Blooded: Dead Things

by A. D. Key

  LANA

  SHE BUMPED INTO Leon coming out of the Men’s Restroom. Lana told him about the blood and then the three girls went inside. When Lana was finished she found Leon in the food section. “I feel a little better. The visions have sapped my energy. If I had known about the chaos that would be bestowed upon me—and everyone else—I would have ate something besides half a salad at lunchtime.” Here was the opportunity right in front of his face (literally) to put some food in his stomach, but Leon walked away from the sandwiches displayed inside the gas station. “Why bother? I know it’s not going to stay down. Think I’ll get water. No, the Dr. Sugar is what I need. No. Water.”

  The bell over the door jingled again. “I have no idea how they deal with that,” Lana agreed. The indecisive man finally picked up a beverage. The first one he laid his blue sapphire eyes on. “The Dr.,” he said and nearly broke into a jog up to the counter. Eager to get out of the gas station.

  Cole came inside the store, triggering the bell again. She noticed children had left behind hand prints on the glass. Cole smiled and headed to the back, entering the same restroom as Loki and Kimberly. And the two girls came rushing out. Lana laughed a little inside. She turned her gaze in the same direction as Leon. There was a woman outside with Lucas. Her friend, Lana judged by their matching bright pink flip-flops and bathing suit strings peeking out of the top of their shirts, strutted to the glass door. Leon put two dollars on the counter for his drink. Lucas had to have prepaid with a credit card otherwise he would not be getting gas. “Keep the change,” Leon said, grabbing his drink and smoothing back his hair.

  He made it to the door before the woman in the pink flip-flops. The chivalrous man held the door open for the woman. Instantly feminine eyes checked out the tall and handsome brunette with soul-touching eyes from head to toe. Leon wasn’t Lana’s type but she could definitely see why girls would be attracted to him. “Thank you,” the woman with a wet pony tail smiled up at him. “You have nice eyes.” The compliment was exactly what he needed. Leon smiled a gentleman’s smile. “Thank you.”

  Lana walked out past her and she could feel the woman’s eyes on her, trying to figure out if she and Leon were an item. And what had happened for there to be scars on her lips? Before the door closed, they saw Cole conversing with Loki. She twirled the ends of her curly, blonde hair. “I’m sorry. But I peg her as a troublemaker,” the seer said.

  Lana didn’t know how right he was…

  LUCAS

  ITRIED TO maintain eye contact but I couldn’t help my wandering eyes. And I don’t think she minded. The wet swim suit had soaked through the white t-shirt and I could see what color it was; black with pink swirls.

  Aroused, I tightened the gas cap and shut the cover. “Yeah, it’s my car,” I answered her. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty for telling the partial truth. Both Leon and I have been omitting that it’s not entirely either one of ours. Unless of course the woman is the type to find sharing a turn on; in which case most of the women typically want a threesome with the two of us and neither me nor my cousin are into “sharing” in that scenario. Hell no!

  I was suddenly pulled into a reverie of the one time I did have a threesome. But the two females were sharing me. Then, when I was a little younger, it had felt amazing. But now for some reason I felt ashamed as the AC/DC girl, Raven, popped up in my mind. This threesome was suddenly my dirty secret and I didn’t want anyone to know. Leon hasn’t had sex with more than one female at a time. And he never would have more than one partner. And now I was deeply ashamed of my behavior.

  “I saw that your plates were Tennessee. You here on business or pleasure?” she asked, pulling from me from my past. The woman had taken her hair down and now she flicked her lose damp hair back and leaned her right side against the car. This chick magnet did the same. I leaned against the car with my left side, positioning my muscular arm on the hardtop, tilting my head into my palm so that we faced each other. The small square that covered the gas cap was the length between us. “Business. But dull I am not,” I smiled charmingly.

  Neither one of us batted an eye when Leon got in the car. The heat beat down on my light blonde hair and I could feel the perspiration on my legs and chest. My jeans and long sleeve shirt did not mesh well with the warm air. I already had my sleeves pushed up, defeating the purpose of wearing them. I wonder how warm those smooth legs are?

  “If you want, sometime when your car is dirty I can come over and wash it for ya’.” She rubbed the tips of her fingers down the side of the car leaving small streaks.

