The Shake

a way to decide who deserved which. I felt there should be a way to make the distinction; a way that wasn’t completely arbitrary. But I didn’t know how to do that. So I was reduced to rationalizing my choices. At best, I chose my victims on the basis of practical concerns over my own safety, killing people whose circumstances offered me a way to cover my tracks.
I could have circumvented the whole issue by meeting my dietary requirements with non-human blood. I’d tried more than once. Relying on non-human sources offered definite logistical advantages, but in the long run it just didn’t work. A few months of nothing but cow and horse blood, and I would begin to feel a subtle and debilitating loss of vigor, as if my metabolism were slowing down in some protective response to malnutrition. It wasn’t life-threatening. I suspect I could have survived indefinitely on non-human blood. But it would have been an impoverished existence. I could live on animal blood, but to live well I needed the sapiens vintage.
Unfortunately, dead people whose bodies have been drained of blood attract a lot of attention. If I wanted to stay in one location for any length of time, I couldn’t litter the neighborhood with dehydrated corpses. Sooner or later, I’d become suspect, and at that point, I’d have no real choice but to relocate. I liked where I was living. I liked being settled, having a fixed abode. So I had to find ways of feeding regularly that minimized the risks.
The question was, who to target? It made sense, I thought, to look for people who had already been marginalized by society, people about whom I could rely on a maximum level of indifference from the authorities. My first thought was to target criminals. The police might be relieved, even entertained, by the terminal misfortunes of my victims. This idea wasn’t completely without merit, but there was a definite drawback to harvesting the criminal contingent: they were people whose activities were already integrated into the vast intersecting networks of law enforcement. More than an occasional odd death would soon set off alarms. In short, the criminals were as much a part of the system as were the police. Which made them an impractical choice as a dietary staple.
Then it occurred to me that there was a group of people who were made to order. Death among them was never really unexpected. And once dead, they were quickly and efficiently consigned to the anonymity of statistics. Bureaucratic indifference would summarily record their departures and just as summarily forget them. As luck would have it, such people were an abundant commodity. In fact, they comprised a significant percentage of the human population. They fell under a spectrum of medical and psychiatric classifications, but what they all had in common was depression. Most of them had at least thought about suicide, and many had made half-hearted attempts. When they succeeded, the police treated their deaths as a formality, filed their reports and trudged back to their case loads. Perfect, really. I could expedite their desire to end it all, and it would be exactly what everyone half expected.
Still, as abundant as the depressed were, I couldn’t harvest them like fruit from an abandoned orchard. In a sense, they had their own niche in the human ecology. Exploiting them for their blood required a significant amount of resource management. They would remain a viable staple only so long as I didn’t kill too many. On the bright side, the resource management gave me something to do with my time, dreaming up ways to cull the herd without attracting the law, planning all the details. The down side was that each meal required a lot of work. It wasn’t something I could do more than a couple of times a month. I still needed a source of human blood that I could take quickly, without much planning or preparation, and walk away unthreatened.
I suppose I was a little slow in coming up with a solution, but when it finally dawned on me, I realized immediately I had a made-to-order supply of human blood pretty much on tap. Every year in the U.S., over 40,000 people die in traffic accidents. That’s well over one hundred a day. These deaths are so routine that they pass unquestioned. There may be inquiries made for the purpose of establishing insurance liabilities, and in some cases, to determine if any criminal misconduct was to blame. But the deaths themselves are explained by their occurrence: death by car crash. If a car goes off the road and hits a tree, there is very little chance that the accident will be attributed to the mischief of a vampire.
All I needed was a dark night, a winding road, perhaps some rain or fog. Add to that the nearly universal tendency of humans to press their luck by driving as fast as they think they can get away with; all these combined to create an ideal scenario for a thirsty vampire. Not that I could just wait by the side of the road, hoping someone would oblige me by driving into a tree. I had to encourage drivers to make the necessary course adjustments.
I would wait along a winding road for a lone driver and walk casually in front of their oncoming car. The driver would hit the brakes, swerve, maybe close his eyes and hope for the best. For my part, all I had to do was jump a few feet into the air and let the car pass under me. Or if I wasn’t in the mood for gymnastics, I could snatch someone’s pet—a medium-sized dog was just right for the job—and wait for the lone car. As it approached, I’d simply throw the dog against the car’s windshield. Very few people can keep their cool in a situation like that. When everything went as planned, the car would go off the road. If the driver was