I have no idea how long I lay insensate in that remote spot, my body crushed and fused to stone, before the smell of blood aroused me. A year? A decade? A hundred years? Long enough for moss and lichen to spread across my desiccated flesh. Long enough for a tree to sprout up through my ribs.
The only true stroke of luck was that the men who found me believed me to be some kind of earthbound demi-god, and offered a blood sacrifice to me in exchange for a successful hunt.
Good luck for me… not so much for them.
I worried at that tree all through the afternoon. I could smell the humans moving further and further away as I clawed off pieces of bark. My fingers were stiff and flat and wouldn’t bend very well. Bits of brittle flesh sloughed from the bones as I scrabbled at the wood. I snapped off the branches in frustration. The hunters were getting away!
I wanted their blood, not just the blood of the animals they’d snared for their dinner. I was weak, my body mangled beyond all recognition, but I pressed my crushed fingers to their task. I gave them no respite. I was ravenous. I couldn’t let those hot, juicy humans escape!
As the sun descended toward the featureless horizon and the air grew ever colder, I finally managed to claw deeply enough into the heartwood of the spindly trunk to snap off the top of the tree and throw it aside. There was still a spike of jagged wood poking up through me, but I knew I would be able to push myself off it if I could free my other arm.
I began to wriggle my body back and forth until at last, beneath the purpling sky, my shoulders tore free of the stones. I snarled at the pain, jerking my torso forward again and again. Each time a little more of my flesh came off. Each time, I managed to free myself a little bit more.
I let myself rest for a while after that. To be honest, it was more of a swoon. The heat of the hares’ blood had long since faded. My body was no longer repairing itself at such a frantic pace. I was exhausted and dizzy. I let my head fall back, panting. My breath made no steam in the air, as I was as cold as the stone beneath me, as cold as the permafrost in that desolate tundra.
One by one, stars began to wink in the bruised heavens above me. I remember lying there, watching them slowly appear. Those distant, blinking points of light stirred something dormant in my brain. Memories trembled at the edge of my consciousness. I could feel them there. Touch them, almost. I groped for them mentally, thinking them important for some mysterious reason… but I was still too damaged. My memories were like the smooth nub of something buried deep in the ground, and I couldn’t get a grip on them. I couldn’t haul them up from the frozen earth of my mind.
The Mammoth Hunters had moved beyond the range of my senses, but I knew I could still track them if I freed myself soon.
Presently, I became aware of a new source of blood. I smelled dog fur and heard the almost imperceptible beating of a distant living heart. I had begun to twist and push myself away from the stones again, but when I noticed the new blood smell, I stilled myself and probed the darkness with my potent vampire senses.
A wolf was approaching, drawn by the smell of the hares’ blood the Mammoth Hunters had splattered on the ground around me.
I made myself as motionless as the stones beneath me. I could feel my blood hunger yammering inside me. Patience! I chastised it.
The wolf trotted out of the dark. I watched through narrowed eyes as it ambled toward me. It paused, scenting the wind, then came onwards. It was a thin, gray wolf, hardly bigger than a camp dog, its ribs showing through its mangy fur, an old bitch, exiled from her pack, perhaps. She was sick, dying. I could smell the resignation of death in her breath, in the stench of her flesh and organs.
And she could smell the blood of the hares. I heard her stomach gurgle.
But she paused again. She sensed danger.
I watched as her fear and her hunger made war. She sniffed the air. I heard her whine, low in her throat, then hunger won out over her natural wariness and she trotted forward, dipping her nose to snort at the dried blood splattered on the ground around me.
I struck.
My twisted arm shot out, faster than any striking snake, and I sank my fingers into her furry neck. The bitch leapt with a yelp, but I was far too fast. Before the animal could turn her head and snap at me with her yellow, rotting teeth, I had slashed her neck open with my fangs. I crushed her to me and drank greedily. The she-wolf’s blood gushed down my throat. Her heat filled me.
