0035 - Sterile Despair
1500 Words
Climbing the hill to Blackwood Manor felt less like a walk and more like a punishment.
Victor’s legs burned. Not the good, tight burn of a morning run, but the acidic, trembling weakness of severe hypoglycemia. Every step up the winding gravel driveway was a negotiation with gravity.
Beside him, Fenrir panted, tongue lolling out. The dog wasn't tired. In fact, the closer they got to the house, the more energetic the animal became. The gloom of the estate seemed to charge him like a battery.
Victor clutched the plastic bag from the convenience store. Inside sat the Holy Grail: a bento box. Synthetic pork cutlet, rice that had been white before the preservatives hit it, and a side of pickled r****h glowing a neon yellow not found in nature. It was warm. It was trash. It was beautiful.
"Almost there," Victor whispered, voice cracking. "Just... don't drop the pork."
The Manor loomed ahead, cutting a sharp, jagged hole in the grey afternoon sky. Usually, the sight of the place triggered a fight-or-flight response. Today, it just looked like a dining room.
He reached the bottom of the porch steps and stopped. Lungs heaving. Trying to pull oxygen from the thin, cold air. He looked down at his shoes. They were caked in the grey mud of District 13—a substance equal parts dirt, industrial grease, and despair.
"Filth."
The word floated down from above, vibrating with harmonics that made his molars ache.
Victor looked up.
Carmilla stood in the open doorway. Or rather, she hovered in it.
Immaculate. Her dress was a deep, blood-red velvet that seemed to drink the light. Her hair was a perfect cascade of silver, defying the wind that whipped Victor’s coat around his legs. She floated six inches off the floorboards, toes pointed downward like a ballerina in zero gravity.
She stared at him. Not with anger, but with the specific, wide-eyed recoil of someone watching a rat swim in their soup. Her nostrils flared.
"You are coated in... isotopes," she said, voice trembling. "And grease. And... human sweat."
"I went shopping," Victor rasped, lifting the plastic bag. "I have food."
"You are a biohazard," she declared. "Do not bring that contamination into the Sanctuary."
Victor sighed. Too tired to argue. Too tired to be afraid. He just wanted to sit on a chair not covered in moss and eat his pork cutlet.
"I'll take a shower," he said, taking a step toward the stairs.
"No!" Carmilla shrieked. It wasn't a scream of fear, but of offended aesthetics. "You will track it across the Foyer! The rug is Persian! It is older than your civilization!"
She drifted forward, eyes glowing with a manic need to clean. "Stay there. I will sanitize you."
Victor stopped. He stood on the gravel, right at the base of the stone steps. The porch was a raised platform of dark granite, perhaps three feet high. Between him and the vampire lay four wide stairs.
Carmilla floated down the first step. The air around her shimmered. A goddess of hygiene descending to purge the unworthy.
She floated down the second step. Victor felt the static electricity building, the ozone smell of her magic clashing with the mundane air of the driveway.
She floated down the third step. She extended a hand, fingers curled into a claw, ready to unleash a spell that would strip the dirt from his skin—and likely the first two layers of epidermis along with it.
"Be cleansed," she commanded.
Then she floated off the last step.
No spell fired. No crimson light flashed. No system window announced a critical failure.
Just a sound. A wet, heavy, biological thwack.
The moment Carmilla’s body passed the vertical plane of the last step—the invisible line where the Manor’s foundation ended and the rest of the world began—she stopped floating.
Physics, patiently waiting for its turn, asserted dominance.
Gravity didn't just return; it collected a debt. It grabbed her by the ankles and slammed her face-first into the gravel.
It happened so fast Victor almost missed it. One second, a levitating vision of gothic perfection. The next, a pile of red velvet and limbs sprawling on the driveway.
The silence that followed was heavy.
Victor stared. Blinked. Looked at the step, then at the vampire lying prone in the dirt.
"Did you..." he started, voice hoarse. "Did you forget you can't fly out here?"
