A penny drop is where you hang from a bar upside down by your knees, and swing back and forth, and when your face is parallel to the ground you release your legs and fall and the momentum helps you land on your feet.

  I’ve done it a bunch of times, and I’m about 50/50 with the landing. Sometimes I land on my feet. Sometimes I stumble a little. But the monkey bars are over playground sand, so falling doesn’t hurt.

  Unless there is broken glass buried in the sand.

  So there I am, swinging, and a few of the neighborhood kids are cheering me on, and when I stretch out my legs and drop I know that I’m not going to stick the landing, and instead fall onto my knees, and will also need to hold out my hands so I don’t face-plant.

  Then, just when the tips of my toes touch the ground, I see it. The green, pointy tip sticking out of the sand, glinting in the noonday sunbeams.

  A broken beer bottle.

  And my feet hit, and I pitch forward like I thought, and fall on my knees like I thought, and then my palms are stretching out and in my head I’m thinking that I need to make sure I don’t land on that glass but another weird part of me kind of wants to land on the glass. I know that sounds strange, and it’s really strange if you know me and you know I’m really sensitive to pain. How much of life is pain avoidance? A lot. It’s probably almost up there with the time we spend sleeping and the time we spend waiting.

  So maybe I was trying to avoid the glass, but maybe I wasn’t, and it went into my palm DEEP.

  I didn’t even feel it at first. I held my hand up to examine the damage, and the large triangle of glass didn’t go all the way through, but it was stuck in my palm and got in between my hand bones and I had a little tent of skin on the back of my hand where the glass point was pressing but didn’t break through.

  The weird thing was; no blood.

  I wasn’t religious or anything, but my parents took me to church on Christmas and Easter, and I remember the big statue of Jesus Christ with his feet and hands nailed to the cross, and he had blood coming out of the wounds. But all I could see on my palm was clumped sand and the sparkly glass and no blood at all.

  Why wasn’t I bleeding? It was bizarre.

  Then the pain came, hard and fast and sharp and venomous and worse than a hundred bee stings all in the same place, and without even thinking about it I reached for the glass shard and tugged it out.

  That’s when the blood came, quick and hot.

  It squirted out of my palm. An actual squirt, like having a mouthful of red Kool-Aid and spitting it out through pursed lips.

  One of the playground kids started to scream, and then things got spinny. The world rocked up and down, all teeter-totter, and my stomach twisted and curled and I couldn’t breathe and at the same time I was panting dog-like.

  The blood wouldn’t stop. It was gushing out. Not just gushing, but fizzing like a dropped can of soda.

  I only lived a block away from the playground, and I distinctly remember walking home, dizzy, my mouth very dry. Every few steps I would look behind me and see the trail of spilled blood following me like a red bicycle track. Sometimes it would be liquid coming out, but I will swear to this day that other times my blood was dust, and the wind blew it away.

  When I walked into the house my parents rushed me to the ER and they used a water irrigation gun to clean all the sand out of the wound, then closed it with fifteen stitches. But I didn’t get a transfusion. Even though I told the doctor that I lost gallons of blood, he ignored me and wouldn’t replenish my blood supply.

  That night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about how much blood I must have shed, thinking about how to replace it all. I drank a whole thing of orange juice, but it couldn’t get the dryness out of my mouth. In fact, I felt dry all over. My skin. My bones. My organs. Every single cell in my body was parched. Desiccated.

  When I complained, my mother told me to drink more water.

  My father said it was all in my head.

  But as I tried to get on with my life, I grew weaker and weaker. I had trouble concentrating. Gym used to be my favorite class at school, but since the incident I couldn’t keep up with the other kids. I began to fall asleep in public, and have weird dreams about swimming in rivers of blood. Gargling it. Drinking it.

  I needed to replenish my blood supply. To stop my body from drying up and blowing away in the wind like dust.

