by Seth Eden
Crystal had not decided what she thought about the likelihood of a Lucian threat. They were supposedly the enemy of the Vampyren. Lither than Vampyren but just as tall and hairy, equally as strong, and with larger canine-type teeth that could rip your throat out before you knew what was happening. Werewolf-like, people said, and even more dangerous when the moon was out.
But she had never seen one. Somehow the Lucian were always just about to strike. For sure, this time. They were coming, and they’d slaughter vamp and human alike. It all sounded like a bullshit story to her. Maybe it was even a story invented by the Vampyren to keep the humans in line.
Oh, ya think we’re bad? You just wait!
Anyway, that made more sense than the alternative; as bad as things had been, they could get even worse, and just as life was settling into something akin to a routine too.
“Should we be drinking?” Jet said, sounding tentative. He had anxiety issues. It was too bad, Crystal thought, that old Mickey didn’t have any Xanax on hand. That might have come in handy too. But booze functioned almost as well. “I mean if there’s something out there when we go?” He was gnawing on his fingernails, his dark brown eyes fixed on Crystal who was taking another sip of her cocktail before knotting her long, black hair into a bun on top of her head, miraculously fixed with a single pin (one had to be efficient these days). “Should we be drinking?”
“We better,” Crystal said, knocking back the rest of her Bloody Mary as she considered a third cigarette. “I’m sure as hell not goin’ out there sober.”
2
Crystal
The streets were deserted. Sometimes that was deceptive. Crystal had snuck along the eerily deserted streets of Chicago before and been fooled into thinking she was home free, only to end up running for her life… not always from Vampyren, but from human men, who were no less dangerous.
That was another reason for her mercenary nature, she thought. She explained as much to both Jet and Nina when they’d asked her why she traded with Vampyren and even chatted with them as if they were old pals. Crystal had explained that if anyone thought human men were less likely to rape and kill you than Vampyren men, you were either an idiot or just deliberately fooling yourself. She had no loyalties based on someone’s planet of origin. Vampyrens were sentient and intelligent just like humans. Their one big flaw was that they happened to drink human blood which was problematic. But since you didn’t have to kill anyone to take their blood, she figured that was just a problem with an easy solution. There was also the breeding issue, but she had always suspected that problem could be fixed too if everyone would just start thinking a little more pragmatically and stop being assholes.
But not everyone could be brilliant and logical, Crystal thought.
“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” Crystal sang softly as they rolled their metal cart full of drugs down the sidewalk. “His name is my name tooo…”
“Whenever we go out!” Nina sang. She was not helping to carry things. She was supposed to be keeping an eye out, but was instead, skipping on the sidewalk, kicking empty soda pop cans. “The people always shout!”
“There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!” Nina and Jet sang.
Crystal didn’t sing that part, earning a dirty look from her cohorts. Her ears had perked up, and she didn’t know why. She hadn’t heard anything. But sometimes her subconscious sensed things before her conscious mind did. She’d never been able to explain that, exactly.
“Stop singing,” Crystal snapped, and the two of them immediately did. They were reliable that way.
They all froze there on the sidewalk and Crystal sniffed the air and scanned the street. She’d gotten good at detecting nearby danger. She’d even become adept at smelling Vampyren from a few blocks away. But then again, a lot of them smelled, not because of body odor but because they were so often covered with blood or somehow stinking of blood even if they weren’t covered in it.
She didn’t smell any Vampyren now, however. She didn’t see any danger either. She scowled at the street as if it were offending her; teasing her with some unnameable danger.
A sleepless malice, she thought. That was from something, some movie. She couldn’t remember what. She was pretty sure they had it on DVD. Oh, that was going to drive her crazy forever.
Just like that, her fears were allayed. There was nothing, and she took a deep breath before pushing the cart down the street again, Nina and Jet falling into step behind her, now softly singing their song, a little more skittish after she’d scared them like that. Sometimes they were real babies.
But they were her babies.
