Captured by the Chimera Zombie-Master

by Veronica Sommers

  I edge sideways, knife aimed at the flabby folds of skin that seem to be its neck. Its keening rises in pitch, and I break, terrified, screaming back at it, darting forward and frantically slashing, and stabbing, and slashing again, until I feel the knife blade drag through something stiff, like cartilage, and the alarm call chokes off. The creature's eyes swivel, and then go still. Its tongue slithers out the corner of its open mouth, lying in a slimy blob on the concrete. Blood leaks from its ravaged throat—unusually dark blood that steams when it hits the floor.

  My hand is shaking so hard I almost drop the knife, but I force myself to renew my grip. I've seen enough horror movies to know that partly-dead monsters can sometimes revive. I stab the thing through the eye for good measure. More dark liquid spurts out, and I jump back, but not quick enough—the blood dapples my shirt in foul-smelling dots that sizzle, eating slowly through the material.

  "Shit!" Dropping the knife, I shed Atlan's coat and pull off the shirt, throwing it into a corner. Then I put the coat back on and fasten it to hide the bra underneath.

  Thankfully none of the acidic blood got on Atlan's coat. What the hell were they messing around with in this lab? Geez.

  Panting, I stare at the thing I killed. I killed it. Way to go, me! I wish Atlan had been here to see me do that. Though he could have taken the little monster out with one easy sweep of his blade—no chopping and hacking necessary.

  Still, I'm kinda proud of myself. Maybe nobody heard the thing's creepy alarm call. Maybe I can still hide back here, and no one will find—

  Another sound stops my thought cold.

  It's the onrushing, ever-increasing sound of more scrabbling toenails, more sludgy sniffs and throaty growls—and feet, lots of feet pattering toward my hiding place.

  "Oh, shit." Hitching my pack onto my back and seizing the knife, I clamber up onto the pipes again, struggling to get up higher as more of the creatures charge for my hiding place, howling and shrieking.

  There's no fighting them now, no escape, no hope that this horrific cacophony has gone unnoticed. I've been treed, hunted and pinned down, and all I can do is wait for the master of these creatures to come.

  I inch along the pipes to the fuse box and crouch atop it, and from that vantage point I get my first good look at the creatures. Their piranha jaws and chameleon swivel-eyes are identical to those of the one that I killed; but seeing their bodies gives me a sick, crawling sensation of wrongness. They look like furry tadpoles on two legs. The legs and fur are hideously close to those of a dog, but the body shape is a horizontal teardrop with a massive face full of piranha teeth at the front end and the tapered tail at the back. The tail must help them balance as they hop around.

  What are they? What the hell are they?

  I don't know much about genetics, but I do know that developing a hybrid creature like this would take years. More than just two years, I suspect. This lab must have been working on creepy-ass gene-splicing projects way before the zombie outbreak.

  The creatures swarm and screech below me, jumping on their hideous pairs of legs, snapping their blood-colored teeth.

  I wait, poised in a fierce pouncing crouch, my ankle aching. My right hand holds the knife, and my left grips the edge of the steel box under me. Sweat mists my forehead and trickles down the back of my neck.

  And then he appears, the sound of the creatures quieting at his arrival.

  He's a hulking figure, well over six feet, with the whip-sharp curve of a stinger arching behind him. In the orange light I see him clearly—a clean-shaven, handsome face, with full lips that carry a perpetual almost-smirk, a narrow nose, and bright yellow eyes—inhuman eyes. Stark white antlers sweep outward from his wavy brown hair. His muscles are, in a word, insane. Body-builder level, really. He looks as if someone injected him with steroids.

  He's naked except for a pair of ill-fitting black shorts, and the near-nudity is weird but a little bit majestic too?

  Something flutters at his back—flickers, and flares outward.

  Wings.

  Dragonfly wings, translucent green with black veins—

  They've barely begun to open before he pinions them back, folds them in so I can't even catch a glimpse of them over the arches of his bulging shoulders.

  "There you are," he says, the corner of his mouth twitching up. "The little panther, ready to pounce."

