Underground Vampire by David Lee

light stopped her at the next intersection.  Already fashionably
tardy, she wanted to reach the restaurant before the rain started in earnest;
looking up the street at the oncoming traffic, she stepped one foot down to get
a head start on the last block.  Behind her ankle in the drain set back
into the curb face, Oliver kept focus on her slim ankle and calculated. 
If only she would step all the way down and stand in front of the grate, which
happened to be a little bit wider than the normal and would fit nicely around
her hips, he might just have dinner.  
    A young trader pushed past the
secretary stepping off the curb into the gutter, impatient to be first.  A
horn blasting down the street automatically pulled every head in that direction
as famished Oliver seized the opportunity and, reaching out, snatched his
ankles between the polished penny loafers and below the cuffs of his expensive
suit trousers and jerked him off balance and through the grate so that, by the
time he realized that his nose broke when his face smashed into the pavement,
Oliver had already smelled his blood.  Abandoning his thought to take the
victim to the Underground city to share with his followers, Oliver attacked his
neck, sucking and slurping blood from his artery directly beneath the feet of
the woman in the pencil skirt, who stood there thinking, wasn’t a guy standing
here, what happened to him, as the light changed and across the street she
went, deciding on a glass of Chardonnay to start the evening.   
    The only one who noticed the
disappearance was the Indian standing across the street.  He marked the
spot and casually walked down the street, pausing in front of a flower shop to
admire the selection and get a better reflection in the shop window.  He
saw Oliver sink his teeth into the trader’s neck and the man’s hands come up in
a futile effort to ward off his attacker.  He watched as Oliver,
temporarily sated, dragged the man’s body down the sewer.  
    Oliver sat in the vault, messy with
what was left of the young man, considering his options. Previously a
fastidious diner, he found that now his tastes ran more to the savagery of the
lion rather than the delicate sip of the hummingbird.  The problem was
twofold: first, the left over corpse resembled nothing so much as a bloody
horror, its neck torn out, bits of flesh strewn about the ground, blood
everywhere and; second, Oliver’s face and chest and shirt were covered in what
he hadn’t managed to drink or eat. 
    It was impossible to roam about the
City or even the Underground in this condition.  In either venue, his
appearance would attract immediate attention: from the Humans, horror and the
annoying police asking question, demanding answers; from the Vampires, shock
and revulsion that he had so obviously violated Clan Law and a call for
punishment.  The solution was obvious.  Society must evolve; no
longer would he be constrained by bourgeois restrictions of the Humans or the
Clan.
     Now, though, he needed a bath
and clean clothing; he really needed to remove their clothing before he ate
them so he could change on the spot.  “How convenient,” he giggled to
himself, “like if cows came with clothes; if you needed a suit, you killed that
one; a bathing suit, that one.”
    He knew that hunting and killing so
openly was dangerous.  It was only a matter of time before he made a
mistake, but the demands of his hunger and the thrill of the chase overcame
whatever judgment he had left.  That, and he knew the Queen would
recognize the signs and know he was back.  The thought of her anger that
he was openly in her City challenging her, hunting and killing on the streets
of her domain, made his digestion better.   Soon, she would react,
mobilizing her minions and he could start his revenge, picking off first that
one then the next till he was on Queen Anne hill and could pay her a visit.
That, and he had to admit it was true, he really liked attacking Humans