The rest of the company filed out of the Sergeant’s room, only Brigson remained. She turned to look at the soldier standing there, outside of the line of fire he didn’t look so bad; his nose looked a bit out of place, it had probably been broken quite a few times, but the thing she noticed most of all were his eyes. Those eyes of his almost reminded her of the eyes of someone she had met a long time ago.

“So, Soldier, you willing to take me up on my offer?” she said, her voice taking up an extra seductive tone.

“No, Sir, uh Ma’am, just a question,” he said. Odd, she thought, he even sounds like him when he’s not talking through a radio.

“Well, shoot Soldier,” she said, leaning against the window.

“I know there are a lot of rumours about you, and I know that you’re the only woman on base, but what I want to know is why you’re called ‘Vampire’?” he said after a moment’s hesitation, almost as if he was worried about what she would say.

“Do you believe in the supernatural?” she asked.

“No,” he said, honestly.

She smirked, “might be a good time to start.”

He looked confused, “huh?”

“Do you know when I was born?” she asked, looking over at him from the window’s edge.

“Uh, at least eighteen years, but most people agree you’ve been in the ranks for quite a few years. So
maybe... twenty-five years ago?” he asked, slightly worried.

“Bloody hell, how young do I still look?” she laughed, the tension starting to dissipate between the pair.

“Well, you look really good for a twenty-five year old,” he said, a small smile playing on his lips.

“Pity I’m not twenty-five,” she said, leaning forwards, her dog tags sliding out of her shirt, “I was born in sixteen-oh-five.”

He quirked his eyebrows at her, “really?” he asked.

“I grew up in London until I was seventeen, and died a week after my eighteenth birthday. My parents were murdered in a rabid attack I was nearly mauled to death. In hospital my condition just got worse and worse, the doctors tried everything; leeches, although they just made my condition even worse, maggots, but they just ate everything they touched, they even tried drugging me with various herbal remedies the gypsies were selling, but even that didn’t work. I died after a month in hospital. After I was buried, the Beast that killed my family dug me up, turns out it was one of the doctors who came to check on me. He would give me this weird red liquid that I initially loathed, but as time wore on I liked it more and more. He took me back to his house in the country and taught me everything about what he was and what I had become. He showed me how to control it and showed me various symbols that would protect those around me from the Beast. Once I was sure he had taught me everything I killed him. He was my first ever kill. My kind doesn’t like it when you kill our own, there are ‘hunters’ for that, so I was exiled and sentenced to life in Australia with the convicts. I only left the country to disguise myself as a boy and join the army, and I guess I never stopped.”

“I call bullshit,” he said, looking at her with disbelief.

“You call bullshit? Try living through it. Well, not really living, more unliving. Though I suppose it’s not really ‘unliving’... walking dead, maybe... either way, it doesn’t matter anymore, I’ll serve out a few rotations here, and then transfer off to another war, wherever that may be. Humans, you’re so predictable, you kill your own people just for fun, at least we have the decency to keep our population small enough to survive without needing to kill each other every few seconds,” she said, irritated at the Soldier’s lack of faith. She’d seen this soldier fight, ransacked his mind while he slept, she knew he was a man of God, why didn’t he believe in her story, it wasn’t as farfetched as that of an omnipotent being sitting up on his high horse and twiddling his thumbs for thousands of years while his creations lived by a poorly translated version of his word.

“Hey, we don’t try to kill each other every few seconds!” he cried.

“Look out the window, Brigson, what do you see? Your fellow humans out there are off killing one another. What are we doing here? Disabling the ‘new and exciting’ ways in which you’ve decided to try and kill yourselves with. Don’t delude yourself, Soldier, you’ve come out here to die or to kill, that’s all you humans ever seem to do,” she turned her head to the stars in the sky above them, clenching her fist to stop the beast breaking through. She always had trouble with arguments.

“I didn’t come here to kill,” he said, his breath almost a whisper.

“I know,” she said, not looking at him.

His eyes snapped up to her, “how?”

“I raided your mind while you slept; I do that with every base I enter. It lets me know who’s likely to betray us and get us all killed. I know everything about you; only child after your sister drowned on a vacation in Italy when you were seven, you married your wife three years ago after you found out she was pregnant, and you signed up for the army after you found out she was pregnant again, you’ve now served half your tour of duty and are considering leaving your wife because she was always an overbearing, demanding little wench who tricked you into marrying her by breaking holes in all the condoms. Yeah, I even know about that,” she looked over at Brigson, fighting the urge to turn bestial and killing everyone in the camp.

He stared at her, completely dumbfounded.

“I haven’t gone Beast in over fifty years, I’m considering letting lose tonight. Do you know what it’s like to keep something bottled up within you, right up until bursting point where you just can’t hold it in anymore? That’s what it feels like to me every day,” she looked out over the campground, her eyes threatening to black over every second.