  The creatures scrabbling and hopping on the ground cringe, cowering out of his way as he advances. When he reaches me, he stretches out his hand as if to help me down.

  My knife whips out, carving a gash across his face.

  I gasp, and he freezes.

  I glimpse the white of his cheekbone before the blood swells over it; I felt the tip of my knife scrape it. Ribbons of blood trail from the deep cut.

  His smile gone, he reaches out to me again. "Give me the knife, little panther."

  "No!" I growl, suddenly furious. "You don't get to give me nicknames, or touch me, or sic your horrible beasts on me. Back off, or I'll cut you again."

  "You left your room," he says. "After you agreed to help me, to be part of this, you ran away. You broke your word."

  "What are you talking about? I agreed to nothing. I don't want anything to do with whatever schemes or goals you have going on here."

  His features harden. "I will give you three seconds to come down."

  He's within striking distance. That tail of his could stab me in half a second, I have no doubt.

  I narrow my eyes and stare him down, defiant.

  One.

  His smirk deepens, his eyes heating with something like admiration.

  Two, three—

  I'm about to ask him why he doesn't just get it over with when the stinger whips forward, catching me in the side of my neck. A hot, stinging pain crawls up my neck to my brain and sets my consciousness on fire—oh god I'm burning from the inside, burning, burning it hurts, oh hell, it hurts—

  The monster collects me in his arms and carries me out of the room. After a few unbearable minutes of agony, the burning in my head fades a little, leaving me with foggy vision and a dreadful heaviness throughout my limbs and body. I think moving even my smallest finger would take a herculean amount of will power. I try it anyway—pressing all my desire into that one small effort—and it doesn't work. I can't even twitch my pinkie.

  The scorpion monster lowers his nose to my cheek and sniffs me. A rumble of approval surges through his chest. What is it with men and my smell? It's disturbing, really. I mean it's sexy with Atlan, but this guy—no way. I don't want him touching me, carrying me, smelling me, or calling me "little panther." It twists something inside me, souring the specialness of what I have with Atlan.

  Paralyzed as I am, I try to keep track of where we're going—the right turns, left turns, stretches of mottled gray ceiling studded with harsh white bulbs. But there's a dull haze in my head—aftereffects of the toxin, no doubt—and pretty soon I lose track.

  For a while I can still hear the scrabbling of the creatures around us, but eventually they veer off down another hallway, the clatter of their claws dissipating into the distance. It's odd that they moved as one, all at once. I peer up at the man holding me, at the powerful lines of his throat and jaw, the pointed tips of his antlers. He's terrifying, and astonishing. I have a theory that every teacher is a little bit of a biologist, and I find this specimen of life irresistibly fascinating. I want to know how he came to be, what concoction of genetic material created these dramatic changes in his body. Obviously someone was playing off the same concepts that resulted in the vampire serum—genetic modification incorporating the traits and qualities of certain animals. In the case of Atlan and the other vampires, the changes were mostly internal, invisible—except for the fangs, of course. But in this man's case, the science that created him seems to have been primarily focused on adding distinct traits of other species to his existing form. They fundamentally changed his DNA. Stem cells had to have been involved, and other deep-level DNA mo
dification that I can't even begin to find the words for.

  At last he shoulders his way through a door, ducks his head, and murmurs to someone, "They found her."

  "You want her restrained like the others?" It's a woman's voice, but not Dr. Corbin or anyone else I recognize.

  "I think so, for now. Until we come to an understanding."

  I still can't move, but I glare at him with all my power as he takes off my pack and Atlan's coat. He lays me on a cot and arranges my limbs, which are stiff but pliable, like a doll's. The woman bends over me, and I recognize her as the gaunt woman with rectangular glasses, one of the four doctors who first met us when we arrived. She clips something cold around one of my wrists—a handcuff, maybe? Though the restraints are hard, her hands are gentle.

  "Why aren't you keeping her with the others, Reuel?" she asks stiffly.

  "She interests me," he replies. "I'm looking for unique women to breed with, after all, and she may be a candidate."

