I had come to rest on a rocky shelf jutting from the quarry wall; a narrow switchback led me to the top, where I emerged into an area of rusted machinery half-buried by weeds. The hour was unknown to me. Save for the moon, no lights burned anywhere. The landscape was one of such uninhabited desolation the world might have ended already.
The quarry’s waters would conceal my second victim, but there was the woman to consider; the last thing I wanted was a police manhunt to complicate matters. I circled the quarry to the parking area. The sight of her aroused no remorse, just the sort of perfunctory, quickly dispatched pity one might feel reading a newspaper account of some distant catastrophe over one’s second slice of morning toast. Two distant splashes—body, head—and into the watery deep she went.
None of which did anything to solve the problem of being a naked, full-grown man at large in an unknown countryside. I needed clothes, shelter, a story. Also, a certain mental agitation, like an inaudible siren in my brain, told me that, should daybreak find me in the open, nothing happy would ensue.
The main highway was too risky. I headed for the woods, hoping that I might eventually come to some lesser-traveled thoroughfare. At length I emerged into a landscape of freshly planted fields bisected by a dirt road. In the distance I saw a light and headed toward it. A small, rather dilapidated one-story house of nondescript design, little more than a box in which to store a human life: the light I’d seen was a lamp in one of the two front windows. There was no car in the driveway, suggesting that the house was unoccupied, the light left burning in anticipation of its owner’s return.
The door obediently opened onto a living room of particleboard furniture, country-themed bric-a-brac, and a television the size of a Jumbotron. A quick survey of the interior—four rooms and a kitchen—confirmed my impression that no one was home. My inspection further revealed that the occupant was a woman, had attended nursing school at Wichita State, was in her late forties, possessed a soft, moonlike face and gray hair she didn’t do much with, wore a size twenty, was frequently photographed in a state of rosy-cheeked inebriation in ethnic-themed restaurants (wearing a plastic lei, flirting shamelessly with the mariachis, holding up a flaming fondue spike), and that she lived alone. From her wardrobe I selected the most neutral things I could find—a pair of sweatpants, voluminous on my midsized masculine frame, a hooded sweatshirt, likewise huge, and a pair of flip-flops—and entered the bathroom.
The sight that greeted me in the mirror was not wholly unexpected. By this time it had become apparent to me that the physical act of drowning had not wholly restored me to my human state but wrought upon my person something more like costumery. The virus remained; my death had merely excited it into some new interaction with its host. Many attributes had been preserved. Vision, hearing, smell: all had retained their supercharged acuteness. Though I had yet to put them to a proper test, my limbs—indeed, my entire physical carriage, bones to blood—hummed with bestial strength.
Yet these things hardly prepared me for what I saw. My complexion was unnaturally pale, almost cadaverous. My hair, which had miraculously grown back, triangulated at my forehead to a comically perfect widow’s peak. My eyes possessed the alien rosiness of an albino’s. But the final detail was the one that stopped me flat. At first I thought it was a joke. Behind the corners of my upper lip, amidst otherwise ordinary dentition, two white points dripped like icicles—or, more precisely, fangs.
Dracula. Nosferatu. Vampyre. I can barely utter the names without a roll of the eyes. Yet here I was, Jonas Lear’s fantasy incarnate, a legend come to life.