“Do you want to live forever?”
Those were my philosophy professor’s words before he killed himself right in front of us.
A year ago, I would have said yes without hesitation. I think anyone would have. The possibility of never seeing death has always been at the back of my mind since becoming aware of it as a kid. I have always been terrified of death, in the exact way everyone else is. On a road trip with my best friend, the question came up late at night with the sun bobbing across the horizon.
I was sticking my head out of the window, enjoying the cool air whipping my hair from my eyes, when she asked me out of nowhere. I said yes, of course, I did. Who wouldn’t want to cheat death and see a new millennium and several after that? Who didn’t want to stop aging at 21 and never see wrinkles lining their face? I grew up watching commercials for skin creams and anti-aging formulas and ignored them because, in my kid mind, I was going to live forever. I saw my youth as never-ending because as kids we don’t really think about death. I explained this to my friend, and she nodded and smiled through the whole thing, before turning to the road and gripping the steering wheel tighter. “Nah.” She told me with a smile.
“Wouldn’t you get tired?”
“Tired?” I turned back to her with a frown.
“Tired of living,” April said. “Wouldn’t you get tired of living year after year with the same face? You never age and eventually, the people you meet and fall in love with will die.” She shrugged. “Everything withers and dies, it’s nature. We live and we die, and that’s it. When it’s our time, it’s our time. And I think that’s beautiful,” my best friend murmured more to herself than me. When I asked her if she was afraid of dying, she just laughed. “Afraid?” she shot me a grin. “Why would I be afraid?”
“Not being able to think,” I told her, a shiver sliding down my spine at the thought. “Just the dark. You die, and it’s just dark, right? It’s nothing. It ends in nothing and continues into nothing. There’s no waking up or stray thoughts. There’s nothing.” I leaned away from the window, enjoying the graze of wind against my cheeks. “And we won’t even know we’re not thinking, because we won’t be able to, right? Dying isn’t just dying as a physical body, your soul dies too, everything that is you stops.”
That is what haunted me during the night when I was trying to sleep or finding my thoughts wandering while sitting in the tub. The thought of everything just ending. It twisted my gut. I saw death as a never-ending tunnel that bled into oblivion.
She nodded, reaching out to turn the radio down. “Yeah, but it’ll be peaceful.” Turning to me, her expression this time was completely serious—and I didn’t see that a lot. She never took anything seriously and when she did, it didn’t take her long to laugh it off or make a joke out of it. “Wouldn’t you want that? After years of living the same life wouldn’t you get tired and want that kind of heavenly peace?” April pulled a face. “I mean, regardless of what you believe in, whether that’s the great pearly gates or oblivion, you would want to sleep at one point, right?” This time, my friend looked… concerned. Because in my expression as well as the words tangled on my tongue, I did not ever want to see oblivion. I didn’t want to lose my self-awareness and just…. die.
The idea of losing myself completely to the void was terrifying, and when I tried to tell her this—she just laughed and told me when I was older (like, in my 70s or 80s) I would think much differently, after living long enough to grow tired of the sunrise and sunset, and the world changing around me. “The world outgrows us,” she said. “technology and AI will only get smarter and we’ll find ourselves in a world we don’t understand, and we won’t want to understand.” She chuckled. “I visit my grandma once a week.
She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s so she barely even knows my name, but sometimes she flickers back to life and tells me she’s tired.” April’s voice broke a little. “She’s tired and she wants to sleep.” My friend tried to smile but I knew talking about her grandma hurt her. “And I can understand her. She’s almost ninety-eight and can’t even die the way she wants to. Naturally, with her friends and family around her. Instead, she will just be alone.”
April leaned back with a sigh, her usual smile twitching into a frown. “Even alive and breathing, my grandma will be alone, and it will be just like death. Because she won’t have her own thoughts and feelings and memories. It will just be nothing.”
Alone.
