Original Blood

by Greene, Steve

  Chapter 15

  Madeline closed the front door behind her as she left. Her legs couldn’t get her away from the house fast enough. She began to run, slowly at first, then faster until she was near a dead sprint. She had to get away from Ginny. Every motherly bone in her body told her to go back, to hold her, kiss her, tell her that she loved her. But how was a mother supposed to explain to her daughter that when they were close, all Madeline could think about was the blood coursing through Ginny’s veins. She had no explanation for it. Even Philip wasn’t sure why her bloodlust was so great towards Ginny but not himself. She was afraid if she stayed too close to Ginny that she wouldn’t be able to control her murderous urges. It was gut wrenching to be so close to Ginny and not have the strength to hold her and run her fingers through her hair like she did when she was a child, tell her things would be alright. But things wouldn’t be alright, not anymore. She felt like her child had been stolen, only to have her flaunted in front of her every day. A memory she could no longer touch.

  Thinking about it made the rage inside her boil and froth. She wanted to punish someone. She wanted to kill someone. She wanted… vengeance.

  She thrust herself like a spear into the heart of the woods about a mile from their home. This was where they were. The pack of evil vampires she had first seen drinking the life force from some poor young girl. She had continued to slowly reduce their numbers night by night. She was so desperate to feed and it seemed like her feeding on other vampires had greatly increased her ability to heal. Her hair had started to return. It had filled in completely, though it remained short. She was healing well, but it took all of her energy to do so. The rats Philip had been bringing home for her simply were not enough to sustain her. So she took to the open field once again to hunt the hunters.

  This night was different. She felt good about her mission. For the first time since becoming a vampire, she felt like she had a purpose. If she had to be a vampire, at least she could aid mankind by eliminating some of the vampires that would feed on them. But when she found the clearing, the vampires that had been there the previous two nights were gone. She circled the camp on the outer edge, checking to see if they were waiting in ambush. When she found nothing, she ventured closer.

  There was movement next to one of the large trees near the camp and she pushed closer until she could make out the shape of a woman tied to the tree. As the woman’s features became more apparent, there was no question it was the girl whose murder she had witnessed on the first night.

  The girl looked up as the sound of Madeline’s footsteps alerted her to her presence. She growled and gnashed her teeth together. She struggled against the thick ropes that held her. Madeline strode towards her and grabbed her lower jaw in her hands as a mother might do to a child that wouldn’t listen to her.

  “Stop!” Madeline said while glaring inches from the girl’s face. To Madeline’s surprise, the girl stopped thrashing and stared at her. Her head cocked sideways a little; curious, red eyes afire in the moonlight. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.” The girl continued staring at her. Whatever used to be there was gone. There was no little girl left in the shell of flesh that stood before her. She pushed the girl’s chin up and away and brought her own mouth down on the girl’s neck. Her teeth were sharp and long enough now that Madeline barely had to bite down to break the skin. The girl made no sound until she began to hyperventilate. As she did so, her heart beat more furiously and forced her blood down Madeline’s throat in quick gushing bursts.

  Madeline’s body tingled everywhere. The sensations were so erotic and exhilarating that she had to force herself to remain quiet. When she pulled away, she felt refreshed, renewed. She licked her lips and had to wipe her mouth clean on her sleeve. Maybe in time she would learn how not to be so messy. For now, she was still learning. A quick twist of the girl’s head and Madeline heard the resounding crack of her vertebrae.

  The woods were surprisingly quiet and Madeline noticed not for the first time that something was odd about the situation. Why would they tie her to the tree and leave? She thought. Did they not want the girl to follow them? That made no sense. Like a flash it came to her. Oh, God! She’s bait! Madeline dropped to the ground in a crouch position and turned to scan the landscape behind her. Nothing moved. What gives? If they were going to attack me, they’d have done it by now.

  Far in the distance, from the direction of her home, a brilliant blue-white flash lit the night sky. Less than a second later, the boom of the explosion ripped at her ears. Her mouth fell open. No! God, no! Not Ginny and Philip!

  Like a bullet from a gun, she shot towards home. Faster, faster, as fast as she had ever run before. “Oh Philip, I’m so sorry.” She was moving so quickly that branches whipped at her skin like tiny razorblades. She could feel the burn where a few of them had broken the skin. She had to get home. She couldn’t let what happened to the girl at the camp happen to her family. Wind blew by so heavily that her tears dried as they trickled back from her eyes, leaving a salty path.

  She cursed herself for being so stupid. How could she have thought that they wouldn’t notice their numbers slowly dissipating? And why did she think they wouldn’t bother to seek some type of retribution? My God! I led them right to my family!

  Her sprint back to the house seemed to take forever. When she arrived, there was nothing left to save. The explosion had completely leveled the house. All the years they had spent there were gone and buried. No pictures, no baby blankets. Everything was gone. Splinters of wood were scattered everywhere like a box of matchsticks carelessly thrown across a kitchen floor. Here and there she would recognize some little scrap of something they owned but there was no sign of Ginny or Philip.

