Seth Eden
Page 1
ARRIVAL OF THE
VAMPYREN
S E T H E D E N
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
The sound of her running footsteps was inordinately loud in the eerie silence of
Las Vegas. Overnight the metropolitan city, home to three-quarter of a million people
had been reduced to areas of rubble, stark in contrast to neighborhoods that remained as
pristine as they had ever been. s in upscale neighborhoods watched to see which houses
remained empty after dark, then raided the refrigerators and pantries.
There was no food shortage yet. It was early days. But lack of everything scored
high on personal stress levels: shortages of working hospitals, of places where the power
was on, of places to fuel a vehicle, of places where you might experience kindness.
Of places to feel safe.
Stephanie ran through desecrated sections of The Strip. Out on Las Vegas
Boulevard she was anything but alone, but still her footsteps echoed in the bombed-out
rubble of the street.
The world had changed in one twenty-four hour period in early June, right as
summer temperatures skyrocketed.
It wasn't like the movies. The ships didn't come with warnings from geeky actors
on mocked up Airforce One's, arguing that the early warning equipment showed they
were coming. The studly, semi-ex-military character didn't get up half naked in the
morning and pad into the kitchen only to glance out the window and drop the orange
juice because the ships were hovering. And no one climbed to the top of a skyscraper to
reach ecstatically for the aliens only to get blown to pieces.
Because the aliens were just there, horrible and undeniable and there'd been no early warning anything. They had materialized, quite literally. Because their ships moved
between dimensions, through wormholes, using technology humans were light years
from even understanding, let alone developing.
They came through in one big, cartoonish bam and started blowing up cities with
what the news insisted on calling surgical strikes. Surgical because they could laser a
Toyota out of a pack of traffic snarled on a New York City bridge, leaving the bridge
intact and the Toyota incinerated.
Or they could drop bombs no different than those humans used and reduce
buildings and streets and lives to rubble.
"It's on purpose," Davy said, her idiot little brother, twenty-three months younger
than her, twenty-six and ex-military. He didn't seem to recognize he was "ex" military. At
that point he had been gearing up to go join whatever group he could find to combat the
aliens.
Aliens.
Vampires, the cable news shows called them, and brought in experts in triplicate
to give their opinions and argue while the hosts of the new shows asked the questions
everyone wanted answers to:
Why are they here?
What do they want?
How do we survive?
And then before they could answer, all the cable pundits and panels disappeared
off the air, and the silence was shocking, and the questions were unanswered.
Stephanie ran.
There was a distribution center for a grocery system located just off the strip, a
warehouse where she'd worked for two short weeks one summer before the amount of
we don't stand for it sexual harassment drove her out. If she could find it she could find a
way to get some of the groceries home and she could move on to panicking about the
next problem.
Finding Davy. Because he'd vanished and cell phones were currently very useful
for telling time and weighing down papers but not for much else. Calls were sporadic.
Calls from her brother were non-existent.
Her father said it wasn't her job to take care of her brother, he was a grown man,
and they needed to head into the desert where the aliens weren't because they were busy
curtailing the movements of everyone in the cities. From there they could make their way
to the coast, where the aliens didn't like the weather as much. Where rural people were
said to be gathering as resistance, places like tiny towns on the Oregon Coast.
Of course to get there they needed water and food and a car and a map that
somehow magically showed where all the buildings were downed and the streets raised.
Because there was a method to the alien's madness of blowing things up.
Aliens.
Vampires.
They called themselves the Vampyren and they were from some dreadful desert
planet, as far as the think tanks and scientists and news anchors could tell before they
disappeared from the air.
They came because they could. They conquered because they liked it.
And because maybe beings as scary as they were could mate with human women
and they intended to.
Which was why she ran. Because she had a gun and she'd learned to use it and
the streets were mostly empty right now as the city was surrounded and what happened
in the middle of it didn't much matter to the Vampyren because the human cattle couldn't
escape. They were trapped there for all the reasons the aliens wanted them – sport, sex,
slaves.
