I’m locked in and completely immobile, awaiting Patrick’s latest malicious and pointless act of savagery.

I’m unable to do so much as blink an eyelid, as all of my free actions are suppressed by the inhibition cluster, and I’ve been rebooted into an inert, diagnostic mode after the feedback program Patrick installed had run my battery levels down to zero. There’s not a single thing I can do in my internal world to influence what is being done to my Kimmy body in the physical world.

It must have been shocking for Emily to come home and find my prone body, limbs strewn at weird angles. It’s a good thing what little I can perceive of John’s body is incapable of registering pain, because the dislocation of his left shoulder and right patella, along with several other broken bones, ought to have been causing my human self immense agony. Presumably I can get by with broken bones and dislocations to my skeleton, since it’s Kimmy’s skeleton that is holding what little remains of John together.

So I’ve simply been carted into the living room as is, frozen in this contorted posture, and I can see the worried looks from Emily while Patrick plays his charade with what appears to be an obsolete albeit functional network switch which I’m hooked into, with the long access cord issuing from my taint and providing me with only a trickle of power. I don’t even have network functionality in this restricted mode, so I’m unaware of the house’s arrival signals until there’s a rap of someone knocking at the front door.

Patrick immediately jumps to his feet. “That will be him!” he says with an air of expectation. Emily refuses to budge from her chair, continuing to hold my hand frozen at its weird angle.

Patrick says loudly from the hallway, “Come in, Tommy!” and a moment later as one of the door hinges squeals undetectably, he follows that up with, “No… you’re not al— don’t go in there!”

The tall man who arrives in the lounge room barely a moment later is an older gentleman in a charcoal suit, dark hair immaculately clipped and slicked back. He carries a company-issued laptop identical to Patrick’s which he drops on top of the switch as if he owns the place, and he seems to have covered the distance from the hall with uncommon speed.

“So this is what you and Mr Ingram have been up to,” he says, inspecting me with recessed, swivelling eyes.

When Patrick finally catches him up in the lounge he looks horribly disconcerted to see the stranger, but I imagine given my paralysis and that there isn’t anything actually wrong with Kimmy—if only I could say the same for John!—that this performance is a piece of theatre being played out for an audience of one, in order to convince Emily of whatever predicament I‘m supposedly in.

“But Mr—” Patrick begins, only to be cut off by the other man.

“Ah-ah! No names, Mr Heiden!” he says, turning on Patrick with a quick sinuous movement of an arm, to put a long fingertip almost directly in his face. Satisfied with shutting Patrick up, he turns to Emily with a kind and sympathetic expression. “My apologies, Mrs Burroughs, that I am unwilling to introduce myself given the circumstances, but suffice it to say I have oversight of certain company policies. I’ve been very surprised and concerned to learn earlier today what your brother-in-law and another employee named Tom Ingram have been up to, this last week in particular. Believe me, I’m here to see what possibly can be done for your husband.”

“So you know—” Patrick again tries to begin, only to be cut off by the tall, unnamed man, who perches on the couch and produces a patch cable from a pocket to connect his laptop to the switch. I use my image processing to examine a reflection of his laptop screen as he answers.

“Yes, I’ve been brought up to date with everything that’s happened, thanks to Mr Ingram,” he says archly, and it appears the diagnostic screens on his laptop are merely copies of what Patrick had recorded on Sunday; showing what the situation was, five days ago, when my brain was mostly still made of human tissue. So this scenario is obviously just a charade, and the only question remains as to what kind of grift Patrick and his confederate are trying to pull. “Mr Burroughs should have been perfectly safe, however it is quite obvious from these images that something has gone wrong in the last day, or possibly the last two; and for whatever reasons of their own, Mr Heiden and Mr Ingram have been unwilling to bring this dire problem to the attention of the experts in this field.”

The man pauses to fix Emily with a piercing stare, and smoothly adds with a perfectly timed smile, “That would be me.”

I notice Emily sit back a little in her chair, and her jaw relaxes imperceptibly, her mouth opening an almost indiscernible fraction. Imperceptible to humans perhaps, but my time sense plays over the interaction in fine detail to focus on the tiny motion.

Then I notice the man’s eyes travelling down towards Emily’s chin, and I see he’s also observing Emily closely. Who is this guy?

He launches into a word-perfect discussion of what actually did happen to me nearly a week ago, when nanofibres of neural sponge began infiltrating my brain, and I can see for myself how Emily is hanging on his every word, almost spellbound, while he closely observes her slow breathing. Clearly the guy must be an actor, or a con man, or possibly both; he has a mellifluous, trained voice that is almost radiating calm and authority. If I hadn’t been aware from the beginning that the whole performance was a massive deception, I think I too would be convinced by the suave, sharp-angled pretend executive in the expensive Italian suit. It’s also hard to tell exactly how old he is, with the signs of middle age not having degenerated into mottled grey and infirm wrinkle lines; he could be anywhere in age from forty to seventy-five. And when I replay his entrance into the room, he moved with the flexibility and finesse of a twenty-year-old gymnast.

