by Rena Marks
He handed it to me when he’d finished and I drew it over my head. He pretended not to notice my breasts as I stretched tauntingly.
The lacing brought the two halves together enough to cover my bosom. “You’ve turned me into a fashion statement,” I mocked.
“A completely modest one,” he agreed.
My teeth refused to stop chattering. I knew what was coming, it always worked this way. It was how my body fixed itself.
Once again, Ethan carried me. I was sick, and at this moment, it felt good to be cuddled in his strong arms.
He was worried. His jaw was tight and I knew my behavior was unusual. Especially when I pressed light kisses to his roughened jawline.
“Ethan?” I whispered into his ear.
“Bella?”
“I don’t want you to be afraid when something happens to me.”
I could almost feel his breathing catch.
“What do you mean, Afton?” His voice was harsh.
“I don’t want you to blame yourself, because this is something that always happens. It’s how my body heals itself when there’s been a lot of damage.”
“Your injury has worsened?”
“I think it was infected. Perhaps poisoned. In any case, I’m about to go into a coma.”
“What? For how long?”
“As long as it takes to heal. I just don’t want you to blame yourself.”
“I should not have taken you into that cold water.”
I sighed. “See what I mean? With or without, I would sicken. It’s nothing you did, it’s simply how I heal.”
“What do I do in the meantime?”
“There’s nothing you can do. I’ve eaten, now I’ll just rest. But,” I warned, “I may thrash. Nightmares. From what I remember.” He knew what I meant. Videotapes of my hospital stays. I’d never slept without being plugged into machines and monitored constantly.
From some clips I’d seen, I could get pretty violent while fevered.
“You might want to tie me.”
Chapter Three
The thing I hate most about dreaming is that when you do, you don’t realize you’re in the midst of it. You have to relive events as though you are really there. Or at least I do.
I had to look up at the faces around me.
That’s what I remember about being three. You’re little. Everyone else is big. Sometimes you feel like, if you could curl into a ball and close your eyes, no one will notice you.
No one will poke another long needle into you.
No one will yell at you, forcing you to eat the foul-tasting food. Take the medications. Pull on you, stretch you.
Endure grueling ballet-inspired exercises, rigorous gymnastics training.
It was scary to look up. It was more scary to not be able to wake up. Sometimes I couldn’t wake up until the burning paddles were pressed to my chest. It was a pain like no other. I hated those white coats. All of them hurt me. One day that changed.
He arrived.
That one doctor was kind. The one doctor leans down, eye level with me. I craved human attention so badly by six. Back then I had no idea emotions were cut from us to turn us into guiltless, unfeeling assassins.
All I knew was I liked that doctor who bent low to speak to me as if I were human.
But he was a man not to be trusted.
“You are a special little girl, aren’t you, Afton?”
I shrugged, unsure of how I was supposed to respond. Because a wrong answer meant punishment. If not for me, maybe for the other experiments locked away with me. And I had to protect the others. It was my duty. I was strongest. I was the first.
“I vant you to try something for me, little girl.”
Deep in my belly, I felt that weird feeling that spread through to my arms and legs before I shut down. Because only when I shut down could I keep from crying.
My toughest lesson was about to surface. Shutting down required more strength that day. It wasn’t to keep me from crying, it was to keep me from losing my sanity.
“Come with me, Experiment A3.”
That was my name. The first two infected children had died from the overdose of vampire virus. I was number three, still alive. I don’t know what the letter stood for but I always remembered it linked me to my real name. Afton.
One Russian doctor had used my real name. Once. Of course, I was too young to realize he was simply trying to establish trust.
We walked for miles through tunnels lined with silver metal sheets. Now I realize it was silver to keep the vampires out. Back then I just knew it was to keep certain vampires in.
Finally we reached the center. The bowels of the camp.
Another laboratory. Bright fluorescent lights, sickly greens. A bed in the center, a frame around it like a coffin.
Chained in silver and kept in a preservative jelly…was a man.
“Not a man, A3. A monster. A human infected. It affects the brain and changes the body. Eventually, they become violent, killing innocent people to eat. Which is why we call them vampires. At the very end, their brains rot and they turn to zombies, eating diseased, foul flesh of dead human bodies rather than just blood.”
The man on the table did look like a zombie. Malnourished to the point of a barely living skeleton. There were purple rings around his sunken eyes, making him look half crazed.
“Repeat after me, A3. This ees a monster.”
I enunciated each syllable clearly. It was a game with me, to mimic the accents of each doctor at the camp. This one was Russian, like the majority of them, and I spoke in perfectly cultured English. The game, however, was for later when I was quarantined. That was when I would remember this moment and mimic his voice until I sounded like a Russian doctor too.
At that age, I had no idea the chained monster was my nutrition. My injections, which made me horribly sick when I received too many, like doses of poisonous chemotherapy. If I had known then, I might have resented the crazed creature.
