Chapter Text
It started with gasoline.
When you lose all sense of purpose, anything can be your purpose. For a day, for a year, you can make damn near anything your ambition. Your raison d’etre. Your single-minded goal.
As if someone like me could ever be considered “single-minded”.
When you think you’re smelling gasoline, you’re actually smelling benzene. It’s an additive, and hardly makes up 1% of the gasoline itself, but it’s sweet as all hell. Those folks who say they love the smell of gas, it’s the benzene they really love.
To me, the smell means people. It means human civilization looming in the near distance. When I find myself hedging closer and closer to a city, a town, whatever – that sweet stink of exhaust is the first hint I get.
That’s what I’m smelling right now. Trickling through the crooked trees, cutting through the symphony of the natural world like a knife, it comes for me.
My bare feet find the invisible path easy as pie, because these tendrils of pollution, they guide me easier than any map.
The reek of humanity. The stench of my failure.
If you’ve got nothing else to propel you, whatever your sights happen to land on, that’s suddenly your new ammunition. When you’ve done it all, when you’ve seen it all, when you’ve lost it all, that’s when you become free.
Did you ever wish you could uncap one of those red jugs of gasoline and take a nice big whiff? Did you ever watch that poisonous brownish liquid pour out of the pump, the smell of it crawling into your nose and biting your face from the inside, and wonder against all reason what might happen if you splashed some of that sweet gas into your mouth?
Our curiosity’s what got us this far in the first place. You think you’d be lounging on your second-hand loveseat with a stain on the armrest, phone in one hand and a cold bottle of something in the other, if somewhere way, way down the line your ancient monkey ancestor hadn’t struck two rocks together, just to see what would happen?
I’m just continuing the tradition, that’s all. At least, that’s what I told myself, that moment I was nose-deep in gas.
The scent of exhaust sneaking through the dense wilderness, it’s like if you were on your lunch break at your third dead-end job this year, and your skeeze of a manager microwaved some fish. And all day long after that, the pungent stink of hot tuna’ll be following you around like a dog on a leash. That’s how it is for me, right now.
Makes me wonder how folks seem to just ignore it. Then again, most can’t pick up smells like I do.
I force myself to slow down. I crouch at the edge of a pond and pick at the dirt under my fingernails. There’s a white-tail on the other side of the water, just behind a copse of trees, and the way the light breeze whistles through its fur, I can almost imagine it’s some kind of music.
I wish I were as distracted as I’m pretending I am.
In case you didn’t know, benzene smells so good that the first thing people thought to put it in was aftershave and douches. This was right before the turn of the century or so, the 19th century. Men slapped that sweet fragrance on their freshly shaven faces, women dumped it down their nethers, and a few decades later, everyone started getting leukemia.
By the time World War II rolled around, people were starting to see the correlation. All these doctors and industrial experts, they said, pump the breaks, so that’s what people did.
I was already in my 80’s when that was happening, but I’ve got to be honest, I wasn’t really paying much attention to beauty products. My world was far removed from the health and wellbeing of humanity.
The pond is gone, the white-tail is far behind me now. When I’m not paying attention I move too fast. My nose is getting impatient with me.
Like how a fox is drawn to a bed of mice, the dusty tang of pollution draws me. A hungry fox, it sticks its nose to the air, searching for even just a hint of mouse urine. Even if he’s not looking for it, if he catches that whiff of prey, those mice are surefire goners.
That’s the very picture of me. I’m just as weak to my instincts. I run and hide, for months sometimes, crawling through thickets and picking my distractions, but the scent of my prey never leaves me for long.
Which brings me to the here and now, slinking my way back to civilization.
If you were wondering how gasoline tastes, it’s not sweet. Imagine mixing bleach with the strongest alcohol you can distill, and you’ll get the picture.
I don’t stop at the first town. Or the second. They’re too small, I tell myself. The kind of towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and the death of anyone is such a big crazy deal. You can’t get away with anything in towns like that. That’s what I’m saying to myself.
I cross interstates, the many headlights just fireflies in the dark. All of them lead to one city or another, but I don’t follow them.
Another wildlife reservation. I slow to a stroll and let myself be cradled in the rich smells of cedar and linden. It’s heavenly, and I wish I could belong here, but I catch something from upwind: charred wood, nylon, cherry cigarillos, and beer. I point myself in the opposite direction and run before the undeniable scent of humans can curl too deep in my belly.
Campers and hikers are easy prey. Easy. But they’re usually dehydrated and, more often than not, intoxicated. If I’m to break sabbath, I can do better than that.
