Blood Cell

by Shaun Tennant

  The window cracked with a high-pitched clicking sound, and Josh Farewell started to bleed. The sniper’s bullet had caught him in the left side of his neck, and all the feeling went out of his left arm. The axe fell away, and Josh fell backward off the vampire, hitting the floor with a crash. Sally screamed and both Williams and Carlos felt their stomachs sink.

  *****

  Outside, Virginia Elliot had seen the commotion in the window. She was watching through her viewfinder while snapping photos. It looked like two regular men fighting. No fangs. No one turning into bats or anything. She started to think she must have been crazy. Sure, she had watched a man burn before, but there must have been an explanation for that.

  But she couldn’t deny what she saw in that cellblock window. It was two men fighting, tooth and nail, to kill each other. And one of them was using a crucifix as a weapon. The other one seemed to be genuinely hurt by contact with it. And when the one with the cross pushed the other one against the window, she saw what clearly looked like cross-shaped burn on the face of the pale one.

  And then the SRT saw their opportunity to save a life, and a sniper took a shot. The aggressor, the one with a cross for a weapon, went down and out of sight. A moment later, the pale one lifted up the mattress, and blocked off the window.

  *****

  Josh crawled backward, inching away from the vampire. With the sun blocked out once again, the creature had full use of his powers. Its neck and cheek were already healing as it tossed the cross away.

  “You thought you were smart to lock us in together. You thought the sun would contain me. But now those bars couldn’t stop me any more than they could hold the wind. But those bars certainly hold you, don’t they, hero?” Josh backed against the bars, feeling the cold steel against his back. With is right arm, he grabbed the nearest bar on the door.

  “Actually,” said Josh, “when I said it was locked, I lied.” With a heave, he yanked the door open and fell out, halfway into the corridor. Carlos rushed over him, his cross raised to the vampire. Williams and Sally grabbed Josh and pulled him out, deeper into the corridor where the sun still shone. Josh screamed as his neck shot pain throughout his body in sharp waves. He was gushing warm, thick blood.

  Carlos started to slowly back away from the cell. The vampire sneered at him.

  “You have one good arm and you keep acting like I can’t just take that little toy from you any time I want.”

  Carlos just waved the cross and took another step back. The vampire jumped into the air, and broke apart. Out of the bars on the cell came a colony of bats, swarming around Carlos and nipping at his exposed skin. Carlos took a few panicked steps backward, but the bats were under his feet and he tripped on them, falling to the floor. The swarm of bats moved to his good hand, their weight resting on him more and more until they felt like a single, solid mass. The bats became the vampire’s powerful hands, wrenching the cross from Carlos. He kicked the cross hard, sending it flying into a locked cell on the windowless side.

  Now there were no more weapons. The vampire never released his grip on Carlos’s arm, dragging him by it, hauling him deeper into the darkness.

  Once they were a good twenty feet from Josh, Sally, and Williams, the vampire jerked Carlos to a standing position, holding him up. The vampire was behind Carlos, his chest against his victim’s back, so they could both face the other humans.

  “This will be your fate soon,” said the creature, baring its teeth. It tilted Carlos’s head to the side, and leaned in for a bite.

  A voice behind them screamed “No!”

  The smoke pouring from the staircase parted and a man came charging toward them. He had one arm hanging useless beside him, the other arm holding a flaming two-by-four like a spear. The end of the piece of lumber had been burned into a rough point, and was still on fire.

  Santos Vega plunged his flaming wooden spear into the back of the vampire. He stepped back, put the ball of his hand against the end of the board, and shoved it hard again, breaking through ribs and burying the massive wooden stake into the vampire’s back. It let go of Carlos and collapsed.

  “You mess with my boys you gotta answer to me.”

  Both Carlos and Santos jumped on the fallen vampire, pinning him down and forcing the wood into the middle of its upper back. There was absolutely no way they missed the heart. But it still didn’t die.

  Propping himself up on one arm, Josh watched them. He grabbed Williams’ pant leg.

  “You have to cut the head off.”

  Williams nodded, and went into the cell to retrieve the axe. When he carried it over to where the two injured friends were pinning the monster down, Santos reached out for the axe.

  “I’ll do it.” Williams placed the end of the handle in Santo’s hand.

  The vampire panted. He didn’t fight or scream. A red tear rolled down his burned cheek, and he resigned himself to it. His endless life was about to end. He mouthed something, and it might have been “I’m sorry.”

  Santos lined up the swing, and raised the axe.

  As he did, the door from the yard blew open in a small explosion, and the first table toppled outward. Within a second there were police in full armour rushing into the corridor, each of them seeing two well-known gang members holding down a third party. And Vega had an axe. They raised their machine guns.

  “Drop it!” shouted the lead cop.

  Santos looked down from the cops to the fallen vampire. Then to Carlos. His old friend was still catching his breath, but managed to mouth the words “fuck it.”

  Santos swung the axe down hard with everything left of his strength, as the police opened fire.

