Symbiosis

Symbiosis

by Roger Ley

Roger Ley  was born and educated mainly in London, but spent some of his formative years in Saudi Arabia. He worked as an engineer in the oilfields of North Africa and in the North Sea before starting a career in higher education teaching computer-aided engineering.
His stories have been published on a multiplicity of websites and broadcast on BBC Radio.
He lives in Suffolk (UK).

Visit his website at rogerley.co.uk

More TTTV Stories by Roger Ley: https://talltaletv.com/tag/roger-ley/

His Amazon author page is at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Roger-Ley/author/B01KOVZFHM

 

My shift at the clinic started soon after sundown when the usual clients began to arrive. The boys dressed in black, their hair slicked back. The girls, disturbingly beautiful, with long tresses and bright red lipstick. Lord knows where they sleep, but somehow they always arrive clean and beautifully presented. I led them to the couches and inserted their cannulas so they could make their donations.

As I walked back to the reception desk, I saw a new face standing outside in the snow, waiting to come in. The door had a motion sensor and slid open, but the new guy couldn’t pass through until I invited him. I smiled and pointed to my mouth. He smiled back and pulled his upper lip up so I could see his canines. He looked okay; he obviously kept them filed down as the law required.

‘Come on in,’ I called.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he replied as he crossed the threshold.

He was young and good looking, well, they all are. Dark hair, pale (never seen the sun) skin, slim build, average height. He came over to the reception desk and showed his wrist tattoo so I could scan it. The computer cross-referenced it with his chip. Everything checked out.

‘Welcome, Claude Barnet,’ I said, reading his name from the screen. ‘Take a seat over there until one of the couches comes free. I’m Mary, by the way, Nurse Mary. I look after all of you guys here at the…’

‘Blood bank?’ he supplied.

‘I prefer to call it “the clinic”,’ I said, smiling. He smiled back with the typical gap-toothed grin of the Afflicted. I already felt a liking for him as I went to check on my other patients. Most of them were nearly finished with their donations, so I was pretty busy for a while connecting them up for their transfusions. Yes, you guessed it; I’m a Bloody Mary. My name is actually Clara, but nobody calls me that. I specialise in treating the Afflicted. I’m not trying to cure them; I just deal with the day to day (actually night to night) business of taking their donations, checking their canines, and giving them transfusions. They don’t need any other medical attention. As far as anybody can tell, they’re immortal and don’t suffer from diseases. Sunlight and people are their only enemies.

I walked back to my desk and added Claude’s particulars to the database.

‘Are you fixing to stay, or just passing through?’ I asked.

‘I’m hoping to stay, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I like it up here where it’s cold and there aren’t too many normal folks.’

I couldn’t blame him. His type was still misunderstood and persecuted. Their affliction is caused by a genetic disorder, a mutation; there’s nothing supernatural about it. The only mystery was why it had occurred spontaneously all over the world at the same time. It had been a rare disorder until this new cohort appeared. Some said the mutation was a response to the COVID pandemic of thirty years ago. Anyway, Alaska was probably a good choice for a cold-blooded immortal of no fixed abode who wanted to stay out of trouble. I took him into a cubicle and checked him over. It was such a shame things didn’t work out for him in the end.

‘Your teeth will need attention in a couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘I’ll book you in for a session with Dr Jones, our dental surgeon.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

I led him over to a couch where the patient’s drip bag was empty and took out her cannula. ‘This is Bella,’ I said. ‘Bella, meet Claude. He’s new here.’

Bella pushed her hair away from her face and smiled carnivorously as they shook hands.

‘Hello, Claude, do you have a retreat for night’s end?’ she asked.

‘No, Bella, I don’t.’

‘Well, I have space in mine. I’ll wait by the door until you’re finished here.’

She’s such a hussy, that Bella. I should have been more thoughtful in my choice. Too late now, though. Half an hour later, the two lovebirds left together and walked off down Main Street.

Over the following weeks, they often arrived at the clinic holding hands. Maybe I’d misjudged Bella. They made a nice couple after all.

The night passed, as nights do. I often think during the quiet parts of my shift that these “Evolved,” as they call themselves, would have been exterminated if they weren’t so useful. Well, they aren’t useful, but the extracts that are made from their blood certainly are.

In a world where the population was in decline, a life-extending drug was heaven-sent, and there are those of a religious persuasion who say that’s exactly what it is. But there are also plenty of people who say that “Elixium” is either the blood of the Devil or a government conspiracy. Well, as they say, “you pays your money, and you takes your choice”. Most people just go for their yearly injection and thank their lucky stars that it not only extends their lives, but it’s a general prophylactic and anti-ageing remedy to boot. No more wrinkles. So, although they’re derided and abused by some of the population, and called vampires, blood-suckers – and even zombies by the illiterate – there’s a symbiotic relationship between our two species. And we are different species because we can’t interbreed.

Most of the people in our little community up here near the Arctic Circle are tolerant of the Afflicted. But there are exceptions. Exceptions like Harlan Goode and his friends from The Time Out – Pool, Tap and Grill. Harlan was a vet, and so were his three cronies. He saw himself as their leader because he’d been trained as an army sniper; his friends were uneducated grunts who just went along with his ideas. Anyway, there was a lot wrong with Harlan’s attitude to all sorts of things: women, foreigners, Native Americans, but most of all the “dracs” as he called them. On the couple of occasions I’d found myself standing near him, his breath had reeked of garlic.

The months passed, and the sun came back to the world. That summer, Harlan and his friends were hunting in the woods a couple of miles outside of town and found the old abandoned Episcopalian chapel. They went inside to take a look around and noticed a trapdoor in the floor. In the small cellar under the altar, two of the Afflicted were sleeping peacefully. Claude and Bella lay on airbeds, surrounded by camping equipment. Harlan and his friends pulled them screaming into the sunlight. It was a bright, sunny day; the poor kids never stood a chance. Their skin bubbled, blistered and then fell away, curling like autumn leaves as they tried to scramble into the shade. Harlan’s friends laughed and jeered as they pulled them back into the light until they were too weak to move, and just lay there slowly disintegrating into the dirt. By all accounts, it took twenty minutes of excruciating pain before they died. Needless to say, Harlan’s clips and pictures went viral. Bastard!

It was the talk of the town thanks to Harlan’s blabbermouth friends showing off in The Time Out. When I heard what had happened, I went to see the sheriff. His problem was that although Harlan and his friends had been bragging about their atrocity, there was no evidence to support a double murder charge. Harlan had been careful not to have himself or his friends appear in any of the pictures, and there were no bodies, of course. In the interview room at the sheriff’s office, his lawyer denied the whole thing, as Harlan sat silently next to him with a smirk on his face.

“Revenge is a dish best served cold”, as they say. The winter came again. Soon after Christmas, Harlan was found lying dead in the alley behind The Time Out with a lump on the back of his head, a pair of tooth-marks in his neck, and most of the blood drained out of him. It was understandable that the sheriff would start his investigation at my clinic. He examined each of my patients but found their canines were well within the government standard.

‘I guess it was a transient,’ he said to me as he left. There was still a general belief in lone vampires living in the woods and feeding on the blood of deer and the like. Humans, if they could find them.

Speciesism has to be discouraged; after all, we need each other, and we have to learn to get along. But after I stepped out of the shadows behind Harlan and hit him with the baseball bat, I just couldn’t resist sucking that lovely warm fresh human blood out of him as he lay unconscious in the snow, even if it was slightly tainted with the garlic he was so fond of eating.

My canines are a little short but still functional. But it’s not easy filing them to keep them looking normal when there’s no reflection in your bathroom mirror.