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Chapter Nine

I haven’t lived long enough to be cynical. But I’ve lived long enough to know the only person who gives a shit about you is yourself. So, I guess I am cynical in that sense.

I look out my cell door window and see them drag in another one. This time, he’s gagged and swaddled up in a straitjacket like a psychotic nightmare. There are yammerings of a crazed individual, conspiratorial in nature to that of an insane mind.

“You sons of bitches ate my corn dogs!” he yells at the men who drag him by his restrained arms.

“There’ll be plenty of corn dogs to be had during your stay,” replies Don, Fulton State Hospital’s largest security guard.

Don looks as if he just stepped off the WWE tour bus with his long, blonde ponytail, villainously trimmed goatee, and shoulders that look as if they could stop bullets in their tracks.

“Will the corn dogs protect me from the witches?”

“Yeah, sure, why not? The corn dogs here are kryptonite to witches. What do you think, Terry?”

Terry, the other security guard, is older and smaller, but looks as if he was a spry linebacker in his youth.

“Yeah, just the other day I saw a corn dog jam itself into a witch’s nose and suffocate her to death.”

Terry nods with a smirk and then opens the cell door across from mine.

It’s a holding pen of sorts. A bench, a toilet, and not much else.

Not even a goddamn book to keep anyone from losing his mind even further.

But this is to be expected in the maximum-security wing of the hospital where they keep the worst of the worst… including me, apparently.

I don’t belong here. Being bombarded with every type of mental illness imaginable makes me long for the comforts of a normal prison population.

.. even though I’ve never stepped inside a normal prison before.

I’m not crazy, and if I am and don’t know it, I sure as hell am not as demented as the hogtied fellow in front of me who’s still rambling on about corn dogs and witches.

“The witches... are bad, man. I need some corn dog sticks,” he continues. “Let me sharpen some. I already cut one of them witches.”

Don releases his grip on the man’s arm and watches Terry escort him into his cell.

“That lady was no witch. She was your landlady,” Don says.

“That’s her front, man! She has a cauldron in her bathroom. I seen it with my own eyes.”

“It’s a bathtub.” Don rolls his eyes. Terry shakes his head and stifles a snicker.

Blood droplets that have soaked through the ends of the man’s sleeves, and minor scratches on Don’s bulky forearm, tell me why the ’corn dog man’ has to be restrained.

Terry inspects the buckles binding the patient, making sure he can’t loosen the straitjacket.

He secures the belts behind the man’s back, and closes the door before heading off with his hulking partner.

The clamor ceases soon after the latch thunks closed and locks the thick and impenetrable cell door. I continue staring through the small window, trying to make eye contact with the new resident. The top of his head bobs in and out of sight as he paces the small room like a caged animal.

I figure if he makes eye contact with me, perhaps he’ll dial down the crazy a bit. The place is lonely, and I need to talk, or at least make eye contact with someone who doesn’t think I’m a monster.

Waiting for him to quit pacing, I notice a smell that needs addressing. The faint stench of bleach permeates the room and the hallway outside. Yes, this is a hospital, but I have yet to see an actual cleaning crew mopping the halls and making sure it remains sterile in the few days I’ve been here.

Perhaps the smell is there to keep our minds off things, obsessive things, like corn dogs, and in my case, the sweet, sweet taste of blood.

I compulsively indulge in my desires and become a slave to the sanguine and scarlet liquid.

Yet, my vampirism comes without the benefits of immortality, flight, or shape-shifting.

I unforgivably screwed up the night I lost my virginity. I never imagined myself a murderer or someone capable of hurting someone. But I did.

A part of me will always feel remorse for stopping a beating heart, but the events that night helped me come to terms with what I eventually could become.

There’s a reason God gave me these teeth, unless he has some kind of morbid sense of humor.

I would hate to think the Almighty takes pleasure in seeing me suffer on Earth.

I think of the way people cover their mouths as they whisper to their friends while throwing judgmental glances my way, as if I’m some loser playing Halloween on a Wednesday in January.

Nah. On second thought, I doubt the Creator is playing a cruel joke on me. After all, He blessed my taste buds, too. I was manufactured to ’seek neck and suck.’ Annie, who I cared for and who cared for me, paid the ultimate price so I could recognize who or what I am.

