The Curse of Immortality (2)
Work, Vampires, and What is that Ungodly Smell?
Read Chapter 1 of The Curse of Immortality HERE
The weekend was a muddled mess of emotions and thoughts. To say I was useless is giving me way too much credit. I sat on my couch and watched Netflix. Oh, and I ate a lot of pizza. I think the delivery dude was probably sick of coming to my place. By the fifth delivery, the driver was looking at me in a way that made me think he was going to call 911 and have someone come over to implement a wellness check. I made sure to tip really well, a subliminal way of saying, keep your mouth shut and there's money in it for you.
Things didn’t get interesting until around 10 AM on Monday morning. I was at work, sitting at my desk, and swapping out hard drives in a laptop when the most ungodly smell drifted in the air and threatened to smother me. I held off retching, stood up, and scanned the room, “Does anyone else smell that?” The heads of my coworkers turned in my direction. Crazy looks and nodding heads met me in unison, “Are you serious? You can’t smell that?” Nothing.
I backed out of my cube and followed my nose. It wasn’t Jim and that powerfully insane Axe body wash that he claims “gets him chic’s,” but really doesn’t. It wasn’t that half eaten egg sandwich that was sitting in the trash can under Ron’s desk either. It wasn’t even Sandra’s under arm deodorant. Why was I able to pick out these individual scents? Scents that now all of a sudden really inflamed my sinuses. Whatever that core scent was, it wasn’t coming from within the IT room and my investigation led me down the hall, through a cross section, down another hall, and right up to the elevators. Holy hell, wherever that smell was coming from, it wasn’t even on my floor. I moved to hit the down button but was intercepted by a crowd of sales weasels who quickly thumbed the up button for the elevators. A crowd was gathering in the hall and bodies were being herded to each lift. I was going up and I had no choice in the matter.
“What’s going on?” I asked on of the sales weasels.
“All hands meeting in the Grand Conference room.”
Shit, I had forgotten about that. When the elevator doors opened, the throng, with me in the front, pushed into the carriage and up we went for three floors. The scent in the air dissipated and was now only a mild annoyance by the time the elevator doors slowly slid open and we disembarked. So I moved with the herd of employee cattle toward the conference room. Once inside, I took my seat as far to the back of the room as I could get. My coworkers arrived after me and were closer to the front. For the time being, I was a guest of the sales team and the egos that swelled within their heads as they razzed on one another while waiting for the CEO to begin. It was ill-fitting suits, hard pressed jackets fresh from the cleaners, and wrinkled trousers from sitting all day and making cold calls. The sales team consisted of a lot of smokers and hardcore binge drinkers because I could smell the cigarettes and alcohol fumes lingering over the entire area. The mystery scent, for the time being, was sufficiently covered.
My eyes kept darting around the room, looking for someone, anyone, that I might know in the immediate vicinity. Not a soul stood out. They were all up front. However, to my right, I noticed a pale faced man, mid-twenties maybe, dark brown hair slicked back, with piercing eyes that seemed to be placed directly on me. I was more than uncomfortable from his steady and never changing glare. I kept thinking, take a picture dude, it will last longer. What was I? Some piece of meat, or something?
The CEO entered the room and took her place at the podium in the front. She wore a dark gray pantsuit and her blonde hair was short and swept back in a hard, plastered doo. She had eyes that were small, almost squinting, but more piercing and mean than anything else. You could tell that this “meeting” was an annoyance to her. Why should she have to consort and speak to the little people? She radiated a mass level of contempt for everyone in the room. As she moved her head across the crowd and back, she began speaking about how there were going to be staff cuts down the line and the 401K was going to be terminated. Her gaze crossed over me, I felt like she was zeroing in on my soul. I’m in IT, for crying out loud. We’re always considered expendable because we make no money. She was talking about me. I could feel it. I averted my eyes and was then caught in the stern dark gaze of the pale face kid. What the hell? I ended up just slinking down in my chair and taking cover in my foxhole of surrounding sales weasels.
When the Ice Queen CEO, left the stage, the crowd rose, hung their collective heads, and the herd began to move back out of the room, through the halls, into the elevators, and back into their stables, I mean, cubicles. We’d been given a general time period to expect our rendezvous with the slaughterhouse manager and we were powerless to do anything against it.
As I was now trailing the crowd, I got to look at the herd moving forward with a depleted gait. It was Monday morning and now we got to go back to our cubicle hell and work while thinking about what could be the inevitable end to our jobs. Pep talk accomplished, Yay us.
I let the herd get ahead of me and walked a bit slower. The elevator and stairwell would be clogged up with bodies. As I was passing the men’s restroom, the door on my left opened and I was suddenly pulled inside. Before I knew it, I was being held up against the bathroom wall, air blower on my right, paper towel dispenser to my left, and the pale faced twenty something in front of me wielding a lot of power.
“You smell like, dog? Were you bitten?” he asked.
My eyebrows arched down as I look into blue eyes that seemed to swirl within, “Excuse me?”
