Free Young Forever by Lola Pridemore

want it to be enjoyable. But now, we didn’t have a choice. We had to do something. Right then, a blood bank looked prefect.
    “Smart girl,” Aloiki said and headed towards the front door.
    “No,” I said, sensing that something was amiss, and held his arm. “Something is going on in there.”
    He glanced over the place and shrugged. “Something like vats of human blood to fill my veins. I’m going in even if I have to crash through the front door.”
    “Halt!” Gerta hissed at him. “Listen.”
    He stopped and we all listened. There was a noise coming from the building, something like an argument.
    Gerta sniffed and looked around. “You’re right. I smell them, too.”
    Oh, yes, indeed. There were other vampires around. Were they in the blood bank? Gerta and I stared at each other, each considering the situation and what we could do. It was a rare occasion when we ran across other vampires. There weren’t as many in the world as the stories would have you believe. Most times, we would pass each other cautiously, warily. Because we were usually competing for the same resources, sometimes we would be attacked. Other times, when we sensed hostility, we would attack. Vampires are loathsome creatures who will fight and kill at whim. Gerta , Aloiki and I weren’t as bad as most but we were always prepared to fight to the death, if it came to it.
    “They’re in there,” Aloiki said.
    “We must leave and make our plans before they sense us,” Gerta said.
    “No, we must stay and fight,” I said. “We have to do this, Gerta , we can’t hesitate. If they sense us, they will hunt us and if they hunt us, they might catch us off guard. If they do that—”
    “They will kill us,” Aloiki said. “Fair enough. What shall we do?”
    I thought about it. What should we do? It seemed like the perfect solution to our problem. We needed to eat. It was that simple. We were being too old-fashioned in our approach. This was the new way and we had to adapt to it.
    “We attack,” I said. “And then we get some of that blood.”
    Gerta and Aloiki nodded. I smiled at them, getting really excited about what was about to happen. We hadn’t been in a scuffle in a long time. The last time I’d even seen a vampire was in the seventies at a crazy party. He’d been a young one, only a few decades old. He wanted to be my friend then had the nerve to try and kill me, to take some of the gold Gerta insisted I carry around with me, like it was the 1800s and you could spend it like it was cash. Well, needless to say, I had to kill to him.
    “Oh, look what we have here,” someone said behind me.
    I turned to see the male vampire who was swinging a baseball bat, of all things. What was he going to do with that thing? Toss me a ball and ask me to throw it at him? But then, another one came out of the shadows and then another and another until there was a total of ten angry vampires. They were a nest, or as Aloiki called them, a colony.
    So, there were ten of them and three of us. Ten versus three. It wasn’t a fair fight at all. Ten of them? Three of us? I had to chuckle because this was going to be brutal; for them, I mean.
    We’d taken on fifty vampires on one occasion and demolished them all. They’d been a group of them living in an old abandoned house’s basement for years. We would have just ignored them, as we do sometimes, because we didn’t like to kill anyone if we didn’t have to. And the mess afterwards was usually too gruesome for words. They either burst into flames—if you pushed them out into the sun—or they dissolved into a mass of blood and innards, which stank. That would eventually turn to this black goopy mess that was impossible to get off a rug. But there was always some remnant of them left behind and it was either in the form of some ashes on the street or a mess on the rug.
    But those vampires, the ones who lived in the basement, had stalked us for several days. We knew they were doing it and chose