Feet drummed on the wooden floor.
Christ! Got to hurry.
I emptied the first bag into the funnel and almost immediately a noise escaped from the vampire, like the sigh of wind after a long desert night.
Oh, God. It was working. It had all been a theory, classroom discussion, and it was working. Blood by any means.
“Quick!” I shouted. “More blood!”
I ripped open two bags at once and poured them at the same time. Dial jerked for some reason or other and some blood went down his hand.
Color had immediately returned to the vampire, and his eyelashes flickered. Most horrifyingly beautiful, his tongue protruded a little, swaying like a grub worm.
I saw the vampire hunters in my peripheral vision as I opened one more bag and emptied it into the funnel.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and yanked me away, the bag and hose flung across the floor, splashing precious drops in the dust.
“Goddamned vampire lovers,” grunted a VVV beast.
“Dial, you’re a traitorous whore!” said another.
I was ready to die, my final sacrifice made, my life seemingly complete. My one mission in life was fulfilled, so I could go happily.
But maybe death is never the end.
The vampire sat up.
Chapter Forty
“Shit! It’s alive!” Grandmaster bellowed. “Anyone think to bring any silver bullets?”
“Not me. Wow, so that’s what they look like,” said one of his men.
“We’ve never used them before,” said another. “We’re second string, remember.”
“Yeah, they all be in coma long before we be VVV,” said a third.
“Shut up, you fools!” Grandmaster then whispered to one of the goons, who promptly took off down the hall.
The vampire might be immune to regular bullets, but we weren’t. Almost a dozen guns were aimed at us. I strained against the grip of the goon who held me, nodding at the vampire to make him understand whose side we were on.
He noticed me. His wide, curious, red eyes rolled slowly onto me—a rather humbling and nerve-wracking experience, I might add, because he was looking at me sort of like a hawk looks at a field mouse.
“Excuse me, uh, sir, but I believe that fellow running over there went to fetch some silver bullets, meant, of course, for you.”
“Did you feed me?” he asked quietly, his voice cracking.
“Yes, sir, that would be me.”
“Holy shit,” Grandmaster said. “It’s talking.”
A few of the men backed away, though their guns were still pointed at the vampire. Grandfather must have sensed their anxiety. “Hold your fire. With all these stone walls, the ricochets will kill us all, and the vampire will escape. Wait for silver.”
The vampire looked me straight in the eye for no more than a second, but it felt more like two seconds and then a lifetime. Then he smiled. “You know me. So what do you propose I do?”
I stared blankly at the vampire. Dial shifted on the other side of the coffin and I automatically looked at him. He shrugged. Great. Thanks a lot, Dial. Abandon me now.
“We’re pretty much mortal but you’re pretty much golden at the moment.”
“I’ve been away a long time. All I know is the sweet taste of blood on my lips.”
“Disgusting creature,” Grandmaster said.
“See what they’re like?” I said, as the goon twisted my arm a little more. “They want to wipe out and imprison your kind. That’s why they’ve guarded you so closely.”
“And yet you have risked your life to free me?”
“Er, yeah.”
“Any special reason?”
We all seemed to be waiting for the runner, or at least the VVV members were, but they were also curious, too. After all, despite being oversized, highly trained killers, they were only human.
“Your way of life is the ultimate rebellion against the norms of this world,” I said, almost as if I had practiced this speech many times over. “You live a life few will ever experience. You are worth preserving—you do not deserve to be an extinct species.”
“Very noble.”
“And you are a noble creature—I mean, person—I mean, vampire,” I said. “But they’re going to shoot you again with a silver bullet and you’ll return to virtual slumber. This may be your last chance to escape.”
“Well, then,” he said, rising from the coffin and stretching a little, as if working the blood through his limbs. “We can continue this conversation later.”
I smiled as he half stepped, half floated down from the coffin, moving with a stiff elegance. The vampire hunters backed away. “We have your two rescuers covered, you filthy blood-sucker,” Grandmaster said.
“I apologize for the filth, and I shall change shortly. I hadn’t expected such an abrupt burial.” The vampire winked at me. And that’s when I noticed his height. He wasn’t really as tall as he looked in the coffin. He was just long—his arms and legs and neck, long, all of them, and he didn’t look quite as noble with his ripped shirt.
Still, no sudden movements from him. Everything was very slow, relaxed, calm, even his breathing. Breathing? Did vampires have to breathe? Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I didn’t think so, in fact I knew at one time in my life I knew the answer. Now, so many things were crowding my attention.
“I’m serious,” Grandmaster said. “We’ll kill these two vampire whores.”
“What’s it to me?” Laumer said. “All the more blood for my feast.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but what could I really expect? He didn’t wink that time.
Then, skidding around a corner was the errand boy. Grandmaster held out his hand. “A brief revival,” Grandmaster said. “And maybe we’ll bury your two girls along with you for company.”
