Birthday

Originally published in the anthology When the Sun Rises (Bruno Gmunder, 2014)

I was born when I was eighteen, the summer of 1997, in Ocean City, Maryland. I was there for Senior Week, a debaucherous rite of passage where freshly-graduated high school students soak up the sun when they’re not drinking themselves stupid. It was our first taste of freedom from parental supervision before we headed to college. Except I never went to college and I never left Ocean City.

Before it happened, though – when I was still human, before I killed a person for the first time - I was sitting with Travis in a lifeguard chair on the beach in the dark early morning. We'd been talking about it all night; it was already decided. The vast, unreachable depths of the ocean lapped against the shore.

Travis took my hand. I looked at the water and thought about how he'd first approached me on this very beach. It was only a few days ago. I'd never even had sex with another guy then. And really, even though I'd had sex with Travis, I still hadn't had sex with another guy.

"How did you know I'd want to become one of you?" I said. "Could you sense something in me from the beginning?"

"No not really," Travis said, staring off into the distance. His dark Italian features were what first drew me to him - thick hair that stood up from his head, bedroom eyes and a joker's grin that spread across his face. If he hadn't found me, I think I would've found him. "I didn't know you'd want to come over at all. At least not until we had sex. Then I could tell."

"So why were you following me around? Did you just want to meet me?"

"Yes," Travis said, and looked me in the eye. "And also, I was thinking about killing you."

Travis got down from the chair and I followed. The sky was starting to brighten as we made our way back to the boardwalk, to Underworld, which was Travis's store. It was right on the boardwalk but tucked back along a corridor painted bright swirling psychedelic colors. He led me through the dark store, past racks of black rock t-shirts, posters, shelves of incense and a case full of glass pipes.

We went through the tattoo room and into the door that went up to Travis's apartment, which was where I'd lost my virginity just two days ago. Except we didn't go upstairs this time. Travis let the door shut behind us. We were in a foyer, mud room. On the other side was a big metal door with a pressure bar that led outside.

"Step over here," Travis said, ushering me to one side. He lifted a rubber-bottomed rug from the floor. There was a square metal panel in the floor. He lifted it and set it against the wall. I looked down into the hole it had been covering. Stone steps that looked like they had been crudely carved out of the foundation of the building led into darkness. "Go ahead," Travis said, and for the first time I was truly afraid.

It smelled earthy; salty and damp. I descended until I was at the bottom. "I can't see anything," I said.

Travis came up behind me. "Sorry," he said. "I forget sometimes. One sec." He went around me and into the darkness, the sound of his feet on the gritty floor echoed. I heard the crackle of a match being lit and Travis came from around a corner, holding a candle.

We were in a cavern. The walls and floor were dirt, smooth and packed down but still ragged, with roots hanging and jutting from the sides like reaching hands. "Come this way," Travis said.

I followed him and came into a wide, low-ceilinged room. The walls were draped in deep red and orange crushed velvet fabric and the floor was covered in swaths of carpet and oriental rugs. There were couches along the side, and while the cavern had seemed damp and cool, this room was dry and warm.

In the center of the room was a table - an altar. It had candles on it and Travis lit them one by one, making the room glow brightly.

"Sonny got into doing ritualistic stuff a couple decades back," Travis said, motioning to the altar. Sonny was one of them; he worked in the store. "We really don't use it anymore."

"Where is Sonny?"

"Just down the way," Travis said, motioning to the cavern. "It's morning. He's asleep." He motioned to the couch. "Sit."

Travis sat next to me. He put his arm around me and kissed me. I kissed him back. Somewhere outside the sun was rising. I wasn't ever going to see it again.

"Tell me why we're here," he said.

"You're going to make me like you."

"Right. I'm going to bring you over. When it's time, I'll bite into your jugular and suck out most of your blood. Then I'll feed you my blood and then it'll start."

"Will it hurt?"

"Yes. It's birth. Or death. It's coming over, to another plane. Which always hurts." Travis put a hand on my leg. We already talked about how this was forever, and about how to continue to live I'd have to kill. He ran his hand up my leg. He began to seduce me like he had all night. Except this time it was with his body. Earlier it had been with words.

Don't think about the hurt. Think about how wonderful it will be. You'll be impervious. You'll explore the world like nobody else can because you'll have nothing but time, and you'll live beyond their rules: self-imposed, government, morals. We're not governed by their gods.

He stopped his hand just short of my cock. Let it get hard with the anticipation of him touching it.

Even killing them can be beautiful. Because they really don't die, we are subsuming them. They're as immortal as we are, in a way. Their energy goes into us, fuels us. They die, yes, but the big lie is that death is the end.

