raised by wolves

The city hummed with activity, a distant humming that reverberates endlessly through your ear canals and makes your head hurt even when you are by yourself in silence. It is different from the silence of the night. So much life all around, so much bustling and moving, so much motion that your stomach starts to hurt from thinking of it, like the insides of a washing machine stuck on the spin cycle forever.

Slowly, invisibly, I made my way across town to the den of a friend of mine. Unless he had awoken from the same troubled sleep with the same amplified thirst as I had, he was very likely to still be asleep.

Santiago was the son of a fascist general in the Spanish civil war. His mother fled to America, and then Mexico, leaving her husband to die at the hands of the anarchists and then became a whore, but raised her son as best as she could on her own and in such circumstances. Santiago showed a talent for painting at an early age, but never had a chance to truly develop his skills for he was found dead on the eve of his twentieth birthday. His mother and those in his village wept and tore their hair for their loss until he rose from the dead and feasted on their blood. Santiago lived as an animal for two long decades before our paths crossed and I saved him from the madness. I taught him to hunt more effectively, and how better to take care of himself. It was a wonder he had kept alive as long as he had, sustaining himself on the mythical diet of blood only. He was skinny and shriveled and hungry, for he did not know that vampires need to eat real food, too. I took him under my wing, and we traveled together for many years, living like kings on the fat of the land—so to speak.

We settled in the city for it’s dense and largely indifferent population, as well as its proximity to the shore, and here we had been as ghosts for this last stretch of innumerable years. We had not spoken in some time, but among vampires this is common practice. Time does not mean so much when time is all you are.

I knocked at the door of a basement apartment in a hive-like development across town, practically a mirror image of my own. I knocked again, louder, hoping to rouse Santi from his slumber. It didn’t work, and so I walked in. The myths of vampires being unable to enter a place unless invited are patently not true—I have known many vampires in my years who have survived as burglars, and indeed, burglary-gone-awry is a wonderful way to explain a ransacked home with a blood-drained corpse as it’s only occupant. And besides, even if the lock was latched, it is no big thing for our kind to move like mist through the crack under a door. Even Fort Knox, human’s gold standard of secure facilities could not keep the likes of us out.

“Santi?” I called into the dark, dusty apartment. There were stacks of magazines and books and DVD cases along with piles of empty chicken buckets and beer cans and wine bottles. A solitary candle burned on a shelf under an image of the virgin mother with Hitler’s mustache drawn on it. Slob, I thought to myself. There was a heavy black curtain hung over the only window to the outside, framed in a rectangle of white light where the sun could still get in.

“Santi?” I called again. “Where are you, pista gorda?”

I found him asleep on a couch in one of the back rooms. There was a drum kit that had fallen into disrepair sitting in another corner, and from there I took a cymbal stand with the heavy metal plate still hanging on it and put it as close to Santiago’s head as I could manage. I couldn’t help but smile as I silently looked for something to strike the cymbal with and found about half of a drum stick.

I began striking the cymbal loud and hard and yelling at Santiago in broken Spanish.

“Despierte, asshole! Chinga tu madre, puto!”

The look on his face as he lunged without sound towards me was priceless.

We tumbled and rolled around on the garbage-covered floor for a while, him cursing wildly and me laughing hysterically. After he realized it was me and not a hunter, he threw himself off of me and let a deeply annoyed sigh escape him.

“Sergei,” he said and cursed. “You scared the fucking shit out of me, man,” he said and crossed himself and spat on the floor. I kept laughing.

“You should have seen the look on your face.”