by D. N. Hoxa
When I thought to look around, I found myself in a room that held the bed I was lying in, stands on both its sides, and nothing more. Not even windows. I wasn’t chained like I expected to be. I wore the same clothes I had on the other night, all torn and bloody, but my flesh healed right there before my eyes, as the cold blood I’d drank touched it.
The man’s thin lips were stretched into a smile, and his small, brown eyes were filled with curiosity as they watched the wounds in my body close. Nothing made any sense to me.
“Are you feeling any better?” he said after a while.
I stood up. “Where am I?” his beating heart was so distracting.
“You’re in Manhattan,” the man said. “I’m Doctor Brown. We haven’t met before, but I’ve heard a lot about you. We all thought you were dead, but we’re really glad you’re not.”
What the hell?
“I’m in Manhattan?” When had I gotten to Manhattan?
“Correct. You came in a few hours ago.”
“You’re human,” I said next.
Maybe this was a dream, because it made so little sense. I remembered the silver blanket, the plane…now I was in Manhattan, in a room all alone with a human who didn’t even look afraid. Instead, he smiled.
Doctor Brown laughed. “Yes, I’m human. The others will want to talk to you soon. We best get to the showers. I have some new clothes ready for you.”
“I don’t…” I had no idea what he meant. The others?
“With all due respect, you do need the shower,” he said, then walked to the white door and opened it. “Come on.”
I dragged my feet after him, dumbfounded out of words. There were others in there, wherever in there was. The hallway outside the room was wide, and though I saw no one, I heard the voices and the beating hearts on all four sides of me. The craving made my teeth turn sharp.
“May I have the Locator, please?” Doctor Brown said.
“The what?”
“The Locator.” He looked like he expected me to know what that was. I raised my brows in question. “The…uh, the device you turned on so we could find you?”
“Can somebody explain to me what the hell this is?” I hissed. This was getting way out of hand.
“Certainly,” Doctor Brown mumbled and ran his hand through his short blond hair. “This way.”
He led us to a door behind which was no beating heart. I was almost disappointed. Inside, the place was completely white. It had a mirror and showers, brand new showers, something I’d never seen before.
“You can use whichever one you want. Here are your clothes. Leave the ones you have on here, and someone will take care of them,” Doctor Brown said. “Someone will wait for you outside when you’re done.”
He didn’t seem pleased with me, and he held my eyes until the door closed and I didn’t see him anymore.
I looked in the mirror, at the man I’d become. So different from the human I was. I almost felt sick of myself as I took my clothes off.
Something fell from the pocket and landed right next to my feet. I almost laughed.
The square piece of plastic and metal stood innocently in my palm. The two buttons on its side had no light in them. The two buttons I’d pressed when I was at Hammer’s house, right before I’d put it in my pocket and forgot all about it.
The Locator. It was the damn Locator the Doctor talked about, the one that had told them where to find me.
There was only one explanation of why Hammer had had this in his drawer. He was working with humans. And I’d been stupid enough to press on the fucking buttons without even knowing what they were.
There were no windows in the shower room either. I scrubbed my body faster than I ever had before. I couldn’t even enjoy the warm water. A million things crossed my mind all at once. Hammer, the vampires I’d left behind, the humans, Morta, Bugz…Dublin.
I had to get out of there. If I played my cards right, maybe I could. They hadn’t tied me to anything. That could only mean they didn’t intend to, either. They thought I was Hammer.
Suddenly, the memory I’d had about Detective Sharps came back to me. They found Hammer, asked for his help for God knew what, and he agreed.
Why?
Dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a white, long sleeved shirt, I opened the door.
Two men waited for me there, the same ones who had covered me with the silver blanket and brought me to Manhattan.
“About fucking time you told us you were alive,” one of them hissed. His big blue eyes spit fire as he looked at me. The other was shorter, but better built. They both had hair that reached their shoulders and glistened from too much wax. Both their hearts beat strongly. It looked like I’d imagined that their hearts weren’t beating the night before, or I’d been weaker than I thought.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, and they both started to laugh.
“At least he hasn’t lost his sense of humor,” the shorter guy said.
“We’re the ones who saved your ass, that’s who. We need to go. They’re waiting for you,” said the other.
I looked around me, but I couldn’t see a way out. With no choice but to follow them, I dragged my feet forward. My ears strained and my eyes moved fast to catch every detail I could.
The guys took me down a stairway and into another hallway, just like the one upstairs. From what I could tell, we were high. On the thirteenth floor maybe. I finally saw a window on the other side. Without a word, I ran to it.
If I were still human, the view would have taken my breath away.
They hadn’t lied to me. I was really in Manhattan. The city stretched wide in front of me, with so many bright lights. It was the most beautiful, chaotic thing I’d seen in all my life.
People, so many people walked to and from everywhere. I didn’t even acknowledge the wall that surrounded the island. There were too many things I was dying to see up close inside it.
“Don’t tell me you missed it,” the shorter guy said.
“Of course he missed it, Elijah,” said the other. “Look at his face.”
