She came to life with a gasp of stale air and dust. Searing pain burned into her chest and back, animal instinct sent her body thrashing against it before thought could even form. The sound of metal rang as her limbs found the walls of her prison that barely had room for her body and none for real movement. She pushed anyway, wild animal instincts screaming that she needed to escape, to run, to rip and tear, to kill whatever was hurting her, to make sure it could never hurt her again. It took time but the walls groaned and screeched until she ripped her way free of her metal tomb, collapsing to the cold dusty floor finally free.
Labored breathing was the only sound for a long time. Slowly the pain faded from a searing burn to a throb before the vampire slowly sat up and coughed out dust. It felt like her throat and mouth were coated in it, a thick dry layer she had to force out of her body before she could do anything. When she could finally speak her voice the dry creak of long disuse as she whispered to the empty room, “Well shit Kasia. Guess we finally lost the bet.” Painful hoarse laughter pulled itself from her body, sending fresh waves of dull pain radiating out from the wounds in her back.
She waited for it to fade again and took stock of her situation in the lightless bare room. First, her last memory. The supply train was a trap, the soviets had been waiting for her partisans instead of food and ammunition. Unfortunate. Gunfire, smoke, screaming, blood in the air… she had just killed a commissar, driving a knife into his chest and losing it there when it stuck in the ribs. She hadn't really needed it, but using her claws always disturbed her own fighters. So she used it unless it became necessary not to. That had slowed her down though, something she regretted in the end when she turned to find they had a hunter with them.
That man had driven a stake into her heart without any hesitation. A professional, just faster with the stake than she was at changing her fingers into claws. At least she had gotten to see his face go from a look of vicious triumph to one of fear and pain when she drove her claws into his throat as a parting gift. She should have tried pulling the stake out before torpor set in fully, but in the heat of the moment that hadn't even crossed her mind. She couldn't remember anything after that, so clearly if they had ever replaced the stake then they hadn't taken any risks and had done it fast.
Next she took stock of herself. An emaciated body, skin pulled taught to the bones. Her fingers were claws that wouldn't shift back but that should fix itself when she fed. A quick exploration with her hands found her head hairless and the wounds in her back still open. A mirror was needed then. She looked around the bare room, metal walls and ceiling, a heavy metal door… and a mirror set into the wall itself, just what she needed. Kasia stood slowly, finding her balance off with the much lighter frame of her dessicated body. She walked over to the mirror and studied herself for a moment. Completely naked yes but it hardly mattered right now, no one to see her and time had left her mummified.
No hair, as it had felt, but she knew it would return with all the rest after a good meal. Her fangs seemed to have grown far past what they should have been too. A reflection of starvation? Probably. Her eyes were voids in her face, it was like they were trying to consume the skin around them. Her dark vision being used in full then, it truly was lightless here and her power was having to compensate for that. There wasn't much else to say, both herself and the room were in the grey scale of her unnatural night vision and many details were lost to it.
She twisted to look at her back and was shocked when her neck just kept turning. She blinked owlishly at herself in the mirror before deciding to question this new bird impression later. Age must have granted her more gifts than she used to have. The holes in her back were vicious things and not healing, but that was the starvation too. She felt like a broken record, repeating that over and over. Had she lost her mind completely? Or it was just the gnawing hunger that she couldn't stop thinking about. Well if it wasn't the hunger then the wounds would be burning instead of fading into a dull ache. She carefully twisted her head back around, uncertain how far she could push that and unwilling to find out here and now. She would test it when she was stronger and her healing could fix a broken neck.
Next was the room itself, bare as it was it was quick and easy. Other than the wrecked metal coffin she had woken up in, there was just a black square of something on the wall next to the coffin and nothing else. The coffin was steel mixed with silver by the smell of it and a quick lick confirmed that. Odd, silver never concerned her and they should have known that. Maybe it served another purpose? She saw the source of the wounds in her back though or at least what was left of them.
The back of the coffin had the broken remnants of thick needles meant to drain blood from her body. They were connected to tubes that vanished into the wall behind the coffin, and the entire setup was clearly permanent. There was also a tube that went from the wall to the coffin lid, but what it led to was destroyed beyond recognition even if she could make an easy guess on that.