Officially, the only safe amount of benzene for a person to be exposed to is zero. But anything so useful and rampant, so easily made and found, that’s not the type of thing folks just toss away.
It’s in paint remover. Paint thinner. Ink. Laundry detergent. Glue, but not the kind your kid is eating. Don’t worry.
None of that stuff tastes sweet either. In case you were curious. Even the most delightful-smelling laundry detergent you can find, even that bottle of coconut hibiscus vanilla cherry blossom whatever with the baby pink cap. Even that stuff tastes acrid and bitter. Talk about false advertising.
I pass more towns that will hopefully never know my face or name. I curve around the edges of these towns, these little communities, stuck like an asteroid in their gravitational pull before wrenching myself away.
The next town, I get close enough to see my reflection in the dark windows of the tasteful craftsman-style homes. With the moon lighting me up, I look like a pillar of ice. My hair’s the mess of blonde that it always is, falling around my neck and face like I’ve got something to hide, the color same as wheat unpicked in the field like we had back when I was young.
The way people sprint away from death as fast as they can while their bodies slowly march on towards it, that’s what I’m doing here. Only it’s not my death I’m marching towards.
You’d probably never think it, but nuclear waste doesn’t smell like anything at all. Pretty much anyone who gets within sniffing distance of the stuff, well, they’ve just booked their ticket to the afterlife, so it’s not like there’s tons of volunteers for experimenting. For sure, if your nose makes it that close to nuclear sludge, your smeller’s as good as cooked.
Just one of those perks of not being mortal in the traditional sense. I don’t really have to care about anything labeled “deadly” or “toxic”. I can hold a rock laced with uranium in my palm and give it a big, wet kiss, and nothing will happen to me except getting dirt in my mouth.
In case you were wondering, uranium just tastes like dimes.
I crest a hill lush with hemlocks and beneath me is a city, and just by seeing it I know it’s the one. Every way I look, it’s nothing but suburbs and green, endless rows of houses all lit up for the night and surrounded by trees older than anybody who lives here. Breaking up the man-made straight-and-true lines is a placid river. Off to the east it forks into two, and there’s a squat little downtown nestled around the waters, with cars passing over the criss-crossing bridges.
If I’m being honest, this is less about the city and more about how I know I can’t resist for much longer.
As always with great clusters of humans like this, I can feel the life. I can sense the great warmth of emotion. It’s nothing so specific as when I’m up close and personal with somebody. Nothing definable, nothing concrete. But clumped together like this, people’s emotions seep into one big pool of heat. Like a mug of hot coffee, I can feel the steam coming off of it. Even to stand here at the cusp of the city, I feel energized.
It’s not just the hunger for a good meal that brings me back, I know. It’s this, too. The roiling emotional landscape, it feeds something else in me. Tugs at something below my dead heart and suddenly here I am, crawling back to civilization, like someone might crawl their way out of unconsciousness with a fresh-ground cup of joe.
Did I mention benzene was also used to decaffeinate coffee? That’s the first way people learned how to do it. Just soaked the beans in a vat of benzene and sure enough, all the caffeine was extracted, but it made the coffee taste awful. And, you know, there’s that whole cancer issue.
In case you were curious, the man who invented it later became a Nazi. Go figure.
I make my way down the hill, leaving footprints in the warm earth. Warm to me, anyway.
By the time I’m nearing some of the buildings built closest to the woods, my skin is buzzing. I deftly scale a tree, intent on scouting out a proper destination, but I don’t go so high that I’m making a spectacle of myself for anyone who might happen to glance towards the trees. The moon is too bright tonight.
There’s a whole lot of trees in this area of the country, which works out great for me in terms of coverage, but they also block my sight in an annoying way. The few miles surrounding me are populated with groups of apartment buildings, most in a blocky, red brick style so suburban that even the tallest of them look squat. Based on the state of the cars I’m picking out, cars parked in the lots cradling these apartments – Dodge Neons with cracked headlights, Saturns with bald tires, endless rows of sedans with pitted bumpers and the paint flaking off around the door handles – these aren’t high-class apartments.
Less than a second later I register the cluster of much larger buildings just beyond all these apartments, and I understand. It’s a university, one big enough to have built a handful of dorm communities.
I grip the tree with my thighs and scrape some sap off of my palm with one nail, thinking. I’m close enough that I can catch the faint noises of people – students – enjoying their evenings in the supposed privacy of their dorm rooms. A group of friends shout at each other while playing video games. A girl chats on the phone, probably with her mother based on the tone. Someone’s brushing their teeth. Someone else turns the page of a book.
I could just go back. But I know a week from now, a day from now, an hour from now I’ll be right back lurking in this tree, plucking victims from a mouse nest.
