REPORTS OF THE VANISHED
961 Words
The files were stacked a meter high. All missing persons. All within a hundred-mile radius of HatchVille.
Badwiser Llorente rubbed his temple as the ancient overhead fan spun in labored circles above his office. The HatchVille town records were in disarray, but he had spent the last four years tracking one thread: disappearances under unnatural circumstances. He leaned forward, peering at the fading photograph of a nurse named Elena Marquez, last seen in 1981, working night shifts at the regional hospice.
No blood. No signs of a break-in. No leads. Just… gone.
Fifty-eight cases now. He had proof. Names, relatives, patterns. All seemingly unlinked—but he saw the glue: every one of them worked in healthcare, or had been recently hospitalized.
He picked up the phone.
“Jesuit Archives. Father Antoine speaking.”
Badwiser’s voice shook. “You don’t know me. My name is Badwiser Llorente. I’m a lawyer. I served in the Senate of Rome during the 70s. I've spent years compiling evidence of vampires infiltrating our systems. And now they’ve turned HatchVille into a blood farm.”
There was silence. Then a response.
“Mr. Llorente… where did you hear the name Cospius?”
The retired lawyer hesitated. “You just confirmed my worst fears.”
That night, Antoine summoned Annes Diane into the war chamber.
Spread before her were blood-stained maps, photographs of crime scenes, Vatican letters written in Latin and Hebrew, and one item that made her knees weaken: a black-and-white photo of her father, mouth open in frozen terror, surrounded by corpses—and a blurred figure lurking in the background.
Annes whispered, “That was the night...”
“The photographer died three days later,” Antoine said. “The negatives were burned. Except one.”
Sister Lavinia stepped forward. “We believe the vampires have turned HatchVille’s medical system into a clandestine blood supply chain. Elderly homes, hospices, emergency units—everywhere that’s rich in untraceable blood.”
Annes clenched her fists. “It’s a harvest.”
“Yes,” Antoine confirmed. “But the feast is just the beginning.”
He opened a newly acquired scroll, pulled from the Vatican’s f*******n archive.
“When the Blood Moon shines and the Sanctuary is hollowed, the Fifth shall rise. And with him, the blood of Rome shall boil.”
“Cospius isn’t just feeding,” Lavinia added. “He’s gathering power. Ritual power.”
Elsewhere, deep beneath the River Verro, an abandoned aqueduct had become a chamber of initiation for the Cospius Cult. Disguised as nurses, EMTs, and even priests, they gathered in robes of shadow and chanted in an ancient tongue older than Latin.
Their leader, Priest-General Valkaran, a vampire born during the sacking of Jerusalem, spoke with venom and glory.
“The Old Blood rises! HatchVille is ours! Tonight, the outer walls of the Vatican will shiver! The veil of man’s ignorance will fall!”
He unveiled a twisted relic—a chalice forged from the bone of Saint Dismas, the penitent thief crucified beside Christ. The relic had been desecrated with vampire blood, corrupted for use in Cospius’ final awakening.
One drop of Vatican blood in that chalice… and the curse would become permanent.
Back at the Jesuit base, Annes sat across from Badwiser in the candle-lit war room.
“You're saying they pose as doctors, nurses, EMTs,” she repeated.
Badwiser nodded. “They drain patients in controlled amounts. Enough to weaken, not kill. Sometimes they harvest enough to feed twenty without a single death report.”
Annes bit her lip. “And no one notices?”
“They don’t want to. Rome is good at pretending monsters are myths.”
She stared into his tired eyes. “Then we’ll give them something real to believe in.”
Her first assignment came swiftly.
Jesuit Squad VII had gone silent after investigating a rural clinic near the ruins of Saint Calista's Asylum. It was an old psychiatric facility built in 1865—shut down after rumors of nurses drinking patient blood reached the Vatican.
Annes, now codenamed “Seraph 9,” was ordered to lead a rescue mission alongside two agents: Brother Marcus, a demolitions expert with a shotgun rosary, and Sister Emiliana, a cold-blooded sniper whose bullets were forged from melted crosses recovered from Nazi vampire camps in WWII.
They arrived at midnight.
The clinic was dark.
The front door was ajar.
Annes stepped through.
Inside, the stench of old blood mixed with incense.
Cages lined the walls. Medical charts written in strange glyphs. An old radio crackled with static, and then a voice whispered in an ancient language:
“Mors tua... Vita mea.”
(Your death… my life.)
Annes raised her blade.
A figure dropped from the ceiling—fangs wide, snarling—and slammed into Brother Marcus, who fired twice, sending silver pellets through the vampire’s ribs. Sister Emiliana took out another with a headshot so precise it turned the creature to dust mid-air.
Annes charged ahead—slicing a vampire clean in two—then burst into the lower chamber.
There they were.
All of Squad VII.
Hung upside down like cattle. Bled dry. Their armor stripped. Eyes open.
Only one had survived—barely.
As Annes pulled him down, he gasped, “They… they have the chalice. They're going to the Vatican… to desecrate the tomb.”
She paled. “Which tomb?”
His voice trembled.
“Saint Peter.”
At that moment, beneath the Vatican, Lord Cospius Dracula emerged from the stone coffin, his face pale as bone and lips blood-dark.
He reached for his sword—a relic forged by Cain himself. And as the cult around him knelt in worship, he uttered his first words in centuries.
“The Apostles must fall.”
- Writer