Guns didn't work especially well with them. They few aliens that medical workers
had been able to autopsy before Earth lost the battle were shown to have two hearts and
very healthy constitutions.
They were physically beautiful, both the men and the women, seven and eight feet
tall, with human bodies and golden brown skin, with heavy beards on the men or
swarthy blue-black stubble, with gold eyes and flowing black hair and muscles like
Dwayne Johnson meets Vin Diesel meets Mr. Olympia.
They were stunning in their beauty and in their viciousness.
"They're blowing up the city on purpose," Dad said, once Davy had gone to try
and figure out what half a unit could do to combat the threat.
"It's working," Stephanie had said. She'd been huddled miserably on the couch in
the living room, thumbing the remote but all the news had been reduced to local and
reported on things everyone could figure out for themselves. She'd hoped her father wouldn't go on.
He had. "You said it was like a pattern and you're right. Smart conquerors know
they have to put the conquered back on their feet or there's nothing won. They have to
have their rewards."
He wasn't going to stop so she'd put in, "Us. We're the reward."
Her father nodded. "They have to have a workable society or they have to take
care of the needs of the conquered people and it's easier to just lock it down and make it
operate on its own with reduced everything --- food, shelter, utilities, water, medical care.
That way it's too hard to find time and energy to revolt."
Her father was a professor of political science and history before the Vampyren
reduced the University of Las Vegas, Nevada to ash. He was probably right.
It didn't matter in the
least.
There was still food to be had. It was just on everybody's mind. After all, the
invaders didn't have to worry about food production in general – as long as they had
something with nutrition content to feed their captives. And they had a built-in food
source for themselves in those very captives.
For everybody left "free," suddenly all the preppers who had hoarded canned
goods sounded a lot more sane. Water was always at a premium in the desert; she (who?)
wanted to find water more than anything else and then she'd take one of the trucks that
had docked in the bays of Universal Grocers and Harassers Inc. At least the vile two
week stint would have proven worth something after all.
Her father would go out after she came back. They always left someone at home,
armed. In case Davy came back. In case someone tried to rob them.
In case the Vampyren tried to drag them off to a tank farm where rumors said they
hooked humans up to blood donation equipment 24/7, feeding them supplements and
bleeding them till they died.
Or mated with them.
Or just plain fucking blew them up.
There weren’t too many ways to die anymore in the metro area. Stephanie wasn't
going to be another statistic to be reported when CNN came back on the air.
She was going to be among the living victorious when the nightmare ended. Her,
and her father, and her brother.
So after she found water, she'd go find her brother.
CHAPTER TWO
Dray Fierro adjusted the belt that held his weapons close at hand and observed
the street below. The remaining high rises in the desert city that had once shined brighter
than the stars at night worked well for keeping guard and watching the streets, but he
was bored and restless.
They'd been on planet Earth for ten days and subdued the majority of the humans
during that time. Their technology and weaponry massively outweighed that of the
humans, and their physical powerless was unmatched.
Now Dray stood watching the street from the roof of a casino, waiting for the next
incident. The armed insurgencies were growing more rare in the cities, moving outward
to the countryside where it was hard to find food and water but where the humans had
more room to operate and to come together to try and overthrow their new masters.
They had no idea they were following the same pattern as all the peoples
conquered by the Vampyren. The ships would appear out of nowhere in the sky, using
wormhole technology to move unseen. By the time the people on the planets knew they
were no longer alone it was almost always too late.
The Vampyren had only lost one planet ever, one that distantly circled their own
star. They'd held out until the Lucians came, the beasts that followed the Vampyren from
planet to planet, battling them for control of whatever resources the Vampyren had
found. It was an old feud and on that planet, the Vampyren had cut their losses and fled.
Not here. Dray smiled fiercely, looking down at the street. A pair of soldiers had
apprehended a group of human males and were dragging them at gunpoint through the
streets. They'd either be conscripted into the guard to work along with the invaders of
their planet, or thrown into the tank farms to be used as fuel, or into a harem, to mate
with the Vampyren females.
