by Bryan Smith
The slender hand gripping the sword’s handle opened.
The heavy blade fell to the ground.
David stared up at her again, confusion etched in his flushed features. “What—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was forgotten as her jaw dropped open, distending to an unnatural length. Rows of glistening sharp teeth flashed in the flickering candle light as her plump lips peeled away from her mouth. Her nostrils flared and a hissing sound emanated from her throat.
David opened his mouth to scream.
She leaped upon him, clamping her teeth to his throat as she drove him to the ground. She growled and snarled like a wild animal, ripping at his flesh and drinking deep from the blood spurting from his jugular vein as a final scream died in his throat.
5: THE FIRST NIGHT OF DAVID RUCKER’S UNDEATH
Everything went black.
Not this shit again.
He couldn’t see anything, hear anything, or feel anything. He was a nowhere man in a nowhere place. Which reminded him of some fucking song he’d heard on oldies radio. It was similar to what he imagined purgatory might be like. The logical conclusion was obvious. He was dead. Or was he? The lack of any sensory input suggested he was no longer among the living, but the ability to form conscious thoughts contradicted the death theory. Or did it? Most major religions believed in a continuation of consciousness after the expiration of the physical body. He could be some kind of floating, disembodied remnant. A soul, he supposed, detached from the physical moorings of a no longer functioning flesh and blood shell.
Blood.
Something about that word excited him, inasmuch as a free-floating remnant or cloud of consciousness can feel such a thing. There was no spike of adrenaline to quicken his heart rate or make him breathe faster. But there was a detectably greater depth of clarity to his thoughts, a sense of discernible mental agitation. The impression was so distinct it was almost as if his thoughts were glowing, manifesting as words and sentences written in bright neon against the backdrop of blackness.
BLOOD.
The last thing he could remember prior to this black nothing was the incredible physical pain resulting from having his throat torn out. All those hideously sharp teeth shredding his flesh, sending shockwaves of the most excruciating agony imaginable coursing through his body. Being without physical substance, he now felt a curious disconnect from that pain, almost as if it had happened to someone else. He was glad for that. Being a disembodied whatever was pretty lame, but it was better than hurting.
Then he remembered something else. It had happened right after the infliction of the obviously fatal wound to his throat. The creature, the whatever-the-hell-she-was, had opened her mouth even wider and then had clamped it tight around the wound, her teeth puncturing his already ravaged flesh again even as her lips formed a vacuum-tight seal around the wound. And as consciousness had faded, he’d heard a distinct gurgling sound.
The bitch drank my blood.
Every damn drop of it.
That state of mental agitation intensified.
Blood.
Blood.
BLOOD.
It was suddenly all he could think about. Blood was everything. Blood was life. There was no commodity more precious, not even gold. He found he could no longer hold a grudge against the creature that had taken his life. Of course she would want to drink his blood. Blood was food. Sustenance. Drinking it was as necessary as breathing.
It occurred to David that his thoughts had taken a very strange turn indeed, but this was a distant realization, occurring at a level far below the really important stuff. What was important was how very…hungry he was.
The word pulsed brighter against the blackness now, five block letters in blazing crimson neon:
BLOOD!
BLOOD!
BLOOD!
His eyes snapped open.
He was back in the creature’s secret place. That hellish chamber. He heard the moans of the shackled prisoners and the clank of their shifting chains. He blinked and stared up at the high roof of the cavern. The bodies of dead men hung suspended from chains directly above him. Their limp forms filled him with a strange despair.
No blood to be had there.
He stared at the slowly twisting dead bodies some more.
Wait.
Dead?
Like me?
Or…not?
Well, surely he’d been wrong about that. He’d merely been unconscious. He was back in his body now. He could think. He could feel. He’d never actually been dead at all. Sure, it was a bit odd how lucid his thoughts had been back there in that formless darkness, but—
His eyes opened wider as he thought of something pretty damned important.
He slapped a hand to his neck and his fingers probed for evidence of the damaged flesh that had to be there. But the wound was gone, replaced by perfectly smooth, unblemished tissue. Had he imagined the whole thing? He didn’t think so. He remembered the sensation of her teeth sinking into his flesh with exquisite clarity. And remembered just as clearly the subsequent mind-searing agony. Now he felt something altogether different. Hunger. Arousal. He kept rubbing at the place where the wound had been and realized how cool the flesh was to the touch.
It was like touching ice.
He sat up.
And gasped when he saw her. She was a dozen feet away, sitting in a chair fashioned from the blackened skulls and bones of dead human beings. Except “chair” wasn‘t quite the right terminology. It was a throne of sorts, a small-scale version of how Satan’s own infernal perch might look. She was nude now, her discarded goth-punk clothes nowhere in sight. He saw flecks of slowly coagulating blood smeared on her chin and around her mouth. Her naked body was distinctly feminine, her breasts larger than they‘d seemed underneath that jacket and T-shirt. She looked like some kind of barbarian queen from an old pulp novel. “You…what have you done to me?”
She smiled. “I killed you.”
