And I realized I could hear them whispering, The princess is dead . . . long live the Queen . . . the Queen . . . the Queen.
Lady was on her knees, weeping. She still looked human enough, but her yellow dress was ragged, her hair thin and tangled, her eyes dull and uninteresting. The only thing upon her that retained its previous luster was the golden signet ring.
I pointed at her with my ichor-stained machete. “Why? Why did you do this?”
“You were the firstborn,” she sobbed bitterly. “I couldn’t be Queen while you lived. I couldn’t.”
I almost asked “Queen of what?” but I saw the clustered vampires and could hear their whispers all over the house. They feared me. More than that, they respected me. I had a power I’d never asked for and surely didn’t want. But it might come in handy anyhow.
I stared down at her. “And you brought me here . . . to die? So you could be Queen?”
She nodded. “Yes. I only ever wanted to serve the King and now I can’t.”
“But you saw what I did at the clubhouse.” I shook my head, still not able to wrap my mind around what she’d tried to do. “You saw what I’m capable of. You could have made me leave my weapons outside but you didn’t.”
“They were just people.” Her tone was supremely dismissive; she was her father’s little princess, all right. “I didn’t think you could hurt the family.”
“Why do they need a human queen?”
“To lead them to new prey.”
I almost said, “I’ll never do that,” but I suddenly realized my will had nothing to do with it. I could hear their whispers because my brain was connected to the hive-mind now. The vampires could see through my eyes, hear through my ears. The moment I found survivors, friendly or not, the hive would know exactly where they were.
And if I closed my eyes, I could feel the King watching me from someplace far away, a land lit by dark stars, a world the ancients called Carcosa.
“What happens when they run out of prey?” I asked, already fearing the answer.
She shrugged. “The servants will starve. And the world will be silent but for the wind in the trees and the waves crashing upon the empty shores, just as the King wishes it to be.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
“I can’t ever trust you again,” I finally told her. “I take betrayal very badly.”
“I know.” She sniffled, wiped her eyes, pulled off the ring, and set it on the stained carpet. “That’s yours now. I just ask that you make it qui—”
I brought the machete down on the back of her neck before she could finish her sentence. Her head rolled away into darkness. The vampires chittered and gazed at me, waiting. I was useful to them, and so I could live. For now. For a price.
If I’d been a better person, I would have reloaded my pistol, put it to my head, and ended things right then and there. Done my bit to save humanity. But . . . I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just that I’d been raised to think of suicide as a sin. I had struggled so long to stay alive, and I’d once sworn to myself I wouldn’t die in my father’s house.
I rescued the ring from being drowned in the spreading pool of my sister’s blood and shoved it onto my finger. It felt as though it had been made just for me.
Two days later, I was back at the Freebirds’ clubhouse. I found Rentboy all alone, dragging bodies out of the shed to pile them in the field. It was cremation day. His pretty face and bare chest were covered in bruises.
“They beat the hell out of me when they got back,” he said, only looking at me from the corner of his eye. “But they let me live. And then they left. Said they couldn’t stay here no more and I couldn’t come with them.”
He heaved a dead woman onto the pile and turned to face me. Then just stood there, squinting, puzzled. “Beauty? Is . . . is that really you? You look . . . different. Where’d your scars go?”
I twisted the ring on my finger. “I’m a bona fide queen, did you know that?”
Rentboy was staring at me, mesmerized by my new glamour. What was that I saw in his eyes? Was it fear? Was it hatred? No. It was utter adoration. It should have made me feel uncomfortable, but I took it as my due.
I held out my hand bearing the ring, and he fell to his knees and kissed it.
“Do you pledge allegiance to your queen?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you swear your life to me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good.” I made him get up. “Pack up the supplies. We’re going into the desert where nobody lives, and we’re never coming back.”
THE LAST SUPPER
BRIAN KEENE
A few minutes before he heard the sound, Carter became convinced that the trees were following him.
