Vampires of the Sun or: Sudden Oak Death

I should make it clear to you: it wasn’t a prison. You’d think what happened was more understandable if I said it was a prison, that we were all trapped there looking for a way to escape. That’s what some people were saying. I was given a newspaper that said that they kept us locked up there and we hated them. That isn’t true, and I don’t want you to think that it was.  I could have left at any time, at least before the blizzard. We went out a lot, all of us. There was a bus into Hobarth that I started taking by myself when I was thirteen. I had a license and I could take my dad’s car anytime. I had plenty of access to the outside world. I think it was Juniper’s dad who started calling the place the Hundred-Acre wood, but it stuck. Charming, right? It was a beautiful place where we lived, all of us and our families and the scientists. It was normal. We went to school together. Someone might think they had stepped back into the past to see us, in our little one room schoolhouse. But we were all the same age, so it wasn’t quite the same. All of the scientists’ kids went to school in Hobarth. Didn’t want to be around us, I guess. The summer before our senior year started, I was sitting with Ivy on the deck. We were laying there, looking up at the sun. I remember exactly what she said to me. She said, “I don’t think there’s anywhere else for us to go.”  She asked me if I wanted to stay in the Hundred-Acre Wood forever. I said I didn’t know. If you think that I’m proving the opposite of my point, just find me a high school senior who doesn’t feel trapped inside their own life. That feeling doesn’t make their small town a prison. I should know what makes a prison, at this point. You’re looking at the picture of us, printed in the papers, on the internet, on the news, all our high school class photos that were meant for the yearbook. You’re seeing what’s not quite human about us and you’re thinking, “I’m glad that could never happen here.”  Ha. I bet that you’re imagining how awful it must have been, what kind of evil people we all were. You’re clutching your pearls and saying, “Imagine, a whole nest of vipers in a high school classroom together!” Probably anybody paying attention to the trial is here for the lurid details. Curiosity. We’re a spectacle. I bet you’re all imagining what we’re like. You want to know what it feels like to be me, or any of us. You want to know how it happened, and why, and if it’s going to happen again.  I’ll tell you what you want to hear. It’s no skin off my back, at this point. It’s hard to explain, though. I guess I should start by saying that we were all always hungry when it rained. All the buildings in the Hundred-Acre Wood had big, big windows. We’d always sit by them, soaking up the light. When it rained, there wasn’t enough sun. No sun, we were hungry. It wasn’t hunger like you understand it— I don’t really know how best to describe it. Like we were skin-hungry. Like our skin was crawling like it wanted something, and what it wanted was sunlight. You could get the feeling to go away a little, or you could at least distract yourself from it, by being touched instead. When it rained, or when it was dark, we’d find someone to huddle up with. It used to be our parents, when we were really little, but when we were older we’d find each other. You know. You just want to be held, and you want to hold somebody, and one thing leads to another. I’m not going to go into details about it. I miss it, though. I don’t like being alone here. I’m hungry all the time. Another thing was that we didn’t really eat food, or get food. We couldn’t digest it, not really. We were all messed up because of how they made us. We had these nutrient shakes that we drank, and that gave us all those elements that you don’t get through sunlight and air and water. They didn’t taste like anything.  I did try eating real food, normal people food, a couple times out of curiosity. I’m willing to bet that most of us did. Just made me sick, though. Went right through me. Our parents always ate in a different room, away from us, just because they were being polite. Well, I’m not sure if that was the reason they ate away from us, or if they were told not to eat in front of us to not tempt us with food. Intellectually, I guess I didn’t mind the whole food thing. I’ve always lived this way, and thus have no basis for comparison. On a different level, though, there’s some part in the back of the brain that still tells our bodies that we should be chewing on something, eating something. It’s funny, maybe, or stupid. We all ended up with these oral fixations, or pica or what have you. Was there a single one of us who didn’t end up eating dirt by the handful, and chewing on furniture, and