“Come on, assholes!” Sally leveled her gun and appeared to be deciding between targets. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Oh, Lucinda, you always were such a poor liar,” a smooth voice said from behind the creatures, further back in the cave.
The sea of rock monsters parted to let the speaker through. A guy of about medium height and build strode toward us. He maybe had a few extra pounds around the middle, but he wore it well, dressed as he was in an expensive-looking suit. To say that he looked out of place down here was definitely stating the obvious.
“No way,” Brock exclaimed as if he knew him.
“Is it me, or does that guy look a bit like you, minus the glasses?” Miranda asked me.
“I don’t see the resemblance.” I raised my gun. “But even if he does, he’s going to look like me minus a head in a second.”
To my surprise, though, Sally stepped in front of us, her own weapon lowered - her guard down.
“Mark?”
X Marks the Spot
“Who the fuck is Mark?” I asked, breaking the momentary silence.
To say Sally’s reaction was a mind-scramble was the understatement of the century. I’d never known her to react to, well, much of anything in a way that wasn’t cool, calm, and psychotically detached. Needless to say, time stopped for a moment - at least for us - in quite possibly the worst situation in the world for a smoke break. Thankfully, the creatures surrounding us seemed to be waiting for some cue to smash our heads in. Ah, standoffs - allowing people to trade awesome last words since time immortal.
“I killed you,” she said quietly.
“Another lie,” he replied, raising a finger in a tsk tsk manner. “Technically, the Jahabich did the work...oh, and you tried to kill me. I believe that makes twice now that you’ve left me for dead. Sadly for you, all that seems to ever happen is I keep coming back better than before, lover.”
Lover? “Who is this clown and, more importantly, why is he under the impression that you’ve banged him?” My question was purposely intended to get a rise out of her - as well as sate my morbid curiosity - but I might as well have been in an entirely different cavern full of deadly monsters for all the reaction it got.
She turned to me, but it wasn’t out of anger. Instead, she had a sort of deer-in-the-headlights look to her. That wasn’t particularly promising. It’s never a good sign when the proverbial immoveable object suddenly loses its shit. “Bill, I...”
“Bill, is it?” Mark, claimant to knowledge of Sally’s nether regions, asked. “You wouldn’t happen to be that legendary Freewill we’ve all heard so much about?”
“Well, I don’t like to brag. Legendary is such an egomaniacal word, even if it is true.”
He shifted his gaze back to Sally. “I have to say I’m a bit disappointed that you traded down to this.”
“Traded down?” I put a hand up to stay Miranda, who was about to start with the shooting again. “Look at you. Trust me, dude, a dork knows another dork when he sees one. The fanciest suit in the world can’t change reality. Don’t even try telling me you’ve never rolled a percentile die at the gaming table.”
“That stuff was a bit after my time, I’m afraid...although I did read a lot of Asimov back when I was younger, if that helps.”
“Really? I kinda dug the Foundation books, but his robot novels were a bit dry for me.”
“I’d agree, but I preferred the Starr series over...”
“Oh, enough of this bullshit!” Sally cried, seemingly jolted out of her funk. She reached into her pouch and produced a grenade. My god, some people just couldn’t handle a little geeking out.
Sadly, the Jahabich were more than ready for her. She’d just barely had time to remove the pin when the creatures were upon her. One closed its mouth over the hand holding the explosive, severing her fingers in the process. Before she could so much as scream, another clubbed her hard in the side, splattering the canteens of blood and sending her flying.
The creature who’d eaten the grenade clamped its mouth shut just as the explosive went off. All that was produced was a muffled boom of sound, followed by its eyes flickering out as it fell to the ground, dead. Whoa, talk about suffering for the cause.
Unfortunately, the time for talking was quite plainly finished and we held the short end of the stick. The creatures converged upon us. The last thing I saw before being swarmed was Mark’s countenance melt away, only to be replaced with the soulless orange eyes of one of those monsters.
“Yes, we agree that it is enough. It is time for you to join us now.”
