by M. Lorrox
Charlie and Eddy both shrug at each other.
“Hey, uh, can I see…umm…that?” Enrique is sitting up on the side of his bed.
Charlie sighs. “I guess it can’t hurt.” He walks over with Eddy and shows Enrique the ring.
“May I?”
Charlie nods, and Enrique picks it up. He flips it over and sees the well-known script on the inside of the band. The TV has grown quiet, and he changes the channel until he finds something where people are talking. He turns back to Charlie and Eddy and whispers, “This is a vampire artifact.”
Eddy nods. “And there’s more.” He takes the ring, slides his fingernail underneath the flat signet area that has the infinity ouroboros symbol carved on it, and he lifts the top piece out from the base. “Check this out.” He positions the band of the ring in the crack between his pointer and middle finger, and he flips the top piece over, revealing the underside.
Both Charlie and Enrique lean their heads over to study the miniscule writing that is little more than scratches. Charlie starts shaking his head slowly side to side, but he doesn’t say anything. Enrique tries to make sense of the writing, but first he realizes he needs to figure out which side is up and which is down.
Eddy looks from the pieces of the ring, to Enrique, to his dad. He whispers, “Earlier, I was working with Jambavan and Sky on trying to translate the writing. The hard part is that the same symbols were used in a bunch of different languages. We figured out which ones, but we never got around to translating it... That reminds me. Dad? Where’s Sky? You said you had a special mission for her?”
Charlie shakes his head. “No time to explain that either right now, but—” He points to the ring. “You’re wrong. This isn’t in any of the languages you found.”
Eddy scoffs. “You don’t even know what—”
“Shut up, I mean it’s not in any single language. It’s a code made to look like those languages.”
Eddy holds up one eyebrow, squints the other eye, opens his mouth a little, and mini-shrugs his shoulders. “Eh?”
“And I know what it’s supposed to say. I mean, I know what sort of thing is supposed to be written on…this item. It’s like a kind of instruction. But what it says I don’t know, not yet…”
Enrique shakes his head. “Wow, I am so confused.”
Charlie sighs and whispers, “This is a piece of a puzzle, creating a sort of map. What’s written on it should be a location, a date, and some direction information.”
Eddy’s eyes grow so big they threaten taking over his face in a hostile landgrab. “That legend, the dark one, it’s true?”
Enrique looks at Eddy. “What on earth are you talking about?”
Eddy shakes his head and his hand at him. “No time to explain right now, but—”
Enrique rolls his eyes. Could you all be MORE related?
“The important thing is to realize that this is incredibly important.”
Charlie nods. “Yeah, it is. And the people after it—after you—aren’t going to take no for an answer.”
Enrique smiles then leans himself back on the bed. “I don’t see the big deal.”
Eddy sighs. “You don’t know the whole story, you see—”
“No, what I’m saying, is that this isn’t a problem. It’s no big deal. You should just give it to them, whoever’s after it.”
Charlie steps forward and gets hand-wavy. “That is the last thing we want to do. The information is desirable and extremely dangerous.”
“I know.” Enrique’s smile grows, and he glances at Eddy.
Eddy smiles back, and while Charlie considers the smallest words possible to tell Enrique that he’s an idiot, Eddy pokes his dad in the side. “Dad. I think he’s got an idea.”
“Oh? Care to share?”
Enrique sits up in the bed and leans forward, speaking quietly again. “The best thing to do would be to give them a fake, but we can’t really whip one up right now. So, how do you get them off your back, without actually giving them the valuable thing?”
Eddy smacks Charlie in the side with a backhand. “You get rid of the information.”
Charlie growls at Eddy. “Want to lose that arm?” He looks at Enrique. “There’s a problem though. People who know about it know that it’s not just—” He mouths A RING. “So, scratching off the symbols won’t do; they’ll want the information.” He pokes Eddy hard in the side of the head.
“Ow...”