  “Philip! Ginny!” No answer. She heard a rustle coming from a pile of rubble a few feet away. It heaved and shifted and the figure of a man rose out of the mess. She recognized him but not as anyone she wanted to see. It was one of the smiling faces she had seen tearing at the teenage girl she had just fed upon. He was missing one of his arms and black liquid spewed from the stump of his shoulder in pulsating bursts. A large pipe protruded from his leg and the rest of his body was a mass of cuts and bruises. Most of his clothing had been shredded to rags and he hunched over in pain. She was surprised he was even able to stand.

  “What did you do?” She asked the man. He grinned but said nothing. His teeth were jagged and broken and when his lips parted slightly, an uncontrollable stream of saliva ran from his mouth. “What did you do!” She screamed. In a flash, she was next to him. Her nails dug into the soft flesh of his ribcage and she hoisted him into the air. The man yelled in pain, but the yell turned into a laugh that carried and echoed off of the row of trees that encircled the place where her home used to be. She screamed in frustration and squeezed her hands together as hard as she could. His laughter turned into a gurgle and air mixed with bouts of blood sputtered and spat from his mouth. His gurgles turned to convulsions of pain as his ribcage gave way under the pressure of her grip. She threw him to the ground and pounced on him. Amazingly, he was still alive. She was well aware of how much punishment a vampire could take since she had been the subject of that punishment not so long ago. She sank her fangs into his neck and the little blood he had left flowed into her. This time, she felt even more tingling than she had with the mindless vampires. She felt more power surging into her veins. She felt invincible! The body of the man slowly stopped twitching. She bit down harder and felt the rubbery meat of his trachea rip from his neck. She spit it out into the yard. Her veins were burning fire and the rage leapt into her limbs. She couldn’t control her anger. The man was dead, but she began to hit him all over, pounding his bones into pulp. She stood up and brought her boot heel down on his head in great thumping stomps until his skull cracked open and gray matter oozed out over the ground and she slipped backwards and staggered. She launched herself at him again, grabbed him by the throat, brought what was left of his face up to hers and screamed a
s long and hard as she could. All the pain and frustration of the last week poured from her. Tears rained from her eyes. She was losing her sanity. Everything that made her a human being had been stripped from her. She lost her dignity, her compassion, her family, even her life had been taken. A sudden thought brought her back to reality. I have to find them. They’re all I have left.

  She scoured the wreckage of the house but found nothing that would lead her to them. The remains of a number of vampires could be seen, but nothing that pointed to Philip or Virginia. The glimmer of hope was that there was no sign of Ginny’s car. Maybe they had escaped.

  She ran to the road and looked in each direction. Would they have gone into the city or deeper into the wilderness? She decided that if they were in a panic, they probably would’ve gone towards the city in the hopes of finding shelter, which was something she would be in dire need of in a few hours. She ran down the road in the direction of the city, keeping herself in the tree line along the side of the road.

  She wasn’t far down the road when she realized she was being watched. Shadows were following her along the ground while some were above her in the limbs of the great oaks and maples that rimmed the terrain. She caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the shadow of a large dog zigzagging through the trees.

  She turned a bend and standing in the middle of the road was the backlit silhouette of a man. Madeline slowed and came to a stop about ten feet from him. “You’ve been a very naughty girl.” The man said.

  “What do you want?” Madeline asked with a fair amount of contempt.

  “Just a little of what you’ve been taking from us.” She heard soft footfalls as dark figures leapt down to the ground from out of the trees. She saw yellow eyes reflecting from somewhere in the forest. Then she saw another pair, and another. Wolves! Are they wolves? She thought. These vampires control them? She looked around her and the vampires were closing in a circle around her. How many had jumped down from the trees? She had no idea. Five? Maybe six? She looked for the largest gap between them and bolted. Two vampires moved to bar her way but at the last possible second, she changed course, catching one of them off-guard. She was able to lower her shoulder into him and forced him backwards hard enough to knock him off of his feet.

  The wind was blowing through her hair again, but this time she was running to survive. She saw the dark shapes of the wolves running on either side of her, darting in and out of the huge trunks. Cackles of laughter came from behind her. Some game. She thought. The vampires send their wolves out to corral the prey while they whoop and holler and have a good ol’ time. Sick bastards.

  She was keeping a good distance between herself and her pursuers until her foot lodged underneath something big and heavy and she tumbled forward smashing her head into the base of a tree. She could feel the wetness on her forehead and didn’t have to check to know that it was crimson red. Her vision blurred for a moment and before she could pull herself up off the ground, two of the mindless vampires were standing over her. They were about to lunge at her when three hairy black shapes leapt over her and attacked them. One of the wolves launched itself straight at the neck of one of the vampires and drove it back into the trees. The other one was occupied with a wolf biting its arm while another pounced on its back and clamped down on its neck. She heard the wolves snarling and growling in the distance and a human-like scream rang out. She took the opportunity to get herself up and continue running.

  As the screams and sounds of fighting faded away behind her, she came to a clearing that opened up to the night sky. The sweet smell of pine needles filled her nostrils and a cool wind swept past her, ruffling her shirt and tickling her scalp. The wolves helped me! She thought. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but she was sure she had left the violence behind until someone plowed into her with such force that the air nearly left her lungs. They landed on the ground a few feet away and the full weight of the person crashed down on top of her. They each scrambled for a hand hold on the other. Somehow, the man on top of her was able to grab her wrists and hold fast. He straddled her thin waist and sat up, winded. She had little fight left in her.

