Free Rule of Vampire by Duncan McGeary

also couldn’t seem to see him if he didn’t want them to. It was a matter of moving away from where their eyes went and into the places where their eyes didn’t go. He could smell their blood, and some of them were sweet and some were sour and some were diseased, and others were just begging to have their blood sucked.
    He was quick and silent, and when he idly wished he could move a boulder to get a better look at Sandra Carpenter as she practiced her cheerleading moves in the nude, he tried it and found he was able to lift it out of the way with ease.
    At four in the morning, his hunger overwhelmed him, and when he stumbled across Jim Harker walking home from a bar, he grabbed the old man and dragged him into the bushes. When his victim began to shout, Stuart grabbed him by the throat and crushed his windpipe.
    As he sucked the dead man’s blood, Stuart regretted killing him so quickly. He’d gotten a hint of a taste of living blood, and it had been far tastier than what this corpse provided.
    Next time. There are going to be many next times, he thought with satisfaction.
    The next day, he slept in, ignoring his father’s reminder that he needed to find a summer job and not laze around the house all day. He did laze around the house all day, and when his father came home that afternoon and started to reprimand him for it, Stuart simply looked him in the eye and the human stuttered to stop and backed away.
    Stuart waited near the window, watching for the sunlight to fade. It seemed to take forever, but finally the rays coming through the window lost their sting. He got up, got dressed, and headed out the door before his parents could see him.
    He repeated many of the activities he’d engaged in the night before, but he was already losing interest in the girls his own age. He wanted someone more like that woman––that vampire––Jamie. Someone mature and sexy and willing. She’d led him on all evening there on the beach, and when she’d tried to slow him down, it had made him angry and he’d tried to force her.
    He admitted that to himself. As a vampire, he could see that he’d been a weak human. He had deserved to be taken down. He shuddered to think what would have happened if those two cops hadn’t come along. He’d be dead meat, just like old man Harker, whose dull eyes had become even duller as he died.
    Stuart was, if anything, hungrier than he’d been the night before, but again he saw it as a logistical problem. Killing citizens like Harker, who was a pharmacist as well as a drunk and pretty well-known around town, was going to be noticed.
    He wandered down to the beach where, during the summer, the homeless gathered like flies. He picked off an old bag lady who had wandered away from the others and sucked her dry. She tasted slightly better than Harker had, but only because she was still alive while he was draining her.
    As the blood flowed down his throat, Stuart remembered leaving Harker’s body looking almost untouched by the side of the road, and it occurred to him that in the movies, the dead sometimes came back. When he was done with the old lady, he idly twisted her head, tore it off, and threw it into the bushes. Let her try to come back from that!
    By the third night, Stuart was bored. And he was lonely.
    He visited his friends, one by one. He found them in bed and crawled in with them. Pete was properly freaked out and tried to smash his face in. He was the strongest guy Stuart knew, but he was like a little child compared to Stuart. Stuart left him dead, his lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling, a look of disgust on his face.
    Greg screamed like a little girl and almost slithered away, he was so small and wiry, but Stuart caught him crawling out the window and bit into his thigh, and found that he could drain a human from any part of their body. When he was finished, he picked Greg up and arranged him on the bed, glassy eyes staring in horror.
    Jimmy woke up and then just froze. When