Feelin' that high [Wolfram]

[Vixen (DELETED 11815)]

”Ahhhhhhhh….."
Vixen’s head tilted back. Ecstasy. Nothing quite like the high.

A dirty syringe fell from the female's hand. Hitting the ground with a clang. The needle at the end bent from the impact of entering the females skin with such force. Elastic wrapped around the woman’s arm just above the gap between the elbow - separating the upper and lower arm. Blonde hair, dirty and unwashed fell over the woman’s features mossy green eyes lucid as she began to hallucinate the world around her.

She couldn’t remember how she got to this stage. She was practically living in the crack den now. Using dirty syringes over and over - no cleanliness, no hygiene. She was a street rat. She had no home. This was her home. She knew some of the people here. They were like her, homeless - needing the next fix. Otherwise the shakes would take over and she would become extremely agitated and angry -- often aggressive, lashing out at the other homeless.

There was no support network in place for people like her - and it was because of this people like herself would go missing. She had seen the people she had known throughout her life be plucked from this place and never to appear - sometimes she would see them - dead, or on posters littering street walls - upset parents looking for their lost child. There had been a time she saw one of the people who were a regular user here - taken. Only to appear a few nights later. They were paler - they looked healthier - like they had been given a second shot of life. Lucky bastards.

Vixen was laying on a broken up cardboard box. The edges of the box moist from the leak in the roof. The damp seeped in sometimes from the streets outside.

“Viiiii.”
”Emily.”
“Can you see it?”
”What?”
“It’s coming for me. The teeth are coming.”
”Shut the **** up.”

Vixen turned her head - her hand lazily coming to her head where she brushed her blonde hair from her view. So her emerald hues looked upon her friend. Emily. She was a street rat just like herself, they had been here as long as each other - their beds of newspaper and cardboard next to each other. They shared everything from their drugs to their toilet paper. What little of it they had, that is.

“I’m serious.”
”You’re high.”
“So?”
”You see weird **** when you’re high. That’s the point of it.”
“Oh.”
”Sleep it off Em.”

The brunette gurgled, and turned over automatically listening to Vixen. She was snoring moments later. Vixen turned herself over so her back was to the floor as she stared up at the ceiling - tracing the mold on the ceiling. This wasn’t a life to have. She had made such a mess of it. Since running away from Texas six years ago, she's never really slept in a good bed. Living off the streets until she came here. Introduced to drugs at a young age, cigarettes - anything she could get her hands on to give her an escape. At this point she’d welcome death. She regretted every bit of her life.

[Leon W Heart (DELETED 11800)]

Leon gripped the crown of his shoulder and breathed short, sharp breaths through his teeth. Blood squeezed out between the gaps of his fingers and dripped down his wrist and forearm as a discernible, hot liquid. It stained the sleeve of his blue cotton shirt, creating dark swelling shadows that looked like gathering storms as an equally terrifying squall of pain, anger, and anxiety manifested at the core of him. He was angry at himself, mostly. He had assumed they were alone right up until the man in dark clothing had yelled at him. The next thing he knew, his arm felt like it was on fire and he ran on instinct; his feet taking him as far away from that place as they could. When he came to a stop, darting into the small opening between two buildings, Leon didn’t recognise where he was.

With his back pressed against the brickwork, he dared himself to look at the source of the pain. He brought his hand away, slowly, but returned a firm pressure when a wave of blood rushed out beneath his palm. He couldn’t get a good look at the damage, but assumed that the bullet must have passed through the top of his shoulder, creating a gnarly trench. Presumably, the feeling of something foreign under his skin was pretty universal, so even if he’d never known what it was like to have a bullet stuck inside, he could determine that it would be as uncomfortable as a getting a splinter the size of a his own thumb. His head rolled back against the wall; the bricks rubbing at the base of his skull was as comforting as a cold compress. That didn’t mean he was close to relaxing, however.

“Oh, that’s probably not good,” he whispered to himself.

Leon had never been shot before. Hell, the worst he had had to deal with was having his leg broken in a car accident. With that being said, he had found himself experiencing more and more of the types of things that he’d never believed were possible after he’d come to this city. He felt like he was going insane. He was certainly in the right age bracket to have that mid-life crisis, but he was certain that such life events present themselves in the form of lavish purchases: flashy cars, designer watches, and maybe even a single night with a professional escort. These were extravagant eccentricities, but they weren’t particularly dangerous or too extreme. Instead, he was drinking the blood of other people and being shot at while doing so...

Perhaps the worst part of this scenario was how his stomach twisted with hunger pangs and he felt the whole-body shiver of a blood sugar crash. His body compelled him to feed and the sensation clashed so powerfully against his moral outrage and disgust that stumbled forward lightheaded and nauseated. Once again, Leon didn’t know where his feet were carrying him and barely acknowledged the feeling of movement until his shoulder collided with that of a woman. He barely stuttered awake in time as she leered at him, the look on her face suggestive of having suffered some great, irrepreprable insult. Idly, he looked to his tan leather shoes to see if he had stepped on her pet chihuahua, but there was nothing. It was only when he was looking back at her face - at those snake-like green eyes bound by orange skin and bleached hair - that she shoved at his chest with a flat palm.

“Hey, you jerk!” she spat.

Leon only stepped back to give her space and avoid any further physical contact.

“You only get to touch it when you pay for it.”

“I’m… sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was go--”

“Obviously,” she snarled back at him.

