Brian Bit Matt

Brian

Brian has been dead for eleven days, and somehow his electric bill is still due Friday.

Brian is in the kitchen, barefoot, holding the envelope between two fingers with his phone pressed to his ear. Kelly has been speaking for just about a minute, but half of what she says is swallowed up by the evening noise from the apartment building. Upstairs, someone pulls a chair across the bare floor. Water runs through the pipes behind the sink. A dog goes mad somewhere down the road, and underneath all that, as steady as if there were a whole room full of clocks, Brian can hear the couple’s heartbeats as they argue on the sidewalk below.

“Brian?” Kelly says, loud enough to drag him back. “Did you hear one word I said?”

He closes his eyes, which only makes the sounds feel closer. “You said Mom’s mad, you’re also mad, and one of you is threatening to come over. I got the important part.”

“I said Mom’s worried. I’m the one who’s mad. You missed dinner again.”

“I’m sick, Kel. That’s usually a pretty decent reason to skip meatloaf.” He means for it to sound normal, even a little rude, because rude is familiar, and familiar might get her off the phone. Instead, his voice comes out thin. He hears her inhale and knows she caught it.

“You’ve been sick for almost two weeks,” she says. “You won’t tell us what’s wrong, you won’t let Mom bring you anything, and Carl said you haven’t been at work since Tuesday.”

Brian’s grip tightens on the bill. “Why are you talking to Carl?”

“Because I called the print shop after you ignored me all day.”

“That’s completely sane behavior.”

“Don’t be an asshole just because you don’t want to answer.”

He leans against the counter and looks at the clock above the stove. It’s 9:47 at night. His shift started at nine this morning, and Carl’s third voicemail is still sitting unheard on his phone because Brian can’t figure out how to explain that fluorescent lights now feel like ice picks shoved through both eyes. “I’m not trying to be,” he says, quieter. “The medicine’s messing with me. I sleep at weird times, I’m dizzy, and the light thing is... I don’t know. The doctor said it might take a while.”

There is no doctor. There isn’t even a useful liar helping him build the story. The man who changed him stayed less than a day, paced across this same kitchen while tossing out warnings Brian barely understood, then walked out for blood and never came back.

Kelly lets out a slow breath. “What medicine?”

“I told you, I don’t remember the name.”

“Then read the bottle.”

Brian looks at the two orange pharmacy bottles beside the toaster. He washed out the labels and filled them with vitamins three days ago in case his mother barged in. At the time, that had felt clever. Right now, it feels like the kind of plan a nervous teenager makes five minutes before getting caught. “It’s in the bathroom, and I’m not getting it. I’ll call you tomorrow when I don’t feel like roadkill.”

“Mom wants to come over tonight.”

“No.” The word leaves him so fast and hard that Kelly goes silent. Brian grips the counter, forcing himself to breathe even though his body doesn’t need much air anymore. “No, sorry. Not tonight. The place is a mess.”

“Your place is always a mess.”

“Exactly, so imagine what I mean when I admit it.”

“Brian, this isn’t funny.”

“I know.” He stares at his reflection in the black kitchen window. His messy hair and tired face still belong to him. The tattoos along his arms still belong to him. The eyes don’t. Before the alley, they were plain brown with enough hazel in bright light for Kelly to tease him about pretending they were interesting. Now they stay amber-gold even when he isn’t hungry, and when he is, they turn a yellow, no-color contact company would put on a normal shelf. “Look, tell Mom the contacts are irritating my eyes and the new pills knocked me out. I’ll call her tomorrow. I swear.”

Kelly makes a frustrated noise. “You bought contacts while you’re sick?”

“I wanted a change.”

Kelly lets out a disbelieving laugh. “You hate touching your eyes. I had to hold you down for drops when we were kids.”

“People grow.”

“Your eyes went from brown to freaking gold, you’re wearing sunglasses in every picture Mark posts, and I’m supposed to think this is you growing?” Her voice rises with every piece of evidence.

Brian looks toward the cheap sunglasses sitting beside his keys. “They’re amber, not gold.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“It feels like the point.”

“Jesus, Brian.” She sounds angry again, but there is fear beneath it, and he hates that he can hear the exact second it takes over. “Are you in trouble?”

His teeth ache.

He turns away from the window and presses his tongue against one canine, checking that it hasn’t lengthened. “No.”

“Did somebody hurt you?”

The alley flashes across his mind in broken pieces. A hand over his mouth. Brick against his back. A stranger saying, Stop fighting, and Brian’s whole body going still even while panic tore through him. Teeth. Cold pavement. Blood pushed against his lips when he couldn’t breathe anymore.

He doesn’t know the man’s real name. He doesn’t know where he went, why one word had locked Brian’s muscles, or whether he plans to come back. He knows only what the man told him after Brian woke on his bathroom floor with a slow pulse and a mouth full of fangs: I took too much. Turning you was the only way you survived.