The errand boy passed over a handful of silver bullets and Grandmaster loaded them into his .43 Stallion, a vampire-hunting revolver that looked like it had more than a dozen chambers. There were supposedly only five such guns in existence, made specially for silver bullets. The Vampire Laumer didn’t flit or try to change into a winged creature—if such a thing were possible—though he surely recognized the threat. Maybe all those years of dormant coma had dulled his reaction time, and we’d only managed to pump a few pints of blood into him.
The white-haired VVV leader loaded the gun with quickness and precision and something approaching joy, as if his purpose in life had been validated. He smiled as he pointed the gun toward the vampire at my side.
“Welcome back,” Grandmaster said. “And goodbye.”
“Kind of you.” The vampire’s smile showed fangs.
I instinctively flinched as Grandmaster’s finger squeezed the trigger of the .43 Stallion.
The vampire, had he still been standing in front of the coffin, would have, of course, been shot and placed back in eternal prison, and I assume we’d have been next, except our prison would have been death; but he was no longer standing there. Where he went off to, I really couldn’t say.
Chapter Forty-one
As I looked around to see just where in the hell he had gone, I noticed the vampire hunters were standing there looking at their empty hands.
No guns.
No bullets.
No wounds.
No pain.
No death.
This was good.
Question: where had the guns and the vampire disappeared to?
A presence manifested next to me. And here would be the answer, no doubt.
The presence was, of course, the vampire, and he stood as calmly as when he was standing there just a few seconds ago before disappearing.
In other words, he acted as if nothing had happened.
Or was I seeing things? Had I fainted on my feet? Was that possible?
But something did happen, because the hunters were no longer in ownership of their pop guns, and the goon who had been holding me was now several feet away. Dial looked as stunned as I w
as.
The vampire turned to me. “Problem, I believe, solved.”
“What happened?” I managed to ask over Granddaddy’s cursing and the confused murmurs of the VVV.
The vampire seemed to smile, but I wasn’t sure. “Another time, boy.”
I did, however, catch a glimpse of his teeth. I wanted to sit with this vampire, this actual vampire, and talk with him, ask him all the questions that had been running through my mind all these years, put to rest all the myths and fiction. To know it all for sure.
“Real time,” blurted Dial from the other side of the coffin. “They can move in real time, while we’re still in normal time.”
“What the heck does that mean?”
“Yeah,” someone said to Grandmaster, a little upset. “That should have been part of our training.”
“You were merely to guard, not hunt,” Grandmaster said. “If you knew the truth, you might defect like Dial here. Vampires can move at a higher rate than we do. They enter into what is commonly called, and as the traitor has stated, ‘real time.’ For every movement we can produce in one second, the vampire in real time would have lived for one hour. They can exist beyond our time, not even a blur to our senses.”
I’d heard of such in my vampire studies, but the professor had discounted it as a violation of the law of physics. But the professor was nowhere around to dispute what had happened.
“Don’t worry,” the vampire said. “I have left your guns in a safe place, where you are sure to find them...” After a dramatic pause, he erupted into a demented laugh. “In the next century!”
He laughed for about eleven seconds, no doubt enjoying his little eternal-life humor.
I looked at Grandmaster. When I finally caught his distracted gaze, I motioned with my eyes in a sort of: Aren’t you missing something?
He touched his chest with his fingertips and looked around, then mouthed: Me?
I mouthed back: Yeah, you, you vampire-hating bastard, you’re forgetting something.
He eased back on his heels and a few silent moments passed while he thought about what he was so obviously missing. The vampire regained his composure and the VVV had drawn back a few more uneasy steps.
And then Grandmaster snapped his fingers. “My silver cross.”
Now pointing, he shouted vehemently, “You’ll never escape me. I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the earth. Even if I have no legs I’ll crawl after you, my intestines trailing behind like a hideous tail after your immortal ass. Even if I don’t have any eyes, no thumbs, and one ear I will never let you rest—”
And as Grandmaster proceeded to eliminate all possible body parts, the three of us made our way out of the cellar. No one attempted to stop us, not wanting to know what the vampire could do to them during that millisecond-but-actually-an-hour-to-the-vampire.
And according to Grandmaster, even if he had no penis, one arm, no legs, faltering heart, an inflamed kidney, dandruff, hemorrhoids, and even Alzheimer’s, he’d never forget this day and never give up the chase.
And somewhere, deep down, probably in the cesspools of my bowels, I respected the man’s persistence.
The asshole.
Chapter Forty-two
We stood in the doorway of the mansion, having retrieved the professor from one of the guards outside the cellar door. The professor had done the obligatory oohing and ahhing at the revelation of all his intellectual fantasies, and I could tell he wanted to interrogate the vampire as much as I did. But we needed to keep moving.
“What now?” I asked.
The vampire stood with great dignity at my side. He did not appear to hear me, and I figured he was probably soaking in the night, since he hadn’t seen it in over seventy-two thousand days, give or take a few.
The professor, however, said quite simply, “We get as far away from here as possible.”
“Should we borrow one of these?” I said, pointing to the array of Broncos.
“Unless you prefer to walk.”