He grabbed my crotch. I was hard. His face was close to mine and I thought he was going to kiss me again but he didn't, just kept his face close and looked into my eyes. The soft sweetness of his breath wafted over me, and I looked at his soft lips and tongue and wanted to suck them, wanted them on mine. His eyes moved from my eyes to my neck and it occurred to me that maybe he was as afraid as I was, that he'd have to keep tight control over an instinct that told him just to feed. That it was as hard for the parent as it was for the child.

He stripped off my shirt revealing my smoothly muscled chest. I had a warm tan from lying out in the sun all week. He had me stand and we stood next to each other. I could see his cock getting hard in his black pants. He took off my pants next, sliding them off my smooth thighs, taking them off one foot at a time. He lingered there by my feet, nuzzling his handsome face against the rising pole in my thin briefs, brushing his chin against it. I felt his warm breath on my hot cock through my underwear. He licked the tip of my cock where precum was seeping through the fabric, and I saw his teeth, just a little. And they looked longer than before, sharper. Just a little.

He noticed me looking and he stood, putting his hand in my hair, pressing his hard crotch against mine, his stomach against mine.

There's a killing response that's just like sexual response. And even though I'm not going to kill you I'm still going there. Getting warmed up, turned on, holding off. Foreplay. The longer you hold off and build it up the better it is. That's why when we kill we draw it out as much as we can, let it sit within us - the hunger, the painful wanting of it, the empty-stomached reality of our need. To feel your fangs straining like mine will be, the ache of stretching enamel and gums, the animal heart inside us pounding and dying to be expressed, waiting for that release, that moment of attack which is as mind-blowing as cumming.

He took off my briefs, released my hot cock into the cool air of the basement. I liked it - the vulnerability. I could be killed, I knew. He could lose control, change his mind, kill me and I'd be helpless.

He opened his mouth and took my cock into it. I felt the swipe of his teeth - not quite scraping, just gliding over it. Despite the fear or because of it, the pleasure was intense. He had a tight suction on my cock, and it felt like my cock was a straw and through it he could suck the cum right out of my nuts. Maybe he could?

He stood. "Take off my clothes now," he said.

I did as he said. Took off his shirt. His nipples hardened just like anybody else's when exposed to the cool basement air. I tweaked one; ran my hand across his hairy chest. I took down his underwear and lifted them off of his thick feet (patches of black hair on the tops of his toes). Then I felt up his hairy legs, calves, rounded thighs. His cock, thick as a tube of toothpaste, rose from his balls. I felt its heat next to my face. Lifted it in my hand, peeled it away from his nuts and took it in my mouth. I could taste his precum. What was it for?

I licked my way up his stomach which was trim but pleasingly thick, swirled with a sparser version of the thick dark hair that swarmed around the top of his cock in a thicket. He smelled good. Like a man. I licked his nipples and came up to his face and he was smiling waiting for me.

He stood naked before me. He was glorious, his body strong and wide, his huge cock swinging back and forth in front of him like a pendulum. I thought that I might look like him one day, be like him, my body composition changing until we were the same person - or would we be? If our outsides changed, like Travis said they did, subtly shifting over the decades, looking older or younger or switching genders, did our insides change as well? Did we become different people completely? I mean, not people...

He smiled -a bashful, half smile - and turned around. Propped himself against the wall and spread his legs out a bit. His strong back was splayed wide, hands on the wall almost six feet apart. His back tapered down to a V, with a smattering of hair, wispy yet dark, trailing all the way down his lats which were thick like sirloin steaks, and fanning out into a brush over his firm and perfect ass.

I embraced him from behind, wrapped my arms around his wide and warm chest and let my hard prick rest against the crack of his ass, which was so firm that my cock didn't really slip between his cheeks. I kissed the back of his neck and savored the smell of him, a deep masculine scent that wasn’t quite human. I felt him relax his ass cheeks a little, allowing my cock to slip in between them. I could feel the heat of his hole against the head of my cock, deep inside.

We’d already had sex twice, and both times I’d been the one to get fucked. I thought I might cum just from slipping my prick against his hole but Travis knew what he was doing.

"Kiss your way down my back," he instructed. I licked muscles and hair. "Explore all over your dad's body. Do whatever you want with it." That was the first time he'd ever used the word "dad," the first time we used this sort of role play. It turned me on instantly.

