“Excuse me, Lord,” the vampire corrected. “And you can leave your carcasses for the ghouls. The pickings here were disappointingly low.”
“Lord…”
“Enough! Get your men and extricate. Nightlady Impindiselo and her ghouls can mop-up.”
The lieutenant oozed reluctance but waited patiently for Nkosi Igazi to finally dismiss him.
I watched, my trigger finger aching, as eight impi entered the same buffel as Nkosi Igazi and the lieutenant and then rode off into the darkness.
So, fewer impi. A buffel full of ghouls instead. And this nightlady…
Could it be?
I turned towards the rapidly burning main building as a roofbeam collapsed.
Fire crackled as a wind picked up, making the flames hum. It was quiet. Too quiet for a night with this much death.
I felt the world should be screaming.
But it never did. Monsters roamed the Earth, people died, and the world never wept.
I felt Graham’s questioning gaze. I looked at him. He looked…sad.
“I have to,” I whispered.
He nodded. Perhaps, he finally understood who I was. And, for the first time in a long while, I was throwing myself into something. Completely.
I shouldered my rifle and trudged into the burning base. More rebels lay dead, strewn over now immolated and peppered furniture. They were missing limbs and were emaciated. Drained of blood and essence. I looked for faces I knew. A mistake. I knew them all.
I had clung onto some slim hope that they had not discovered the secret entrance, but the tunnel was wide open, for all to see. I smelled iron and gunpowder within.
My boots clinked against spent shells. Ak-rounds. At least the rebels had fought back. They went out shooting. Sometimes, a dignified death, shouting against eternity, was all one could hope for.
I descended into the tunnel. The lights had gone red and the fire sprinklers sputtered, long out of their showers. More corpses. Some had mocked me. Tormented me for what I was. But then they had come to respect me. Come to see me for what I had become.
I crouched down by Wisdom’s side. He lay spread-eagled, his finger still on the trigger.
I hoped that he had found peace again.
I rose suddenly as I heard bestial scratching. Further up. Near the conference room.
I moved on, leaving my dead friends behind. I had never realised how much of a labyrinth this base had been. But now, in the dim red light and without a friendly face to escort me, I only had the memory of an alternative path to guide me.
More scuttling. I stopped as a ghoul passed me. Just metres away. I held my breath. I didn’t want to fight. Fighting meant noise. Noise meant death.
The ghoul started turning towards me…
A smash of glass. The ghoul tore down the hall towards it. Graham reappeared on my shoulder, a beer bottle in either hand.
I nodded my thanks and kept moving. Less death here. But still evidence of fighting. Blood droplets. And…footprints in the blood. Leading towards the conference room…
I turned a corner, following the tracks and saw the table of the conference room. It was turned on its side and had become swiss cheese from bullet holes.
I edged closer. And closer. My heart pounded in my ears. I entered the conference room, and my heart jumped.
Themba.
He was covered in blood, legs and arms splayed as he lay slumped up against the table.
I rushed towards him, just as Graham shoved me to the side, behind the whiteboard and some piled up chairs. I almost protested, until I heard bootsteps. I held my breath.
Two ghouls entered the room and began sniffing Themba. But before I could react, a woman entered. She had not changed, at all, despite the years. And I felt a fire grow inside of me.
Black braids. Topped by that same red beret. She wore a black leather coat. She was unarmed. Of course, she was. She was arrogant. She didn’t think she could die.
“No, my pets!” she scolded. “That human still lives. That means he’s for me.”
My eyes widened.
Themba was alive!
The ghouls backed away as the vampire approached my cousin’s limp form.
“Run along. Patrol the perimeter. There must still be some dirty traitor in these hills. Find them. And when you’re done, you can feast.”
The ghouls wordlessly exited the room.
It took everything inside me to not jump out and fire upon the creature. She leant over Themba and I saw spittle spilling from her mouth.
“A rare vintage! Matured in hatred and rebellion. The last of the Mqanduli…I will savour you, my sweet.”