They both laughed, but I didn’t mind. I couldn’t take my eyes off the city. There was so much life down there. So many people. So many innocent lives.
How could Mohg and Chandra want to destroy it?
That was the first time in my life that I felt a little bit like I was Hammer. If he’d really agreed to help humans, I understood. I would have, too. Standing by and watching this beautiful place burn to ashes like the rest of the world wasn’t something I was comfortable with.
“Come on, pretty boy. Let’s get going,” Elijah said. I turned around and followed them.
The room they took me to had a large mirror on one side and walls on the other. A square, grey table was in the middle, and five people were already sitting around it.
I only recognized one. Detective Sharps from the memory. He looked a little different somehow, but I knew him.
“Hammer, it’s good to see you,” one of them said. So many beating hearts inside one place made it hard to focus. I only nodded.
“Come, take a seat.” Another waved at the chair across from them. “Thanks, Isaac, Elijah. Will you wait outside?” he said to the guys. Without a word, they walked out and closed the door.
“We thought you were dead,” the first guy said.
“I was,” I said reluctantly. There was no point in lying, no matter how much I wanted to. I wasn’t Hammer. I didn’t know Hammer, and I wasn’t going to be able to pretend to be him. So I might as well tell them the truth.
The guys laughed. All of them, except Detective Sharps. “What do you mean? You were dead?”
“Yes. I died. I came back.”
“From hell?” They laughed harder.
“Do you want to know what happened or not?” That stopped them cold. The man across from me raised his brows in disbelief before I even started. “I died. I went to hell, and then I came back. When I did, I lost my memories. I don’t know anything about th
e life I lived before.”
Half of them wanted to laugh, but they took one look at my face, and they stopped themselves.
“I don’t understand,” the man said. He seemed to be the one in charge.
“Me, neither, but by the looks of it, I gave my memories to get out of hell.”
“People don’t get out of hell,” he said, a dumbfounded smile on his face.
“Vampires do.” Apparently.
“That’s not possible,” he said, shaking his head.
“If I am possible,” I said, referring to the fact that I was a fucking vampire, “anything is, don’t you think?”
“But…how?”
They all looked at me like I was a ghost now. Their hearts picked up the beating and it echoed in my mind.
“First, get me another bottle of blood.” If I was going to be able to focus on anything other than the blood that rushed through their veins, I was going to need blood. “And alcohol. Vodka, if you have it.”
Detective Sharps frowned, but he went to the door and told Isaac and Elijah to bring me blood and vodka. I could hardly wait.
“So let me get this straight. You died, and you somehow came back here, but you don’t remember anything?” the man in charge said.
“That’s it,” I said, flinching. “Only, I remember some things. Just a little bit.”
“What things?”
“I remember him,” I said, and pointed at the detective. “Sharps. He came to see Hammer and ask for his help.”
“That was my father,” the detective hissed. So that’s why he seemed a bit different.
“Wait, wait, wait…” the man in charge said, and he stood up. “Hammer? He came to see Hammer?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How can you…you don’t remember anything? Anything we’ve done?”
“I’m sorry…” I said, and my voice trailed off. They looked so desperate that I really did feel sorry for them.
“We’re fucked. We’re screwed,” the man next to Detective Sharps said.
“Hammer’s gone? He’s…gone?”
“He’s not gone gone. I’ve been remembering things the past few days.”
“Like my father?”
I nodded.
“Did you also remember why you decided not to help him?”
He definitely didn’t like me.
“I did…” I began, as the memory slowly repeated itself in my mind. I didn’t know if Hammer had agreed to help. The memory hadn’t gone that far. “Listen, I know this is a shock to you, but the more I seem to know, the more I remember. So why don’t we start from the very beginning?”
The man in charge sighed loudly. “Goddamn it, man. Goddamn it,” he mumbled.
“Let’s start with names. Tell me your names, and we’ll move on from there.”
“You already know mine,” Detective Sharps said. “Sean Miller, head of RONY.” He pointed at the man in front of me, who still had his head down and was murmuring something to himself. “Wyatt Mitchell,” the detective continued to the man next to Sean. “Carson Evans and Brady Rogers, Security.”
“Okay, let’s continue to how you all know Hammer, can we?”
Sean and Carson began to laugh.
“It’s not even funny,” Detective Sharps said.
“Like hell it isn’t! I celebrated when your Locator turned on…” then he stopped, looked at me with his brows raised. “How did your Locator turn on?”
“I found it in one of Hammer’s houses. Pressed the buttons without knowing what they are,” I mumbled reluctantly. Was I a fucking kid, touching things just to see what they did? Damn it.
Silence for a few seconds.
“You found it,” Sean said, nodding, like he was trying to convince himself.
“Are you fucking with us, Hammer?” Wyatt said.
I shook my head. “It’s the truth.”
The door opened and Isaac came in with one large glass of blood in one hand, and a bottle of vodka in the other. I drooled internally. The blood was lukewarm, like it was just now taken out of someone’s body. I drank it all in one gulp.