“What about Laumer? He can do that millisecond thing and go anywhere. And maybe vampires can fly. After all, we’re still sorting out fact from fiction.”
All was quiet, very quiet, as quiet as a tomb at four a.m. How many hunters did we leave behind in the cellar? I think I counted eight. Counting Dial, there had been eleven all together, so that left two still lurking in the shadows where the bastards belonged. Where were they now?
“Do you think it’s safe?” I asked.
“I don’t see any other possibility.” The professor was still crushing on the vampire, and he seemed a little annoyed at my pointing out the fact we were likely doomed. “Laumer doesn’t need us anymore and can obviously leave anytime now, but apparently he hasn’t chosen to.”
With that, I looked at the vampire, who did seem to be rather too quiet. He was holding his side, like a long-distance runner getting a stitch, but in this case, it was like a thousand stitches.
Vermilion liquid coated his hands. Not only that, I saw it pumping through his fingers.
He smiled weakly at me. “I suppose I’ve been shot.”
“Stealth bullets!” said Dial.
Laumer swayed slightly and I put my arm around his aristocratic shoulders. “Silver stealth bullets?”
The professor said. “Of course! Why shouldn’t these foul creatures employ advanced technology?”
“Are you okay?” I asked the Vampire Laumer, realizing I was holding onto him like a parent, like a child, like a lover, like a pal. Like a prized possession I never wanted to lose.
He grimaced and his lips stretched back, revealing his beautiful teeth. “Not so bad for a dead guy.”
“They’re coming,” said Dial.
The vampire slumped and, despite his frailness, grew too heavy for me to hold. He slipped from my grasp and fell to his knees.
Dial scooped him up. “Follow me.”
And we followed him to the nearest Bronco. Dial pulled open the passenger door and crammed the vampire in the front seat. Laumer was again flopping like a rag doll.
I opened the back door of the SUV, careful not to dent the vehicle next to me, argued with decency and formality with the professor as to who should go in first, fastened my seatbelt like one always should, and watched as vampire hunters poured out of the woods.
One of them leveled a rifle at the Bronco. I ducked instinctively, thanking my instincts for not wanting to get my head blown off. The bullet thumped somewhere on the SUV, but thankfully not on me.
In my lying position, I saw Dial twisting wires together beneath the dash. “Isn’t that illegal?” I asked the professor, who was hunched next to me.
Before the old man could answer, Dial shouted, “Got it!” and the Bronco roared to life.
Dial threw the gear into reverse and smashed down on the gas. The SUV, predictably, went backwards with a leap. I heard three succinct thuds and wondered what we hit, until I looked back and saw three VVV faces smashed against the back window, distorted in what I assumed to be extreme agony.
The Bronco switched to its forward mode via Dial brain impulses sent to his hand, and our three stowaways slid off. The Vampire Laumer was slouched in the front seat, tossed around but apparently feeling no ill effects. If you didn’t count suspended animation, coma, and eternal unholy thirst as “effects.”
The professor was leaning between the front seats, doing an examination of our special guest. I thought he took a little too much time with his fondling, and it was starting to get a little creepy, but given the recent Juan-Dial revelation, I figured everything was fair game at that point, as long as I got Janice in the end.
I risked a glance up and saw that we were headed rapidly in the opposite direction of the mansion. I approved.
What I didn’t approve of, however, was the fact that a dozen or so identical Broncos thought it necessary to follow us.
Chapter Forty-three
And to top it all off, they started shooting at us.
And since I heard each dis
tinct crack, I assumed they weren’t using stealth guns. I was starting to take this personally.
“How’s he doing, professor?” I asked, taking note of the fact that my side mirror had just been obliterated by a bullet.
“He’s been shot three times, not two. One bullet’s wedged in his hip, another in his kidney. I’ve already extracted the one in his lung.”
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Dial.
“Where?”
“They blew out a tire.”
“Funny,” I said, “the ride doesn’t feel any different.”
“Well, they did.”
“But we seem to be moving okay, so it must not be too bad.”
“You’re correct, but we’re obligated to crash into a tree.”
“Say again.”
“We blew a tire in the dark of night on a deserted road during an intense chase scene, so therefore we must fulfill the scheme of things and crash into a tree.”
My mouth opened, desperately wanting to respond to his twisted logic but it was too late: he turned the wheel roughly and crashed into the first tree that caught his divided attention. The tree fell, the Bronco slowed.
“Hmm, better find a bigger one. There!”
BAM! We crashed.
“Everyone out,” said Dial.
Everyone outed, Dial dragging Laumer over his shoulder.
“Now what?” I asked, standing in the middle of the woods. The professor struggled with the vampire and I could hardly believe I had momentarily forgotten him in my will to survive. I went to the professor’s aid and helped him and Dial stand the immortal upright.
A hundred feet away, the fleet of Broncos banged off the road and followed our smashed path.
“Now we run like hell,” said Dial, moving to the vampire. “I’ll carry him.”
“Just be careful,” I said, “Though, of course, he’s the one person that all your training wouldn’t kill.”
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 2 Page 42
