Pro-Tip for Humans #100: you spend your entire life not dying.

blood

            pain

                      touch

                                   drifting

                     is that a voice?

i hate my life.

There are voices in the fog, arguing, yelling even, and I know one of them, knew one of them, but that seems so long ago, another lifetime that happened to someone else, someone who isn't so goddamn cold. Someone who isn't me.

blood

             pain

                         touch

                                        drifting

                          did someone speak?

            what is life?

This time different voices. Someone punches me in the chest, and I want to tell them not to do that, that is a chest that belongs to me, but it occurs to me that I have no voice. The dead have no mouths, and that's what I'm supposed to be. Dead. Then the thought occurs that if I'm dead, why does it hurt so much? Or is that the memory of pain? And on the subject of pain, is it supposed to hurt this much? My veins burn liquid fire, my muscles screaming, and I want to scream or laugh or cry but this is a memory. Or is this even happening?

This had better not be a dream sequence. I hate dream sequences.

blood

              pain

                          touch

                                          drifting

                         is that a voice?

             i hate my life.

The taste of blood fills my mouth. It is not like when you bite your lip or your tongue, and there is that bitter taste of copper like when you lick the contact points on a 9-volt battery. If you grew up with a healthy fear of electricity and don't know what I mean, you're missing out. This taste is sharper, fuller, more alive if that makes any sense at all. It is more like someone has filled my mouth with blood until it is pouring out of my mouth. The taste is everywhere, it encompasses my entire being—

—and goddam

                                    it

                                               is

                                                        good.

blood

"—not gonna be here when he wakes up," someone says. I struggle to attach a face, a name, a person to the someone. Louise. She doesn't sound like her normal self. It's like she's freaking the fuck out. "They're going to be coming for me."

I can't open my eyes. She is just one of the voices in the fog. There is another one, a woman, further away. She has the kind of voice that sounds like she's always doing something else more important, and this clearly isn't it.

"Let them come," the woman says. "You can fight them. We'll fight them together."

"Harry's let them off their leashes while you've been away," Louise replied. "They're worse now. They changed. You went away and everything changed. A lot of good and a lot of bad, and then... there's them. The Gentlemen."

"Let them come after me then," the other one says. "I haven't had a decent fight in forever. I could do with some random acts of violence. Or focused acts of rage. Same to me either way. Maybe we can make the Seven O'Clock News!"

"Why are you doing this?" Louise asks after a moment.

"Because you needed me," the woman says softly. "Because you asked me."

Either the conversation grows indistinct or I'm drifting off. It feels like they're a hundred feet away, and I'm underwater, struggling to hear. It feels like I'm drowning and there's nothing I can do about it.

I close my eyes.

And then I close them again.

                   pain

It is a shitty motel room, the kind that you can rent by the hour. It smells like sweat, ass, and musty linens, the kind that you don't want to inspect too closely. It is the kind of room where turning on a blacklight would reveal more stains on the wall than actual wall and makes you want to turn it right back off again.

I have been in cheap shitty motel rooms before, but nothing like this. It is like a hostel that has been taken over by homeless people who then used all of the available funds to fuel their drug habits before realizing that they at least need to put some kind of furniture into the rooms. So yes, there is a bed, the shittiest bed you can imagine with possibly the shittiest mattresses available. There is a tv, a relic from the nineties, and looks like it had been purchased second-hand from a thrift shop of highly questionable character. The tv sits on top of a black, battered Lack table from Ikea, the kind you can pick up for $15 or $9.99 in the AS-IS section if you get there on a Wednesday morning (they clear the displays on Tuesday nights, so it's prime pickings on Wednesday mornings). A single plastic chair that looks like it would break as soon as you look at it, is the room's only other furniture.

It is the kind of room you wake up in if the gang of idiots you had been partying with the night before, had been too broke to get a proper motel, but not broke enough to sleep it off in an alley and possibly get mugged and arrested.

Louise peers intently out of the room's only window, the light on her face slowly changing from blue to red to blue to red again in time with the unseen flashing neon light somewhere outside. The way she is dressed definitely gives me some weird action movie or violent video game vibes, the type of game where the bad guys have bigger guns and know exactly where you are. When she raises her hand to part the threadbare curtain, I'm not surprised that she is holding a massive black hand-cannon that looks like it came directly out of a Lara Croft movie. Four large black military-looking machine guns lean against the wall next to the tv.

Fucking surreal, right?

To add to the surreal nature of everything, I realize at that moment that I'm lying naked on the middle of the bed. Oh, and there is a spring poking me right in the middle of the ass-cheeks; a couple of inches down, and I'd be referring to the mattress as Dr. Mattress. In case that was too subtle for you: because it would be sticking right up my asshole.

"Is this a dream?" I manage to mumble, and Louise glances back at me, her eyes wide with surprise.

"Unfortunately, this part is all real," Louise says with a half-smile.