I kissed my way down his back, drawing my tongue along the curve of his spine, stopping when I got to the top of his butt crack. "Play with Dad's butt. He likes that," he said. I laughed and it broke the tension a little. I tongued the tip of his crack and he moaned and pushed his ass back toward my tongue, revealing more wispy black hair and his pink asshole.

"Are you sure it's okay to do this?" I said, my mouth hovering just over his hole. The smell was deep and masculine, like aged wood. He would tell me later about how it works, how our digestive systems, like most of our organs, become vestiges, useless images of what they were when we were human.

"Sure it is," he said. "Aren't you curious?" I was, and had been since he'd done it to me the night we first had sex. I licked a swath right up his crack and against his hole. His whole body shuddered. It didn't taste dirty at all.

I licked up his thighs and around the base of his ass cheeks, skimming around the fur and licking the slopes and curves. Travis moaned whenever my tongue came close to the slick and wrinkled skin of his hole.

We feel sex. We feel joy and happiness and sadness just like people but our lives are more practiced, longer lived. We're naive, then wise, then naive then wise all over and over again. You really never stop learning things from this world. The longer you live the more you realize you don't really understand any of it.

He pushed his ass back against my face. I dug my tongue deeply into his asshole. He squirmed back to meet it and groaned loudly. It seemed to echo down the dark cavern. I still didn't know where that cavern led.

"Slide a finger inside me. Get it wet first. Go easy on me, it's been a while."

"Will it hurt?"

"No. It's gonna feel great for both of us. I'll show you exactly how, how to make Dad's ass feel good." He turned around and smiled back at me, the sharpness of his teeth shining in the low candlelight. It was easy to forget what was going to happen, he was so boyish and playful about it.

He draped himself belly-first onto the sofa, his left leg dangling on to the floor, perfect firm butt parted. He rested his head on his arms and closed his eyes like it was all a beautiful dream. I licked him some more like that, loving the way the tip of my tongue caught right into his hole like it was snapping at me, hungry for more. "Get your finger nice and wet and slide it inside."

I did as he said, pressing my wet finger to the muscled ring of his hole and pressing in. The tip popped inside. Travis gasped. It was tight but I felt him adjust himself as I slid it inside, contracting and relaxing his muscle. The more he relaxed the more he drew my finger into him until I was in him up to my knuckle. "Deeper," he said.

Soon he asked for a second finger. I felt his cock as I pressed my two fingers together and pushed them into him. His cock got harder as I stretched him open. He groaned.

“I’m ready for your cock, now,” he said.

"Should we use a condom?"

"No need."

Viruses can't do a lot in our bodies. Living things are generally repulsed by us, our composition.

My cock was incredibly hard, stiffly sticking out from my body like a post, and Travis's ass was spread out before me, soft and willing, his asshole exquisitely stretched around my fingers. "Go ahead and slide it in there," Travis said, breathless. "Dad can take it."

Sex is important. It's how we connect. With each other, it strengthens our familial bond, gives us strength and protection. And it's one way we have of connecting with humans, with understanding them. Knowing them as individuals makes them so much more edifying when it's time to consume them.

I positioned myself behind him and pressed my hard cock to his asshole. It was slick and lubed up – self-lubing a trait he'd developed over the years, his asshole no more a human asshole than any other part of his body. I felt his hole kiss the head, wanting to draw me in but I was so hard that my cock popped right back up. We re-adjusted, Travis moved his ass downward a little, lining his hole up with my cock head. I pushed forward and the head sank inside.

"Oh fuck," Travis moaned. His asshole spasmed around my cock and I thought I'd cum but I let it rest, regained my bearings. He held a hand to my abdomen to keep me from pushing forward, to adjust himself. My breath synced with his and slowly, imperceptibly, I inched inside him, seeming to do it without even pushing, him drawing me inward.

It felt like heaven. The image of the cavern just off to the room came into my head, the dirt walls of it moving, embracing me, wrapping me up in them and pushing me down the hall to what?

Finally my balls were pressed against his ass and he let out a deep breath. I fell onto his back. My hands went to his neck and he brought them to his face. He kissed my finger, nibbled it and I felt his teeth.

Proto fangs. Just sharp enough to where I could feel that they weren’t…normal. "Fuck me," he said. My slight blond bush of pubes was pressed to the brush of dark hair around his asshole. I licked the back of his neck. Found his jugular vein, pulsing, and licked it, feeling the power of it, charging blood through his system. Blood that both was his and wasn't, the flow of it rushing like an underwater rip tide.