“Okay!” Crystal said. They’d come to the bombed-out office building with an elevator that still worked. They pushed the cart full of meds through the “entrance” which was really the entire front lobby, the glass doors having long ago been shattered, the marble-floored lobby was in shambles. The elevator didn’t work. They were going to have to carry the meds up two flights to the main floor that served as Dr. Jack’s office.
The kids could do that. They had to do something to earn their keep.
They complained a little as Crystal stomped up the stairs ahead of them, but they did their job and on the third floor, they rolled the cart down a wide corridor to the somehow still intact glass doors that read Law Offices of Harrington & Stewart.
Sometimes, Crystal wondered what had become of the people who had once been things like lawyers or… insurance adjusters. They were out there somewhere and if they weren’t, they had either died in the invasion, or in a breeding pit, or in a tank farm… Well, she supposed, perhaps it wasn’t that difficult to imagine, after all. It was more like a little exercise of the imagination to think of what might have happened to particular people.
Crystal herself had been a psychology major in college when the invasion had hit two years ago. She didn’t have the slightest interest in any career that necessitated a psychology degree. In fact, the idea of listening to people talk about their personal problems and demons all day sounded like a fate worse than the breeding pit, but she had been forced to pick a major by her now very dead parents so she had. School had not been difficult. She was sharp and savvy and she knew how to game every system she ever came across. As a result, she had swung through three years of college with a 3.7 GPA while somehow logging an impressive number of hours on her bong (which she had named Elmer Fudd for no other reason than having been very high at the time).
In fact, learning not just to survive but make a tidy business out of bartering shit had given her a sense of purpose for the first time in her life. Although… she did miss the weed. It was easier to find smack and Oxy than weed. She wasn’t going to fuck around with opioids. As shitty as life was, it was still life, after all. It was still fun to sit around and get buzzed with Jet and Nina though sometimes she wished they were up for sharing themselves, sexually speaking. They were tragically monogamous and in the meantime… it had been a while for Crystal. The only sex on offer lately was not sex, but assault. And that didn’t count. Apparently, nobody wanted to ask anymore, human or vamp. Nobody had ever succeeded in trying with her, but she’d had to use her taser more than once. The only decent lay in the last couple of years had been another trader who came through town some months ago. He had a big dick and a talented tongue. She still thought about him when she jerked off.
There was a guard behind the glass double doors of Dr. Jack’s makeshift hospital. Crystal was used to that. She was not used to them wearing a DIY uniform. The guard was wiry and pale and holding an AK and he pushed open the glass door to talk to them. Crystal bounced on her toes, looking over his shoulder at the office floor beyond where she saw Dr. Jack in a Star Wars t-shirt and baggy jeans giving a little girl stitches atop a folding table.
“You got business?” The guard said, nodding at them, but she saw his eyes stray to the boxes of meds on the cart.
“We got meds!” Crystal shouted loud enough for Dr. Jack to hear. She saw his head jerk tow
ard her. Dr. Jack was hot and a widower and, tragically, very gay. His husband died in the first sweep of the invasion. Dr. Jack still wore a picture of Robert in a locket around his neck. Crystal pretended that it was corny because it was easier to dismiss it than feel sad. Thinking of Jack’s Robert made her think of her dead parents and her dead friends and her dead ex-boyfriend from U of I at Champaign-Urbana. She didn’t want to think about any of that, thank you very much.
But she still wished she had some weed.
“Let them in!” Jack called out. Jack was black and handsome as hell. He had a beard growing in just now and not a bit of hair on his head, and he was jacked because when he wasn’t looking after patients, he was working out. She was pretty sure he almost never slept.
The guard opened the door with a flourish and Crystal held her head up as they pushed the cart inside, feeling like some important visiting dignitary.
Jack was finishing up the little girl’s stitches, but he kept glancing over to look at the treasure trove being rolled inside. “Holy shit…”
“Bad words!” The little girl said.
