childe
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Vampyre Story
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Aug 17 08:52 UTC 1995 |
The courtroom was old. It would have been dark and brown and thoroughly
respectable a hundred years ago. Now it had bright colorless flourescant
lights and gleamed unnaturaly. It was 12 noon and the entirety of the
court was on a lunch recess. A host of lawyers and jurors and court
recorders and security guards. Even the audience was on lunch break.
Everything, including the condemnation of a murdering son of a bitch like
Jeffrey Blank was on hold for lunch.
He didn't think it was funny exactly, so much as boring. He was brought
back into the courtroom as everyone returned from lunch. He smiled at them
and leaned back in his stiff wooden chair. The smell of polished wood
eminating from the hole court didn't bother him. He could have been
sitting out on the lawn of his parents house, a jobless, carefree eighteen
watching the world pass him by in middle of a summer night.
His appointed lawyer was a boring forty something man who was doing it
because he couldn't get anyone but the state to pay him a penny for his
useless services. Jeff had seriously considered defending himself, but
ultimately he knew it didn't matter. He was guilty as sin, as far as this
court and the people in it were concerned.
He might as well plead innocent and then get up there on the witness
stand and swearing on a Bible he'd rather burn announce that he had shot
the damned tellers and while he was at it (why not?) everyone else who'd
been shot in the past twenty years. But he didn't. Jeff wasn't going to go
out with a bang. He didn't want to super nova into Death Row. Quite
frankly, he didn't want death row at all.
But that was where he was headed.
He didn't really listen to the trial as they proceeded to show the
evidence against him. The gun registered to his name with two missing
bullets and the remaining bullets matching perfectly with the kind that
were in the heads of the dead tellers. The witnesses who were the people
at the bank he'd robbed; who's money he'd been out to steal--each one of
them positively identified him as the murderer. Well he'd been robbing the
bank. He wasn't ever going to deny the simple truth in that.
He hadn't shot any tellers though. And to make matters worse he didn't
have any idea who had. It was the middle of the night when he started and
without the damned complications that had come up, he would have been out
of there before any tellers had showed up.
Jesus. He watched the trial, smiling through it. Pleaded innocent, told
the truth and nothing but the truth on the stand. "I robbed the bank. It
was my gun. I didn't have an accomplice. I wasn't an accomplice. I didn't
shoot anyone."
No one believed him. He didn't ask or expect them too. It was beyond
their limited frame of comprehension that a man could be at the scene of
the crime, and not committ it.
It didn't take them more than twenty minutes to come back with the
verdict and sentence in hand. Jeff wasn't pensive. Do you worst, he
thought. He knew what he was getting and looking at their faces he smiled.
There was no worse punishment than a death sentence no matter how much
they wanted to give it to him. Oh damn.
Most of the people sitting on death row were never actually executed.
Jeffrey Blank sat on a hard bed in jail and hoped he wasn't on of them. He
would rather die young and proud up on that electric chair than spend his
life forgotten in a sanitary cell, solitary confinement eating prison
food.
He spent six weeks on death row. And then one day the door unexpectedly
opened up and a man in an ugly sports jacket with a tie that didn't match
came in and looked down at him.
Jeff was growing a goatee and it made him look like Satan. The man in
the ugly clothes looked extremely unnerved. Jeff leaned back on his back
and put his naked feet up. The door closed and the man sat down at the
small table off to the side. Amazingly, once the door was closed the guy
grew more relaxed.
"So this is Jeffrey Blank," he said.
Jeff raised an eyebrown. "What can I do for you?" he asked, opting for
indimidating politeness. He didn't get altogether too much human contact
and he saw this as a perfect oppurtunity to see how he could do at
frightening people.
"That all depends, Mr. Blank--"
"Jeff."
"Jeff," the man looked down at his hands which he'd clasped on the
table. "I'm Doctor Michael Something."
"Am I sick?" Jeff asked. Wouldn't that be funny. What if they rushed him
off to a hospital and he died there, from some damned disease and never
got to be executed afterall. And executions were so romantic. Ah, damn.
"No."
"Damn." Jeff said, shaking his head. "I didn't really think so."
"We need volunteers," the doctor said looking at Jeff with big dark
eyes. He was a sort guy the doctor, short and thick boned. And he was
wearing thick glasses. He was smart, and Jeff could see it in his every
move.
"To do what?" Jeff asked raising an eyebrow. "What does noble science
need to stoop so low as to come here for?"
"Well--"
"This isn't a noble scientific study then? Come on, you've got me
curious now," Jeff said, staring at the sturdy doctor. The doctor didn't
seem at all upset. Damnit, Jeff knew he wasn't cut out to terrify.
"We think we have a vaccine for the AIDS virus," the doctor said.
"So? As far as I can tell you think that about every five minutes over
there in the medical community," Jeff said. "What's different about this
one?"
"Do you know anything about science?" the doctor asked suddenly
incredulous. But he was licking his lips. This was his baby, his subject
and any open ears were going to hear the story without too much prompting.
"I'm not as dumb as they'd like to think," Jeff said.
And that was enough for the good doctor. "Well this one has made mice
with human dna in them immune to the virus. We've been testing it on them
for three years. But there's no way to know what it will do to human
beings. And we can't find any volunteers. Of course not. The very concept
of medicine, the Hippocratic Oath and all. I mean if it doesn't work
whoever we test it on is going to have AIDS."
"And so you're here," Jeff said. "In a prison, talking to everyone on
death row in one big line. One murderer after another."
"Yes. It's not my favorite thing to be doing on a nice afternoon," the
doctor said.
"Is it nice?" Jeff asked. "I don't notice."
The doctor seemed a little taken aback at this. "You don't, ever?"
"Why does it matter? The weather, it's a stupid thing to make peace for
stupid people who have everything in front of them on mother's best china
and can't understand that they've got it," he said.
"Oh," the word from the doctor was more like a grunt of understanding.
"That." Then there was a long pause when no one seemed to have anythin to
say.
"This is an offer?" Jeff asked.
"Yes."
"What happens if the vaccine works?"
"A pardon."
"And you didn't already get enough people before you got to this cell
here, I can't believe it," he asked.
"Some people would rather chance prison," the doctor said. "You must
know how few are actually executed."
"I know, believe me this time I wanna be right there with them."
"So this is a no?" the doctor asked, and he deflated. Looked ultimately
disappointed.
"Why does it upset you so much?" Jeff asked. "Aren't there more bums
around here waiting to die?"
"Actually," the doctor said, "You're the last one. And we only need one
more. Sometimes fate turns out like that."
"Are you running it out of jail?" Jeff asked, looking around the nicely
dismal blue grey of everything in the cell.
"No. We've got a small clinic equiped to deal with maximum security,"
the doctor said.
"Are there windows?"
The quick question shook the doctor, who also looked around the cell
now. "They've got steel bars and--"
"Can you look out them and see trees and grass and stars?"
"Sure."
Jeff curled his cold toes and asked, "When do I get transferred?"
(This is going to be a vampyre novel just wait and see)
by jenne hirschman
blank and soemething need real names i am taking suggestiosn
(for neko)
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