Filled with panic, I searched for Ra. He was sitting behind me, forcing his foot back into position to facilitate healing. Now was my chance to jump him and rip the head off his disgusting body, but a feeling washed over me that I shouldn't. I turned back to Hathor, sitting in the dirt and staring at me.
"Get out of my head!" I yelled to her.
"I want both of you alive," she replied.
"No!" Fighting against her will, I slowly approached Ra, but found that the passion to kill him had fled from my being. Absent such passion, I knew he would destroy me. I stopped and considered. Why had Karen attempted to go for the helicopter as Ra chased her earlier when she still had her demonic memory? She didn't know how to fly it. What was she after? Samael had come here to take Ra's venom, and he knew how dangerous Ra would be. Samael's virus! He must have brought some just in case. I turned around and started walking towards the helicopter.
"Where are you going, Michael?" Hathor asked, getting up.
"Fuck it. This is hopeless. You both have a nice life," I bluffed, hoping she couldn't read my specific thoughts.
"Please reconsider. The three of us will be unstoppable together." She followed at a safe distance.
"The other side made the same offer," I said, still walking away. "Not interested in being a musketeer. Leave me alone." The helicopter rested fifty feet away. I picked up the pace.
"Tell me where you are going?" she demanded again.
"I'm going to fly that thing to Heathrow, and then catch a flight home." She scurried to catch up to me.
"That's fair enough," she said, now walking at my side. "We can give you some time to reconsider, but before I can let you leave, Ra needs your venom."
"Can you get him not to kill me while I give it to him?" Almost to my target, I wanted to keep her distracted.
"Well, I don't know. His mind is a mess. I think I can confuse him long enough, but I can't control him outright."
"I'm supposed to bet my life on that?" Coming to the side of the helicopter, I saw the pilot dead on the ground, drained by Samael. A gun rested next to him, but it wasn't the virus shooting type I had seen earlier.
"We have to do something," she said, not even glancing at the dead man.
"Well you figure it out while I go and see if this thing is still flight worthy." I glanced back in Ra's direction, and saw him standing gingerly on the damaged foot. He was testing if it was healed enough to continue killing. "And I suggest you do it fast before your hubby decides to eat you." I turned back to the helicopter and walked up the stairs. Hathor looked worriedly in Ra's direction, and then I was inside the machine, wondering if she would follow.
A horrible sight greeted me—the beautiful girl lay strewn over a seat on her back, arched at a painful looking angle, her neck exposed with crusted blood trailing down it. Samael had mercilessly slaughtered her. In the end though, the girl had the last laugh when he crashed from taking in so much of her enhanced blood, but I still took her death as a personal failure. Short on time, I had to let it go. I looked around the small cabin for the virus weapons.
"Michael," Hathor called from outside. "Michael, he's coming!" I ignored her.
Nothing stood out. There was no wall-mounted rack neatly loaded with rifles. No dark green military containers stashed under the seats. Nothing. I turned in a circle, growing desperate.
"I can't stop him! He's not responding to me!" Hathor cried. "We have to get out of here!"
A closet at the rear of the compartment caught my attention. I rushed to it, ripped the door off and threw it aside. Inside was an oversized double-barreled rifle. I snatched it up, fumbled trying to open it to see if it was loaded, but I had to give up. Hathor had entered behind me.
"He's just about here! You must heal him! Go, now!" I felt her in my mind, urging me to bite Ra, but she forgot to urge me not to hurt her. I turned around; raising the dual barrels of the gun in the process, praying it was loaded with the right kind of ammunition. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Freeing myself." Just as I pulled the trigger, the helicopter lurched violently and then rolled onto its side. I went sprawling down. Outside, the beast roared. Inside, Hathor screamed. Hurriedly I stood up on what used to be the wall of the helicopter. I saw her laid out near the cockpit, the cloth from her pants blown away on one leg with the black lines of disease already appearing on the exposed skin. From my own experience, I knew the virus would die before reaching her brain, so I lifted the gun, intending a life-ending head shot.