  “Why’d you run? We could’ve had all kinds of fun. Now it looks like it’ll just be me and you.” The man from the road said.

  “Get off of me you bastard!” She tried to heave him off with a quick thrust of her hips but he only laughed.

  “Why, your teeth haven’t even come in all the way yet, Honey. How long have you been one of us? A week? Maybe less?” The man lowered his head and took a deep inhale of her scent. “Oh yeah, I think I’m going to enjoy this.” His head reared back exposing large fangs and he was about to strike when two small pops came from the tree line and two small darts appeared in his chest. He looked at the foreign objects protruding from his chest as though it was his first time seeing the moon. “What the?..” He said as his body went limp and slumped down upon her.

  Without him actively holding her down, Madeline wasted no time. She grabbed his collar and threw his dead weight off of her like a wet towel. She stood to run and never looked back to where the shots had come from. All she wanted was to be free of them. She had to find Philip and Ginny. She ran for the trees but not before another pop came from somewhere behind her. She felt a pinch on the back of her shoulder and reached back to pull the dart from her flesh. Another pop, and another. One dart whizzed by her ear and another hit the back of her thigh. More from surprise than pain, she tumbled to the ground and when she tried to get up again, the world began to spin. Suddenly a bright light was in her face, obscuring her vision.

  “Looks like we got a couple of good ones, Colonel.” A voice behind the light said.

  “Alright. Bag ‘em and tag ‘em, soldier.” Came a squelchy voice from a radio.

  “Yes, sir.” Was all she heard before the butt end of a rifle came crashing down on the back of her neck.

  Chapter 16

  He had his little girl in his arms while the last breath trailed from her body. He felt her go limp. Her weight suddenly became twice as heavy as before. He felt a wisp of cool air blow past his cheek, now extra sensitive from the wetness of his tears. A million different memories flashed through his mind. How fast Ginny had grown into a beautiful woman. What would happen to her, now? He thought. Would she become something akin to her mother or something worse? Could he risk keeping her? Of course, he knew the answers to many of the questions that flooded his mind. The trouble was his heart overruling his mind. He had to believe that she would become what her mother was and not one of the others that Madeline had told him about.

  Madeline had told him that some of the vampires were mindless, crazed animals, while some, like her, had retained portions of their humanity. She had even heard whispers of very old and powerful vampires that had orchestrated the coup that was taking place. He thought the vampire hierarchy very much resembled that of an ant or bee hive. Mindless drones did most of the grunt work. Soldiers were the next level up in the chain, with the queen, or prime as he liked to call it, running the show.

  So, the question remained; would Ginny become a drone or a soldier? There had to be a link, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He was convinced that there was a deciding factor. Babies were born male or female, seemingly at random, until closer investigation told scientists that the sex was chosen by the administration of an x or y chromosome. There had to be a similar explanation to why a soldier or a drone was created, but he hadn’t had enough time to study Madeline to find out what it was.

  He felt so lost, so hopeless. He had no way of getting in contact with Julia. And what will happen to Maddie? She would return from her hunt to find the home they had built razed to the ground by an explosion. Would she know they were still alive? Would she be able to find them? Would she find shelter before sunrise? The last thought made him shudder as he remembered the damage only a few seconds of exposure to sunlight had done to her. Her screams were still fresh in his ears.

  He wanted to remain faithful to the Go
d he believed in, but this was too much. He had lost his wife and youngest daughter in the last week. Then they had been returned to him, and now he had lost them all again! Ginny was all he had left and he wasn’t about to give up on her. If the people that had helped them had any intention of hurting her, they would need to kill him to do it.

  A hand gently touched his shoulder and a soft woman’s voice came from somewhere behind him. “I’m sorry.” The voice said. He nodded slightly.

  A man’s voice came from the same vicinity. “I’m sorry as well, but we can’t keep her here. She’ll turn and kill all of us if….”

  The man’s voice ceased as Philip rounded on him. “If you want her dead, you’ll have to kill me as well! I will not abandon my daughter!”

  “I… I didn’t say that. I just think we should put her outside where she can’t harm anyone.”

  “I will not abandon my daughter!” Philip said again.

  Philip felt the hand of the woman on his shoulder again. “Listen, there’s a veterinarian’s office downstairs. We have kennels down there and one of them is fully enclosed and reinforced for larger dogs. We could restrain her and put her in there…” Philip felt her hand squeeze his shoulder when he tried to protest. She put a hard emphasis on the first word. “…only until we can judge whether she is a danger to us or not.”

  There was a long silence and Philip sighed. He couldn’t argue with her logic. Whether his daughter or not, he couldn’t risk the lives of two strangers who had just risked theirs to save him. “Very well. Lead the way.” He stood and picked Ginny up in his arms. Ginny was a slender woman but her dead weight was still a strain on his aging frame. He emitted a grunt under the load, but refused to let the man carry her when he offered.