Blood Thirst

by Lena Hillbrand

  The tarp bounced over an edge of some sort, and the chains pressed through the layers of wrapping as his body moved from the cushion of snow onto a harder surface. The blindness inside the sleep sack, the way it dulled all his senses, and his inability to free himself from the chains drove a shard of panic through his core. When the two sapiens rolled him from the tarp, he thrashed against the restraints, all rational thought having momentarily vanished. He writhed on the floor, straining at the chains, until he heard the clank of metal and several clicks. Then a door closed, and he lay in the cold darkness of a room, alone once more.

  He struggled for some time, and then lay still and waited for what came next.

  Thoughts crowded into his mind as he lay waiting for what would likely prove the end of his life. He had lived for…he didn’t know how long. He’d survived twenty-three years before he evolved. Then he’d lived in Belarus for…fifty years, perhaps. And then in southern North America for perhaps that many, or more. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped counting. He hadn’t realized he had lived so long, grown so old. He still felt…young. Inexperienced, unseasoned. And now his short life would come to an end. And what had he ever done? Trained for a war that never happened, worked at jobs he did not enjoy, listened to bad music, read worse books, and had a dozen or so partners, none of whom had left a stamp on him or his life once they’d gone.

  He could hardly call it living, what he’d done. Until he had met Byron, he’d done nothing but work for many years. The years when he’d done most living had come before the Second Evolution, when he’d been only human. When he’d been granted potentially eternal life, he’d spent it working and stifling some hidden urge, perhaps his true nature. But what true nature? He couldn’t even answer the question himself. Once, his brother had told him he had a curse on his nature, the inability to be satisfied. Perhaps that was all that had kept him from leading a fulfilling life, a life like Byron’s.

  Or perhaps he could never lead a life like Byron’s because he was not a man like Byron. He had no high position, no money. He didn’t belong to the Second Order, or have opportunities for the kinds of work they did, the kinds of work that paid a man well enough that he could travel, see and experience something new, do as he pleased. Instead, he had the sort of job that just let him keep his apartment and his car. True, he had taken an assignment with Byron and killed a man this year. But before that…nothing.

  Yes, he’d cared for many animals in his different jobs, and he’d put some disreputable men out of business, and he’d returned some saps to their distraught owners. But nothing that counted. Nothing memorable. The idea of buying Cali was the first thing he’d been passionate about in decades. He wondered if she would remember his name. In case he died, he had wanted someone to know. But her remembering seemed highly unlikely, if not impossible. She had likely forgotten already. He didn’t think himself the sort who stood out in the memory of people, or even saps. And he’d done Cali as much harm as good.

  She probably wished to forget him altogether. After all, he was only another Superior to come and bite her. Unless her arm got infected and she needed someone to suck the vileness out and save her life again, she had no reason to think of him. She’d remember him fine then. But he did not wish to think badly of her or anything else in his last moments. So he thought about the good parts of his life, all the small things he’d done for people over the years—the kindness and pity he’d shown the animals in his care; the saps he’d taken back to the Confinement instead of the blood bank, insisting that they’d gotten lost and hadn’t run; and the ones he’d returned to relieved and thankful owners.

  He thought of the time he’d spent with Byron, playing games and talking. Of Myrna, the one memorable attachment he’d had, with her chaotic beauty and fierce principles, her wicked laugher, her marvelous legs and soft cloud of hair, her reckless disregard for law in favor of moral right. He remembered the warm feeling he had when he spent time with Cali, how the life in her seemed too much for her to contain so a bit seeped into him. And he thought of the peace of being alone these last weeks, and working his body harder than it had worked in years. Inside his mummy cast, a smile found his lips as he lay on the dank dirt floor of a cold building somewhere in the mountains.

  He’d had a chance to live and he’d squandered it. But if his life ended now, if this was his end death, he’d made himself ready for it. He had to. Because it was ready for him.

