Feral Hearts

by Edward P. Cardillo

  She headed back inside.

  “Stefania, wait,” Angela started, but she spoke too late as the door swung back behind Stefania. The door had only one handle, and that was on the other side. There was no way for any of the rest of them to go after her.

  “Bollocks,” Paul uttered.

  * * *

  Stefania headed back down the corridor and saw her keys glistening on a table in the middle of the kitchen, exactly where she’d left them. As she walked over towards them, a door at the far end of the kitchen opened and one of the vampyre, dressed in very little, slowly drifted into the room.

  Stefania ducked quickly behind one of the kitchen benches as the vampyre, accompanied by one of the revenants, entered the kitchen, sniffed the air, and promptly turned straight in the direction of her hiding place.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are…” the vampyre taunted. Knowing it was hopeless and that she had very little chance of an escape, Stefania reluctantly got to her feet.

  The moment she did so, the once-human revenant leapt towards her. Stefania stepped back and as she did, slashed out with her knife, leaving a deep gash across the creature’s chest. Hurt, the revenant retreated, preparing to pounce again and glaring at the human who had dared to cut him.

  Stefania thought she recognized the creature. Though his features were now noticeably altered, he closely resembled one of the old widowers who, until recently, had lived in the town. Stefania thought he was the one who used to run Derosso's local general store, but she wasn’t sure. She had only been in there once or twice before the store’s sudden and mysterious closure. Rumor had it the owner had gone mad, totally and irreversibly insane. No one talked about why.

  He had been the first of many.

  Stefania had her suspicions. Recently it seemed as though many of the local men had all started to go crazy, almost all at once. The only thing that linked their sudden common madness was the arrival in town of the Feral Hearts strip club and the brothel on the hill.

  Stefania had no proof, but staring at this creature before her, Stefania thought she knew for definite now exactly what had been going on. Her suspicions had been proven. The vampyres had been slowly converting the men of the town into these…things. Twisted monstrosities of the people they once had been.

  This creature had once been human. Now, he seemed to have reverted to a primal state, more beast-like in nature. Walking on all fours, the nails on his hands and feet had been replaced by long claws, and his mouth was now filled with way too many teeth to fit his jaw, causing him to drool uncontrollably.

  Those were not human teeth sitting in his mouth any more either, but teeth designed specifically to rip and tear...and maul. They were the teeth of an unnaturally born predator, and she was the prey.

  Slipping her keys slowly into her pocket so she wouldn’t lose them again, Stefania put down her knife and pulled out the small crucifix from around her neck she had been given by her mother when she was seven. Thrusting it out in front of her, holding it in both hands, Stefania began to chant the Lord’s Prayer in Italian.

  The revenant hissed at the sound and backed further away. His eyes locked on the crucifix as he tried to put as much distance between him and the religious emblem as he could.

  “That may work on him, Sweetie,” the vampyre said as she stepped forward, “but don’t think your little toy will work on me. Your false God holds no power over me."

  With one clawed hand, the vampyre reached out and snatched the crucifix from Stefania’s fingers, breaking the chain effortlessly. Looking straight into the eyes of her prey, the vampyre slipped the silver crucifix into her mouth and swallowed.

  Stefania could see the cross and the chain clearly disappearing all the way down the foul creature’s throat as they went down. A small hiss of steam emerged from out the vampyre’s mouth.

  Apart from that, there appeared to be no other sign of ill effect.

  The vampyre smiled, a grin that revealed far too many teeth, and stepped even closer towards Stefania. There was barely even a hair’s breadth between them.

  Unable to move and completely frozen in fear, Stefania felt her bladder letting go and a trickle of urine running down her leg. She felt ashamed, but she had never in her life been as scared as she was now. She reached for her knife but, in her blind fumbling, couldn’t find it.

  “You know,” the vampyre said, “your kind really are quite…pathetic. Are you afraid, little one? Are you scared? You should be. Not even your pitiful false God can save you now…”

  Backed up against the wall with nowhere to go, realizing the hopelessness of her situation and that she might actually be about to die, Stefania opened her mouth to scream.

  She never got a chance.

  Before Stefania could register what was about to happen, the vampyre lashed out with her claws, opening up her victim’s throat in a geyser of blood. It leapt upon her and started to feed, lapping up the lifeblood that flowed from Stefania’s body as she fell, slowly dying, to the floor.

  With her body bleeding out and only seconds left to live, Stefania attempted to reach behind her and lay hands on her knife. Finally, able to snag it in her last few moments, Stefana swung it around, but the vampire easily deflected the weak blow, breaking Stefania’s wrist in the process.

  Stefania barely noticed. By then, it was too late anyway.

  The former guide was dead. Gone. No more.

  The vampyre dropped Stefania’s lifeless, drained corpse to the floor like an unwanted doll and prepared to move on. There were plenty more where this one had come from. Hopefully, the next one might put up a bit more of a fight. She liked a challenge.

  Somehow their blood always tasted better when they struggled.

  * * *

  “Stefania! Stefania!”

  Lucy frantically banged on the door outside, but to no avail. Paul pulled her away. Angela just stood watching the pair, detached.

