Loss Prevention

“Are you sure?” Sam, a security expert, asked.

“I counted three times. There are five bags of blood missing,” Jan answered. She was in charge of the Red Cross blood bank. Blood supplies were critically low and if word got out that blood was disappearing there would be hell to pay.

“Do you have any leads?”

“None, we’re clueless.”

Sam walked through the storage room. Nothing seemed out of place and there were no traces of a break in.

“I have a theory but I’ll have to investigate overnight,” he said. Jan nodded then handed him a set of keys.

That night Sam sat alone in the dark storage room. A few hours had passed when he heard the flapping of wings then a dark figure appeared. The vampire’s body was illuminated by the glow from the exit sign.

“Damned blood sucker,” Sam thought as he watched it drink the bag of blood. He hated them more than most monsters. He closed his eyes as visions of a vampire sucking his wife Mary dry as he watched helplessly flashed before him. His eyes opened in time to see the vampire turn back into a bat and disappear into the ventilation system, the bag grasped in its claws.

He met with Jan in the morning. “You’ve got a vampire.”

“Huh? They’re not real! Are they?”

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Sam answered. “The monster comes in through the ventilation system as a bat, transforms into a human to drink the blood then takes the evidence with him when he turns back into a bat and leaves the same way it got in.”

“How do we get rid of it?”

“I’ll have to do a stake out.”

Jan hated violence but agreed to his plan. “Just get rid of it.”

Sam set up in the storage room again. While he waited for darkness to fall, he used his pocketknife to sharpen a wooden stake. A few hours passed when he heard the bat again. After it transformed, he stepped out of the shadows and stabbed the vampire in the chest with the stake.

“That’s for Mary,” he hissed as he watched it writher and die.

The next morning he showed Jan the vampire’s dead body. She blanched at the sight of it.

“I can dispose of it for you,” he offered.

“Thank you,” she said as she handed him cash for his services. Jan gagged as she watched him put the decomposing body in his trunk then drive away.

When he got home, Sam dragged the vampire’s body into the kitchen. He started skinning it then cut the meat from the bones. He divided the meat and put it in storage bags. Eating the vampire wouldn’t bring his wife back, but it was better quelling his hunger than rotting in the ground.

© January 23, 2011