“All right.” the man slapped Nick on the shoulder. It felt aggressive to him somehow, threatening. “Then what do they want with you? He said you’re not like us. What’s that mean exactly?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said, his feelings of community being stretched to premature limits. He didn’t like the vamp’s hand on him. “Maybe… maybe he means I’m different from you in the same way a tall man is different from a short woman. Or a cocker spaniel is different from a pit bull.”
In a blur of motion Brandon’s arms shot up and grabbed Kim’s head. He wrenched and flung her aside before flipping over and grabbing Nick’s leg. He struggled to get free and a second later Brandon had his teeth buried in Nick’s shin. Nick screamed and kicked at him with his free leg. The man next to him joined in as well as a few others. The vamp held strong until Kim sat up and calmly placed a hand on his leg.
Brandon pulled back, his upper body rigid. People were still raining blows on his head, shoulders, and back, but they may as well have been flies. His eyes rolled up in his head and his breath caught in his throat. It looked like an electric current was surging through his body. It took perhaps ten seconds for whatever Kim was doing inside to kill him.
Pearlanne was suddenly behind Nick, forcing him into a chair. She came to his side and rolled up his pant leg. Two square-looking pink holes were in the side of his shin, leaking something the color and consistency of rust-colored water.
“Somebody give me a belt!” she shouted. Nobody had one. A moment later she had someone’s t-shirt and was knotting it above his knee. Nick didn’t have the heart to tell her it was already too late, in part because he hoped it wasn’t. It could have been his imagination as he felt heat from the little wounds radiating all the way up his thigh, across his stomach and back, up to his chest, then finally into his brain.
“Thank you,” he said to her, the black already closing in.
* * *
Nick woke up to someone slapping his face. He opened his eyes and that hurt. He moved and that hurt. He moved slower and it was still painful. Nick was covered in cold sweat.
“He’s burning up,” someone said. Nick had no idea what whoever that was was talking about. He was freezing.
Nick remembered passing out. That was the second time tonight, which couldn’t be good. He tried to focus on the person in front of him. That hurt too. It was the vamp with the glasses. Nick felt like he had a whole body hangover. He had to move, though. Those others had to have called for reinforcements.
He tried sitting up and the vamp put his fingers in Nick’s chest. It felt like he was being jabbed with four red-hot pokers.
Nick didn’t ask what had happened, he remembered it clearly. What he wanted to ask was what was happening now. What was the poison he had been injected with? Was anyone trying to get an anti-venom? Or an ambulance?
“They’re still outside, Nick,” the vamp with the glasses said. “A few of us tried to leave and they were attacked. They’re not trying to come in, though. We need you to relax.”
“Is everyone… okay?” Nick thought he sounded like an old man. His chest and neck ached from speaking.
He shook his head. “They killed Kevin.” His eyes welled. “Tore him apart. We were lucky to make it back in.”
He knew most of them were upset to be here. They might be looking for someone with whom they could vent their frustrations.
“Pearlanne?” he asked.
“Her.” The vamp squeezed water out of a paper towel and applied it to Nick’s forehead. “She’s fine for now. If we make it to sunrise, I don’t know.”
Nick didn’t know what was so significant about sunrise. He made a face, hoping he didn’t have to ask the question out loud.
“Those are vampires out there. I mean, you cut one of them in half and he still didn’t die...”
Nick was pretty sure that wasn’t right, but those had looked like fang marks in his leg.
“Anyway, once everyone saw her father and the other one were dead, they kind of let up on her.”
Nick wanted to see what was going on. He didn’t know if he was dying, and he didn’t want to wait around for it to happen. “Get Kim,” he said. “It hurts. Tell her it hurts.” The young vamp with the glasses nodded and stood. He walked away and a moment later returned with her. She looked like she had been sleeping or crying, maybe both.
“I would have helped you sooner, but Brandon took a lot out of me. When I have to use that much effort it totally zaps me.” She knelt and put her hands on Nick and instantly he felt better.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked her.
“No. I don’t know how long I can do this, though. I’m still kind of wiped.”
“I won’t need you for long. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just get me out of here.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Nick held onto her as he bent and checked his leg. For as horrible as he felt he expected the bite to look angry and infected. Other than a little trickling of blood it didn’t look bad at all.
“We didn’t know whether to bandage it or not,” the vamp with the glasses said. “It kept oozing that brown stuff and we thought that was the poison or whatever leaking out.”
“What’s your name?” Nick asked.
“Allen.”
“Thank you, Allen.”
