I was a doctor working in a hospital in Transylvania. It was a simple hospital, nothing special. It was a hard winter, and we had a lot of sick patients, we were almost full. I just finished my morning coffee, when my assistant, Sarah entered the room.
“There is a patient in the waiting room who just arrived,” she said.
“Send him in,” I responded.
A black-haired man, who was in his mid 30s walked inside the room. I jumped out of my seat when I saw his face. It was a terrifying look. The poor man’s face was blueish, and his head structure was strange and uncanny. The top of his head looked flat, and his brown eyes were getting red.
“Uhm, welcome! I’m Dr. Damford,” I introduced myself.
“Hi, doctor,” the guy coughed. “My name is Steve. As you can see, I have this terrible sickness for about a week.”
“Yeah, it’s bad,” I nodded. The patient raised his eyebrows. “I mean, sorry, I still don’t know what kind of sickness this is, I have never seen something like this, but we’ll find out in no time.”
“Thanks,” the patient said. “My teeth are also hurting like hell, my dentist checked it, but he didn’t know what caused it. Maybe it’s related to this illness.”
We spent about an hour trying to find out something about this strange illness, with no progress. I told the guy to stay in the hospital for a few days for further analysis.
Around the evening, just as I was packing my things to go home, Sarah stopped me.
“We checked the patient’s blood, and I think I found the virus that might’ve caused his symptoms. You should see it.”
I agreed and quickly placed the blood under the microscope. It was full of dark, pulsating viruses. I didn’t remember ever seeing something like this. I thought I had discovered a new virus.
“Interesting,” I said. “Send it to the doctors in the neighboring cities, maybe they’ll know something.”
The following morning, when I arrived at the hospital, I immediately checked my messages from the other doctors who knew about the virus. My suspicion was true, no one knew anything about the virus. It was something new.
It was breathtaking. I just discovered an entirely new virus. I, an average doctor, in a poor country nobody heard of, discovered a new virus. But I also had to take care of the new patient, Steve.
Yeah, Steve’s condition hasn’t improved. He looked even worse when I entered the dark room full of ill patients. Steve was laying in a bed just below the window. His head looked even stranger, it looked like everything but a human skull. His eyes were also blood red. I could see two long teeth sticking out of his mouth.
As I turned on the lights for further checks, Steve closed his eyes and covered his face with his arms.
“Turn it off, turn it off,” he shouted. “Please!”
I found it strange, but I turned the lights off. He acted like a little kid who didn’t want to go to school in the morning.
“Ah, thank you,” he sighed. “The light is hurting my skin, I don’t know why, but it hurts…”
“Are you sure?” I asked. Only then I noticed the windows in the room covered with some blanket. “Why did you cover the windows?”
“Sorry about that. The sunlight… it hurt me.”
“That’s weird. It only hurts your eyes, right?”
“No. It feels like my skin is burning. Please don’t turn the light back on!”
“Your eyes look bad,” I walked closer to him. It was a scary image. His eyes were totally red, like someone had replaced them with ruby. “Can you even see anything?”
“I… I think I see better in the dark than before. Not so well in the light. Damn, I hate light.”
Later in the day, we tried to experiment with the virus. We put it on dead skin cells to see how it reacts. The result was interesting. The virus made the dead cells active again. They regenerated. It was a surprising discovery, but a strangely good one. Maybe we could use this virus to make human life longer, I thought.
Before I could’ve done anything else, I heard a loud scream from the patients’ room. I immediately ran there, banging the door open. As I entered, the blood froze in me.
At the end of the room, there was Steve at another patient’s bed, biting the poor man’s neck. Everything was full of blood. Then Steve stood up and looked at me. He looked…terrible. His victim was dead.
He wasn’t a human anymore. Just a blue-skinned monster with glowing red eyes and gigantic teeth. He was just like a… vampire.
He smiled at me with his terrible face. I was still just standing there, frozen from fear, staring at the thing Steve had become. I was staring at the vampire. This word is still hard to write for me. It’s so surreal… A vampire…
Without a signal, Steve ran towards me with unnatural speed. He was in front of me in 2 seconds. Steve tried to bite me too, but luckily, I managed to dodge his attack, jumping to my right.
I quickly grabbed a flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it straight at Steve. He screamed. It was a bone-chilling scream, I had never heard such a terrible sound in my life.
I was even more scared when armed men stormed inside the room with machine guns. Their leader, an older guy, pointed at the vampire.
“That’s the motherfucker, shoot!” he yelled.
They all shot Steve for about 10 seconds before he finally stopped moving. Their leader looked around, then approached me.
“Are you doctor Damford?” he asked.
“I am,” I nodded.
“Good. Leave him alive,” he looked at the soldiers, “and kill the rest.”
I just sat in the corner as the soldiers just shot all the patients who were in the room. They were all innocent.
“What are you doing?” I asked with fear in my voice.
“Look, doctor Damford,” the leader said, “I’m general Micheal. I’m responsible for keeping the existence of this virus a secret, as it’s too dangerous for the public to know. We recently discovered this thing, and it’s terrible. We have no idea where it came from, and how it works.”
“Why did you kill the other patients? They were innocent!”
“To keep the information a secret, and to prevent the patients from turning into a vampire.”
“But you still left me alive…”
“We need people like you, doctor,” Micheal smiled. “I’m offering you a job at our labs, where we experiment with the virus and other… infected patients. We have to find a cure for this, and we must understand this virus. Humanity is in danger, doctor.”
“Fine. I accept.”
“Great. If you don’t mind, we have to destroy this hospital. The whole staff is probably infected already.”
“You can’t do that,” I argued. “Please, let my coworkers live!”
“That’s not a possibility, doctor,” Micheal said.
“What’s happening?” Sarah, my assistant, rushed inside after hearing the gunshots. Without a second thought, Micheal pointed his rifle at her head and shot her.
“No!” I screamed, but it was already too late. It was all my fault. All these massacres…
“Please, hurry up, doctor,” Micheal said as he ignited his Molotov cocktail to burn my workplace to the ground. “We don’t have much time.”