The word didn’t really hit me until I thought about it. Did I want to outgrow everyone else around me and be alone in a world I didn’t understand, and one which didn’t want me? Did I want to lose people I loved to old age and live past my expiry date?
Yes.
I did.
Against all odds, yes, I didn’t care about outgrowing the people around me, and yes, I wouldn’t mind living in a world that had outlived me.
“Yes.” I found myself responding to our professor.
I was doodling Adventure Time characters in my notebook when the question was asked, and finally, I lifted my head, severed from my own thoughts. I only joined Professor Jackson’s class to get closer to a girl I had a slight crush on, and every class since had been a total bore and the students were exactly what I were expecting them to be like.
Still, though, I was working up the courage to talk to my crush, so I spent most of the time either doodling or daydreaming. The class itself was pretty peaceful. The lights above were a warm glow and easy on the eyes. I usually found myself dozing to the sound of the tap, tap, tap of typing on laptops and the professor’s monotone drawl as he paced the stage. That particular question, however, pricked my interest. Because usually I was asking it myself as a shower thought or going through the positives and negatives on a long car ride with nothing to do but listen to an audiobook and stare at the long stretch of road ahead sometimes bleeding into the sky. Around me, I could see that question had caused a slight stir. The girl sitting next to me who had been idly scrolling down her Twitter timeline on her MacBook briefly averted her gaze from a BTS fan edit, her eyes flickering to the front of the hall and then to me.
I don’t usually speak up in class because I have nothing to say, nothing to discuss, and nothing to debate. The class bored me, the discussions bored me, and the debates when they happened, were less about getting words across and more about either gaslighting twelve (yes, there were only 12 of us) students for their own pleasure or arguing until they were blue in the face about something as simple as logic, and why we have it.
Most of the time it was just about being right. I chose to keep my head down because most of the time, I had no idea what any of them were talking about. I mean, I knew the basics and then some. But after a while, they started to sound like they were speaking in an ancient language. With my voice splintering the otherwise peaceful silence, the professor nodded and gestured to me. “Why?”
I wasn’t expecting such a dull response. In every other class, he answered questions to students with even more confusing questions which were both rhetorical and not. Professor Jackson thrived on getting a discussion going. But this time he simply stopped pacing the stage and looked directly at me, inclining his head when my mind went blank. I didn’t mean to answer this question out loud, but now that I was really thinking about it, I had a lot to say. “Why do you want to live forever?”
I shrugged, fully aware of twelve pairs of eyes on me. “Well, I don’t want to die,” I said, my cheeks growing warm. “If I had a chance to live forever, I would.”
“You don’t want to die, or you are scared of dying?”
“Both.”
I think that was the universal answer, anyway.
Professor Jackson nodded in response. I wasn’t even sure if he knew my name. The man was a thirty-something-year-old with the eyes of someone much older. I often wondered if he had ever experienced trauma or pain because, in the rare moments when our eyes met, his were like no other I had seen before.
I don’t think ‘haunted’ is the right word. I wouldn’t say he had haunted eyes. But they definitely spoke of something dark, something deeply embedded inside of him which brought on this kind of question.
If anything, he looked like he was in pain. Not always. But when I focused on him and truly drank him in, his lips were always pressed in a line, eyes narrowed in a certain way inclining he was writhing in pain. I wondered if he had chronic headaches. Professor Jackson wasn’t an ordinary teacher. He didn’t care about us missing due dates or work he had assigned and often had an “oh well, it’s your future lol” kind of attitude. The guy wore the same white collared shirt and tie with the sleeves rolled up and a blazer that hung off his wiry frame. Nothing really fit him. His shirt was always untucked and buttoned wrong, and he had come to class twice wearing his shoes on odd feet. “Nobody wants to die,” he said. “But would you really want to keep living generations into the future? Think about it,” he cleared his throat.
