“What’s worse than being kidnapped, tortured, abused, ignored, dissected, and thrown away like trash? Remembering it, over and over again.” ~ Zara

September 2005
They were all dead in less time than it took for the commercial break. One minute, Zara and her family were watching a back-to-school special, and the next, the girl was the only one left alive. The monsters didn’t break down the door with a loud crash or a bang. They were as silent as shadows, and they struck so fast that no sound of warning came from their victims.
The shock of the murders was so profound Zara didn’t even fight back as she was taken from her home. A hand clamped down over her mouth as she stared wide-eyed at the massacre of her family. It was the last time she would ever see them. The last time she would ever step foot in her childhood home. And from that moment on, she would never feel safe again.
She was loaded into a waiting van and then unceremoniously knocked unconscious by a blow she never saw coming. The next time she opened her eyes, she was in a locked room, surrounded by four brick walls with no windows and a steel door. The only thing in the room was a small cot pushed up against one of the bare walls. Zara stood and winced as her body groaned in protest at the movement. She ached everywhere, as though she’d been beaten with a baseball bat. She imagined her captors were none too gentle with her while she’d been unconscious.
She moved slowly to the cot and eased her battered body onto its surface. The room wasn’t cold, but she shivered nonetheless. Her mind was trying to comprehend what she’d witnessed. She knew she must be having a nightmare. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt very, very real.
She closed her eyes as images of the monsters who’d broken into her house filled her head. Zara hadn’t been able to process it at the time, but now she was beginning to work out what she’d seen. They’d moved with inhuman speed. Their mouths were large, gaping black holes filled with sharp teeth. But prominent among them were huge, pointed incisors, like twin sets of knives, top and bottom, slicing and rending her parents’ flesh. They’d ripped into her mom and dad’s necks as easily as she might bite into a soft piece of bread. But they hadn’t stopped there. The monsters had drunk her parents’ blood like it was a fresh glass of iced tea.
“Not possible,” Zara muttered under her breath. What her imagination was trying to conceive … vampires … just wasn’t possible in the real world. Vampires were just monsters in books and movies. They weren’t real. They couldn’t be real. And yet Zara couldn’t deny what she’d witnessed with her own eyes.
Maybe she was just going into shock. Maybe what she’d really seen was simply too much for her mind, so it was making up some scenario that would keep the hellish scene from being real to her. After all, if vampires didn’t exist then there was no way her parents had been killed by them, and therefore, this really was just a horrific nightmare.
Zara’s eyes began to fill with tears, and her sight became blurry as she pinched her arm so hard she nearly cried out. It was no nightmare. It was real. The sobs wracked her body as she pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She buried her face between them and wept for her parents and the life she’d lost.