I put my laptop aside and tried to get to my feet. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. My head was still spinning, so first, I had to scramble to my feet with my back against the wall and, only after that, I took a hesitant step forward without additional support. After standing up, I started to slap my cheeks hard, trying to at least somewhat dispel the mist that filled my brain. I was feeling slightly better, although I felt an almost total lack of any life force inside. I moved my neck from side to side, stretched my shoulders, and jumped several times on the spot.
Maybe I can walk at least a dozen steps. But where should I go? I had no idea where this Halen Street was, not to mention which block. 43? Or 28? Damned if I know! I turned around. I could go back into the station and ask someone for direction but I still wasn’t sure that it was safe for me to be close to people. Vampire hunger had left my body together with the rest of my energy, but who knows? Maybe, once I see some mouthwatering human, it will come back as if nothing had happened.
A taxi stopped a few feet away from me. What a stroke of luck! A driver should know the way, and a bulletproof partition between the seats should protect him from any possible attacks from my side. I grabbed my things and hurried to it. But of course, it couldn’t be that simple. Some fat guy in a Knicks cap was already heading toward the taxi from the station’s main entrance. There were only several steps between him and the car. Fate was clearly laughing at me. I slacked my pace, realizing that rushing would be totally pointless, when suddenly a gust of wind tore the cap from the stranger’s head, and it rolled away on the ground, like a merry tumbleweed.
The fat guy quite comically rushed to catch it. I seized the opportunity, skipped quickly to the car, and sat in the back seat. The driver examined me warily. I looked extremely suspicious – my hands were trembling and my blurry eyes were moving nervously from side to side. He probably thought I was a crackhead.
“Kid, are you alright?” the driver said to me in a tone, implying that he didn’t really care at all about my well-being.
I tried to answer that everything was ok, but I failed. My mouth was dry and my tongue was behaving funny. It still moved, but not the way I wanted it to. The driver looked at me for a few more seconds and then shifted his gaze out the window. Apparently, he decided to throw me out of his car and take that fat-ass who finally managed to catch his cap.
Luckily for me, the fat guy had already disappeared through the doors of the station. The absence of another client was, of course, a solid argument, but there was still a chance that I would be thrown out. To avoid this, I hurried to take all the money I had out of my pocket and throw it through the small window in the partition.
I don’t know how, but I managed to force myself to say, “43, Halen Street.”
The driver even flinched at the sound of my voice, which, at that moment, resembled the sound of fingernails scratching a chalkboard. But, since I had paid for a ride (and way above rate), the driver had no choice but to shift into gear and drive.
We drove the whole twenty minutes. Breeksby’s residential district was just a glint in the rearview mirror, and now the gloomy outlines of an industrial area were looming outside the car’s windows. Finally, we got to the end of the industrial zone. The buildings were all abandoned. Most of the windows were boarded up, and the rest were grinning with splinters of broken glass. A few minutes later the car stopped and the driver grumbled, “Here. 43, Halen Street.”
I looked in the direction pointed out by the driver. Block 43 was a creepy three-story box of dirty gray color with no trace of functional windows or doors.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
This time the driver didn’t even care enough to open his mouth and just nodded.
“Maybe this is the wrong address. Can you take me to block 48?”
“Listen, kid. I’m not going to drive around this district at night in search of some address that you don’t really know,” the driver replied irritatedly.
I lingered for a moment.
“And I’m not going to stay here waiting for your decision either. In this part of town at this time of night, a taxi is the same thing as a big neon sign that says ‘Mug me’.”
I remained silent and didn’t move.
“Well, that’s your choice.”
The driver stepped on the gas and started turning the car.
“Wait! Ok, ok, I’m getting out.”
The driver pulled up. I took my bag and got out. I hadn’t even closed the door yet, when the car made an abrupt turn, almost brushing against me with its back, and whooshed noisily in the opposite direction, leaving clouds of dust in its wake. I turned around. It was a godforsaken place. The only source of light there was a single street lamp somewhere at the end of the street, which was about as useful as a dozen fireflies locked in a jar.
In this dim light, I still managed to make out all of the ‘sightseeing attractions’: several deep holes in the asphalt, piles of trash, dilapidated fences with bent rods. It was an ideal place for making horror movies. At any moment, I expected a maniac in a hockey mask to come running around the corner with a roaring chainsaw. I walked around the perimeter of building number 43. I found a puddle of quite fresh and still reeking vomit, a whole family of rats, who weren’t at all embarrassed by my appearance, several dozen beer bottles and cans, nearly a billion cigarette butts, and, of course, an obligatory element of such landscape – a creepy one-eyed doll with a scorched head. What I didn’t find there was an entrance.
There were doors, of course, but all of them were either securely boarded up or heat-sealed. The main question I’d been asking myself during the recent days of my life lit up in bright colors in my head again, “So what am I supposed to do?” There was no one around, and it was unlikely that I would catch a ride in this neighborhood, even during the day. And I didn’t have a phone, so I couldn’t call Uber. I dropped my bag and sank to the ground, resting my back against the rusty metal gate which probably served for the loading and shipping of whatever was produced in that building, when it still functioned. Judging by its look, it had previously been a plant manufacturing apocalypse.
What am I going to do… What to do… Well, apparently, prepare myself to die! I had gotten into the taxi on my last legs, using up the remains of any energy I had stored in the ends of my hair and nails. Now, I was absolutely empty. I wonder what will be local newspaper headlines if I die here. “Mysterious incident: aspiring high school soccer player found dead in the abandoned industrial area”. “Although there is no flippin’ way they will find my body here!” I thought. “If it isn’t dragged away by rats or eaten by some starving cannibal bum, it will be lying here at least for a month until someone with some sense of moral decency comes across my decomposed remains, which, at that point, would be pretty hard to identify.”
Ah, to hell with it! Live fast, die young! I tilted my head back, rested it against the gate, and closed my eyes. If I were to die, I would take it, and there was no use crying about it. Pff, death, no big deal. My head got foggy again, and this time I wasn’t resisting it. What was the point? Chip and Dale definitely won’t rush to my rescue. Somewhere above me, I heard a low, mechanical sound. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and looked up. At a height of about ten feet, a security camera clung to the side of the building. It moved, making that mechanical sound again, and aimed its red eye at me.
I had just started to comprehend how the camera had ended up there when I heard a rumble behind my back. The gate, which I was leaning against, was rising, making me fall backward. I hit the back of my head on the ground and everything went dark for a moment. When I regained my sight, I saw a human figure leaning over me.
ns 15.158.17.164da2