Enrique starts to laugh. “You two should start a comedy routine, I swear…” When Charlie and Eddy both glare at him, he stops laughing. “You’re right, and that’s why you also fake a translation. Check it: I can take a picture with my phone, then photoshop the symbols into a different order or get rid of some of them or something.” He brushes some imaginary dust off the shoulder of his arm that hangs in the sling. “I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so. Then you let them get the ring—if they want it—along with the faked images.”
Eddy raises both eyebrows and starts bouncing his head. “Yeah, okay, yeah, that would work.”
Charlie, not convinced, shakes his head side to side. “Whoa now, let’s get real. We’re in a hospital. We need to have a plan to enact immediately in case we need it.”
Enrique shrugs. “Yeah, this is the immediate plan. Non-immediate plans include making a legit fake.”
“How are you going to photoshop the picture? Plan to reprogram an x-ray machine or something?” Charlie sighs.
Enrique resists rolling his eyes. “Sir—” He pulls his phone from his sweatpants pocket. “—there’s an app for that.”
When Hamid ibn al Zaman has his fill of fresh blood—straight from the neck of his barely alive abductor—he sets the body down. Hamid stands, then he checks for his phone in his pockets. They must have taken it. He checks the kidnapper’s bodies, but they don’t have it either.
He hunts all around in the back, then he searches through the ambulance’s front cab. It’s nowhere to be found.
They must have ditched it. I’ll have to use theirs. He turns back to the bodies, but he remembers that he just went through their pockets. They didn’t have anything at all on them, not even wallets.
He wipes his face. Who am I dealing with? He looks out the front window, and he sees a GPS stuck to the dash. He grabs it. First, he zooms out to see where he is. Route 1, in Virginia. Then he taps around until he sees where the GPS was set to bring them. Fredericksburg, VA? Not even an address, but only a city? He shakes his head. That must only have been a waypoint, just to get underway.
He looks around the cab for clues, but he doesn’t find any. He climbs out of the front passenger’s door and reads the side of the ambulance. It’s generic, without a hospital name. He shakes his head. Whoever did this is, they are not amateurs.
He looks around. On one side of the road, there is just farmland. Across the road, there are a few houses set back a bit. Overall, the houses look run down, but one has a pair of shiny cars parked in the driveway. They’ll have a computer, or at least a phone. He considers if he should drive up in the ambulance or leave it with the bodies; one human that is probably dead by now, and one decapitated vampire. Hmm.
Hamid hops back into the cab and looks for something to make a spark with. He finds a pair of emergency shears, and he cuts a long strip of fabric from the pants of the now dead driver. Outside, he opens the fuel door and props open the little metal flap with the scissors. After threading the fabric down and into the tank, he pulls it out, flips it around, and threads the opposite end in, covering the entire length of the cloth in diesel.
He’s about to strike the scissors on the pavement to make a spark and light the fabric, but he thinks better of it. Back inside the ambulance, he roots around and finds an oxygen tank and hose. When he’s about to climb back out, again, he pauses and grabs the GPS.
He pockets the GPS, opens the valve on the oxygen, and verifies that pressurized gas is blowing out the hose. He aims the hose where the fuel-soaked fabric touches
the pavement, then he scuffs the shears across the ground and makes a spark. On the third attempt, the spark ignites the fabric.
The flame travels slowly up the wick, and he watches. He knows that fuels like diesel and gasoline will ignite and burn slowly if a flame is put to them—not explosively like many people think. He knows that the fuel needs to be atomized into an aerosol to explode, so he opens the valve on the oxygen tank all the way and threads the hose into the tank until he can hear the oxygen making splashes in the diesel fuel.
He nods and walks away. He’s halfway to the house with the pair of nice cars when the wick ignites the atomized diesel and the ambulance explodes into a fireball that lifts the rear of the vehicle off the ground and sends metal flying in all directions.
Hamid jogs the rest of the way to the house. At the front door, he knocks and tries to look desperate. He hears someone moving inside.
A man wearing sweatpants takes a bite of his hotdog and looks through the door’s peephole. When he sees the tall, dark-skinned man on the other side, he grumbles and opens the door. “Whattaya want?” Then he sees the ambulance on fire. “Holy shit!”
