All next week I had been working my butt off. I had school homework, lessons with Rettle and other Order members and for the rest of the time – endless hours of solo training. I had been thrashing the hell out of my column, making it thinner every day, practicing shooting a gun, learning other useful skills. Geek and Lee had been teaching me search and surveillance; Fleming – showing how to make a homemade version of Bloodberry. Lumberjack turned out to be not only the hugest man I’d ever met but also a great expert in survival techniques.
I’ve always liked Lumberjack, but when I got to know him better, I almost fell in love with that enormous but childishly naive and sweet creature. There must have been no other man in the world that contained so much emotional warmth, kindness, and tenderness. While we walked in the forest not far from the headquarters, Lumberjack taught me how to determine cardinal directions by the foliage, what was edible and what poisonous, and other forest wisdom. During the breaks between instructions, he had time to tell me his story of becoming a vampire. Philippe Saint-Pierre, that was his real name, was born and grew up in the virgin forests of Canada.
He, his father and grandfather had lived in the same hut located several hundred miles away from the nearest civilization for their whole lives. At about my age, Lumberjack also experienced a vampire hunger. Since, in contrast to me, he didn’t have a supermarket meat department around, young Philippe started hunting deer and other forest animals. Although he tried to hide the traces of his “crimes”, his father and four elder brothers were experienced trackers and soon they noticed that a previously unknown predatory animal appeared in their forest.
Noticed and started tracking it down. As the result, Philippe’s own father caught him devouring another forest resident. Since Saint-Pierre family was actually half-savage Daddy decided that his child had been possessed by a demon and couldn’t think of anything better than shooting his own son. With bitterness in his voice that made my heart sink, Lumberjack confessed that the wounds from the shots healed quite quickly on a young vampire’s body, but in bad weather it still ached a little in the chest where the charge hit.
Wounded Philippe broke into a run and managed to run away. Having grown up in the woods he decided to stay there. At first, he lived in a cave, then built some kind of a hut. He ate wild animals and replaced his worn clothes with a self-made outfit from animal skin. Lumberjack had been living that way for several years almost having turned into a caveman. Soon the rumours that a Bigfoot appeared in Canada reached the Order of the Night Guardians. My uncle hit the road and managed to find Lumberjack. According to Philippe, meeting Mike was the best day of his life. My uncle told his new friend that he was not alone in his misfortunes and took him to the States.
Stoker was next to teach me. He did turn out to be not so much of an asshole. He was quite friendly and told me a lot of jokes, mostly dirty ones, but still funny. However, Stoker started his “course for aspiring burglars” with another dirty trick. Mister Alvarez clapped handcuffs on me and gave me a task to escape them using anything available. I wandered around the headquarters like a complete idiot for a full hour, sticking everything I could find into a keyhole – from a ball pen to a kitchen knife.
When I finally gave up and asked Stoker to show me how to get out of the handcuffs, he wrapped his hands around my wrists, and, grinning, yanked my hands in opposite directions. The chain connecting the two cuffs broke as if it were made from plastic.
“Learn to use your vampire strength. You can break most of the common locks at one blow,” Stoker taught me the first lesson. After that, things got merrier. He showed me how to pick and bump locks and break into cars. He also taught me the most useful skill in case of a zombie apocalypse that I’ve always dreamt to learn – hot-wiring a car.
Having closely communicated with Stoker for the first time, I found that he had his own very special charm of a bad boy, the one your mother forbids to be friends with, and that makes you want to hang out with him after school even more. So I completely changed my negative attitude toward Stoker. I also learned the secret of his nickname. Turned out that in those days when Edgar had already been a vampire but hadn’t entered the Order yet, he, just like Jack, liked to pick up girls in bars, showing them his fangs. And to look even cooler, he would introduce himself using the name of the famous author of Dracula.
Once I even managed to have a heart-to-heart talk with Fleming who was spending most of the time in his lab. That day I showed my weakness. Tired after hours of training I decided to hide from Rettle’s all-seeing eye on the roof. And there I found two sun loungers and a small table with a pot and two cups. It turned out that Fleming was meeting sunset there almost every evening, sipping his favorite Earl Grey. Sometimes he was joined by Rettle for whom the professor kept the second cup.
It was the age that Fleming and I started to talk about. I asked whether it was true that he was younger than Rettle and if so, why then he looked three times older than the coach. Fleming confirmed that he was only sixty-five years old, and in those times when Rettle was fighting somewhere in the trenches near Berlin, he didn’t even exist. Turned out that Fleming was a converted vampire like Rettle. Fleming offered me to sit in the sun lounger next to him, poured me some tea and, having made another sip from his cup, began telling his story.
“Fifteen years ago I was a doctor. I had a small clinic with several doctors and even my own laboratory which I was very proud of. I’ve always been attracted to the scientific part of medicine. I was particularly interested in viruses. One day a twelve-year-old boy was brought into my clinic. His name was Sean McLorene. The first symptom of his unknown illness was light sensitivity or photophobia. At first, I thought it was congenital erythropoietic porphyria. Erythrocytoschisis or breaking up of red blood cells that I detected in the boy’s blood counted in favor of that diagnosis. However, no other symptoms of the disease were found. No hypertrichosis, no erythrodontia. I came to a deadlock. Meanwhile, there appeared more and more new symptoms – allergy to silver, strange itching in the gums. I suppose you’ve already guessed that the boy was a vampire. But vampiric signs started appearing very early in him, that’s why his transformation happened not very commonly. Then mavrocytes appeared. I isolated them and originally classified them as non-cellular infectious agents. My mistake was expectable – every doctor sees his specialization in a disease. After finding the source of the problem I started searching for antivirus. But then arrogance surged up within me. I wanted not only to discover a new disease but also to successfully cure it. I should have requested the assistance of large research laboratories. But I was blinded by the Nobel prize, looming on the horizon. That’s why like all great daredevils of medicine I decided to test the effect of the new vaccine for vampirism on myself. For this reason, I had to infect myself with the ill boy’s blood. At first, the vaccine worked. It was efficiently destroying mavrocytes in my blood. But the next day they appeared again. I made a colossal mistake while researching the disease. It had never occurred to me that mavrocytes caused changes in the bone marrow. No matter how many mavrocytes were killed by my vaccine, each time my bone marrow produced more and more of them, and after a while, my body developed immunity that made my remedy useless. This is how I became the world’s only converted vampire who was stupid enough to infect himself. And as for your question – why I look so old. In contrast to Rettle, I went through transformation already in advanced age, so my body had gotten old even before conversion. Besides, during all these years, I’ve kept searching for the remedy for vampirism and each time performed experiments on myself, which undoubtedly had a negative effect on my appearance.”
For the first time during the professor’s confession I brought myself to ask a question, “And what’s happened to that boy?”
“To Sean? All these years I have been keeping in touch with him, supplying him with donated blood and then with the first versions of Bloodberry. He has a great family. His parents have found out about vampirism from me and it hasn’t scared them a bit. On the contrary, they started taking even better care of their boy,” the professor paused and looked at me. “And then little Sean had grown up and started calling himself Geek.”
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