* * *
Amazingly, I found myself still alive several minutes later. The Jahabich attack had been for the purpose of subduing us, not outright killing our asses. That was always a good thing. I, for one, would always take torture with the possibility of escape over my head stuck on a pike, but I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of guy.
That didn’t mean we were exactly in great shape. Not killed wasn’t the same thing as ready to rumble. To put it mildly, they’d pretty much clubbed us into submission. Brock and I had gotten a generic pummeling; nothing our vampire healing couldn’t fix. Miranda clearly had a broken nose, freely bleeding, as well as a matching set of black eyes. I had little doubt she was likewise missing a few teeth. Aside from that, though, she was mostly just bruised up.
Sally, on the other hand, had taken the brunt of it. Currently, all she had left on her right hand was a semi-intact thumb. Thankfully, the nubs that had been her fingers had scabbed over. Even so, by the way she was limping and holding her side, it was clear her insides had been scrambled too. Even more telling was the hungry way she kept eyeing Miranda. I had a feeling if I didn’t keep Sally’s mind off of things, our resident witch would soon be covered in bite marks in addition to her other injuries.
We were being marched forward together in a group, the Jahabich surrounding us at least three thick on every side. Our weapons had been removed and smashed to bits and the rest of our belongings discarded like a pile of rubbish. All that we had left were the clothes upon our backs as they led us down one of the myriad caves leading out of the massive cavern.
As casually as I could, I managed to step between Sally and Miranda to try to keep any casualties inflicted by our side limited to the bad guys.
“So tell me about your rock monster boyfriend,” I asked idly.
Sally just glared at me.
“Seriously, now would be a good time to share.” I lowered my voice to a bare whisper. “If there’s anything you know that could help us here...”
She glanced around. I had the feeling she was looking for the monstrosity named Mark. What the fuck? Talk about anticlimactic. Back when we’d first encountered Vehron, we’d called him Chuck as kind of a goof so we didn’t have to keep referring to him as that badass vamp who scared the shit out of us. His real name, however, ended with “the Destroyer.” I could respect that. But this clown who’d just captured us...really? I sincerely hoped to find out later that maybe he was called something awesome like The Deathbringer or The Harvester of Souls. For some rock monster nerd named Mark to take us down so easily was just embarrassing.
“Right before they fed me my own teeth,” I said, “I saw your boy toy head out ahead of us. I’m pretty sure he’s not in this crowd.” I looked around, noticing that the Jahabich pretty much all looked alike in their rock forms. “Maybe.”
“That’s not Mark,” Sally said at last.
“He seemed pretty sure he was.”
“He can’t be. I saw him die.”
“Okay, that’s a start, but let’s back up a bit. Why did he call you lover?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, it’s because we dated a long time ago.”
“Is this really necessary?” Miranda turned and asked, unaware of how close she was to becoming Sally’s next chew toy.
“Mind your Ps and Qs, sister,” I replied. “Inquiring minds want to know.”
&nb
sp; I turned back to Sally. “So was this an ‘opposites attract’ kind of thing? Two ships, or boulders, passing in the night?”
“No, stupid,” Sally growled. “We were both human at the time...ugh!”
She stumbled, holding on to her side, which still freely dripped blood - although whether it was hers or the remains of our canteen stash, I wasn’t sure. Regardless, I caught her before she could fall and let her support herself against me. Amazingly enough, she didn’t put up a protest. I guess she was hurt worse than she let on.
“Okay, so you were both human...crazy kids in love.” I looked around as I said this. They were leading us down a long, wide tunnel, dimly lit by whatever had given light to the cavern we’d come from. “So then you vamped out and what...he got bombarded by cosmic rays and became The Thing?”
“It wasn’t like that,” she gasped. “I was turned first, and then I killed him.”
“On purpose?” For just a moment, the mask of bitchiness fell off of her face and I saw real pain; pain that had nothing to do with her injuries. I immediately felt bad about the question. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s the same story as with any other of our kind. I couldn’t control myself.”