She cradled Themba’s head, as if he were a lover. My heart thumped. This had happened before. Again, and again. I saw Sifiso. Dying in front of me. Dying and becoming…
No…
I wasn’t that scared little boy anymore. And I may not be a man.
But I didn’t need to be.
I was a Blood Hunter.
I burst out from my hiding spot and levelled my rifle at the vampire’s head. I squeezed the trigger. Bang! Bang! Bang!
My ears rung and my arms ached as I kept the rounds on target. The bullets impacted with the vampire, even as she spun and, with a hiss, roared towards me. I ducked under her first attack, still firing, as she caught me with a kick.
The wind was knocked out of me and she pulled the rifle out of my hand, then swung it at me like a club. I pulled away just in time as she shattered the rifle on the wall behind me.
She dropped the broken weapon and let loose a flurry of bestial thrashing. I sidled away, but too late. My arm burned as she raked into my flesh. She stopped and grinned, as she licked her fingers.
“Another good vintage! Spicy. It tastes like…rage.”
She thrust forward with her outstretched hand, as if it were a sword. I managed to draw Blessing’s knife and slash, sprinkling her vampiric blood across the whiteboard.
She clutched her hand and then stared at me with rage to match my own. Just before she charged with the ferocity of an angry cobra.
I slashed outwards, trying to maintain my control and deflect her strikes, but it was too much! The sheer monstrous anger…
My arm grew numb from pain and bruises mingled with bloody cuts appearing all over my body.
I had to end this! Vampires could outlast any human. I couldn’t afford a war of attrition.
A bottle suddenly impacted with the vampire’s face. My chance! Despite my aching body, I charged her, knife pointing towards her heart.
She batted me to the side. As if I was a small child. I fell prone, my knife skidding across the floor. Before I could lift myself again, I felt her boot crunch on my leg. I cried out. She laughed, before leaning in close. She lifted me up by my throat. Not enough to choke me. Not yet. I saw her face clearly, even as my vision faded.
That arrogant grin. Those bright red eyes. I remembered them. I had run from them. But not this time.
Recognition flickered across her face. Her grin deepened.
“I remember you! I remember your scent. It reminds me…”
Somehow, her grin became even more evil and more satisfied.
“It reminds me of burning flesh…”
Vampires were tough. They could shrug off a lot of bullets. But they weren’t unstoppable. The trick was…exposing their weak spots.
“You made a mistake…” I wheezed.
She cocked her head. Somehow, I grinned.
“You got too close.”
In a single rapid movement, I pulled my pistol from my waistband and fired at her head. She dropped me to the floor as she screamed, a hole drilled through her chin and out her head. In her pain, she tripped over a fallen chair.
I rose and approached her.
She stared at me with those red eyes full of hate.
“You can’t kill me!” she yelled, like a desperate fanatic. “You’ll bring damnation upon yourself. Everything you love, everything you believe in…w
e will destroy it all. Nobody harms the Blood and lives! We will hunt you to the ends of the Earth. We will know your face! Every single one of us.”
“I’m counting on it.”
I fired. Her body convulsed with every blow, until she no longer moved. My pistol was empty.
I picked up Blessing’s knife and cut into her neck. Deeply, until it left her body. I would leave it outside for the sun. Just in case.
As the bloodlust left my body, I saw the slumped body of my cousin. I rushed towards him and felt for a pulse.
I breathed a sigh of relief. He was alive. His wounds were shallow. Non-lethal. Even so, I applied some first aid. Stopped the bleeding. Even if it was just to not attract any more vamps or ghouls.
If the vampire was truly dead, her ghouls would go feral. If they had made it outside, they would have scattered into the hills. Come morning, hopefully the sun would eliminate them for good.
“Come on, cousin,” I whispered, as I pulled him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “This is another time you failed to die.”