Hamid nods. “I started smelling smoke so I pulled over—” He pretends to be winded and amazed. “—and then there was a fire and boom!”
“Jesus.” The man takes another bite of his hotdog, then looks Hamid up and down. “Lucky break, huh?”
“I suppose so. All my things were inside. Can I use your phone?”
“What are you, a mechanic?”
Hamid tilts his head. “Sorry?”
“You don’t look like an ER guy, or a medic or whatever, but you’re driving an ambulance that just caught fire? For no reason? Come on. I was born at night, but not last night, buddy.”
Hamid opens his hands up to the man. “Please I just need to use a phone, it’s very important.”
He laughs. “Oh, is it? Need a new towel for your head? Get the fuck outta here before I get my gun.”
Hamid sighs. “I’m sorry to have bothered you, and for breaking your face.”
A minute later, Hamid has gone through the house and has verified that there isn’t anyone else there—no racists with shotguns waiting to sneak up on him. The homeowner is slumped near the door, unconscious and bleeding from his nose.
Hamid returns to the room where he noticed a computer. It’s an early 1999 model iMac with a teal-colored shell. He sits down at it. “How quaint.” He hits the spacebar to wake the machine up. When the screen flickers on, a web-browser is open to a Neo-Nazi website. Hamid glances at the corner, the man is logged in as WhiteGod69 and his profile picture is a gun being fired. In another browser tab, a social network. Hamid clicks it, the man is logged in there too, as JKGoodman. He recently posted a picture of himself at a picnic with a Latin woman.
It has fifteen comments and forty-six likes.
Hamid grumbles, then opens a private browser and logs into the secret portal at InfiniteVampire.com. There’s an emergency banner at the top of the screen: Injured Elders Taken to INOVA Fairfax Hospital—Evacuate DC. Hamid reads it, and then he logs back out. See how easy that could have been?
Hamid closes his private window, and he once again faces the man’s malevolence and hypocrisy apparent in his open websites. He wonders if he should do something on the logged-in sites, or if he should just walk away.
So far, he’s had a fucked-up day, and he decides that he should probably do something to put a smile on his face, however brief. He’s about to start a new thread, then he frowns. I don’t have time for this.
He stands, looks at the computer again, then growls as he reaches out, swipes the computer off the desk and sends it flying across the room and into the wall. It dents the drywall and the screen shatters. Sparks fly before it crashes in a smoking mess on the floor. He smiles. Good enough.
As he walks back toward the unconscious homeowner, he looks around for anything useful. He decides he doesn’t really need anything, but then he notices the cars outside the kitchen window.
He looks at the man, who is still slumped against the wall and bleeding. “You should get to the hospital.” He grabs a set of keys that hang on a hook near the door and hits the button on the fob to pop the trunk.
He picks up the man like he was a bag of dog food and tosses him in the trunk. He programs the GPS he took from the ambulance for the hospital, and he drives off as a firetruck and police car speed toward the burning ambulance.
-RRANRNANTTLE-
Harold aims the blunderbuss toward the barricaded set of double doors on the third floor.
Skip looks at the case, sighs, then he lunges with the crowbar toward the glass, smashing it.
Harold spins toward him. “What are you doing?”
Skip slides the crowbar along the edges of the case, clearing away the broken glass. “Getting another weapon; we’ll need every one we can find.” He reaches into the case and lifts the ceremonial mace from its hanger.
Harold opens his mouth to scold Skip and insist that he return the heirloom, but the continued rattling from the barricade dissuades him. He sighs. “Good idea. Why are they acting up? Has something changed?”
“I don’t know, maybe they heard us.” Skip turns and walks back the way they came, and Jambavan follows at his heels.
Harold scrambles behind them, then he pauses. His eyes cast to other objects in the bottom of the case: the Smithsonian Institution Badge of Office, a gold ceremonial medallion depicting the owl of Athena; and the Ceremonial Key, a skeleton key that in the mid nineteenth-century opened the massive oak doors to the Smithsonian Institution Building. He grabs both from the shards of broken glass and slips one into each of his jacket’s pockets. Safer with me than left behind.