He released a sigh, averted his eyes downward, and then seemed to be formulating words in his head. HR was definitely going to hear about this assault.
“Look,” he said, “Were you recently bitten by a…. Werewolf? Because I’ve been at this company for over a year, I’ve seen you before. You’re the IT guy. Everyone knows the IT guys. And YOU, never smelled like a dog before. So were you recently bitten?”
“Maybe?” I offered back.
He dropped me from the wall and my feet were happy to say hello to the floor again. I watched as he backed away from me, put his hand to his forehead, as if in some pain, and then shook his head back and forth, “I’ve never talked to a wolf before. I’ve passed some on the street. I’ve gotten weird looks from them now and again, but I’ve never actually met one.”
“And you are?”
“Oh, my name is Jeff. Jeff Allen. I’m in the logistics department.”
I turned my head just a bit in a move that said, “and…”
“I’m a vampire. I can smell the wolf in you. It’s in your blood.”
“Is that the stank smell that I’ve been smelling all morning? I could swear it was coming from somewhere downstairs,” I said, as I crooked my head to my shoulder to take a whiff from under my armpit.
“No, that’s coming from just outside the building. You can’t smell the wolf on you. You can probably smell the wolf from another wolf, but you won’t notice it on yourself.”
“What about other people?” I asked.
“Nope, you’re good. Or well, as good as can be.”
“And you say, you are a vampire? You don’t smell like anything?”
“We don’t smell. We aren’t even living really. We’re in a suspended state of unliving. No heartbeat either. Just a really awful dark red globulous blood that somehow crawls through us without the heart pumping.”
“Gross.”
“You're telling me? I’ve been a vampire for two years now and I’m still not used to seeing it when I get a cut.”
I tilted my body to the right and looked around Jeff in the bathroom mirror, “You’ve got a reflection.”
“Ah yes, I should explain so you don’t ask me every Hollywood trope in the book,” he replied, “We have reflections, the cross doesn’t hurt us, garlic tastes divine on a good pizza crust, and while direct daylight is annoying and saps our level of power, we don’t go out in a blaze of glory. We can’t transform into a bat either.”
“Ah.”
“We can compel people to do our bidding if the situation is right. That’s helpful, it’s how I got my last raise, not that we’re going to be working here much longer, after that all hands.”
“I know right? Who ruins the week with a downer meeting like that first thing on a Monday morning?”
“So what Pack are you in? I’m in the 403rd Coven. We meet in the old Baker’s Funeral home, over on Sixth.”
“I’m not sure yet. I was bitten over the weekend.”
“Fresh wolf. New to the world of immortals. Your sponsor, the one who made you, will be in touch.”
“So let me ask you a question, does this process work the same for vampires as it does for… werewolves?” I whispered that last word.
“Well, we’re different types of species so the process is different, but the general set up of a Pack and a Coven is fairly similar. They’re like a union, kind of. We can’t very well have immortal monsters going around the city and eating people on a whim, that would put the spotlight on us. So the Packs and Covens were created to make sure outsiders don’t get hurt.”
“Do you… Do you like being a vampire?” I asked.
“It has its perks. The whole immortal thing. They told you about that?”
“They mentioned it…”
“I’m really quite new to this myself. Like I said, I’m only two years in. My maker has been pretty good about showing me the ropes.”
“Blonde English girl with a killer body?”
“No, tall American dude, works in the city planning office.”
I nod my head and shrug, “Do you know of a blonde English vampire that hangs out with a female Asian werewolf?”
“No way? You got chosen by The Pair? You lucky dog! Literally! Damn, I’ve heard stories of people turned by them. Lots of sex and foreplay and then a choice is given?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much how it went down.”
“Nice!” replied Jeff.
“The foreplay and sex, yes. The being bitten and blood all over, not so much.”
“Hey, you're immortal now though.”
“So I keep hearing.”
Jeff looked down at his watch, and then said, “Look, let me give you my card, it’s got my direct cell number on it. Give me a call sometime and we’ll shoot the shit and talk about the supernatural life. I’ve got a call I have to get to,” and he departed the restroom.
I leaned back on the wall and tried to process this new life that I was living. There was a vampire in logistics and now a werewolf in IT. I wondered if the CEO was a witch?
By the time I got back to my desk, I had decided to use a sick day. Might as well use them before the possibility of losing them happened in the big cut. So I wrapped up what I was doing, made my “sick to my stomach” excuse to my manager and then headed back to the elevator. As the carriage took me down, the turgid smell increased. The main lobby of the building was absolutely swimming in it, all to the oblivious nature of the non-immortal humans going about their day. I exited out the front revolving door and was hit by the full force of this weapon of mass stench. I turned my head to the right and looked at a bum, oh sorry, urban outdoorsman, sitting in a puddle of his own urine and leaning back on the wall of the building. He had marked that spot for his own, and apparently the entire building resided in his domain.
TO BE CONTINUED…