"That's what I'd expect a dream to say." I try to sit, and my body gives me the middle finger as my head is taken over by a tribe of tiny invisible pixies with jackhammers and bad attitudes. I don't realize how bad it is until I collapse onto the floor, my legs having been replaced by jello when I wasn't looking.

The room spins

                                      and

                              reality

                     snaps

              into

place with a resounding—

"Ow."

When I was able to see again, Louise was looking down at me, her brilliant blue eyes wide with concern.

"I think I need more drugs."

"I'm not sure that this carpet has ever been cleaned, but the good news is that you won't have to worry about contracting any horrible diseases from it, so there's that."

Through my pounding headache with one persistent jackhammer pixie refusing to get off the back of my head, I struggled to make sense of what she was saying. I rose very, very slowly, ignoring Louise's offered hand of assistance, and the room didn't spin so much this time.

"That must have been one hell of a party," I groaned. A memory flashed across my mind looking for someplace to settle, but the jackhammer pixie wasn't having any of it.

"Yeah, about that," Louise said in a way that was so obviously loaded that it got my immediate attention. "Normally, I would have more time to do this and ease you into it, but time is of the essence, so I'm just going to break it to you and get it over with."

The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I looked at Louise in shock, suddenly very self-conscious of how naked I was. Holy fucking shitballs—

"We didn't have sex did we? Is that why I'm naked?"

Louise's raised eyebrow and exasperated sigh told me everything I needed to know about that possibility and calmed my fluttering heart.

"No, you doorknob: we didn't have sex."

"Well that's a relief."

"You died last night, and I had to turn you into a vampire in order to save your life."

She waited for my reaction, and I just nodded, waiting for more. Then to break the silence—

"Okay, cool. Is that all?"

"Seriously? I tell you that I turned you into a vampire, and that's your response?."

"Oh, I'm assuming that this is still part of the dream sequence. I was waiting for the scene to change but nothing is happening yet." I looked around the suspiciously non-dreamlike room. It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever had a headache in a dream. "Man, this is one fucked up dream," I observed.

Louise pinched the bridge of her nose and began to pace, head bowed, eyes squeezed shut.

"What are you doing?" I finally asked.

"Counting to twenty," Louise responded without missing a step, "and trying very hard to remember why I saved your life."

"Oh that one is easy! Because I'm awesome!"

Lousie paused, sighed, and walked over to the window. She gestured for me to join her. I grabbed a sheet from the bed and wrapped it around me to make a rudimentary and mildew-scented toga. I looked like an actor with a no-nudity clause in a move that had no budget for nicer sheets, but at least my junk wasn't swinging in the breeze.

My legs had congealed into something with a bit more substance— more rubber than jello — so I was able to deny the reintroduction to the floor that gravity insisted would be good for me, but my stomach had decided to join in on the "let's fuck up Bob" festivities. It was like there was a fist clenching my stomach, and it squeezed hard three times, and then released, waited for a bit and then repeated.

I was beginning not to like this dream. At all.

I joined Louise at the window and winced as I squeezed out a fart, praying that it would be silent and not smelly, and that was all my stomach needed to chill the fuck out.

"Sorry," I whispered.

Louise looked out the window, and I looked with her. The window looked out onto a short alley that led to what looked like King Street East and Spadina Avenue. I actually recognized the Sushi restaurant across the street, so that placed us right in the heart of downtown.

"You're about to go through some changes in your body, and it's going to hurt a lot. Your genetic structure is rewriting itself, rewiring how your body deals with trauma, how you feel... everything. Everything is going to taste amazing and that's good and bad, but I swear it's one of the best things. This is what vampirism does. It throws out all the inconvenient bits and makes you better, but it hurts like a sonofabitch. You're going to feel like you're dying, and there are times when you will wish you could die, but it will pass, and you will get through this."

"You sound like you're saying goodbye," I noted.

"I so wish I could be there for you when you've gone through the change, but what I did was against the rules, and the guy in charge is a massive prick who doesn't like people breaking his goddam precious rules. So he's sent some very bad men for me, and from what I've heard, nobody ever survives a visit from them."

As if on cue, a slim elegant figure stepped into the mouth of the alley and raised his head slightly to look up at the window. It was as if he could see us and he wanted us to know. An actual chill ran down my spine, this rippling of fear, a sudden rush of adrenaline like I had never experienced. The base of my spine went ice cold as if someone had shoved a block of ice back there, and sweat beaded on my forehead at the same time. Heat rose from my upper lip, almost like a physical presence and it was almost as if I could inhale it, could taste it, the smell of my own fear.

I recoiled forcefully, stepping back away from the window, panic rising in me, desperate for that monster in the shape of a man not to see me.

"Holy fuck—"

Louise glanced out the window and nodded with a deep sigh.

"That's Mister Flynn. The other two will be along shortly, but he's the most dangerous one."