absolutely demolishing our shirt collars by chewing them up as a kid? We were all given these chewy toys, and that helped a little. Oh, and sugar free gum— we could have that. The urge to chew on things never really went away, even though it wasn’t really connected to anything that we needed. It stayed, even when we were older, so, you know. Maybe it is an inevitable quirk of how we were made. You think that I was the ringleader of all of this. By some definition, that’s true. I was the first one to do it. I can admit that. The first time it happened was a Friday night. Ivy and Pine and I, we would always like to go into Hobarth on Friday nights. There was a club that we liked because it was crowded, dark, and loud. The lights were fantastic, all different colors, and the DJ that they usually had was decent. I like music. Technically, we were underage, but we got in anyway. It doesn’t hurt to tell you this NOW, but the bouncer there was one of the scientist’s kids. He knew we physically couldn’t drink. He’d let us in. We’d go dancing. I didn’t ever tell my parents or anybody where I was going, and I bet Pine and Ivy didn’t either. But it wasn’t like we were really getting into trouble, and we were ALLOWED to go places. Nighttime was the best time for going out in public, because we didn’t have to worry about getting enough sun on our skin. We were just hungry. We would go to the club, and we would dance in the crush of bodies. It was good. Touching, being touched. Moving, being moved. It helped with the skin-hunger. In the dark we wouldn’t look any different from everybody else. Green in our eyes would just look like reflected light.  There was this girl there, she was always there on Friday nights, and we made out sometimes. It was a casual thing. We’d go in the corner and, you know. She liked it when I would kiss her neck. She was really, really into that.  Anyway, we were making out in the back, kinda near the bathrooms. It was beyond loud in there, but when she said anything I could feel the rumble in her throat. I guess I was kinda into it too. She was running her fingers through my hair, and her head was tilted back, and I was just in the crook of her shoulder and her neck, and we were up against each other like there wasn’t any difference between her body and mine.  Somebody bumped into me. I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear. There was the jolt of someone smashing into me. By accident, I bit her. I mean, really it was more like my teeth crashed into her skin enough to make a hole. It wasn’t a serious wound, but there was blood. I was like, “Oh no, I’m so sorry!” She was like, “Don’t stop baby.” I guess she was kinda into that, too.  I didn’t really know what else to do but get back to it. I kept kissing her neck, and the blood got in my mouth, and it tasted like nothing I had ever tasted before. She stopped bleeding pretty quickly. Like I said, it wasn’t a deep cut. That one little taste of it, it was crazy. Someone flipped a switch in my brain. After I left the club with Pine and Ivy, we were sitting in my dad’s car (I was driving, but we were back to the Hundred-Acre Wood and parked in my driveway.) I told them about it. “It made me stop being hungry,” I remember saying. “I’m not kidding. “You were probably just weirdly into it,” Ivy said. “You got so excited you forgot about being hungry. It happens sometimes.” “No, I don’t think that’s it,” I said. “I mean, maybe?” “I’ve tasted my own blood before,” Pine said. “When I’ve cut myself. It doesn’t taste very good.” “Well, maybe ours tastes different,” I said. I don’t know why I was defensive about it. I knew what I had felt, and I needed them to understand. Maybe I should have not said anything, and tried to forget about it, but for some reason it was sticking in my head and I couldn’t get the thought out. It had been a transcendent experience. My mouth kept moving by itself to tell them, even though them knowing wasn’t going to help us all live better lives. Pine and Ivy went home, and I tried to go to bed. A couple days later, Pine came to see me. It was daytime, and we went for a walk along the edge of the woods, just soaking up the sun, feeling warm, full, and content. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.” “Yeah?” “About the blood.” “I’ve been thinking about it, too,” I said. “Am I crazy?” “Maybe. Do you think… Maybe it’s just, you want to taste somebody else?” “Do you want to try?” I asked him. I let him kiss me and I let him bite my wrist to taste my blood. He said it didn’t taste any better than his own.  “Maybe you just have to be hungry,” I said. “Or maybe it is that our blood is different. Not the same nutrients in it, you know.” “Introduce me to your friend,” he said. “Maybe she’ll let me kiss her neck too.” I didn’t know why Pine was into the idea, why he wanted to try that badly, but there was some part of me that understood. The next time we were at the club, I found my friend and I introduced them. We danced, the three of us. We were all beautiful in that dark light. Pine’s eyes shone like I’d never seen them before.  I have some self respect left. I won’t go into the details. That was how it began. It was innocent. There wasn’t any urgency to it. I never meant to hurt anybody. Nobody else did either, when word went around. We were a tight knit group. We all talked to each other, and when Pine and I both said that it was something that made us less hungry, people listened. They wanted to find out for themselves. I bet that everybody who had a friend in Hobarth (which was everybody) did it at least once or twice.  Nobody minded that all the young adults in Hobarth had friends from the Hundred-Acre Wood that wanted to kiss their lips a little too hard. Nobody got in trouble for it then, anyway. But you know how this story ends, and it doesn’t end that summer in Hobarth, because the summer came to an end, and the fall. Then it was winter. It was crushingly dark all the time. Pitch black once the sun set. We all hated the winter. Even the artificial lights couldn’t make us satisfied. We huddled up together, and tried to let the feeling pass. We had survived all the winters before this one, and we would have probably survived this one too, except for the blizzard. Who builds a scientific facility dedicated to people who need the sun’s energy to live, way out in the middle of Minnesota? Was land cheap there? Was it nice to get us far away from civilization? I don’t know. It was really the worst storm anybody had ever seen. And I’m not just talking about us. I mean our parents, and the scientists too. Nobody had been through a storm like this in living memory. You couldn’t see the sun, and you couldn’t go ten steps out the door without getting lost. The power lines cut out pretty quick after the snow started. It was mostly the wind, I think. That would push you off your feet, if the snow wasn’t thick enough on the ground to hold you upright. It was easy to blow the power lines down, I guess. We had a generator, of course we did. It that could only last as long as the fuel. The snow lasted longer. It snowed and snowed and snowed. My mother told me this story about her grandmother, who had been alive for the blizzard of ‘78, and how long they had been without power for, and how long the snow had lasted. Everyone agreed that this was worse. Even when the snow itself stopped, it was deeper than your head, the sky was covered with clouds thick enough to stop all light from getting through. It was midnight at noon, I swear it was.  The roads were closed. The wind was a hundred knots, the conditions on the ground were impassible, there was no way they were fixing the power lines, and there was no way we were going to get more fuel for the generator. Not even by helicopter. The solar panels were as hungry as we were. Hungrier, maybe. My father lit a fire, and we huddled by it, but that paltry little light would never be enough for me. I felt like there was a piece of me burning away in there. My family had food. I did not. I was starving to death amidst their feast. I looked at them while they sat by the fire because they were cold. I wasn’t cold; I was hungry. I found Pine and Ivy and asked them what we were going to do. We carved a hole in a snowbank and sat, clutching each other. All of us, we were the only ones who understood what it was like to be this hungry. I hope you never have to understand. “How long can somebody live without food?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Pine said. “They can live for a month,” Ivy said. She pointed at all our little houses, buried to their gables in snow. “Who knows about us?” “They’ll get some good data points on us,” Pine said, and laughed. “They’ll learn they can’t ever make people like us again. We starve to death in a snowstorm.” “I don’t want to die,” I said. “I’m hungry.” I put my head in the corner of Pine’s neck. Felt his skin on mine. We were both skin-hungry. We were dying. My mouth moved. It wasn’t like I was controlling it; it was just the hunger instinct. I bit him. He hit me. “I don’t even taste good,” he said. I think we all realized at once exactly who did taste good, and exactly what we thought would make us less hungry. All of us, all thirty of us, we gathered together. Pine and Ivy and I, we picked the place and spread the word, but I think everybody would have figured it out even if we hadn’t. We snuck out of our families’ houses that night. We all met in the schoolhouse. We had outgrown the place. We were all a little too old, breaking