I knew there was a problem when I saw the waitress drawing fake vampire fangs on her lower lip.

She was peering into a mirror with her back to me, but my table was at just the right angle for me to see what she was doing.

Not that I was trying to be nosy. I was really just looking around so I could give my order—I was already twenty minutes into a hour lunch, after all. And at first I thought she was just checking her make-up or putting on lipstick…it was a similar motion after all. But no. When I looked past her to the reflection, I saw it was a black pen in her hand. And she was drawing twin crescent fangs down from the line of her mouth to the top edge of her small chin.

That’s when she met my eyes in the mirror.

The waitress finished the second fang and then turned on her heel in my direction. When she reached the table, she just stood silently staring at me. I could see a thin bead of blood where she’d jabbed herself too hard with the pen making her right fang.

Swallowing, I offered her an uncertain smile. “Miss? Are you all right?”

She nodded, her eyes never leaving mine. “Yes. I am fine.”

Her voice sounded strange now, an odd lilting accent that I didn’t remember her having before. Awkwardly fumbling with my menu, I tried to remember what I even wanted.

“Ah…um, a club sandwich please. And a bottle of water.”

“Vould you like chips?”

No, I wasn’t imagining it. She was doing some kind of weird, bad accent. Why? Halloween was a week ago, and this place was normally super boring even on holidays. I’d even had this waitress before, and she’d always been slow but otherwise fine.

“Um, no. Just the sandwich please. And the water.”

“Very well.”

She left without another word, and I thought that’d be the end of it. Then five minutes later I heard her loud, fake accent on the other side of the room.

“I am sorry. I know this is not what you vant.”

I turned in time to see her jump onto a man in one of the distant booths, sinking her teeth into his neck with such force that red spray shot across the table and began to soak his screaming wife or girlfriend. There was a confused delayed reaction from everybody else, but after three or four more seconds of her ripping into him, everyone in the place started yelling, including me.

I ducked out before the cops came. I needed to get back to work, and what could I tell them that would help? I made it as far as this ATM kiosk thing before someone leapt onto my car and started trying to break in. H-he had drawn on vampire fangs too. I popped a tire trying to shake him off, and when I finally stopped, he started breaking in. So I ran over here. Blocked myself in here with you. He went off after…after someone else, but you saw that old lady a minute ago, right? She was chasing those kids and she had drawn on fangs too. It…has the whole world just gone crazy or vut?

The ATM kiosk footage shows that the unidentified man had kept his back against the ATM machines since the woman had come in, too fixated on her ramblings to speak or look out the windows toward the events she was describing. For the woman’s part, she had began rummaging in her purse soon after blocking the door with a trash can. The man had visibly tensed at this, perhaps fearing a robbery, but he seemed to relax a little when instead of retrieving a gun or a knife, she had just pulled out a small, black eyeliner pencil.

Then she’d started drawing vampire fangs on her lower lip.

She was still telling him the above story while she worked, and it doesn’t even appear she realized what she was doing as she savagely dug into her skin, making one crescent and then the other. In any event, once she was done, the pencil and purse were soon discarded and forgotten. She was stalking toward him now, hands hooked into claws as a sad smile spread across her befanged lips.

“I am sorry. I know this isn’t what you vant.”

Identification of the remains of John Doe is still pending.