by Arthur Slade
I was too tired to train. The rest of my day was unmemorable.
And so was the next, though I did dream about zebras.
I took more time to think about my father. By now, he might have been driven mad. Most likely, they had found a way to feed him. His attitude toward my mother and me was curious. As if we were the abominations. He was obviously the abomination. But what did I know of the rest of the vampire world?
On day six, a black car pulled into the driveway. I was lounging in a chair out front, in a jacket and under a blanket, reading Misery. I’d always kind of enjoyed reading while huddled under a blanket in the cold. I tried Anne Rice once, but really, those vampires would talk you to death.
The car sat still for several moments before the rear passenger window rolled down.
“Amber Fang?” The voice was female.
“Yes,” I said, not making a motion to get up.
“Would you come here?”
“I prefer if you come here.”
I sounded braver than I felt. I wasn’t sure who was in there, and I’d had the slight hope it was Dermot until the woman spoke. The window rolled up. Several seconds passed. The door opened, and a black woman stepped out. She strode down the sidewalk, her long coat trailing behind her. She sat across from me and took off her black leather gloves.
“I’m Margaret Adams,” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“I can’t say I feel the same,” I said. “Are you someone I should know?”
“I’m the chairman of the League.”
“Oh. I met a different chairman earlier.”
“We lost my predecessor.” I remembered Hallgerdur spouting something about cutting off the head of the League. Had they killed Ernest? I’d only met him briefly, but had been impressed by his style.
“I—I’m sorry to hear that.” I really did mean it. “He seemed like a nice guy.”
“It’s a challenging position.” This was delivered flatly.
“I’m surprised you’re out here on your own.”
“I like to be hands on.”
“I can appreciate that. So you must know about my father. What is he up to?”
“He continues in stasis.” She sounded somewhat robotic.
“He’s still sleeping in that coffin?”
“Yes. Have you experienced any mood swings?”
“A plethora. I could snap at any microsecond.”
She patted her gloves on her knee. “Well, we’re going to alleviate that situation.”
“Is there a pill?”
“No. I’ve come to take you to a safer location.”
“But I like this house. It’s so ... white.”
“You’ll be returned to it. We’ve prepared a safe habitation zone for you.”
I set down the coffee cup. Did everyone in this organization learn to speak by reading 1984? “What’s to prevent you from locking me up forever?”
“You’re too much of an asset. And we do have a contract with you.”
“Why didn’t you send Dermot to pick me up? He’s your errand boy.”
“Dermot has had a slight medical setback.”
“Is he all right?” The concern peppering my voice surprised me.
“He’ll recover. Now, did I mention that you’ll have internet access in your new room?”
“Wow. And how will this solve the problem that I could snap at any time and begin a feeding frenzy?”
“I’ll show you that when we arrive.”
“Do I need to bring anything?”
“No.”
I had a tingling Spidey sense that I should splash the remains of my coffee in her face and flee. But that was instinct rearing its instinctual head. Logic suggested I needed to have my feeding schedule reset. And, though I didn’t quite trust her, I trusted Dermot.
So I followed Miss Adams to the car, bringing the book along. She even opened the door for me, which was rather kind. Then she sat on the opposite side. The driver was an Indian man, his turban black. She said something in Hindi, and we started down the road.
Then we were quiet, and eventually, I started to read again. It wasn’t that long of a drive, maybe two hours. Or another eighty pages in my book, which was how I often measured time. She said something to the driver in Hindi again, and all the windows, including the one between us and the driver, went black, along with the interior of the car.
Margaret hit a switch and the light above me turned on. “What’s this about?” I asked.
“Well, we can’t have you knowing exactly where home base is.”
We turned to the right. A sharp turn.
“I guess that makes sense.” Though the sensation of moving through absolute darkness was unnerving. We turned to the right.
“You can keep reading, if you like.”
I did so. Another hour passed. We suddenly went down an incline, and the windows became see-through again. We were in a long tunnel, lights on. Soon, we came to an underground parking lot. More black cars than I could shake a stick at. We then stopped in a parking spot marked Chairman.
“Come with me,” she said. We exited the car. “Welcome to home base.”
If this was their office building, I pitied them. Never had I seen so much dull lighting and gray cinderblock. I didn’t know what I had expected. I guess my imagination had been fed by all the spy movies with glass elevators, black pods opening up, and walls swishing out of sight to reveal secret rooms.
Instead, there was a beat-up elevator with orange doors and an orange interior. Ugly orange, I might add. And the further down it went, the more the air smelled like rotten fruit. When the doors opened, there were more gray walls. It had all the pleasantness of a Cold War-era morgue in Russia.
“Was there a sale on gray paint?” I asked.
She graced me with a look most people would save for a bird that had defecated on their windshield. “Come this way, Amber,” she said.
I followed her into an office that housed about fifteen cubicles and the same number of geeks. There were three security guards in nondescript outfits patrolling the hallway. “This is where it all happens,” she said.