The crazy guy finally stops pacing in circles and gives me a blank stare through the small glass window. I smile and I believe he catches a glimpse of my teeth. He immediately frowns, and his emotionless eyes pool with tears. He begins pounding his head furiously against the window.

I don’t mean to frighten him. Nor do I want him to crush his skull against the window. Blood smears against the glass, while I yell through my door slot for help.

Don and Terry sprint down the hallway to the man’s cell.

As soon as Don unlatches the key ring from his belt, the man disappears from view.

They open his cell room door, revealing the man lying on the floor, twitching from a seizure.

Don radios for help while Terry turns to me with a worried look in his puffy eyes.

“What the fuck just happened?” he asks me.

“I have no idea… I just wanted to say hello. I sure as hell didn’t ask him to eat his tongue for breakfast.”

Don crouches next to the man. He reaches into his pocket for a mouth guard, but before he can insert it into the man’s mouth, blood sprays out from the man’s lips like a geyser.

“He just sliced his tongue in half!” Don springs up and away from the crimson spray.

Three blue-gloved members of the emergency medical staff, wearing face shields and smocks, rush in to try to stabilize the inmate. Don and Terry make room for them as they step out of the cell and into the hallway. I notice small specks of blood spray on Don’s left cheek and nose.

“You showed him your teeth?”

“Does that mean I can’t smile now?” I deadpan, giving him a toothy grin and showing off my large incisors.

“I got this motherfucker’s diseased blood all over me ’cause you couldn’t keep to your sorry self!” Don barks at me as he reaches for his key ring and looks as if he’s going to enter my cell and pummel my ass. “You’re such a fucking asshole!”

“Just trying to be friendly,” I smirk.

Terry pulls the larger security guard back from my cell door, shaking his head disgustedly. “Don’t. He’s a biter, Don.”

“I’m gonna come back with a muzzle and then I’m going to pile-drive your ass into the ground!”

“Whatever gets you off, big guy.” I wink and blow him a kiss.

Don’s words lose their impact as I’m instead mesmerized by his neck.

The meaty stalk is reddened by the Missouri summer heat.

His vein pulses and hardens with anger. A man his size, age, and temperament probably suffers from high blood pressure.

One little prick from one of my fangs at the right spot would yield a bounty, for sure.

I have to play the long con. I’m small and scrawny compared to these behemoths.

They’d punch holes in me with their large fists. I have to wait for the right moment.

“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to sound sincere.

My apology appeases Don for the moment, and he turns away from me while pulling a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiping the blood from his face.

“I’ll try not to smile next time. I just have so much to be happy about and want to share the joy that’s pushing up out of my soul.”

“It’ll suit you well if you keep that trap of yours shut,” Terry says.

“What do you mean?” I ask, not worried by his ominous tone.

Meanwhile, the bloodied man, now passed out or dead, is then picked up and rolled out of his cell on a stretcher.

I continue staring through my window for the next half hour.

Surprisingly, no one ever comes to clean up the pool of blood left behind in the man’s cell, but the smell of bleach persists.

I’m in a dirty, unkempt Clorox hell. And if I stay here long, I’ll eventually stop being who I know I am.

I don’t plan on spending the rest of my life being a medicated stiff who can only look forward to being pounded like a piece of meat.

No way in hell will I let that happen.

Chapter Ten

I curl up on my aluminum bed and try using my own body warmth to repel the cold surface as best I can.

I begin counting the small holes in the white cinder blocks in front of me.

There are 157 of them, and only 98 on the one above.

I wonder how the holes got there. Air bubbles most likely, trapped when the manufacturer molded them with concrete.

They’re slight imperfections in an otherwise impenetrable cement barrier, preventing me from escaping to the outside world.

Yet the holes give the blocks a sense of vulnerability.

If I could somehow find a way to poke them with something sharp, over, and over, and over again, then perhaps the blocks would lose their strength.

Who am I kidding? That wouldn’t work… would it?

You’d think being in isolation for as long as I’ve been that my mind would slow into a state of semi-hibernation, but no, it races like never before.

I cannot stop thinking. About stupid shit too.

Like poking holes through cement blocks, one at a time, for months on end, until the wall has the consistency of Swiss cheese.