Carmilla didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just lay there, face buried in the very filth she had been trying to avoid. Her shoulders began to shake.
Not laughter.
A high-pitched whine, like a kettle beginning to boil, started to emanate from her form. The air around her began to warp—not with magic, but with heat.
"I..." Her voice was muffled by the gravel. "I am... dirty."
"It's okay," Victor said, instinctively stepping back. "It's just dirt. It washes off."
"I FELL!"
The scream was silent, a psychic shockwave of pure humiliation.
And then, she exploded.
It wasn't force. It was heat. Pure, sterilization-grade heat. In her panic, Carmilla triggered a purification protocol, but without the Manor’s dampeners to regulate it, it was just a raw, uncontrolled flash.
A wave of white heat blasted outward.
Victor flinched, shielding his face with an arm. The heat washed over him, dry and instantaneous, like opening an oven door to check on a roast.
"Are you okay?" he shouted, lowering his arm.
Carmilla was already scrambling up. Moving with frantic, skittering speed, crawling back up the stairs on hands and knees, desperate to regain the safety of the stone. She didn't look at him. She just fled, vanishing into the darkness of the hallway with a sob that sounded suspiciously like indignity.
The front door slammed shut.
Victor stood alone on the driveway. The wind blew cold against his cheek.
"Well," he muttered to Fenrir. "That was dramatic."
He looked down at his hand.
The plastic bag was gone.
In his grip, he held a charred, twisted loop of melted polyethylene. Below it, where the bento box had been, was a square black brick.
The heat blast hadn't hurt him—Carmilla’s control was precise enough to avoid flesh—but the cheap plastic and processed food stood no chance. The pork cutlet, the rice, the neon radish... instantly carbonized.
Victor lifted the brick. It crumbled slightly in his fingers, dusting his shoes with fine, black soot.
It smelled of burnt chemical preservatives and tragedy.
He stared at it for a long time. His stomach gave a low, mournful growl—a sound of betrayal echoing in the quiet afternoon.
"I sold my dignity for this," he whispered.
He dropped the carbon brick onto the gravel. It shattered into dust.
Fenrir walked over, sniffed the remains, sneezed once, then trotted up the stairs to scratch at the front door.
Victor followed. He felt lighter, in the worst possible way. The hunger was now a sharp, clawing thing in his gut, but the absurdity of the moment had numbed him to the pain.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The Manor felt different. The air was heavy, thick with the scent of old wood and the lingering ozone of Carmilla’s shame. Distant sounds drifted from the upper floors—water running, things breaking, perhaps a coffin lid slamming shut.
He walked into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. Dust puffed up around him. He didn't care.
He needed a distraction. Needed to not think about his empty stomach or the fact that his landlord had just face-planted in the driveway because she forgot how gravity worked.
He picked up the remote. Turned on the television.
The screen flickered to life. The news anchor spoke with the clipped, sterile urgency of a disaster report.
"...reports are coming in from District 13," the anchor said. The banner at the bottom of the screen read: THE MIRACLE IN THE SLUMS.
Victor froze.
"Eyewitnesses describe a figure in a long coat," the reporter continued. "A man who walked into the Clinic of Last Resort and performed impossible surgeries with his bare hands. They are calling him the 'Surgeon of the Slums'. Sources say he reversed terminal Neuro-Rejection in minutes."
The screen cut to a shaky cell phone video. Dark. Grainy. But the figure was unmistakable. The coat. The exhausted posture. The hands.
"Who is this mystery healer?" the anchor asked. "Is he a licensed doctor? A rogue bio-hacker? Or something else entirely?"
Victor stared at the screen. His own pixelated face, obscured by shadows but terrifyingly recognizable to anyone who knew him, stared back.
He didn't just lose his lunch.
He had lost his anonymity.
His stomach growled again, louder this time, demanding payment for the miracle he had performed.
Victor let his head fall back against the dusty cushion. Closed his eyes.
"I hate this house," he said to the empty room.
From the kitchen, the coffee machine gurgled. It sounded like agreement.
- Writer
