Nerves of Steel

by Lee Hayton

  Nope. No dice. The next channel along also had the same information. This time a Barbie doll reporter flashed her pretty smile while looking nervously over her shoulder.

  Mass escape. Do not approach vampires. They are armed and hostile.

  Well, of course, they bloody are. That’s what happens when you keep a race of people as slaves. They get pissed off.

  How the hell did they manage it? Broad daylight and they’d all gotten out? It didn’t make sense. Even having the benefit of listening to the creatures discuss this very plan in a dark cave near the center of the earth, didn’t let the news seem any more credible.

  Vampires couldn’t go out in sunlight. It was like the first commandment of their people. Drink blood. Live in darkness.

  How could they escape a facility when to go outside would strike them dead?

  I kept flicking through the channels, looking for more information. After a few minutes of the same repeated facts, I looked at the note on my knee again.

  “Don’t believe him.”

  I’d repeated everything that the vampires had discussed. If the man had genuinely tried to take care of it, then this was a spectacular failure.

  But had he even tried?

  Suddenly, I wanted Miss Tiddles in the apartment. Even though I now believed she was nothing but a spy, someone who knew what I knew would be a comfort.

  Nika.

  I stood, full of the impetus for action, then stopped. Shouldn’t I wait here for Norman to return instead?

  “Don’t believe him.”

  Norman had been taking care of himself in this apartment for the past few years. Another afternoon wouldn’t kill him. If he grumbled about the lack of homecoming celebrations, I could justifiably point him in the direction of the TV and the horror that was unfolding on it.

  Except Norman won’t think of it as horror. He’ll think of it as his people going free.

  I shook my head. No matter how much captivity grated on his soul, I couldn’t believe that my friend would ever accept freedom at the price the vampires were demanding.

  Seven hundred teenagers.

  I could imagine them at home right now. Putting their hair into fancy updos, either home-grown or bought and paid for in an expensive salon. The boys would be fingering the corsages they’d purchased for their dates, and wondering if they should settle for first base or venture further.

  My high school dance hadn’t been much to write home about. I’d gone, but only with a friend from school who was just as abhorrent to the girls in class as I was to the boys. Back when I was ugly, I’d dreamed of a pauper to princess transformation on prom night. I’d been brought up to believe that being pretty was essential and that prom night held a touch of magic in its arms.

  Those arms hadn’t reached around me then, but the thought that they might still held some power.

  I grabbed my jacket from the back of the door, stuffed some candy bars into my pocket, and wheeled my bike out into the hall.

  Nika didn’t look happy when she opened the door to me. I’d expected to find her out on the street. Midday was prime time in the goods and meat auction taking place out there. To find her closed inside worried me more than it would to see a gun to her head. To see the fear painted on her features sent my heart rate skyrocketing.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  The words were firm, but Nika’s grip on the door was not. I pushed it open and walked past her.

  “I need to get in contact with your man again,” I said. “I don’t think he understood the magnitude of what I told him.”

  “He understood.”

  Nika stood in the doorway, not bothering to close the door or move away. I remembered the expression she’d had when she first came to me. The look of fear almost entirely hidden by her look of self-disgust.

  It was the latter that kept her in a bad relationship so long. I wondered how toxic the current one was.

  I’d been so stupid. Leopards don’t change their spots. Just because women are strong, doesn’t mean they won’t end up with yet another abuser.

  “Give me his number or tell me his address.” I shrugged and narrowed my eyes. “Your choice.”

  But Nika shook her head. Whether she was calling my bluff or genuinely couldn’t help me didn’t matter. End result, she wasn’t going to.

  “You got your deal,” she said. “Get out.”

  “I didn’t get my deal.” I walked toward her, bunching my hands into fists. “My deal was Norman coming home, and my apartment’s still empty.”

  Nika laughed then, hollow and unamused.

  “Didn’t you see the news?” she asked. “Your mate will be as free as a bird by now. If he doesn’t come back to your apartment, well…”

  She shrugged, and I wanted to punch my fist through her face. I would fit perfectly into the ranks of every abusive boyfriend she ever had. Nika wasn’t giving me what I wanted, what she’d promised, and it made me ache to pulverize her smile to dust.

  No wonder I had a hard time making friends.

  “You know what they’re planning,” I said. “How can you just stand there and let it happen?”

  That laugh again. It stripped joy from my soul until it lay open, hollow and bare.

  “Do you still believe that you can change the world?”

  I shook my head, but the heart hammering in my chest said, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”

  “There’s going to be thousands of them,” she said. “All of them pissed off, and all of them bent on our destruction. If you want my advice, you’ll fuck off out of town.” Nika waved her hand toward the window, the street. “There’s going to be nothing here worth staying for. They’ll tear you limb from limb and still leave you alive.”

  “There can’t be thousands of them,” I said, finding a hole in her armor I could start to chink away at. “The vampire compounds only ever hold a couple of hundred.” I tilted my head to one side with a frown. “So, they can’t escape in numbers.”

