Long Dark Night

by Janci Patterson

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “Doing what? Driving you?”

  “All of it. I’m a monster. What is wrong with you?” That was mean, but I meant it.

  Jack was quiet for a moment, and I was sure I’d offended him.

  That’d be better. For him.

  “I told you,” he said finally. “Zeke asked me to help you out.”

  “That’s fine, but there’s helping people and then there’s opening a vein for them.”

  I expected him to come back with some kind of retort about how I hadn’t minded at the time, which was totally deserved.

  Instead, he looked thoughtful. “What you did with that knife, when you cut on your throat? That was awesome. Like something out of a movie.”

  “Okay,” I said. “All the more reason for you not to get involved.”

  “Are you kidding?” Jack said. “This is the first interesting thing that’s happened to me in a long time.”

  I gaped at him. “You let me drink your blood because you were bored?”

  Jack grinned. “Maybe. Does that make me crazy?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If you’re looking for adventure, you’ve got the wrong girl.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe I’m not looking for adventure, exactly. Maybe I’m just looking to do something that matters.” He shook his head, like he was still a bit dazed from the blood loss.

  “I guess I should have provided you with a snack,” I said. “Like they do at the blood bank.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows at me.

  “It sounded funnier in my head.”

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I just ate.”

  That wasn’t funny either, but Jack smiled anyway.

  “Come back inside,” he said. “Let me give my cousin a call.”

  Eight

  I followed Jack into the kitchen. He reached into the fridge and pulled out a jug of orange juice. As he drank, some of the color returned to his face.

  Then he pulled out his cell phone and made a call.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “I know it’s late, but a friend and I were thinking of coming down there tonight. Can we stay with you?”

  That sounded like an unreasonable request to me, but the cousin apparently didn’t care. “Awesome,” Jack said. “Yeah, we’re going to leave now, so we’ll see you in the early morning. No problem. We’ll try not to wake you up.”

  Jack hung up the phone. “See?” he said. “No big deal.”

  Jack moved a little too quickly to get ready to go. I wondered if he was afraid he would pass out, or afraid I might change my mind and leave him behind. From the kitchen cabinet, he pulled out a bottle of pills. He popped one in his mouth and downed it with water.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Thyroid medicine,” he said. “If I don’t take it, I get edgy.”

  Another benefit of being a stiff. I’d never have to take medication again.

  Getting in a car with a guy who had just lost more than a pint of blood might not have been the best idea in the world. Jack drifted in his lane, nearly missing several of the turns. His back tires slid as he took sharp corners on the wet roads. I buckled in. Flying through the windshield might not kill me, but that didn’t mean I wanted a face full of glass.

  We sped toward a stoplight, and Jack didn’t slow down.

  “It’s red,” I said.

  “Oh, right.” He slowed down, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Maybe you should drive.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have my license.” I’d actually never been behind the wheel. I’d been signed up to take Driver’s Ed three weeks after I was turned.

  “Oh,” Jack said. He chugged back the rest of his orange juice.

  I wondered if Vance knew where I was yet, if he’d follow us out of town. I had to be near a corpse to sense it, but even if it was the same for him, there were other, more mundane ways of tracking people. He hadn’t sent his men after me again, but that might just mean he was lying in wait, letting me believe I was escaping.

  A few miles down the road, Jack seemed to be recovering from the blood loss. He sat up straighter in his seat, and looked more alert.

  “I’m sorry I never talked to you before at the store,” Jack said. “I wanted to, but I really did think that Zeke might kick my ass. Do you remember what you were reading last time you came in?”

  I did. “Why, do you?”

  “Sandman,” he said. “Did you like it?”

  I shrugged. “It was a little weird for my taste. But I liked the art. It was Zeke’s favorite.”

  “You should try Bone. Less weird. Less pretty. Better story.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So that’s why you wanted to talk to me. To give me a sales pitch.”

  Jack fell silent. “No,” he said, finally. “Actually, I thought you were cute. And a cute girl reading a comic book . . . that’s hot.”

  I put my hand on the door handle.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said instantly. “I shouldn’t have said that. Look, that’s not why I’m driving you down. I don’t expect anything from—”

  “It’s okay,” I said, mostly to get him to stop talking. The truth was, Jack was cute. More than cute. I did like the way his hair flopped in his face. But I’d never been the kind of girl all the guys chased after when I was alive, and the only one who’d chased after me since I died was Vance.

  Being chased by Jack sounded alarmingly nice. Him calling me cute was enough to make me feel giddy—and terrified. But I’d let him touch me, and it hadn’t been horrible. And drinking his blood made me feel—

  Gah. I couldn’t think like that. I’d thought Vance was nice once, too, and I couldn’t have been more wrong about him. I couldn’t sort the monster inside me from the frightened child.

  “How are you going to eat next?” he asked.

  I sighed. I only had another twelve hours or so to figure that out. “I don’t know. I can’t keep taking blood from you. Your body won’t produce it fast enough to keep you healthy.”

