“Goodbye . . . D. Oh, the potential we had . . . ”
The weight in D’s hand dwindled rapidly, along with her voice.
No one moved.
The dazzling light threw long, long shadows across the floor.
When one skinny boy raised his damp eyes at the sound of a door opening and closing, the beautiful Vampire Hunter had disappeared.
-
A few days later, a horse and its gorgeous rider were following the narrow road where the crusted remains of snow conspired with the shoots of young grass.
Though the night was over, a thick cover of leaden clouds shrouded the eastern sky. The rays of the morning sun didn’t reach the ground.
An almost imperceptible breeze fluttered the hem of the rider’s black coat as he crossed the sea of grass stretching far into the distance.
Behind the rider, there was the moan of the morning’s first electric bus approaching.
About fifteen feet ahead of him was a small bench. Humble though it was, this was a stop on a bus line connecting the Frontier and the Capital.
Noticing the horse and rider, the skinny boy seated on the bench looked up in surprise. The next moment, his expression became bashful and he looked down again. His gloveless hands were thoroughly chapped.
The small traveling bag by his side bore the address of his destination as well as his name—Marco.
The horse and rider passed by.
Shortly thereafter, there was the sound of the bus stopping. It drew closer, then passed.
Suddenly, a window opened and the boy stuck his head out. Wildly waving his thin hand, he shouted something.
The piercing groan of the engine and wheels scribbled out his voice. But D could hear him. And this is what the boy had said: “I’m headed to the Capital. Gonna do the history of the Nobility.”
A gust of wind blew, as if to chase after the bus.
D remembered.
The face of a boy listening the final words of a girl. A look of boundless pride in his eyes. The face of the someone who loved.
And D knew.
The messenger who left the white flowers, and let a girl dream.
At some point the clouds broke, and, as he watched the little bus disappear into the sun-showered distance, a faint smile started to rise on D’s lips.
If that boy could have seen it, he would have told people for the rest of his days how he’d been the one to bring it out. It was just such a smile.
VILLAGE OF THE DEAD
CHAPTER 1
-
The tiny village seemed to obstinately refuse the blessings that the sunlight poured down so generously from above.
Though a Frontier village like this might see its share of years, as a rule, the size of the community didn’t fluctuate. The eighty or so homes wavered in the warming light. Every last bit of the lingering snow had been consumed by the black soil, and spring was near.
And yet—the village was dead.
Doors of reinforced plastic and specially treated lumber hung open, swinging with the feeble breeze; in the communal cookery, which should have been roiling with the lively voices of wives and children preparing for the evening meal, only dust danced alone.
Something was missing. People.
The majority of the homes remained in perfect order, with no signs of struggle, but in one or two there were overturned chairs in the living rooms. There was one house where the bed covers were disheveled, as if someone just settling down to sleep had gotten out of bed to attend to some trifling matter.
Had gotten out—and had never come back.
Small black stains could be found on the floors of that house. A number of spots no bigger than the tip of your little finger, they might be mistaken for something like a bit of fur off a pet. They wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye. Even if they wanted to, there were no people around with eyes to be caught.
Evening grew near, the white sunlight took on a dim, bluish tint, the wind blowing down the deserted streets grew more insistent, and an eerie atmosphere pervaded the village at dusk—like ebon silhouettes were coalescing in the shadows, training their bloodshot gaze on any travelers that might pass through the wide-open gates.
More time passed. Just when the dim shadows were beginning to linger in these streets settling into darkness, the sound of iron-shod hooves pounding the earth and the crunch of tires in well-worn ruts came drifting in through the entrance to the village.
A bus and three people on horseback came to a halt in front of one of the watchtowers just inside the gates.
The atomic-powered bus was the sort used for communications across the Frontier, but its body had been modified, so that now iron bars were set into the windows and a trenchant plow was affixed to the front. The vehicle was not exactly the sort of thing upstanding folks had much call for.
Every inch of the vehicle was jet black—a perfect compliment to the foreboding air of the trio looming before it.
“What the hell’s going on here?” asked the man on the right. He wore a black shirt and black leather pants. Conspicuous for his fierce expression and frightfully long torso, here was a man that would stand out anywhere.
“Don’t look like our client’s here to meet us,” said the man on the far left. Though his face wore a wry smile, his thread-thin eyes brimmed with a terrible light as they scoured the surroundings. The hexagonal staff strapped to his well-defined back made his shadow appear impaled.
As if on cue, the two turned their heads toward the even more muscular giant in the center. From neck to wrist, his body was covered by a protector of thin metal and leather, but the mountain of muscles beneath it was still sharply defined. His face was like a chunk of granite that had sprouted whiskers, and he brimmed with an intensity that would most likely make a bear backpedal if it ran across him in the dark. Twining around him, the wind seemed to carry the stench of a beast as it blew off again.
“Looks like they’ve had it,” he muttered in a stony tone. “The whole damn village gone in one night—looks like we lost the goose that laid the golden egg. Just to be sure, let’s check out a few houses. Carefully.”