  The axe hit the concrete so hard it cracked out a piece the size of a golf ball. Santos and Carlos were both riddled with shots, hitting the floor and closing their eyes.

  The police turned their guns to Williams, who was already raising his hands. They stopped firing. Stepping closer to the grisly scene, one officer started to talk.

  He was interrupted as the head of the unknown person on the floor rolled away from his body in a loose half-circle, and exploded into blue flame. The body burst into white-hot fire. The survivors of C-pod and dozens of police watched in wonder as the fire reduced the body and the head down to ash. The flames had burned so brightly that the wooden axe handle was gone when the fire died, leaving only the axe head and two piles of grey ash.

  “Jesus Christ,” said one officer.

  A piece of the building collapsed at the top of the stairs, and a wall of forced air blew acrid smoke into the corridor. Williams snapped out of his haze.

  “Get us out of here. There’s an injured man and woman down there!” Officers rushed to Josh and Sally. Williams looked down at Carlos and Santos. He grabbed the nearest cop. “What the hell did you shoot them for?”

  The cop reached down and rolled Santos’ head to the side, feeling for a pulse. He looked back to Williams and said “Rubber bullets, sir.”

  *****

  Outside, Virginia was snapping photos of the breach in action, and saw a surprising amount of smoke blow out from the cellblock. The police who had just rushed into the block now came rushing back out. With them, they carried two unconscious Latino gangbangers, both with badly damaged arms. Behind them came a white man who Virginia recognized from the window. He had a bullet wound where the sniper had caught him. Finally, one of the hostage guards came out, and shockingly he had a woman with him. Where the hell had she come from? But there was nothing else. No other prisoners or guards-held-hostage. No creatures of the night. Just five survivors from a facility that probably held at least a hundred more before their whole mess got started.

  What the hell had happened in there?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Josh Farewell woke up in a hospital a few hundred kilometres from Pittman, in a pleasant morphine haze that kept him from completely going insane when he thought about what he had seen that day. His head was immobilized by a hard cast that went from his shou
lder blades to his jaw.

  There was a woman at the foot of the bed, sitting in a chair. She wore sweats and no makeup, her auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail. She looked exhausted.

  “Sally?”

  “Hey.” She didn’t stand, but she did reach out and rest a hand on Josh’s ankle, just for a moment.

  “We’re alive, I guess.”

  “Yeah. I heard that Vega might lose his arm, but he’s not in this hospital. Me and Matt are fine.”

  “That’s good,” slurred Josh. He fought to keep his eyes open. “How about me?”

  “I think the bullet broke you up pretty bad, but I don’t think it got you in the jugular or anything.”

  “Have I been out for long?”

  “Just a half a day or so. They did surgery.”

  Josh managed a closed-mouthed smile for her sake, but she didn’t return it.

  They sat in silence. A nurse came in to check on Josh and ask how he’d rank his pain from one to ten. It was a seven. She nodded, and didn’t do anything to bring that number down. Then Josh and Sally were alone again.

  “So...” he started, but couldn’t quite articulate a way to address the bloodsucking elephant in the room.

  “The whole top two floors of the pod burned down. I bet they keep it closed...” She trailed off. Josh knew where she was going: ...since there’s nobody alive to live there anyway.

  They sat in silence again. The song playing on the radio down the hallway became a murmur of a DJ’s voice. Sally stood up.

  “I signed an affidavit. My version of what happened. I told them you saved my life, and Matt Williams’ too. I think they’ll send you back to minimum security after this.” She took a deep breath. “I said that the riots killed half of them, and the fire burned the other half. Matt and I both signed that John Norris had gone insane and killed several men. He’s alive too, but it’s our word against his. The cops who saw... they won’t contradict you.”

  She leaned over him, and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. She whispered “There’s one guard on your door and one at the end of the hall to the left.”

  She went to the door, and turned back. “Thank you.”

  And Sally left.

  Josh pushed his call button and when the nurse arrived, Josh had tears in his eyes and asked for more morphine. She gave him a Tylenol-3 instead.

  At six p.m. another nurse came on shift and brought Josh his dinner. He couldn’t really chew or swallow so his dinner was two cans of meal replacement formula. He was mobile enough to lift the can to his own lips, although the nurse offered to help.

  At eight p.m. she came back to help him to the bathroom. Josh had lost a lot of blood, and just standing made him lightheaded.

  At ten she brought him a toothbrush.

  At eleven she turned off his TV and told him to rest.

  At midnight, Josh Farewell was gone.

  EPILOGUE

  Six months after C-Pod burned to the ground in an unprecedented prison riot, John Norris was lying in bed in a long-term care facility.

  His wife had divorced him. The charges for what Farewell and Williams and the lying bitch had pinned on him were still under investigation.

  And he was paralyzed from the neck down. Williams had admitted to that much, and the bastard wasn’t even charged because it was “self defence.”

