Page 18 of Blood Lust

“Right, Redfeel. Look, all I want is a little blood. No one gets hurt if I am given some every once in a while. I promise to be your best patient.”

“Mr. Parker, feeding a human being with blood is a health hazard. End of story.”

I shrug my shoulders and nod. The more I try negotiating, the more the realization sets in that I face two decades of being muzzled and starved into submission.

Dr. Redfield opens a file sitting on his desk. My file. Even with my fuzzy brain, I can tell it contains medical records, notes, and photographs of my fangs and x-rays I don’t remember taking.

He puts on a pair of reading glasses and studies the folder’s contents while bird songs from outside travel through the window, bringing life to the sterile and quiet office. I miss those serene sounds that I once took for granted.

Dr. Redfield places the contents back inside the folder, closes it, and pushes it aside. He orders Don and Terry to pick me up. Standing without saying a word, he walks out into the hallway with Don and Terry holding me up in tow by my arms.

The hospital halls and offices are all painted an off-white that hasn’t been reapplied in years. Everywhere I look, I see cracks and smudges.

We follow Redfield down a staircase and into what appears to be the hospital’s basement. He walks a few steps down another narrow hallway and into a dark room. Don, Terry, and I wait just outside the door. Fluorescent lights reveal a single chair in the center of the room with an attached lamp above it.

It looks like a setup from a dentist’s office.

“What is this?” I ask warily.

“What does it look like, Mr. Parker?” Dr. Redfield picks up a corded phone hanging on the wall.

Everything feels wrong… Something bad is about to happen. What are they going to do? Are they going to destroy my teeth? I try unsuccessfully to slip from Don and Terry’s grasp, but I’m still restrained by both strong men.

“Relax,” Don says. “You’re not going to feel a thing.”

I have to somehow snap out of my stupor. There has to be some way to stop the doctor from entering and violating my mouth and taking the only things that identify me and confirm who I am. Unfortunately, they’ve drugged me up so thoroughly that my awareness isn’t trustworthy. Even Don and Terry’s large claws seemingly wrapped around the entirety of my noodle arms feel dulled and phantom-like.

Sounds in the room are muted. I hear Dr. Redfield talkingon the phone, but what he says sounds unintelligible, foreign. I close my eyes and after I open them, I’ve lost track of time, horrified to find myself on my back and with a goggled man forcing a metallic instrument into my mouth.

I try speaking, but my tongue feels as if it’s sinking toward the back of my throat, tickling my gag reflex. I feel warm chunks of food and sputum on my chin; apparently, I’ve vomited.

Rubber gloves, blue masks, eyeglasses, a pair of thick eyebrows, and yellow-handled pliers hover over me, and then I disappear into darkness. Not a sensation is felt, but I know as soon as I go into a slumber that I will no longer be able to call myself a vampire.

Annie died in vain.

Chapter Fourteen

A week passes and without my fangs, I become as malleable as clay, and docile as a three-legged cat. I’m just a scrawny kid whose only defense is his fingernails, and even those are now trimmed down to the point where the ends of my digits are as sore as the gums in my mouth.

I haven’t had the will to eat. Two days before, Dr. Finnegan came into my room and gave me another evaluation, worried that I’d begun a hunger strike. I nodded slightly in response to his questions as I lay on my bed with my back turned to him.

He determined I was no longer a threat and decided to let me venture out of my room in hopes that I will eat.

It’s my second morning sitting at a table in the mess hall. They say if I eat my breakfast, I will be rewarded with going outside into the yard. I still can’t eat. I’m not hungry and withering away seems to be my fate.

I became acquainted with this fellow named Bruce the morning before, who took a liking to me for some reason. I don’t mind his presence, and he sits next to me during breakfast as he did the other morning.

“Eat up, my man,” he says. “You don’t want to get too slim around here. Gives off the wrong message. I don’t think you’re ready to be someone’s boyfriend.”

I don’t reply and refuse to lift my head and make eye contact with Bruce. The oatmeal looks gross and the sprinkled raisins resemble roach eggs.

“Kid, you need to eat. You’re disappearing before our eyes. The staff’s gonna force-feed you with tubes and IVs,” he advises. “You want them poking and prodding you some more?”

I pick up the spoon and rub my tongue across my teeth, stopping at the sore gaps in my gums where my canines once were. I feel emasculated... cheated... mutilated.

“Don’t give up,” Bruce says. “Enjoy the bit of freedom you have now.”

Bruce has been here two decades. He has an easygoing disposition, despite being locked up longer than I’ve been alive. He’s also a supremely talented artist who’s chosen to teach an art class every week as a reward for patients with good behavior. His soft eyes, graying beard, and pleasant smile make him seem more like a benevolent philosopher than the drug-addled schizophrenic he claims to be. And just like me, he has a depressing tale to tell that helps keep things in perspective.