"Please, don't," she whimpered.
"To kill Ra, I must kill you. I'm sorry." I felt her try to enter my mind, but she was weak and easy to fend off. I aimed, and then the sun faded from the open side door that was now above me. With no time to comprehend what was happening, a large hand grabbed my hair and yanked me up and out of the helicopter. I yelled in shock.
I kicked and punched as the beast pulled me up to where we were face to face, but all my efforts had no effect. He pulled back the balled fist of his free arm and then hurtled it forwards. Agonizingly, I felt my ribs shatter. The impact ripped the rifle out of my hand, and I went sailing uncontrollably through the air. I landed hard on my back, my head slamming to the ground with a bone-shattering thud. I blocked out the pain and forced myself to get up.
For a moment, I stood there swaying like a drunkard, my vision swimming deliriously, and then I felt Ra's enormous hand clutch my throat and lift me up. With feet dangling in the air, I stared down in pure horror as he pulled me towards his grotesque fangs, dripping in anticipation. I lashed out, I kicked, I yelled, but all was futile; my energy was waning. This is the end, I thought, the final failure in a long string of failures. I closed my eyes, awaiting his bite.
I heard a forceful hiss, the sound of compressed gas, followed by a furious roar from Ra that nearly deafened me. I opened my eyes just as he dropped me to my feet. Karen stood behind him, the rifle I had lost now in her hands. She squeezed the trigger repeatedly, not realizing it only held two shots and I had already used one. Ra turned around and I saw a chunk of flesh missing from his back where the projectile had hit.
"Fuck!" she cried, giving up trying to shoot an empty gun and opting to throw the weapon at the monster. He dodged and backhanded her across the face, sending her roughly to the ground, unconscious even before she landed. All of us were stressing our healing abilities to the limit on this day.
Undaunted by the little extra viral load from the projectile in a body already filled with it, Ra turned back to me. I knew it would be hopeless to continue the fight in my state, so I spun around and ran. My legs felt shaky and with my strength nearly depleted, I worried that running away might be impossible, too. Sadly, I was right. He tackled me from behind. We tumbled to the ground, face to face, and I knew that I only had one choice if I were to survive. I had to bring his mind back to sanity.
I darted my head forward, mouth opened wide, and caught just behind his ear with my fangs. Healing venom pumped into him for a second before he yanked away, and then blindingly fast buried his own fangs into me. We lay there looking like two lovers in a park, with one lover discreetly draining the life out of the other. Such is love.
My resistance was feeble at best. Once his venom hit, I heard myself moan, and I think I actually forced his head in closer with my hands, begging him to drink me. As he did, I looked up at the blue sky and smiled, feeling content. The sky began to dim as if twilight was rushing in, but then I realized that it was my vision dying. Life was almost over. Peace was coming.
A thought meandered through my brain: Where am I? I felt so weak. Had I been in a car accident? My neck hurt. Everything hurt. There was a man next to me. He pulled whatever was in my neck out.
"Michael?" he said, leaning over me, sounding far away. His face was blurry, with just the intense blue of his eyes discernible. "You're going to be all right, Michael. Your venom worked. You have performed admirably, just as planned." His voice faded as I lost consciousness.
Epilogu
e
Flickering light danced across my closed eyes. A hazy thought questioned what it could be. Probably a passing police car, another thought answered. And then I remembered feeling the heat and being paralyzed in my sleep. Fire! The flickering light is a fire! I knew it. I must warn Sara and Lori! My eyes shot open.
There was no raging inferno surrounding me; it was just a wall-mounted television displaying what looked like news with the sound turned down. The scrolling feed at the bottom of the screen said something about a French recovery and a death toll surpassing a million. I decided that it wasn't real news, but just a realistic disaster movie. I turned my attention to figuring out where I was.
The television provided enough illumination in an otherwise darkened room to see relatively well. I turned my head to the right and saw a rack of hospital monitoring equipment. Confused, I didn't recall being in an accident, and oddly enough, the equipment appeared to be off. There were no monitoring wires leading to me, and no IV as far as I could tell.