He’d been walking from the Edgefield Hotel toward the town of Troutdale, just past the point where Halsey Street turned into historic Highway 30. The moon shone overhead, three-quarters full in a cloudless sky, providing enough light to see—not that he needed the illumination. Carter saw clearly even on the darkest of nights, and his hearing and sense of smell were equally hyperattuned.
A vast mountain range spanned the horizon to his left. He thought that the peaks might be related to Mount Hood, but he couldn’t be sure, and there was no one to ask. Nor could he pull out his phone and find out via the Internet, because both had stopped working months ago. He walked on, once again certain that the trees were following him. He heard them behind him, shuffling forward, tiptoeing on their roots. Every time he stopped and turned to glare at them, the trees stopped, too.
“I’m crazy.”
His voice sounded funny to him, and his throat was sore. How long had it been since he’d spoken aloud? He couldn’t remember.
“I’m crazy,” he repeated. “That’s all. And I’d have to be, wouldn’t I? Living alone like this? It’s enough to drive anyone crazy.”
He walked on, trying his best to ignore the trees. To his right was a field lined with rows of grapes. The unattended crop had grown wild. Vines, heavy with fruit, sprawled out into the road and snaked up trees and telephone poles.
The rustling sounds started again. He was sure they were real this time. He spun around.
“Stop following me!”
The trees didn’t answer.
Carter turned, stumbled over a pothole in the road, and winced as a jolt of pain ran through his leg. He’d broken it two weeks before, which was why he’d holed up at the Edgefield Hotel for so long. Before the epidemic, such an injury would have healed more quickly, but food had been in scarce supply, and thus, it had taken longer. Before the Edgefield, he’d last eaten in Seattle, and that had only been a starving, rail-thin feral dog—barely enough blood to sustain him and certainly lacking in the vitamins and nutrients he needed to effectively heal.
He’d spent a few days in Seattle, scrounging, before ultimately moving on, but the dog had been his only encounter. Seattle, like everywhere else in the world, had been emptied by the plague, its population reduced to nothing but bags of rotten meat filled with congealed, sludgelike blood. The stench wafting out of the city had been noticeable from miles away, and Carter had been certain that it would have been even to someone without his heightened sense of smell.
Unfortunately, there had been no one else left to smell it.
He’d made his way on foot from Seattle down into Oregon. Driving had been out of the question. The roads were choked with abandoned cars, wreckage, downed trees, and bodies. They’d cleared a bit in Oregon, but he’d continued walking anyway, because it made it easier to hunt. He’d reached Troutdale and broken into the Edgefield, intent on sleeping through the day and then continuing on toward Portland that night, when a stray beam of sunlight had altered those plans. He’d been climbing a stairwell, listening to his footfalls echo through the deserted building, sniffing around and sifting through the thick miasma of dust, mildew, long-spoiled food, even longer-spoiled corpses, when the first light of the rising sun had drifted through a
window and struck him on the arm. Flinching, Carter had recoiled. The next thing he knew, he’d lost his balance and tumbled down the stairs. He heard his leg break before the pain set in. Then, he’d lost consciousness.
When he awoke, daylight had begun to stream through the empty halls. Panicked, Carter crawled into an alcove behind the stairwell and huddled in the darkness, shivering with agony and shock. He’d remained there until nightfall, when at last, feverish and half-delirious with pain, he crawled out again and managed to find a hotel room with a door ajar. He’d dragged himself inside and shut the door. With great difficulty, he’d draped a moldy bedspread over the room’s lone window before collapsing with exhaustion. Then he’d slept.
On his second night in the Edgefield, he’d heard a faint skittering from out in the hall. Alert, he’d sat up in bed, sniffing the air. Slowly, he crawled to the door and opened it. Then he lay there, still as death. He waited a full hour before the rat investigated, and it took another twenty minutes of motionlessness before the animal was brave enough to come close to him and take an experimental nibble, at which point Carter reached out and grabbed it, seizing the creature with both hands. After he’d eaten, he rested again, allowing his leg to heal.
