The sulking commenced. I almost never left my room other than to eat every so once in a while and go to the bathroom a couple times a day.

I spent the days lying in my bed in the soft darkness Karl’s bunk above me provided, reading, sleeping, writing in my diary and silently hating Karl. The main reason I never left the room, was every rare time I did I seemed to run into Karl and Liz evolving in their relationship. I once came out of the bathroom to find them kissing on the stairs and had to run back into the bathroom to cry. Luckily no one saw me.

I briefly wondered if Karl could sense the resentment building inside me because of his relationship with Liz, but I knew he was far too dim for those kinds of senses and emotions. WHAT did she see in him?

Truthfully, I was actually more active at night when I wouldn’t be questioned for what I was up to. I divulged a way to jam the cell just before lights out with our toilet plunger to where I could slip out after everyone was asleep.

I would usually awake a few hours after lights out and sneak out of the room. Wouldn’t do much other than sneak around and try to avoid the sight of the night guard which wasn’t hard since he spent most of the night watching porn on his cell phone.

I would sometimes not even remember waking up and doing it, just would snap back into life in the dining hall, or outside of Bory’s cell watching him sleep and then slither back to my cell where Karl was fast asleep. It started to scare me and it started to happen more and more the longer time went on. The blackouts.

Then. Full moon. Epic disaster.

I awoke in the dark, but I could see.

My first glimpses didn’t tell me where I was. All I could see at first was the flash of a real bed. The first one I had seen in months since I was scooped from my suburban life of comfort.

I blinked, hard, to try and reset my brain and eyes. It worked.

I was looking down at Liz, sleeping peacefully. No. It happened again.

I jumped back, away from the bed and my mind raced. I was in the room where she must have slept. Apparently she didn’t really sleep in a cell.

The room looked a bit like the nicest room a princess would live in inside a castle. It was well-furnished with a large, cushy bed, fireplace and chairs, but still had stone walls which reverberated the cold and not a single window. What was this room?

I started looking for a way to exit and could only locate one door. A tall, wooden entryway with a curved top. I tiptoed in that direction, hoping not to wake her.

I wasn’t successful. I stepped down upon something sharp and cried out, rustling Liz in the bed.

“Who’s there?” She called into the dark.

I stopped in my tracks right in front of the door. Maybe it was my time to confess my love.

I turned to see Liz sitting up in the bed and my heart dropped. She looked as beautiful as ever, even panicked in the night.

But something was wrong and she knew it.

“Oh my God,” she screamed out before a squirt of blood, cold and blue in the shallow light of the night dripped quickly down her neck.

She moved her hand for a moment to reveal dual puncture wounds neatly placed upon her neck.

“Luca?” She cried.

I rushed up to her in a panic, but she motioned me away with the hand that wasn’t trying to stop the bleeding on her neck.

“What did you do?” She screamed at me.

“I don’t know. I didn’t do anything. I just woke up,” I stammered and started backpedaling towards the door.

“You better get the hell out of here, fast,” she screamed. “He’s going to come in here any second.”‘

“I don’t know,” I stammered on.

“Just go,” she screamed.

I heard footsteps come from an open corner of the room. Heavy footsteps. Familiar footsteps.
“Go,” Liz screamed.

I froze. The footsteps came into the room. I did know them. They belonged to Karl. He stopped across the room. Gave me a confused look for a while, the way a dog would if you pretended to throw a ball but instead held it behind your back.

He looked to Liz. The blood on her neck. His face changed.

He erupted with a furious groan and lurched in my direction.

I took off to the only door I saw and flew through it.

The door opened up into a dark flight of stone stairs lit with lanterns which lined the walls. I descended them as fast as I could until I reached flat ground at the back of an empty cell.

I could hear Karl’s footsteps pounding behind me as soon as I reached the flat cell.

They were much closer than they were before.

I dashed out the open cell door and reached the bottom platform of the main hall of the facility. Hugh’s escape tunnel. It was hopefully big enough to where I could squeeze out of it.

I made it to the ground floor without a guard in sight and raced for the bathroom in the corner. Just as I reached the door, I heard a siren turn on in the main hall and heard the yelling of the guards from up on the higher floors. Another grunt from Karl. Closer.

Inside the bathroom. I nearly slipped on the slick floor before I made it to the corner stall and ripped off the toilet seat cover.

The little tunnel was still there, looking hideous. Its cold, dark, dirty form couldn’t have been less inviting, but I had no choice. I put my head down and stuck my body into it. I fit, barely. I grabbed hold of a piece of rope attached to the back of the cover and pulled it with me until it snapped snuggly into the wall and I was in complete darkness.

I wasted no time in starting my worm wiggle through the tunnel away from the facility. It was likely the guards and possibly Karl were tearing apart the bathroom, searching for my escape route.

I crawled through that god awful tunnel which smelled of hot sulfur for an hour, or maybe it just felt like it, until I saw the siren call of light the end of the tunnel. I used my last ounces of strength to speed up in the direction of the sweet light.

The light would eventually come to me when I tumbled out a little steel tube into a marshy drainage ditch misted with soft rain.

The morning sun was rising behind great mountains off in the distance above a hardened, dead tundra of gray grass. I may have escaped the hell of the facility, but this place looked just like another kind of hell.

I turned around to see from where I came, but all I saw was the crude end of the tunnel and more tundra. At least I didn’t appear to be just right out of the facility or something.

That relief would not last long. At the edge of the tunnel, I saw a blinking light cased in a metallic box.

I walked over to the box to take a look. A familiar voice piped up from behind me. Stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey.”

I whipped around to see Hugh standing in a black hoody and black sweatpants bracing against the cold wind with his long hair whipping in his face.

“What the hell did you do?” Hugh asked as he approached me. “You set off my alarm.”

“I don’t know. I just had to go.”

Hugh got right up in my face. He grabbed hold of my jaw and looked at my mouth judgingly. He gave it a wipe and produced a hand smeared with blood.

He wiped the blood off on his hoody and patted me on the back.

“Let’s get the hell out of here fast. You are so far from out of the woods man.”

He led me away from the tunnel and starting shaking his head.

You stupid vampires…