Magical PR 101

Chapter 3

Twenty-eight. I counted twenty-eight bodies. Twenty-eight very naked, very possibly dead bodies.

The bodies were lined up in four neat rows of seven, each lying prostrate on identical rectangular metal slabs. Almost the entirety of their heads were covered with medical electrodes, connected to a maze of wires and cables that were so entangled I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. From the neck down, however, their smooth, pallid skin was exposed for all the world to see. Or at least for Ross and me to see. I resisted the urge to cover my eyes with my hands. It had been a while since I’d seen a naked man.

"Are they vampires?" I asked.

"We're not sure."

"Are they dead?" Probably the more pertinent question.

"We're not sure," Ross repeated.

“You're not sure??? Haven’t you checked?”

Ross shot me a dirty look. “Watch this,” he said, and promptly fell over backwards, his head hitting the floor with a loud bump.

“Ross? You alright there?” I asked, peering over at him. His eyelids were closed and he lay perfectly still – no muscle dared twitch and no intake of breath racked his chest. Come to think of it, he did look a bit like a corpse, especially with that ghostly pale skin of his.

Silence.

“Um. Ross? You made your point. You can get up now.”

Silence again.

“Ha. Ha. Seriously, dying on the inside. Now can you get up and explain to me what the hell is going on in here?”

He still didn’t budge.

I leaned over him, looking for even the slightest hint of movement to betray him. Worried now, I nudged him gently with the toe of my shoe. Still nothing.

So I took the next best course of action. I kicked him in the shins. Hard.

Ross grabbed my ankle, and I hopped around on one foot, trying to maintain my balance. “That tickles,” he complained.

Ugh. Vamps.

“Okay, now that you’ve had your amusement at my expense, can you please help me understand what’s going on? Tell me I’m not looking at a murder scene,” I begged.

"Temper, temper, cara mio. No, not a murder scene. A PR crisis," Ross said, as if that explained everything.

"One does not necessarily rule out the other," I retorted. Talking to this man was like pulling teeth.

"What was it you said? Ah, yes. Seriously, dying on the inside," Ross threw my words back at me.

For a man who was likely several centuries my senior, he was behaving like an immature asshole. "You know what I think? I think you're procrastinating. Delaying the inevitable. Don't think I won't bill you for every second you keep me here. The sooner you come clean, the sooner we figure out how to deal with this mess."

Ross sobered at that,  rubbing his temples with his fingers, his eyes squeezed tight. When he looked at me again, he suddenly seemed much, much older, as if stress had finally managed to supercede his vampiric blood. 

"It's the Turn," he said at last. "It's not working right."

"Not working right, how?"

Ross sighed. "I started hearing rumors as long as eight months ago, but we didn't have our first incident until four months back. Mark Banner, age twenty-eight, Vampire Candiate #2,791. Healthy as a horse. My brother Gian was the source of the blood transfusion and I oversaw the procedure myself." Ross walked over to one of the bodies. "Here's Mark now."

"So what happened to him?"

"Everything was proceeding as usual. We had him hooked up to the digital monitor, ECG and EEG waves were dropping at a normal rate, the metamorphosis of his skeleton and musculature was on track...Then it all went to shit. His body temperature plunged to 78.5 degrees - that's a full thirty degrees lower than the average internal temperature for a vampire. And he started to wake up from his induced coma. We tried to sedate him with anesthesia, but it had no effect whatsoever. He actually sat up on the operating table, let out a couple of screams, and started vomiting up blood. Puked his guts up for a solid minute, and then, wham! Went unconscious."

"And he's been like this ever since?"

"Well, we cleaned him up a bit, but yes. No change since four months ago."

"What about Gian?"

Ross swatted the air. "Took the usual month to recuperate, but he's fine."

"What about all the others? Same thing happen to them?"

"Well, I can't say for sure for all of them, since--" Ross paused, grabbing a nearby clipboard, "...candidates # 1,045, 2,032 and 2,033 are imports from other facilities. But for the rest, repeat performances of Mr. Banner, here."

 "Are you sure they're not all dead?" I prodded. 

He shook his head. "Unfortunately, no, since medicine hasn't yet found a way to register vampiric vital signs. But none of the bodies have shown any signs of decay, so that's a positive sign."

"So let me get this straight. You watched Mr. Banner undergo a highly problematic medical procedure that unquestionably resulted in a tremendous amount of pain, if not irreparable damage and possibly death - and you continued to perform the procedure an additional twenty-seven times?"

Ross winced. "It sounds really bad when you put it that way."

I threw my hands up. "Mr. Rossi, the first rule of crisis communications they teach us at school is that as soon as you're aware of something going wrong, stop all activity immediately."

"Corrie, you do realize that death is not unheard of when undergoing The Turn. How were we to know Mark's death wasn't a fluke? Besides, we inform all our candidates that this is a high risk medical procedure and that the success rate is only eighty percent. They voluntarily sign a waiver that absolves us from liability for personal injury or death."

"The waiver might  hold up in a court of law, but twenty-eight comatose victims isn't going to endear you to the public."

Ross grimaced. "It's actually eighty-four victims. Some of the patients are under surveillance in other facilities."

"Hell, you'll be lucky if they don't try to burn you at the stake like they did back in the 1600s."

"Those were witches, Corrie."

"Whatever! The point is, you're screwed."

Suddenly I was very aware of Ross looming over me. He stroked a long, white finger down my cheek and then jerked my chin up sharply so that I was forced to look directly into the immeasurable abyss that were his eyes. He smiled wide, his incisors distending below his lips, the Rossi rose once again easily visible on his left fang. "You will fix this, Corrie," he said, somehow without moving his lips.

The right palm of my hand started to itch.