BLOOD REBORN

Asher Stone’s eyes flicked open, his mind foggy and his body heavy. He lay on a cold metal table, surrounded by the sterile smell of a hospital. A faint hum of machinery echoed through the room, and his gaze drifted toward the sound.

A woman with a long, curly brown hair and warm, hazel eyes stood beside him, her hand wrapped around his wrist. She smiled softly, and Asher felt a pang of recognition, but he couldn’t quite place her.

“Welcome back, Asher,” she said, her voice gentle. “I am Dr. Sophia Laurette. You appear to have been through a lot and I want to ask if you remember anything?”

Asher’s mind was a jumble of fragmented memories and disjointed images. Before flicking his eyes open and finding himself in this unrecognized place, he recalled being on his knees and vowing to get revenge before a cold, metallic object was pushed into his heart and the sensation of his life force drifting away.

But there were gaps in his memory, one he couldn’t account for. He drifted his gaze back to Dr. Laurette and felt a surge of frustration. He looked around the place and saw dangerous tools and equipment. With anger in his voice, he roared in the room, “What did you do to me? Why can’t I remember anything?!”

Dr. Laurette felt her body shook at the sudden roar and she tried to be as calm as she could. She knew they were dealing with a specie here, a rare kind and she needed all the patience she could get.

“You are a dead man, dead since god knows how long because our system can’t quite give us an estimated date, but we picked up signals from the area you were buried and we found you, somehow. It’s still quite a mystery to me, but I think science is evolving rapidly. From the looks of it, you must have been a test subject and an experiment could have gone wrong on you where they decided to dispose of you, but it’s a miracle we found you. It means you have been given another chance to live.”

Asher suddenly felt a sharp pain in his head and he held it with both his hands. His eyes suddenly widened as parts of his memories came flooding back. While kneeling and vowing to take his revenge, he remembered a glimpse of his killer’s face, but when he tried to get a full view, it felt like his brains were being pierced by a sharp object and he let out a shrill cry that shook the room.

A few men in uniform came rushing into the room and Asher could see them holding a rare object, one he hasn’t seen before, but he could tell it was dangerous and they wanted to use it on him.

“Stand down officers. He is not a threat. He is just reacting because everything around him is strange,” Dr. Laurette tried to calm the officers who had been given the order to shoot if the specie can’t be handled.

One of the officers walked up with his gun still pointed at Asher and he said to Dr. Laurette, “Dr. Griffin has given the orders. If the specie acts up, we shoot to kill. We can’t afford to put everything we’ve worked on in the line all because of your obsession with things like this.”

As they were both talking, Asher suddenly felt that something wasn’t adding up. He remembered feeling…different, maybe stronger, faster, and more alive than he could ever be, and that he could take down these men in the room within a second, but then, he felt too weak inside and his brows pulled into a deep frown as he looked down on his body.

“What did they do to me?” he asked himself, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Just put the gun away Denver. You are scaring him.”

“He should be f*ck*ng scared,” the officer named Denver said. “It is how they tame lab rats like him.”

“Look, if we don’t discover what kind he is and the purpose he was made like this, we will never find out. This is a discovery that thousands of other organizations would want to get their hands on once it is leaked. We can’t lose on this one.”

Denver gave Dr. Laurette a reasonable look before he said, “Just one error, and everything you’ve worked hard for will be gone in a second.”

“That won’t happen,” Dr. Laurette assured him and saw him start to leave with the others where the door was closed again.

Now that her privacy had been given back to her, she let out a soft sigh and turned to look at Asher who seem to be in a frenzy.

“Who are you and what did you do to me? Where did all of my memories go? And what is this place?”

“As I introduced before, I am Dr. Sophia Laurette, and the only thing I did was try to bring you back to life. You are in a lab right now because we needed to run some tests on you to find out your roots, and about your memories, we didn’t tamper with that.”

Dr. Laurette went ahead to walk to the front where a large glass was planted to the wall and she tapped her finger on the surface. A blue light displayed on the screen and Asher was taken by surprise at the sudden pop up on the glass. He didn’t understand any of what was happening. It felt like he was in a different world, one he would have never thought to find himself in.