I swung my head to the left and was surprised to see a woman sleeping in the reclining chair next to my bed. I didn't recognize her, but she obviously had enough concern for me to stand vigil. She wasn't a regular hospital visitor though, for I discerned in the dim light that she wore a hospital gown just like the one I had on. She was a fellow patient.
What had happened?
A seizure! I concluded that I must have had a seizure and Sara rushed me to the hospital, but that still didn't explain the stranger next to me. I searched my memory for recognition of the woman, but just found the usual assortment of jumbled mush. For some reason, memories roamed my head from what seemed like past lives. There was a lost love during World War II, riding horses and laughing with a young girl in 1800s Europe, and ridiculously enough, being a personal advisor to Napoleon Bonaparte decades before that. These dreams, and much more clouded my mind, but I have never confessed them to anyone out of fear of the psych ward. Through all of these seeming memories, the beautiful sleeping woman remained a stranger, but between the memories, enormous dark expanses did exist. Perhaps she had come from this darkness. There was only one way to find out who she was.
"Hello?" I said softly, startled by the sound of my own voice. "Miss? Hello?" She stirred. "Miss?" Her eyes flew open.
"Mike! You're awake!" Her face lit up, all remnants of sleep instantly washed away.
"Do I know you?"
"What?" She leaned forward. "You don't remember? It's me. Karen." She switched on a bedside lamp, and for a second her beauty halted my breath, but recognition still escaped me.
"Remember what?" I asked.
"Goddamn it! Not this again!" Her outburst startled me and she noticed. "I'm sorry. Do you need to feed?"
"Feed?"
"You know, eat? Get some energy? Drink some blood? Last time we were in the hospital, your memory returned after feeding."
The woman is crazy, I thought. She must have escaped from her room and wandered into mine. I started looking for a button to call a nurse.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I'd like a nurse."
"Isn't gonna happen. We're under special lockdown. You can get a soldier, that's about it." To my dismay, I couldn't find the call button. "You really don't remember anything?"
"No." I relaxed back into the pillow. "I woke up in bed at home with what was like sleep paralysis, and then a bright light went off in my head, and now here I am. Where are we anyway?"
"A hospital in London."
"London!" I bolted upright, staring at her in disbelief.
"You really don't need any blood?"
"What are you talking about?" I asked loudly in frustration.
"Please don't yell. My head is pretty messed up already."
"I can tell."
"I have memories," she continued softly. "Almost like memories from a very lucid dream, and in these memories you are a vampire." The way she described her memories sounded exactly how I remembered what seemed like past lives. "I remember doing tests on you, and you even bit me."
"Does that mean you're a vampire, too?" I asked in a mocking tone.
"No. They tell me that these memories aren't real, but from trauma. I could have sworn they were real though, which is why I asked if you needed to feed."
"Trauma?"
"Yes. Apparently we saved the world."
"This is bullshit. You need to go back to your room and take your meds. Where's my wife and daughter?"
"I was told your daughter is en route, and your wife…I don't know." She seemed to be hiding something, but of course, all lunatics are hiding something. "My room is adjacent to yours. I woke up earlier today, and was worried about you, so they let me in. I'm not crazy, Mike." The look in her eyes was pleading, and it cracked through my armor somewhat.
"Okay," I said. "What trauma have we been through?"
"Well, a man manipulated his way into power. He nuked France, and…"
"Wait! Are you telling me that's the real news on TV?" I pointed to the television, which was now displaying images of a melted Eiffel Tower surrounded by a scorched landscape.
"Yes."
"My God…" A dark-haired woman addressing the press replaced the image of the destroyed Eiffel Tower. There was a familiarity about her. "Who's that?" I asked.
Karen looked. "She's expected to win the presidential special election in France."
The caption below her image stated that her name was Monique Moreau, director of the Moreau Foundation.
"She looks familiar," I said.
