“Can you remember anything else? For instance, can you remember in any detail what was he wearing?”
Brenden paused for a moment before answering.
“No, I don’t think I can remember.”
“What about the man, is there anything else about him that you can picture?”
With the repeat of a reference to his attacker, Brenden’s mind returned to the thought of those grey eyes that had been the last thing that he had seen alive. He did not reply to Amanda’s question and, even though she gave him a while to reply, this time Brenden said nothing further. Eventually, it became clear to Amanda that the interview was over and that it would be pointless to push Brenden any further.
“Brenden.”
He did not reply but just kept his eyes fixed on an empty space on the floor.
“Brenden,” said Amanda gently, but with a little more volume than her previous attempt to get the boy’s attention. “Brenden, thank you for all your help, but I think you can go back to class now.”
“Oh sorry. Yeah, sure I guess.”
Slowly, Brenden got up from his seat and, without saying anything more to Amanda, he left the abandoned classroom.
***
Amanda carefully placed her newly acquired bags of blood in the portable fridge she kept in the boot of her Renault Clio. She hoped that she could save up a few pints while helping out at the school, but she knew that even they would not last long, meaning that soon enough she would be looking desperately for any work she could get to avoid the fate dreaded by almost every vampire residing in the living world. Yes, there were options if someone ran out of blood, but she would not even contemplate them until all other possible avenues had been taken. Indeed, there were two main options and both of them seemed like a fate worse than the death she had already gone through. The first was to just give up on the principles of the school and go out and attack the next living being that happened to cross one’s path. The other, and to Amanda an option that seemed almost as bad as the first, was to voluntarily admit oneself to what the vampires and zombies had called ‘the Tunnels.’
She and the rest of her class had been informed of this place just a couple of weeks after their arrival at the school. They were told that not too far away from the school, there was a network of subterranean tunnels that had been purposely built over the years to house all of those who would, in some way, pray on the living if they were not able to maintain their blood or other supplies. In time, the inevitable happened, and the place became home to not only those who killed but also those who just did not want to take the chance that they would eventually succumb to the temptation of attacking people if they remained in the living world. The class had also been warned that anyone who went down there would not die and that although some would be able to learn to tolerate their hunger, many would never be able to overcome the demands of their bodies, leaving them with a sort of half-life filled with nothing but a constant search for blood or whatever their particular affliction drove them to crave. Very few of those who left for the Tunnels returned and, due to the state of many of those who had chosen to trap themselves underground, there was very little news about what happened down there.
Needless to say, though it was most certainly not an opinion shared by all the teachers at the Tithonus School, it was quite clear to Amanda and her fellow pupils that their own tutor saw the Tunnels as an abomination.
Amanda’s teacher had grudgingly accepted that minor improvements had occurred since the invention of the light bulb; something which allowed those down in the Tunnels the ability to live in something other than perpetual darkness. However, the concessions were few and this opinion left its mark on Amanda to the extent that even the idea of the place filled her with dread. Consequently, Amanda was left in a state of stark incomprehension on the day when her class was given the choice of whether they would like to enter the Tunnels as, to her horror, three of her classmates said that they would go. Worst of all was the development that one of the three had been Mary, a zombie that Amanda had befriended over the course of the two years in the school. Amanda had remonstrated with her friend over the decision, but Mary was adamant that she would depart with the other two and never return to the world of the living. The final time they were together, Mary had informed her friend that she just did not understand that they were in completely different positions.
“As a zombie,” Mary had said, “I’m lucky to have kept as much of my mind intact as I have, but my skin is grey. Not only that, I look like nothing more than the walking corpse that I am. You don’t understand what I see when I look in the mirror; you don’t know the fear I live with every day, how I might not only spread this curse among those I loved but be seen by them and rightly feared as a monster. You are just as beautiful in death as you were in life and so have no fear of what the living will think of you when they see you. I can already hear what they will say and I have made the decision that I never want to really hear it spoken. You are my friend, and I am sorry