  It had been five minutes.

  “She’s not coming back. Those bitches must have gotten to her,” Paul reluctantly told Lucy. “If they hadn’t, she would have been back by now.”

  “They’re picking us off one-by-one,” said Angela. “Taking the weakest first, thinning the herd. Like lions do with gazelle, or sharks with their prey. We should get moving again. Others will be coming.”

  From the streets beyond the hotel screams, howls, shrieks, and cries could be heard issuing from throughout the town. People were being killed, and Paul could smell burning.

  “Now what are we going to do?” Lucy practically yelled at them both. “Where are we going to go? What’s your fucking plan now? Huh?”

  “There’s the police station,” Paul suggested. “There’s bound to be some kind of vehicle there we can steal. And guns. You can’t tell me a police station in a town as fucked as this one isn’t gonna have any guns. Maybe we might even be able to call for help.”

  “Do you even know how to get there?” Lucy asked, on the verge of panic. She was getting close to losing it, Paul realized, and really who could blame her?

  Angela just stood there, remaining silent, detached, and simply watching them both.

  “Trust me,” Paul said. “I’ll be able to find it. We’ll take the back streets. I’ll get us there. I have this kind of spooky sixth sense of direction. I never get lost.”

  For the second time that night, Paul found himself reluctantly taking control, almost despite himself. He didn’t like it, but there simply wasn’t anybody else left. Lucy was about to flake, and Angela was so unresponsive. There were many things that Paul wasn’t, and one of them was a natural born leader.

  All Paul really wanted to do was survive

  * * *

  Tony Forelli threw down the radio transmitter on which he had been attempting to call for back-up and cursed in Italian. Since the local boss who’d brought the girls here had hung up on him, all the phone lines had gone down. His cell phone wasn’t working, and he couldn’t call out on the police radio transmi
tter either. All communications outside the town were down.

  He, his Mama, and the rest of the town were on their own and pretty much fucked by his reckoning. The only chance he and his Mama had of surviving, it seemed, was to try and escape before things got any worse.

  The rest of Derosso could fend for itself.

  Opening up the police station’s weapon locker, Anthony armed himself with a shotgun and plenty of shells. He then headed back upstairs to his apartment above the station and knocked loudly several times on the guest bedroom door.

  “Who is it?” his Mama called from inside.

  “Mama, it’s me!”

  “How do I know it’s you?”

  “Because I’m the only one with the balls to tell you that your meatballs taste like merda!”

  The door slowly opened.

  Tony reached in and quickly pulled his mother out into the hall. She slapped him hard on his face, presumably for the commentary on her meatballs.

  “We’re leaving, Mama. Now. I did a bad thing. I let evil things into this town, and now they’ve gone mad. We have to go.”

  “What sort of evil things?” Mama asked him.

  “Vampiro,” Tony said, and that was enough. Mama knew enough of the old ways to know what he was referring to.

  Within minutes, the two of them were making their way out of the rear exit of the police station.

  Tony prayed silently for the first time in years.

  * * *

  Paul, Angela, and Lucy were no more than a couple of blocks away from the police station when the undead took another of their number.

  Though Paul seemed confident, he knew where they were headed. Lucy was less than sure. The twists and turns they seemed to be taking left her feeling confused and disoriented. That, added to the increasing amount of smoke and fumes she was breathing in, was not a good combination.

  She paused to take a breath and when she looked up, Paul and Angela were gone.

  Shit, she thought.

  A figure stepped out of the shadows, hurt and bleeding. It took Lucy a second to recognize her own father. There was something different about him though, something not quite right. Lucy couldn’t place it, but was just too relieved in that moment to see him to really know or care.

  “Dad?” she asked, confused at what he was doing in Derosso and convinced that she was hallucinating.

  “Lucy,” her father replied, “thank God I found you. Your mother sent me here to keep an eye on you. She was more worried about you than she let on and told me to come after you, follow you, and make sure you were okay for a few days before flying back. I’d just decided to check out some of the town when all of this started happening.

  “What is going on? Why are all those women back out on the street running around killing everybody?”

  “Oh, Daddy!” Lucy ran to him, tears running down her cheeks. Everything that had been building up in her all this time suddenly erupted. For the first time tonight, she finally found herself able to acknowledge just how scared and terrified she had been feeling. Looking into her father’s eyes, her self-assured veneer melted away, and she felt like a little girl again.

  It’s all right now, Lucy thought. Daddy is here.

  Her father’s face rippled, changed, and became something else.

  In place of where her father had been only a few moments ago, one of the scantily clad vampyres was now gliding towards her. Too late, Lucy realised she had been duped and was too slow to do anything about it.

  As Lucy turned to flee, other vampyres descended from the buildings and fire escapes around her, surrounding her. As one, they fell on her and began to rip and tear and feed, sharing the feast of her flesh and drinking deep of her blood.

  Fortunately, Lucy’s torment was short lived.

  Unfortunately, that was probably of little comfort to Lucy.

  * * *

  Tony silently made his way to the rear of the police station and opened the back door that led to the side street outside.

  “Wait here in the alley,” he told his Mama, “and stay quiet!”