  Norris ignored the TV that the damn nurse had left on, and stared out the window as the sun went down. He couldn’t see the sunset—that was on the other side of the building. What he saw was better—the darkness rising. He was filled with a deep sense of regret. Not for the bad things he’d done, but for those opportunities that were missed. If only he had ascended before Williams took a home-run swing at his spine. He would have healed by now. He would have taken his revenge on Williams and on his wife and on everyone who ever forgot to respect him. The setting sun would be his wakeup call. The night would be his playtime.

  Instead, he was confined to bed; to bitchy nurses keeping him up all day and giving him pills to force him to sleep at night. They forced him to go through life on their schedule, not his own. He was a nocturnal creature now. Didn’t they understand that? The master had touched him. Touched his mind. Why couldn’t they see?

  As the sun set, darkness took over. Norris had ordered the nurses to leave the fluorescents off, and without the sun Norris was finally in the darkness again. Home again.

  Someone entered the room. It wasn’t a nurse, that was for sure. This man was large, imposing. He walked like a C.O., or a soldier. In the gloom, Norris had trouble seeing the man’s face.

  The stranger smiled, and as he did his eyes shone silver. Norris couldn’t see the man’s teeth clearly, but he knew what they were.

  The stranger pulled up a chair.

  “Hello, John.”

  “Huh—hi.”

  “My name is Fedor. Do you know that name?”

  “No,” said Norris, his eyes watering.

  “Yes you do. You know my name the same way I know yours. We are connected, John. We both felt our minds tethered to the master. Think of my name, John.”

  Tears streaked Norris’s cheeks. “Fedor Mikhailovich Ivanov. He found you in a prison.”

  “Yes, John. You see, the master really did choose you.”

  Norris smiled.

  “However, he chose poorly. Because you failed him, John. You failed to give him your strength and you failed to get him out of that prison. Because of your weakness, John, our master is dead.”

  Norris tried to plead with him, but the stranger—Fedor—placed a finger to his lips.

  “Hush. I am the master now. And I have come to fulfill a promise.”

  Fedor pulled back Norris’ blanket, revealing his bare arm. He lifted Norris’s lifeless arm away from the bed, and sunk his teeth into Norris’s wrist. Fedor drank. Enough to make Norris sleepy, not enough to kill him. Norris felt his eyelids grow heavy.

  “This will not heal you, John. The wounds of your life will stay with you in the afterlife.” Fedor smiled as he tucked Norris’s arm under the blanket. “You’ll never walk again no matter how long you live.”

  Norris was weeping now. Fedor stood up, returned his chair to the corner, and strolled to the window. It had a lovely eastern view. Fedor tore the curtains away and crammed them into a garbage can. As John Norris faded into the last sleep of his natural life, Fedor whispered “Enjoy the sunrise.”

  SECOND EPILOGUE

  A man named Alden Colgate sat in his favourite booth in his favourite diner in Watertown, South Dakota. This place was great. They were around the corner from Alden’s apartment and served breakfast all day. In creating this identity, he had decided that Alden Colgate was a fan of breakfast for dinner.

  He felt the presence of someone else and assumed the waitress had finally brought him his eggs and hash browns.

  It wasn’t the waitress. A pretty blonde woman slid into the other side of the booth.

  “Hello,” he said with a deep voice.

  “Hi.” She offered a handshake. “Mr. Colgate? Mr. Alden Colgate? Did you just look at a tube of toothpaste when you needed a new name?”

  “I think you might be confused—“

  “I’m here about a job.”

  The woman slid a stack of papers across the table. On top was a photo of a fancy old building.

  “This is the Ram’s Club in Ottawa. We’re going to break in.”

  “Lady, I don’t know who you think I am, but—“

  “I think you’re Joshua Farewell, one of three surviving inmates from the Pittman Penitentiary riot.” She flipped to another photo. “This is you.”

  The photo was of Josh and Williams pressed up against a window. They were straining against something the photo didn’t show.

  “When I took that, I could see the man you were holding in the sunlight. I watched him burn.”

  Josh kept his poker face.

  “Tell me Josh, what sort of a person burns in sunlight and can’t be captured by ph
otograph?”

  “What do you want?”

  She flipped back to photo of the men’s club, and tapped it with her finger.

  “I don’t do burglary and I’m not crossing the border again.” Josh crossed his arms.

  “Yes you are. Because I’ve been investigating this whole mess and something tells me this place is connected to all of it. You think a thing like that just happens to arrive when the prison goes over the boiling point? Someone was watching, and someone tipped that thing off. Someone in this club.”

  Josh shook his head. “Who are you?”

  The blond smiled and offered a handshake. “I’m Virginia Elliot. I was a reporter before I tried to publish what I saw. Now I’m on my own.”

  Josh stayed quiet while the waitress delivered his breakfast. He took a bite of the potatoes and found them bland. The reporter pulled another page to the top of the pile. It was a photo of a framed watercolour painting. A man with white skin and silver eyes. Josh recognized the man, despite the poor resemblance.

  “I took this in their lobby. It’s hanging next to a photo of their members from 1910. Look familiar?”

  Josh set his fork down and buried the portrait at the bottom of the pile.

  “If we’re going north,” he said, “I’ll have to stop and pick up my girl.”

  THE END

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