  “Coat it too?”

  “I will coat anything you want,” the woman flirted, running her fingers along the skin where her belly meets her shorts.

  Intrigued, I raised an eyebrow.

  A hand squeezed my upper arm muscles. But it didn’t belong to the woman who was a little older than me. “We found something. Ready?” Loki asked me. Lana walked around the car’s rear and I snapped back to the harsh reality of today. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  I quickly put the wet t-shirt woman’s number into my phone. Her name was Brittany. Maybe if I was ever here again we could hook up. Raven’s face suddenly popped up in my mind again. Seriously, what the hell was up with this? Raven defiantly wasn’t my girlfriend. “Well, it was nice meeting you,” the chick said seeing her friend exiting the store. “You, too,” I said turning around to the driver door, waiting for Loki to climb inside the fully fueled vehicle. “What was that about?” the gray-eyed girl asked, taking her place in the middle of the flat seat.

  “She offered to wash my car,” I beamed with satisfaction.

  Loki watched the two older females pull out onto the road. “Slut,” she resorted to name-calling. Lana shook her head at the jealous girl’s epithet for the other girl.

  “Hey, don’t you have to pee?” Loki reminded me.

  “Oh yeah.” I got out and went inside.

  Leon didn’t realize he dozed off until the knock at his window.

  “We need a timeout,” I told him with frustration written all over my face. Leon met me at the taillights, still parked in front of the pump. I lost my cool. “Kill Vampires. What I do. Kill vamps! I despise them! Instead of going home we are now going to Concordia, Kansas! I’m driving to find—not kill—and ask it,” I contemplated on the correct pronoun, “her, for help?”

  “I could tell you were giddy about Raven—”

  “—Whoa! Timeout in the timeout. I have never been giddy. I don’t get giddy.”

  “Luke, are you sure you’re not afraid she will hold a grudge for your discourteous behavior when you bumped into each other?”

  I was. “Anyway, this is about you, too. You’ve been seeing it.” The Vampire Hunter in me reverted back to the original two letter word. “Which means for some reason we are supposed to save it. IT. A VAMPIRE!”

  “I’m okay with that part of her,” Leon confessed. “She is a Potential. Which means she not only does good in the future, but there is an amelioration, improvement, in the world.”

  I didn’t know what bothered me more. The fact that she is a Vampire, or the part of me that was okay with that. “Call Uncle Joe. Give him and Rachel the heads up. Zombies. Vampire-Goddess-thingy. All of it.” I couldn’t be there to help family, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave them in the dark.

  As I strode to the car door, I saw a black Mustang reflecting in my side mirror. The vehicle stopped a little ways behind us on the side of the road before the entrance to the gas station. A cell phone stuck out, pointing at the four door Chevrolet…

  Leon finally joined Loki and me on the front seat, and Kimberly said quietly to no one in particular, “He’s still in the tan wagon…” She rocked herself again. What the heck did that mean? Leon and I looked to the Shadow’s in the backseat for an explanation. They shrugged, unable to offer one.

  My five passengers and I headed down a long steep hill, the open road stretched out before us. Black birds flocking overhead. “Do you think th
ose birdies will peck us to death like in those movies?” Cole asked. “And since everything in them seems to be zombiefied, I wonder if lions or owls can be zombies? Or kangaroos?”

  Except Kim, we all chuckled picturing zombie kangaroos hoping all over the place.

  “Kangaroos are herbivores,” Lana pointed out.

  “Yes, but what if they ate a plant that had infected blood on it?”

  “Then anything could be…”

  “Cows. Turtles,” Leon added. Zombie turtles got us laughing like hyenas, except Kimberly who remained introverted and withdrawn.

  “Ants,” Loki said, and unintentionally killed the laughter.

  “Ants? That’s not terrifying or funny,” Cole stated.

  “But ants can lift ten times their bodyweight so—”

  “I can still stomp them,” Leon concluded.

  I checked my rearview mirror.

  “What?” Leon queried, suspicious; it was the third time I had done this since the previous county.

  “That Mustang behind that so-called-truck has been behind us since the gas station.”