“Look, I know how this all looks and sounds. I found the Locator, pressed the stupid buttons because I had no idea what it was, and now I’m here. If you could just tell me what went on between you guys and Hammer, then maybe I can remember it myself.”
“Hammer helped us with some things,” Sean said. “I’ve only been head of RONY for the past decade, but Hammer worked closely with the one before me.”
“When did it all start? I remember Detective Sharps. I remember he found Hammer and told him he needed his help, but that’s as far as the memory went.”
“Hammer heard my father out, but didn’t agree to help. Not until the bombs went off. A couple of years after, he changed his mind and found us,” Sharps said.
“Are you a detective, too?”
“There are no detectives anymore. It’s Security now,” he said. He did not like me, but I couldn’t complain.
“So Hammer found you after the world went to shit.”
“He did,” Sean said. “He helped us understand your kind better. We thought we knew everything there was to know, but he told us just how stupid we’d been. With the bombs and all…” He flinched. “Anyway, he helped us learn how to protect ourselves better. He knew we had no chance against the vampires with what we had then. They would’ve gotten to us a long, long time ago if it wasn’t for the walls and the Trackers.”
“I don’t…” I didn’t get it.
“He designed the walls. He taught us how your virus works. He developed our devices, the ones that enable us to track your kind from a mile away.”
“But why?” Why the hell would he have done that? He’d betrayed all the vampires of the world.
“What do you mean, why?” Sharps said, a dumbfounded smile on his face. “You don’t need me to tell you how much better your kind is over us. We had no chance. Absolutely none, and he knew it.”
“If it wasn’t for him, we would’ve been long gone,” Sean said, shaking his head in wonder.
I didn’t know which thought to pick first.
Who the hell was Hammer? A hero, or the worst villain the world had ever seen?
“He usually used the Locator when he wanted to talk to us, so we sent ours to meet him.”
“How does it work? How did you know where to find me?”
“GPS. Some satellites are still working,” Wyatt said. He sure looked like I was supposed to know what that meant, so I acted like I did.
“Why did he only help you after the bombs?” .
“No idea, but I asked my predecessor once. He said it was part guilt, part pity,” Sean said.
“He didn’t talk to us at all for more than a year before he died. Before you…what the hell am I supposed to call you now?” Wyatt said, frustrated all of a sudden.
“Stick to Hammer.” I said it before I really thought about what it meant.
He sighed and rubbed his face furiously with his hands. “Well, one day you decided to disappear, and then we heard you were dead,” Wyatt said.
“We looked for you for one year and four months. The last time we heard from you was when you sent a message with the names of two of ours you saw torturing and killing innocent people outside the wall. We took care of them right away, thinking that you’d come back when we did. You didn’t,” Sean added.
“Why did I disappear?”
“We were hoping you could tell us that,” Sean said dryly.
“What the hell are we going to do with him now?” Sharps asked the others.
I opened the bottle of vodka and took a long sip. It was delicious, and I didn’t think about their hearts for the next five minutes.
“There’s a war coming your way.”
“We’ve been at war ever since I was born,” Sean said.
“No, I mean a real war. The vampires are coming for you.”
For a second, no heartbeat and no sound of breathing was hear
d in the room. The blood left all of their faces, and they became even paler than me.
“Why?” Sharps said and shrugged. As if he couldn’t come up with a good enough reason.
“Why do you think? They want the whole world to themselves.”
“That’s not possible. Vampires can’t survive without human blood,” Carson said.
Remembering the bodies of humans lined up one after the other in Brazil made me shiver.
“Everything is possible. And yes, they’ve found a way around it.”
I didn’t know much about the drug Mohg claimed he’d made that replaced the effect of blood for vampires, but I didn’t want to tell them about the humans, either. It sucked for me, and I was a vampire. I didn’t want them more freaked out than they already were.
“What are you going to tell us next, that angels are going to descend and wipe everyone off the face of the earth?” Carson said, half laughing, half yelling.
“What I’m saying is that they’ve been preparing for a long while now. They have bombs. They have vampires. They’re testing your borders and your knowledge, and honestly, you’re doing a pretty shitty job,” I hissed.
“At least they haven’t been able to get past the walls,” Brady said.
“Yet. They haven’t been able to get past the walls yet, and trust me, it’s not because they can’t. It’s because they never wanted to before.”
“Let them come,” Sharps said, raising his chin. “We have silver, more than anyone can imagine. We have weapons.”
“They have bombs,” I said.
“We have bombs, too,” Carson said, reluctantly.
“Listen to me, they’re testing the walls. They’re looking for ways to get the bombs inside. When they do, you will all blow up, and your weaponry isn’t going to be of use. You won’t even see it coming.”
“I don’t believe it,” Brady said. “He’s a liar.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Sharps hissed.
“If you look closely around your walls right now, you’ll see things. I’m not sure what kind of things, but things that weren’t there before. They’re testing you, finding out what catches your attention, and what doesn’t.”
