Now that you’ve read it let me know what you think! You can do that either in the comments on this post or in a review from where you bought the book.

I wrote After A Taste in 2020 in an effort to add to the other zombie short stories I had written thus far in the hopes of completing an entire collection (still have that goal in mind).

This particular story I wanted to try two different things. One was to examine how a vampire would handle the end of the world as humans slowly succumb to each other and zombies. I thought this would be an interesting twist with vampires similarly struggling to survive in a post-apocalypse. They require humans to survive and humans are going extinct, I have a novel series in mind that explores this concept further.

In the story, Francis’ goal is to create a human breeding pair and establish a permanent blood supply. But as a single person, this would largely be impossible. The logistics of finding two humans capable of mating, keeping them alive, and keeping them secure would be a herculean effort for one person. Let alone the chaos of trying to birth children in a world without doctors, medicine, or hospitals. And to top it off Francis would have to wait 6-9 months before new blood could be obtained. Needless to say its not practical and Francis largely has no hope of surviving but still fights anyway.

I was also intrigued by the idea of an immortal slowly dying. It’s one thing for a human to die in a post-apocalypse. But imagine living for hundreds, possibly thousands of years through various calamities and finally succumbing to death because the beings you fed on have now died off. It would be a frustrating and truly humbling experience I would imagine.

The second idea I wanted to explore was my own take of a zombie and vampire hybrid. It has been explored a few times, Zompires or Vambies existed in the Marvel comics. In the Marvel Zombies 3 comic series Morbius is infected with the Hunger zombie virus and becomes a hybrid.

It’s not a commonly explored concept. The argument I see most online for why it’s not explored is that the natures of the two creatures contradict each other. Generally speaking a vampire is a person who is cursed with undeath but retains their human-like attributes. A zombie is a soulless reanimated body without any of its former self. For most people a vampire is a greater hierarchy of undeath compared to a zombie. In other words, a vampire is already undead so it can’t be zombified.

I thought this was a rather narrow view. Zombies and vampires come in all kinds of styles. Some are supernatural, some are the result of viruses, some are from the occult, and so on. If you’re looking at strictly traditional zombies and traditional vampires then I agree you probably couldn’t obtain a hybrid. But with all the varieties out there? It’s totally possible.

In this story the vampire is more of your traditional form of vampire. But the zombies are the result of a virus that infects the tissue of its hosts. In my mind a vampire, while supernatural, is still made up of human tissue. So it would in theory be susceptible to a zombie virus.

I don’t have a name for the hybrid creature. Zampire, Vambie, zompire, all seem…cheesy and largely taken. I want a unique name like Dhampir or Ghoul but haven’t come around creatively to finding a name. (feel free to send some suggestions).

My hybrid retains many of the positives that come with being a vampire; added speed, strength, agility, and durability but loses the human-like personality. It’s still an intelligent hunter, as evidenced by waiting for the right time to strike or allowing zombies to turn the victim first but is more animalistic and feral. The positive benefits it obtains from zombies is that it no longer needs to fear sunlight and is impervious to pain and fear. To me this would be a frightening combination and make for a challenging foe in an alreadty complicated apocalypse with zombies, vampires, and other humans.

Another aspect that makes this creature dangerous is that it now feeds exclusively on zombie blood. Something much more readily available than human blood. It can also generate additional sources of zombie blood by turning humans as shown in the story. This gives it a direct incentive to hunt down humans and turn them. It does hunt zombies to a degree so over time it would probably thin or cripple zombie herds. But I would personally take a group of zombies then one of these monsters.

As a side note the reason the creature feeds on the ankles of zombies is that a zombie heart would either beat slowly or not at all, so the blood would largely pool in the legs.

I intend to explore this creature further in additional stories. Perhaps in the aforementioned vampires during the apocalypse novel idea I’ve been tinkering with. Hopefully by then I’ll have a name for the beast.

Let me know what you think of After A Taste, the world, or this creature. I’m happy to answer any questions regarding the creature or possible applications in future stories.