Back to the ground I go, dancing back down the branches in a finely controlled fall. I’ve thought about how fun it would be to join a circus as an acrobat, and then watch everybody hold their hands over their mouths as I swing from bar to bar with just my little finger on each hand and tightrope walk on only my very tiptoes. I’d watch them gasp and point all in perfect unison like they’re the performers.
Talk about the last thing someone like me should be doing.
I sneak on past those dorms and leave their cool brick behind. I keep my body in a low crouch, with slow, calm movements that don’t break a single twig or spook one animal. The only thing darting fast is my eyes, picking out the lights in the distance.
I have to cross one wide road, lit up white from streetlamps and headlights and the moon. I wait for a good gap in the traffic and crouch low, then spring into the air, soaring in a high arc over the street.
From there, it’s just patches of manicured grass studded with bushes and domesticated saplings, same as you’d see at any good quality institution. I skirt around the edges, never stepping out anywhere I might be seen from a window or a late-night walker.
I’m tucked inside one of the more robust bushes when a man – a boy, really – strolls down the sidewalk not twenty feet from me. He’s alone, bundled up in a hand-me-down windbreaker. He’s got earbuds in, and the song he’s playing isn’t one I recognize. He likes it, though. He’s humming along, his voice flat in places with no one but me to hear it.
I let him pass, then continue my winding path. I stop again when I find another student curled up in a doorway with a textbook, and again when I cross one in the back corner of a parking lot, sitting in his car with the windows rolled down and a cigarette burnt down to the filter hanging between two loose fingers.
All of them, I leave without them ever knowing I was there. A friend once admonished me, “Don’t hunt in a rush, or you won’t find anything worth a damn.” Maybe it’s just the perfectionist in me, but when you have such a wide selection open to you, there’s no point in settling. Especially since I cave in so rarely. I can’t help wanting to savor this.
If you only get dessert a few times a year, are you making the trip to a five star gourmet bakery or stopping by the gas station a block and a half away for a prepackaged Twinkie and soda?
I’m at the edge of another parking lot, this one laid before one of the larger buildings I’ve seen in this campus. Most of it’s red brick, like all the others, but there’s a lot more glass and odd, angular corners to the construction. More modern, more sleek, just a twinge of artistry.
I crouch behind an electrical box and watch the few windows that are lit up yellow.
Maybe I can catch one of the faculty on their way out. Folks who’ve got a lot more years under their belt, they don’t taste as great, but it eases my conscience some.
The earth rotates infinitesimally, inch by micro-inch at a thousand miles an hour. Crouched to the earth like this, sometimes I can almost feel it, the great groaning of the world as it spins. I track the stars above me and make them into a sudoku puzzle, then solve it.
There’s no telling how long I’ll be out here, waiting. That’s what I’m saying to myself when I sense someone at the building’s exit nearest to my hiding spot. I catch sight of her through the glass, poised to push the door open, and I can tell at first glance she’s not faculty. Far too short, eyes too wide. The emotions drifting through her are smooth and clear, unsullied by the trials and frustrations of an academic careerist.
The door groans open and though I’m carefully hidden away, I flinch. She begins her trek across the wide open parking lot yawning between us, her quick stride aimed not at the sparse number of cars parked near the door, but at the road down far beyond the edge of the lot
Out under the wide sky, all lit up with spotlights, she looks even smaller. Her face is beautiful for a human, her features pointed and delicate in a mousey kind of way, with a large forehead to make them appear even more minute. She’s lined her huge eyes in makeup, as humans tend to do, and I have to wonder how much of her eyelash length is her own. Black around the lashes, then pink blended into red on her lids, with a similar pink shade dusted over her cheeks. It looks nothing like real blush to my sharp eyes, but it’s a pleasant effect nonetheless.
Her face is framed by a cropped black hair, ruffled into feathered points. Her full lips look like they should be turned upward, but right now they’re set into a hard line. Her shoulders are rounded back, spine straight, face set forward like she wants to look around but she’s forcing herself not to.
All of this, I notice and catalogue in less than a second of observation. That’s all I ever need for anyone, but for her, I keep looking.
She’s got a hoop through each ear, and peeking out through some wisps of hair I can see a sparkling stud set into the curve of her outer ear.
I used to want a piercing. With some patience and pain and a lot of care, I even managed to get a hole punched through my earlobe, although having someone else’s mouth so close to my throat wasn’t ideal. There’s only one way to puncture my skin, so I couldn’t exactly be choosy.
But my body refused to accept the piercing. The tiny wound healed within minutes, snapping the titanium jewelry in two. All that effort for nothing.
