It was Rollo who found the thing. It was trying to hide - curled up below some black plastic refuse sacks at the end of a dark, litter strewn alleyway, but there was no way you could miss it, really. It was the smell that gave it away. The stink from it was that strong, man - it almost hurt to breath, you know? The smell from the piles of garbage everywhere was nothing compared to it. My eyes were filling with tears and I pulled my jacket up over my nose to mask it some, but there was nothing you could really do. It seemed to get into your lungs and stick there like poison. I felt my throat spasming in protest and my mouth filling with water, and fought to hold it down. I didn't want to puke in front of the guys, but I could see they were struggling, too - their faces were drawn tight in expressions of pure disgust.
Anyway, it was too weak to put up much of a fight. They're actually pretty rare these days; so yeah, maybe we went over the top a little bit, but hey - who really cares about them, after everything they did to us? Even so, I felt sick about it afterwards, man. I even had a couple of nightmares - not that I'd tell the guys about that, you know?
That night there was only Rollo, Ace, and me. There had been more of us, back in the day; but then we've all lost somebody over the years, right? Everyone lost someone back then. And the rest of us - the ones still living, at least - we grew up fearing and hating the things. When they started to get sick, and humanity started to fight back - that fear kind of went away, you know? But the hate didn't. In fact, the hate kept growing. I ain't trying to make excuses for what we did, just telling it like it was. We sure as hell ain't the first ones to go hunting them, right?
We were bored, and to be honest, more than a little loaded when Ace suggested it, and it seemed like a good idea. Why not? We knew it wouldn't really be dangerous; and if we found one - so what? Nobody cared; and we thought we'd be putting it out its misery. There haven't been any of the strong ones for years, not since the Government released the V-AIDS Virus and began the Great Extermination. Remember before all that, when they were still powerful? When you were so scared you could hardly breath? When you could hear the screams outside every night? I was just a kid, but I sure as hell can. Every night, huddled together, praying they wouldn't come for you... I'll never forget how it felt.
Anyway, when we found what we were looking for, we went kind of wild. All those years of hate and fear... it was the first time I'd ever seen one of them up close like that - infected, and helpless. Rollo was grinning when he dragged it out by the ankle from under the garbage bags. Exposed, it was hideous - pale, ravaged and impossibly thin, writhing and mewling as it tried to pull away. Face down, it clawed at the ground.
"Awwwwww, baby!" he said, his grin twisting as the smell seemed to thicken even more.
"Man, lookit that thing!" Ace said, with a look of amazed revulsion on his face, hand over his mouth to ward off the awful cloying reek of its rotting flesh. I saw he had his cellphone in his hand, using it to film the pitiful thing on the ground. Rollo stepped back and wiped his hands on his jeans, his expression dark. It was trying to crawl back under the pile of garbage. He leaned over it and spoke gently, as if he was genuinely curious.
"Where you going, beautiful?" he said, and suddenly swung a vicious kick at it, his heavy boot thudding into its ribcage. I winced. The thing shrieked and rolled onto its back, and we saw it in its entirety for the first time.
"Ohhhh... no WAY!" I said, disgusted. I couldn't believe how ravaged it was, even although I'd seen humans with advanced cases of malnutrition before; this was more like a skin covered skeleton, and that awful thinness just made the rest of it worse. The skin was pale to the point of translucency, mottled with mold and dreadful fleshless areas; the eyes milky and obscured by cataracts. Patches of long, filthy hair were plastered to its scalp. Its mouth was working, fluid dribbling down its chin.
I watched as the huge incisors bit futilely at the air; dark blood was leaking from just about everywhere - nose, eyes, ears. It thrashed its head and I jumped back as a gout of blood splattered onto my boots. Rollo stamped hard on its wrist, pinning it. I heard a dry snap as he ground his heel down.
"Aw man, that's nasty," Rollo said. He pulled a switchblade from his pocket. "Don't you know it ain't polite to spit?" he said. With a quick motion he leaned over and sliced off one of its ears. Man, the noise it made! I wouldn't have believed it still had the strength to make a sound like that, and I took a step back in alarm. Ace stepped forward and drove a kick into its face, cutting the sound off with a horrible crunch.
Well, you know the rest, right? You've seen the video? I had nothing to do with setting the website up; that was all down to Ace, but it sure didn't take long for it to go viral. Five hundred thousand hits and counting, man. People are sick, ain't they?
So anyway, that kick was the signal for us to go wild. I don't really remember much about actually doing what we did; but yeah, we sure made it suffer. None of us had a wooden stake, so it wouldn't die, no matter how many bits we sliced off. In the end, I poured lighter fluid on what was left and set it alight. It was still screaming, even then; and that's what gave me the nightmares, later on. It was still screaming. To be fair, I thought I'd heard somewhere that fire would finish the damned thing, but then again - that's the thing about vampires, its pretty hard to actually kill them. The V-AIDS virus doesn't kill them, just deprives them of whatever it is they get from blood that made them strong; whatever makes them invulnerable.
Sometimes, man, when the nightmares come and I'm lying awake in the dark, I think about them. I wonder about that night, what we did. I wonder how long it had lived, and how many people it had killed or turned in its lifetime. Some people say we should study them in case they ever develop immunity and come back in numbers, but believe me - those folks are a minority. They're weak, we can do what we want to them, and nobody really cares.
We stood around for a bit and watched it burning, but the smell was even worse now it was mixed with the stink of burning flesh - and honestly, I think we all felt a bit weird about what we'd done. As I said, maybe it was a bit over the top. We didn't say much as we headed home.
Truth be told, we haven't really said much to each other since then, you know it?