Girl Talk

Countess grabbed the hot cup set before her, excitement glowing in her eyes. She hadn’t had anything to drink in hours and she was starving. It smelled delicious and before she knew what she was doing she had sunk her fangs into the side of the Styrofoam cup and taken a large gulp of the steaming fluid inside.

“Blah!” She spit out the word and the coffee simultaneously. Her face was contorted in a swirl of shock and revulsion. She hadn’t realized it, but as she had dragged the cup of coffee away from her face it had leaked onto her exposed décolletage from the punctures that she had made when she had bitten into it. Not only had she put that nasty fluid into her mouth, now she was wearing it as well.

“I told you vampires said blah,” Rah snickered to Essea. The cyborg gave a slight nod to the beastion and sipped her own cup of java. Rah’s sensitive nose could smell that Essea’s drink was laced with chemical components that probably tasted worse than what Countess had just sipped... .ah... .sucked?

Sarahtaur trotted over to the vampire, a towel draped over her shoulder. She handed the cloth to the pale girl who began wiping off immediately. The centaur scolded her gently, “I told you, Tess, you have to tell the machine what universe you are from or what your dietary needs are. Otherwise, you just get straight coffee.”

Countess sighed, “How am I supposed to know what universe I’m from? I’m a bloodrista, not a rocket scientist.”

Crowe entered the room as Countess was speaking. She walked with a purpose, simultaneously scanning the room for danger and nodding a hello to the other girls. Countess noted that everyone was there now except Second Sarah. She watched as the little psychopath, Crowe, stepped up before the enormous Bucky Starrs Coffee machine. Her lip twitched as she stared at it. “Coffee,” she demanded with a snarl. The machine almost reacted as if it was afraid of her and began brewing before she had even ordered. Countess watched the girl snatch the drink away with a satisfied smirk on her face. Crowe downed the entire contents of the cup in one long gulp. She gave a satisfied belch and sneered at the coffee maker. It produced another cup, and Countess swore she saw it give a little shiver as Crowe took her new brew from the machine.

Countess liked the coffee lounge. It was full of comfortable plush chairs and sofas. There were tables you could stand at or pull a stool up to as well. The colors were soft blues and orange. The color mix was odd to her red eyes, but it worked. The self-serve coffee was the best part. There was no waiting. You simply told it what you wanted and it was made within seconds. Her problem was that she kept forgetting to tell it to make hers with blood. Honestly, why should she have to tell the machine to add what should already be in there?

Countess remade her cup and went over to a bright orange couch to sit down. It was her favorite spot in the whole lounge. The cushions hugged her bottom and formed around her back so that it felt like she was getting a comfy massage. This time she resisted her urge to bite into the cup and took the top off. She gave it a sniff and took a long drink. Caffeine and blood filled her system and she immediately felt better. Everyone needed caffeine.

She liked watching the others. They were like funhouse mirrors of herself, so similar and yet so different. She could already see the cliques starting to form. Rah and Sarahtaur clung to one another just because of their animal natures. Essea and Crowe, who had been like oil and water at first now found common ground in being outsiders. Essea, who was nice enough, was not able to comprehend all of the complexities that came from being completely biological. Crowe had lost enough of her humanity that she could identify more with the machine half of Essea than she could any of the others. Silent Sarah fell in right between the two of them. Her inability to speak matched Crowe to some degree and Essea seemed to be able to understand everything that she pantomimed when she spoke.

Countess found that she fit in with all of them. Her vampiric nature made her inhuman enough to fit in with the animal folks and her alien way of seeing the world placed her right into the outsider camp. Oddly, she even felt like she was companionable with Second Sarah. Second Sarah was the only “normal” one of them. She was like the basic template from which the others had been made, and Countess had to admit that the idea of that bothered her a little. She didn’t like the idea of there being a main mold, with tiny variants being produced, with her being one of the variants. She was her own person. Still, she had to admit that while each Sarah here was different they were also the same.

