Not If You Were the Last Vampire on Earth Read Online Free

keep my strength but the curves have melted away, my sacrifice for surviving The Sweep.
    Dad first started showing the signs of the sickness when I was seventeen. He lost his appetite and went from a healthy forty-seven year old in amazing shape to dropping fifty pounds in a matter of weeks and sleeping longer each day. While he was able, he used his waking hours to show me survival skills that would come in handy.
    “It’s only a matter of time before I’m sick, too,” I’d tell him which used to piss him off.
    “Rule number one, if you think you’re going to die, you will die,” he would snap at me. Because it gave him purpose and made his last days mean something, I went along with his lessons.
    He taught me how to start an open fire and to cook over it. He taught me which plants were poisonous and which to eat. He taught me how to hotwire a car and how to siphon gasoline. He taught me how to shoot. Not only to hunt, using faraway targets. But he also made me pull the trigger on mannequins dressed to the nines up close with the barrel aimed between the eyes.
    “You’ll never sleep okay after you kill someone and every time you do, your footsteps will be heavier,” he told me, popping open a beer for me. (Right after he said to fuck the legal drinking age.) I still drank it hesitantly. As an ex-military sergeant, he was comprised of order and honor and rules. His recent descent into debauchery was unnerving.
    ‘Well, maybe I won’t have to,” I said hopefully.
    He eyed me sadly. “You will have to, sweetheart. I’ve been in war torn countries where it degraded into every man for himself. You won’t see the other end of this tragedy without taking a life. Do not hesitate. You have a good soul. Follow your gut.”
    I didn’t even tell him about the two men I killed outside the pharmacy a couple months later. He was so gone, such a glimmer of his former self. I left his mind in peace. That night I opened a can of peas and mashed them and tried to coax him to eat it.
    I read Walt Whitman to him until his eyes went glassy from exhaustion. Exhaustion from living.
    I wiped the thin trail of blood that leaked out of his nose. His breath gurgled and I got the machine out to pump the liquid from his lungs. The bag filled crimson.
    I stroked his hair and lied on the bed with him and said nothing about the shooting. Two days later he died.
    When things got really bad, when the population had thinned considerably and no one bothered to pick up the bodies anymore and people turned on each other like we were never civilized, I stayed in the house. I had buried my dad in the backyard and I could see the mound from upstairs when I peeped out of the corners of my blinds without disturbing them. I holed up inside that house until it was more quiet than not outside. When signs of life only came every few days.
    Then I carried the pistol with me everywhere. I named it Wayne because my Dad used to love John Wayne. I never had to shoot anyone else but I almost did when I saw a man pounding his fists into a woman on the corner of Baker Road and Jorgan Avenue. I drew it out and pointed it at him. Wayne trembled in my fist.
    “Back off,” I said with more bravado than I felt.
    The man stopped swinging and ran and the woman yelled at me for being a psycho before taking off after him.
    When I realized I was alone, really alone and not just lonely, I began talking to Wayne. I remember smiling as I thought of Tom Hanks befriending his volleyball in Castaway and the sharp pain I felt knowing I was doing the same. With a gun.
    About the time I was drugged out on pills was when Wayne and I broke up. It was a sad night, the one right before I went on my hunt for Baloo. I put several bullets in the gun and traced my finger around the barrel over and over and over. A tiny pull, a brief moment and I could possibly end the human race. That’s all it would’ve taken.
    My father ended up being right. He taught me a lot of things that I ended