World of Darkness World of Darkness: Attrition - Sleepwalking (Complete)

[William Rose]

The following events originally took place during the months of September and early October 2005

I remember the cot being rather uncomfortable. It was not surprise being about a foot and a half shorter than I was tall. Still given the floor or the cot I figured I’d try. Mistake number one; between the uncomfortable cot and the sounds of muffled coughing or people in pain crying out or moaning I couldn’t sleep. In fact if anything it woke me up more. Finally around three am I decided to get a drink and move back to the floor. At least the floor wasn’t too small for me. I sat up slowly. The thing creaked like the squeaky door that dad hadn’t ever gotten around to fixing and I didn’t want to wake Mom or Tricia up.

I sat there for a moment and just looked around. In the wake of Katrina and everything chaos had become a part of daily life. Sometime between midnight and three in the morning even chaos takes some time to chill out. I looked around and noticed a nurse or an orderly moving among the sick and injured. He stopped and checked on a patient for a moment and then leaned close as though listening to the person’s heart with his head to his chest. I remember thinking it was odd but then I was tired and cranky so I just shrugged it off and got up to find the can and get a drink.

The next morning I found out that that man had died in the night. I guessed that was what the doctor had been doing, determining if the man was ok. I had pushed it out of my mind but the next night I say that same person making rounds again. I couldn’t sleep and so I watched quietly. The next morning that man was found to have died. The process repeated; given the chaos and the living conditions it didn’t trigger anybody else’s suspicions. In the end I watched this man visit five people in a many nights and all five were found dead in the morning.

I did some investigating after the third death as well as the fourth and fifth. The autopsies were brief and lax at best in the aftermath given the lack of facilities and funding and the overall surplus of dead. In these cases the people were all injured, people who had been pulled from accidents, or rescued from collapsed buildings or even those who had gotten on the wrong side of looters. Whatever the case all had died from blood loss … in a hospital; makeshift as it was crappy treatment and overcrowding aside something didn’t fit. I remember recalling the various stories from when I was a kid. The voodoo stories of zombies and necromancy and black magic, stories of vampires and other monsters.

So on the fifth night I didn’t even bother trying to sleep, not that I had the night before either, but this time I had a plan. I watched and waited. I guess being so damn dark skinned has an advantage, even at seven foot plus in a dark enough room I can hide if I really try. Regardless I watched and waited for that same guy, a guy that I hadn’t seen at the hospital anytime other than late at night. When he was done I waited until I was sure he was gone and then went to check the victim. Not a mark on the woman’s neck to be found when I looked, no surprise there, but what was there were two small drops of blood that ran down her neck into the pillow. To me that screamed vampire loud enough to make me damn near shit myself.

Worst part was that after that I started to see everything differently. It was like a switch got flipped or I walked through a one way door. Nothing was the same and nothing has been the same since.

[William Rose]

After that I saw things out of the corner of my eye, maybe it was post traumatic stress, god knows Katrina was bad; maybe it was simple paranoia after proving to myself that vampires were out there. Either way, the next time I came that close it was late and I was alone. Mistake number two; when the shit has hit the fan the way it did with the post-Katrina don’t go anywhere near the disaster area. I had gone back to our house to see if anything was worth saving. The water had started to recede by then and I was hoping maybe I could save some photos for my mom or maybe something that would cheer up Tricia. The house was a mess, everything was sopping wet; the plaster sagged off the walls like an old man’s sagging face. The upstairs hadn’t been high enough to stay dry but I managed to find an old photo album on a high shelf that was in OK shape.

Of course I took too long and by the time I picked my way out of the house it was getting dark. Dark plus a foot of stinking water plus go only knows what kind of animals and bad people are out there waiting to prey on the idiot who lets them. Looking back on it I realize I was still too much of a stupid kid. I decided to prove my stupidity by taking a shortcut through a cemetery. Mind you cleanup wasn’t yet more than pretty words that the government talked about. Bodies old and new littered the cemetery. When your city is already below sea level you don’t usually bury people in the ground but above it in a sarcophagus or mausoleum. I shoulda turned around as soon as I saw them, but it would take me twice as long to get back to the FEMA trailer farm if I went around, so I didn’t. Like I said, I was still a dumb kid.