“Everyone you have ever loved or cared about is dead and buried. The places you called home are now eaten up by nature. Every face is a stranger to you, and you are too scared to form an attachment to someone because you will inevitably outlive them.” his expression darkened. “You will watch them grow old and yet your face will stay frozen in time. You will get asked questions. Why you never look any different, and you have to lie to them and make a swift getaway to avoid alerting authorities which you know will never catch up to you. Oh, no, You are too fast for them. But the idea of revealing this… gift to the world scares you.” He paused to direct his question to the rest of the class. “Tell me. Seriously. Would you, against all odds, accept immortality?”
“Duh.”
Casper Littlewood looked up from the essay he was typing for a different class. Until then, I figured he wasn’t listening, engrossed in his own work. But then he closed his laptop and leaned back in his chair with his arms folded. “Who wouldn’t?”
The rest of the class murmured in agreement and our professor nodded before walking back to the wooden podium where he had been reading from his own published journals. “Oh?” His lips curved into the first smile I had ever seen from him.
Sure, his facial muscles sometimes contorted and quirked into the start of one, but never really settled on a real and proper smile. He leaned forward, a brow arched. “So, all twelve of you are saying yes, and accepting a chance at having immortality?”
Yes.
This time I didn’t say it out loud.
Professor Jackson hummed. “And the baggage which comes with it?”
Again, yes.
The students around me responded with light hums and nods.
I wondered if he was going to catapult into some kind of fictional scenario which branched out into two different paths; one would be the good side of being able to live forever, and the other, the more negative approach. Regardless of where he was going with it, now I was fully interested in this blooming discussion. Usually, I doodle when I’m really focusing on a subject, and I started to shade the corner of a page of my notebook. Except Professor Jackson didn’t speak.
I waited for him to, but instead, there was this long stretch of eerie silence, bar the noise of the boy next to me tapping his pen on the edge of the desk. I lifted my head to see if the guy was setting up a presentation or reading his own notes before a girl screamed.
It wasn’t a long time, more of a shriek of fright. At first, I thought her reaction was a spider before my eyes found hers—which were pinpointed on the front of the class where our professor stood. Following her gaze, I found myself eye-to-eye with Professor Jackson, and when I tried to look away, I found I couldn’t.
Professor Jackson was smiling this time. I wouldn’t say his smile was at all twisted with evil or pleasure at the thought of doing what he was about to do. Instead, I only saw peace. It was the first real and proper smile I had seen on his face, and this one was genuine. I wasn’t sure if the fact that he was actually smiling had taken my eyes and mind hostage, or his fingers were wrapped around the handle of a particular-looking dagger.
Particular, because I had never seen anything like it. The handle itself was gilded gold, and the blade looked sharp enough to cut through metal.
I should have been able to predict what Professor Jackson did next, but I found myself choked with naïve thoughts. Maybe he was going to use the knife as a metaphor I didn’t understand or present it to the class as a model in whatever scenario he was going to delve into. But no.
With a peaceful smile that only spoke of escape and freedom, our teacher plunged the blade into his throat. For a dizzying moment, I thought I imagined it. These are the types of daydreams our intrusive thoughts bring us; thoughts of our teachers spontaneously slicing their throat open out of nowhere. I found I was completely frozen. Both body and mind. I don’t know if it was a trauma response my mind had shut down completely. Everything in me was telling me to look away, to get up and run out of that class and never look back. But his question was still weighing on my mind—once curious, and now something stronger and more feral taking over me like a leech creeping into my brain and winding itself around my thoughts, eating away all logic. I did want to live forever. I did want to outlive the people and the world around me.
And watching my professor choke on his own blood, on a sharp geyser of scarlet exploding from his neck like a fucking cartoon—it only made me crave immortality more. To be able to rip into my own flesh with no effect, to plunge a dagger into my heart with no consequences. It’s kind of amazing how far blood can travel, especially when the right artery has been ruptured. Or maybe my mind was overexaggerating the reality of what I was seeing. In the fog of my own thoughts, the front row was automatically hit with a shower of scarlet. I could sense their shock and horror, and yet even without looking at them, I knew they couldn’t look away either. That something was eating away at their heads, despite being coated in warm red. Initially, it was like being let loose to something I didn’t understand, something brand new blossoming inside me.