  I started with bugs. It helped my stamina a little bit, but bugs didn’t have much blood in them. Crunchy bugs, like beetles and flies and spiders, didn’t help with the dryness. They tasted bad, and I had to chew them for an extra-long time to make sure they were really dead so they didn’t crawl through my viscera and bite my organs.

  Plumper bugs, like caterpillars, worms, and especially leeches and ticks after they’d gorged themselves, pepped me up. They didn’t taste very good, but they were juicy, and they refilled the fluid in my dry, dry cells.

  Yeah, I know it’s disgusting. But have you ever thought about the lengths you’d go through to stay alive? What are you willing to endure to see tomorrow? What atrocities would you commit? What taboos would you break?

  I don’t know why the glass in my hand was the catalyst for my dehydration condition. If I had to guess, I’d say I lost so much blood that my body finally recognized its own limitations. I was always at risk for drying up. In a way, I was lucky that this playground trauma made me aware of my problem.

  Back in those days, all the kids used to tell gross-out stories during recess. Like the infamous dead baby jokes. There’s one that has always stuck with me.

  Q: What’s grosser than a pile of fifty dead babies?

  A: A live baby, trying to eat its way out of the middle.

  I’ve never eaten a baby. I’ve never eaten anyone. That’s Flesh’s thing, not mine.

  But I will tell you about the first time I sucked a person’s blood.

  After my bug phase, I moved on to animals. My parents kept buying me pets, and these pets would have “accidents” and I’d drink their blood. I’ll spare you the details because a lot of people are really squeamish about animals dying, even though they stuff themselves with fast food and wear leather shoes and have feather pillows and use lambskin condoms and wash with soap, which contains glycerin, which is made from animal fat.

  But I’m getting off topic.

  After my pets kept dying, I think it was sometime after Fido 3 or Whiskers 7, my parents caught on to what I was doing and started taking me to lots of doctors who didn’t know shit about what my real problem was.

  I learned to play along, pretend I was getting better, but all the while my insides were drying out. What would you do?

  My pet supply dried up. So I began to hunt humans.

  It started about two years after I discovered my problem. I was walking to school, like I’d done hundreds of times before, and I noticed something. A neighbor of mine was putting his recycle bins at the end of his driveway for collection, and like all good zombie robot citizens he’d separated the glass from the paper and the plastic.

  His glass was mostly beer bottles. Not unusual, especially in my neighborhood.

  But most beer bottles were made of clear glass, or brown glass.

  This guy had all green bottles.

  Some brand from Europe, and I wouldn’t have thought much of it, except I knew who lived at the house.

  A kid from school. A year younger than me. Small for his age. Name was Fritz.

  See, I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten hurt at that playground. Over the years, other kids had also cut themselves on buried glass.

  Green glass.

  So I became a private eye/ninja/spy who began to tail Fritz. I wore a thrift shop trench coat with deep pockets where I hid a notepad and binoculars and a disposable camera and a paperback book, because if you’re just standing around you’re suspicious, but if you have a book you’re just reading outdoors.

  I tailed Fritz during the day. At night I’d sometimes sneak out of my room and hang out in his backyard to see if he snuck out.

  This went on for a month. A bad month for me, because I was getting so dry I had crust coming out of my eyes, and my scalp was flaking off in little white scales. It was winter, so there were no bugs. I was banned from the local pet shop. I had to resort to dumpster diving at the local butcher, drinking the meat juice from the bottom of garbage bags.

  If you’re curious, or even if you’re not, the juice in steak isn’t blood. It’s myoglobin, which transports oxygen to the muscles. It worked okay to keep my organs from shriveling up, but I needed something more substantial.

  Which I eventually got.

  I’d arrived at Fritz’s house early on recycle day, and saw him taking four beer bottles out of the bin.

  He brought them into the park, to the hill where a lot of kids went sledding.

  Fritz broke the bottles against the street curb, and shoved the largest shards in the snow at the bottom of the sledding hill.

  I took pictures of him burying the glass.

  Then I went to a 1-hour-photo place (remember those?), and mailed a picture to his house, along with a note to meet me at the library at 2 P.M. on Saturday.