"She's been on TV a lot today," Karen said. "Her husband took over as the French president, but was killed in the nuclear blast according to the news. Her strength must be incredible. I couldn't take over a country after losing someone so close to me."
"So someone actually got hold of nuclear weapons and bombed France?"
"Yes and…how do I say this?" She paused, thinking. "They're telling me that somehow you and I tracked this person here to England and killed him."
I looked at her incredulously, and then blurted, "That's impossible! I was in my bed! Wait, I know how to debunk this. What's the date?" She told me and I sat in stunned silence, trying to figure out how several weeks had gone missing.
"They're calling us national heroes, Mike."
I looked at her and then back to the television. Now a man was speaking from behind the presidential podium. I recognized him as the American secretary of state, yet the caption below kept putting president in front of his name. What is going on?
"Why are they calling him the president?" I asked.
"Because, they told me, everyone who was above him in succession is dead. The world was left a mess, and you know the worse part, I can't really remember what happened either. They said it's possible some sort of nerve agent was used on us."
"They? Who are they?"
Just then, the door opened, startling us both. A tall man in Navy khakis adorned with numerous ribbons of honor and silver eagles on his collar stepped into the room. He eased the door shut and walked to us carrying a folder. As he approached, I recognized the golden Navy SEAL trident standing out boldly on his chest. It made me wonder doubly hard what sort of mess I was involved in.
"He is they," Karen said, pointing at the soldier.
"Glad to see you've come around, Mr. Spencer," he said.
"Who are you?" I asked. He gave me an odd glance before regaining control of his facial muscles.
"My name is Captain Thomas. Ms. Weiss, good to see you're feeling better."
"Thank you."
"Captain, what's going on? How did I end up in London?" I asked, desperate for answers.
"I'm sorry, but a lot of this is a mystery to us, too." His demeanor seemed strange, almost nervous. It was as if he was preparing to give the act of a lifetime before a skeptical audience. "We found you and Ms. Weiss unconscious next to a deceased man that, in a very short time, came to rule the world. Many have labeled him the antichrist."
&nb
sp; "Impossible," I stated.
"I'm telling you exactly what we know, Mr. Spencer."
"How come I don't remember?"
He opened the file he carried, read to himself briefly, and then looked up. "They think your memory was damaged by a nerve agent."
"I don't believe it," I said. "And why am I not hooked up to the machines here? Where's the IV? Aren't those standard procedures in hospitals?"
"Please don't make this difficult," the captain said. "The doctors felt that you were okay medically. We are keeping you here more for privacy so that you can recover in peace. You both have been through a lot, but you're heroes and the world wants to thank you. They'll thank you by hounding you nonstop. We're trying to save you from that for now."
"Where's my wife and daughter?" I asked.
"Your daughter has arrived in town and will be here very soon."
"And my wife?" His face tensed; his silence worrisome. "My wife?" I repeated as the butterflies started fluttering in my stomach.
"I'm sorry, but she didn't make it."
"What?" I asked in disbelief.
"She was a victim of the riots." A cold shiver ran through me. I clearly remembered my wife sleeping next to me as if it were just moments before, yet this man told me that she had died.
"Does my daughter know?" I asked.
"Yes, and we've provided her with counseling during your absence."
"Thank you," I said absently, feeling like I was drowning.
The captain turned to Karen and said, "Ms. Weiss, I have the information you asked for as well."
"And?" she said.
"He is missing and presumed dead. I'm sorry."
She was silent for a moment, and then replied, "Sad, but it's not the end of my world. We were done a long time ago and honestly, I think I've forgotten what he even looks like."
"We have taken the liberty to issue his death certificate, even though his body has not been recovered. We wanted to expedite you getting on with life." The officer thumbed through the papers and then stopped and scanned through a particular one as he spoke. "He held significant assets, all of which are being transferred to you. This includes the house you live in, another in Sweden, several automobiles, boats, a helicopter, two planes. There is…wow, over a billion dollars in stocks, bonds, precious metals, and cash. Plus a few companies, including the one where you work, Plasma Worx, Incorporated." He looked up.
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