“I know what it’s like to be angry, to have all your rage stored up within you so that it hurts just to live. I know what that’s like,” he said, starting to realise that all wasn’t well with the Sergeant.

“Brigson,” she began, her voice starting to be very strained, “there is a box underneath my bed, pull it out and open it up.”

He scurried down to her bed and pulled the box out from underneath. It was a small box, coated with very old leather with a strange symbol painted on the front with black ink. He flicked the heavy, brass locks open saw a series of pale pink strips lying on a bed of velvet.

“Pass one to me,” she demanded, using all her willpower not to make her voice as guttural as it was trying to be.

Soundlessly, he passed a strip to her and she spat out her piece of gum and starting on the new one, her face visibly relaxed.

“What are these?” he asked, part of him becoming increasingly worried about just what he was standing in the same room as.

“It’s an alloy of animal fat and blood; I chew at least one piece a day. It stops me from tearing the throats out of everyone in this camp on a daily basis,” she said, simply.

“If you are telling the truth and you really are a vampire, why haven’t you drunk everyone’s blood already? Aren’t we delicious?” he asked, both horrified and curious.

“One simple reason, Soldier, humans taste terrible, why else do you think you’re species is still alive? You’re all stringy and most of you have problems with your blood, we prefer to eat herbivores when we have to feed,” she mused.

“But...you’re vicious killers, right? Attacking people whenever you can?” he asked, perplexed.
Laughter began to barrel out of her diaphragm, erupting from her mouth and causing her to sag against the frame. “Yeah, fuck you too, Stoker. We only attack humans when it’s an emergency. Our kind has been grossly overstated for thousands of years, kinda like sharks. Sharks are having a bad year if they kill twenty people, yet humans kill them in the thousands because they’re ‘vicious killers which endanger their safety’. You know what, I call bullshit. Every year humans kill hundreds of our kind, mostly the young and reckless or the old and fatigued, when we only kill one every decade in a bad year. We don’t really kill people in this day and age; people are less likely to die en masse like they did back in the late thirteen-forties.”

“So... you don’t actively try to kill people?” he asked, sitting down on the edge of her bed.

“Where do you think we are, Soldier, at a tea party with the Queen of England? We’re at war,” she said
bluntly, as her eyes trailed a cat that was running across the camp.

“No, I’ve seen you on the field, you don’t fire on anyone, civilian or enemy soldier, and you only detonate a bomb when you’re sure no-one is in the blast radius. You try everything in your power not to kill people,” he said, looking at her with piercing blue eyes.

“It’s a test,” she said, calmly.

“A test for what?” he queried.

“To prove I’m still human,” she said, fingers tracing protective sigils in the window frame.

“But didn’t you say that we like to kill each other every few seconds?” Brigson asked, confused.

“I’m trying to be the best of humanity, live up to the ideals you create for yourselves to make you sound more important than every other animal in the animal kingdom, including other humans. I don’t want to be the monster parents tell their children about at night,” the Sergeant turned towards Brigson, eyes flashing between normal and Bestial black.
Brigson jumped back with a start as he watched her pupils expand so that it covered her entire eyes and then contract to look absolutely normal.

“I didn’t used to be this way, you know,” she said, quietly, “I used to be a kill-happy gunslinger gladly taking revenge on the people who had persecuted my kind for so long. I was that way up until nineteen forty-five and working with the British cavalry. My Commanding-Officer knew all about my little problem and even tried to help me control the Beast. He was the greatest man I ever knew, and made me realise that I should strive to be the very best of humanity, even if I’m not really one. He kept both of my secrets; the fact that I was a woman in the army and I was a vampire. I gave him the option to become like me, but he told me that, from my behaviour before I came under his command, he didn’t want to lose what made him human,” a tear leaked out of her eye.

“What happened to him?” Brigson asked gently, realising they were on a very shaky subject. If he was anything, stupid wasn’t one of them.

“He died. The entire cavalry unit was massacred during an assault by the Germans. I ran off before the Germans came to ransack the bodies and transferred to another unit. I still remember him; the first man to know of my true identity and being so utterly stupid as to actually try and help a monster not be a monster. I swear, when they were handing out survival instincts he was off learning pole dancing or something,” she smirked at the last sentence.

“He sounds like a good man,” he said, giving her gentle smile.

“The funniest thing about it is if he had accepted my offer, he would have survived the gunfire,” another tear traced down her face and she turned back to the window, “it’s probably time for you to get back to your room, Soldier.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, walking back to the door of the room, “good night, Sergeant.”

“Goodnight, Soldier,” she said after he closed the door behind him.