The Eye of the Moon by Anonymous Page B

sound it made seemed loud enough to wake the dead, and in this case it woke the undead. He heard one of the two vampires stir in the kitchen below. Taking a last deep breath, he picked up the revolver and headed out of the bedroom and back down the stairs.
    When he reached the bottom he saw the still-unconscious body of Kione slumped in one corner of the kitchen. It was lying against the cupboards near the sink, the two gaping holes where its eyes had been staring blankly back at JD, but it was still unconscious. Death had not come for the creature yet and small puffs of steam were still issuing from its lips as the air was expelled from its battered lungs.
    In the other corner of the kitchen, out of JD’s sight, was the vampire that had once been his mother. She had climbed to her feet and was looking for some flesh to feed on. JD hardly recognized the woman as she stepped slowly over Kione and appeared in his line of vision. Her face was still caked in blood and the blue veins within it were bulging. Maria needed her first taste of human blood. Seeing him only as a potential victim, she forged a huge bloodthirsty grin at JD and charged towards him, her eyes mad with the lusting for his blood.
    Standing at the foot of the stairs, JD was now struggling to maintain control over his drunkenness even with the burning rage inside him. Slowly he raised the gun in his right hand andpointed it towards the onrushing vampire. His hand had begun trembling almost uncontrollably, and the legs that had carried him down the stairs were now turning to jelly. Even to take aim was a struggle, but just as his final chance to fire came, he took it. At the last possible moment before the monster was on him, he closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.
    BANG!
    The noise reverberated around the house. It was far louder than he could possibly have imagined, and it was followed by an echoing that seemed as if it would never end. Several seconds later, as the sound seemed to quieten a little, to become a mere ringing in his ears, the boy opened his eyes again. His mother’s body was lying flat on its back in the kitchen doorway, smoke pouring out and upwards from a gaping hole in her chest where the bullet had entered. Her heart had been blown apart. As the smoke departed her body it floated away into nothingness, her soul passing with it.
    JD’s hand was no longer shaking, his grip on the gun had steadied, and for the first time he felt the wet sensation on his face where his mother’s blood had sprayed over him as the bullet punched into her flesh. She lay there dead before him. Her soul had been taken, and his had been lost in the process. A window in the kitchen had somehow blown open and both their spirits had slipped out through it and vanished into the night sky.
    He took two steps towards her corpse and looked down on it for a moment. The blackened eyes were unrecognizable in the bloodied face. This was not his mother any more, and he was no longer JD, the fun-loving innocent who had so recently fallen in love with Beth. He pointed the shiny silver revolver at the lifeless corpse and with a hand as steady as a rock fired the remaining bullets into its face and chest, hitting his target with great precision for a young man who had drunk so much.
    When the chambers of the pistol were empty he tucked it into the back of his trousers and pulled the hood of his robe up over his head. Thanks to Kione, he had learnt a valuable lesson. When you have the chance to kill someone, never passit up, it might come back and bite you. Kill first, worry later.
    As he watched his mother’s decaying body burn away into ash on the floor his anger began to build. If the men in his mother’s life had not deserted her, then there was a good chance that this would not have happened. Now he was going to have to go to the house of one of those men and explain to his younger brother that he would never see his mother again. This wasn’t fair. Bad things happened