“Wait,” I said, stopping. “So what you’re saying...”
That was a mistake. The Jahabich apparently had no problem with us yammering amongst ourselves, but they definitely took issue with me slowing down the parade. One moment, I was coming to a conclusion of sorts, and the next I saw stars as I was clubbed rudely in the back of the head.
“You okay?” Miranda asked.
“Nothing four or five bottles of Advil wouldn’t cure.” Fuck that shit. No way was I letting a teeny tiny, head-erupting migraine interrupt this. I shook my head until the double tunnels before us merged back into one.
“I know what you’re going to say, Bill,” Sally said, having regained her own footing. She was walking a little more solidly now, her healing taking over. Even so, I knew it would cost her if she didn’t get some fresh blood soon. “I turned him. I just didn’t know it at the time.”
“Into a vampire?”
“What the fuck else would I turn him into?”
I decided to bite my tongue and let her continue.
“But I didn’t realize it. I thought I’d killed him. It was only recently that I learned otherwise.”
“So what happened?”
“He tried to kill me in revenge, and then I fed him to those things.”
“Oh, of course. So how’d he become one?”
“I have no fucking idea. You’ll notice I was just as surprised as the rest of you when he appeared.”
“More so,” I commented. “I personally had no idea who the fuck he was.”
“Well, now you do.”
“And you two really dated?”
She nodded once.
“Well, look at you with a taste for the old nerd sausage after all.”
Brock guffawed, but the Jahabich seemingly found his braying as annoying as I did because they smacked him upside the head for it. Oh well, dude had a stupid laugh anyway.
I expected Sally to try to disembowel me with her good hand, or at least glare daggers back at me for my dickish remark, but instead, she simply lowered her head and let her hair droop down, covering her face. Holy crap, this was really unlike her. I always envisioned Sally as a blonde tigress, toying with men like they were mice waiting to be swallowed. Now I was forced to wonder whether she and this guy had actually meant something to each other and now...
...and now she was living out her own version of the very prophecy I feared coming to pass. Though it now seemed I wasn’t the Freewill the various prophecies spoke about, the thought that one day I’d have to face Sheila in a fight to the death had been a massive Sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I’d pretty much considered myself the unluckiest guy in the world; that I’d been born under a bad sign, and various other woe-is-me scenarios. In my self-centered conceit, I hadn’t stopped to consider the plight of others. I’d been so ingrained in how other vampires acted in the here and now that I more or less assumed they’d always been that way. Perhaps the road to darkness wasn’t a quick exit to Evil-ville. Perhaps it was a long, winding path.
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t about to go all sappy with most of them. Folks like Colin could go eat a fat dick long before I’d sit down and give them a shoulder to cry on, but maybe, just maybe, I could consider cutting Sally a bit of slack.
She suddenly raised her head, her eyes black and her fangs out. “This time, I’m gonna finish the fucking job if I have to kill each and every one of us,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone else.
Okay, so maybe not that much slack.
A Trip to the Zoo
I wasn’t sure what would await us at the end of our forced march through the tunnels, but my imagination was happy to fill in all sorts of unpleasant scenarios. Conversation had lapsed after Sally decided to take a vacation to Crazy Town, and the Jahabich weren’t particularly loquacious conversationalists in their ugly rock forms. I tried to make some sense of that. Speech was probably not the easiest thing when your mouth was a craterous maw, but it almost seemed as if the Jahabich had two distinct personalities at play, depending on what form they inhabited.
I could understand that a bit, what with a rampaging nutcase camping out somewhere inside of my cerebral cortex. At the same time, it didn’t seem quite the same. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Thoughts of Sally and her ex kept crawling back into my head, which didn't help either. She was so far out of that dude’s league that I was having problems making sense of it all.
