Page 95 of We Were Eternal Once

I stumble along the road before the house, taking it until it diverged. I go to the left and follow it until I reach the next farm and the next house.

There are humans inside. I can smell their blood from the street. My mouth waters at the thought of it.

My teeth are in their neck before they could wake. I drain all five humans I find, leaving their bloodless bodies in their beds. The hunger abates, sated for now. My stomach bulges at the volume of blood. I’ve never drank so much in my life. It makes me lethargic. I am about to fall asleep when a noise stirs me.

I move through the house toward the noise. My ears and nose strain for another human and find none. Yet I can hear voices.

I pause in the front room. One of the boxes speaks. I drop to my knees before the box, moving my hands over it to try to understand. I turn a knob and the voices stop, replaced with a buzzing noise. I turn the knob again and again until the voices return.

“Good morning from Radio 7! We’ll start the morning off with Amoureux Solitaires by Lio!” The voice stops and is replaced by noise. I stare at the box until a voice starts up again, singing. It’s French, but not the French I was used to. Some of the words I don’t understand.

The sound changes, another song. It takes several lines before I realize it was a form of English. I sit in front of the box until the sun rises outside, when I crawl under the bed of one of the humans and sleep until the sun goes down once more.

The box is still speaking when I wake. I listen to it until it cuts out for the evening, replaced with a continual buzz of noise. I leave the house and walk back to the first house. The smell hits me once I open the door, my senses stronger now that I’ve fed so much. I need to eat again tonight, I can feel the edges of hunger.

I move through the house, searching for a clue to how I’d gotten there. The tattered, dirty remains of what I wore when I fled Paris lay crumpled on the floor. I find nothing else to answer my question, so I turn to the field.

It looks different than it had when I was buried. It takes me awhile to find the spot. There is a hole where I’d been with a shovel next to it. It wasn’t as deep as I remember, time removing the layers of dirt.

I should have had the human dig it deeper. I did not account for time disturbing my grave.

I sit at the edge of my grave until the moon begins to fall, then I return to the home.

I can find someone to bury me again, but that left too much up to chance. I can not risk being fed blood by the earthworms and the dead, or being dug up by a human.

I break the leg off a chair in the sitting room and turn it over in my hands. I could sharpen in, I could fall upon it and hope it hits my heart. I could compel a human to cut my head off.

Or I could live.

The thought gives me pause. Did I deserve to live? Did I want to live?

No, and—I wasn’t sure.

What am I without you? Do you even still live?

Yes. I know that in my bones, in my soul. If you’d died, I would have felt it. It would have been another absence, another hole, just deeper.

I will not make the decision this night. I am hungry and only just recently awoken. I should take some time to think, to consider.

I will make a decision tomorrow.

PART SIX

Acceptance

Berlin, 1989

“They can’t keep the wall much longer,” says the man near me at the bar. They are not called taverns anymore, and they are not quite the same. I woke up a year ago and am still learning much about the new world. Very little changed decade to decade in the past. Since I’d buried myself, there’d been an explosion of innovation.

Television, radio, photography, telephones. I could turn on a television and watch something occurring across the world. I could get on a giant metal beast and travel by land in less time than a cart and buggy.

There are cars, aeroplanes, fast guns, denim pants.

Several wars, the latest of which led to a wall that cuts through Berlin. Berlin looks nothing like it did three hundred years before.

I knew I did not want to return to Paris, so I went east. I found trains and cars and moved with the humans across the continent of Europe.

The world I awoke in was nothing like the one I left.