And now, here he was, intent upon exploring Troutdale before sunrise. If his efforts were unsuccessful, he’d move on to Portland tomorrow night. He doubted that Portland would offer anything more than Seattle had, but it was something to do. And, in truth, it wasn’t just food he was looking for. It was companionship.
Carter was lonely.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. He was, as far as he knew, the last living human on the planet, except that he wasn’t alive and he wasn’t human. He hadn’t been either for a long time.
The breeze shifted and Carter caught a whiff of the grapes. It had been decades since he’d tasted grapes—or jelly or wine or anything else made from them. Decades since he’d tasted food of any sort—pasta, beef, ice cream, vegetables. Chocolate.
Carter sighed. He’d loved chocolate as a boy. Sometimes, he tried to remember what it had really tasted like, but the memory was fleeting. A ghost—a gossamer phantasm as insubstantial and romanticized as the memory of a first kiss. Over the years, he’d grown accustomed to being a vampire, but Carter had never quite gotten used to not being able to have chocolate. He’d tried several times—once right after his transformation, and a few times since. On each occasion, the chocolate had acted as a toxin in his system. All foods had the same effect. He wasn’t lactose or gluten intolerant. He suffered from a food allergy, and it encompassed all foods. All except blood.
Carter died on June 17, 1967, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, during the beginning of the Summer of Love. A still mostly unknown Jimi Hendrix had just begun the opening chords of “Wild Thing” when Carter, high as a kite and feeling happy, had gone outside the fairgrounds hand in hand with a beautiful brunette who had never given him her name but had looked a little bit like Grace Slick. They’d begun to make love in a dark area behind a porta-potty, except that the love turned to terror very quickly, as the girl’s soft, eager kisses on his throat had turned frenzied and then sharp. And then . . .
. . . nothing.
He’d been lost in a dream haze, not unlike an acid trip. To this day his memories were sketchy at best. Someone, perhaps a fellow concertgoer or one of the outnumbered security guards, had interrupted them. They must have, because she’d never had the opportunity to drink him dry. If she had, he wouldn’t be here today. Carter had a vague memory of being loaded into an ambulance, and another of a paramedic leaning over him, aghast, and muttering, “Jesus, look at his fucking throat! It’s like a wild animal got at him or something.” Then, much later, he’d regained consciousness inside a morgue. His first thought, upon waking, was that he’d missed the rest of Hendrix’s set but had certainly experienced his very own wild thing.
Carter had figured out fairly quickly what he was. That was the easy part. Discovering which portions of the vampire legends were true, and which were bullshit, had taken a little longer. He was vulnerable to sunlight and garlic, but things like crosses and other religious trappings had no effect on him. He saw himself in the mirror just fine, albeit his reflection didn’t age the way others did. He was perpetually twenty-two. He didn’t know if a stake through the heart could kill him or not, but gunshots, a stabbing, and being hit by a tractor-trailer one time in the eighties hadn’t. He’d recovered from those injuries as easily as he’d reknit his broken leg. He’d also recovered from a spinal fracture suffered shortly after his transformation, when he’d jumped off a building in an attempt to turn into a bat. That last part of the vampire legend, as it turned out, was also just myth, as were the supposed abilities to control animals such as rats or influence and hypnotize people.
He’d never again seen the vampire who’d turned him. Indeed, in the years that followed, Carter had known only two others like him. One had been a girl he himself had turned in the early seventies—a redheaded flower child named Lindsey. They’d met at a Grateful Dead concert, and Carter had fallen in love almost immediately. For months, he kept his secret from her, until one night, when Lindsey was high and fantasizing out loud about what a cool trip it would be to live forever, and Carter had told her that he could make that possible.
And then he had.
Lindsey hadn’t accepted it well, and a few days later, when the hunger for blood had become overwhelming, she’d opted to commit suicide by watching the sunrise, rather than feeding on another human. Sometimes, when he slept, Carter still smelled her burning and heard her accusatory screams.