“I ain’t too crazy about that idea,” the man in black said. “How ‘bout we send Grove? For him it’d . . . ” His voice died out halfway through the sentence. The giant had shot a glance at him. It was like being scrutinized by a stone. “I . . . er . . . I was just kidding, bro.”
It wasn’t merely the difference in their builds that made the man in black grow pale—it appeared as if he truly feared the giant. Quickly dismounting as the man with the hexagonal staff did likewise, they entered the village with a gliding gait.
There was the sound of the bus door opening, and the face of a girl, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three with blonde hair, peered out at the giant from the driver’s seat. “Borgoff, what’s up?” she asked. Though her visage was as lovely as a blossom, there was something unsettling about how overly alluring it was, something that called to mind a carnivorous insect—beautiful but deadly.
“Odds are the village’s been wasted. Be ready to move on a moment’s notice.” Saying that in a subdued tone, the world seemed to go topsy-turvy. His voice suddenly became gentle. “How’s Grove?” he inquired.
“He’s okay for the moment. Not likely to have another seizure for a while.”
It was unclear whether or not the giant heard the girl’s response, as he didn’t so much as nod but kept gazing at the silent, lonely rows of houses. He flicked his eyes up toward the sky and the dingy ivory hue that lingered there. The round moon was already showing its pearly white figure.
“Wish we had a little more cloud cover.”
Just as he’d muttered those words, two figures came speeding down the street as if riding the very wind.
“It’s just like we thought. Not a single freaking person,” the man in black said.
Then the man with the hexagonal staff also turned to the sky and said, “Sun’ll be setting soon. The safest bet would be to blow t
his place as soon as possible, big guy.” Saying that, he jabbed out his forefinger.
The giant easily pierced the hazy darkness with his vision, glimpsing the tiny black spot on the tip of that finger.
“Make for the graveyard,” he said.
In a flash, a tense hue shot through the faces of the other men, but soon enough they too grinned, climbed effortlessly back on their horses, and boldly started their mounts down village streets that had fallen into the stillness of death.
-
So what had transpired in the village?
The entire populace of a village disappearing in one fell swoop wasn’t such a bizarre occurrence on the Frontier. For example, the carnivorous balloonlike creatures known as flying jellyfish seemed to produce an extremely large specimen every twenty years or so, and, often reaching a mile and a quarter in diameter, the beast could cover an entire village and selectively dissolve the flesh off every living creature it detected.
-
Then there was the basilisk. A magical creature said to inhabit only mountain ravines and haunted valleys, it had merely to wait at the entrance to a village and stare fixedly at a given spot within. Its single, gigantic eye would glow a reddish tint before finally releasing a crimson beam, and villagers would come, first one, then another, right into its fearsome waiting jaws. But the sole weakness of that beast was that, occasionally, one of the hypnotized humans would bid farewell to their family. When they did so, it was always in exactly the same words, and the remaining villagers would prepare to go out and hunt the basilisk as a group.
However, the most likely cause of every last person vanishing from an entire village was both the most familiar and the most terrifying of threats.
When news of such an eerie happening was passed along by even a single traveler lucky enough to have slipped through the vanished community unharmed, people could practically hear the footfalls of their dark lords, supposedly long since extinct, lingering in that area. The masters of the darkness—the vampires.
-
Having arrived at the graveyard on the edge of town, the trio of riders and the lone vehicle came to an abrupt halt. In a spot not five hundred yards from the forest, moss-encrusted gravestones formed serpentine rows, and there was an open space where, little by little, a blue-black darkness rose from the ground.
The group strode forward, continuously scanning their surroundings. Finally the group came to a halt in the depths of a forest that threatened to overrun the tombstones. From that spot alone, there blew a weird miasma. The ground above it looked as if something—some beast or demon—had churned over a large expanse of ground, revealing a red clay, the color of dried blood. The ghastly miasma over this exposed earth froze the leading pair atop their horses, and made the giant swallow so hard his Adam’s apple thumped in his throat.
What lay concealed by this ravaged earth?
Moving only their eyes, the men scanned the area in search of the source of the miasma.
It was then that there was a dull sound.
No, it wasn’t a sound, but rather a voice. A long, low groan—tormented and unabashed, like a patient having a seizure—began to snake through the uncanny tableau.
The men didn’t move.
Partly it was the ghastly miasma, twisting tight around their bones and preventing them from moving. But, more than anything, they were frozen to the spot because that voice, those moans, seemed to issue from within the bus. When the giant had asked, hadn’t the girl said that Grove wouldn’t have a seizure? It must have been the bizarre atmosphere of this place that made a liar out of her. Or perhaps his cries came because, no matter what illness afflicted them, there was something humans found horribly unsettling and inescapable about their condition.
It was a few seconds later that a figure appeared from behind one of the massive tree trunks, as if to offer some answer to the riddle.
A veritable ghost, it stepped its way across the red clay in a precarious gait, finally coming to a standstill at a spot about thirty feet ahead.
The figure loomed before the glimmering silver moon. An older man of fifty or so, with a dignified countenance and silver hair that seemed to give off a whitish glow, anyone would have taken the figure for a village elder. Actually, however, this old man was doing two things that, when witnessed by those who knew about such matters, were as disturbing as anything could possibly be.