  Which he did.

  END FLASHBACK

  Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off mid-flashback. I know it’s rude.

  But it was just about snack time, and Blood needs blood…

  PHIN

  I don’t get rattled by much.

  When I was younger, I did. Bad stuff burned into my head like a cattle brand, and the scars wouldn’t fade. But as I aged, and life kicked my ass more and more, it took more and more to get me to react.

  I still feel things. There’s a guy I know, named Tequila, who doesn’t experience emotion the way that others do. If I had to bet on it, he probably lacks an amygdala—a peanut-sized mass in the temporal lobe that processes fear. He’s the type of guy who could free solo a cliff face while people were shooting at him and the mountain was on fire, and his blank expression would never change.

  I’m not like that. When I experience tragedy, or horror, or disgust, my neurons fire like they are supposed to. But mostly I can keep my responses in check.

  Strangely, I’ve become worse at this since having Sam. The trade-off is that I laugh more often, smile more often, and feel like I’m connected, rather than the disconnection I often experienced in my past.

  But once upon a time, I was the baddest motherfucker in the room. Nerves of tungsten, heart of titanium, fists of wrought iron.

  Okay, that was cringe. But I was tough.

  Looking at Mr. Sigmund Manx, the lone occupant of Room 455 in the Long-Term Care Ward, and my badassery fled with its tail between its legs.

  To call the man old would be like calling a raisin ripe. This guy had so many wrinkles he could have been Cleopatra’s babysitter.

  Crisscrossing over the wrinkles on his bald head, face, and neck, were deep scratch marks, scabbed over.

  SIB. Self-injurious behavior.

  I checked his hands, and saw his wrists had been tethered to the bed rails.

  His hospital gown clung to his frail body, which looked like a skeleton under a sheet. Fat, bulbous compression stockings covered his legs from toes to groin, and they twitched and shook in spasms. His skin was beyond pale, almost bluish. Deep-set, rheumy eyes stared at me with obvious fear, though he was the one whose appearance would freak out just about anyone, me included.

  He mewled, like a hurt kitten, as spit flecked his liver-colored lips and ran down his chin.

  This dude was a goddamn zombie. The closest thing to the living dead I’d ever seen.

  And he smelled dead as well. A reek of shit and rot.

  A compassionate society would put a pillow over this guy’s head and take away his suffering.

  “Help me.” His voice sounded like tearing tissue paper. “Please help me.”

  I tried to keep my face relaxed and my voice even so I didn’t register any disgust or pity or fright.

  “My name is Phin.”

  “They’re sucking my blood. Sucking me dry.”

  Apparently I didn’t need to bring up the topic myself. “Who is, Mr. Manx?”

  “You need to untie my hands.”

  “Who is sucking your blood?”

  “Please help me. Why won’t anyone help me? Please help.”

  “Who is sucking your blood, Mr. Manx?”

  “Thirsty. So thirsty.”

  I noted a plastic cup on his bedside table, a straw sticking out of a liquid that looked like water but seemed thicker. I brought it to his mouth, and Mr. Manx screamed with the force of a tire blowout.

  “NOT ME, YOU FOOL! THEM! THEY’RE THIRSTY!”

  The outburst shook me so much I almost dropped the cup. I managed to keep my composure, place it back on the table, and seriously considered leaving.

  Did I really want to sit and chat with this guy?

  “I’m here to help you,” I lied. “Tell me about the Destiny Drac.”

  “The Destiny Drac. Bloodsucking bim. Blood. After my blood. Blood is thirsty for blood.”

  So unlike the nurses, this person knew the vampire’s preferred nickname. “Blood. Tell me about Blood.”

  He nodded, the thin skin on his face stretching. “Sucking my blood. Draining the life out of an old man. I’m sick. Did you know I’m sick?”

  I tried to remember the alphabet soup. “You have APS.”

  “My blood won’t clot. It’s like a faucet. They use a powder, so I scab up. But the scabs don’t last. The Destiny Drac. I know. I know.”