I pulled back, let my cock slide out, then pushed it back in. "Fuck yeah son. Work Dad's ass. Fuck me." Travis's firm cheeks bounced as I pounded my hips against them. I never would have imagined myself fucking this butch older guy, but really the pleasure all seemed to be his. I went slow to keep myself from cumming, but a few times I paused and Travis fucked his ass back on to my cock like he couldn't stop taking it, and I would feel the cum rise up in my nuts but he always knew exactly when to rest and let me get control again.

It was only after he began to lift himself off the couch and I slid out of him, allowed him to rise, that I saw his face had begun to change. It wasn't so much inhuman was it was swelled and exaggerated, overripe. His whole body was puffed up - still slender, but it was like muscles had grown where there hadn't been muscles before, where there shouldn’t have been muscles at all. He pushed down on my shoulders, positioned me seated on the sofa, and straddled my lap.

He took hold of my cock with one hand and sat right down on it. Grabbing the back of the couch with one hand and my neck with the other, he fucked himself on my cock in even, fluid motions, my cock going deep into the heart of him each time. He went faster and faster, went into some other state of being, his body getting more and more swelled, hairy angry chest near to bursting. He wasn't smiling but his mouth began to open, and now his fangs were fangs and he was looking into my eyes and I was so close to losing it, to cumming. His pace was insistent, this gorgeous guy - thing - taking me but letting me take him, the dominant and submissive intertwined, victim and killer, one and the same. My nuts crept up into my body and the fear I felt ran side by side with lust and made me feel crazed, unhinged.

He brought his face closer to mine, closer to my neck. Those fangs...

"I'm gonna cum," I said, thinking I'm afraid and I don't know if I...

His eyes became yellow and translucent as he fucked himself on my cock and licked my neck, just a swipe of his tongue right along my vein. I felt the cum rise up in my nuts and then he slammed his ass down onto me and I was past the point of no return. He stayed still as my cock swelled and shot the first jet of cum into him. Just as it did, he sank his fangs into my neck.

They were thin as needles at the tips but thickened from there and I felt every centimeter of them as they pierced into me, widening two holes into my skin, popping the thick wall of my vein.

He began to suck. The power of it was surprising. The life began to drain out of me instantly, all of this happening in one moment, my cock still shooting into him, my seed and my blood draining into him at the same time - me into him, him from me, a closed circuit. Pleasure flooding my body still even as my life flowed out of it. This is it, I thought, I could die but I'm not going to, he's going to bring me over, I have to trust him.

My orgasm subsided as my life began to subside, my heart thudding slower, my vision blurring. Sleep crept up and then walloped me over the head. I was aware that he was still feeding from me, but the torrent of blood that was going into him became more of a trickle. Somehow I could feel the struggle in him to stop, to not just keep going and take it all, take my life. How easy it would be just to suck a little more, suck up that last delicious morsel of my life, tasty as a the last bit of salty pie crust on the plate, swallow it down and let my body float away, having served its purpose.

My vision went dark. I saw myself traveling down that cavern and now I knew where it led: into the ocean, into an abyss, a place where they sank the bodies, a dark and endless place.

Travis tore himself away. He screamed. His mouth was wide open and dripping black red, my blood drooling down his chin. A total animal now, a demon, but it was all like a dream as my vision contracted further.

I was vaguely aware of him reaching behind himself, pulling out a razor. He slashed it across his wrist and shoved it into my mouth and the taste...

It hit my tongue with a sizzle, an almost electric shock. I wanted it. That tingle as the first trickle of his blood (which was my blood which was the blood of all he'd ever killed) went down my throat. The most delicious thing I'd ever tasted and I locked my mouth to his arm like a leech, sucking messily, greedily. No thought in my head but the intense want of it. I bit down and my blunt teeth tore open the flesh of his arm and made even more of a mess, blood all over my face and dripping down my neck, chest, abdomen, to my crotch which was still inside of him, still hard.

Blood filled me and as it did my vision got clearer, like I was swimming upward to the surface of the water. Then I broke the surface and in a flash I was soaring above it, roaring right up into the dark sky and looking down at myself. The room in the cave was as clear as if it were in four dimensions, a shift as swift and violent as the shock wave from a nuke which blasted through my body, pain and exhilaration one and the same. My head felt like it was pressed in a vice and split open like a watermelon. I screamed.

Undead. I’d come over. Pain like I never felt but it began to subside as my cock slipped out of Travis's ass. I was still in space, still looking down, the earth laid out for me like a satellite map, you zoom in and see the tiniest speck of sand, so clear you could count each one. And there was Travis, his whole body now unswelled, back to normal. But he didn't look like he used to. Nothing did. I was seeing it all for the first time.

He was seeing me for the first time.

"Welcome," he said.