Chapter 24. Decay
“It wasn’t you,” Anathi insisted, as I slumped in my chair, the guilt of what I had caused wracking me now that the adrenaline had dissipated. We had been on the run for days, trying to rendezvous with surviving members of the rebellion. I had only found a few rebels and Blood Hunters. Too few. Many had already given up and were fleeing the cause. If they weren’t already dead.
We were hiding in an isolated hut in the wilderness. A Blood Hunter safehouse. Not on the rebel books. Most of the rebels were dead, but we couldn’t be too careful. Vampires had ways of making prisoners talk. And only Silumko had known about this place.
Silumko stood, arms crossed.
“The rebels got sloppy, Mgebe. Cells you never could have known about were hit at the same time. It wasn’t you. Possibly an informant.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Themba said, defeated. His wounds were bandaged, and he was recovering quickly. But he had the air of Wisdom now. No optimism. No energy. He looked like a shell of the Themba I knew from Mqanduli or the rebellion.
“It’s over,” he continued. “All we can do now is escape this damned country. Perhaps, that’s what we should have done in the first place. Should have gone west…”
Silumko nodded. His feelings on the matter were indiscernible. My mentor had always been a closed book. More a brick wall than a human with emotions.
“There is not much else we can do here. I am heading north. The Corps sees things similarly to us. I hope to find a home in Goldfield. I won’t stop killing vampires. But…this is not my home anymore.”
The others nodded, grimly. So, few left. Silumko, Blessing, Themba, Anathi. The other Blood Hunters had been killed during a botched operation. Blessing survived to tell us of their bravery. Silumko called it foolhardiness.
Silence followed as the group pondered Silumko’s words. I looked to Themba. I expected inspiring words. A speech about how much this land…our land…mattered. But he only looked into his lap, avoiding eye contact.
Was it really ending this way? Themba’s wounds were recovering. He had been knocked out before the real fighting started. Something for which he felt shame. But it also spared him. Yet, he had come so close to death. If nothing else, I had saved my cousin. And that did matter!
Even so…it just felt so empty. Ending now. After all we had done…
Anathi squeezed my shoulder. I looked up at her. She looked defeated. No more of that fiery determination I was used to. She had accepted this end.
“Take care, Mgebe. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side of the Three Point Line?”
Anathi turned towards the door. Silumko and Blessing moved to do the same.
It was really over, wasn’t it? Despite…everything. All we had gained. All we had done. All the sacrifice. Everything.
All over.
I clenched my fists.
No!
I stood up, knocking over my chair.
“No!” I said aloud, causing everyone to stop and stare.
“It’s not over!” I yelled. “Not after how far we’ve come.”
Blessing shook his head, looking pitying.
“It is,” Themba murmured. “We have lost too much. They crushed us. Utterly. Informant, bad luck…it doesn’t matter. We’re done. We’ve lost everything.”
He slumped down on the bed he was sitting on.
But we hadn’t, I realised. I glanced at my mentor. My paranoid, almost alien and perpetually mysterious mentor. He always had a plan. Always.
“Not everything,” I said. I turned to Silumko. “What happened to the rest of the silver?”
“The silver caches were taken,” Themba interjected, dismissing the point. As if he was looking for more reasons to give up.
Silumko, for once in his life, fidgeted. The group turned on him, noticing this oddity as if he had just yelled out an expletive.
“That isn’t exactly true,” he said, hesitant. “I did not trust that you truly believed in our cause…so I hid a few more caches.”
Themba looked taken aback. “That belonged to the rebellion! We were allies!”
Silumko stared daggers at my cousin.
“I have survived this long because I don’t trust easily. And, in this case, I have been vindicated. There is still silver. I plan to take it to the Corps as an offering. You are welcome to all take a split…maybe.”
Before Themba could retort, I stepped between them all.
“We haven’t lost everything! We still have silver. We still have weapons. And there are still Blood Hunters in the Transkei. Us. We have walked down this path for too long to just let it end like this. And you, cousin, they took too much and you fought too hard to just give up now. We must leave this place, that much is clear. But not like this. Not while they think they have won!”