“But…” He trailed off, realizing something. This place had felt too hot before, a sensation amplified by the press of too many filthy bodies in an enclosed space. But now he was cold. He held up his hands and stared at them, noting at once that they were paler than before, an almost pure shade of white tinged with blue. His gaze shifted back to the girl—no…woman; this creature was no mere girl—and he repeated his previous question. “What have you done to me?”
She smirked. “I already answered that one. Surely you have other questions.”
He touched his forehead.
Cold. Jesus, why am I so fucking cold!?
“Why am I so fucking cold?”
Another of those chilly, soulless smiles. “Because you’re a dead thing, David. You’ll feel colder and colder until you feed. And if you don’t feed…well, that’ll be the real end of you.”
David wrapped his arms around his torso and began to rock slowly back and forth. “By ‘feed’ do you mean…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
She nodded. “You’ll have to drink blood.”
David stared blankly at her for a long moment.
Then his mind made an intuitive leap.
“Holy shit, you’ve turned me into a vampire.”
She shrugged and scratched flecks of dried blood—his blood—from a corner of her mouth with a thumbnail. “Obviously.”
He abruptly stopped rocking. His terrified expression gave way to a glare. An urge to charge her and tear her head off her shoulders consumed him. He leaned forward a little, the muscles in his body tensing as a low growl emanated from deep within him. “You…bitch.”
She laughed. “I won’t deny it. I’m the meanest bitch you’ll ever meet, David. Of that let there be no doubt.”
His hands curled into fists. He was surprised at how little fear he felt now. Despite the deep chill permeating his body, he realized how good he felt. How strong. How perfectly aware. He’d always kept himself in reasonably good shape, but he’d never been what
you could call an athlete. He did a bit of exercising every day, just enough to feel like he wasn’t getting sloppy, mostly cardio stuff, but he didn’t lift weights or do any other kind of strength conditioning. And yet now he felt real power coiled in his muscles. He felt like he could go toe-to-toe with the toughest motherfuckers around and come out on top. His senses were heightened, too, particularly his sense of smell. Every scent was sharper now, crisper and bolder. The scents of human filth—shit, piss, and sweat—were now so pronounced they should have made his gut clench. He should be on his hands and knees puking his guts up. However, while the smells did disgust him, they produced no physical reaction. Instead, the disgust he felt was psychological. He felt contempt for the producers of the vile excretions.
For the fucking humans.
She ran a slender hand up and down the length of one of her porcelain-white thighs, licking her lips as she watched him. David felt his cock grow as he watched her caress herself. Her voice was huskier when she spoke: “You feel it now, don’t you? The difference.”
David couldn’t help it. He smiled. “Yes.”
He sprang to his feet and exploded toward her. Exploded, that was the only way to describe the physical sensation. He was upright and mobile in the blink of an eye, all before he was even remotely cognizant of what was happening. The newfound power buzzing through every tendon and nerve-ending in his body propelled him through the air like a rocket. Despite the speed of it, he was conscious of the movements of his body. The pumping of his arms. The pistoning of his legs and the flexing of his powerful thighs. He was running, a simple physical act in essence, but to the human eye he would be just a high-speed blur slashing across space.
Then he was on her.
His astoundingly strong hands wrapped tightly around her neck and began to squeeze. He snarled, eager to feel the surrender of her tender flesh to the crushing force of his hands. He stopped squeezing when he felt something strange inside his head. It was a crawling, insidious sense of something alien, some ethereal tendril, wending its way through the nooks and crannies of his brain.
He let go of her throat and staggered backward a few steps.
Maddeningly, she’d never stopped smiling. “You have a lot to learn about the new you, David. Many lessons. Here’s the first.”
He felt something flex inside his head.
Then he was on his back and convulsing violently. He remained conscious and perfectly aware as the tremors continued for an interminable time, his limbs twisting themselves into awkward and frightening configurations as he strove in vain to regain even the slightest measure of physical control. It was useless. She had him firmly in her grip. He was her slave. Her plaything. She could lock his body in a spastic state until he died, if she so desired. He feared his unthinking attack had pissed her off enough to make her do just that. Tears were leaking from his eyes by the time the convulsions abruptly ceased. The instant the shaking stopped he sucked in a massive breath and exhaled a cry of the deepest anguish. Then his body was shaking again, but this time it was from the force of his sobs. He turned onto his side and curled into a fetal ball, squeezing his eyes shut as tears dripped from his face to the damp earth beneath him, ground already stained with the blood of this creature’s countless other victims.
His cries mingled with the sobs and moans of the chained men and women hanging from the walls and the cavern’s ceiling. For a time he gave himself over to this expression of misery and grief, lost himself in it, and for a fleeting handful of moments it provided a kind of comfort. He wasn’t David Rucker, newly minted dead man. He wasn’t a man at all. There was no sense of self. He was just a part of a larger organism. A new thing forged from the flesh of all imprisoned in this awful place. It was good not to be David Rucker. Good to be just an unthinking, unfeeling thing.
Until the spell was abruptly broken.
“Enough of this pitiful mewling.”
David drew in another big breath and forced his eyes open.