It was gentle at first, seeping into me piece by piece and getting a feel for me. But then it started to hurt. Like a toothache, a dull but barely noticeable pain started to thrum within the confines of my mind. When Professor Jackson finally hit the ground, the twelve of us were still sitting, still staring, at the pooling red seeping across the stage and stemming around him.
Something… ached in my jaw, and that pain I thought would go away with a Tylenol continued to leech into the back of my throat, blossoming into more of a burn.
It’s weird. The more I stared at the man’s body lying out on the stage like that, I could feel my body starting to slowly react. I lifted myself from my seat slowly before collapsing back with a staggered breath. That pain started to get worse, and I felt it like a snake wrapping itself around me, suffocating not just my chest, but my thoughts—every thought which dared graze the forefront of my mind was set on fire and replaced with that same question. And when it really hit me, bleeding into me slowly, I got up again. But this time I stayed on my feet. My mouth was aching all over, and my teeth felt like razor blades. I had no control over my body as I took long strides toward the end of the row and then down the steps. Others joined me.
But those others did not have faces in the sea of fog, which was drowning me, pulling me deep, deep down into the depths. The burning which had not subsided, only grew worse until my brain felt like it was on fire, dragging me to the edge of my own humanity which I had not even been aware of until it was being picked from me by invisible fingers.
I didn’t realize it until I was kneeling on the stage with my hands pressed into stemming scarlet, scooping up as much glistening red as possible and gulping greedily, that our professor had left us with both a question and an answer.
Would I like to live forever?
The blood did not taste good. It tasted exactly how blood should taste. It smeared my lips and cheeks, but I continued to drink deep, bending over and pressing my lips and the tip of my tongue onto the stage and slurping up as much as I could.
I wasn’t alone. I felt their presence around me, dropping to their knees and smothering themselves, painting themselves in our professor’s blood. When I crawled over to where the man’s body had been, I was left staring at a sort of ashy substance coating the stage. The body was gone. And with it, the knife which killed him. When I fully came back to reality, my brain was on fire. I don’t remember leaving that class. I don’t remember talking to anyone or discussing what we had just done—only that the universal and unspoken realization between the twelve of us was that our professor had given us a gift; one forced upon us when we watched him rip open his throat.
That was where his bewitching began. And it ended when we had chewed the flesh from his bones, until we were full and satisfied, and he was reduced to flakes spiraling into nothing. I didn’t even remember fully what I had done; only that my mouth tasted of blood which now tasted good, which now tasted like liquid gold tainting my lips when my tongue flicked out to lick at remnants. I thought I was a vampire.
I went home and looked in the mirror. I had a reflection. I was still hungry and ate food. I could still drink and sleep and breathe. Nothing had changed.
At least, that is what I thought.
The pain came much later when I was sleeping. It struck like a lightning bolt, cruel and unforgiving. Agony. It writhed through me, setting fire to every nerve ending and boiling my brain until I stuck my head in a bucket of ice. I thought it was an infection, maybe brought on by the, uh, activities, I had taken part in. But no. I didn’t have a temperature. I wasn’t burning on the outside. I was burning on the inside. My fucking brain was ON FIRE.
I tried everything. When it became too intense to walk, I called an ambulance and was told I was absolutely fine. I got an Uber back to my apartment, and sitting In the back of that cab, I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t have words to describe the pain because no words exist. I thought it would go away with multiple Tylenol. I thought it would go away by drinking my mind away. But even on the edge of reality, completely out of my fucking mind, it was still there. Cruel. Never-ending. With this pain came… visions. No, they were more like memories.
