Blood Donor
A disturbing tale inspired by a piece of flash fiction by John Watson - Horror Author
What a rush!
Marina’s mind raced, almost as fast as the sedan she steered—her heart pounding with the energy high she continued to ride from the evening’s earlier indulgence.
God, I needed this, she thought.
She let out a scream of wild, delirious glee.
“HAAAAAaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!”
But her scream jerked into a sudden gasp as she sucked in air with a wheezing rasp, eyes wide at the sight before her. She slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel. With a horrible thud, her car careened into an inescapable object, sending it hurtling through space.
The sedan’s tires screeched, smoking burnt rubber, as the car skidded into the large oak tree at the edge of the road, the passenger side of the hood smashing into the tree with a horrible crunch. Untethered from the seatbelt she had ignored, the woman’s body launched forward, crashing through the windshield and flying over the driver’s side of the hood to land on the picket fence of the neighboring homestead.
She hung there, impaled on the fence, several pickets piercing her torso. As she choked out her last breaths, Marina Kittredge’s eyes managed to focus on the middle of the road where, in a crumpled heap, lay the young man she had hit, limbs akimbo, unmoving.
***
SLAM!
The doors flew open, rammed aside by the gurney frantic hospital attendants furiously pushed down the hall toward the emergency room. Blood dripped over the gurney’s edge, leaving a crimson trail of rubies on the pearl white floor below.
In the operating room, doctors and nurses focused on their various, vital tasks. The only words spoken bore both necessity and urgency.
“Lost a lot of blood!”
“Gonna need a transfusion!”
“Type AB negative.”
Behind the scenes, other hospital staff members aided the effort. A quick check revealed no AB negative on hand. Someone was already dialing Nick Wasserman, their regular AB negative donor…
***
The cell phone on the motel bed rang. And rang. The caller ID read “Landry General Hospital” before going to voicemail.
The towheaded man would have answered the phone had he not been an empty vessel, hands and feet tied to the bed frame. The edges of the gash across his neck curled dark and dry; his skin, withered from blood loss, sagged with a sickly, greenish white.
Footsteps approached the front door, followed by a sharp knock.
“Nick Wasserman? This is the police. I need you to open the door.”
After a beat, keys jangled as one worked its way into the lock.
***
The inability to find their usual AB negative donor had led the hospital OR staff into a slightly panicked brainstorming, when Doctor Kim recalled the driver of the car who’d arrived dead on arrival: too many organs, including her heart, damaged beyond repair. It was a million to one shot, but they tested her blood and the team rippled with relief and action once the dead woman’s blood type revealed a match.
The hit-and-run victim lay beside the woman who’d struck him, linked now by tubes as a transfusion sent blood from the lost life to the salvageable one. With luck, Terrence Carpenter’s would-be killer would, ironically, save his life.
***
“Exsanguinated? What the hell does that mean?”
Police Detective Manuel “Manny” Flores scrunched his lips as Forensic Specialist Dee Lester, still examining Nick Wasserman, explained: “It means he’s been drained of blood. I mean, there’s maybe a half a pint or so on the sheets, but there’s almost none pooling in his body and he feels lighter than he should, so my guess is our killer used something to siphon it out of him.”
“What the hell for?”
“Black market, maybe. Usually organs are taken, but if the killer knew his blood type was really rare and that’s all they were after… It’s not common but I’ve heard of a few cases. I’ll check the sample when I get back to the lab.”
Flores shook his head. “Fuckin’ ghoulish, if you ask me.”
“Pretty much,” Dee agreed.
***
Terrence couldn’t understand the visions before him. They came in such a rapid blur, it seemed like a movie running at far too fast a speed. He could only capture the tiniest glimpses, but they made no sense: as if many lives, spanning centuries, flashed before his eyes. Men in powdered wigs? Then white leisure suits? Women in bustles? Then flapper dresses? And so much blood! On walls, faces, hands. His hands?
In a sickening lurch, like some spinning carnival ride coming to an end, the images slowed down to a final day as if he lived it at that very moment:
a towheaded man at a bar smiling at him,
tying that same man to a motel bed,
cutting his throat with something sharp,
sucking his blood from the wound,
catching his reflection—a woman?!—in the motel mirror, blood dripping from his/her fangs,
driving madly at night,
something in the road,
himself in the headlights as he’s hit—
Oh my god!
***
Terrence jerked awake with a gasp.
“Easy, now,” a voice said.
He looked around. He lay in a hospital room. In a hospital bed. Bandages on his body. A nurse leaning over him.
“How are you feeling” she queried, gently.
“I…uh…”
His voice rasped, his throat painfully dry.
The nurse smiled, kindly, asking “Thirsty?”
Yes. Yes, I am, he thought …
… eyes focused on the vein throbbing in her neck …
This story was inspired by a piece of flash fiction by John Watson - Horror Author.
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Freakin' awesome! I love a good vampire yarn, but that's not what impressed me most about this story. I love how many different threads you have running through the story and how all the different perspectives eventually tie together to give us the twist. It's tricky to juggle so many different points of view in a short story, but what's doubly amazing how you never lose the story's momentum: from the very first sentence to last, everything has such a bombastic, kinetic energy to it. Appropriately, given the way vampirism is framed as a rush of indulgence here, reading this story was also a rush: pure adrenaline. Loved it!
This was such a cool story. I loved it!