  8

  When the door to the trailer opened, the night outside had a weird, eerie quality. It wasn’t exactly dark, or light, but somewhere in the middle. The usual light didn’t filter in, but a strange new glow, unlike sunlight and unlike the usual scant lights that shone at night. Light bulbs gave softer light, starlight came from far away, moonlight was…kind of similar, but just different somehow.

  Cali watched, curious and a little apprehensive. She tried to see past her master, but from her position on the floor with Shelly, she couldn’t see much of anything.

  “Levante,” her master said to his two homo-sapiens. Shelly and Cali both tried to obey simultaneously, and both ended up falling back to the floor, tangled in the blanket. Cali had a brief second of fear, knowing her master’s short temper with humans. But before she could look at him and get really scared, she heard a noise beside her, so unexpected that it took a moment to register. Shelly was laughing. No, giggling.

  “Come on, girl, get up,” he said. “You go first.”

  Cali untangled the blanket and stood, barely noticing Master’s irritated expression. She could really like a boy like Shelly. She hoped he would stay. No one around her had laughed in weeks—not that she had a whole lot of people around. But she knew Shelly was scared, and the fact that he could laugh anyway earned him some affection. She’d gotten just about lonely enough that she would have befriended a Superior if one had been willing to talk to her, keep her warm, and laugh with her.

  She turned and held out a hand to help Shelly up, and together they stepped out of the trailer. The eerie light shone everywhere, and even stranger, it seemed to come from the ground itself. And the ground it came from looked like nothing Cali had ever seen. It was the brightest white imaginable, and soft, and freezing cold. Her feet hurt the second they touched the ground, a penetrating kind of ache all the way into her bones. And when she lifted her foot from the weird earth, the cold wetness came up too, clinging to her bare foot and sliding off in powdery white dust.

  “What is this?” she asked, staring all around her. She’d never seen anything so foreign. “Why is it so cold?”

  “Girl, ain’t you ever seen snow before? Good-ness. You are in for a shock.”

  “Is it…always this cold?”

  “Silence,” Master said, shooting them a look. Cali stood in the snow with Shelly, both of them shifting from one foot to the other, while their Superior took a few bags from his car. When he’d gotten all he needed, he led them into the building. Although no stranger to pain, Cali found the ache of snow almost unbearable, the way it radiated from each foot and spread up her legs.

  The floor inside the tall building was cold, but not like the ground outside. Cali didn’t know what their master planned, or if they’d make their new home there. Master didn’t tell them anything, but after he talked to another Superior, he motioned for them to follow him and handed them his bags. They carried his bags up two sets of stairs. When they reached the top of the second set, Master walked down a hallway and opened a door using a keypad on the wall next to the door. Cali had seen lots of similar keypads, and something about the familiar device in this strange place comforted her.

  After motioning for them to go inside, Master entered behind them. He hurried them to a small door inside the room and opened it the same way as the main door. The two humans stepped into the room, and their master closed the door behind them.

  Cali and Shelly looked around the small room. It was square, just big enough for Cali to lie down and stretch her arms above her head in each d
irection. Along the base of one wall, a mat lay rolled up and tied with a fraying cloth string. A sign marked the wall above the bedroll, but of course neither Cali nor Shelly could read it. Other than the mattress and the sign, there wasn’t much to the room—a small flushing floor toilet with a stack of tissues beside it in one corner, some marks on the walls from previous occupants, a small rectangular window roughly the size of a man’s forearm high up in the wall.

  “Is this our new house?” Cali asked after looking around and taking in the details of the room.

  “I sure hope not. Look at this place. There’s hardly enough room to breathe. You stand over there and don’t look, I have to use the pot.”

  “Okay,” Cali said, turning away to give her companion privacy.

  “I can’t go with you listening. Sing a little song or something.”

  Cali laughed. “Didn’t you go in front of everyone where you came from?”

  “Yeah, but that’s different. That’s everyone. You’re just one someone. So sing something. I have to whuzz.”