Almost instantly, my flesh and bones began to knit together again. I heard a crackling sound, like dry sticks being snapped over a knee. I felt the bones in my face shift with the sound. One of the bones in my forearm drew back into the muscle, and the skin healed over.
More… I needed more!
The old wolf died, and I squeezed her body savagely to push more blood through her veins.
When I could not suck another drop from the ragged tears in the she-wolf’s neck, I threw the carcass away from me. Grinning and licking my lips, I heaved my body forward and tore the rest of my fused flesh from the stones. I clawed the frozen blanket of earth from my lap to free my pelvis and upper legs. Finally free, I heaved my body onto its side, twisting myself off the wooden stake that I’d been skewered on.
I laughed then in the starlight.
Free!
My left arm was still broken and twisted around behind me, and my legs were unrecognizable, crippled and useless-- one foot was hanging by a single cord of muscle-- but I was free!
Employing my only functional arm, I began to drag myself across the frozen ground. My breath steamed now with the blood of the wolf, but it would grow cold again soon enough. My body continued to heal as I crawled like a monster across the ground, a twisted, white, crab-like thing. Fangs gleaming, eyes flashing like lamps in the dark, I crawled.
I crawled after the Mammoth Hunters, inhuman, no memory of the past and no thought of the future, just one thing in my mind: the blood-thirst, and how I might slake it.
The Last Mammoth Hunter
1
The Mammoth Hunters stalked their prey, and I stalked them.
I was curled in the scant shade of a wind-warped shrub, observing them from the pinnacle of a grassy hummock as they snuck up on the herd. It was early morning, but the light was already burning my eyes, the sun a blazing nova in the sky. I had finally caught up with hunting party after a week of crawling across the ground on my belly, and I watched them now hungrily from my hiding place, only a couple hundred meters away.
Though I’d moved without rest after freeing myself from the stones, it had taken me a week to catch up to them. The hunters moved swiftly by day. It was only at night that I managed to gain any ground on them.
My progress was slow during the day, as I had to inch forward on my belly, my face turned to the frozen ground. Contrary to popular fiction, vampires do not burst into flames at the first glint of sunlight-- ridiculous!-- but we prefer to move at night. Our eyes are very sensitive. So during the day, I slid mechanically through the grass, only faintly aware of my surroundings, following them by the scent they left behind them on the frosty earth. I made better progress at night, shuffling forward lizard-like in the dark, my eyes and fangs gleaming.
Along the way, I’d managed to catch a mole and an injured bird, and I’d sucked every drop of blood from them, but such paltry fare had done little to satisfy my hunger, or repair the horrific damage to my body. Every so often, I encountered the bones and entrails of the small animals the Mammoth Hunters had snared and devoured, and I licked the last bloody juices from the bits of offal they’d cast aside.
Each day I was able to move a little faster, until I finally caught up to the Mammoth Hunters last night.
Though I was tempted to snatch one of them from their campsite when I caught up to them, it was close to dawn and I was afraid I was too weak to kill one of them and dispose of the corpse before the sun peeked over the distant horizon. Already the eastern sky was lightening. I knew I had to wait. One of them would wander from the group tomorrow ev
ening, I counseled my ravening thirst, and when that happened, I would be waiting. I would have the cover of darkness, and the time to do what must be done. Feed, dispose of the body and hide myself before his companions arose.
I’d followed at a distance after they roused. They made their toilet and ate before they broke camp, and now I watched them crawling forward, in the same manner I’d trailed after them, slithering through the grass on their bellies toward a small herd of mammoths.