“They have won!” Blessing yelled, a slight sob in his voice. As if pleading with me to give up.
“Not yet,” I replied, voice level. “Not the war.”
The group, even Graham who perched on a wooden shelf, pondered my words in silence.
“What are you proposing?” Anathi finally asked. She faced me dead-on, no longer turning to leave.
“One final mission. One final blow against the Empire. And one final hunt against the Blood.”
“What…what are you planning, cousin?”
“We must go back to the beginning. To the heart of this vampiric empire. We’re going home, Themba. To Mqanduli.”
Chapter 25. Home
The path of the Blood Hunter had taken me across this land. I had seen rolling green hills, dotted with mountains and seaside vistas that would make the gods envious. Themba was right. This was a beautiful land. A land worth fighting for. Perhaps…worth dying for.
But, it wasn’t the land that mattered. It was the people. And I had seen, throughout my life, the atrocities that the impi and vampires had wreaked on the amaXhosa. I had seen villages sacked, occupied, barely surviving under the boot of men with guns. I had seen the soul of my people slowly drained away under threat of blood, fire and violence.
Yet, I had never seen something quite like Mqanduli now.
Over a week, Themba gathered the surviving rebels. Only three other men from the Mqanduli Marauders had survived. That was good. I thought Themba and I were the only ones left. We still didn’t know if there was a rat and Silumko cautioned Themba to be careful. But my cousin was, even in this dark hour, an optimist. Even so, he gave rebels he didn’t trust completely smaller tasks. Of the dozen or so rebels left, only five accompanied the Blood Hunters to Mqanduli. At least, what was left of it. The others were tasked with attacking other impi and vampire facilities across the land. To mark our exit with fire. To tell the Empire, we weren’t dead. And we would return.
Yet, watching what had happened to my once quaint, yet proud town, from the safety of a distant hill, I wondered if I should have returned. This was Mqanduli. And I could see faint shadows of
what it had once been. The town square was still in the same place but had been concreted over. Some of the outlying homesteads had survived, but their kraals had been turned into warehouses for industrial farming. It was fitting that the sky was grey and weeping.
But, that was where the slim similarities between this place and my home ended.
Where there had once been a village of humans, there was now an industrial hellscape. Windowless, grey warehouses blanketed the field, between obsessively straight grid-streets. Guard towers interspersed this prison of a village. Yet, there were no outer walls. Why would there be? Only a fool would attack Mqanduli. And only the suicidal would attack its medieval, European style, fortress overlooking this vampiric domain.
“You said you had come back before,” Graham remarked. There were just the two of us. For now. The others were nearby, but hidden. We wanted to minimise the chance of a rat informing on our plans. Because of that, we had filtered in on our own over the past few days, camping a safe distance away from the vampires’ stronghold.
“I did,” I replied. I stowed my binoculars and turned away from the bleak wasteland. “But always from this distance. And…I never really accepted it.”
Graham nodded, slowly, as I covered myself with a dark green tarp, a similar colour to the grass and foliage.
Tonight, we wouldn’t have enough time for me to do this. I wasn’t sure I’d even survive tonight. But there was something I needed to see. I did not know why.
I approached Mqanduli on foot, sticking far away from the modern tarred roads. Even the layout of the roads didn’t match up with the old Mqanduli. I wondered if the somagwaza’s hut had been spared in the wilderness. The road leading to it had been overgrown.
Graham didn’t speak but remained visible underneath my tarp. I could only faintly hear his shallow breathing as rain pelted the tarp. For some reason, I took comfort in his presence. Perhaps, I had grown overly familiar with his presence. Stockholm Syndrome.
The new Mqanduli was built around Nkosi Igazi’s garish keep. Which meant that parts of the old Mqanduli did not fall into the bulk of his field of warehouses and towers. I had made sure of that before beginning this journey. It was foolish, I knew. But I had to know for sure. And the trees hid the truth from me, meaning there was only one way to find out.
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