“Interesting,” I said, though it was the opposite. No outrageously handsome secret agents. Most everyone had glasses and that pale look people got from lack of sun exposure. Several of the desks had typewriters. I guess Dermot wasn’t kidding about their old tech.
“Come along.” She continued through the main office and down another hallway.
A few of the office workers looked up at me. It dawned on me that several of them may have been spending the last few years staring at my photograph, reading my file, and falling in love with me. I winked at one particularly lonely looking male, and he blushed.
In the next room, recognition lit up the synapses in my brain. “Jordan Rex,” I said. “I’d know that face anywhere.” He was the very first contact, the man I’d pursued in Seattle, who had turned out to be a League agent. “Or is Jordan your real name?”
“It’s not.” He didn’t blink. I’d file him under I’m not happy we have a vampire in our employ.
“Michael Hexdall, allow me to introduce Amber …” She paused. “Which last name are you using now?”
“Fang,” I said.
Michael nodded. “It’s good to meet you again.”
Margaret gestured, and we went down a long hallway with closed door after closed door on each side of us, each with a number on it. Then the hallway opened up into a larger room.
There were about twenty holding cells here. Uneasiness settled in my brain. “Where exactly are you taking me?”
“The sunshine room,” she answered.
To my utter stunnification, the walls of the next hall were painted with soothing sunlight and cloud scenes. Did they have daycare here? She opened up a pink metal door. Yes, pink. We went inside.
At first, I thought we’d somehow magically climbed to the surface, for there was a prairie scene in front of me, the sun in the dista
nce. Birds chirped. A couch sat near the window. I blinked. Then it became clear that a large HD screen made up one wall.
Dermot was sitting in a black chair, his skin still rather pale but speckled with pink. He looked better than he had a few days ago. I guess they’d squirted a few blood products into him.
“Hi, Amber,” he said. “Welcome to the sunshine room. Your new home.”
27
ALL IS NOT SUNNY IN THE SUNSHINE ROOM
“Home?” I echoed. “Huh?”
Sometimes I slipped into complete ineloquence. I blamed it on running from trailer park to trailer park.
“We’re worried about your reset date,” he said.
“You mean, when my biological clock will demand a feeding.”
“Yes. I interrupted it. And so, to make amends, I convinced the League that you deserved your own room.”
“Do I get to snack on you?”
“Been there. Bled there. Not again.”
I licked my lips.
“We brought you here,” Margaret said, “because this is a comfortable, contained place for you to wait for this reset to occur. I’m sure you’ll adapt to your new surroundings.”
“I can adapt to anything,” I said. “But what am I supposed to do here for fun?”
“You have a nice view.” Dermot tapped a button on a remote and a jungle came up followed by jungle sounds. Soon, I’d be meditating to ocean waves. “There is a bed.” He got up, flicked a switch, and a bed came out of the wall. It was one long, black mattress and looked rather comfortable. “You have a coffee machine. You don’t need food. Well, our food. There’s an en suite shower through that door. And plenty of books.” He gestured toward a shelf. “Plus, you’ll be able to connect to your online classes.”
“Sounds so very pleasant.” I touched a few of the books on the shelf.
“I know it’s not perfect,” Margaret said, ignoring my sarcasm. “You’ll have to trust us that it’s best for you.”
“You didn’t consult me.”
“We wanted to show you first. We expected a negative reaction.”
I looked around the room. “Does that TV get HBO?”
Dermot shrugged. “We can bring in movies on a USB stick. Any requests?”
“Escape from Alcatraz. Or Shawshank Redemption.”
His smile made wrinkles form around his eyes and for the first time, I thought I saw scar tissue there. From surgery, perhaps.
“How long will I be here?”
“That depends on when you reset,” Margaret said.
“Yes, I suppose it does. Is there a plan in place for after the reset happens? A visit to a prison, perhaps?”
Margaret tapped on a second door in the wall. It was black and metal and very thick. “That door will open. A woman or a man will walk through. You will be fed.”
“I’ll be living right beside my food?”
She nodded. “The subject will be comfortable. We’ll provide you with files to prove said subjects conform to your moral code as it relates to eating.”
“Will my future victims know?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No sense causing psychological trauma.”
“You’d better provide reliable documents.”
“We will,” Margaret said. “I’ll leave you in Dermot’s capable hands.” Then she was up and out of the room. My room. My feeding pen.
“How have you really been, Amber?” Dermot asked when the door closed behind her
“Agitated. Sleepless. On edge.”
“So, the same as always.”
I gave him a half-hearted smile. “And you, Dermie?”
He raised an eyebrow at this pet name. “I’m well enough. Did actually get to have a few days off. I even went to a baseball game.”
“Oh, visit your folks? Turkey dinner?”
“My folks are under the impression I’m dead.”
I nodded. He was all in, in terms of this organization. “Well, that’s sad,” I said softly. I know it could have been interpreted as sarcasm. “So what’s happened with your girlfriend?” I asked.
“That’s classified. You know that.”
“A girl can ask.”
“I want to know how you feel, Amber. Are you thinking about feeding more often?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m worried about you. About ... well ... your condition.”
