The Mercy Killings
written by: LJ Jacobs
The floor of the cold damp basement was full of corrupted townspeople. They lay asleep on their backs, spread out around the sinister black coffin at the centre of the hive.
I moved the strong beam of my torch along familiar faces at my feet. They were the faces of people who only days before had been able to walk in the sunlight hours instead of hovering and scratching at bedroom windows in the dead of night, hoping for an invitation inside to feast on blood and to pass on their vampiric infection.
I’d had visits of my own on such nights, and my torch now singled out those particular canvassers. They were the ones I was most interested in finding here today.
They were my family.
Or, what used to be my family.
After a short search, I found them in the corner.
I reached into my rucksack and pulled out seven long stakes.
I staked my mother and father-in-law first, then I moved along to my parents. I must confess, I cried when I staked my parents, but I only winced when I staked my in-laws. I suppose that’s only natural (after all, blood is thicker than water).
But the tears for my parents were nothing compared to the ones I shed after staking my wife and our five-year-old twin daughters.
I felt a deep guilt and regret after doing that, especially after their screams had faded to silence and their faces became normal again. Before eternal peace fell over them, though, there had been a brief look of confusion and betrayal, as if their judgmental human side had surfaced for a moment. I believed that was just the desperate departing souls of the vampires, trying to play with my head one last time before being cast back to the hell from where they came. They wanted me to feel guilt and shame and to doubt my actions.
But I remembered what The Professor had told me before he, too, was taken in the night and recruited to the army of the dead. He said I wouldn’t be killing people; I would be setting them free, like a mercy killing. I had to hang on to those words for my sanity.
You’ve enabled them to move on, I thought. It’s like they’re being released from an incurable, painful cancer… You did what was best for them.
With my family now at peace, I ignored the rest of the cursed townspeople, including The Professor, and went straight to the black coffin that I assumed belonged to the king of the vampires. The head honcho himself, Lex Van Kreek. The man we all thought of as a kind and caring senior citizen, who hadn’t long ago come to live among us, but who was really an agent of Satan himself, intent on slowly turning the residents of the town into a bloodthirsty hoard.
Putting my torch to one side, I pried the lid off the coffin. I then grabbed the sharpest stake from my rucksack.
I raised it high above the chest of the wrinkled old man who looked like he was just sleeping peacefully. So peacefully, in fact, he could have been someone’s napping grandfather.
Before I thrust the stake into the beast’s heart, his red eyes flickered open and his lips burst apart like a gaping wound, revealing his infectious bloodstained fangs.
I quickly continued my task and plunged the wooden stake downward.
A deafly squeal reverberated off the walls of the basement, louder than the ones that had gone before. The brute thrashed and rived and, unlike the others, crumbled to ash and vanished.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
It was over.
My family’s souls were saved and the head vampire was destroyed.
Suddenly, a familiar voice called out in the semidarkness. – Adam, is that you?
I jumped.
It was The Professor!
I grabbed my torch for a better look.
His face was no longer pale, his eyes were no longer red and his teeth were back to their regular size. He was now completely normal and coherent once more.
– Oh, thank God the nightmare’s over, he cried. He looked towards the coffin that was now full of dust and touched his face, paying particular attention to his teeth. -It… it seems that a total cure is possible if the head vampire is taken out first… Some of the folklore is true it seems.
Others by the coffin also started to stir from the dark trance. Everyone, that was, apart from my poor family. They lay motionless, the stakes still protruding from their chests.
What have I done? I thought.
I’ll never forgive myself for not staking the head vampire first, because there was a good chance my family could have become normal again.
Like a fool, I rushed in without thinking.
It seemed I was too focused on the disease rather than the cure. I’ll carry that guilt with me until my dying day. My family didn’t have to perish. They didn’t have to die… again…
- The Mercy Killings - October 19, 2024
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