  My words slowed all the way along that sentence as Nika’s humorless grin widened and she began to nod.

  “Oh, yeah. You’re starting to get it,” she said. “They must have had this planned for months. For years.”

  None of this made sense. I put my hands up to cover my face for a moment, trying to compute out the rational answer and coming up with only gibberish.

  “Do you know what he did with the information you gave him?” Nika asked. She didn’t wait for a response. “He wrote it down and laughed as he threw it away.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Listen up, lady. You stay around here for long enough you don’t need to witness things to know them.” Nika stepped toward me, slow, menacing. “Do you know who he works for?”

  I shook my head while my mouth tried to supply an answer. “The empire? Some shadowy department of the government?”

  “He works for Manpower Industries. The largest corporate competition to slave labor.” Nika crossed over to the window as a burst of broken glass echoed up from the street outside. A car crash or maybe a baseball bat and a shopfront window.

  Still keeping her back turned to me, her gaze riveted on the scene playing out below, Nika continued. “He wants the vampires to escape. Then nothing stands in the way of him bidding on every construction job in the city.”

  “But they’ll kill people.”

  The simple ethics behind my statement dropped out of my mouth to die, wriggling on the floor.

  “You sound like a Barbie doll,” Nika observed, her back still turned. “You sound like a five-year-old who believes in good intentions and happy endings.”

  A five-year-old who still believed that right should triumph over wrong.

  I swallowed the tears that were threatening. To burst out crying now would do nothing to lend me credibility. “We need to stop them.”

  Nika turned at that, her mouth open in surprise. “There is no ‘we.’ I’m an old client, who doesn’t need your help any longer. Now, why don�
�t you piss off back to your apartment and enjoy the freedom of not having a price tag on your head?”

  I grabbed her arm. “Nika, if we don’t do something, then the vampires are going to attack schoolchildren. They’re going to turn them. It will kill their parents and wreck their whole lives.”

  When she stayed resolutely still, I asked with a catch in my voice, “Don’t you care?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, placing her palm flat on the window, “once I give a damn about myself I’ve no care left for anybody else.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I tried Mike next. He was the only other person I could think of. Gentle giant though he was, he also wasn’t about to stick his neck out on a desperate mission not even backed up with a plan.

  “But how would we stop them?” he kept saying, as though I had any idea. “Won’t they just attack me and turn me if they’re in such substantial numbers?”

  Well, yes, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. They couldn’t turn me, not all the way, but they could suck me dry and leave me behind like a pile of trash. Even with my strength, I wouldn’t be a match for a crowd of vampires, let alone hundreds or even thousands.

  I also couldn’t let the attack on schoolchildren just happen. Not without trying my best.

  My last resort wasn’t a great plan. I phoned up the local television station and asked to be put through to the news desk. “I have some information for you,” I said, hoping I sounded cryptic. From the snort of laughter I received, I guess I just appeared barking mad.

  “There’s going to be an attack tonight,” I whispered urgently to the man who finally answered. “The vampires are going to try to turn all the teenagers attending the joint prom.”

  “What’s your source?” a bored voice asked back.

  “I overheard some free vampires talking in a cave. They also talked about freeing the compound, and that’s happened.”

  “That’s under control. The renegade vampires are being rounded up as we speak. It’s not news.”

  He hung up while I stared at the receiver in my hand, frowning. What spell was the city under that its citizens could afford to be so laze faire?

  I felt a compelling need to travel to the conference center where the prom would be held. I would fight the creatures off with my bare hands if it came down to it.

  And then what? Once you’ve killed half a dozen, they’ll tear you apart.

  I needed someone with power and resources to stop them. There was only one person I could think of with that.

  Mrs. Pennyworth wouldn’t be pleased to see me, but I’d gotten used to hostile receptions. She had money and influence. If I was going to mount any kind of preventative force to stop the carnage tonight, I needed both of those.

  As I stood on the Pennyworth’s front doorstep, Graham looked at me as though I came covered in dog turds. His nose went up into the air, and he refused to meet my gaze, his lip curling when I walked past.

  The battle to get past the front gate guards had been hard enough that I didn’t care about Graham’s reception. Having come close to being shot off the property, literally, a turned-up nose was something I could handle. If the guards hadn’t phoned through to Mrs. Pennyworth and she hadn’t agreed to see me, then it might have been the end of me, there and then.

  “What is it that you want?” Mrs. Pennyworth said, meeting me in the entrance hall. She glanced at her watch. “I should be at work right now.”

  I knew from my first glance at her that Madeline only allowed me entry because she was scared I’d inform people she’d hired me. If the woman had only known me better, she’d know that I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to. There was nobody I could sell the information to. Nobody I knew who would care.

  Her not knowing that had paid the price for my entry, but it wouldn’t stretch any further.

  “You have a daughter at Aviemore High School, don’t you?”

  I’d seen the photographs on the mantelpiece above the piano the last time I’d visited. It hadn’t meant anything at the time. I’d been too focused on other things.

  Now, it was a way in.