Memories of places and faces froze in time that I had only ever learned about. History. But this history was polluting my mind, endless memories of people I didn’t know, and lives I had not lived. I saw families and lovers, children and elders, the world when it was at its most quiet– when it was just beginning. I thought they would stop by numbing myself with drink and weed, anything I could get my hands on. But they raged on, blossoming from simple snapshots of past eras to people who have lived and breathed, seeing through their eyes. Seeing one individual’s memory is scary enough, but multiple people with different lives, all of them intersecting and looping over and over again, until I could no longer see what was in front of me.
All I could see was them. Daisy, who wanted to be a dancer, where vehicles were only just beginning to appear on roads.
Johnathon, who fought with his parents over going to fight in a war he didn’t want to join. Further back than that, names I couldn’t understand and faces that bled together. The world came apart and then together again, endlessly.
And all of these people had lived this exact pain which was driving me crazy. All of them, every memory I saw, all of them saw the same sunrise and same sunset. The exact same sky I could see. All of them, including our professor, joined the wave of faces pulverizing me.
He had eight different lovers. Males and females, all of whom he had watched age and wither and die, while he continued on with the same face. Burning. It reached the point after days of ignoring classes and staying in bed, that I started to consider dying. Which was crazy, right? I didn’t want to die. I was afraid of death, of the endless sheet of nothing which would envelop me.
But anything, even what I had feared for my nineteen years of life, was better than this. Better than my brain boiling away. So, with the clock ticking toward midnight, I locked my apartment and stepped outside. The pain was too intense for me to have thoughts, and only then it was just that I wanted everything to end.
Everything. I was clawing at my skull when I stepped in front of a truck. And I felt it in an instant. Just an instant. Relief. When 8000 tonnes of metal slammed into me, the pain stopped, and for a glorious moment, I was left in blissful nothing. The same nothing I had been fearing since I learned what death was. And death is exactly what April told me years ago before she died of a brain tumor.
Death WAS peaceful. And it wasn’t the long, endless stretch of nothing which has paralysed me my whole life. It was nothing, and nothing was perfect.
Nothing wasn’t sleep, but far deeper. The deepest sleep you can imagine.
But before I could fall into that nothing, something leeched onto me, an invisible presence grasping hold of me, and violently pulling me back.
“Excuse me, Miss?”
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on rough brick, a dozen paramedics in front of me surrounded by dizzying red and blue lights.
Looking down at myself, I was in one piece. No injuries or broken bones. Nothing, except that burning that continued to rage on inside my brain.
“Are you all right?” The paramedic looked kind of startled. I would be too if a girl had walked out in front of a truck and was somehow absolutely fine.
I managed to nod and get to my feet. My head was swimming. I had definitely died, there was no doubt about that. The head-on collision had made sure of that. But I wasn’t dead. I was standing, no scratches on me, the cool night air grazing my cheeks. I nodded, or at least I think I nodded. I opened my mouth to speak, but the blaze inside my head continued on, and I swallowed my words.
“Are you sure?” the paramedic didn’t look convinced. “Reports say you walked directly into traffic, and…” he looked around helplessly. “Realistically speaking, you should be dead,” he said. “But we may still have to check you over just in case of concussion or internal bleeding.”
“She’s fine.”
A voice startled me, enough of a distraction from my brain slowly boiling itself. When I twisted my head, the BTS girl was standing behind me. I call her “BTS girl” because I hadn’t yet learned her name, and all I saw on her laptop, bar essays, or presentations we were going through, was… BTS. Just looking at her expression, the slight crease in her forehead, and her lips curled into the start of a silent cry, I knew the girl’s brain was burning too. I was yet to talk to my classmates about what we did—and I wasn’t planning to any time soon.
I wasn’t sure how to start the conversation without saying, “So… we consumed our (maybe) immortal teacher.” The paramedic looked skeptical, his gaze flicking to me. “Do you two know each other?”