  A few yards away was the garage that held his pride and joy, a Land Cruiser of the kind the polizia used in Rome. Tony had demanded it as a part payment for allowing the Russians to set up a strip joint in his town in the first place, a decision he was rapidly starting to regret.

  Fumbling for his keys, Tony hurried across the yard as stealthily as he could manage. Opening the side door to the garage, Tony slipped inside and hit the controls that would open the big double doors at the front. Hopefully the both of them would be able to drive off into the sunrise before anyone realised they were gone.

  The doors were slow, taking forever to retract, but thankfully made little sound.

  Come on, come on, come on. Every second spent was another second wasted.

  * * *

  Mary quickly leapt along the back streets and side roads, headed swiftly towards her destination. As soon as Viktoryia had realized that Paul and his fellow travelers had fled the hotel, the vampyres pulled Mary and a couple of the other girls aside.

  “With nowhere else to go, the cattle will most likely head towards the local polizia di stato. They will feel safe there. I want you to beat them there and cut them off. I’ll follow behind shortly and join you as soon as we clear the hotel. Do what you like with the others, but do not forget, I want the one named Paul kept alive!”

  Mary owed Viktoryia, more than any of the others. The Head vampyre had saved her. Unfortunately, as she’d soon learnt, in undeath, just as in life, everything came with a price.

  Mary had been dying when she first met Jamie from a wasting disease that was slowly eating her away from the inside. She had always meant to tell Jamie about it, but all through the early days of their relationship there had never been a right time. Then Jamie had told her all about Viktoryia.

  The pair had challenged Viktoryia, driven her off, but Viktoriya had somehow sensed the illness, the cancer inside of her. A week later, she returned to Mary with a deal, promising her eternal life with no more need to fear death. Caught in a moment of weakness, at a time when her pain was at the highest it had been in months, Mary reluctantly agreed.

  The price she’d agreed to pay had been to give Jamie up and leave him to Viktoryia. There had been no mention at that time of her needing blood to survive, nor that she would forever more be tormented by her desire to feed.

  In the days, weeks, and months that followed, Mary’s increased blood lust had quickly consumed her. She lost herself, become more animal than human, driven by instinct and the need to survive. She’d learned to hunt, to feast, and to feed.

  She was a predator.

  In time, as she became more self-aware, Mary felt ashamed.

  Even if she considered breaking her promise and returning to Jamie’s arms, she no longer thought she could face him. So, Mary shut off all emotion. She became like the rest of them, her sisters, her new family…

  …until tonight, when she had seen Jamie again and watched him die in front of her.

  Though she was no longer capable of feeling emotion, deep inside of her something had begun to stir.

  After tonight, Mary decided she would give up.

  She couldn’t do this anymore. This would be her last night of being a vampyre.

  She would do Viktoryia’s bidding this one last time, then no more.

  * * *

  Pulling into a back alleyway and away from the street, Mary spotted an elderly lady standing in the shadows at the rear of the police station seemingly alone, an easy target.

  Despite her earlier assurances to herself that she wouldn’t be feeding anymore, Mary found the familiar blood lust descending upon her like a cloud of sanguine mist. She had not fed in days, and her stomach was cramping from hunger pains.

  Unable to resist the temptation any longer, Mary flew into the alleyway and pounced, pushing the old lady to the floor and licking at the woman’s throat with her tongue before sinking her teeth in dee
p.

  Beautiful, coppery, fear-filled blood rushed into her mouth like a tsunami. Mary felt as though she were drowning but found she couldn’t stop herself until her appetite finally sated.

  Excitement coursed through her as her victim’s blood spilled down her lips and over her face. Mary felt her nipples hardening and a dampness developing between her legs like she had never experienced before. Drinking blood was not just about sating hunger. It was also the way her kind experienced sexual pleasure.

  There were many vampyres who even achieved climax during intense feedings, she had heard. Some of them often starved themselves specifically so that they could intensify their sexual pleasure as they fed. But that was not why I waited so long before feeding again, Mary tried to tell herself. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t. She wanted to believe that she had it in her to refrain for the right reasons.

  From behind her came the sound of a shotgun being cocked. Mary came out of the trance-like state she had entered and was suddenly overcome with feelings of guilt, disgust, and shame at herself and her actions. She rose to her feet and turned towards the man standing at the end of the alleyway.

  The old lady’s heart was still clutched in her fist from when she had ripped it from her body in her frenzy. Her victim’s blood still coated her lips and fell from her face in big, fat, red drops.

  Kill me, Mary whispered, as much in his mind as with her mouth. Kill me, please. End it all. Just do it. Put me out of all this pain and misery…please.

  She had been cured, the cancer was now gone. It had left her when her body had begun the transformation from human into vampyre, but the cost had been too great.

  Mary just wanted someone to finally end it all…

  The shotgun roared and Mary’s head exploded, spraying her brains all over the walls of the alleyway.

  Tony Forelli fell to his knees.

  He knelt before the corpses of his Mama and the thing that killed her. Tony Forelli tried to scream but found any sound simply refusing to come out. His body shook, and he knew that he was going into shock.