Vampyren males didn't mate with their own kind. Not soldiers or royalty, not
anyone important who needed to stay alive. Sex, yes, and he felt a stirring at the thought
of it. Vampyren females were inventive and lithe and experimental and very, very
enthusiastic about sex.
Vampyren females who were mating triggered hormones that had never been
controlled. Without the hormones, they couldn't breed.
With the hormones they bred, conceived one hundred percent of the time, and
dismembered and consumed their mate pretty close to one hundred percent of the time.
Even warriors were afraid of the females and those warriors who had actually accepted
a challenge and walked away from a mating were considered heroes.
He ought to know. He had the scars to prove it. The female was pregnant, too,
and carrying a litter – two boys, it seemed.
When Dray came off guard duty and back onto the streets to patrol, any human
females he found were, by right, war prizes.
He could take his pick.
He stirred again, thinking about it, and licked his lips.
Human females tasted so sweet.
CHAPTER THREE
Jackpot!
Universal Grocers had just made up for those miserable two weeks she'd worked
among the perverse assholes.
The delivery trucks were backed into the bays so all she had to do was load one
up and drive it out.
Well, maybe not quite that simple. Stephanie was hopeful but she wasn't stupid.
There was the raising of the metal door that rolled up and down with the punch of a
green or red button. Provided there was electricity.
And the fact that if it was a standard shift, she'd be stalling every other block,
though given the IQ of the assholes who'd worked there, probably automatic.
In her mind, Davy said, Wait, didn't you just insult yourself, too? You can't drive stick
either.
And I'm trying to rescue you, why? She responded to her imaginary brother.
Truth was, she didn't know that she was. Davy could get all wrapped up in
whatever he was doing and forget to call home when conditions were good. When
conditions were all space vampires all the time and he'd gone from ex-military and liking
to play military games on his phone to living one with his old army buddies? Who know
when he'd even remember he had a family that might be worried about him?
"Damn brothers."
She had no idea why she had the grocery distribution warehouse to herself but it
was time to stop gloating and get moving.
The heat of the Nevada summer day increased as afternoon moved toward
evening. The hottest part of the desert day was always in the evening when the sun beat
down the hardest. (not true) She was pouring sweat as she packed the truck with water,
then with canned foods, and finally with more perishable items they could eat first.
She had to be losing even more weight in this heat inside the warehouse. Before
the aliens invaded she'd been carrying a lot of what her dad charitably called baby fat (at
twenty-six? she kept asking) and what her brother called –
Yeah, whatever, Davy.
If he could see her now. In the weeks since the aliens invaded she'd been running,
learning to shoot, lifting weights, learning martial arts, and everything done with limited
food which was more from fear than necessity and with the heat and the fear.
She was pretty fucking buff, too. Great diet and workout program, this invasion
thing.
She'd rather still have that puppy fat.
It took longer to load up the truck than it would if she knew how to work the
battery-operated forklifts but killing herself wouldn't help anybody and she could
imagine running one right off the dock. Three hours after she started she was ready to
try opening the bay doors and driving out. The warehouse was adjacent to The Strip, in
the shadow of the high rise casino hotels it provided with all the ama
zing foods she was leaving behind in favor of canned beans and cured meats and water, water, water.
The Alien Vampire Diet -She'd write it as a bestseller if they all survived the
invasion.
Stephanie slid behind the wheel of the truck and started it for the second time –
she hadn't wanted to load it up only to find the battery had gone dead – then looked at
the bay door. There was a green button right next to the loading zone for each truck – just
lean out and hit it.
She could try it. Unlikely it would work but stranger things happened and the
power did keep coming on and going off again. Pulling the door up by the chains would
be slow and painful.
With the truck idling, she powered down the window and leaned out and slapped
the hell out of the green button.
Nothing happened.
"Would've been too good to be true."
She left the truck running, the door open, and made her way to the bay doors. The
chains confused her briefly before she chose one, grabbed hold of it, and started to tug.
The door shuddered and looked like it was trying to close itself harder.
She always grabbed the wrong cord for venetian blinds, too.