  Cali hummed a tune while Shelly did his business, and when he had finished, he told her to stop. “My goodness, girl, you could deafen a deaf man with that singing. I’ll have to help you out with your voice. Now, what are we gonna do about this room? Isn’t it just the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “Well, maybe not the ugliest. But the plainest, for sure.”

  “I know. How are we supposed to be of service when all we do is sit around in here all day? There’s nothing to do at all.”

  “What did you do where you came from?”

  “We had the garden, of course. And we made stuff, you know, clothes and stuff, and we did repairs when anything around Master’s house or buildings needed to be fixed. I was never much good at that,” Shelly said, laughing. “But I can cook and clean like you don’t even know.”

  “Really? I’ve never cooked.”

  “Never? Girl. I am so gonna teach you if we ever get outta here and have us a real place. Who cooked for you?”

  “Well, I lived at a restaurant for a long time, and we didn’t have a place to cook. Our owners just brought us packaged food. And then I lived at the Confinement, and there was a big kitchen where some people cooked, but I never did. I had garden duty.”

  “But the cook should always know the garden. My goodness. I am going to love teaching you all kinds of things.”

  Cali looked at Shelly and found herself smiling. She’d never met anyone so nice. She couldn’t help but like him and trust him instantly. He seemed so open, like he’d never lived through anything, like he’d never been bitten or treated bad by a Superior, like he’d never had a reason to stop smiling.

  “Were you happy at your last place?” she asked after a while.

  “Happy? Hmm, yeah, I guess I was. It’s been my only place, though I’ve been rented out a few times for labor on other farms. But our master, he was just the best, you know? He never beat us or anything, and he let the girls keep the babies until they were four or five and they had another one before he sold the older ones. He was real good to us, even ones like me who weren’t much use. Except for renting out or being bit for a meal now and then. See, the other Superiors around mostly were farmers, too, but the ones who weren’t might come feed on us sometimes. Master sold most of the males, of course, but, well, I think I was sort of a favorite.” Shelly’s cheeks pinkened a little, and he scuffed his toenail along the floor.

  “Why?”

  “You know. He liked to have me around for extra…duties now and then.”

  “Like what?” Cali asked.

  “Girl, you are too innocent. You know. Duties. Visits in the night?”

  “For feeding on?”

  Shelly laughed. “You really are a laugh, sweetie. Yeah, my master liked to feed on me, for sure. But other stuff, too.”

  “Ohhh,” Cali said slowly, feeling stupid. She shuddered and hugged herself. “Ugh. I mean, I’m sorry. Wasn’t it awful? How are you still so…I mean, you seem awfully nice and normal for having that happen to you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, girl. I didn’t mind at all. Like I said, we were all in love with our Master. He was good to us. And he got me things, even, sometimes.” Shelly glanced up from under his lashes as he said this, still smiling.

  “What kind of things?”

  “Let’s see. He let me wear Superior clothes,” Shelly whispered, leaning towards Cali. “I mean, when no other Superiors were around, of course,” he added. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper again. “Sometimes, he let me come in his house at night and we’d use his big bed. It was so…just…wow. And once, he even let me stay until morning.”

  “Why would you want to?” Cali blurted out before she could stop herself.

  “Girl, you never been in love, have you? You just wouldn’t understand,” Shelly said, waving a hand. “But I reckon he got tired of me now, since he sold me off. Not that I thought it would last or anything. I’m not stupid. Just a fool in love.” Shelly covered his heart and Cali laughed. She thought of the time Man with Soft Hair had let her sleep in his bed. The bed had felt so nice—when he wasn’t in it. He’d never done anything that made her too uncomfortable, and she’d been awfully glad of it. But she’d never in ten lifetimes think of loving a bloodsucker.

  “Wow. Nothing like that has ever happened to me,” she said.

  “You never been in love?”

  “Not yet,” Cali said, peeking at him from the corner of her eye.

  “You ever had a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know.” She picked at a thread on her shift. “Not really.”

  “Oh, yeah you have. Tell me about him.”

  “I don’t want to. He wasn’t my boyfriend, anyway.”