What really scared her was Mother. The Headnet, as Declan often referred to her, had very clearly initiated changes in herself and the others that she didn’t like. First, she noticed that she no longer spoke her own language. She could only speak in Declan’s native tongue. While this was helpful she found it very disturbing on a number of different levels. If the artificial intelligence was able to change something so fundamental and deeply ingrained in her as her native tongue Countess found that she had to ask what else she could change. Was her favorite color really sanguine red? Had it always been so? She would never know if her memory had been altered.

Secondly, she had been far too accepting of the name of Countess. She had no idea of why she had been given that appellation until Mother had spoon fed her the stories of Countess Elizabeth Bathory and Count Dracula. She would have preferred to just be called Sarah, but apparently, it would have gotten confusing if everyone referred to themselves by their actual names. Sarahtaur was a good example of someone else who had basically been given a nickname and forced to live with it. Countess recognized the reasoning behind it, but she didn’t like it. She also noticed that she was perfectly fine knowing that everyone she had known was dead and gone. She hadn’t suffered a moment of grief, nor had she suffered any sort of mental trauma from the events in her café the night that Declan had saved her.

She should have had nightmares, flashbacks, or experienced moments of rage due to inability to have fought back against the cultists. She had none of those things, and that was wrong. Without warning her mind grew fuzzy. She shook her head, suddenly, trying to clear it. She had completely lost her train of thought. What had she been thinking about? Oh, yes, Second Sarah and how she got along with her so well.

She assumed that the Sarah Assortment was only going to grow because there was no way Declan’s obsession over his lost love was ever going to decline. As it did so the girls would further divide into more diverse camps. Hell, there were three of them that wouldn’t even associate with the original group. Conservative Sarah didn’t like the idea of what she termed as non-humans, Triggered Sarah got upset over everything that they did in one way or another, and Vegan Sarah had been ousted by the core team from the beginning. Her ideas were just to alien for them to stomach. So, that sequence of Sarah’s had shunted them to the other side of the compound.

She wondered where she would fit in with them. Would she always be the one who had a place in each circle, but never fit in all the way? Would Declan, she wondered, bring home other monsters? After all, wasn’t that how the others saw her, as a monster? She knew everything they did when it came to arts and entertainment. Would he bring back a Zombie Sarah? A Slasher Sarah sounded both horrifying and titillating all at once. What if he brought back a “real” vampire, as in an undead version of herself. Where would that leave the Countess at then?

She never got to finish that thought. She had been about to take another sip of her coffee when the lounge doors burst open with a horrendous rending noise. It was impressive as the doors were solid metal and about two inches thick. Two figures flew through the rent doorway and crashed to the floor. Declan was on top of what looked like a pile of rags that covered a Halloween doll, only the doll was moving and fighting back.

Declan was in a rage. She had never seen him in such a state, and it scared her. It scared her because she knew of only one thing that could drive him to go so mad. The monster that he was straddling had threatened one or all of the Sarah’s, and their man was fighting to protect them. She could see it in his eyes. Eyes that were glowing a reddish tint just like hers, only his were actually glowing with a raw untamed power. Red energy smoked from his eyes and he looked . . . bigger, more muscular than normal. Suddenly, she was far more titillated than she should have been in a situation like this, she hated herself for it, but then also couldn’t help looking at him.

Declan had grabbed the skeletal man’s head and was pounding it against the floor repeatedly. Each bounce produced a sickly crunch and a scream of pain from Declan’s opponent. Then the reaper man managed to raise a hand to Declan’s chest and a brilliant flash of white flared. The glow enveloped the entire room, leaving a negative image of what she had been looking at moments ago burned into her eyes. Countess could barely see anything for going flash blind, but as her sight returned she could make out the figure of the man that Declan had been fighting rise to his feet. Countess leapt to her feet and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Ladies, break out the gear Kristine gave us, and get ready to give Declan some backup! We’re gonna kill this asshole!”