Author: Rachel

Daniel Francis: time of death, 11:38 pm; 382. Standing over the still warm but now lifeless body, I couldn’t help but feel…..well, many things, if I’m honest; guilt, remorse, relief. He had known his time was soon ending – the cancer had ravaged his lungs, destroyed his kidneys and began attacking his bones. There had been moments of clarity in the midst of the morphine-induced haze in which he had spent his last days: moments where he understood what was going to happen, moments where he knew exactly how I could help end his suffering. Watching the life leaving a body hadn’t got any easier, even as a third year resident. Not even after three decades as a vampire.

I remember the night I was turned like it was last week – I won’t horrify you with the details of the incident that led to my waking up in hospital, hooked up to countless machines, needles in every limb filling my body with various fluids, a stranger stood at the foot of my bed. She had a sombre expression on her pale face, almost as if she were grieving. “I’m so sorry”, she whispered.

“What happened to me?”

“I bit you” she told me, matter-of-factly. “I found you outside the nightclub, beaten and bloodied. You had so many broken bones……I didn’t think you’d make it.”

“So, you bit me?!”

She shrugged. “I tried to heal you first, you know, feed you my blood, but it didn’t seem to be working, so I fed. I figured it’d be a shame to waste the blood.” I had always had enough of an open mind to believe in the supernatural, so her admission of being a vampire was not much of a shock. “What I hadn’t expected was for your heart to stop in the ambulance on the way here. You dying caused you to turn.”

That statement was a shock, however. I was only 23, had my whole life ahead of me – travelling, marriage, children – all now taken away from me. My sire and I talked for hours that night, she answered all my questions and taught me everything I would need to know about being a vampire. She explained that she had never taken an innocent life; she hunted either the dying or evil – those that were not worthy of the life they’d been given. Her philosophy made sense to me, so I followed her example. I took advantage of the abundance of time now on my hands and continued my medical studies (switching to night classes, obviously), graduating in the top 10% of my class. I moved between hospitals every decade or so, just before people would start questioning why I wasn’t ageing. South County Hospital had been my home for just under 2 years when this cancer patient came under my care.

Dan had come in just over a year ago, when the cancer was only in his lungs. Chemo and radiation therapies were unsuccessful and unfortunately the cancer spread around his body. Spending so much time in the hospital, I had gotten to know Dan pretty well. He often joked about my being a vampire during his morphine highs due to the fact that I only worked nights and have such cold hands. During his lucid moments, he would grip my hand tightly and beg me to do whatever was in my power to help him. I chose tonight, when the rest of the doctors were busy with a cardiac arrest, to end Dan’s suffering. I increased his morphine drip, whispered in his ear that everything was going to be alright and bit into his carotid artery, feeling his warm blood flow down my throat until his breathing stopped. I never drained more blood than I needed, nor enough that the loss of blood would be noticed by the coroner – just enough to satiate my hunger and kill the patient.

I left Dan’s room, disliking how empty it suddenly felt and headed to the locker room to compose myself. I wrote down my notes for the medical records that I finish at home during the day, when the sun is too bright to venture into. Out of habit, I took a few deep breaths to compose myself before setting out to find patient number 383.