(8.1) Boons

Chapter 8, Part 1

I woke to the smell of dried blood and hard water. I could feel a slight weight atop me and my vision was blurred white. A few seconds after I realized where I was, I pulled the sheet off and sat up on the autopsy table.

Screaming ensued, as did the slamming of the door as the poor coroner ran for his life from the “Zombie Incursion.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been in a morgue over a case of mistaken death, so I got up and rifled through the coroner’s drawers, looking for a spare set of scrubs. One thing about morgues that I liked, everytime you showed up on a slab you get a free shower. The wetness of my hair told me that I either hadn’t been discovered until late in the day, or the Doc had a whole lot of work and didn’t get around to me very quickly. Judging by the fact that I could see streetlights out of the poor excuses for windows, I was going to go with the latter assumption.

 As I donned the scrubs I noticed that my blood had been cleaned off, while the numerous holes that adorned me were in the process of closing themselves up. My stomach hurt quite a bit, reminding me that I was going to have to take it easy for the next few days.

The fact that I was able to recover from a daylight assault like this was my particular daylight boon. My sire on the otherhand, wouldn’t have been able to take the kind of punishment that I could during the daylight hours. His boon was that he kept his strength, making a hit from him hurt just as much at noon as it did at midnight.

Generally, I heal at the speed any vampire does when my wounds are inflicted at night. If I’m attacked during the day though, It can be a good long while before I recover fully. Thankfully the sun had just come up when I was gunned down, making the bullet wounds easily patched up with a few butterfly bandages. If it had happened an hour or so later, I might not have gotten off the slab.

Tugging on a pair of paper booties and a surgeon’s mask, I headed out of the morgue and flagged down a cab, making sure to dodge the groups of men that were running to deal with a walking corpse. When the cab pulled up to the gun shop, I saw Tom’s car just inside of the yellow crime tape that was posted everywhere.

My heart sank a little bit when I realized that the keys were in the pockets of the pants that were undoubtedly on their way to a crime lab of some sort. Which would mean that if they didn’t have my clothes, weapons, phone and ID yet, they soon would, which could make my life a living hell. So I did the only thing that I could think of that would distract the cops long enough to check my car.

I blew up the gun shop.