She studied the black square in the wall for a long minute, it looked like glass and when she ran the back of her hand against it, it felt like it too. A gentle tap made an odd noise that didn't match up with the glass theory though. A few minutes of consideration made her decide to leave it alone for now. All this study and thinking did help her get a grasp for her own mental state though, her mind was moving sluggishly and it felt like she was fighting through mud to connect thoughts together past first instincts. She had to push to concentrate and once she was focused she quickly found herself lost in it, spending more time than she intended on each detail.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Still, it was better than being scattered so slow and methodical was the plan. She was weak enough that she needed to act with thought and not on base instinct. That decided she sat and mulled over her findings. First, she was hungry beyond sanity. Even a brief consideration of that had her digging into the door to try and escape without even a flicker of conscious intention. Without anything to immediately eat she could focus past it, but it took willpower and she had to force herself to sit back down. That meant the moment she saw anything with blood, she would be jumping on it without any ability to control the impulse. If she found something weaker than her that was fine, but something stronger… well it wasn't like she could do anything about that.
Second, clearly she had been abandoned here. The tubes made a few things obvious, they had fed blood into her mouth and then harvested her own blood through the needles. That meant they probably had been using her blood to make more vampires. The stake being wood was a must to keep her in place, it was just how things worked, and the stake clearly had rotted away to dust if she was free of it. Given how they had clearly built all this to last, that meant it had been decades at the very least, longer if the wood had been treated. So abandoned, not just neglected. She was also alive which meant whatever caused that to happen hadn't given them time to burn her.
Or was it intentional? Maybe they just didn't know she wouldn't die if left alone? If they had been making fledgling vampires and had been running tests on them, they might have made assumptions about what she could survive based off of them. Did they not realize age changed them with time? Maybe not, any significant changes after the initial turning took decades after all. They might have seen so few results they just assumed it was all a waste of effort, especially with the curse. Well, the result was the same either way and she didn't have a way of figuring it out.
Third, she was stronger than she used to be. Just a glance at the door and coffin confirmed that, she had always been strong since her change but not ripping through steel strong. That was useful. Was it from age? Had that much time passed? Or was it what they had fed her? Maybe they had tried feeding her different types of blood to see the effects on her spawn. Or maybe she had broken out blind and fed on her own? She couldn't remember anything, but if she was mad from hunger would she? How was she even functioning now anyway?
She knew she wouldn't learn what other changes had been wrought on her until… she cut that thought off before she lost it again. Vampires got stronger the longer they survived, so if it had been awhile then they had technically done her a favor. Hiding her from hunters like this and keeping her fed so she didn't just decay was almost a boon. Almost. It was probably the only useful thing to come out of all this, but she would have preferred doing it the hard way all told. She frowned to herself, or at least tried to despite the desiccation that locked her expression in a dry rictus. That had taken awhile to process through for very little information.
No helping it, she would need to get out of here and figure out what came next after she solved her most immediate problems. She stood with disturbing grace, already finding her balance with the new weight and looked at the ceiling overhead. She whispered a prayer in her dry and creaking voice, “Ancestor stars guide my steps to your light once more and I will give unto you all I dare.” That done, she went back to work on the doors. Forcing them open only took a few minutes and was simple enough, they opened outward so she simply dug in her feet and pushed until the old and rusty metal gave way with a scream. She paused when the gap was large enough to pass through and slipped out, not wanting to waste more time or energy on them.
The room beyond was an observation room, she found that the mirror she had been looking in was really a secret window. She had never seen that before and it was fascinating. In front of that was a long table covered in oddities, typewriter keys set into the table, knobs that could be spun, levers that either didn't move or did nothing. More of that odd glass set over the keys. All of it covered in thick dust. So it had been a long time, maybe a couple decades? Half a century? She didn't like where that thought was going and focused on the keys and labels set into the table.
There were words under all that and she couldn't understand what they said, but she could recognize English words when she saw them. Britain then? America maybe? A base for one of the two at the very least. Not Russia at least, and she was almost thankful for that. Who knows what she would have woken up to in Siberia. But she spoke Russian and not English so it did make things harder too. This room explored, she went to the doors leading out, which were another set made of thick metal. This was getting old already.
On the other side she found a long checkpoint hallway, firing slits for guards flanking a matching pair of doors across from her. A good killing ground. It was as lightless here as it had been in her prison, reinforcing the abandonment idea. She looked at the next set of doors and sighed, now hoping their experiments had escaped and ripped through the rest of the place. She really didn't look forward to having to force open who knew how many doors if they hadn't.
The soldiers' side of the checkpoint had been deserted in good order, little was left behind except the furniture and a… thing? This one looked like someone had placed a thin box on top of an equally thin typewriter with no paper. Such an odd device. Still, clearly they had abandoned this place willingly then, not in a hurry, and simply left behind things they didn't want. She sighed. Of course she didn't have that much luck. She could only hope that all the doors wouldn't be this thick.