  “You know who the Destiny Drac is?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I know. I know who—”

  Then his whole body began to shake, and his spittle sprayed me and would have hit my mouth if I hadn’t been wearing a mask. I watched the left side of his face droop down, like it was melting, and one of the machines next to his bed began to beep out an alarm.

  I looked around for someone to alert. When I rolled into the hallway, no one seemed in a hurry to rush to Mr. Manx’s aid. I returned to him, watched him stroke out, watched him flail and flop the right side of his body, one eye locking on mine, the other pointing up to the ceiling, perhaps to silently accuse an uncaring God.

  It took several minutes for a nurse to arrive, unhurried, business as usual. A big-boned, dour brunette in red scrubs and latex gloves, name badge RHONDA. She didn’t even ask me to stand aside as she detached his IV bag and injected something into his arm catheter.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “Transient ischemic attack. He has these mini strokes a few times a week. You a relative?”

  “A friend.”

  She hooked his IV back up and perfunctorily wiped some drool off his chin with a towel. “Mr. Manx don’t have many friends.”

  “He was telling me about the Destiny Drac.”

  “I bet he was. That’s one of his favorite topics.”

  Mr. Manx’s good eyelid fluttered. “Iting eee! Iting eee!”

  Biting me? Is that what he was trying to say? Who’s biting him?

  Rhonda, the RN?

  “Every hospital has a boogeyman,” Rhonda spread her large hands, big enough to pop a dislocated shoulder back into place. “Ghosts who steal souls. Demons who possess the sick. Cannibals who raid the morgue like it’s a dorm hall fridge.”

  “Vampires?” I asked.

  Rhonda gave me as cynical a stare as I’d ever received. “You’re one of the people who was at that house. With those killers.”

  I nodded.

  “Had a couple of bites taken out of you, I heard.”

  “My skin graft surgery is tomorrow.”

  Rhonda made a face. “Human mouth is filthy. Full of bacteria. Worse than a trash can. You think a dog bite is bad, but the bite that causes the most infections is human. I’m surprised kissing doesn’t kill people.”

  She raised Mr. Manx’s head and adjusted his pillow. He appeared distressed, desperately trying to speak.

  “So, the Destiny Drac?” I asked again.

  “I’m guessing it’s Goth kids, taking their role-playing games too seriously. Been gossip about the Drac for years in this town. But it never leads anywhere. Could be a shared delusional disorder. Like St. Vitus’ Dance.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It was a mass psychogenic illness that killed people in medieval times. People started dancing, and they danced for days until they died. First it was one person. Then more and more joined them. And nothing could get them to stop.”

  “Some sort of disease?”

  “Some sort of mental disease. Never found any infectious agent. More like a viral video. Or a meme. Spread from person to person, until hundreds were infected by it. The Destiny Drac exists because the town of Destiny thinks there’s a Drac. The idea feeds itself and spreads around. You ever hear of folie à deux?”

  “No.”

  “One person has some delusion, like he’s got bugs crawling under his skin—”

  “UGS!” Mr. Manx bellowed out.

  Rhonda patted his bald head. “Shush, now. So one person believes they got bugs, or fibers embedded in their skin. You know Morgellons disease? People think aliens or the government or Big Tech is planting microchips or trackers or bits of string and rocks into people? I’m hearing it a lot now, from the anti-vaxxers. It starts with one person thinking it, then another thinks they have it. They bolster each other, you know? Confirm each other’s fears, making them worse. Next thing you know, a whole community thinks lizard people are running the Democratic party. Happens all the time.”

  “Lizard people?”

  “Shared delusion. Cults. Religions. Sports teams.”

  “Sports teams?” It may have been all the painkillers I was on, but this RN was one of the most interesting characters I’d ever met.

  “It’s all tribalism. It’s genetic. Groups of people that have all of these rituals and traditions in their culture and tribe, and they hate those in other tribes.”

  I held up my hands. “Not that I’m not enjoying this conversation, but how does this relate to the Destiny Drac?”