Dr. Jack snorted, spreading a bandage along the girl’s arm and said, “Fuck that. Okay, don’t let this get wet, Marla. Your mommy’s waiting over there, see?” He pointed to a plastic chair by a glassed-in office where a haggard-looking woman was sitting with an IV in her arm. “Go find mommy.” She nodded and bounced off and Dr. Jack straightened up and clapped his hands together. “Crys!”
“Jack!” Crys said, reflexively digging out a cigarette.
“Oh, don’t smoke in here,” Jack said, aware it was a losing battle. “C’mon, man.”
Crystal ignored him and lit up, smirking as she gestured toward the cart bearing treasure. “Relax. I come bearing gifts.”
“Holy shit,” Jack said, his eyes growing large. “Is that Cipro?”
“Two cases,” Crystal said proudly. “I got Penicillin, Amoxicillin, I got Naloxone—"
“No way!” Jack said. He threw his arms around Crystal, nearly burning himself with the cigarette. “Angel!”
Crystal flushed and pretended she didn’t, squirming out of his embrace even though it was the most action she’d gotten in a while. “Yeah, whatever. Next time I get an arm torn off or something, I expect to get a spot at the front of the line.”
“Sure sure,” Jack said, marveling as he ripped open the boxes and pawed through their contents. There were other medical supplies too, all the things that Mickey’d had no idea what to do with, anyway. “Syringes, oh thank God…”
“Hey, Jack,” Crystal said, her curiosity taking over. She nodded at the guard now back at his post behind the glass door. “What’s with the uniform on your security? The thing looks patched together from Goodwill? That guy pretending he’s a cop now or what?”
“He is a cop,” Jack said simply, studying the label on a bottle of Cipro.
The cigarette nearly fell out of Crystal’s mouth. “What?”
“A bunch of guys started a new human police force,” Jack said as if that was somehow not a major revelation and, to Crystal’s mind, inherently absurd. “They have headquarters downtown. Making their own uniforms. It’s pretty ragtag so far. But I guess it’s helpful.”
“So vigilantes,” Crystal said.
“Well… they’re calling themselves police,” Jack said, shrugging.
“They have no court system or any human political system to enforce the laws,” Crystal said, feeling like she very nearly knew what she was talking about. “They’re vigilantes.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. “I’m safer because of em’.”
“Really?” That was a shock. She couldn’t even figure out how that worked. But she didn’t have time to play twenty questions. They had two other doctors to deliver to. “Okay well... ”
“Thank you!” Jack said, suddenly appearing in front of her and clasping her hands. “Means a lot.”
“Oh gosh, Jack,” Crystal muttered. “Don’t be genuine. It gives me hives.”
They were already back outside and heading to the next hospital when Crystal realized they’d forgotten one of the small cases of Naloxone. “Oh shit.”
Crystal felt a spike of anxiety and was angry at herself for such a stupid mistake. Why hadn’t she double-checked, why hadn’t she…? If she ran now, she thought, and sent Nina and Jet on to the next stop with the cart, she could meet them at the third hospital and they could be back home before nightfall.
But once it was dark… She wasn’t even sure who she was most afraid of. There were so many possibilities. But the Vampyren at night… They got wild. She’d gone this far without getting attacked. She was hoping to break some kind of record.
“I’m gonna run back home,” Crystal said, checking to make sure her taser was stored in the back of her cutoffs and her knife was in her pocket. “You guys go on. I’ll meet you at Doc Friday’s. You know where it is, right?”
“Yeah…” Nina looked panicked and Crystal grit her teeth. They needed to just get this done. The meds would save lives and as much as Crystal didn’t much like to admit it, she cared about that. “Are you sure?”
“Nina!” Crystal snapped, as they stood there on the sidewalk. “It’s fine. The Nalo boxes are light. I’m just gonna run really fast.”
“Okay,” Jet said, looking as terrified as Crystal felt. He probably was. Somehow the two of them felt so much safer when they were with Crystal. She couldn’t figure that one. More of their weird codependency, she supposed. She’d put on some muscle over the last year, but it wasn’t as if she would save anyone from Vampyren anytime soon even if her knife had come in handy on occasion. Jet was six feet and he was lanky but stronger than he looked. It was really just his inner nerd that made him feel like he needed Crystal to protect him.