The herd was comprised of three subordinate females and a large matriarch. There were two calves following at their mother’s sides, but no bulls. Not at this time of year. The largest of the beasts, the alpha female, stood almost ten feet tall at the shoulder, and was covered, like the other adult females, in a thick and swaying shag of tangled auburn hair. The animals were tearing clods of grass from the frozen earth with their long trunks. They slapped the grass against the ground to shake the dirt from the roots, then curled their trunks under to place it in their mouths. Busy eating, none of great beasts seemed aware of the hunters winding toward them in the grass. As I watched, shading my eyes from the sun with my one good hand, I was mildly curious to see how the little men would kill one of those giant, browsing animals.
My people had encountered Mammoth Hunters from time to time when I was a living man, but I had no recollection of it then, watching them from the hill. The many millennia I’d slumbered in the glacier had pulped my brain a thousand times over, and I had not yet healed enough to recover my memories. I had become a little more cunning in the last few days, feeding on the blood of the region’s scant wildlife, that and the hunters’ castoffs, but that afternoon, watching the Mammoth Hunters stalk their prey, I was hardly more intelligent than any other predatory animal.
At some unseen signal, several of the hunters leapt to their feet and pelted toward the mammoths. The massive animals reared in surprise and began to thunder away from the sprinting humans. As the subordinate females fled in a panic, the matriarch of the herd doubled around, her ears flapping out to the sides in a threatening display. She moved to protect the calves at the rear of the group. The trumpeting of the shaggy animals echoed across the windy tundra.
As I watched, two of the bigger men in the hunting party ran alongside one of the smaller adult females and caught handholds in her draping pelt. They began to pull themselves up her coarse wool, hand over hand. She reared and blared as they climbed her, but couldn’t jar them loose.
Korg, the leader of the hunting party, was first to haul himself onto the back of the agitated creature. He pumped one fist in the air in triumph, then reached behind to pull some kind of lance from a leather pack strapped between his shoulder blades.
Before he could stab the mammoth with his spear, the matriarch of the herd came lumbering toward him. Unlike modern elephants, both the male and female mammoth were equipped with tusks. Korg saw the matriarch’s deadly tusks coming at him and swung down onto the opposite side of the smaller female’s flanks. He did not drop to the ground, but clung to the beast’s shaggy wool, swinging to and fro as she trampled around in fear.
The matriarch and the smaller female almost collided. The bigger mammoth trumpeted in frustration and anger, then swung away as she shifted her attention to three nearby hunters, who were chasing down a calf. Squalling in fury, she gave pursuit. Even so far away, I could feel the impact of her footsteps throbbing through the soil.
The second hunter fell off the bucking subordinate female and was struck a glancing blow by her shuffling hind leg. The impact sent him wheeling across the ground, but Korg did not fall. The big leader of the Mammoth Hunters held on.
I watched him climb back on the female’s shoulders. He didn’t pump his arm in triumph as he had the first time, but drove his spear into the mammoth’s neck, right where the base of the animal’s skull met the vertebrae of the neck. He must have missed whatever vital spot he was aiming for, however. As the female reared up, honking in pain, he grabbed two handfuls of her coarse wool and tried to cling to the bucking behemoth. His legs swung out below him. I watched, entranced, as the great beast reared, pumping her forelegs, the little man swinging back and forth from his handhold. Her feet returned to the ground with a resounding thoomb! then Korg regained his position, snatched another lance from his quiver and drove it into the animal’s skull.
The female went down instantly, her legs buckling beneath her. The six ton beast struck the ground with a reverberating thud that made the little stones around my arm, some two hundred meters away, jump off the ground. I saw a geyser of blood jet across the hunter on her back. The sight made me twitch forward hungrily before I could restrain my appetite and hunker back down in the shade of the bush.
The alpha female glanced toward her fallen sister, then herded the others away. They receded anxiously into the distance, their mournful trumpeting and the low thunder of their movement, lingering in the air even after they’d vanished from sight.
The Mammoth Hunters gathered around the fallen cow. I watched her eyes roll round to look at them, little men jumping and pumping their fists in the air in celebration, and then she huffed and passed away.