  Shock chills my bones. If I weren't already paralyzed, those words would have done the trick.

  The monster—Reuel—leans forward, stroking my cheek with the backs of his fingers. His face is pensive, almost soft. "I'm not sure. I need to find out more about her before I decide, though. The younger vampire will tell me. One of the soldiers I questioned suspects that the two of them were intimate, given their behavior on the way here."

  "Intimate? So the vampire has a libido, then?"

  "Apparently he didn't for years, so it must be a recent development. It's a fascinating situation." He gives my cheek a final pat. "I'm going to enjoy this."

  5

  Atlan

  If I don't get some damn answers soon, I'm going to crack.

  Maybe I'm already cracking.

  I didn't drink from Finley last night. Normally I'd be okay after 48 hours without blood—not great, but okay. Unfortunately I've spent a lot of energy and adrenaline since then.

  When Chandra tapped on my door to let me know it was my turn for watch, I took a spin down the hall with her, just to catch up. She's a good friend of Viana's, and a graceful fighter. Like me, she takes pride in the form of the kill, not just its function.

  After a couple turns through the hall with me, she headed back to her room, near the middle of the corridor. She turned to wave to me, and I waved back; and then I saw him, the monster, emerging from the darkened end of the hallway.

  I was closer, and faster. I made it to her first and threw my body between them just as his scorpion tail jabbed toward her neck. The stinger caught me in the arm, and I felt my bicep going numb instantly.

  "Run!" I roared at Chandra, and I gripped the creature's tail between the joints with my left hand and held on, so he couldn't pull out of me right away and chase after her.

  Maybe if he'd gotten me right in the neck, I wouldn't have had those extra seconds to fight back. Maybe Chandra wouldn't have been able to escape. I hope to hell she's able to stay out of sight and figure a way out of this. Maybe she can contact someone back at Deathcastle. Maybe they can send a team—

  But no, that's a bad idea. Sending a team to break us out would stretch the defense of Blue City way too thin. There aren't enough vampire warriors to defend the wall as it is. They sent three of us out here on the rescue mission. I know Captain Markham won't risk sending any more, not unless the stakes were a lot higher.

  It's up to us to get ourselves free. To get out of this damn mess. I'm so mad at myself for not being able to figure a way out yet already, but with my neck in this noose and my hands bound a bunch of different ways, I can't figure how to get loose. I've tried jerking on the throat rope—nearly snapped my own neck. My healing abilities don't extend that far. I won't be any use to my team if I'm dead.

  Which is what I'm going to be if I don't get blood soon. With all the energy I've spent, and the speed at which my heart's been going lately, it's only a matter of time before I go all weak and dizzy. Then I'll start seizing, and my heart will stutter. Finally it'll stop altogether, and that will be it for me.

  I can already feel my pulse slowing down.

  The big metal door creaks open and Reuel enters, his dragonfly wings folded tightly against his back so they're nearly invisible from the front. I have to admit he's imposing, with the branching bone-white antlers and the wicked-looking scorpion tail.

  "Can you fly with those wings?" I ask.

  "Yes." He says it proudly, and a little wistfully. He probably hasn't had much chance to fly, living down here in this concrete hole.

  "I call bullshit," I say, just to rile him up. "There's no way a big hunk of muscle like you could get off the ground with a pair of those flimsy little fairy wings."

  "Believe what you want," he says coolly. "How are you feeling? Thirsty?"

  As a matter of fact, I am, and not just for blood either. My kind need food and water as much as humans do, and we require extra amounts of protein to sustain our super-strength. I've had nothing to eat or drink since the meal we got when we first arrived.

  But I'm not about to tell this dude I'm thirsty.

  "I'm good," I tell him.

  He scoffs and opens a cabinet nearby, extracting a plastic reusable water bottle, the kind with a flip-up straw. Striding over to me, he jabs the straw between my lips. "Drink."

  The liquid looks clear, and I don't smell anything funky about the bottle, so I drink, deeply, as fast as I can in case he snatches it away. After a few moments he pulls it back. "Better?"

  Reluctantly I nod.