“I’m Ray,” the tall blond said. He offered his hand and Nick shook it. “I just wanna say thanks. I mean, we woulda been toast if you didn’t take out that vampire with the chainsaw. You are crazy, man!”
“Yeah, well, don’t look for a repeat performance. Where’s the body?”
“Dude, we left him where he was. Nobody wants to touch him.”
Nick made his way out of the small office, back into the room he’d been in before. He didn’t know what this place had been pre-Conflict and thought they were currently underutilizing the space. There were several desks coated in dust and a bank of cubicles by the far wall. Nick hadn’t taken the time to look around earlier because he’d been too focused on Brandon. Two sets of tracks were in the dust and Nick followed them to where two man-sized lumps lay, covered in papers. That had to have been Pearlanne’s father and uncle.
“Half of us might hate her guts right now, but nobody wanted her to see them like they were.” Nick turned to the wide-mouthed Hispanic vamp speaking to him. He was short and had close-cropped hair and eyes as dark as night. He shuddered looking at the bodies.
“Where is she?” Nick asked. The vamp shrugged.
“Somewhere,” he said.
Nick made his way to where his body lay and pulled away what looked like a mound of covers to word processors. The upper half of Brandon looked peaceful, asleep on his back. He looked seventeen or so and had an innocence to his face that was sad. His legs were lying the opposite way, the column of flesh between upper and lower twisted.
“Kneel with me,” he said to Kim. They got down and he looked at the body. This had been a killer. Something about him didn’t seem right, though. Nick felt more sure about it being this close to him. It felt odd to pat down his legs. He checked the pants pockets and found nothing. He thought about reaching into the open cavern of his torso. No, that was too gross, and what was he hoping to find?
Nick thought about the bite. Two holes like he’d been bitten with fangs. Dolph had said it was impossible for vampires to exist, some virus or whatever had wiped them all out and it would remain in the air for years to come. If that were true, however, then what had Brandon bitten him with?
He put his fingers on Brandon’s chin and pushed. The mouth came open with a soft, plosive sound and Nick peered inside.
“What are you doing?” Kim asked. They’d attracted a small audience. Nick looked around, noticed Pearlanne wasn’t amongst them. He wondered where she was.
He moved his upper lip to check his teeth. No fangs. Maybe they flicked in and out or something. Nick touched an index to the point the canines, wiggled at one of them. They didn’t even break the skin.
He reached behind the teeth and felt something hard. Nick hooked it with a fingernail and pulled out a small piece of plastic. It was black, flat, and about an inch and a half wide.
And had a pair of metallic fangs on either end.
“What the hell?” Nick turned it over in his hand, careful to avoid the sharp parts. Brandon and his group were efficient killers. They didn’t need something like this. Was it supposed to serve some other purpose?
Then the words of the killer from the vision came back to him.
I killed no one. I set them free…
He hadn’t thought to take him literally. Nick didn’t know what ‘setting free’ meant.
If he weren’t dying, what was happening to him?
“The military is here,” Pearlanne said. She was sweaty and looked like she had been fighting. Her lip was split and one eye was partially closed.
“What happened to you?” Nick asked.
She smiled. “I was having a little chat with a couple of vamps who had a problem with how they got here.”
“Well, you did kidnap us,” Allen said.
“You were out after sundown,” Pearlanne said. “It was lawful apprehension.” She stared everyone down. “Were any of you taken from your homes? Anybody complaining about excessive force?”
Nobody spoke. Nick had been hit with a taser, but they hadn’t beaten him with billy clubs or broken his legs.
“How can you be so blind?” a woman asked. Nick looked and saw it was one of the vamps who he’d come in with. “What happens to humans who get rounded up after sundown? Do they get taken to detention centers? Did they get put in front of a firing squad?”
“A firing squad?” someone said. “I heard they send you to one of those islands. Puerto Rico or something.” During the Conflict, many small islands had been completely overrun by vampires. A rough estimate of somewhere around eighty percent of Puerto Ricans had been devoured. The relative few who had escaped had told any number of horror stories of what they had seen and how they had narrowly escaped.
“A bullet is cheaper,” someone else said. Nick was surprised to hear how cynical many of them were. He supposed he was too, but they were even more glass-half-empty than him.
“Look, regardless of how you got here, there’s obviously someone or something out there that would have just as soon seen you dead. They killed my uncle and my father. For all anyone knows we still aren’t safe. The military won’t watch over us all forever.”
“Let me go, Kim,” Nick said.
“The poison is still in you. You’ll barely be able to move. You’re still sick.”
