Early November, 2009
Manchester, New Hampshire

With his back against the door, the Kindred half-cursed, half-laughed at himself for the mental instabilities he had displayed at the murder scene and his bizarre actions afterward. The gruesome sight involving a corpse with a stocking on its head, hands tied behind it and a bloody groin wound were enough to start the delusional part of his mind going. The cops who had showed up acted liked parents with 'different' children at his one-man-discussion and brought him to the hospital, where the suggestion of a nice, sunny room had driven the now-paranoid Malkavian to try and escape. After they strapped him to a bed and left him there, he had slipped out of the bonds and tried to disguise himself to escape, but one of the cops, backed by three very large orderlies, came out of the elevator and charged him. He had ducked back into the room, and now had his back to the door, frantically searching for a way to escape. Realizing that the window was his only option, the Kindred braced his hands (sheathed with a stolen set of janitor's gloves) against the door and got a running start. The door was kicked in just as Mathias heard the glass shattering around him. At first he thought he was home free, then noticed he was 40 feet up and winced as the ground rushed up to meet him, the men in the room above staring down at him with their jaws hanging somewhere around their ankles. The cop, wincing himself at the meaty THUD the man's body made as it hit the ground, turned to an orderly and asked, a grayish tint making its way across his face, "You guys have a spare meat wagon to take this guy to the coroner?" An orderly, a little green himself, replied, "Yeah, but the guy'll have a fit when he sees this bastard's guts." The cop said something unpleasant as the first nurse and doctor sprinted across the green lawn to where the Malkavian lay unmoving.

As the doctors' and nurses' feet pounded the ground to reach him, Mathias realized that if his heart still worked, it would be racing. This was probably the most critical point of his impromptu plan. The first doctor on the scene checked for a pulse, it was all Mathias could do to keep from wincing as the man's fingers ran over what Mathias assumed was a busted collarbone. He lay there unmoving as the doctor proclaimed, "He's had it. DOA, time of death," he checked his watch, "2:31 AM. Cause of death: massive blunt trauma caused by a fall." The doctor pulled his sleeve back down and glanced up at the window. "Jesus. He jumped through that? Damn fool." The cop, meanwhile, looked very angry and walked up, rolling Mathias over with the toe of his shoe. "You got off lucky, you." he mumbled several obscenities under his breath. Restraining himself from the obvious desire to kick the corpse in the ribs, the officer walked back to his patrol car to report in. "Witness at scene has just jumped out a fourth-story window. One less witness to get a statement from." As the policeman's door closed, Mathias' superhumanly sharp hearing picked up more than a few curses as the cop drove off. The largest of the orderlies, as he walked off, said, "If I didn't know better I'd swear that freak was smiling at me."

The vampire, meanwhile, lay there in pain as the coroner's truck pulled up, and two assistant coroners, both bleary-eyed from being woken up at some ungodly hour to fetch a stiff, staggered out with a body bag. One of them said to the other, "Damn right I'm fed up. I want a raise or I'm saying the hell with this. Two-thirty in the morning and we're out here to get some nut case who took a dive out a hospital window. I want overtime for this." Mathias had to use all his powers of self-control to avoid giggling madly. As could be expected, the two coroners were less than gentle, and Mathias half-winced in the body bag as his cracked collarbone ground together. As the old Ford van pulled out, the Kindred began redirecting his blood to knit his collarbone back together, and he felt himself growing slightly hungrier as his pain lessened. However, he stopped his healing process when the sounds of the van's dying engine quit. "Let's just throw him in the drawer, do the basic procedure on him, fill out the papers and go home. I'm calling Edwards about this in the morning," the other one said. "Damn right," the colleague replied.

About half an hour later, Mathias found himself naked on a cold metal slab being pushed into a locker with a sheet over his head. This is not good, he thought. There was the scritch-scritch-scritch sound of someone writing, the tapping sounds of someone walking, and the yawning of a tired human at 3 in the morning. A slamming door and clicking lock told him that the coast was clear, as did the revving sound of two separate cars. Pushing upwards on the sheet, he tried to push his way out of the drawer; lucky for him, the tired assistants had forgotten to lock it. The slab flew out so quickly that he almost flew off, the sheet billowing as air got under it. Now then. Standing up, he immediately noticed that he needed clothes, and began looking around for some. He did not have long before dawn, and he had to figure out exactly where he was. Peeking out of the door while holding the sheet around himself, the Malkavian noticed a messy desk sitting next to the door. Quickly walking over to the desk, he looked for anything that might have revealed where he was; on the phone it said 'Lenescu Morgue' and gave an address that Mathias knew was outside his comfort zone. Becoming agitated, the Kindred ran back into the morgue, looking around for anything that might have passed for clothes. No dice; the room did not have any kind of modern garment.

Doors around the building flew open as the Malkavian ran around throwing them open; a bathroom, a second corpse room, and a dissecting room. Luckily, a pile of clothes lay next to the body on the slab: a young man in gang colors with a series of bullet holes in his chest. Ignoring the cadaver, Mathias went straight for the clothes, discovering that the young man's pants were the only item not bloodstained or too small to fit. However, another problem presented itself as there was no belt and the pants were about three sizes too large around the waist. Realizing that this might create problems, the vampire nonetheless pulled the pants on and was about to leave the room when he smelled blood. A bucket of it sat in the corner of the room next to the table; only slightly hungry, Mathias nevertheless knew that he would likely have trouble getting all the way back to his haven tonight. Drinking his fill from the bucket (which was not much, considering the bucket was a 3-gallon that was almost full itself) he dashed back to the corpse room, looking for that sheet. Tearing off strips of the cloth, he tied the jeans to himself and tried to tuck the sheet into the jeans to make something that looked like a shirt. No good; it looked ridiculous and completely unlike any shirt he had seen. Panicking at this delay, he came up with a quick solution and sprinted to the dissecting room. A tray of dissecting tools lay next to the corpse on its other side, and Mathias grabbed the first sharp implement he saw, hacking a rough hole in the sheet for his head, then two more for his arms. Dawn was getting closer, and the Malkavian knew that he could not stay in this building because of the number of feds who would be around.

Wiping the sharp implement on his sheet/shirt as he ran back to the dissecting room, he replaced it with a sheet-wrapped hand on the tray. Next, he wiped down the bucket and anything else he could think of that he had touched. At last, he ran to the front door, slid open the locks with his hand and slipped out onto the street, closing the door behind him. The street was nearly empty, since it was almost 4:30 in the morning. Walking down the sidewalk, the vampire passed a house with a newly-dug garden in the front (he assumed it was a garden) and paused a second to skim off a double handful of dirt, smearing it on the sheet he was wearing. Continuing onward, the vampire realized that he was on the wrong side of the river when he saw one of the buildings that he knew was within the fringes of his roaming area. Nearly panicking at this revelation, he started across the bridge at a brisk pace. An early-morning jogger noticed the dirty man walking across the bridge and altered his pace to avoid the person he assumed was a bum. The Kindred continued his walk as the sky got gradually brighter, crossing to the other side of the river and breathing an unnecessary sigh of relief when he passed across the unwritten boundary with his territory. Starting to sprint into the heart of his territory, he made it to his haven as the first prickling rays of dawn were peeking over the horizon.