“To be clear, you’re not going to suck my blood?” The gag slipped just enough for speech, but Liam still spit the edge out a little on the ‘b’ sound.
“I am not.” The vampire laid out their row of surgical tools like a doctor from the dawn of the industrial revolution, which was as terrifying as Liam thought it’d be. “We don’t do that. The cultural phenomenon of ‘Dracula’ is quite incorrect.”
“No bats, no wolves, no mist?” Liam felt around with his fingers, tracing the cables that bound his wrists behind the chair. “And the daylight thing is clearly wrong.”
“Daylight requires more makeup,” the vampire confirmed, choosing what appeared to be an electrical buzz saw from their roll of implements of torture. “But as you have observed, it is not a hissing, recoiling kind of problem, and more and aesthetic one.”
The aesthetic appeared to be the only thing history truly got right about vampires. Liam’s captor was an androgynous sort of thing, beautiful in the lines of their body and the planes of their face, heavyset eyes that burned dark and intense from overly deep sockets. Goth clothes without being ostentatious. Black eyeliner, light foundation, blood red lipstick, lots of piercings.
“So what are you going to do to me?” Liam told himself he wouldn’t ask, but it was hard not to vocalize with an ice pick and a long stemmed spoon being laid out on the table, polished to a lovely lustrous silver shine.
“I am going to eat you,” the vampire turned their back on him, and Liam wrestled with the cables destroying his circulation.
His chair scratched against the floor.
The vampire turned back around.
“It’s a lot less painful if you stay still.”
“I’m not going to sit still while you eat me,” Liam spit, scooting the chair back in a drum beat to his death.
The vampire walked toward him slowly, their steps even measured between the scratching sound of chair on cement floor.
“It’s the literal apocalypse, couldn’t you eat the zombies?!” Liam shouted, the chair catching on uneven cement at just the right moment to punctuate with a harsh cracking feeling in his teeth.
“Zombie is such a harsh word,” the vampire bothered to gently pull their slacks up before squatting down, hands resting on their thighs, cravat right in Liam’s face. “And anyway. We undead aren’t so dissimilar. Were circumstances different, we could even be friends.”
The doors to the warehouse rattled the lead pipe holding the doors closed, bent at unnatural angles by inhuman strength. The moaning outside was a hum like millions of bees buzzing.
“And that, I’m afraid, is the dinner bell.” The vampire smiled, teeth normal and blunt, with canines evolved for ripping and tearing into meat.
A normal human mouth.
Liam stared at their smiling face, at their normal teeth.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
The vampire’s cold hand grabbed Liam by the hair, yanked him to his feet, slammed his face into the cold metal operating table. The doors groaned under the weight of the zombie horde. The vampire’s grip on Liam’s hair was a vice, holding him in place. With their free hand the vampire lifted the small saw. Flicked the switch, letting the whine of the blade drown out the zombies. Drown out Liam’s whimpers.
“You asked why I didn’t simply eat the zombies,” the vampire explained, gently, almost sympathetically. The grip in Liam’s hair jerked his head to a better angle. “Dear man,” the vampire said. “I’m no cannibal.”
And then the medical saw connected with Liam’s skull, and his screaming was all that was left of him.