She was standing over him now, her hands on her hips, her magnificent breasts jutting outward, primitively regal and majestic, a pose that again reminded him of old pulp novel covers. Something by Boris Vallejo or Frank Franzetta, maybe, from some long ago sword and sorcery epic. Her body entranced him all over again from this perspective and for a long moment he forgot all about his terror of her. Her legs were perfect. Long and shapely. The sweet swell of her hips and the flat plane of her belly were equally mesmerizing. And those full breasts…
Then he looked at her face and saw that she was smirking.
He gave his head a hard shake and glared at her. “I hate you.”
“No, David. You love me. I am everything to you.”
David sneered. “Saying it won’t make it so, you evil cunt.” He surprised himself with a laugh. Even more surprising was the pronounced disdain in the sound. “Hell, I don’t even know your goddamned name. I only love one woman and her name is—”
Her mouth opened in that unnaturally wide way again, her eyes bulging from their sockets as her jaw distended and a scream loud enough to shatter skyscraper windows filled the cavern. The sound went on and on, increasing in volume with seemingly each passing second as the black hole at the center of her face grew wider. David slapped his hands to his ears, but this did nothing to muffle the sound. The sound drilled into his ears and made his brain quiver like jelly until his eyes rolled back in their sockets and consciousness again deserted him.
6: DEPRIVATION
His head was still throbbing when he awoke an indeterminate time later. The ache extended from his frontal lobe to the back of his neck. It felt much like a hangover after a night of serious drinking. For those first few groggy moments after regaining consciousness, he allowed himself the hope that it was a hangover. He’d gone out for a night of boozing with buddies and things had gotten a little out of hand. At some vague point a few too many had turned into a lot too many, which accounted for his present state of misery and all the crazy dreams about gorgeous naked vampires and imprisonment in some remote, hellish cavern.
The delusion lasted until the moment he became aware of the heavy chain links encircling his wrists and ankles. His head tilted downward as his eyes fluttered open. His eyes widened and he sucked in a big breath as he realized just how high above the ground he was. The vampire woman’s throne of blackened skulls and bones looked like a piece of pretend furniture plucked from a dollhouse belonging to Satan’s granddaughter. Ditto for all the rickety tables and torture devices. But this did nothing to distance him psychologically from the gruesomeness of the grisly tableau. If anything, this new perspective only enhanced the overall horror of the situation. For one thing, the cavern was much bigger than his original perception of it. You could fit a professional football stadium in this space with plenty of room to spare. He’d noted piles of bones and decaying body parts before, but now he understood how little he’d appreciated the scope of the human detritus. Many of the bone piles were simply massive. You’d need a fleet of bulldozers to clear them from the cavern. The ache in his head intensified again as he tried to comprehend how long it would take any single person, vampire or not, to kill this many people. He finally gave up trying to understand it. It was beyond understanding. She wasn’t just an old thing, she was ancient. The beautiful, youthful appearance was a façade, one she maintained through all these stolen lives.
He shifted slightly and winced as the rough cavern wall abraded his bare back. This caused him to shift again. The movement sent spikes of pain shooting up his arms, which were stretched straight up over his head. He turned his head up and peered at the thick length of chain wrapped around his wrists. The chain was secured to an iron bracket bolted to the rock wall. He jerked against the chain links, but they didn’t budge. He tried again, putting all his amplified vampiric strength into the effort. One of the bracket’s bolt seemed to give an infinitesimal amount. He gathered up his strength to try yanking at it again when something occurred to him. What if he did succeed
in ripping the bracket from the wall?
His head tilted down and he stared again at the ground far below.
Shit.
He was already dead. At least that was the case if the vampire had been telling the truth. He was certain, though, that she hadn’t been lying about that. He was dead. Undead. Whatever. What was the worst that could happen to him if he fell? He couldn’t die again. Could he?
No. Probably not.
But the impact when he hit the ground might shatter every bone in his body or reduce his flesh to pulp. It was what would happen to any normal human body dropping from a height this great. However, the vampire’s bite had changed his physiology in some fundamental ways. He suspected the fall would hurt him tremendously, but that he would then heal, become as good as new in a short amount of time. It was a truth he felt in his bones, an essential part of his new reality.
Still…it would fucking hurt.
The best course of action could be just to hang out—he couldn’t suppress a laugh at that thought—until the she-bitch decided she’d punished him enough. The bitch about that was she might decide to really teach him a lesson and leave him here for a seriously long time. He began to feel sick again as he thought about how a creature like his captor might perceive the concept of “a seriously long time.”
Hell, he could be up here for years.
He thought about that for a while.
Man. Holy shit. That would really fucking suck. The horror of the situation would begin to abate after a while, after, say, the first six months. Boredom would set in at some point. And then what? He felt an intense queasiness that again ramped up the pain resonating in his skull. This passed quickly, but the sensations were intense enough to tell him he’d overlooked something critical. Another cramp made him wince and cry out. A fresh horror dawned inside him as he realized he was going to have a much larger concern than mere boredom if he was kept hanging here for any significant period of time. His teeth chattered and his whole body began to quiver. The sensation of cold permeating his body was intensifying, becoming all-encompassing, making him feel like some kind of mythological beast. The Ice Man. And, like the cramping ache in his belly, it was only going to get worse the longer he went without…feeding.
