• I awoke to a cool breeze streaming through my window. Then all of a sudden my wrist started throbbing. It felt as if it was on fire! Terror-stricken I screamed. My mother ran up the stairs to my bedroom and found me on the floor screaming about the fire, begging for someone to extinguish the flames. She called for an ambulance and they rushed me to the emergency room.
    For three days all I could feel or think about was the fire, the burning in my veins. The doctors tried to cure it; they ran all the tests they could think of, but nothing helped and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Then on the third day my heart started racing. The heart monitor next to my bed was beeping at the speed of light trying to keep up with my pulsing heart. Then all of a sudden it stopped. My breathing, my heart; it all stopped. The monitor was buzzing like an irritating fly, the green lines of my non-existent heartbeat solid and flat. At first I thought I was dead. Then, suddenly, there was a dry ache at the back of my throat and an unquenchable thirst for blood came over me. I was horrified. Drinking blood, or even thinking about doing so was disgusting, and yet, that was all I could think of. That’s when I realised what I’d become. I wasn’t dead but if I wanted to spare my family the horror of who I now was I had to pretend to be dead. Although I was ‘thirsty’ I kept quiet, I didn’t breathe, blink or even move as hospital staff swarmed around my bed, trying to revive me. Thoughts raced through my mind, all the vampire movies that I’d seen, where they died painful, horrible deaths or were made outcasts because they had a craving for blood. Those actors were me, but I wasn’t in a game of make-believe, and so to avoid the movies becoming my life, I made myself a statue, a limp, human statue immune to all they tried. I looked and felt like a dead corpse and they believed me gone.
    When the doctor pronounced the time of my death and told my mother, she came to my bedside, took my cold hand in hers and cried. She cried for ages but I couldn’t be sure how long she was at my bedside for, because this new body of mine had no real sense of time passing by. I wanted to get up and comfort her and tell her everything was fine. I hated when she cried, we'd already lost my father to a car accident a year ago, now she thought she’d lost me to some strange disease that the doctors have no cure for. Yet through it all I stayed limp because if my mother knew that I was a vampire she’d suffer even more than if she thought I was dead. When the coroner came to take my body away for an autopsy my mother left to sign the necessary forms. Two male nurses moved me to a stretcher and wheeled me down the corridors of the hospital to the morgue. Once there, they left me on the stainless steel table, ready for the pathologist. I waited until they closed the door, then I got up and slipped through a window in the adjoining office, into the shadows of the night. They would think that someone had stolen my corpse and it would upset my mother but it was best this way. She would be shielded from the truth.
    As I slipped away I left behind everyone I knew, the place where I grew up, my entire childhood, and every memory I’d made during my suddenly short time here. Everything I hold near and dear was here, and I had to leave. What would become of me? Would I ever be able to return? I pondered these questions for a few hours while I looked for a place to hide for the day until the cover of night came again to hide my escape. Then I thought of new questions: how will I survive now? What will I do with my life now that I have all eternity ahead of me? Will my family ever get over losing me and my body; a body that they should have been able to bury, to say goodbye to? I slipped into a dark alley, prepared to rest for the journey ahead. I didn’t sleep for I found I couldn’t but I watched everything that passed. I watched the TV store across the way showing the afternoon news. I was the front page story that day:"A girl with a strange new disease died today. While some are concerned that it may be the start of a new plague, officials say that there have been no reports of any other cases. What is bewildering is that her body appears to have been stolen from the morgue last night, where doctors were planning an autopsy to try and determine the cause of the strange affliction. Is this one of the ways in which organs are provided for the black market? We’ll speak to the detective on the case after the break and our condolences go out to her family."
    It hit me suddenly; I was leaving my family and I was suddenly thrust into a world where I would no longer have friends and family to protect me. I think I was in shock, unable to cry for my loss so I sat quietly while questions without answers turned in my mind. As night came and I took my leave I knew this was for the best. I was leaving to protect everything I held dear, my family and friends and I couldn’t come back, not for at least a century or more, maybe not even then. It was strange to think of time in terms of centuries, but I knew that this was what I’d have to do from now on. Slipping out of the alley, I used the skills I’d learnt from an old friend during rebellious teenage years and hot-wired a deep burgundy Porsche. As I drove through the city, I knew I had a hard task ahead of me. I would find out who did this to me, why they chose me, and if I didn’t like the answer I would get revenge for my life, and for my family.