Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

I struggled to sit up. This was getting too absurd to scare me stiff. I could just get up and leave.

No, I couldn’t do that. I was bound. I pulled against gauze wrist restraints at my hips. My ankles seemed free but I was still as helpless as a kitten up a tree or, more apropos, a sacred scarab beetle on its back.

At least a kitten had claws.

Speaking of which, why couldn’t I feel the silver familiar? Why wasn’t Irma goading me on with complaints and cheers? I felt oddly shrunken, wondering if that was the first result to a body that was being embalmed, ancient Egyptian-style. What did they do first? Drain the blood? No!

Terrified, struggling to maintain hope and sanity, I became my own intentional Irma.

Come on, Delilah! You’ve fought off group-home bully boys, werewolf and hyena packs. One CinSim and some thoroughly modern human nurses shouldn’t unnerve you.

My inner voice sounded soft and weak. I wanted to just go and cower in a corner. I wanted to kick myself again for thinking and feeling that way. What was wrong with me?

Nothing, said a wee, small voice.

Everything, shouted voices I’d imagined all around me. “That’s why we have to do this.”

“The blood is the life,” the man at the foot of my resting place announced, toasting with the vial of my probable “bad” blood. Hey, it worked fine for me. It was my blood! It was my life!

And the doc’s dialogue line came from an old thirties movie, just like the CinSim.

That “blood is the life” guy had the same hammy tones as the Invisible Man in his mad scientist mode at the beginning of his self-named movie. They all had it, this guy and all the English-y curtain chewers from wee-hours cable rerun black-and-white movies.

I’d seen all those films in the group homes when I didn’t dare join the other girls in a group bedroom where the punk boyz would hunt me. Those guys despised and avoided the “game room” with its Ping-Pong table as a place for “losers.”

So I hid out there nights to watch old black-and-white films as truly “silent movies” because I didn’t dare turn up the volume. I had to stay awake and sit up all night to fend off… mad scientists?

No, boys! Bad boys. Boyz. They’d been after me before any of the other girls. My white skin, my blossoming “mountains,” everything wrong with me. Me.

I was breathing so hard I sounded like a bellows and some distant part of my brain diagnosed it as hyperventilating.

The blood wasn’t the life. It was death. My death. Bad girls. Bad grrlz. I was one.

That’s why I was here, being hurt. I would bleed. I would die and this man, this doctor, would preside.

At least now I recognized him, or his breed anyway.

Doctor. I must do, be, as doctor said.

Then another, more terrifying recognition clicked into place. He wasn’t just any CinSim doctor, he was the Mother of All Vintage Film Doctors and the Father of the Monster.

Doctor Frankenstein.

“WELL,” VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN muttered to himself, “if the blood won’t do that eliminates the draining process.”

I felt the table I was on tilt more level. What was this, psychotic pinball? I realized with another chill that the damn table, and me, had been canted at an angle all along, the better to “decant” all the blood in my body.

Hadn’t my earlier online researches revealed that the ancient Egyptian embalmers used just such a technique? Being treated like an antique corpse didn’t appeal to me any more than playing a glamour corpse on a twenty-first-century forensics TV show.

“I really don’t need you nursemaids anymore,” Frankenstein absently told the six weird nurses. “I now have an entire, live body. With such a fresh beginning I can attempt a better resurrection than I got with the Bone Boy. I’ve never had much luck with assembled parts. The complete body is the key and the blood, not bones, is the life.”

The nurses stirred uneasily, or eagerly, which was more than I could do at the moment.

This was an English actor-not today’s Colin Farrell or Colin Firth but… Colin Clive!

The thirties’ Frankenstein CinSim extended his monologue to better relish the sound of his own mellifluous voice. The breed just can’t resist exposition.

“My royal masters and their minions certainly don’t need any more experience in embalming,” he droned over my not-yet-dead body, “so I can hone my resurrection skills. First she must be killed, I think. Hmmm . I do find that part a bit queasy-making. I live to create life, not destroy it. I’ll have trouble violating that directive. The royals must understand that one does not overcome one’s assigned role that easily.”

As he maundered on, I realized two things simultaneously. The scared, shrunken part of me that had been quavering on this table had known nothing of the Millennium Revelation and CinSims.

And, second, the part that did was coming back like ghostbusters.

If I wanted the silver familiar back, I had to call it. That couldn’t be an ambiguous summons, so any love-hate thoughts of Achilles and Snow’s long white locks were out. Besides, after what I’d let happen to Snow, I figured he’d like to see my blood drained about now.

I concentrated on my stouthearted Lhasa, Achilles, who would have tackled any five-times-bigger hyena on my behalf if he’d been alive. This Egyptian subterranean theme park was a place of resurrection. I’d seen Snow call a dragon to life from its ashes under the Inferno. I figured I could retrieve my late lamented and incredibly loyal dog from the lock of his hair I’d saved from the Kansas crematorium and recently added to the familiar.

This is Millennium Revelation Vegas, baby! Nothing dies here but lame onstage acts.

I took another deep breath while I still had one and called up the look and thought of Achilles with every shred of my bereft heart’s longing.

There is someplace even more potent than thoughts of home, and it is the place in the heart where lost loves are enshrined. I conjured Achilles’ spirit as hard as a six-year-old kid making a wish, with my eyes squeezed tight and my fingers curled into fists as tight.

Even at six I had stopped wishing for anything, but now I had memories of my love for Ric and the fierce risks I’d taken to save him.

I pictured Achilles bounding to me through foot-high Kansas snowdrifts, his white hair flowing behind him, baring his intent black eyes and long red tongue lolling against small rows of sharp white teeth.

“Ow!”

My wrists felt caught in the vicious steel-toothed jaws of an animal trap tightening like blood pressure cuffs. Then the gauze bindings shredded and my arms pulled free.

I eyed my stinging wrists, which now sported matching Wonder Woman sterling silver cuffs with turned-out, sawtooth edges. Ow! for anyone who tried to grab my wrists.

I looked up to see Frankenstein contemplating a scalpel like Hamlet the skull of his dead court fool. I could kick my unbound feet into Frank’s wimpy mad-scientist chest like a kangaroo and be up and outa here in a second.

Oops. While I was busy channeling my dead dog and silver sidekick, the three nurses on either side had pulled down their masks and torn off their gowns.

I gazed upon beauty bare: six sets of sparkling Hollywood-white vampire fangs and snowy banks of dead-white cleavage fit for a plus-size Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

The twin silver cuffs melted up my arms and began streaking toward my bare neck.

“Chill, dear,” one nurse leaned down to coo. “We’re actually your bodyguards.”

“Wait,” Frankenstein cried as I clutched my winding sheet to my chest and scooted my rear down the stone table away from him. I didn’t wait, but spun to get my feet to the floor. I turned to face him across the stone slab with its drainage gutter along one edge.