He was using his left hand to pin his jacket, with its upturned collar, to his chest, while his open right hand covered his mouth—as if to conceal his teeth.
“Thank you for coming,” the old man said. His voice seemed pained, like something he’d just managed to vomit up. “Thank you for coming . . . but you’re too late. Every last soul in the village is done for, myself included, but . . . ”
Surely these men must’ve noticed that, as he spoke, the old man didn’t turn his eyes on them.
There was nothing before his pupils, stagnant and muddied like those of a dead fish. Only a long line of trees continuing on into the abruptly growing darkness.
“Hurry, go after him. He . . . he made off with my daughter. Please, hurry after them and get her back . . . Or if she’s already one of them . . . Please make her end a quick one . . . ”
Appealing, entreating, the old man went on in his reed-thin voice. Not so much as glancing at the men before him, he faced into empty space. With the darkness so dear to demons steadily creeping in around them, it was an unsettling sight.
“He’d been after my daughter for a while. Time after time he tried to take her, and each and every time I fought him off. But last night, he finally showed his fangs. Once he got one of us, the rest fell like dominoes . . . I’m begging you, save my daughter from that accursed fate. Last night, he . . . took off to the north. With your speed, there might still be time . . . If you manage to save my daughter, go to the town of Galiusha. My younger sister’s there. If you explain the situation, she’ll give you the ten million dalas I promised . . . I beg of you . . . ”
At this point, the heap of dirt behind the old man underwent a change.
A small mound bulged up suddenly, and then a pale hand burst through it and into sight. Resembling the “dead man’s hand” flowers that bloomed only by night, this was in fact a real hand.
A deep grumbling filled the forest. Sheer malice, or a curse, the grumbling bore a thirst—an unquenchable thirst for blood that would last for all eternity.
The figures pushing through the dirt and rising one after another were the villagers, all transformed into vampires in the span of a single night.
Appearing just as they had in life, only now with complexions as sickly pale as paraffin, when the moonlight struck them they glowed with an eerie, pale-blue light.
There were burly men. There were dainty women. There were girls in dresses. There were boys in short pants. Nearly five hundred strong, their bloodshot eyes gleaming and mouths held humorless, words like unearthly or ghastly hardly sufficed to describe the way they stared intently at the men. So focused were their eyes, the figures didn’t even bother to knock off the dirt that clung to their heads and shoulders.
“Oh, it’s too late now. Kill us somehow and get out of here . . . Once it’s really night I’ll be . . . ” The old man’s left hand dropped. The pair of wounds that remained on the nape of his neck also showed on the necks of the other villagers.
It’s hard to say which happened first—the old man lowering his right hand, or their jaws dropping. For between his lips thrown perilously wide, a pair of fangs jutted from the upper gums.
“Yeah, now it’s getting interesting,” the man in black said in an understandably tense tone as he reached for the crescent blades at his waist.
Perhaps the spell that held them had been broken, for the hands of the man with the hexagonal staff were gliding to the weapon upon his back.
The old man zipped effortlessly forward, followed by the mob at his back.
“Giddyap!” As if this was just what he’d been w
aiting for, the man in black spurred his horse into action. The one with the hexagonal staff followed after him.
A number of the villagers had their heads staved in under the hooves, falling backwards only to have their sternums and abdomens trampled as well.
“What are you waiting for, freaks? Come and get it!” As the man in black shouted, the heads of nearly half of the fang-baring villagers went sailing into the air, sliced cleanly like so many watermelons.
An instant later, silver light limned another corona, and the heads flew from the next rank. Even novice vampires like these knew they mustn’t lose their heads or brains, but they dropped to the ground leaking gray matter or spouting bloody geysers as if they were fountainheads.
What had severed the heads of the vampire victims so cleanly was one of the blades that’d hung at the man’s waist, about a foot in diameter and shaped like a half-moon. Honed to a razor-fine arc, it was known among the warriors of the Frontier as the crescent blade. A wire or cord was usually affixed to one end, and the wielder could set up a sort of safety zone around himself and keep his enemies at bay by spinning it as widely or tightly as he wished. Due to the intense training necessary to handle it, however, there were few who could use the weapon so effectively.
But now, the weapons swished from both hands of the man in black to paint gorgeous silver arcs, slashing through villagers like magic—to the right and the left, above him and below, never missing the slightest change in their position. In fact, each and every one of the villagers had clearly been cut from a different angle. His attacks came with such speed and from phantasmal angles! It didn’t seem possible anything he set his sights on would be spared.
Another particularly weird sound, entirely different from the slice of the crescent blade, came from his companion’s favorite weapon—the hexagonal staff that he always carried on his back. Both ends of the staff had sharp protrusions, veritable stakes, but normally this weapon would be spun and used to bludgeon opponents. On this night, its owner was using the hexagonal staff in this manner. However, the way that he swung it around was quite intense. Spinning it around his waist like a waterwheel set on its side, he smashed the head of a foe to his right, spun it clear around his back, and took out an opponent on his left. The movement took less than a tenth of a second.
Vampire Hunter D: Raiser of Gales Page 21