Dr. Laurette tapped on the screen a few more times and then turned to look at Asher where she now explained, “You see this blue and red lines, these are what we call an anomaly in the system. Up until few weeks ago, yours was red but later changed to blue and that was how we found you. It was like you were sending a message directly to us and I and my team decided to bring you in. But these red lines are strange anomalies that we haven’t detected yet. We haven’t figured out what they are but we think they are similar to you.”

“I don’t understand,” Asher said, feeling confused even more. “Anomalies…red lines…I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Dr. Laurette walked away from the screen and towards the bed. “Asher,” she called and said, “all I’m saying is that you are a different kind of breed. I don’t know what life you lived or what cruelty you faced, but the experiment they did on you has altered you in some way. We’ve run some tests and your blood work is unusual.”

“What do you mean by altered?”

“Your DNA has been tampered with. It means your blood and my blood are not the same.” Dr. Laurette sighed almost immediately after saying that, knowing that was not the way to put it. “I’m saying you are most likely not human like me or the rest of us here.”

“Human…” Asher muttered under his breath and just like a flash, he felt a part of his life replay in his head.

“Blood,” he muttered again and then looked at the doctor who stood there with a guarded expression.

“What?” Dr. Laurette asked him. “Do you remember anything?”

“They tried to kill me…no, they killed me. And if I am alive, they will find me again

“Who do you speak of?” Dr. Laurette asked, but then, Asher stood up from the bed and walked over to the screen that was displayed on the glass. He did a few thinking in his mind and as if remembering something, he suddenly raised his eyes and said;

“It’s the blood moon.”

“Blood moon? What are you talking about?” Dr. Laurette asked and walked over to where he was.

Asher’s mind was still racing from it all and he started to say as he understood, “I am the target. Because I am awake, they would detect me and find me. This is not an anomaly, it’s a f*ck*ng signal,” he used the word he caught onto from Denver earlier and he took a step closer to Dr. Laurette where he said to her, “It’s like a connection. My kind will find me, and they will kill me and everyone in this place.”

As Dr. Laurette tried to understand what he was saying, a sudden noise was heard outside the room and heavy footsteps followed. They seem to be running towards something.

Asher’s ears picked on the commotion and he turned his eyes towards the door.

A sudden bang was heard on the door and it opened to reveal Denver.

“You need to see this real quick,” he said to her and then looked at Asher.

Dr. Laurette’s expression turned worried. “I’ll go see what’s going on,” she said and hurried out of the room where the door was closed again.

Asher knew something didn’t feel right but he was having a hard time recollecting his memories. The gaps were just too much and it wasn’t giving him the answer he needed. He had more questions than answers, and just as his mind was racing with possibilities, he turned his gaze back to the screen and tapped his finger on the blue circle, the one Dr. Laurette had called his anomaly.

The circle enlarged and he could see another circle beside it where his own anomaly was sending out what looks like a current. The circle then got darker and seem to be overshadowing his anomaly. On seeing it draw closer, his heart suddenly missed a beat and then the commotion outside stopped. The room was silent once again except for the sound of his ragged breathing as he whispered;

“It’s here.”

Like a flash, bits and bits of Asher’s memories started to return, reminding him of who he was before he was murdered. He felt a strong energy within him and he slammed his palm on the screen where the pop up disappeared immediately. He let out a groan and the muscles around his face pulled.

The door opened again and Asher turned his head towards it to see Dr. Laurette wearing a grim expression. “Asher, I need to tell you someth—”

“I’m not safe here,” Asher cut her off before she would finish what she was saying. He moved away from the glass and dragged his body that still felt heavy, towards her and he said, “They are coming. They will be here any moment from now.”

“Who are they?” Dr. Laurette asked.

“My kind…Vampires,” he said. “I can’t let them get to me, not yet, not until I recover all my memories.”

Dr. Laurette had a strange look on her face and instead of questioning him further about what he was saying, she discarded it and said the important th