“Nobody’s here,” Brian tells her, because it’s the only answer he can manage without lying outright.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I’ll call tomorrow, okay? I love you.”

“Brian, wait.”

“Tell Mom I love her too.” He hangs up before Kelly can hear his voice break, then places the phone face down on the counter. It starts ringing again almost immediately. He lets it.

The hunger twists through him before the second ring ends.

Brian folds over, hip striking a drawer handle as pain claws from beneath his ribs into his throat. It isn’t a stomach cramp. Hunger should live in his stomach, but this lives everywhere. His gums throb. His mouth floods with saliva, and both canines slide longer until the tips cut his lower lip.

“Come on,” he mutters, pressing the heel of his hand against his mouth. “I fed yesterday. I did.”

Calling it feeding is generous. He found a butcher willing to sell him a plastic container of pig blood after Brian claimed he was making sausage. The first mouthful had nearly come back up, cold and thick and wrong, but he’d forced enough down to quiet the pain. According to three websites and one deeply unhelpful library book, animal blood might work. According to his body, those people were full of shit.

He yanks open the refrigerator. Eggs, mustard, half a pizza, three beers, milk that smells sour despite tomorrow’s date, and the last container of blood wait beneath the harsh little bulb. Brian grabs the blood and drinks from the edge before he can think too hard about what he’s doing.

It tastes like cold pennies and spoiled meat. He swallows twice, gags, and slams the container onto the counter hard enough to splash his hand.

The pain loosens, but it doesn’t leave. Worse, the blood has woken something up. The couple below has stopped arguing. One of them is crying now, and Brian can hear a quick pulse under the sound. He grips the sink until the metal edge bends faintly beneath his fingers.

He lets go at once. “Great. That’s great.”

His phone buzzes with a text. KELLY: If you don’t call Mom by noon, we’re both coming over.

Brian stares at the message, then at the bloody print he left on the counter. He pictures his mother using her spare key. He pictures Kelly laughing at the fake contact excuse until his eyes flare in front of her. He pictures hearing their hearts this close, warm and alive, while his hunger is so bad that pig blood smells almost acceptable.

He can’t let them come here.

He needs real blood. He needs the man who made him to return and explain how to get it without hurting somebody. He needs to wake up eleven days ago with an ugly hangover and an embarrassing gap in his memory instead of a body that feels borrowed.

What he gets is another stomach-turning swallow from the container.

“No.” He wipes his mouth and shoves the blood away. “I can’t do this.”

Staying inside feels worse by the minute. Every sound in the building presses closer, and the air smells stale with old cooking, dust, and people sleeping behind thin walls. Brian changes into jeans, boots, and a black hoodie. He puts on sunglasses even though it is completely dark outside. Streetlights hurt if he looks directly at them, and hiding his eyes has become less embarrassing than explaining them.

He leaves his keys on the hook and decides to walk. Driving while dizzy and hungry is how he ends up wrapped around a telephone pole, a fact that would be hard to explain if he crawls out healed.

The wet air helps for almost half a block. Then the city opens around him.

Every passing person has a heartbeat. He hears them before he sees faces, quick pulses coming closer and fading behind him. Perfume, cigarette smoke, laundry soap, sweat, and warm skin fill the sidewalk. Beneath all of it is blood, not as a smell exactly, but as something his body recognizes. Brian jams both hands into his pockets and keeps his eyes on the pavement.

“Don’t be weird,” he whispers.

A woman walking past gives him a worried look and pulls her purse closer.

“Wasn’t talking to you.”

She speeds up. Brian winces. “Nailed it.”

Three blocks from his apartment, music and laughter spill through the door of a neighborhood bar. The people smoking outside block half the sidewalk, and Brian crosses the street before their combined scent reaches him. Beer, fryer grease, tobacco, and blood roll over the wet pavement anyway.

His jaw tightens.

He turns around. He means it this time. Home is unsafe, but standing near a packed bar is worse, and he still has enough control to know that.

Then someone pushes through the bar door behind him and calls a goodbye over his shoulder.

A new scent cuts through every human body nearby. It is warmer, heavier, alive in a way Brian doesn’t understand, and it hits the hunger like a match dropped into gasoline.

Brian looks back.

The man is tall, broad-shouldered, with dirty-blond hair and an old jacket hanging open over a faded T-shirt. He walks toward the side lot alone, one hand in his pocket, apparently unaware that Brian has forgotten how to move.

The man isn’t human. Brian doesn’t know what he is, only that the scent of him makes the yellow-gold reflection in the bar window flare brighter behind Brian’s glasses.

“Oh, no,” Brian whispers.

He steps back once, ready to run. The stranger glances over, and for half a second their eyes meet through the tinted lenses.

Brian should go home. He knows that with the last calm piece of his mind.

Instead, the stranger turns toward the parking lot, and Brian follows.