"There's three of them?" I dared a look again, and sure enough, there were three men now. The slim one Louise had referred to as Mr. Flynn was in the middle, flanked on one side by an impossible giant of a man and on the other, a skinny one —erratic and twitchy and in constant motion.

All doubt concerning the existence of monsters evaporated at the sight of those three in the alleyway. Those three—

"What the fuck are they?" I hissed in terror.

"They're vampires, Bob. Have you not been listening?"

"Vampires don't exist!"

"I'll stay here while you go out and explain that to them."

"Hard pass—" I interrupted myself with a loud and long belch that seemed to go on forever. It was a long braaaaaaaaaaaaap that left my throat burning, and my mouth tasting like the liquid from the bottom of a dumpster. It left me bent over and gagging, struggling to stay upright on trembling legs.

Louise holstered her pistol and picked up one of the machine guns for a final inspection, hands moving quickly in a well-practiced rhythm. I think that's when I realized I might not be asleep. And if this was reality, I was totally fucked. The Louise I knew was a caring and compassionate person, a doctor who was passionate about working in the Emergency Room where she could do the most good. That woman was the one who had let me stay with her for three months after I had been kicked out of my old apartment after being laid off from the internet start-up. That Louise was the person who had (inadvertently) introduced me to her best friend in the world, a woman named Jaime, and had been happy that we had seemed made for each other.

This Louise was apparently a body-armour-wearing weapons expert, who was ready to fight three bonafide terrifying monsters.

This Louise was a motherfucking vampire.

Please fasten your seatbelt: up is now down, left is right, and by the way, gravity still sucks.

"We call them the Gentlemen. Even other vampires are terrified of them, because what they do is, well... they kill other vampires."

"I want to wake up now Louise," I pleaded through a desperate not-grin, my mind teetering on the edge of terror and insanity. "Please let me wake up!"

"Still not a dream Bob," Louise said as she checked the magazine on another gun. "I'm a vampire, and in three days, your change is going to be over, and you'll be one too. A vampire just like me. But only if I can get these walking slabs of evil away from you."

My stomach cramped suddenly, and a wet-sounding fart exploded out of my ass before I could even try to control it. What is widely known as a "shart" and in the worst cases will leave a spray of wet shit inside your underwear. Totally gross. A vile and obnoxious odour immediately took over the room, and both Louise and I gagged. Louise reeled away, trying to escape.

"Oh, gods! It got into my mouth!"

"Serves you right for turning me into a vampire," I quipped and then gagged again. "Good god that's terrible."

"It's the change. I'd forgotten how bad it is." Louise spat and covered her mouth and nose with the arm of her armoured jacket.

Not wanting to move too much in case another shart caught me by surprise, I glanced at the window and then back at Louise.

"So I died?" I was surprised to find myself asking. My stomach gurgled at me, right before my stomach clenched again, hard this time. I was surprised to find sweat pouring off my body like I was in a sauna. On the plus side, the jackhammer pixie was apparently on lunch break, leaving only a cold spike of pain right between my eyes that made it incredibly hard to focus.

"Why did you turn me?" I found myself asking. "Why did you save me? Doesn't this go against the doctor's oath or something?"

Louise looked at me like I was the stupidest person on earth.

"Because you're my friend, and I love you, dummy," she said. She shouldered the rifle and grinned crookedly, looking like the total badass that she was. "Stay here. I'm going to go and make some noise. I'm really hoping these guys haven't learned how to dodge bullets because that would really suck."

"Gimme a gun," I groaned, and then in the next moment my stomach cramped hard, and I was bending over, a violent stream of liquid ejecting out of my mouth across the shitty motel room. It was sudden and brutal, and for me, it seemed to last forever.

Even Louise seemed surprised by the eruption, and after somehow having managed to avoid getting caught in the projectile spray, now edged towards the exit door, holding her breath.

"Is it supposed to hurt this much?" I gasped.

"You'll be fine, really," Louise said, trying not to breathe.

"You're lying aren't you?"

"A little, yeah."

"Scale of one to I hate you-die-die die?"

"So, I'm going to go and try to kill these evil fucks rather than breathe any more of this because this right here is pure evil."

I threw a half-hearted middle finger salute.

"Love you too, Bob," Louise said and then she slipped out into the corridor, the door clicking shut behind her.

I wanted to look out the window to see where the Gentlemen were, but instead, I found myself staggering towards what could only be the bathroom, feeling the sabotaged biochemical factory that had replaced my stomach on the verge of a violent eruption. I ripped the sheet-toga away and made it to the toilet a full second before my ass exploded.

Gunfire broke out, a distant rat-tat-tat-tat, followed by a couple of distinctive blam-blam-blams of Louise's handgun, but I wasn't listening. I was screaming as my insides tore themselves to pieces in a symphony of pain and misery.

Worst. Dream sequence. Ever.

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Soundtrack: Coma - Guns N' Roses