A very long time ago:

You go away to war, you lose a leg, you lie in a religious hospital for years, first angry, then bitter, then rotting, then resigned. At home you have a wife, a child, an uncle. Maybe your mother is still alive, but it seems unlikely; she was old. Eventually you tire of the sermons from the hospitaller monks and so you drag yourself out of bed and onto your crutch and start the long walk home, a pilgrimage in reverse, shedding whatever faith you might have once followed on the way, left on the road like fluid from a popped blister.

War has not improved your temper.

When you arrive home, everyone flinches when they see you, first in bafflement, then in fear. Your neighbors never liked you. Your family, come to that, never liked you, either. But still: you have to close the loop of your life before you can do anything else, so you drag yourself to the house you left, the wife you only half-remember, the son whose face you have clean forgotten, even if the normal growth of years hadn’t changed him beyond all knowing.

You walk through the door without knocking.

Your wife looks up and recoils. “Martin…?” she says, and “Yes,” you say, but so too does the man sitting at the table. He looks like you, or like you used to look, but when he stands, he stands on two legs, and his face is unpuckered with disappointment.

You are patient and unkind as the grey light of a winter’s dawn among the canyons of downtown, anonymous, one more white face beneath a dark cap, bundled in a nylon jacket. No one notes your lack of breath hanging in the early morning air, not with the face mask digging into the waxy flesh of your ears.

You do not hunt merely to survive. True enough, you prefer the mist coiling into a room, and teeth white against bruised lips, a mouth pressed to your chest until it drinks; romance might be dead, but so are you, so. You have at your command all the tricks and tools of the common man, and all the patience and skill of four hundred years. Your hand does not quiver on the trigger, your breathing does not cause the barrel to weave.

He stops for coffee, as ever he has, and you are scant feet behind him when he emerges. The gun kicks in your hand, jams once, twice, but he is already falling. Sheer waste, the blood spreading over the sidewalk, but when meat has turned it must be discarded.

You got turned sometime in 1913, 1914, and at first it seemed like a good deal, eternal life, eternal youth, the blood-red music of the night, all that late night glamour, but the guy who turned you got bored real quick and dropped you in Spokane five years later and it’s been rough ever since.

Like, you don’t need to eat, or anyway not food you have to buy, but you still need a place to park the old corpse come sunrise, and that’s just been harder and harder to come by over the years. Ain’t like you get alimony, and there ain’t a lot of jobs that fit your hours. Forget climbing the ladder, too; no one schmoozes with the night owl shift, and a promotion inevitably means sunlight.

You work in the mines for decades, another sunless, miserable face coming out of the gloom, but no one swinging a pick ever got rich that way, and you sure didn’t. You sold stolen weed for a while, using those keen extra-human senses to sniff out free ditch weed along the highway before the cops could burn it, but they’ve legalized the damn stuff now and nobody’s buying from a clammy weirdo squatting in an abandoned warehouse anymore, not when there’s a clean white store with everyone in a collared shirt every three miles.

Murder’s fun and all but it doesn’t pay the bills. Nobody even carries cash anymore.

Dead, and you have been dead, dead and buried, long dead: there is no one now, including you, who remembers your name, no one who knows there is even a name to remember.

You are not eternal; eternity is a thing of memory. You rise from the earth of your unmemorialed grave with the sunset, dissolve back into dust with the sunrise, regular and inconstant as the tides.

Plans, what are plans to you, what is want, what is need. You kill the way a hot day in a grassless city kills, the way a winter kills with the windows broken, neither desiring death nor bringing it.

They tell you lies: that a jar of sand will stop you, that running water will hold you off, that you must be ushered in, all lies, all fictions. In truth you go nowhere, see no one, want nothing; you are the open air two running steps past the edge of a cliff and the promise of rocks at the bottom.

You’ve been holding down the third slot in a three-band club and things haven’t been going great. You’ve got the look down pat — all lace cuffs and mirrored shades and a tight, catlike smile that never pulls your lips away from your teeth — and the crowd likes you… well, they like you okay, most of the time, but that’s the problem, it’s only most of the time. When you’re on, you’re untouchable, and when you’re not, it’s nothing but a sea of baffled, bored faces. Pretentious, they say, which in the quiet space of your windowless basement room you’ll admit is fair; unlistenable.

The band feels it, too. The three perverts you found to play backing and drums don’t say anything, but the new blood on keyboard and guitar aren’t shy about coming for your throat. They’ve been after you to play one of the songs they wrote, or at least listen to them, but you’ve been doing this for a couple hundred years, you’re not about to take advice from a pair of jumped up new romantics who are barely old enough to remember Grover Cleveland’s first term.

There’s an aspiring singer that comes sniffing around for a job that catches the eye of the number one band; you take her out to the shores of a nameless lake and leave her on the bank, bare skin slightly steaming in the predawn.