  “Girl, it’s just getting light out. We got all day here, and who knows how many more days. What else is there to do? You best start talking.”

  “Okay,” Cali said, laughing a little. He made it so easy. So she told him about the boy at the Confinement who had his eye on her at one time, and she told him about all her sisters and their babies and their boyfriends, her mother, all her half sisters and brothers she didn’t know, and about the Confinement.

  Shelly told her about the sapien farm he’d lived on, his friends, about snow and trees and the four seasons, and about the jobs he’d been rented out for. They swapped stories about their homes and compared gardens, each describing the different plants that the other didn’t know and delighting in the ones they both knew. Shelly was right. They had nothing to do but talk. So they talked all that day, as they would talk for many more days in the time they lived together. Cali never knew she had so much to say.

  9

  Byron cursed the snow. Here he’d almost made it to his destination, and he had to get held up by snow. Not only that, but his trailer wasn’t weather-proof, and the temperature had dropped to single digits, so he had to pay extra for an adjoining sapien-room off his own hotel room. It wasn’t too bad, except the smell of them started wafting into his room after a couple days.

  He didn’t know what they did in there, but whatever it was, it sure as hell didn’t smell pleasant. The stink of them grew stronger and stronger until it seemed to penetrate the door and come through into his room. He even told them to bathe, but he didn’t stick around to supervise them. He was a Second Order Superior. He shouldn’t have to put up with such indignities.

  After the third day, Byron requested another room with an adjoining sapien-room, and he found that one tolerable for two more days. He didn’t know when he’d get out of the damn hotel. The snow didn’t show signs of tapering off any time soon. He couldn’t imagine what kind of lunatic would want to live in this climate. Over the last century, he’d gotten quite content with his warm spot in the world. What fools did up here in the mountains, he couldn’t guess.

  When he grew restless after a few days trapped inside, he called his wife.

  “Miss me already?” she said, smiling into the pod in her licenti
ous way.

  “The second I pulled out,” he said.

  She laughed. “Half a minute on the phone and already talking dirty.”

  He smiled, letting her turn his comment into something sexual as she liked to do. Already, his mood lifted a little. Sometimes all he had to do was see her face to know that everything would turn out as it should, in his favor. After all, they had both survived a hundred years of war, and so had their two children. Through it all, they had stayed married. When it was over, they had both secured lucrative jobs. Marisol brought a light to his life, one that he didn’t think he could live without. He’d sink into despair without her smiling face, her lewd humor, her resolute love for their family. She brought constant good fortune to their lives and refused to let it go.

  “How can a man help himself, when he’s looking at you,” Byron said when Marisol kept grinning at him in expectation of his comeback.

  Now she laughed again. “I miss you, too, baby,” she said. “As soon as you pulled out.”

  “How are the children?”

  “Oh, you know. Paige is down with the flu and Parker’s been throwing up all night.” She grinned hugely. She could go on talking all night and never once get serious, never once tell anything resembling the truth. Still, in their human lives, the conversation would have made perfect sense. Now, it only seemed ridiculous. But sometimes, Byron needed exactly that, and Marisol always seemed to know when.

  “Well. Have you called the doctor?” he asked, playing along.

  “You know doctors,” Marisol said. “They just charge us a hundred anyas to tell me there’s nothing they can do, and then they prescribe something anyway, which we can’t afford.”

  Byron stiffened. He hated talking about money when Marisol played her little game of being human again. She knew him so well, and yet she never seemed to pick up on how degrading he found it to have her remind him of their days of scraping together money to buy diapers, to pay for doctor visits, and the kids could forget field trips at school. It had been so long ago, but somehow Marisol seemed to remember it like yesterday. But even she slipped up sometimes—forgetting that as humans, they had called their money ‘dollars’ instead of ‘anyas.’ Still, unlike most Superiors, her memory of human times stayed as sharp as her memory of her Superior life, even after several hundred years. If not for her, Byron probably would have forgotten every bit of his human life—and with great relief.