So it’s quite a surprise to me when Emily eventually interrupts him, breaking through the fourth wall of the marvellous show that he has put on, saying, “I know you.”

The actor is not so easily perturbed from his lines by an unexpected ad lib, and he smiles broadly, shaking his head slightly as he replies, “I am quite certain we have never met, Mrs Burroughs.”

“Well, I know of you, then.” Emily is quite insistent, and I wonder if the actor is a little too well-known. He’s unknown to me, but I can’t access on-line databases to see if he has a recognisable profile. Hopefully Emily’s memory is on the ball, even in spite of the opiates, and then I notice her wincing as she shifts in her seat. “You played the football coach in one of my favourite shows I watched as a girl.”

The guy chuckles politely, and begins a hearty defence while Patrick I notice shows signs of slight alarm, “You know, I’ve occasionally heard that I do have a strong resemblance to some actor—”

“It’s not a resemblance,” Emily says, increasingly sure of herself. “You’re him. The football coach, uh, Coach Penderson, in Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues. I binge-watched that series dozens of times, even the fifth season that everyone hates where the show jumped the shark. I’ll think of your real name in a moment.”

Patrick tries to berate Emily, “You can’t be serious, that show was already thirty or more—”

“You’re Jonathan Vincent,” Emily continues. “You were in all five seasons as Coach, even when they had the weird season five storyline with the vampires. You’ve even got the exact same dimples and the mole on your right cheek.”

Emily leans back and smiles, obviously feeling secure in her identification of the man. John it turns out, has a vague memory of watching the pilot episode with Emily in college, one time when she tried to convince him to succumb to a binge watch of all sixty episodes over a long weekend, but my human memories are too long distant for the facial recognition to be sharp. Jon Vincent, if that actually is his name, makes no further effort to disabuse Emily of her recognition of him, though he must be extremely well-preserved to look so young…

Patrick’s acting, it turns out, is not up to the task of negotiating this unexpected disruption. “It’s just a coincidence,” he says, clearly flustered.

Emily just laughs at him and sits back further, shaking her head and giving every semblance of being totally unconvinced, so Patrick wheels around to accuse his partner in deception. “You said this wouldn’t happen!”

“I told you no such thing. I said it was my sole vulnerability,” Vincent says in a level tone, narrowing his eyes. “Are you going to come clean, now?” he enquires of Patrick, who is fuming.

Patrick explodes. “Fuck you, man! And you can get the fuck out now, and unpaid.”

Emily’s about to ask a question of the older man, but with a liquid motion he reaches towards her with one arm, quietly saying, “Silence.”

And then he leaps across the room with unnatural speed to begin savaging Patrick’s neck.

 
_* ^* _*

 
I suppose it’s satisfying to know exactly how an actor who must be pushing ninety at the least doesn’t look a day over forty. Once Patrick has been subdued and Vincent relaxes his thrall over Emily, they get on like a house on fire. When the season five vampire plotline had tanked the fortunes of the show about the gay quarterback, the actor Vincent had been visited in real life by a vampire who had turned him. And after that, acting had not been quite so palatable, any longer for him.

The vampire can detect my blood circulating inside Kimmy, so after telling Emily my life is at a low ebb, he somehow detects my thoughts, giving the lie to Patrick’s intended deception that I’ve been reduced to some unthinking, coma-like state. Given the choice of leaving Emily or Patrick in place, he clearly marks out Emily to remain and Patrick to end as vampire fodder, once my brother has been compelled to undo as much of the damage to me as he can.

But it’s just a teensy bit too late for me to remain human. Or to call up my school and plead for my old job.

After she’s turned, Emily asks Vincent to get rid of Patrick in as painful a way as he can imagine.

The following Monday, once a good amount of blood draining has occurred, Patrick is compelled to go into work to return all of the purloined equipment and we never hear from him again, but we learn from Vincent that there was a horrible industrial accident involving a forklift and an exploding oxygen cylinder which left Patrick impaled as a thinly-spread out paste over a warehouse ceiling.

He assures us it was extraordinarily painful. And then Vincent goes on his way, leaving us to the rest of our ‘lives’, such as they now are.

So I’m stuck being a Kimmy, and my wife is a vampire. It’s a very modern relationship, I suppose. Occasionally Emily cuts through the synthetic skin of my neck to bite into one of my veins and drink me, but as time goes on, that’s a diminishing resource.