. Maybe ten minutes, if he hurried. Harold’s stomach growled. Well, it didn’t quite growl. A few years of a liquid diet made some changes. It more whimpered and turned in on itself.

  He’d snuck some blood at the hospital for breakfast earlier. How long ago was that? Several hours at least.

  The feds said these meetings ran into the early morning. Probably to ensure the greatest possible discretion for those unassuming and misunderstood beings led astray by the popular societal belief they had to live on the flesh and blood of other people, Harold chimed mentally. He sneered at the mission statement for this little club. Come to group. Wean yourself off a blood and flesh diet with the support of others going through the exact same thing. Be normal.

  Nearly all the chairs were taken now. A veritable zoo of beings sat in the lazy circle, chatting, staring into space, trying to assume relaxed poses. A man walked into the group carrying a tray of coffee from the deserted snack table. It was the poindexter from the fed’s photos, Donald. Harold’s nostrils told him this guy was a normie, but he had almost no scent. No smell of soap or fabric softener or sweat. Only a very little salt and blood drowning in the surrounding smells of the others at group. His stomach simpered again and Harold leaned closer. Donald wandered around to each of the group members, trying to get them to take of a cup of coffee. Most of the group members actually took him up on the offer, but they didn’t drink, just held the warm cups in their hands. A few even blew on their coffee as if trying to cool it. Some who were clearly zombies boldly took sips from their cups. They smiled with partially rotted jaws at their nearest compatriots. The nearby compatriots pulled away with some disgust.

  Harold only had eyes for the lone man, completely at ease in the midst of all these hungry creatures. Extremely normal in a yellow plaid button shirt with pullover knit vest and Dockers, the man even wore horn-rimmed glasses. He took the empty tray to the snack table and went to stand in one of the gaps between chairs. Harold could easily make out what he said.

  “I’m glad to welcome you all back for this session of FEBS. We’ve had a few successes. Two of our previous members, Liza and Ricardo have successfully completed their thirteen step program and are now beginning their lives as day dwellers.” A round of clapping sprang up at the man’s words. He smiled and took part in it too, then held up his hands until silence fell on the group, but a loud, wet snort erupted from one of the members.

  “Those two better get an SPF 3,000. Can anyone say crispy?” A couple of members laughed, and then quickly muffled it behind their hands.

  Donald’s smile dropped as he turned to the speaker, who was to Harold’s amazement a slug, the slug from the fed’s photographs, a giant slug. Holy Toledo.

  “Now, now we’re all going to have to be supportive of each other. We want to succeed. Short quips aren’t going to help.”

  The slug straightened to its full three feet height and eyed the man with one lone eyestalk. The other had disappeared into its head. “Is that a remark abo
ut my height?”

  The man gave his little smile again. “Not at all, simply a reminder. It takes an open mind and supportive nature to make the complete transition.”

  The slug made a sound deep in its gullet. “Speaking of open,” it swiveled its eye stalks around until they stared directly at Harold. He felt slow crimson embarrassment rise up. “Why doesn’t the new guy come out in the open with the rest of us?”

  Most of the rest of the group turned to look in Harold’s direction too.

  He dumbly realized the others must have surely known he was watching them. Hell, a few of them were vamps. They could probably smell and see him standing there, like a pervert, in the dark. He wasn’t used to dealing with other infecteds, at least not outside of a hospital.

  “Who is it?” Asked Donald with widened eyes. He looked in the same direction as the rest of the group, but stared blindly into the darkness.

  He groaned. Well, it was one way to make an entrance.

  Harold skulked towards the group from the dark pallet alley. Brighter lights above the clearing burned his eyes and he held a hand up to shield them. It was almost as bright as daylight in the clearing.

  “Oh ho!” Donald exclaimed and rushed forward much faster than expected to grab Harold’s cold hand. Reacting purely on instinct, Harold snarled at the idiot and bared his teeth. In a flash, two others from the group were up and between them. The stinking wereman from earlier had Harold by the front shirt. His open jaws inches from Harold’s throat.

  “Now, now Rufus.” Donald came up and smacked at the wolf’s fist curled up in Harold’s shirt. “Remember, how you were when you first came to the group. This is our newest member, Harold.” He smacked lightly at the wereman’s fist again and the wereman gave away with a little snarl of his own.

  “Down boy, down,” Donald said lightly. For the first time, he had a real smile to show one of the members of group. He chortled a bit and urged the others to back off from a petrified Harold, who may have momentarily lost bladder control, but wasn’t about to open his trench coat to check.

  “My name is Donald. You could call me the group leader around here, but we all really help each other, you know.” Donald slipped an arm around Harold’s back and urged him towards group. “We don’t bite you know, well, most of us. A few members of our group are as yourself, just beginning their paths.”

  Harold’s teeth ached a little and his stomach turned in on itself, reminding him yet again he was hungry; he was standing right next to a flesh and blood human being, standing right next to a late lunch. Only the thirty pairs of eyes centered on them kept Harold from making any sudden moves. He didn’t want to face the werewolf over the ripped throat of his skinny pullover wearing master.

  Donald sat Harold down in one of the metal chairs. A coterie of those group members who’d come to the man’s aid swooped in and sat down real close to Harold. One man sat close enough for their knees to brush. His face and skin so pale as to be almost translucent. He kept sucking on his cracked and oozing lips like a baby on the bottle to get at the blood. He stared at Harold. Harold might have mistaken the attention for personal interest if it weren’t for the man’s evil eye. It was a stare matched by a good three-fourths of the group. Most of them very gaunt folk. He’d broken an important protocol by flashing his teeth at good old Donald. It was a defensive mechanism, really.