But I didn’t know.
“This is what you’ll do, A3. You will terminate the monster. This knife is made of silver. I want you to plunge it into his heart, the way you’ve been shown.”
Yes, at the age of six I’d already terminated. Not vampires yet but humans, small animals. Not that I knew it as death to humans, the government justified mercy assassinations. Prisoners on death row were given a choice over lethal injection, battle a six-year old Extinguisher in training and possibly win your freedom, like a modern day gladiator.
Not many humans understood after three years of being continually stricken, I already had the speed, strength and agility of an adult vampire. Forever. It was fully bound into my DNA. I was just too young to understand how to control it. A big reason why the others like me kept dying.
Lately, I’d heard what-if whisperings amongst the white coats. What if she were bred? I didn’t know that word.
Bred.
“Your entire life is devoted to learning to extinguish monsters. This is your first live one, though he’s a little weak. How I wish technology was that where we could store his blood but you’ve turned out to be quite a success. We are done with that phase of your testing. You are completely stricken.”
I was a failure that day. At six, I was unable to extinguish the monster. The whispers were that perhaps I was unable to strike out at a helpless creature.
That worried them. The question was perhaps my emotional training hadn’t been rigorous enough.
They kept him prisoner for years, until I turned thirteen. At thirteen I’d matured enough to hate Doctor Morozov.
With the way the creature had looked when I was six, he’d invoked the last vestiges of pity in my heart by the time I turned thirteen. By that age I had already exterminated countless vampires and had become quite the successful Extinguisher. Still, for some reason the doctors wanted me to extinguish the one responsible for molding me. The one who’d nourished me with his blood.
My surrogate mother.
A
gain we headed to the bowels of the underground camp. The deeper we traveled, the more chilled I became.
Although nothing had been said, I knew what was expected of me.
“This time, it is different, A3. He has not been drained of blood in years. And you have matured to see him for the monster that he is.”
I had matured enough to see many for the monsters they were.
The vampire was healthier and a lot more vicious. He was caged now, instead of preserved in jelly on a flat bed with tubes draining his life away.
He was still pale and weakened but not helpless. An enormous cage lined the length of the laboratory. At some point, probably when the creature was sedated, a doctor had been locked in this cage performing tests on him. There was a small metal desk and stool, a couple of steel beds that jutted from the wall like platforms. For now they stood empty. Instead the doctor performed routine work on the computers safely outside the cage.
Doctor Morozov had grown arrogant during the years. He pushed me to the vampire after electronically opening the gate.
I tumbled headfirst toward the creature. He hissed at me and attacked. The hissing was his mistake, it cost him precious moments, while speed was my biggest strength.
Plus, he’d been locked away for years and had no idea what Extinguishers were capable of.
A quick jab of my forearm to his throat stopped his hissing and the element of shock was on my side.
But I was just toying with the monster. Testing him, wasting time. For Dr. Morozov was up to something and I was going to find out what.
I heard alarms being sounded. Morozov had dropped the quarantined gates around the heart of the camp. No guards could get in. Just as I couldn’t get out of the cage. And we couldn’t get out of the main lab room. Yet.
The vampire came at me clumsily, for all his brute strength, he had no fighting skills left after so many years of wasted muscle. I leapt onto a table and flipped a no-armed cartwheel over his head. His face registered surprise at the show of gymnastics.
Morozov didn’t, of course. I’d been a trained gymnast for years.
But it served its purpose. I noticed where the cameras were in the room. There were three—someone never noticed they’d been placed in the caged area. Apparently the cage had been added after the cameras were installed. One was aimed at the outskirts of the lab, where the good doctor watched our gladiator scene from his safe distance.
The creature turned to me and I allowed him to throw me. I was much lighter and smaller than he was and like I hoped, he threw me upward. It was painful but it smashed the camera directly behind me.
One down, two more to go.
I wasn’t about to take another direct hit so soon, though.
I canvassed the possibility of weapons in the room. The metal stool one of the medics used. I picked it up and smashed the creature’s head with it, then carelessly tossed it behind me and shattered the second camera.
Here’s the thing about being thirteen. Subtlety is not yet a fine point.
Morozov got suspicious. “What are you doing, A3?” he screamed. He ran to the control box, where I assumed he’d lift the gates for the guards.
I followed him and the vampire followed me along the length of the cage.
Morozov had never been faced with direct danger. He’d always had his experiments chained and drugged, after all. But we were locked inside. The doctor ran back to the gate to be sure. He tested the lock, running some numbers through the keypad on the cage.
I was underneath the last camera, standing in the blind spot, blocking its view of me.
I reached up and quickly bent it so it had a convenient image of the floor.
The vampire used a spurt of unnatural speed to get to the doctor through the bars of the cage. It was doubtful that with all the tests throughout the years, they never once thought to measure the length of his arms to see how far out he could reach.
