Legendary Vampire in the Apocalypse
Chapter 4: The Apocalyptic Moon, How Beautiful It is

Chapter 4: The Apocalyptic Moon, How Beautiful It is

Dion could not remember when the last time a night had felt so cold.

The wind crawled and scraped, daring nearly to peel through his skin, dig a nail through his flesh and stab into his depths, through his blood that its touch frosted, and into his heart that it cracked.

"You... had fun tonight... yeah?"

Whatever should have been of the sounds beyond this alleyway, those growls and the shatters of stone, those bestial roars and those hollers of desperation, all of it died beneath the deepening fractures of his frosted, shivering heart.

"...Yeah." The word scraped from his throat.

He could not step any closer. Otherwise he might fall to his knees.

And he would not be able to tell if he could stand himself back up.

Not when looking at that wide, glorious smile, as if they had just conquered something great.

"Heh... would you look at... that then, D... the Boulevards... they were ours tonight."

Shijo laughed through the gurgles of blood, and Dion’s eyes hesitated to look into his for more than a few fractions of the moment, the blood dripping fire extinguisher hanging from his grasp as if it would fall any moment.

And Shijo’s smile only grew wider, "What did you think of my assist? That’s what they..." a wheezing, bubbling breath interrupted him, and he continued regardless, "call it... in football, right?"

Over the throb and cracks within himself, Dion heard the grating of his jaw, and he surrendered it loose. His shoulders fell that little more.

"... I should have—I should have stuck with y—" he could not say any more, as he creaked his mouth shut, and his breathing hastened.

Thereupon, Shijo glanced away. His smile lingered, and the moon, directly above their alley, witnessed his denigration.

He had interrupted, and buried the sound of Dion’s cracking voice beneath his own.

"Hey... do me a favour..."

"..."

"I don’t..."

The spatter of tears snapped through the air between them. Dion’s mouth had been bitten shut, and his shoulders quivered in their weakness. He choked back what would have been an interrupting snivel to the voice he was losing.

"... I don’t... want to turn into one of them."

Todo Shijo’s body, eaten through at his collarbone, had gone a dead pale.

There were black-green, squirming veins running through his body, and darkened blood was gushing out of his largest wound, onto the ground.

Dion watched his best friend’s head turn over to him once more, this time with tears falling from his own eyes as he smiled in spite of everything.

"Can... I curse you with that?"

The pipe of the extinguisher thudded faintly against its metal side.

Dion’s hand rose, and at the movement of his unsteady body, his tears fell onto his shirt, while a few droplets fell into the pool of blood growing out to touch him the last time.

And Shijo’s head glanced back upwards.

"The moon’s... beautiful tonight. Don’t you think?"

"Yeah... It is..."

With the fire extinguisher high, and Shijo silent, Dion dragged in a gasp of breath. He swung downwards, and he had believed that he had committed himself.

However, he had hesitated.

The crunch of Shijo’s skull resounded, but the blow hadn’t broken wholly through.

Dion suffered the sound of him wheezing in agony, and the sight of his body jolting harshly.

A guttural roar broke out of him.

His arm wrenched up with the despair of his encroaching death, and he killed a part of himself with the second blow.

He cursed a long stride over Shijo’s corpse, and he kicked at that of the dead, zombified woman.

He smashed the fire extinguisher against her head over, and over, and over, until the head had been destroyed, and the extinguisher, having broken through the ground, finally ruptured, exploding a swath of white foam forth and throwing him to his behind.

Dion, heaving for breath, his mouth bleeding as he had bitten his tongue, had landed over Shijo’s blood, the broken extinguisher fallen from his grasp.

And he only briefly, without the slightest care, paid attention to the temporary end of the deluge of error messages, and the appearance of the newest one:

{ Critical error 999: Soul scan failure, unable to read records of existential memory! }

"Fuck you!"

Then, suddenly, he heard the sound of the door that he had come out through being shattered once more.

People raced through, screaming incoherently, and many broke one way while the others broke towards him.

Dion, eyes pried wide and thundered back towards whatever sobriety that his drunken, desperate state could ever possibly muster, grabbed for the broken extinguisher.

He scurried to his feet and damned the idea of slipping as he ran.

He didn’t have any thoughts more than that. The only thing that he could do was survive. He had to survive!

He looked over his shoulder where zombies raced after the people that followed him.

"Wait! Help us!"

"Stop, man! Use your weapon to stop them!"

"Please, help!"

Abruptly, one of them slipped over the extinguisher foam and fell.

They were caught by zombie clutches, and within moments the sounds of their flesh tearing resounded.

Dion hurriedly turned the corner.

He was in no place to help anyone.

Thereupon, he broke to a stop, and his eyes quivered into a gradual wideness.

This part of the alley was somewhat larger than where he had just come from. It led into the main street after all.

And in the middle of it, turning towards them at the commotion that they had made, was a gnoll.

The monster was over seven feet tall with blood slobbering down its maw and a serrated blade in its grasp. A hungering growl threatened from its throat.

Dion could swear the creature gave an ecstatic grin in that moment, relishing the sight of a meal delivering itself to him.

"No... No... Monsters too?!"

One of the people that had followed him, naively believing that he knew somewhere safe to go, stuttered the slippery words out, and they hesitated before stepping backwards.

Dion, at the same time, didn’t move a single inch.

After all, rather than the lot of them, perhaps because he was the first to turn the corner and thus the closest one to it, the gnoll’s attention was entirely on him.

And behind the creature, in the direction that it was facing, there were several corpses, piled atop each other with the majority of them reduced to bone, ripped of their flesh.

His breathing went deathly shallow, and his heart stuttered.

Where he stood, he could hardly feel his knees holding him up securely by this point.

The torrent of emotions, adrenaline, and what he had to curse himself with, all while he was drunk, were compounded upon by the crystallization of fear that the Gnoll brought to him, and them all.

The sound in its throat, even low, rumbled down the alley deep into their flesh, as if it had a weakening effect on their muscles, rendering any kind of movement to escape very difficult.

’Zombies and fantasy monsters...’ Dion hysterically laughed to himself at the thought. ’And a glitching system for an apocalypse. Wonderful. JUST FUCKING WONDERFUL!’

Even with those thoughts, he did not move. If he made the slightest turn to try to run, regardless of what the others did, he felt like the thing would immediately rush forwards to kill him.

At least right now, even though it seemed so... irritatingly amused with him, that was better than being slashed by its blade or worse...

His eyes had briefly glanced at the pile of corpses. They had to have been people who were on the street.

Then he remembered the sound of wall concrete being broken. There was no way that had been done by a zombie.

That meant there were more of these things roaming.

"The zombies are coming up behind us!"

Dion heard that shout and still did not turn.

A wry, quivering grin escaped as he wondered whether he would have been able to escape had he not wasted those precious seconds thrashing the zombified woman’s corpse.

If only they had stayed home to have that movie playing in the background instead.

’The only option that I have is to choose how I die..."