“You make it sound like I’m pregnant.”
He shrugged. “You’ve never been in this situation. I’ve seen the blood madness once.”
“And what happened?”
“It was four years ago. We had one of your kind as a prisoner. And, well, we didn’t know about the feeding cycle.”
“Male or female?”
He hesitated. “Female. But it wasn’t your mother, if that’s what you’re asking. She was ancient. She looked a thousand years old. And she was missing three fingers on her left hand.”
“Who was she?”
“The name she gave us was Carpetha. Our best guess was that she was one of the Grand Council.” He ran a hand through his hair. “She hated us, Amber. I mean, I know you dislike humans, but I do sense a fraction of respect. But this one ... even the sight of us was anathema to her. She tore the heads off of three of our men. Right in front of me.”
“What happened to her?”
“We drove her back into her holding cell. I shocked her. Enough to kill a bull. She went mad a few hours later. She threw herself against the walls of the cubicle until it was a big blood smear. Biting at the walls, gouging out the cement. Then she started to bite her own arms. Any place she could reach with her teeth. She bled to death.”
I swallowed. “She bit herself?”
“There wasn’t much left. ‘The thirst!’ she shouted. So this is .... uh ... territory I don’t want you to explore.”
“It’s not territory I want to be in. But I have fed a little. Perhaps that changes the equation.”
“That’s my hope. We are on day seven of your interrupted feed. But there really is no way to know when your internal clock will reset. I assume it’s not a sudden clicking over, that you’ll have some sort of warning.”
“Maybe you should visit me via Skype.”
“I’m confident you’ll be able to control yourself. At first, anyway.”
“I’ll do my very best,” I said. “That’s a promise.”
28
THE INTERMINABLE JOY OF WAITING
The waiting was not pleasant.
Dermot visited me in the afternoons. At least, I assumed it was afternoon. I only had the clocks to judge by. I was beginning to miss the sight of the sun, the warmth of rays on my skin. I got tired of breathing air that had been pumped a thousand yards down a shaft into this room.
I paced the room clockwise, counterclockwise, and clockwise again. There were several cameras watching me. I would literally climb the walls and hang from the ceiling and look right into one of them every once in a while. I could only imagine the startled lackey on the other side. I watched the door to the outer office waiting for Dermot to arrive. I watched a season of Friends. It was quaint what people used to find funny.
I stared at the black door, too, and would stand nonchalantly beside it. I didn’t hear any voices, though. Perhaps they didn’t talk to anyone or to themselves, or else they just didn’t talk. Could have been a mute. Or a monk. Or a ninja. I couldn’t hear a heartbeat.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Just that I couldn’t hear it. And I wanted to. I needed to.
I paced. And played solitaire. And watched the time tick down each day as I waited for Dermot to appear. He would visit me on the hour at 3:00 p.m. My thoughts were not flipping toward blood, nor was I staring at his jugular any more than I had any other time. Boredom ruled the kingdom of my mind.
I couldn’t help but wonder if there were cameras in the shower. Some pimply geek was just aching to get his thrills, I bet. Maybe even itching to upload the video to vampirenude.com. I scoured the tiny ba
throom looking for a camera. I crawled over every space and found nothing. Finally, I unscrewed the light bulb and showered in the dark. Unless they had an infrared camera, they had no visual access to my private bits.
I wasn’t usually so prim and proper, but there was a difference between showing your body willingly and being forced to show it.
Each day, I’d sit near the black door for longer and longer periods. Listening. Licking my lips.
“I need the paperwork,” I told Dermot on the following visit. “I might snap at any time, so I need to know who’s on the other side of the door.”
“The research department is slow with the paperwork. It’s been delayed.”
“How can it be delayed?”
“This was a sudden situation. It’s not like we had planned ahead to have you in this room. Please be patient.”
“You know me, Dermie. I’m not the patient sort.”
“That’s for certain.”
I angrily curled an eyebrow. “You’re not the one locked in here. I need to know who my next meal is. Now!”
“I’ve been pushing for it. You’ll have it by tomorrow.”
“I hope that’s soon enough.”
“I understand your frustration,” he said. “And I do look forward to getting you back into the field.”
“It’s open sky I want to see. I’m suffocating here.”
“We’re doing the best we can.”
“Well, do better.” Then I whispered, “I feel I am going mad.”
“But are you thinking of feeding? Is that it?”
There was no hunger in my stomach. “No. Just. Getting out.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. For whatever reason, his touch actually calmed me. “You’re going to make it through this, Amber. You’re the toughest woman I know.”
I breathed in. “Thanks, Dermot. I appreciate it.”
After he left, I played solitaire again. Then I read The Stand and a John Green novel. Oh, and I studied. They’d been kind enough to bring me a few of my textbooks. And finally, I turned out the lights. Red lights appeared on the ceiling—a smoke detector and cameras—the crimson stars of my sky. I paced in the dark, the room memorized. I settled myself against the metal door and listened. Why did they have these two suites side by side? Had they done this before?