The good doctor never noticed when I bent the camera, he was so panicked by the vampire in front of him. He made a startled move to back away but it was too late. The creature reached out and picked up the lab coat by the lapels, lifting him so his feet dangled above the ground.
I had a moment of panic. When the cameras were watched later, would the humans wonder where I was for those split seconds?
Would they be able to realize I wasn’t present for the few moments it took to move the camera’s view and let the creature get to the doctor?
Did I have to make a run for the monster?
Or…
My brain stopped as a new idea came across it.
My God. Morozov had closed the main gates because he wanted me dead. He’d thought the vampire would kill me, exonerating him because it was videotaped during what he would call another training session. He never expected us to break from the steel cage.
Which is what I would do.
He hadn’t realized I’d just reached full strength. Lucky for me, for I hadn’t quite realized it would materialize like a gift in the night either.
Rage filled me. After all I’d endured, had managed to survive, he was going to create my death just to learn from the experience? For what purpose?
Adrenaline surged through my limbs, making it hard to suck in enough oxygen for my racing heart.
“Kill him!” Morozov shouted to me, despite his awkward dangling position from the creature’s outstretched hands.
“Afton, be still, my love.” Somehow, Ethan’s voice came from the vampire. “Stop thrashing so, you’ll hurt yourself.”
Was it Ethan? Or was it a vicious vampire? Was it a kill or be killed situation, or a trick?
“Stupid girl, kill the vamp! It is what you are trained to do.”
Chapter Four
My mind blended the facial features of Ethan and the vampire before me. Blurred them until they were so indistinguishable, I couldn’t tell one from the other. And my limbs were heavy, slow to move, as though they trudged through thickened mud.
“Shh, bella. Let me hold you through the night.”
I did want to be held. So very, very much. I hated being back at this place, the place I’d just as soon forget. The place forever imprinted in my mind.
There was only one who ever called me “bella”. And I had not been able to exterminate him.
I had pulled the monster from the doctor. The creature with the crushed larynx stumbled toward the back of the cage. He moved forward to the gate again, one solid kick square in the chest smashed him through the metal.
The hinges gave and the gate crashed with the echoing clang of metal against cold stone floor.
His squeal was horrific as he pulled himself from the burn of the silver, leaving crispy skin sizzling on the bars. It might have churned my stomach but I was in the zone.
The doctor turned ashen moments before his brain registered his danger. He was in a room with a crazed monster which had scared the hell out of him through the gate.
A room in which cameras had been crushed.
A room where alarms had been deliberately triggered and safety deadbolts had been integrated, sliding into place. Delaying security’s rush to his rescue and locking the doctor in hell. His own stupidity.
The vampire grabbed at him, lifting him by the neck with one hand. I walked behind, far enough to keep my distance should he decide to drop the doctor and rush at me instead.
“A3! Attack!”
I almost laughed. He expected to command me while he was at the monster’s mercy? After planning my death as nothing more than another experiment? I meant nothing to him.
Until he needed my help.
I watched as the vampire ripped out his throat. I knew that the doctor’s blood pouring down the monster’s throat would enable the healing process on the vamp’s damaged body immediately, soothing the pain of his crushed larynx and metallic burns.
Still, I waited. Because there was still that little niggling problem of battling helpless creatures. Full strength was much more of a challenge.
But this time, it could talk.
“What the hell are you?” His voice was harsh, his throat still healing on the inside.
“I am an Extinguisher. I serve the human race.” The prepared speech rolled out automatically, years of memorization paying off.
A surge of anger raged at the knowledge that it slipped from me so unconsciously.
“An Extinguisher? That harebrained scheme actually came to pass?”
We were slowly circling each other. I wouldn’t forget he was trying to lull me so he could catch me off guard.
“Thirteen years ago.”
“You’re just a little girl.”
“Not anymore.”
“No,” the vampire sneered, eyes on my fully developed breasts. “I see you mature faster. How did they merge our DNA with yours?”
I fought the urge to hunch my shoulders in an attempt to cover myself. Instead I snapped, “You were kept prisoner an awful long time.”
The realization of why he was kept alive for so many years dawned on him. His eyes glowed with hate. “I was your donor? You little bitch—”
“Now, Mama,” I chided and watched his lips thin.
“Get this straight before I kill you and every human in this camp. You’re nothing but a man-made attempt at crossbreeding. Less than that, an experiment. The child of Frankenstein.”
“Dr. Frankenstein” was close enough to the lab doctor who created me. The other Russian accent. Dr. Fokusovich. His head was extremely flat in back, with low-placed ears. He moved clumsily, some sort of birth defect.
“Perhaps I’ll introduce you to the natural way of crossbreeding before I choke your pretty neck.” The vampire massaged his crotch lazily, causing the area to bulge through the thin material of his scrubs.
It was enough to raise my temper to attack first, against all the training I’d been given. Yet that same training was strong enough for me to automatically go for the most recent injury.
His throat.