out of the confines of youth, into some other way of living. It was unnatural to sneak around there in the dark, without our teachers to guide us. We put the desks in a circle and talked in the dark about what we should do. The hunger was so bad. You have to understand that when you get that hungry, you’ll start to do anything. We all understood this on a level that was deeper than skin, all the way to the bone, all the way to the heart. There wasn’t any disagreement from anybody. Not a single word. “None of our families,” Ivy said. “We’ll have to just pick from the scientists.” “How many do you think we’ll need?” Pine asked. “There’s a lot of us.” We wrote down the names of all the scientists on little scraps of paper, and we put them in a box, and we drew out five names. It was fair that way. We weren’t picking favorites or least favorites. Six of us to each one. It was a small town. We knew where everybody lived. Nobody could call for help without electricity. The snow on the ground made everything sound awful quiet.  I had Jefferson Bethume’s name written on a little piece of paper in my hand. Sage, Maple, Rose, Willow, Briar, and I, we broke the lock on his door. We rifled through his drawers and took knives from his kitchen. We were quiet. We crept upstairs to his bedroom.  Dr. Bethume looked kinda peaceful. He had this big quilt over him, and there was a fire in his fireplace. It crackled loudly enough he didn’t wake up or hear us when we opened his bedroom door.  We held him down and cut his throat. I had the knife, because I guess I had the idea, which meant it was my job. But Sage and Maple held his arms, and Rose and Briar took his feet, and Willow kept the pillow pressed down over his face so he couldn’t struggle away. It was over pretty quick. We laid him down over his kitchen table to make all his blood drain out into his biggest stockpot. Then we took mugs from his cabinet and we drank it all.

. Maybe it didn’t even make us less hungry except in that we thought it should make us feel less hungry. This feeling came over us, though. Like nothing any of us had felt before. I can’t explain it to you, but it made us feel like we had done what we had to, and that we were going to continue to do exactly, exactly what more we had to. We tossed all his bedsheets in the fire, because they had blood on them, and we found new ones in his linen closet to replace them with. We washed out his stockpot and all the mugs we drank out of, and we put them back in his cupboards. We wiped everything down with paper towels and bleach. We dragged his body out into the woods and we cut it up and tried to make it look like maybe wolves or coyotes had gotten him. The wind was still blowing enough that all the different parts of him were half covered by snow by time we were done. I don’t think that you really want the gory details. Maybe you do. Kill somebody yourself and you’ll get to see it firsthand, if you really want to know. Anyway, you know how this story ends. We went back to our houses, pretended like nothing had happened. The crazy thing was, nobody even noticed that people were missing until a few days later. There was the search, now that the weather was cleared. They found the bodies pretty fast, didn’t they? It must have been something, to find all that in the woods. It didn’t take too long for someone to put all the pieces together after that. Nobody really thought that five scientists would go on a hike in the woods in the middle of the worst blizzard in a hundred years. Whatever. Do you want me to say that I feel bad about it? Yeah. Fine. Guess I do. But you don’t know what lengths you’d go to if you were me. Nobody’s ever going to know what it was like to be me again. After this, they’re never going to make more of us. Of course they won’t. It’s probably for the best that we’re first, last, and only to be like us. But I’m not the first person who went hungry, and God knows I won’t be the last. That’s all I have to say. It’s the truth. There’s no reason for any of us to hide it. We were all in it together, and we all confessed when we asked. Maybe we should have lied, said it was only a couple of us, and then the rest of us would have been free. Doesn’t really work like that, though.  There’s your show trial, real work of brilliant entertainment, to look at us and marvel about how strange these not quite human youth are. You marvel. You do that. I’ve said my piece, and I won’t be saying any more for the judge and the jury and the cameras. I’ll be here with this electric fucking light, and no windows. They won’t let me talk to anybody or touch anybody, you know. I’m goddamn hungry and I’m fucking lonely all the time. I have no intention of living out the rest of time here.  But I’ll spare you the details.