There are freshly made missing posters hung up around the town. Recently, a tourist has gone missing. His gaggle of friends are busy wandering around San Creado, handing out flyers, asking if anyone has seen this man. He's young and bright-eyed, cocky to the point where even his picture emanates arrogance, as every youth seems to be. Last seen two nights ago, a friend of his had relayed to Zachariah that the night of his disappearance, he'd sent a series of frantic texts, claiming a man was following him.

Zachariah reads everything on the flyer. Everything except for his name - that, he has scribbled out with a permanent marker. His apartment reeks of dead body, but not just because he's in it. There's another guest just as rotten and decomposed as he is in the bedroom. Should anyone get a peek at this man, they'd come to find he's got an uncanny resemblance to the youth in the flyer.

His actions had not been his own at the time. He remembers, clear as day, spotting the man lagging behind his group of friends, more concerned with his cell phone than keeping up. It was dark, and the particular road they were travelling down was poorly lit. It was the perfect environment for something like him to be lurking in. Though Zachariah swears up and down it wasn't him in control, he knows exactly what had happened. He made no attempt to stop it, instead just took a backseat and shut his eyes as tight as he could as the angel took over for him, sawing through flesh like a hot knife through butter. Zachariah had spent a good part of the night, once the angel had finished and relinquished control, hunched over the toilet, crying and trying to vomit. With nothing in him, the latter was impossible, and he's not sure if his tear ducts even work anymore.

It had been necessary. Or so that's what the angel had told him. It's an eye for an eye kind of deal, she said. If he wanted something, he had to give something in return. He couldn't do it himself, however, so she had begrudgingly done the deed for him, though to an outsider it wouldn't have made a difference. It's the same body that cut that man up, and therefore the same person.

Though it makes him sick to his rotten little stomach, Zachariah can't stop staring at the flyer. He can feel the gutwrenching fear that his friends had gone through while making these. The message is written in comic sans but still has a frantic energy to it, detailing the young man's clothing and appearance - white, hardly older than 21, a tad overweight, dressed head to toe in sweats.

He had crossed out the name because he fears that if he should ever learn it, that man might just come back to haunt him. Zachariah has since done away with his soiled clothing, washed every speck of blood off of his body, but he still feels dirty. He hopes that he gets what he was promised for this, otherwise... he doesn't know what he'll do. It won't be pretty.

As soon as he's out of sight, Zachariah makes a beeline for the beach. He would break into a sprint, but his legs are too far gone to do any running. Once he makes it to the beach, he crumples the flyer up and tosses it into the ocean, as far as his decomposing arm can throw. Unfortunately, the waves just bring it back to shore. It washes up at his feet. "Ugh," is all he can say. What else is he supposed to do?

Rialto's fingers felt at the edges of the paper, smoothing out the hasty sticky-taping job with little avail; the transparent material was already creased. A crease disrupted his forehead as he pored over the missing poster, in itself slapped together just as hastily. They didn't have a noticeboard or intercoms positioned around San Creado - news travelled, as vampires old enough to have moss grow on them would be familiar with, by word of mouth, and in writing. Frantic whispers feeding the nightlife's strangeness, spritzes of spray paint appearing often around town - primarily nothing more than single words, or cryptic symbols. It all came from the need to communicate.

He fancied himself a master of design, but there was no critique leaving him as the vampire squinted at the picture, a blurry IG selfie not meant to be examined for longer than five minutes, grit in the picture evident after every pixel turned to ink. Rialto read the name and maybe thought, the times he'd traipsed around this town without the intention to sell, doing nothing but listen and watch and fix his enormous sunglasses, he'd seen this person himself - a flash of his face in Rialto's peripheral, some guttural yell of his name from one of his friends while they were spilling from the doors of the diner, his shadow intermingled with others.

Rialto didn't feed from tourists. For one, tracking someone to feed on was actually much more exhaustion than he liked, and even if tourists came and went Rialto somehow found himself faced with a total disconnect from want. Hunger was a painful ache, a burn, and knocked impolitely at his door by way of kicking it down and grabbing him by the collar like a money-laundering landlord, yet he was easily appeased. Or just lazy. Nowadays he hadn't sunken his teeth into anything other than red gummies; blood sodas were like his water.

They didn't have to kill when they ate, but feeling the pulse of life through blood hitting the arteries, the gush of it once he bit down akin to popping an egg yolk, thrust someone's life so uncomfortably in his hands that Rialto now couldn't help wanting to let go and squirm. He abstained from it entirely.

The posters won't do anything in this town, hanging silently on the walls. It's not as though they have a law system, and it was bound to be pasted over with something else. Decisive, Rialto tore it straight off the telephone pole and rolled it up to shove half of it in the waistband of his sweats.

He wasn't entirely surprised to see Zachariah on the beach while winding back to his carriage, seeing as he could smell him from a long way off, but Rialto highly preferred not to - a solid reason why he tried not to breathe too much around him. He knew decay, because it wasn't a stretch of the mind to realise that a vampire had killed, but he didn't like it. All he saw was a wrinkly, wet ball of paper drifting back, ink starting to bleed vaguely through the page but too soggy to see. Rialto didn't focus on it, politely refraining from pinching his nose but not from breathing through his mouth instead, fingers drumming absently on the roll by his side, and commented, half-seriously, "Oh, a message in a bottle."

© MADI