  "Good." He pulls out the metal chair Dr. Corbin used, flips it around, and sits on it backwards, facing me. I guess it's tough for him to sit properly, with the tail and the wings and all that crap. "Time for you to tell me a few things, vampire," he says.

  "Like what?"

  "Things about your blood-slave. She fascinates me, and she may have potential as a breeder. I need you to tell me everything you know about her past, what she's been through, what she's capable of."

  The word breeder sent a red haze across my eyeballs. "Go screw yourself," I say, lisping as my fangs slide further from their sheaths.

  "Don't go all feral now," he says. "I just need some information."

  "You touch Finley, and I'll kill you. You hear me? I will kill you."

  He laughs. "Kill me? That might be harder than you think. I have DNA from the axolotl—are you familiar with it? A Mexican variety of salamander that can regrow missing limbs—tail, leg, jaw, even pieces of the heart and brain. A useful talent. The antlers—a side effect of the deer DNA fused with mine. Deer also have amazing powers of regrowth—limited to their antlers of course, but still. And the Greenland shark is one of the longest-living vertebrates on Earth—we threw a little of that into the mix as well. Thankfully I didn't adopt any physical traits of that ugly creature." He smirks. "So don't think you can get the best of me, vampire. My skin and muscles are tougher than the average human's. And should you cut off a limb of mine, I would simply regrow it."

  "How fast, though?" I ask. "And can you re-grow your head?"

  Reuel chuckles. "I like you. But I have things to do, and I've only allotted one hour for this session with you. So I'll ask you again—please tell me all you know about Finley."

  I respond with a string of caustic swears.

  "I see." He rises from the chair and approaches me. "You're something of a freak yourself, you know. My contact with the world outside this bunker has been limited for the past two years, but in all that time, and before the Gorging, I never heard one story of a vampire with a dead sex drive regaining his libido. It's an oddity, some might say. Or maybe a miracle. What caused this astounding awakening?"

  I close my eyes, trying not to think of Finley—and of course that's all I can think about—her breasts and her hips, her mouth, her laugh—those eyes, so serious one minute and sparkling the next.

  My dick twitches in my pants, hardening.

  And Reuel cups his hand over my crotch. My eyes flash open, and I snarl at him, t
wisting my body away.

  "It was Finley, wasn't it?" he croons. "She's the only one who makes you react this way."

  He takes the zipper of my pants delicately between his talons and draws it down. I can't breathe—black horror sifts through my thoughts, turning them dizzy and useless.

  Reuel works my dick free, letting it emerge through the gap. "A nice piece, my friend. It would be such a pity if you lost this, just after its reawakening." Suddenly my length is ringed in his hand, his talons pressing in five painful points against the base. "I could pinch it off right now. And I will, if you don't tell me what I want to know. Tell me about Finley."

  6

  Finley

  By the time Reuel returns to the side of my cot, I've recovered the feeling and movement in all my extremities. I'm furious and desperately curious at the same time, especially when I notice that his cheek, where I cut him down to the bone, is whole again, with not even a scar as a reminder of the wound. So he has healing abilities, similar to those of the vampires. Even faster, apparently.

  "How do you feel?" he says.

  "Like you care."

  "I actually do." He drags a chair over, its metal legs squealing against the concrete in a way that sends a shiver over my skin.

  He settles in, backwards astride the chair, his bare chest a mass of knotted, strained muscle, as if he doesn't quite fit in his skin and the power inside him is coiling and swelling, threatening to burst out. His handsome face is smooth and impassive, but there's a deeper layer of shifting, restless emotion beneath the calm. The corner of his mouth crooks up in that habitual haughty smirk of his.

  "We need you," he says. "For two reasons. First, you're a survivor. You have an uncanny ability to wiggle your way out of near-death scenarios."

  "You could say that of most humans left alive in this apocalypse," I mutter.

  "True, but given what I've seen of you, and gathered from Atlan, you have a gift for getting yourself out of dangerous situations."

  I bite the inside of my cheek, trying not to let my disappointment show on my face. "Atlan told you things about me?"