Have you ever tasted blood? I mean really tasted blood. Have you ever had a hunger so insatiable or a thirst so unquenchable that no amount of food or wine could fulfill it? Blood, the ruby nectar of life that is so precious to so many. It is a rare commodity to find the purest of the pure and a treasure that I value with my life.
Now before you think I am a vampire because of my appetites I must tell you that I do not belong to that illustrious sect, regretfully. I belong neither to the immortals or the normal living beings, the ones that crawl along the freeways in their chrome and glass sarcophagi. I belong to a group consisting mainly of myself. I am sure that there are others like me but I am unaware of them at this time .
I am in turn savage and gentle. I have been called evil by those that are narrow minded and do not understand me or my existence. I have been viewed as a scientific miracle and monstrosity by educated men and women. I have been ostracized by my family since the tender age of four when my mother and father first realized that I was different.
Instead of playing with other children I stayed to myself and became obsessed with the basic rules of nature between the hunter and the hunted. I often wandered off into the woods behind our house and watched for hours on end as snakes swallowed small field mice and the spiders crawled on their nimble legs toward the trapped and panicking flies that were silly enough to stumble into their sticky lair.
To look at me you wouldn’t know of my, shall we say, unusual appetites. You could pass me in a store, the school hallway, on the street and never know who I am. I could be your best friend, your neighbor, your lover. Your lover. I have never denied my passion for the opposite sex. I worship women, I adore women, I am obsessed with them. I love their softness, their essence, their sensuality. Most men take them for granted or simply ignore the mystery that surrounds the soft vixens that haunt their most erotic dreams. Not I.
Women, since the age of fifteen I have been captivated by them. I have loved them with a fierce abandon that amazed even me. I have also been obsessed with one. Do you know what it’s like to become so impassioned with one person that all sense of right and wrong are suspended and one thought burns like a fever in your blood?
I am not one of those men that they do a movie of the week about. I do not stalk young women and frighten them to death. I have always prided myself on being better than those poor fools that can’t seem to tell fact from fiction. No, I do not stalk women. I love them too much for that. My blood has made a very insatiable man, the flesh is weak.
I stare blankly at this monitor, not sure why I am writing this for everyone to read. I’m sure many of you will judge me but that is nothing new. Madness, isn’t that what most great tragedies are based on? The poor characters that stroll across the stage are truly mad in their own rights.
Each person must deal with his own demons; his own madness, but most just sit quietly while it slowly eats them alive. I on the other hand, am Madness personified. I am a genetic what-if that never should have been. My dear sweet, angelic mother and my father didn’t know that inside each of them, they carried the one dormant gene that would create the creature they gave birth to. I remember going to church on Sundays, sitting beside my mother on the front pew and listening to my father preach his sermons.
He talked of sin and the serpent in the garden and of man’s downfall. Then he talked of the evil that Satan wrought when he led man astray, of the evil that the devil could plant in the seed of an unborn child because of the faithlessness of two married people. He preached long and hard of the weakness of the flesh and of temptation. He stared at me the whole time and I knew what he was saying, he was denouncing me in front of the whole congregation. He was telling everyone that my dear sweet mother was less than what she had always been to me.
Then came the tests. My father contacted some of the doctors he had known when he had been an intern.
Tests. What a waste of a word. Torture would be more suitable. Blood was a favorite of theirs and they couldn’t seem to get enough of mine. Four times a day they would take my blood; you know after a while the needles cease to hurt. I was put under glass you could say, I was studied twenty-four hours a day. While I slept they watched me; when I woke they watched me; when I ate they studied me.
For fourteen long years they probed me, they poked me, they turned me every which way they could and probably would have loved to cut me open save for the fact that I was a living, breathing ‘human’. All the time my hunger was growing to a fever pitch and I knew that it was going to surpass even my control.
It was the eve of my eighteenth birthday when I awoke with the worst gnawing in my stomach I had ever felt. My body trembled as I staggered from my hospital bed and made my way into the tiny cubicle of a bathroom. The fluorescent’s blinded my sensitive eyes as I splashed icy water in my face and fought down the wave of nausea .
I felt like a man that had been starved and my throat burned with thirst. A thirst I had never known. It was a thirst for something more substantial than the chilly water that cascaded over my open palms. I needed food.
I pressed the call button and slipped into a primal crouch on the floor, instinctively taking up this ageless predatorial stance. The orderly that came to my room was accompanied by another burlier man that had been working at the hospital for four months now. I don’t know what his name was but I rarely ever worry about names anymore.
They pushed the door open and found me crouched there. I must have been a terrifying sight with my eyes glazed over with the blood lust that creeps into them. I have seen it myself many times. I launched myself at them like a man possessed and quite possibly I was. The need for sustenance overrode any fear that I might have had that they could take me. Instead I went for the throat on first one man and then I lunged for the other as he tried to run from the room. I’m sure their screams were heard in the hallway but since it was so late at night there weren’t many on duty in this ward at least.
I didn’t care. I was in such a fever, I think I would have taken all them on. The first taste is always the most bitterly sweet. Salty with just a touch of metal. Nourishment. Fulfillment. Something to quench the burning thirst and quiet my stomach. I ate.
Sometime later, after the fever pitch had left my body I realized what I had done. I wept as I stared at the two lifeless bodies that were now surrounded by the crimson pool of their own life’s essence. It slowly slipped from the torn flesh to run in ruby rivers to the pristine white floor. Everything is so harsh in the light, but in the shadows, there are areas that seem less real. Not so with this. The light was harsh, it clearly outlined the dead men lying on the floor and it clearly showed me covered with their blood, smeared across my mouth, dripping from my hands, coating the front of my sweat pants.
Time; it can play tricks on the mind. Something may seem to take forever when in all actuality in only takes a few seconds. I felt like I had stared at those bodies for days but I had only stood there for two minutes before I realized that I had to get out of there. I had to run, to get away before others came and put me in those awful padded cells with the jacket again. I grabbed the items closest to me and ran out the door, unmindful of the bloody footprints I left in my wake.