Thirty minutes later and creeped out beyond my capacity for rational thought, I saw something moving among the bodies. The moon was only a sliver and the lights; well, the lights hadn’t been on in weeks. What I saw looked like a man, except for the exposed muscles and bones and the way that its flesh was mottled and green or gray or yellow or … well lets just say that nothing matched. Whatever it was, it was picking through the bodies, picking over them like an old lady picking through the fruit at the grocer. Given what I was seeing I’m not sure how I kept it together or why I stuck around as long as I did.

The thing found a body it liked, by the look of it the body may have been very recently interred or worse, one of Katrina’s many victims. As it worked I could see that one of the creature’s legs was mangled and bent in ways that no human leg was intended. One of its arms also hung limp, by the look attached only by rotting skin and sinew. The first thing it did was tear off the damaged arm. Somehow it tweaked the muscles in that damaged leg enough to keep the bone fragments in line and keep itself upright as it then chewed through the shoulder of the corpse and then replaced its now missing arm with the fresh one. My stomach lasted long enough to see it replace its damaged leg before I threw up. Once I had enough control I fled. I would have run screaming if I was terrified that I might attract that thing or something like it.

I think I stopped being a stupid kid somewhere during that run through the chemical and waste laden water. I made it back, exhausted, out of breath, stinking of god knows what, and my legs screaming bloody murder after not only running a couple miles through standing water but the various cuts and abrasions I had received on the way. Stupid mistake number three; don’t run through water that is contaminated with sewage and spilt chemicals. I think they shot me full of enough antibiotics for a dozen people. Not a stupid kid anymore, no sir, I was a full on stupid adult.

[William Rose]

And then there was the werewolf. No really, I swear I saw one. OK I swear I saw something tear a couple of thugs and looters apart. Mistake number four; standing up for what’s right against more people who are better armed. Like I said before, stupid kid, no, stupid adult, yes.

This couldn’t have been more than a couple weeks after seeing the corpse thing. It feels that was anyways, the timeline doesn’t check out on paper but in my mind we were in that trailer for longer than the paper says. I was going to the store. One of the places that was back open by nothing more than sheer determination on the part of the owner and the rare case of FEMA doing something other than putting their thumbs up their asses.

It was early in the morning, the place wouldn’t be open for a while yet but the lines would start to form eventually and I planned to get there early enough to be at the front. When I got there three guys were pulling food and supplies from out the store through the broken window. I called out, rushed the first guy and hit him with a solid tackle that knocked the guy into the wall stunning him. And then I took a glass bottle to the back of the head.

I went down like a ton of bricks, my vision was doubled and blurry. While I tried to recover something hit me under the chest. It was like a kick, but no way somebody could kick that hard. It sent me flying to the bushes, I was down for the count in no uncertain terms. That’s when the screaming started. Those three punks, shrieking like kids in a horror flick. If it were just the screaming I woulda passed out an been done with it but there was another sound, the heavy guttural sound of a beast, and then the sound of bones snapping and flesh tearing. I heaved myself far enough out of the bush to see something vaguely human shaped literally tear those punks limb from limb. That’s when I finally passed out.

Now as I said my vision was blurry and I was seeing double so I understood when the authorities told me that it was a lion or something escaped from the zoo. I didn’t believe it for a second, given the sounds and the secondary evidence, but I understood how they could rationalize it to themselves. I looked around later that day, carefully given my bruised ribs, and found massive paw prints, something like a huge dog would make. Lion my ass, it was a freakin’ werewolf, or I’m Peter Fucking Pan.

Not long after that we got out. Mom took me and Tricia to our uncle’s place in Georgia, and then later we moved out to LA around the new year when mom got her new job. I never looked back. After what I had seen I hoped I never saw any of it again. That was almost four years ago and I wish I could forget it. I wish I could run fast enough or throw far enough to get those memories to fade away.