  Leon looked in his mirror to see for himself. The dark-colored vehicle tailed closely behind a small truck with a missing tailgate. “Maybe he’s leaving, too.”

  “He pulled over at the gas station just to take our picture.”

  “After we stopped?” Loki asked.

  “Obviously,” Cole snapped. “In order for him or whomever to take the picture while we were at the gas station, it would have to have been after we stopped at the gas station, Loki.” Sometimes your lack of reasoning skills really irritate me.”

  “Sorry.” Loki twirled one of her curls and flashed her gray adolescent eyes up at me. Her soft looking, unprotected leg brushed against my jeans. “I’m just trying to figure out why.” I grinned flirtatiously at the young seductress.

  “He’s doing it again,” Lana said, facing the back windshield. Rounding a curve, everyone except me turned around in their seats. A hairy arm retreated back inside the Mustang, phone in hand. “That would creep me out if I had not seen Lee today. A man taking photographs means little to me now that I’ve seen a dead man walk—that isn’t a Vampire.”

  “Who’s Lee?”

  Cole’s perplexed tone offended her. “How could you have forgotten so soon? Do you always forget about the dead ones?” Cole stared. Not wanting to dig himself further into a hole. “The man our cold-blood Kronos took last night,” Lana recollected, and Cole winced at the name, Kronos. “Lee’s the one they saved me from.”

  It took Leon a second but when he realized he had heard correctly, he nearly spit out the dark colored soda he just took a swig of. “Kronos? You had an altercation with the Leader of the Vampires?”

  “Yeah,” the Shadows answered.

  “We were starting to doubt his existence.”

  “Oh, he’s around,” she confirmed. “Unfortunately.”

  Suddenly confound, Cole asked, “How are you guys able to kill vamps? It usually takes like two Shadows to do that.”

  “It helps to have the advantage—visions. They help us get the drop on em’ and save my Potential—victims with the ability in their future to do significant good to the world.”

  “Maybe he just likes the ride,” I shrugged, still thinking about the Mustang Picture Man.

  I accelerated through the path of flat lands, temporarily away from danger, and closer to the unknown—not a comforting thought. After all, the hours of May tenth were just starting.

  Epilogue: Hello and Goodbye

  THE SIX OF US WERE NEARING the border of Nebraska and Kansas. A radio DJ—one of the few left—announced that our journey out of the plagued Nebraskan state was still on a schedule. But I wasn’t too worried. We were approximately five minutes from the Nebraska/Kansas state line.

  “Uh, Kimberly, do you want to tell us about yourself?” Cole tried distracting her mind from all that she had lost. I suppose he empathized with Kim. With him being adopted and losing his biological family.

  “I’m…I’m…in college. I-I have a red and green color deficiency.”

  “That’s highly unusual,” Leon stated. “Women tend to be carriers of that gene but do not express the trait. They inadvertently pass the color deficiency or color blindness to their sons. Your mom—”

  “Once he goes he doesn’t stop,” I leaned closer to Loki. We shared a chuckle.

  In my rearview I saw Lana pass Kim a stake. “It does not seem fair to deny you the right to defend herself.” “You were in the cemetery,” Kimberly said to the dark-haired Shadows. “Yeah!” Lana said, eager for conversation with the grieving woman. “You were with…”

  “My boyfriend and his little brother.”

  “Devin?”

  Leon and I tensed up at the mentioning of the little boy’s name. Lana and Cole were the only ones who seemed to notice. Lana looked sorry to even be a part of the conversation now.

  “He…” the wretched, falling apart, woman shook her head.

  “Turned?” Cole asked, stunned.

  “Before, when you said they were all dead… I didn’t think that included the little boy,” Lana swallowed. “Sorry.”

  Loki spun around in the front seat. “I didn’t know you knew a Devin.” Resting her arm on the top of the seat, she gazed up at me. “Did you guys know him?”

  Cole and Lana must have figured out Leon and I were somehow involved with little Devin’s death; the Shadows simultaneously said Loki’s name in a way that translated into shut up. Abashed, Loki pressed her back hard against the seat. “Okay! I just wanted to know about him. He’s not here because he was probably an idiot and got turned into one of those freaks,” Loki remarked impudently, rolling her eyes.

