John Wilkinson watched the young couple make love through a telescope from his home on the other side of the lake. He wasn’t so much interested in the act of lovemaking as the sheer vitality of the youngsters. What life force they possessed! In his youth, Wilkinson himself had been known for his virility. That was before he chose a vampire with a grudge as his lover. Evidently Wilkinson had had a relationship with the woman in years past, and it had not ended well. Wilkinson couldn’t even remember her. But she remembered Wilkinson. She screwed him, and then screwed him up. She snapped Wilkinson’s spine and turned him into a vampire, sentencing him to eternal life in a wheelchair.
Wilkinson’s chosen career before his unfortunate tryst with the angry vampire was in the field of nanotechnology. He developed tiny, nearly microscopic robots that the government put to a variety of uses. He had hoped to keep his job after becoming a vampire, but his boss wouldn’t accommodate his request to work only nights. He had been let go, and now lived on his government pension. Of course the government couldn’t help him with his thirst for blood. Wilkinson found it next to impossible to hunt in a wheelchair, so he had put his experience in nanotechnology to work for him.
Wilkinson used his skills to develop hundreds of thousands of flying nanobots; tiny winged robots equipped with needles and bladders, which he programmed to use heat-sensing technology to fly to a target, attack it, drain it of blood and return home. Once the nanobots returned, Wilkinson would empty the tiny bladders and collect enough blood for a decent meal.
The boy across the lake drove off in his pickup truck and Wilkinson pressed the button that opened a small portal leading from his basement lab to the outdoors. A dark stream of nanobots poured through the portal and out over the water toward the girl on the other side of the lake.
Mary heard a buzzing sound coming from across the lake. She looked in that direction, and a dark cloud appeared over the water, heading toward her. Mary ran toward the trees, casting terrified glances over her shoulder as she went. She was looking back when she tripped over a chunk of blackened firewood. The cloud descended on her, and she felt stinging all over her body. She scratched furiously at her skin. She tried to scream, and a dark, buzzing tentacle broke away from the cloud and dove down into her open mouth. Mary’s vision faded as the buzzing mass covered her eyeballs. By then she was nearly unconscious, and barely registered the stinging in her eyes. Soon the pain was gone and everything was black.
The nanobots flew back across the lake and though the portal into the lab. As Wilkinson drained the robots, he found they had collected an unusually small amount of blood. He checked his computer data, and discovered that not all of his nanobots had returned. About a third of them were unaccounted for.
The deputy coroner began his examination, dictating his report into a digital recorder.
“This is Doctor Lawrence Meggins with Wayne County Coroner’s case number 593-09. The subject is Mary DelMonaco, Caucasian female, nineteen years of age. She has a small rose tattoo on her right ankle. No other unusual features. Ms. DelMonaco appears to have died of exsanguination, although the source of her blood loss is not immediately apparent.”
The doctor used a large ceiling-mounted magnifying glass to examine the girl’s skin. “Ms. DelMonaco’s body is covered with thousands of tiny pinpricks,” Dr. Meggins dictated. “It’s as if she had been attacked by a swarm of insects.” Dr. Meggins lifted one of Mary’s hands. “Ms. DelMonaco’s skin also bears scratch marks, which I believe to have been self-inflicted.” He examined her fingers. “My best guess is that she was trying to fend off an insect attack.” Dr. Meggins looked closely at Mary’s fingernails. Underneath one of the nails he saw a small dark spot. Dr. Meggins clicked off his recorder, grabbed a scraping tool and dug under the nail, removing a small black object. He took the fingernail scrapings over to his microscope for a better look.
Dr. Meggins centered the scrapings on a slide and placed the slide under the microscope. Most of what he saw was unremarkable; traces of human skin, dirt and sand. As Dr. Meggins moved the slide around, the tiny dark object he had seen under Mary’s nail came into view. He gasped, and had to blink several times to make sure he wasn’t imagining the tiny machine he saw through the eyepiece. It had what appeared to be a dark, metallic body, wings and a sharp needle at one end.
Could a swarm of tiny flying machines have killed the DelMonaco girl and drained her of blood? He needed to call his boss to come take a look at what he’d found.
Dr. Meggins retrieved the slide and walked across the room. He reached for the phone, and that was when he heard the buzzing coming from the examination table behind him. He turned slowly, and watched in horror as the dead girl’s cheeks slowly puffed out. Her lips parted, and a black cloud streamed out of her mouth. The slide fell out of Dr. Meggins’ hand and shattered on the floor. He didn’t have time to scream before the buzzing cloud enveloped him.
Wilkinson found the rest of his nanobots patiently hovering outside the portal the next morning. He let them in and drained their bladders. He swirled a glass of the blood they had collected under his nose. Wilkinson found that it had a decidedly different bouquet than the girl’s blood, but it was definitely human. He took a sip, and while the blood lacked the freshness and tang of yesterday’s collection, he decided it would do quite nicely indeed.
—
© 2009 Robert C. Eccles
Tags: Robert C. Eccles
April 19th, 2009 at 9:18 am
(Spoiler alert) I really like this idea: What if you had a vampire that couldn’t hunt, but was an expert in nanotech. It’s good as is, but it could easilly be expanded into a paranomal/mystery novella or novel, not revealing the source of the strange bites until the end.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:25 am
I like this. Creepy and very inventive!
April 19th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Oh yeah, Bob…this is very, very good. So original. I agree with Joshua, this could definitely be expanded into a novel with the mysterious deaths leading us to that thrilling revelation at the end.
April 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for the kind words! Perhaps I’ll give the novella/novel idea a try.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
This story is rich with ideas. Extremely creative. I admire writers who can come up with fresh ideas for vampire tales. Really fine work.