I’m so suffused with peace looking at this girl that when I feel the bright pinpricks of fear tickling at my core, I’m thrown off balance. It’s not from me, of course. I haven’t felt real fear in decades. It’s the girl’s fear, crackling across the parking lot and disrupting this easy moonlit night.
Even without my unique ability, I can read everything about how she’s feeling in a glance. One smooth hand is clutched at her bookbag, and the other reaches up and smooths her hair behind her ear. The way she’s walking is just the cherry on top: the classic pace of a woman with places to be, important things to do. Not hurried, but purposeful. Exactly the gait so often adopted by women who know what a danger the world is and want to deter a potential attacker before they even approach. She’s trying to look like she can take care of herself. Don’t fuck with me, her walk says, but basically everything else about her screams easy victim.
It disturbs me to think of her this way, since I’m the worst kind of predator she could run into. But I don’t want anything with her. I’m just here to watch while I wait for a more suitable victim. There’s no harm in watching. No crime to experiencing a human like this. The innocence of her emotions coat my mind like a salve. I’m not even going to get close to her, I’m just–
It hits my nose, then. Sweet. Sweet like honey.
I’m only breath. For this one instant, I’m only the scent entering my body.
It hits my nose sweet, runs up into my head and slams into my brain. It’s thinned out some by the open air and the distance, but not by enough. I couldn’t keep it out of me if I wanted to.
Her blood. It’s her scent, wafting across the parking lot. The smell of her has reached me.
My lungs expand, pulling in more air, and my sight goes flat. I can taste it, now. The scent tickles the back of my tongue. It courses through me, running under my stone-strong skin like the blood that’s been over a century gone from my body. Setting everything alight, giving me life where there’s usually only cold inhumanity.
But it’s my throat that takes all my attention. I can’t see the girl anymore. My whole vision is filled with the river of fire I’m drowning in. My head dips beneath and I inhale pure flame. It sears down my windpipe and ravishes my throat so thoroughly that my entire existence is pure, nightmarish pain.
If I hadn’t known my heart was dead, I’d swear I hear it beating in my chest, light and staccato as though it can hardly contain itself. As if the flames kickstarted it back into working order.
Didn’t Dante once write of a part of hell set aside for the murderers of the world, a river filled with fire and blood for them to wallow in agony? I wonder how a man like Dante could’ve known of such a place. I never would’ve guessed it, except here I am now. Burning.
I blink. In the time I spent succumbing to her smell, the girl’s made it another couple dozen steps across the parking lot. The sound of her feet hitting the pavement matches my imagined heartbeat exactly.
She won’t make it much further.
All my plans for finding a faculty member and just letting this girl walk, everything is out the window. Now my entire mind is focused only on two things: the incessant flames raging through my body, and how to get that girl somewhere private where I can enjoy her blood properly.
My attention flickers away from her. I locate one, two, four different security cameras aimed in this general direction. By the look of it they’re older models, and certainly not equipped for something as fast as I am. They might get half a frame of blurred white as I dart across the lot, and then the girl and I will be long gone. She’ll all but disappear out of thin air. Taken by a ghost.
I move to stand, and that’s when I realize I’m already standing. I’m not even behind the electrical box anymore. Somewhere in my anguish I rose and took two haphazard steps towards the pavement. I’m still under the trees, but only just. She probably didn’t notice me. I’m too sunk in shadow to catch the attention of human eyes at this distance. Especially from her angle.
I taste her emotional climate to check for any new fear, and it’s almost my undoing. Her heartfelt innocence, so light and airy, it reminds me of the sweet scent which reminds me of blood which reminds me of my aching, searing, unbearably hot thirst.
Every muscle in my body is coiled and ready to spring. If she had been any closer at the time I smelled her, I may not have had the clarity to even think first. It wouldn’t do to bite her right here in the parking lot. There would be footage to destroy, a mess to clean up. Maybe witnesses to silence. Loose ends.
“Excuse me?”
I freeze. No part of me moves, not even my lungs to breath or my eyelids to blink. I peel some of my attention away from the girl to focus on this immediate threat. The voice came from my right, a short distance away, close enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice too loud. A couple meters, maybe more.
Mid-40’s, past smoker, today’s lunch of pastrami on rye still lingering on his breath, shorter than me but not by much. The heat of him radiates against my side, pulsing in time with his heart and giving me another indicator of his general size and shape. He’s got high blood pressure.
It takes me about a quarter of a second to make this analysis, and another sixteenth of a second to weigh my options.