Although there’s been quite a bit of debate in recent decades concerning why the mammoths went extinct, the simple truth of the matter—at least for the wooly mammoths of the north—is that they were easy to climb onto.
I watched as the hunters began to butcher the six ton animal. A couple of the men went to tend to the fellow who was struck by the mammoth’s foot. He hadn’t risen from the spot where he’d rolled. The others set to the tasks of building a fire and carving into the meat of the beast.
After a few hours, the hunters settled down to palaver while mammoth steak roasted over their fire, a midday feast. One of the younger men nodded, accepting some duty they appointed him. He cut some of the sizzling meat from the spit and then turned and jogged South. Headed home, I suppose, to fetch the group’s wives and children. But the young man would never complete his task. I watched him diminish into the distance, then abandoned my hiding place to trail after him.
2
The man they sent home to fetch their families was the young one who’d found me on the pile of stones, the boy-man with the shaggy dark hair. I slithered through the grass after him, falling further and further behind at first, but luckily, when he passed out of view of his elders, he quit jogging and adopted an idler pace. As the sun swung past its apex in the sky and began its slow roll westward, I found myself drawing nearer him. Near enough to smell his flesh and hear the ditty he was singing under his breath.
When he was finished eating the half-cooked mammoth meat, the boy-man stopped for a moment to piss. I slithered stealthily forward as I watched the urine arc out in front of him. He smiled to himself and swung the stream back and forth. The acrid stink of his water made me curl my nose.
I was less than a hundred meters away, but he did not sense me. Still, I approached cautiously. In my crippled condition, I knew I couldn’t overtake him if he discovered me by chance.
When he was finished urinating, he looked over his shoulder the way he’d come, his almond-shaped eyes narrowed. The constant wind of the tundral steppe plucked at his lanky black hair, brushed through the fur collar of his outer clothing.
I froze where I lay, flattening my body as close as I could to the cold earth beneath me. There was little cover where I crouched, mostly lichen and moss and a few tufts of wind-bent grass.
Had he seen me from the corner of his eye? Had he heard the tiny scrapings of my movement?
No.
I smelled no alarm in his scent. After a while, I raised my head enough to catch sight of him and found him kneeling on the ground, furiously flogging his cock. He was turned three-quarters away from me, his back hunched forward, and he was rubbing his stick like he was trying to make a fire, a breathless low groan in the back of his throat.
Grinning, I dragged myself toward him, staying low and placing my limbs carefully. I froze again when he y
elped, but he was just spilling his seed. A moment later, he laced his pants and jumped to his feet. His legs were a little wobbly, but he glanced back in the direction he’d come, smiling and flushed, then continued on his way.
As the sun lowered in the sky, he gathered dry grass and shrubs while he walked, braiding them into tight bundles. I followed, and just before sunset, watched as he settled to make camp beneath the low limbs of a tree.
I observed from a distance, peeking through a gap between two exposed stones, as he retrieved his fire kit from some inner pocket in his clothing. He spread his tools out and went to work, striking two stones sharply together—flint and some iron-bearing stone. When he had his tinder smoldering, he crouched down and blew in it. After adding some larger sticks and his twisted braids of grass, he leaned back beside his crackling fire to relax. He ate some dried meat he took from a small sack tucked in his coat, then poked his fire with a stick and watching the embers swirl upwards for a while, chewing thoughtfully.
Dark came quickly once the sun dipped below the horizon. The first dim stars began to wink in the blackening sky. The boy shrugged off his coat and unfolded it, transforming his outer wear into a clever little sleeping sack, which he wrapped up in to retire for the night.
He didn’t have enough kindling to keep a strong fire for long. It had burned down to coals before he’d even gotten good and asleep. The embers glowered beside him, a feeble red light, popping every few minutes as a knot or seed exploded in the heat.
The dark closed in on him.
And so did I.
I slithered nearer, then waited, twenty meters away, until his eyes drooped and he began to snore.
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 5