  “How do you normally eat?” he asked. I could almost see his thoughts as they occurred to him. Did I find someone to do this for me every night? Was he the most recent in a long string of men I’d duped?

  “Zeke used to get blood from Vance.”

  Jack’s face sharpened. “The guy who killed him.”

  “Yes. He gave us bags of it from donors. I guess you could say he’s our boss.”

  “Tell me about him,” Jack said. It was the kind of leading question he probably used all the time at his crisis hotline, and with his friends. But I had no words to describe how scary Vance was, not in a way that Jack would understand.

  When I didn’t answer, Jack changed the subject. “Are you sure the police can’t help you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Because they don’t know about undead?”

  “We’re called corpses,” I said. “And if they do, they’re covering it up, right? Which means they’re already working for Vance.”

  “That’s a thing that controlling people do,” Jack said. “They convince you that they know the police, so that you won’t get help, even though you could.”

  That was probably true, but Vance had a prison underneath the hospital. You couldn’t do that without having a lot of power. “I think he’s telling the truth.”

  I was pretty sure Jack thought I was wrong, but he agreed anyway. “Okay,” he said. “No police. So what does this Vance guy want with you, anyway?”

  I leaned away from Jack, pressing my temple against the window. He was going to keep rephrasing that question until I gave him a satisfactory answer. Fine. I owed him one.

  “He’s the one . . . he’s the one who turned me into . . . what I am,” I said.

  Jack drew a deep breath. “He was your boyfriend, then?”

  My stomach dropped. “No.”

  Jack was silent. I dug my n
ails into my thighs, trying to figure out how to answer the questions I was sure would follow. I didn’t know how to tell Jack what Vance did to me. I didn’t know how to say it out loud.

  “He raped you,” Jack said. It wasn’t a question.

  I was so startled I twitched. No one had ever said that word to describe what Vance did to me. Not me. Not Zeke. Certainly not Vance. And while the words sounded violent in my ears, I also felt inexplicably grateful that he’d said them.

  “That’s why you’re so afraid of him,” Jack said. “He raped you and it changed you into a corpse. And then he killed Zeke while he was protecting you.”

  I watched the lights from the cars behind us bounce in the side mirror. I couldn’t say yes, so I nodded instead.

  Jack shook his head. “How long ago did it happen?”

  “Six months,” I said.

  “You’ve been dead that long?”

  I nodded again.

  “Did he . . . also kill you? Or does the disease . . .”

  “It’s lethal,” I said. “Once you catch it, you turn into a corpse within a few hours.”

  “But you don’t die and then rise from the grave.”

  “No,” I said. “I told you, we’re not vampires.” I’d never even lost consciousness. I was awake, curled up in a ball in the closet in Vance’s office, when my heart stopped beating, and I thought I had died and would float out of my body and drift away to heaven. But instead I stayed glued inside my flesh as it turned cold as hell. I lay there shaking, waiting for Vance to come back for me.

  Which, of course, he did.

  Jack looked over at me. “If you want to talk about what happened to you—”

  “I can’t,” I said. If I couldn’t bring myself to say the word, there was no way I could carry on an actual conversation about it.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “I get that. But a lot of victims call into the hotline, so I have some experience talking through it. If you ever do want to talk to me, you can. I’m a pretty good listener.”

  I believed that he was, but I had absolutely no idea what to say.

  “April?” Jack said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want you to know you’re safe. I mean, you’re safe with me.”

  I felt the truth of that in my bones, even if I didn’t know how to trust it. “Makes sense,” I said. “Considering if you tried anything with me, you’d die.”

  Jack gave a stiff laugh. “Yeah. I guess I hadn’t thought that through.”

  “Thanks, though,” I said. I believed that he meant it. I felt safe with him, relatively speaking.

  But then, I’d believed that Vance wanted to help me, back when I was alive.

  Vegas was a straight shot down I-15 from Salt Lake. Once we passed up Utah Valley, the road was dark, punctuated only by the occasional small town. In between, our beaming headlights were the only thing blocking the light of the stars.

  “I’ll need to stay inside all day,” I said. “Will your cousin be okay with that?”

  “He has to work anyway,” Jack said. “We can hang out at his place.”

  “And then, when it gets dark, you’ll drive me out to Baker?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “After that, you can go home. I can pay you for gas.” I was pretty sure I had enough for that and a ticket to Paris, though I wasn’t exactly sure what these things cost.

  Jack was quiet for a moment. “What about you? What will you do?”

  “I’m trying to get to Paris. Zeke’s friend in Baker can help me get there.”

  Jack paused for a second. “So I won’t see you again.”

  He sounded sad about that. And he shouldn’t. I knew he shouldn’t. He was looking for someone who would make his life more exciting, the geek girl who read comic books and took him on adventures.

  My adventure would only get him killed, or worse. “I won’t bother you anymore.”

  “You aren’t bothering me. I want to do this.”

  “Look,” I said. “When Zeke asked you to help me out, this is what he meant. So thanks for driving me down, but the sooner I get out of here, the better off we’ll both be.”

