The sun looked on at me with an expression of peril. It burned fiery holes into the carelessly sewn leather I wore. Sweat dripped from my forehead.

I looked on to the west, watching the road. I stared at the pavement, the frayed road markers, the dustballs. My eyes were witness to the barren landscape and nothing more. I lay still in a prone stance in an old watchtower which would serve as a perch for me, to swoop down on my prey from afar. My stomach lay flat against the baking wood as I patiently waited for my target in the safety of darkness amidst decay. My eye against the scope of my PSG-1 and my conscience at the backburner, I found a silhouette of a man emerging from the horizon. His form broke the still image of the distant landscape. I zoomed in closer with a pair of army grade binoculars, slowly turning its knobs and focusing the image. The form had layers of detail slowly piling up until I could piece together a conclusion as to who this shape was. It was a man; Caucasian, 5 foot 11, 154 lbs. He was wearing a black pinstriped suit. Smart attire, sure, but for this climate it'd be more suicidal than smart to wear a full suit. He wore a plastic smile on his face, the pearl daggers in his mouth reflecting discouraging amounts of light. He walked closer and closer to my tower, closer and closer, until finally...

The scene was then set. A man, armed with a rifle in the security of a decrepit watchtower, and a man down below, waiting to be picked off from afar like fucking deer on a hunting trip.

I switched back to my PSG-1, held its trigger softly, and caressed its metal body, switching off safety. I peeked into the scope again, locking my eyelids with the scope's rim, when I saw that same suited man pointing an identical PSG-1 at my exact position. My stomach briefly did a backflip.

Flashback to the previous day.

12:01 AM. August 4th, 2009.

Smoke swirled about my person. My pale hands were holding cards, my fingers glistened under the hot light above me as light bounced on and off the multiple jewel encrusted rings on my fingers. The light burned. There were three cards in my hand: A King of Hearts, A King of Clubs and an Ace of Spades. 21 in total.

I dropped my cards, uncertain of the consequence. They landed with a 'tap' on a green surface laden with velvet and painted with numbers. After which chips piled in front of me. An artificially endowed blonde woman then said something particularly uninteresting to me involving "cashing in" these chips.

I did so and went through the necessary protocol, and afterwards I had exactly eleven thousand and forty seven dollars.

I took my winnings and bought myself a two night stay at this hotel. I walked through the array of neon lights, cigarette smoke and silicone implants to the elevator.

Carrying my briefcase full of green, I entered the elevator en route to my suite. I stepped in, tapped on the control pad for a bit and headed to floor twenty four of hotel/casino Circus Circus.

The gears bringing me up sounded constantly, and over that hum was cliché elevator music. And faintly under all this ambient noise was the sound of a knife dragging its razor edge along rope. It grew louder and louder, the sound of the edge consuming the fibers that are keeping me from falling to certain death below.

Out of pure paranoia, I dropped my briefcase and removed the maintenance panel on the elevator's ceiling. Afterwards, I produced a Glock and climbed up. I held onto the panel's edge and pulled myself up, I dragged one arm onto the surface of the elevator and did the same with my armed appendage. I then found myself standing on the elevator cell, staring at a slender man in a suit, his face covered by a balaclava, cutting the rope keeping the elevator working. He immediately took notice to my presence, and swiftly disarmed me with some martial arts technique, sending my pistol down into the abyss, discharging it in the process. I heard faint, panicked screams, as if the gong signaling the start of a destiny deciding bout had been struck. So now, I find myself in a faceoff with an unknown assailant, a smartly dressed unknown assailant. Who smelled of roses. Stone roses.

The assailant launched his fist directly at my torso, and I felt my fine silk coat wrapping itself ever so slightly around his fist, which was followed by the raw kinetic energy in his punch throwing me completely of balance. I lost my footing and almost slipped into the vertical shaft of death. I reeled for a moment, recovered and delivered a blow of my own, an uppercut, right to his chin. It connected and I felt my knuckles come in contact with his jaw. He fell backwards in a graceful surrender onto the elevator, creating a resonant thump echoing throughout the empty air.

I stood on top of him and removed his balaclava. I thought the see the rugged face of a thug, but what I saw was the exact opposite; I had a beautiful maiden in front of me, unconscious and defeated by my hands. She was striking. A pearl. She looked so peaceful and serene as she lay defeated on top of the ascending elevator. I felt guilty leaving her to die here, regardless of how it seemed she was out to assassinate me. That feeling of guilt and my... hunger led me to this course of action.

I brought her back into the elevator, still on its approach to the top floor. Exactly when I brought us into the stall, the ascent to the 24th floor was done. The elevator doors opened, light filling the almost pitch black chamber and in front of me was an elderly couple, smiling as they saw what they thought to be a young couple in the elevator. I ignored them and carried the girl and my briefcase to my room. I inserted my keycard into the door panel and it flew open.

I tapped the lightswitches on, turned on the television and put the unconscious woman and my case of green on the bed. I walked around the suite I had just rented, found a few hilariously bad recreations of some classic paintings, tasteless décor, and among other things, a hot tub in the bathroom. I walked back to the bedroom and checked the specifications of the flatscreen television in front of the bed.

Unimpressed, I sat on the edge of the king sized bed I had laid today's loot on. I flipped through the channels on the flatscreen television before stopping at CNN to see that a story on vampire hunters was being ran.

Why the need for vampire hunters, though? To briefly explain the situation, what happened was, that several months ago in Russia, a pharmaceutical laboratory was sabotaged. A group of terrorists exposed the human DNA samples to vampire bat DNA, and to prevent the scientists from detecting the sabotage, they also hacked the lab archives, making sure the control DNA samples all matched the new vampire bat/human hybrid DNA. And eventually the pharmaceutical company came up with the "perfect" batch of weight loss pills, which was of course containing the vampire bat DNA. What the scientists did was take the DNA of people with faster metabolisms and generally naturally healthy and fit bodies, and integrated it with several chemicals that would force the new DNA into the patient's genetic code, overwriting it and eventually making the patient fit and healthy. So they then tested this new weight loss formula on some human guinea pigs, and at first they got the results that they wanted, however, what they didn't expect was for these subrengjects to also turn into killing machines.

The scientists then found themselves with a batch of fifty or so people exhibiting symptoms such as "aggressiveness, accelerated hair and teeth development, increased strength and bloodthirstiness". Not only that, they found that what these subjects had was contagious.

Words flew from the CNN reporter at an incomprehensible rate. I didn't take those in, however they showed slides of some vampire hunters, and one slide showed the familiar face of a maiden, to be precise, the maiden strewn across the bed at this moment.