After the door shut, Iggy allowed just a second to pass before he headed for bed. Lying on his side, he hugged the blanket into his chest, filling the open space between his arms and the wound. His head sank heavily into the pillow, and then, he was out cold. He slept blissfully through the next night until three o'clock struck. The click of the bedroom door sounded and he lunged upright. By the time his eyes opened, he was propped up on his knees and ready to run.
Aster entered the room and flicked on the lights. "Robert!" she hollered in laughter. "Look at you! So easily startled." She approached the bed. "If you are going to feed with us, you better get up now. You thirsty?"
Yes, he was thirsty. The glass in his stomach rattled with each breath, and the burning in his throat was hot, but now all of those sensations were familiar to him, and secondary to his sleep deprivation. He rolled back onto the bed, sinking hard and fast into the unrelieved exhaustion, and buried his eyes in the hollow of his layered forearms. It was easy to forget the facts. He was still newly infected, and he still needed a different amount of sleep than her. However, he couldn't tell her that.
Aster nudged him, and before she could invite herself any closer, he sat up and hung his feet over the ledge of the bed and shaded his eyes from the light. His eyes felt heavy even while they were shut. She purred, "that's right. Get up. You're thirsty. Show us how to hunt people like animals. We're dying for a good time."
"No, no. Please, let me sleep, please," he begged. He rolled back down, drawing his knees up toward his abdomen and wrapped his arms around them. "I won't cause any problems, I swear. I'll get up when I can. Just let me sleep." He felt her weight sit on the bed beside him and thought, oh, no.
Her fingers drew lines against his scalp and twisted a few strands around. "Your hair is so soft," she fancied. "What in the world wore you out so much that you'd even sacrifice feeding for sleep nonetheless? Your smell… it's… so-"
Iggy grabbed her hand. "Leave me alone."
Wincing, she drew her hand away, and hastily said, "fine, but tomorrow, we're going out and you're going to show me a really good time. Got it?"
Iggy couldn't stay awake any longer even if he tried to. When he awoke sometime later, he did so again with a startle. He sat up abruptly and circled the room, searching through the darkness for danger. There was an untouched empty dresser. The door was shut and dim light glowed through the crack underneath it. He held his breath and listened for noise. He could only hear muffled snoring through the walls. With relief, he exhaled and fell back onto the bed. He was in the same place that he had fallen asleep. He was alive. And he wasn't caught.
Iggy was grateful in the moment, but leaving everything behind was saddening just as much as it was enlightening. He could never return to his life, not to what it had been, but maybe he could live a different life? One in which Baine, Nansen, and Emi never existed and he'd still have amnesia. He sighed deeply. The wound in his chest was wet and itchy as if maggots were crawling inside of it. Would starting a new life be worth it when death was staring him in the face?
As he sat up, the thirst rattled, reminding him of exactly who he was. It plead to make up for the last two days that he'd gone without a drink. What was once a controlling ruler, an all-powerful sadist capable of horrendous murder, had become a small voice that resorted to gently asking for relief. After his experience at the labs, his resistance to starvation was thoroughly exercised, a relief in itself, now all he needed to do to become even stronger was to build up more resistance to the pain, but then again, what was the difference? He'd be dead soon.
He braced himself and stood. Moving always made the pain worse. He pulled down on the hem of his strange clothes, unwrinkling them. In one night, the smell of vanilla and salt was wiped out and replaced with his own sweet cucumber smell. It was such a potent smell, as if he was sweating perfume out of his pores. How don't they know that I'm newly infected, he wondered. I can't hide the smell.
He pushed the door open just enough to peek through, and the squeal from the grinding metal sounded loudly in the midst of silence. Still, no one had been jostled. The house seemed empty, although he knew otherwise. Besides being able to hear the low snoring from one of the rooms in the hallway, he could somehow feel their presence like static in his bones. He was becoming keener the closer to death he came.
The hallway was shaded, and around the corner, the wall of tinted windows was vaguely lit from the outside. He glided through the small opening and approached the wall, where he could feel the warmth from the daylight become hotter against his cheeks and forearms. He peered through the dark glass at the white clouds that pressed against the gray sky, the shadowy grass that reflected glistening beams of light from the sun, and the small birds who pecked the sparkling ground for food. Through these windows, the world was a colorless black and white animated picture, and genius. The day world was so calm, warm, and happy. A place that he could never join.
To distance himself from the feeling of rejection, he paced the hallway, then the upstairs, and soon enough his exploration was concluded. He sat down on the middle step, and held his cheek in his palm, comparing this house to his old home, a place that he must forget.
He didn't hear the lock on the front door click open. The door swung open and the sunlight beamed passed his head like a laser, flooding the wall in front of him. The entire room brightened up. He lunged down but the sizzling hot rays caught the back of his neck and the top of his shoulder. A hissing flash of smoke puffed off of his skin. The front door closed, the light was no more, and the smoke disappeared, but he was left with an excruciating burn.
He couldn't help but cry out, "how could things get even worse?!" He clamped a hand over his mouth to silence himself and put the other hand over his burns, then full of painful anger, he glared back up the stairs. He could hear Becca clumsily strip her shoes off and walk over the tiled floor. Something got set down on the countertop. And then, she came to the stairs.
There, she stood at the top, all alone, with dark skin that was still warm from the sun and dry crimped hair reaching out from her head in all directions. Her cheeked had seemed pudgy, but they weren't. They were swollen from the mouthful of infected caries that she had. The rest of her was curveless and straight as a board. Iggy could see her black panties underneath her short skirt, and the scars… Her brown eyes rounded soberly. She spoke in a hushed voice, "are you alright?" Iggy responded like a timid animal. He darted into the dark hallway from which he had come. Becca ran down after him. "Wait!" she bid him in a whisper. "Wait!"
He clenched his shoulders tight, squeezing until there was no blood left to feed his firing nerves. Just past the doorway of his room, he had a bout of lightheadedness, and he tripped over his legs and skidded across the carpet onto his knees. Becca swung around the door frame and fell onto her knees at his side. Her palms were open facing him, reaching to touch him, and her mouth shhh-ed repeatedly. He leant away from her. "Don't touch me!" he snapped. He rubbed the burn hard with his hand. The skin under his hand felt normal. Soft. Smooth. Uncharred. But the sting was harder than alcohol.