Vampires
Jeremiah turned the corner and began walking down an alley. He heard the vermin in the garbage rummaging around. Three floors up in an almost vacant apartment building he could hear a baby crying. He jumped up and grabbed the ladder leading up the fire escape. As he reached the third floor window he could almost feel the baby’s desperation.
He opened the window to a familiar stench, decomposing human flesh.
A male in his early twenties sat on the couch.
Heroin needles laid with the unused portions of the drug on the coffee table. Enough for a full weekend.
He glanced at what was left of the face. ‘You never saw it coming did you.’ he thought to himself.
His wasn’t the only rotting corpse in the apartment though. He could smell another.
The mother laid in the hallway, a girl in her early twenties. Her right arm outstretched towards the baby’s room.
“You did though.” Jeremiah remarked as he walked past her into the room of the screaming infant.
The baby laid there in it’s crib. The stench alone from it’s unchanged diaper would have brought tears, but Jeremiah had no tears. He looked at the starving, screaming infant.
He walked to the window in the room and opened it, letting in fresh pollution from outside. Watching the people walk to and fro on the street. No one knew what went on in this apartment. No one looked up, no one heeded any mind at all to the screaming baby.
He walked back to the child and watched it’s red face howling. He began to send calming energy toward the child.
In about ten minutes time the child had stopped crying and fallen into a deep sleep.
Jeremiah watched the sleeping baby, no more than six months old in it’s crib alone. No parents to care for it. No neighbors to care for it. No one to care for it. Not even him.
The stench of death radiated off the baby, it was ill with some form of cancer. It wouldn’t even make a suitable meal.
Jeremiah walked to the front door an unlocked it. He took a final look at the male laid back on the couch. He opened the door and walked out into the hallway.
Apartment 332 faced him, so he kicked the door in.
A family of three sat watching television, and jumped screaming at the sound of the door being kicked open.
The boy aged seven ran out into the hallway and down the stairs.
The dad began explaining they had nothing of value.
The mother pleaded for their lives.
Jeremiah grabbed the man while the woman ran out of the apartment to find her son.
Jeremiah spoke no words, made no facial expressions. He felt only a pang of hunger. He bit into the male’s jugular and drank. A feeling of ease began to settle in his shoulders then ran slowly down his back. All the tension he had been feeling seeped somewhere into the floor. After his stomach was filled he again felt completely relaxed. He dropped the corpse on the floor and washed up in the kitchen sink.
He heard the woman returning in hysterics with her now in silent, numb shocked son. She wasn’t alone. She’d brought police with her.
Jeremiah looked up at the clock. It was almost time to meet up with the others. He straightened himself up and walked calmly out of the apartment.
The mother was still screaming and sobbing at the same time as he passed her in the hallway. She did not even notice him walk past, nor did her son or the police.
Jeremiah walked out on to the sidewalk outside.
He heard the woman scream in a decibel so high he thought it would burst human eardrums.
Then he heard the baby crying again. It cried for three minutes before it was picked up by one of the officers.
The officer leaned out the open window and looked up and down the street as she held the baby in her arms.
Jeremiah glanced up at them for a second, then walked off.