The other one like him had been Nick, a witty, fast-talking Greek who claimed to be over two hundred years old. Nick also claimed that he had helped to invent socialism. They’d met in Berkeley in 1986. Carter had been feeding in an alley behind a bookstore, after attending a poetry reading. When he’d finished, he’d become aware of the other vampire’s presence. Nick had stood watching, a bemused expression on his face. Carter had been astonished to meet another like himself, and Nick became a mentor of sorts. He’d told Carter their kind were few and far between. Pop-culture depictions of vampire hierarchies and councils were bullshit. The only community Nick had known about was in the backwoods of West Virginia, and they were foul, savage creatures, more akin to a feral dog pack than civilized beings such as Carter and himself.
Nick had gone to North Korea shortly after Bush succeeded Reagan. Carter hadn’t heard from him since. He often wondered what had happened to his friend, especially since the plague.
He was so lonely.
Nick had sometimes teased Carter about his friendships with humans, asking him if the butcher made friends with the cows before he slaughtered them.
Carter thought of that now, as Troutdale grew closer. And yes, he thought, yes, the butcher would befriend the cows, because he’d be so happy just to have someone to talk to again.
He walked into town, passing under a wrought-iron arch with a fish statue on either side. A sign proclaimed WELCOME TO TROUTDALE—THE WESTERN GATEWAY. A gateway to what? Carter wondered. Another world? How wonderful would that be, to slip from one dimension to the next, and travel to a reality where the plague had never happened and he wasn’t starving and there were people to talk to and laugh with. If only it were that easy.
Carter passed an outlet mall. Most of the storefront windows were broken, and a tree had fallen through the roof of the bookstore, allowing the elements to get inside. He paused for a moment, listening and sniffing the air, but as far as he could tell, the mall was deserted. If he got closer, it might be possible to discern a rat or squirrel living among the ruins, but that would have involved an arduous climb down a steep embankment. Carter instead decided to try his luck deeper into town.
The main drag was lined with small shops—a tattoo parlor, several attorneys’ offices, a chiropractor, a dentist, a hair salon, and a spa were mixed in among numerous bars and restaurants. All of them were desert
ed, their occupants long gone. He paused in front of an antiques store. A faded, yellowed newspaper cartoon had been taped inside the window. Its edges were brown and curling. In it, a young boy and his pet tiger were snuggled together in bed. The caption read, Things are never quite as scary when you’ve got a best friend. Carter supposed this was true, because he was fucking terrified. His nights were spent in constant fear. Mostly, he was scared of being alone.
The other side of Troutdale butted up against the Sandy River. There, in a wooded area behind the Depot Rail Museum, he found the remains of a homeless encampment. A blue plastic tarp had been stretched out between four tree trunks and tied fast, forming a makeshift roof. Beneath it was a stone fire pit, filled with charred sticks. Judging by the mud inside the circle of rocks, it had been quite some time since a fire had burned there.
“Hello,” he called. Rather than echoing, his voice seemed to fall flat, as if the forest itself had swallowed it. It faded all too quickly, replaced again by silence. Carter longed for the drone of an airplane overhead, or the rumbling of a train or a bus passing by, but there was nothing. Even the birds and animals had gone silent, no doubt as a result of his presence.
Sighing, Carter turned back to town, intent on finding something to eat. Out of the corner of his eye, the trees seemed to turn with him. He wheeled to face them.
“I told you to stop following me! Leave me alone.”
And that was when he heard the sound. It started as a distant whoosh of air, with a low, mechanical hum beneath it. He recognized the noise right away. It was the faraway sound of a car on the highway, coming closer. Carter glanced around frantically, trying to determine its origin. Then, as it drew nearer, he ran back down the street. While flying or transforming into a bat might have been the stuff of fanciful legend, Carter was indeed equipped with unnatural speed and strength, both of which he relied upon now, dashing the entire length of Troutdale in just under thirty seconds. But the exertion left him winded, and he was still weak from hunger, and he had to stop again beneath the fish archway, panting.
Seize the Night Page 43