  Donald wandered back to his original position and introduced Harold from afar to the rest of the group. Of course, he’d known Harold was coming. The courts contacted him and somebody paid a pretty penny for “membership” in the program. Harold had to fill out all the paperwork and pay a pretty hefty ’bonds’ fee in advance. Harold found this out after the fact and after the federal sponsored ’intervention’. He rubbed his face and scooted forward a bit to put precious inches between himself and the others in the group who were trying to become one with him. He should have just left.

  It didn’t take long for Donald to launch into some clap trap about becoming normal. Everyone sang a mantra and Harold only got part of it, something about swearing off the sins of the flesh and staying strong. Then, it became a talk show with members volunteering their feelings and trouble from the past week. A group of zombies mimed their attempt to go grocery shopping. It didn’t end well.

  “We all encounter little bumps on the road to self-betterment. While those people in the grocery store didn’t applaud you for trying to get groceries, we do.” Donald started clapping and others in the group, including the zombies started clapped too. “Next time people start running from you I want you to walk tall and ignore them. They are only reacting out of fear and prejudice. You can rise above it.”

  Then, one of the zombies admitted to biting a woman on the head at the grocery store and the clapping trailed off. Another zombie sitting beside him raised her hand and said she was the woman. She started sobbing and Harold saw the skin flap forward on top of her head where the zombie ripped open her flesh to get at the brains. The other zombies threw their now empty coffee cups at the zombie who’d sinned, mainly he thought, for admitting to the faux pas. Donald patted the crying zombie woman’s back.

  This was getting good. Add a few security guards and they’d have an episode of Jerry Springer.

  “Don’t you cry now,” he said, “you’ve come to the right place. We’ve all been through what happened to you. It’s a shock to say the least, but it’s possible to get back to normal.”

  The zombie woman looked hopefully at Donald. Harold felt sick. She was a freaking zombie. Fresh looking sure, but on her way out. Finite. Kaput. Ain’t nothing bringing that woman back to good health. Yet, Donald stood there telling her things were going to be just fine.

  A zombie body after infection was in Caedocinis, electrical impulses didn’t stop, awareness didn’t end, but their bodies stopped growing new cells and wounds didn’t heal and old cells just kept going until they literally died and fell apart. Medical science didn’t have a cure. He may be new at all this undead stuff, but he understood that much.

  After all, when the zombies the military had been experimenting on in the 1980s got loose and started running amuck, the only fix they found was to burn them all to ashes. Even then Harold always wondered. Were those people still trapped in the ashes? Once a zombie, always a zombie, even when you had completely decayed away. He feared it and sent a silent word of thanks that at least he hadn’t become a zomb.

  Donald wandered towards the group’s center. “As some of you may know, I was once like you.” Harold grinned at that. Right, if Donald ever felt the urge for a little human snack then he was definitely going to make a complete recovery. “I was once a vampire. I sucked blood.”

  The mention of blood reminded Harold of his hunger again. Mister lip sucker next to him even got distracted from giving death stares and paid more attention. When you were a vampire it was hard not to notice when someone said blood. Kind of how the word “boobs” made a guy suddenly pay more attention. A word like that also made you focus more on those in the room who had boobs or blood, which included pretty much everyone, but Donald remained the only one with fresh, clean blood and walking around the room got Donald’s blood flowing. Harold could hear it rushing through Donald’s veins. Even the pumping of his heart increased, bite-me, bite-me, bite-me, it taunted.

  “Yes, I drank blood and lived on my fellow man. It was a horrible, mean existence, running in fear, hiding from the light. I couldn’t die, but I couldn’t live either. Until one day,” Donald held up a finger and turned to look everyone in the eyes or eye.

  “One day I had an epiphany. I didn’t have to live this way. I had accepted the stigma and preconceived notions of mainstream society. Everything we know about the living undead, about ourselves, we’ve been taught by scary myths and legends that portray us this way.”

  And medical science, Harold thought.

  Donald allowed the group to absorb those words. “I changed. I stopped drinking blood. I started to seek out the light and t
he way to being human was shown to me. All I had to do was wean myself of the behavior which led me to my former bereft state.” Donald went back to the group of zombies and laid his hand on the shoulder of the zombie who admitted to turning a woman in the grocery store.

  “It wasn’t easy. I fell off the wagon several times. I still had emotional scars and mental blocks, old ways of thinking hindered me. It took hard work, but eventually I became the man you see before you today.”

  Everyone broke out into applause again. Even the coterie of group members once so attentive to Harold was now entirely focused on Donald. Harold could see the wolf man’s tail wagging so hard, patches of fur came off of it in droves. This Donald guy was good.

  Quietly, but loud enough for Harold’s ears could pick it up, the slug muttered if Donald was what they would all turn into, it would much rather stay a back-biting, bloodsucking larva of a slug. A couple of others in the group turned to glare at it.

  The rest of the meeting consisted of others complaining about stress or hunger, problems with the whole “becoming normal” thing, and a few failed attempts to get back in touch with family members. Donald was trying to set up a meeting where everyone brought in a family member or friend for a monitored conversation about how problems caused by bloodsucking and flesheating affected their relationships. Few of them were turning up familial support. Most of the group members were infected long enough their families were also dead or moved on or else didn’t even realize their loved ones had turned into fucking monsters.

  Donald finished up the meeting with rules for everyone to keep in mind. Get a buddy. Don’t be alone when you start to get hungry. If possible, seek out the buddy. Try blood and flesh alternatives while weaning yourself onto real food. Get a few minutes of daylight every twenty-four hours. (Harold thought that might account for the slight crispiness of some of the other group members.) Above all, try to take on the attitudes and activities of normal humans.