  “Yes, that’s right. Why?” Mrs. Pennyworth frowned with the part of her face where the Botox was wearing thin. “Has Anna got into some sort of trouble?”

  “She’s not in trouble yet, but she will be,” I said. “You’ve seen the news about the mass vampire escape from the compound?”

  She gave a single nod, firm and short. “I saw. The empire has got that back under control.”

  “I don’t think they have,” I said. “I think that the vampires are still loose in vast numbers and they’re planning on attacking the joint prom tonight.”

  Mrs. Pennyworth sighed and gripped the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know what rumors you’ve been listening to, but I don’t need to hear your scaremongering.”

  “It’s true,” I said. My desperation grew in line with my panic. Time was running out. If I couldn’t convince her of the seriousness, then there was no way that I could stop the terrible events being planned. “Why would I come here and lie to you?” I asked.

  “Because you’ve been taken in by someone,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know. This is ridiculous. Any vampires who were turned would just be taken into the camps.”

  “What if they turned your daughter?” I asked. “Is that what you’d let them do?”

  I laughed and shook my head when she didn’t immediately answer.

  “I’ve been held in those camps, too, you know. I don’t believe for a second that any parent would let their child be taken there.”

  “You think that they’re planning on attacking our children to make a permanent bid for freedom?”

  As soon as the question was out of her mouth, the truth must have become apparent to her.

  “The empire won’t allow it,” she said. Although Mrs. Pennyworth shook her head, her words lacked conviction. “If they attack our children, it won’t matter what we say. They’ll put them in chains.”

  “They haven’t even been able to hold onto the ones they’ve got,” I said. “Nobody is going to hand turned teenagers to them. The entire city will be in an uproar.”

  Mrs. Pennyworth turned and summoned Graham to her side with one raised finger. “Get hold of the matron,” she said. “I need to talk to her.”

  I waited, eager to hear how she would help to stop the attack. Instead, Mrs. Pennyworth shook her head. “You can go now. I’ve heard what you wanted to say.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “But, we need to get together enough men to stop them. We need the old armaments from the city stockpile. I can’t get those out by myself.”

  “I suggest you go home and thank your lucky stars that I’m not calling the empire forces to come and pick you up.”

  I took a step toward her, holding my hand out, thinking if I just had one more moment, I could make her see.

  “Get out. Graham?”

  He was at her side in a moment, handing a dialed phone over and escorting me to the door.

  “Don’t make a scene,” he said under his breath. “The mistress is very unhappy at the moment. It won’t take much for her to call the police.”

  “Tell Anna to pack her things and be waiting at the door,” Mrs. Pennyworth instructed the matron of her daughter’s school over the phone. “I’m coming to collect her for the night. We’ve decided on a private celebration of her graduation instead.”

  She hung up the phone and looked at me, lifting her hands up to either side. “Sorted, thanks,” Mrs. Pennyworth said. “Was there something else you wanted?”

  I retreated. Not wanting to go home, I decided to stop by The Waterside again. If I wasn’t able to save an impending attack, then at least I could drown my sorrows.

  An indifferent city shrugged as I cycled by. I could try another parent, a whole group of them, but time was limited. I couldn’t count on anybody to help me. I’d used up my only plans.

  Once inside the pu
b, I purloined a phone that someone had been stupid enough to rest briefly on the bar. Fighting my way through the crowd waiting for the bathroom, I found a spot where I could just about hear, and made a last-ditch attempt to avoid what seemed inevitable.

  “There’s a bomb planted under the conference center,” I announced in a breathy voice when the conference center reception desk robot answered the phone. “You need to call off the prom celebrations tonight, or the whole building will be blown sky-high.”

  “The conference center is a state of the art facility with self-scanning for any known risks,” the robot replied. “You can rest assured that there are no bombs located in, on, or under the conference center. Thanks for your call.”

  Fucking bots. There’s no reasoning with them. They think they know it all, just because of being programmed with the tiniest pieces of information that they need to operate.

  Of course, they had scanning equipment. It had been a routine part of every building ordinance in the past fifty years.

  “Someone’s been in looking for you,” Gwen the barmaid said. She glanced over her shoulder to where Mike was serving, then pulled me aside. “She’s waiting for you downstairs. We’re ready when you give the word.”

  What?

  I walked down the cellar stairs, thinking at every step I’d be attacked or trapped or something else equally as devastating. Today just wasn’t going my way. In fact, it had been a pretty lousy decade all up.

  “Over here,” a voice called out of the shadowy pool of dimness at the base of the stairs. I recognized the voice immediately.

  “Miss Tiddles. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s not just Miss Tiddles,” another voice said. Pete stepped forward from the shadows. He smiled guiltily. “I drove home after dropping you off, but I couldn’t get the thought of the attack out of my mind. When I saw this one hanging about”—he jerked his head at the werecat—“I thought I may as well lend a hand.”

  I smiled in gratitude at the two of them, then it crumpled into dismay.

  “I don’t think the three of us stand any chance against an organized plot of this size.”