I thought back to the first time I’d met Sally. It was on a subway train in Manhattan. She’d approached me, we’d gotten to talking, and eventually she’d invited me to a party - a party I just so happened to get killed at. Following my rebirth as an undead horror, she and I had gotten along in a sense, but I never hesitated to remind her that she was at fault for my current condition as well as everything that followed - including the impending global apocalypse. “Oh yeah, well, it’s your fault the world is being destroyed” is a pretty hard argument to come back against.
During that first meet-cute; she’d seemed somewhat hesitant - almost as if she’d had second thoughts. I’d always assumed it had been a bullshit act, her way of looking vulnerable so as to keep me focused on the dangled carrot in front of me. Now, though, I had to wonder. Jeff, the master that Sally had served under back then, often sent out his minions under compulsion. She’d told me as much long ago. Ultimately, she didn’t have much choice in what she was doing.
But what if that small bit of hesitation had been real, her mind’s way of rebelling against the edict of her master? Miranda had said Mark looked a bit like me. I didn’t really see the resemblance, but whatever. Was it possible Sally saw it too back then, her memories causing a momentary hiccup in her resolve?
Gah! All of this was fascinating to think about, but ultimately useless in our current plight. This was a real life horror movie, not some chick flick in which we’d all realize everything had been a big mistake right before the climactic kiss at the end. Whoever this Mark guy was, I had the suspicion he wasn’t trying to impress Sally in the hopes of winning her back. It would be in my best interest to envision him more as the Freddy Krueger of this story.
No, fuck that. He was the evil lich king and once more, I, Kelvin Lightblade, battlemage of the Silent Order, had been called forth to do battle with the forces of darkness. Hell, was this really any different than that time my party got captured by those daemon-phage-infected centaurs? I’d gotten out of that one by the skin of my teeth, but I’d walked away with a plus-three cloak of warding for my troubles. Damn, if only I’d remembered to pack my dice with me on this trip.
I was still considering these things when I realized it was getting brighter. We’d been traveling in the dim twilight that those glowing cave thingies afforded us, but up a
head, a much brighter light seemed to stream forth. Fortunately, most of the Jahabich were five foot nothing or shorter, so I could crane my neck to see what waited ahead.
The tunnel opened up once more to a wider space. A brilliant orange-hued light flowed forth from it - a shade not entirely dissimilar to that which glowed from these creatures’ eyes. Whatever this was, I had a feeling answers awaited. But would those answers help us or screw us in our quest for survival?
* * *
“Holy shit.”
“I don’t think there’s anything holy about this place,” Miranda said.
She had a point.
I had been envisioning some throne room, a place where we’d be forced to kneel before some rock god - and not of the Ozzy Osbourne type. That, or maybe a grand cathedral where we’d be sacrificed for some stupid reason or other. Instead, this was...I don’t know. Was it a prison, a torture chamber, some sort of giant smelting pot? Fuck, maybe it was all of the above.
All I knew for sure was we were no longer alone, minus our ever-effervescent Jahabich company, of course. The place was huge, easily as large as the cavern with the pictograph. This one was far from empty, though, and filled with what I had to assume were prisoners.
The first ones I saw were a group of humans. They all sat together, looking tired, hungry, and without anything remotely resembling hope upon their faces.
A group of vampires were next. They were unmistakable as their blackened eyes and fangs shone in the dull light. They were all scraped raw and bloody, but that didn’t stop them from circling one another, hissing like animals and taking the occasional swipe at their fellows with their claws. All of them had a disturbingly gaunt look about them.
“Are they...”
“They’re starving,” Sally said bluntly.
Well, that at least answered one question I’d wondered about ever since being turned.
Some greasy monstrosity was next, looking like a two-headed condor that had been dipped in red tar. Its wings were spread, but speared to the floor with stalagmites. More groups of oddities followed, each weirder than the ones before them, but the last bunch especially caught my eye - Sasquatches. There were four of them, but they were far from the vicious brutes I’d squared off against - appearing mangy and beaten down as they sat in a circle. They looked more like they were planning to die than escape.
Half A Prayer (The Tome of Bill Book 6) Page 14