Finally, she managed to get them to agree, and the sun was still mercifully high in the sky as they parted ways. Crystal jogged and focussed on the mission.
Get the drugs, get the drugs, get the drugs…
She was keenly aware of the slightest noise, her nose on red alert, sniffing out any potential danger.
Yet somehow the Vamp managed to take her by surprise.
He was very clean, she thought. It was a strange thing to think when a Vampyren stepped out of the long afternoon shadows and made you fall on your face. She’d scraped her chin and she hissed, barely registering the hulking figure looming over him but then suddenly thick arms were lifting her right up off the ground and setting her on her feet.
She looked up at him, her heart thudding in her chest. He was one of those pale Vamps and he had a lighter shade of hair than most that glinted like silver. His eyes were nearly white.
What kinda freak, she dimly thought.
“Hey there, Little Red Riding Hood,” the Vamp said, practically licking his chops. His lips were unnaturally red and now she could smell it; the sharp and metallic scent of blood. He’d just eaten. Well, that was good, right? Maybe then he wouldn’t want to eat her.
She’d come across almost-friendly Vamps before. Vamps she could reason with, at any rate. But others…
“You sure are lookin’ good,” he rasped.
That was a song, she thought. Well, and a fairy tale. She wondered how he’d learned either. The Vamps were really acclimated to the culture nowadays. It was off-putting.
“Right.” Crystal nodded curtly and leaped to take off running. But abruptly, a hand was clamping onto the bun on top of her head, unknotting it and dragging her backward by the hair. She screamed bloody murder, and that only seemed to spur him on.
The sidewalk was scraping up her legs as he dragged her back along the pavement to a dark alley and she reached for her taser only to find that it had dropped somewhere along the way. She screamed and kicked and squirmed and spat.
“I’m Drake,” the Vamp said casually as if they were sitting down for a drink. “And I’m about to fuck you right into the ground, little thing.”
“No!” Crystal screamed. “NO!”
<
br /> Seriously, why couldn’t they ever ask?
It was a funny thought, she considered. Or it would have been. Perhaps in some scenario, it was kind of funny.
Now it was some gross and smelly alley and her kicking the ground as Drake the Vampyren easily dragged her along like she was a sack of potatoes. He picked her up and spun her around and Crystal fought like a hellcat but there was nothing for it as he shoved her against a brick wall, the immovable force of him holding her head to the wall as he yanked her cutoffs down painfully over her ass.
Fuck fuck fuck…
“Drake!” A cluster of Vampyren appeared at the end of the alley and he looked over. They didn’t seem particularly concerned by the sexual assault in progress. Not that Crystal should have been surprised, she supposed. “Lucian!” One of them hollered.
Seriously?
The prospect of Lucian that weren’t just some invention somehow filled her with more fear than the prospect of rape but now Drake hauled her over his shoulder even as she helplessly squirmed.
“Let go of me, you fuckwad!”
Unsurprisingly, Drake, the brutal Vamp wasn’t listening to her. Instead, he tossed her inside a metal locker sitting there in the alley. She screamed as he shut the doors, her attempts to stop him wildly unsuccessful. The entire interaction had been like a housefly fighting a gorilla. She’d been so panicked she hadn’t even thought to pull her knife. The part of her that thought of herself as a leader, a hero, was pretty pissed off about that. Only, nobody had gotten that far with her before. It had paralyzed her.
Now, locked inside a tiny, pitch-black space, where she was likely to die, she burst into tears. She had been helpless, and she had let him win. It was stupid to blame herself yet shame overwhelmed her. She screamed and sobbed and pounded on the doors and attempted to rock the locker and push it over. What good that would do, she had no idea. At least it was something she was doing. But the fucking thing was far too heavy and instead, she ended up huddled in a tiny ball inside the locker, crying into her kneecaps, hot tears sliding down her legs.