Her arms crossed beneath the bust line, drawing attention to the visibility of her neon pink bra behind the loose white cotton dress. The taut, smooth skin was wrapped fondly over a body of feminine idealism, implying that she was in her early twenties. As traditionally attractive as she might have been, though, Leon’s aquamarine gaze was directed at her throat. With each breath and each word, the muscles there twitched and danced - a lure on the end of a hook that encouraged the pike to swim in for a closer look. His pupils tightened to the size of pin pricks, but his focus was interrupted when he heard her scream and saw her dabbing at her own skin.

“Oh my god, I’m bleeding!” she yelped, smearing the red across the skin of her collar bones.

Despite her frantic search, she didn’t find a wound. She looked at him next, her own eyes widening when she saw the splash of blood down his left arm.

“Oh my god, it’s you! You’re bleeding,” she squealed. “Eww! I mean, are you ok?”

“I’m… fine,” Leon managed, but the attention was too much for him to bear. He backed away as he spoke. “I’ve… gotta… go.”

Only, Leon didn’t know where to go. He had never been to this side of town and couldn’t remember how to get back. With all that being said, he could quickly discern that he had stumbled into the poorer parts of the city and, generally, the lower economic zones were rife with crime. Surely, that meant he could also benefit from a lack of police presence. He could find a place to rest, lick his wounds, and maybe replenish his blood supply without interference. Feeding from the drug-addled homeless was certainly going to be a lot easier pickings…

[Vixen (DELETED 11815)]

The Next night ;

Vixen had a routine - she would find whatever she could and she would use, snort it - inject it. Whatever she could find anything to take the feeling that was life. She was walking the corridors of the crack den. Fingers caressing the walls, the wallpaper that was falling off the walls practically - damp covered the walls in their black ivy kind of way. She blinked a few times. As she tilted her head backwards to look at the ceiling.

A few men looked at her as she went past. There were a few huddled together in hushed tones whispering amongst themselves a small fire in a metal bin as she rubbed their hands together. Fingerless gloves rubbing against each other. A friction that would go straight through her. They all stopped and turned their haunting eyes to look at Vixen.

“Yo.. Vi.. you got any.. Yanno. Good stuff?”

The blonde shook her head slowly. She had nothing. Her skin was itching from the withdrawals. The beads of sweat slowly trickling down her face. Her dry, chapped lips were being gnawed upon by her teeth as her whole body shook.

”N-N-N..O o..” The words erupted from her stuttering lips as she folded her arms over her chest. She was wearing a grey tank top. A large hole over the bottom of the top, revealing the white flesh beneath. Vixen was thin, lack of nutrition in her system. She dumpster dived whenever she could and she would eat the scraps that she could find there.

She turned and began to head back into the general direction of where Emily was. The woman was sleeping when she left - they had their own little corner of cardboard and newspaper for a bed and they had been inseparable since finding each other here. Both had a lot of potential before they slunk to the lives of homeless. Escaping their former lives - to find something better, only be at rock bottom with no way of climbing back up.

It was then she found a respectable looking man walking through the corridor. He looked like he was looking for something - she tilted her head to the side in pure curiosity. She moved toward him. Knocking into him. She muttered an apology before pushing past him and walked on.

What the man didn’t know is that she had nabbed the his wallet.

[Leon W Heart (DELETED 11800)]

As it turned out, there were many dark, damp little holes in the Gangland Slums that were perfect hideouts for his kind. He was too well-dressed to hide amongst the homeless, trick-turners, and space-walkers; his sky-blue attire was ineffective camouflage against the grim tones of poverty. Leon had taken refuge in a nearby warehouse in order to heal and wait out the day’s harmful rays of sunlight. It had remained abandoned despite the value of goods it housed; a slip of his foot on the tarpe as he climbed a crate up into a small nook below the roof had revealed its contents. Prior to his encounters in Harper Rock, Leon had been an English Language professor at the Oxford University in the United Kingdom and had only seen a gun behind the protective wall of screen glass. So it came as a rather alarming surprise to find that that particular crate - and possibly the other twenty or so identical crates that were in the room - were rammed with a range of assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, and grenades. The old man didn’t know it, but he managed to find a nook in the best guarded building in the area.

Night passed into day and returned to night without incident. His waking eyes, still bleary with sleep, were first to report that his injury had healed, though he still felt the same thronging, burning pain in his arm. It seemed that while his body had healed - with his blood having vaporised from this world - his mind remembered it all with agonising clarity. Slowly, he made his way down from his perch; his ears piqued for any kind of movement beyond those doors. It was unlikely that he would be able to contend with a gang of armed men when he couldn’t tackle a single one in an alleyway. With bated breath, Leon approached the door and trained his hearing to the steady thump of a heartbeat. As he drew closer, the drum-beat thumping was joined by the melodic inhale and exhale of oxygen. The sounds were strong enough for the Vampire to pinpoint the Human’s location and quickly devise an exit strategy.

With a tense jaw, Leon lightly rapped on the door to get the Human’s attention. As expected, the man moved to grab the doorknob, to yank it open and investigate. It was then that Leon pushed his body weight into the door in one fast movement, launching 95 kg of wood and muscle into the man’s face. He hit the floor with a sour smack, but Leon didn’t wait around to acknowledge his condition; he stepped over the man and moved down the corridor as lithe and quick as a midday shadow. The thunder of footsteps, heartbeats, and voices drowned out the sound and sensation of his own movements and before he knew it, he was being lured to the vibrations of a lone mortal. It drew him to the doorway of the wastrel’s boudoir; his figure silhouetted but for the cold glimmer of his eyes that shone like a wolf’s. Incidentally, she was curled on the soiled mattress as prone and vulnerable as a sleeping rabbit. The beast inside him howled out, demanded to be fed, and so he descended on her in a snap; with teeth and claws and inhuman strength, he painted the walls red with her tainted blood.