The Bloodless Corpse
by Michael E. Marotta
I knew that he was dead, tucked into a fetal position, stuffed under the instructor’s station at the front of room LAS 327. I saw the tiny gray holes. My spine chilled. I left the room to call dispatch. Later, the other patrollers in Safety thought I got out of the room because of the body, but it wasn’t that. I knew that there was a vampire on campus.
The medical examiner did not report the wounds – most likely for the same reason I did not mention them in my incident report. The cause of death remained open.
The school turned edgy, even in the daytime. At night, people hurried to their cars in groups.
The sheriff lent us two deputies “to re-establish a sense of safety.” Each walked halls during the day, and cruised the parking lots from 5:00 PM until 10:30 PM. Our own patrols changed to a buddy system – at least in theory. Typically, we hit the doors, split up, made our checklists, and met on the way out. Some of the patrollers did not like it. Long used to being on their own, they would take off and meet up a couple of buildings later. It was all right with me. I take a lot in stride at my age. Campus safety patrol was the second job in the fourth career in 35 years. The student’s death was hard– he looked like a nice kid – but I was not shocked or grossed out.
What kept me awake was the vampire. A man who does not believe in God cannot believe in the Devil. I argued with myself, but no sophistry could contradict the observation. That immutable empirical fact demanded its own logic.
After two weeks, campus life settled into a surreal imitation of itself. Until someone was arrested and charged, we all waited for the next one.
When I saw her on the east third floor of the Gunder Myran building, everything about her said “victim” – shoulders slightly dropped and pulled in, head down watching her shoes, backpack too heavy with books. And she was being followed by Death. The smell was not the pain of fetal pigs and dissected rats from the biology labs, or even cadavers from the biology core. But it was. It was in the air. “Miss!” I called. “Miss!” When she turned around, I knew that Death was inside her. Her reptile stare lacked even the pleasure of a meal. I wanted to be hers. She was twenty feet away when I whispered, “Take me.”
She flew to me in a stride, gripped me to her, her talons in my back, her hand grabbing my hair, pulling my head to bare my neck. My hand leapt to my shirt pocket, yanked out the pencil and stabbed it into her heart, pressing the shaft home, my hand flat against her cold breast.
Her eyes lit up with shock, then horror, … disbelief … hatred – and then release. She died in my arms. There was no blood.
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