  Jack nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Got it.” But he still didn’t sound happy about it. “But you do need a plan for how you’re going to eat tomorrow, don’t you? You’re sure you can’t take my blood, one more time?”

  “How often does the Red Cross let you donate? Once a month?”

  “Every eight weeks.”

  “So probably not.”

  “We should have gone to see my mom’s friends before we left. Maybe you could have gotten some blood from the hospital.”

  “Which hospital?” I asked.

  “St. Januarius.”

  I closed my eyes. “Vance owns that hospital.”

  Jack stared at me. “He owns—”

  “He owns the hospital where your mom works.”

  Jack’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Well I have some sleight of hand experience,” he said. “Maybe when we get to Vegas I’ll steal you a pint.”

  He really was looking for an adventure. “And if you get caught?”

  “I haven’t thought it through that far.”

  “You do that a lot, don’t you?”

  Jack was quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re just trying to help.”

  “Hospitals have to dispose of old blood somehow, right? We could search their garbage.”

  “I can’t eat it if it’s rotten.”

  “So it has to come from a person.”

  “Or be well-preserved.”

  “What about finding others like you? Would they give you blood?”

  I winced. Vegas wasn’t out of Vance’s reach. Zeke seemed to think we needed to get off the continent. “They’d turn me in. If Vance knew they’d helped me, he’d kill them.”

  Jack squinted at the road.

  “Sorry to be so difficult,” I said. “But you see why corpses don’t usually try to run from Vance.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re going to need another donor,” Jack said. “Vance can’t stop you from doing that.”

  I didn’t answer. He could kill me, kill Jack, kill everyone involved if he caught me. We passed three mile markers before Jack spoke again.

  “Can he?”

  “Zeke had this friend once,” I said. “Kyle. He turned a girl without Vance’s permission—this girl he’d had a crush on when he was a beater.”

  “A beater?”

  “Alive. Anyway, Vance found out, like always, and instead of killing him outright, he cut him off from cold blood. Kyle showed up on our doorstep at like two AM begging Zeke for blood. But Zeke couldn’t give him any, because when Vance found out, he’d cut the two of us off, too.”

  “Where’d he find blood, then?”

  “He tried to feed from this prostitute, but he must have waited too long, because he went crazy and killed her. The cops picked him up before sunrise. He disappeared after that. The news said he committed suicide in custody, but I don’t know, really. I figure they gave him to Vance.”

  “That’s why you think Vance controls the police.”

  “They didn’t talk about him turning to ash on the news, so someone covered it up.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “But here’s what I don’t get. How can Vance have that much control? You say he doesn’t let you turn humans into corpses without his permission, but if it’s sexually transmitted, I’d think people would break that rule all the time.”

  “Right. That’s why Vance didn’t just kill Kyle. Death wasn’t enough. He wanted an illustration.”

  “So all corpses are celibate, then? Because they’re afraid of Vance?”

  Oh, that. I forgot sometimes that the very idea of sex didn’t make everyone want to curl up into a ball. “Well, we can’t really feel things the same way beaters do. Physical things, I mean.”

  “Ah,” Jack said. “I see.”

  That was what Zeke said an
yway. Sex was different, after you were a corpse. It wasn’t about pleasure anymore—just power.

  I had a hard time imagining it any other way.

  A few hours later the freeway wrapped around to the west, and faint light appeared on the horizon. I stiffened, looking at the clock. It was only four AM. The lights weren’t the sunrise, but the glow of the strip.

  Jack turned off the freeway before we reached the strip, and we headed west into a residential neighborhood. When we pulled into an apartment complex, the sky was still dark. So were the windows.

  We parked in a guest spot, and Jack led me up the stairs to a third-floor apartment. He pulled a key from underneath the doormat and we let ourselves in.

  The door opened into a living room. Two couches formed a right angle in front of a large TV. Jack’s cousin had a game system, too, but only one.

  “Leo will be up in a couple of hours,” Jack said quietly. “He said to make ourselves comfortable.” He sat down on the couch and pulled out his phone.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Looking up blood loss.”

  I sank down onto the other couch. “Here we go,” Jack said. “According to this, I have about fourteen pints of blood.”

  The monster was still several hours from waking, but this was like watching a commercial for chocolate cake. “Do we have to talk about this?”

  “I’m going somewhere,” Jack said. “I have fourteen pints of blood, and a person can safely lose fifteen percent of their blood volume without going into shock.”

  “I don’t want to put you in any more danger,” I said.

  “Me neither,” Jack said. “But if you feed off someone else, you’d have to out yourself to them, too, which puts you in danger. And if you don’t feed at all—”

  “I put everyone in danger.”

  “Right. According to this, if you just take a second pint, I’ll be able to recover without a transfusion. So I’ll go buy some liver and some more orange juice, and after I’ve eaten, you can eat.”

  What he was saying made sense, provided I hadn’t taken more than a pint last night. I didn’t see a whole lot of other options. But I still felt like an imposing guest, taking way too much from him and giving nothing back.

  “Can you at least draw blood by syringe this time?” I asked. “That way we can be sure I only take a pint.”