I found myself nodding, and eventually, he let me go, making me promise to drop in at an emergency room if I started to feel sick or dizzy. When she pulled me away from the scene (or lack of) I realized she wasn’t alone. BTS girl (who I quickly found out was called Eve) led me to a kid’s playground where the rest of the class was waiting. The majority of them were standing with serious expressions, while a guy called Noah was sitting on a swing set. I could tell from the way he was rocking backwards and forward, he wanted to actually swing. I got the basic low-down from them. Yes, our professor had been some kind of immortal being, and when asking us if we wanted immortality, had been a contract we had signed without knowing.
“But we didn’t sign anything,” Eve said.
“We didn’t need to,” Jack, who was quickly becoming the leader, shrugged. “All we had to do was say yes.”
“And…” I found myself saying.
“Yeah.” He nodded grimly, catching my gaze. “This is the ‘baggage’ he was talking about. My guess is he’s been waiting to pass this thing on.”
“But how exactly did it… pass on?” Casper, who had been staying quiet, finally spoke up. “You can’t just… catch immortality, right?”
Jack’s lips quirked. “I’m pretty sure we all ate and ingested our immortal teacher’s body, so yeah, it can be passed on.”
“But why did we do it?” Miri, normally a vocal student in debates, now hiding behind her curls, spoke up softly. “I didn’t have control over myself.” She shook her head, her hands suddenly going to claw at her hair. “Fuck. He made me do it! I wouldn’t just do that!”
“He planted a question in our mind that we were already sure of the answer to, and then did… I don’t know, magic shit or whatever, which made us do…” Jack drifted off. He pulled a face, and I vaguely remembered him going to town on our teacher’s guts. “That.” He folded his arms. “Mr. Jackson was bad news, sure. But now he’s dead, and regardless of whatever mind tricks he played on us, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s given us exactly what we wanted,” he ran his hand through his hair.
“Or…what we thought we wanted.”
“So, what do we do?” Johnny, another vocal student, spoke for the first time. He collapsed into a swing set beside Noah. “I can’t deal with this…. Whatever the fuck it is,” his gaze flicked to me. “She died, right? And then came back to life. So that makes us just like him.”
“It could have been a fluke,” Casper muttered.
“Bullshit,” Miri said. “That truck slammed into her. She would be a pancake right now.”
I started to notice the realization prickle on the other’s faces. Twisted lips curled pain turned to small smiles of curiosity. We were all burning, sure. The pain was driving us crazy enough to end it all—but for us, there wasn’t an end. What exactly do a group of 12 immortal nineteen-year-olds do when they’re told they no longer have death as a barrier in front of them?
Well, you would be right in saying they would lose their fucking minds.
I’m not sure if it was the knowledge of being completely indestructible or the burning pain which raged through the group of us. Initially, it was… fun. I think. I don’t remember most of it. I started to notice little things. My period stopped, and my face seemed to… freeze. I no longer got spots or sweated. Food started to taste like cardboard, and I once realizing that there was no meaning of life if life did not end, I started to… spiral, along with the rest of my class. We split into two groups. The more feral ones who had grown bored of normal life, and hunted people down for the fun of it, and our little group. Who found fun in the smallest of things. The others didn’t hunt for food. Because they were still human. They hunted for the thrill of a kill and zero consequences. They denied it at first, but I mean, with disappearances being reported in the city, it was pretty obvious.
First, came rooftop jumping. Dangerous and deadly to a human, but our new pastime. The thrill of diving across apartment buildings in the dead of night with no real danger except my skirt flying up in the battering wind. Falling felt like nothing, and the impact was like landing on a hard mattress. Quickly, though, even rooftop jumping had become a bore. The burning started to take over my life when I didn’t have any distractions and the realization started to hit me. I would never die. I would keep going and going and going, outliving my parents and friends. I would watch all of them die and just keep…
Going.
In books and TV shows and movies, an immortal being gets bored of living forever after several thousands of years of being shackled to life.