Skip returns to the map of fire exits by the elevator. Jambavan looks over one of his shoulders.
When Harold meets them, he takes position behind Skip’s other shoulder. “What are you looking for?”
Skip points to the Regent’s Room on the map. “This is where everyone is, right? And it’s a tower? These here are the outside walls? How high does it go up?”
Harold furrows his brow. “On the floor above us, there’s a series of rooms in the tower, and above that there’s a big office, and above that an attic that leads to the parapet, or the roof of the tower.”
-RRRARANNATTLLTE, dum, bum, bum-
They look over and see objects falling away from the barricade. Skip turns to Harold. “The office. How do you get to it?”
“From the fourth floor, above us, but—”
Skip takes a step past him to face into the Regent’s Room. “Get everyone ready to move, now.”
Korina, who is seated at the grand, round table in the Regent’s Room, shakes her head. What?
-RRNNATTE, drrrmmmmm- Something slides against the floor.
Skip turns back to Harold. “Tell me there’s a way to get to the fourth floor besides through those doors.” While keeping his eyes locked on Harold, he points out from his shoulder to the barricaded double doors.
“Oh, well—”
Carrie—still holding the croquet mallet—jumps down the four steps from the Regent’s Room. Her bright sundress flows behind her. “The Wilson Library!”
Harold nods. “Yes! Yes, this way!” He spins and heads toward the rotunda with the barricade, then he makes a sharp left into the oddly angled hallway. Skip stops in the rotunda and grabs Jambavan’s arm. “Keep this barricade in place until we call.”
He nods. “Yes, sir.” Then he tosses the fallen furniture back on top of the pile and pushes the pile toward the doors. They rattle again, and creak, and then for a moment, there’s no noise or motion at all.
Then the double doors explode open and shove Jambavan and the barricade back a foot—the zombies pushed on the doors all at once. Through the cracks of the various pieces of furniture, Jambavan can see a thick mass of zombies through the partially opened doors. Arms reach in through the gaps and start pushing and tugging on the barricade.
/> The tour group rushes out of the Regent’s Room, into the rotunda, then down the hallway to the library. Katlyn rushes by with Minnie. Frank and Korina are the last of the group. Jambavan nods to his knight as she passes. He leans backward against the barricade, holding it in place while dozens of zombies push it forward.
When the group reaches the Wilson Library, Korina finds Skip. “We’re the last!”
He nods and holds his hands up to his mouth to yell for Jambavan, but Korina interrupts him.
“Wait! We’re not sure the path ahead is clear. We should send someone before making our rear vulnerable.”
He sees a staircase along one side of the library; it leads to a balcony above the hallway they came out of, and on the balcony, a doorway leads to another hallway. He points to the upper hallway and finds Harold. “That way?”
“Yes!”
Lance waits for Korina’s or Skip’s order to explore the upper hallway, but it never comes. Instead, Skip sprints for the stairwell, rounds it, bounds up the steps, then disappears into the hallway.
The hallway is straight, and he runs until it T’s into a wider one. He looks left—to where on the floor below there was the rotunda and barricaded doors—and sees another set of double doors and with furniture piled in front.
-Ranrnatle-
You’ve got to be kidding me! He turns to the opposite side—toward where the Regent’s Room in the South Tower was. He sees a short set of stairs, just like there was leading to the Regent’s Room. Past them, there are some walls and an opening to the left. He runs back down the hall to the library. “Come on! I’ll hold this barricade. Bring everyone up and tell Jambavan!”
He turns and sprints back down the hall, makes a left, and throws himself at the antiques piled in front of the double doors on the fourth floor.
As Carrie leads the first of the group into the wide hall behind Skip, he yells over his shoulder. “Bring everyone up to the office!”
“Okay!”
The line that follows her—two dozen children, a dozen vampires, and a dozen Smithsonian Institution employees—all glance at Skip before running in the other direction. When Korina struggles around the corner with Frank’s help, she calls Skip over. “C’mon!”