  Everyone except me stared at her, appalled. However, Kim felt something other than shock. Piqued by the girl’s words she yelled, “Only a child!” Kim vehemently yanked a hand full of curls, pulling Loki’s skull back against the seat. Cole automatically grabbed Kimberly’s wrist in hopes of prying her fingers loose. But she used her right hand to club the girl on top of the head with the stake.

  “Lana!” Loki pleaded for help.

  The halting brakes gave us all whiplash. I halted the car to a stop blocking a semi-paved driveway. I looked in the side mirror, remembering we weren’t the only ones on the road. The tiny truck swerved to the left avoiding a collision with us. Brakes grinded on the Mustang. But that did not stop it from rear ending me and my passengers. Just when I was about to take off my seatbelt and die from the damage to my precious ride—and the delay to the state line—something bumped us forward again.

  “Stay,” I ordered.

  Outside of the parked car, a smoking radiator got my attention. A lime green station wagon had apparently rear-ended the Picture Man in the Mustang and the ugly station wagon was smoking to high heaven. I looked at my trunk, expecting the worst. Then it I gave it rapturous kisses for it only had a scratch.

  “Look at my car!” The Picture Man shouted at me. The paint was severally chipped and the tail-end was damaged from the station wagon. “Don’t you know what’s goin’ on? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Tailgating is a crime,” I smirked.

  “I didn’t do anything to you!”

  I rolled my eyes and strutted back to the others waiting in the car. “Pay for this!” The man shouted after me. And when I didn’t respond, he threatened, “I know people!”

  The cool and unseen wind tugged at my sleeves and pulled at the tiny hairs below my hairline. The sun hid. Not again! Parked a couple of yards ahead, a driver, a great distance from the roadblock, demanded assistance as she tried getting out of her minivan. Her feet hit the road, only to be pulled down and back by her messy hair into the purple van. Gun! My mind screamed. I need a gun. I was about to help but Lana…

  ✽✽✽

  …Outside, the concerned girl’s pupils Split—two pupils became four with silver rings around them—magnifying the image inside the van. The victim kicked a
nd thrusted her body about because the brain told her that it might have a chance at survival.

  It was wrong.

  This is not right! Friends and family are turning into cannibals. Blocking out the warnings from the military soldiers, Lana ran—crossbow ready, eyes reverting back to their original shape—to the desperate voice in the minivan.

  The lady in the long brown skirt from the minivan was not going to live. She has been bitten. If you get bitten then you become…a danger. Lana had gathered this much due to the tension surrounding the subject of little Devin…and horror films. I know zombies have entered my world. And I know how to stop them just like most people know how to get rid of a Vampire—even though they fail due to lack of training.

  But the Shadow didn’t know how to kill a human.

  Can she even do that? If not, why go to the middle-aged woman? The savior has been running to the rescue for years. Why would that change now?

  She really is going to die.

  Standing in front of the van’s door, Lana eyes fell upon what use to be a person. It grinded its teeth against the skin that separated the lady’s hopeless eyes. The fearless Shadow placed her crossbow on the roof to pry the woman from hungry grasps. Lana punched the creature, then with both hands she gripped the woman’s shoulders and slung her down to the pavement. The tuned out words from the soldiers sprung into her ears:

  “Stop!”

  “Stop!”

  “You shouldn’t be doing that!”

  Further ignoring the warnings, Lana reached down to the transformed passenger slumped over onto the driver’s seat. The valiant girl made a fist, and with one swift motion her bawled up fingers connect upwards against its chin with such hostile speed and strength that the head tore off, ripping at the neck. The bloody head spun backwards with such force that the passenger window paid for it, cracking. The detached head rolled off the edge of the seat landing on the floor.

  Rearing back, Lana glanced at the road block. Several men in uniform abandoned their post and ran toward her. A bad situation. There was no way it was possible for a woman—especially a girl of her small size—to physically dismember another person. And what was she to do with the infected? Put an arrow in her? Though it is a theory of hers, Lana hasn’t seen for herself what happens when you get bit. So would it not be a good idea to leave the woman with the ones that hopefully do know?