We got bored (or sick of it) within a year.
Burning.
Every day I burned and was haunted by my answer to that question.
“Do you want to live forever?”
Fuck no.
Nobody tells you that immortality comes with the baggage of every single life lived and passed on through that so-called gift—and we would have to bear it. I did a lot of things I am not proud of, though most of them were pain relief. I threw myself into a train, sliced off each of my fingers (that was part of a game), and climbed to the top of the tallest building in our city, diving off of it. I landed on both feet, stumbling into an awaiting Eve’s arms, who was waiting to tell me it was a terrible idea.
It was a terrible idea. I had leg cramps for three days after that.
But it still didn’t distract me from the burning.
Nothing did.
I started to hunt, joining the other group. Well, we all just came together, really. Stupid shit like morals don’t really matter when you’re not really living. I came to last night, my head against cold porcelain, my mouth filled with a mixture of straight vodka and blood. I’m not sure whose it was, but it was a change from coffee and soda, both of which tasted like water.
My life became a blur of bad decisions bleeding into each other. Hunting was at least some kind of pain relief. And I can’t explain why. Seeing the death of someone else, and knowing they are going to die, knowing you can entangle yourself with the delusion that you can die with them, is at least something. Though none of us had witnessed the perfect death yet. Until three days ago. Charlie was the new guy. He walked into class mid-discussion and announced he would be joining, with a smile I envied. When he sat down, the smell of his coffee turned my gut and the way he sipped it with a satisfied smile.
I could tell, or I guess sense, the rest of the class watching him. Ever since turning to our more feral side, we had claimed the current lecture hall as ours.
Our professor died on the stage, and we lost our humanity on that stage, so it was ours.
Charlie just walking in and announcing that he was joining had definitely put a sour taste in my mouth. Next to me, Eve had stiffened up while in front of us Casper’s nose kind of flared. Our current professor welcomed him with a smile, and for the next hour, her class became a white noise in my head, as I found myself engrossed by everything Charlie did. When he opened his laptop and typed, taking small sips from his hydro flask, and sticking his pen in his mouth, tenderly chewing on the end.
Charlie asked questions while we were all silent, oblivious to twelve pairs of eyes following his every move.
It wasn’t… fair.
I caught the exact words in Casper’s glare.
Noah’s curled lips.
Miri’s fingers tightened around her pen.
I found myself jealous that he just sat there and smiled, occasionally checking his phone. He wasn’t in pain like the rest of us, bombarded with endless memories of long-dead immortals. Eventually, I turned away from him, focusing my attention on my notebook.
Before Charlie started coughing.
Violently.
It started as short gasps which I thought was a panic attack. But then he grabbed his throat, his cheeks turning unnatural shades of blue and purple. Charlie’s eyes were wide, terrified, his lips curled into a silent cry for help. His body was trembling as he gasped for air. The professor ran out to get help, telling us to call for help. But none of us did. Instead, I was mystified by the agony in his eyes, finally, something I could relate to. His lips twisted and silently crying out filled me with mind-numbing euphoria. Charlie was dying. When his head hit the desk and he went still, I expected him to jolt back to life just like us.
But no.
Charlie stayed dead.
And it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. His was the perfect death. Exactly what I had been waiting for.
Slowly, we surrounded him, prodding and poking him to see if he would move. When Miri reached into his pack, she pulled out a pack of candy I’d caught him snacking on. “Peanuts.” She said, waving the candy wrapper in the air. “I don’t think he knew he was eating peanuts.”
That set off laughter. Hysterical laughter ricocheted across the hall.
That laughter quickly quietened down when we realised Charlie would be able to die. Unlike us, he would be able to embrace death.
How was that fair?
Charlie just joined our class, and HE was the one who was able to die? Who didn’t have to deal with a brain boiling itself to not-death?