I could kill him. No doubt that’d be the easiest way forward. I wouldn’t have to think about it, just close the short distance between us, tug him behind the electrical box or a tree, and snap his neck. He wouldn’t have time to fight, probably wouldn’t even know what was happening. I could do it with my eyes closed.
But that’s more mess to clean up. Plus, I just don’t want to kill him. It’s such a waste to kill for nothing more than convenience. It’s deaths like his that torture my conscience throughout my self-imposed exile out in the wilderness. I don’t want to kill him, and I don’t have to, because there’s a second option. But it’s really not my favorite.
He hasn’t seen anything, not really. I could leave now and no one would be the wiser. Surely if he had seen me move, really move, his level of fear would be off the chart, and right now it’s not. He’s seen nothing.
The fire still burns inside of me. I have just enough control to hold it at bay and keep myself frozen in place, instead of leaping across the lot and sinking my teeth into–
No. I force that thought to a halt and shove it away. I take the bubbling river of flames razing my insides and try to calm it into a blue, placid sea. Blue is a good color. Blue is peaceful. I’m not at peace, but I can pretend to be. I have to pretend, or this man will lose his life for my lack of control.
I soften my posture as much as I can without letting go of the tight grip I have on my movements, and slowly turn. The man stands there just as I pictured him, his face drawn up in concern and his graying hair all askew. He’s got a grease stain on his white button-down, near the pocket.
As I turn, his eyes go right to my face. I watch as the usual disbelief dawns over him, muddling his polite concern with confusion and a little twinge of fear. Same old story as always.
I react instinctually. The calm I’ve been cultivating, I open the gates and let it flow out of me. It’s effortless, second nature for me, to immediately put at ease any humans who have the misfortune of interacting with me face-to-face.
It works like it’s supposed to. The man’s brow goes smooth and his shoulders loosen a bit as his fear dissipates. In his eyes I’m still a ragged vagabond with filthy clothes and a gorgeous face, but at least he’s not afraid of me anymore. Just mostly confused as to why he’s found a very pale homeless man lurking here, staring at a girl like some kind of creep.
It’s a pretty fair assessment, now that I think about it. I may not be the particular brand of lowlife he thinks I am, but I’m very much an active danger to that girl, far more so than anyone else she might encounter.
All this runs through my head in only a matter of seconds. The pause would be unremarkable to him.
“Hello,” I say pleasantly. I smile without showing any teeth and set my face into something reassuring. I’m sure the fury of desire still burns behind my eyes, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
He doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Or anything else, at least. He gives me a look up-and-down, lingering a bit on the long tear in my pants that runs from just below my knee to halfway up my thigh. Humans don’t just walk around with their clothes wrecked, I know that. I wasn’t exactly expecting to be seen, or I’d have cleaned up beforehand.
I suck in a quick breath and the smell of his blood punches a hole in my gut, but compared to the temptation of the girl behind me, this is nothing. Just your garden variety human.
The man’s still staring at me and I feel a touch of nervousness begin to creep back into the edges of him, so I shrug apologetically and say, “Sorry, I must’ve zoned out. I’ll get going. Have a good night.” Another closed-mouth smile.
I’m turning to leave, taking care to move at a normal, human pace, when he says, “Wait!”
I can’t, I think. I’m already nearing my breaking point. The small semblance of control I’ve accumulated these last few decades is quickly eroding into nothing. The girl’s face flashes through my mind. I almost just give in, because I know how good it would feel and every second I’m not sinking my teeth into her is agony.
But then I feel something else.
Not the man’s lukewarm concern, but an echo of it way off behind me. I hear the girl’s footsteps dwindle to a halt. I can feel her eyes on my back.
The very last thing I need is for her to approach us. Once she passes the point of no return, I won’t be able to stop myself.
I ignore everything in my body telling me to take her. I hold my breath and let my strongest form of tranquility rush out behind me in crashing waves. I can tell when it hits her. In my mind’s eye, she becomes smooth as glass.
I realize I’m just staring at the man. “Yes?” I respond. Let me go, let me go. Let me leave you here alive.
He hesitates and looks past me to the girl, then back to me. I see myself as a reflection in his eyes: hair filthy, auburn eyes wild. The deferential smile on my face is marred by the tension I can’t seem to fully erase from my body. Gleaming white even in shadow. A mess. A monster.
I watch him consider, feel the agitation knotting in his belly, before seeming to decide something. “Nothing. Just see yourself out. Not supposed to be here if you’re not attending the university.”
I nod politely at his bullshit excuse. I don’t give him a second glance, just point myself in the opposite direction as the girl and leave. When I know for sure I’m out of sight, that’s when I run.