For the story so far, click here
THIS STORY IS NOT SUITABLE FOR READERS UNDER 12
Chapter 6: Rosaline
They’d been talking all night.
“So I get it, I do.” Muriel was having trouble getting it. “She had to eat. She had to kill to survive. So she made sure she only killed bad people. Cruel people. She had to kill them to save the animals. Okay. I get that.” She hadn’t noticed that two of her friends had left the room and the third, Sammy, had long since nodded off. But that was okay, she didn’t need a response. She just needed to discuss it out loud.
Velma put her head around the door. “I have to pop out for a bit,” she said quietly.
Muriel looked up. “What? Oh, yeah, of course. I should go.”
“You don’t need to go. Stay as long as you need to. I won’t be long anyway.”
“Where’s Andy?” Muriel whispered so as not to disturb Sammy.
“Still in the bathroom. I think he must have fallen asleep in there.”
Muriel looked at the clock, “oh wow, I didn’t realise it was that late.”
“Okay, I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Velma told her as she backed out of the doorway and returned to the kitchen.
“Hey,” Muriel hurried to catch Velma before she left, “are you going to kill someone?”
Velma nodded.
“Do you have to? Now? Can’t you stay here with me? Just this once?!” There was an angry edge to her last question.
“Yes. I have to.” Velma was hurt. “I do it because I have to!”
“Why?” Muriel whined.
“Because I’m hungry Muriel! And I can’t afford to get too hungry!” She paused to calm herself. “It’s how I stay in control. If I get too hungry I won’t be able to resist -” She hesitated again, unable to finish the last sentence. “I’ve got to go,” she concluded and left.
**
Velma had another friend at work – Rosaline. She was so timid it took her more than six months to say hello to Velma, but gradually they became friendly. By the end of that first year of working together, they were regularly discussing their favourite music and foods. Rosaline’s favourite food was garlic bread but she couldn’t have it very often because Doug, her husband, said it made her breath smell. She also loved chocolate but she had to be careful not to overdo it, Doug said, because she was getting a bit wide in the waist. He would show her the photo he carried of her in his wallet and remind her how skinny she used to be.
Rosaline blushed and laughed when she told Velma these things. “He used to say I was beautiful,” she said, “can’t really blame him for being upset that I’ve let myself go.”
“That you’ve got older you mean?” Velma asked sarcastically, “no, a man can’t be expected to put up with that!” Rosaline smiled and Velma smiled back. “He doesn’t know how lucky he is to have you.”
Rosaline’s smile faded. “He said yesterday that I’m lucky he sticks around because some woman at work fancies him and he said ‘no-one would ever fancy you‘,” she tilted her head at Velma, “that’s not very nice is it?”
“Does he ever say anything nice?” Velma asked. Rosaline didn’t reply.
Velma couldn’t get Rosaline to say much for a couple of weeks after that. It was just polite nods and half-smiles. But eventually they got chatting again and Velma was able to find out that Rosaline was a majorette when she was at school, that she had a best friend called Sue who was a ball girl at Wimbledon, and that Doug had life insurance.
**
Velma caught the night bus right outside her building and bought a single to the town centre. She alighted outside the multi-story carpark and took the lift to the roof. No one parked on the roof since the CCTV cameras had been vandalised. It was 3.33 am. Not much more than 3 hours till sunrise. No one was around. Velma stepped off the roof, became the bat, and headed to the seaside.
She’d been following Doug on social media and learned that he’d chartered a boat for the weekend with two mates, as he did every year. They enjoyed spending time outdoors like real men, drinking and fishing.
After flying for less than half an hour, Velma was feeling sluggish. The harbour from which Doug’s boat set off was no more than ten miles from home – less than an hour’s flight for the Velma Bat in calm weather. But the closer she got to the coast, the windier it got and that slowed her down considerably.
After reaching the harbour, she had no easy task in finding the boat at sea, but her persistence was rewarded when she finally spotted it. The Dominator was being tossed energetically by the waves and she didn’t expect to see anyone on deck. When she dropped onto the boat, in human form, she had to immediately grab the guard rail to stay on her feet. It was a full moon and her view of the distant horizon told her that there was less than an hour and a half until sunrise. It started to rain. Slow at first but the drops were heavy. She had to get a move on.
She forced open the hatch for access to the lower cabins, expecting to find Doug there, but before she descended, the wind dropped for a second and she heard a sound behind her. She closed the hatch and approached the man vomiting over the rail.
She touched his arm. “Doug?” He turned and confirmed she was right. “Having a rough time?”
He was confused and shouted over the noise of the wind and waves. “What the hell -? Where did you come from?”
“Oh I just dropped in for a minute,” she shouted back, “I’m Roz’s friend.”
His attempt at a reply was thwarted by another resurgence of his dinner which he spat into the sea before turning back to look at her. “How the hell – did you stow away or something?”
“Or something, yes,” Velma replied, but he couldn’t hear her very well and she realised she was wasting time she didn’t have.
The rain was coming down hard now and her chances of making it home before sun-up were diminishing by the second. But, because it was Doug, she didn’t want to just do it. For Rosaline’s sake, she needed him to know why.
She looked forcefully into his eyes and shouted above the crashing of the waves and the howling of the wind. “You will sit still and shut up for one minute while I tell you why you’re going to die tonight.” The fear in his eyes showed nowhere else on his motionless body. “The way you treat your wife is contemptible,” Velma went on. “You disrespect her. You demean her. And you make her feel weak and worthless.” His eyes expressed denial. Disbelief. Velma ignored him. “You do that because you know you don’t deserve her. You know you are beneath her. Way way beneath her.” A huge wave crashed over the side of the boat and drenched him. Still he sat still, eye to eye with Velma, attentive to her every word.
“You are a truly horrible man.” Velma bellowed, then paused to let that sink in. “But tonight you will finally do one good thing. Instead of being an enemy of the sea, you will, for once, be its ally. Tonight you will feed the fishes.”
With her left hand gripping the rail, she took his right hand in hers and sunk her teeth into his cold wrist. Being still under her spell, he did nothing to resist. Less than a minute later, she threw his drained body over the side.
She stood there for a moment, watching his remains disappear under the waves, remembering Muriel’s plea before she left home, and she wondered if her friends would ever really understand that it was better for everyone if certain people just died.
She climbed onto the highest point of the boat, what she liked to call the roof of the steering wheel bit, and jumped off it to become the bat again before she hit the water. Now she knew she had to make her best flight time, in the worst flight conditions. Her little bat body fought bravely against the wind, a struggle made harder as her fur soaked up the heavy rain. It was only a couple of miles to shore but she was exhausted by the time she got there. The horizon was looking orangey and there was no way she would make it home. She needed a cave or a tunnel but she wasn’t familiar with this town and, with only minutes before sunrise, started to scan the landscape in a panic, looking for somewhere safe.
Then she saw it – the miniature railway. The track went through a short tunnel under a hill and Velma headed straight for it. There, safe in the dark, she tucked one wing tightly against her body while fully extending the other. The resultant mid-air flip enabled her to grab the earth ceiling in her claws. And there she hung, safe upside down in the dark, while sunlight painted the train tracks just a few metres away. Now she could sleep.
****
Click here for more Velma chapters
Velma the Vegan Vampire belongs to Violet Plum © 2026
Violet’s Vegan Comics – creating funny, exciting and always entertaining vegan fiction since 2012
Violet's Vegan Comics 
Comments Welcome