I think it was an unspeakable pact between us that no one who joined our group would be leaving the room mortal, or in a body bag.
Jack suggested that we ate him.
We thought about it, but the only time human flesh tasted tolerable was while we were under the control of Professor Jackson.
So eating him was a no-no and his corpse was slowly growing cold. The professor was nowhere to be seen, so this had to be fast.
Miri announced that she should be the one to bite him—and when we asked her why biting would do anything, she just shrugged and said, “I saw it in a movie.”
So, biting it was.
Rolling up her jacket sleeve, Miri bit into her own arm, but her teeth weren’t sharp enough. So, she grabbed a knife, slicing open her wrists this time, and I was entranced by rivulets of red dripping down her arm. I knew it wouldn’t last, her skin knitting itself back together, so she had to be fast. She bit him first, which was awkward because her teeth were too blunt.
Jack tried, but he didn’t even make a mark.
Eve managed it, after really clawing at his neck. Casper and Noah guarded the door while the girl straddled poor dead Charlie, eventually piercing his throat. “Okay.” She motioned for Miri to force her bleeding wrist into his mouth, but she shook her head, showing us her wound was already gone. Jack volunteered this time, taking the knife and stabbing himself in his hand.
Call it being petty, but we were bored and jealous, and definitely envious that this kid got to see death while we were fucking cursed.
I watched Jack slam his hand over Charlie’s mouth, making a fist, and forcing it through the boy’s lips. “This isn’t going to work,” Miri whispered. “You’re just making a mess.”
We were. Charlie’s desk was covered in blood, and his bag and laptop were stained with pretty much everyone’s blood. But we weren’t giving up. Jack tried three more times before sitting back with a sigh, running his hands through his hair. “It’s not working.”
From the look of Charlie’s very dead corpse, I figured he was right. So, we gave up. Miri did her best to clean up his desk with wet tissue paper, and Jack and Noah attempted to position Charlie respectfully. I wouldn’t call hanging off his desk respectful, but sure, they were still pissed that a member of our class had escaped the painful jaws of life. The boys unlocked the door, and our professor rushed in with paramedics in tow. Charlie was pronounced dead (wbk) and carried from the lecture hall on a stretcher. When the paramedics were gone, neither of us spoke. I think we were too frustrated that Charlie had got away.
That was until our professor didn’t come back, and when I left the classroom to head to the bathroom, I found myself face-to-face with a stream of horrifying gore splattered across the floor. I saw our professor’s body first. I only recognized her because of her blonde hair. The rest of her was unrecognizable, an amalgamation of shredded flesh lying in stemming scarlet.
“Uh.”
That was all I could say. Just, “Uh…”
Because standing among the bodies, with a paramedic’s severed head in his hand, was Charlie.
Well, it was mostly Charlie. He had the new boy’s face, but that face was twisted into something of a monster from my nightmares, a black-like substance writhing through his flesh like vines creeping their way up his face. Like poison.
His eyes still looked relatively human, except for the amber glow around his iris. It began to slowly dawn on me, that this is what Jack’s blood and Eve’s bite had done to the boy. It had not turned him immortal, or at least the way we were turned.
Instead, what I was looking at was, well, I think it was a vampire. A real-life vampire, whom we had created. “Uhh?” Charlie mimicked me, dropping the head and staggering back with a cry, his lips curling into a fanged snarl. “What the fuck did you do to me?!”
It turns out our attempt at making another immortal went kind of… wrong. We’re now in the possession of a newborn vampire who is completely out of control, and we still don’t know how to die, or at least get rid of this intense never-ending burning.
He blames us, which… is fair.
But he’s also slowly working his way through the student body of our college, so has to be monitored all hours of the day by at least two of us.
He doesn’t even remember his name… which is a problem. He is a vampire, right? What else could he be?
But anyway, would any of you like to live forever?
Feel free to contact me.
(I’ll also throw in a 19-year-old nihilist asshole of a vampire too if you want)