“Not for too long. I think this was meant for me.” He held up the fangs.
“No,” Allen said. “That was some sort of weapon. He only bit you because he knew he wasn’t going to make it out.”
“No. If he was going to kill somebody it would have been Kim.”
“Well, he did try to break my neck,” she said.
“Yeah, and then he bit me. If this was a lethal poison, why not bite the person who was hurting him? He was trying to break your hold for long enough to get to me. And the other obvious thing: I’m not dying.” Nick took her hand off his arm. His stomach felt like the bottom dropped out of it but he held his feet. The air agitated his skin and everything was tinged red. Slumped into a chair, Nick was pretty sure he felt better than he had when he first woke up.
Someone kicked a trash can over to him.
“You look like you could use that.” Nick’s stomach agreed.
“Aw, hell.” He grabbed the trash can and everything came up, which wasn’t much considering it had been several hours since he’d last eaten. He was still holding onto the can when the voice came over the megaphone.
“You. Inside. We need everyone inside to come out single file, with their fingers laced behind their heads. The area has been secured and you are in no danger.”
The tall blond, Ray, pulled his long hair into a ponytail and tied it with a rubber band. He looked at Pearlanne.
“You think he’s talking to you too?” He smirked and headed for the door.
“Hey, where are you going?” someone said. “Out,” Ray said. “Look, if they shoot us in here or out there doesn’t make that big of a difference. I’m a get-it-over-with kinda guy. Remember, we got some people in here who can’t comply. I’ll give them the heads up.”
“I know what you’re thinking.” An equally tall vamp who looked about half his weight hooked him by the arm. “You think if you surrender first they won’t shoot you because they want to round us all up.”
“Stop it with the conspiracies, already. The military isn’t some big bad wolf. They’re on our side, even if it doesn’t seem like it. If all you yahoos had bothered thinking about it, if they wanted us all dead they would have launched a rocket and blew us all up.” He wrenched his arm away from the skinny vamp and continued toward the door.
“Wait a minute,” Allen said. “We still need to think about this.” Ray kept walking. “Look, Ray, as far as we know they’re still going to arrest all of us.”
Ray turned around and looked at him. “What? You gotta be kidding me. Why would they?”
“Hello? Why are we all here to begin with? We broke curfew.”
“But all this. I mean, they were trying to kill us! They can’t be out there to arrest us now.”
“Why not?”
Pearlanne was standing by the door. She looked uncertain.
“Nick?” she said. “What do you think? Those vamps were here for you.”
“I don’t know,” he said, his stomach still tap dancing inside of him. When Kim tried to put a hand on his shoulder he shied away. He needed to feel his way through this and despite outward appearances, he was starting to feel some better. “They could have been coming for any of us. What was that thing your father had? He scanned us all with it and it told him something about me.”
“It’s something the military gave him.”
The room collectively groaned.
“So that’s it, then,” a woman said. “Those uber-vamps were sent by the military.”
“What do we do?” Ray asked.
Nick bit his lip for a moment. “I’m gonna turn myself in.” He stood. The room felt like it was leaning to the left for a moment then everything slowly righted itself. Nick blinked several times before his head cleared. “If I’m the reason they came here, then they should leave when they have me, right?”
No one said anything and Nick headed for the door. He stumbled and Ray caught him. Nick thanked him and pulled himself upright. Allen stood in front of the door.
“This isn’t right. This so isn’t right.”
Pearlanne seized him by the shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. “All of you. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t feel bad, Pearlanne. They’ve been trying to get me for a while. It was just a matter of time.” When Nick thought about it, there really was no way he was going to get away forever. The city was only so big and he couldn’t have honestly expected to go floating from place to place. They’d found that girl and it didn’t seem like she’d been advertising her home address.
He pushed open the door and put his hands behind his head. There was a big military truck about seventy yards away. There were about a half dozen floodlights pointed at him, nearly blinding him.
“Proceed toward the light slowly,” a voice boomed. Nick shuffled his feet. The light was giving him a splitting headache. He wanted to shout, which would have been pointless over the roar of a helicopter sweeping overhead. It added another spotlight that felt like dynamite exploding in his brain. Nick’s nose began to run and a moment later he realized it was blood trickling across his lips.
He looked toward the light and thought he could see the faintest outline of someone approaching him.
“Continue walking,” the voice ordered.
Nick thought he was moving. He looked at his feet and saw they were bar
ely rising off the ground. The light was like a balloon, each step closer into it, the tauter it got, only it wouldn’t explode once it had been squeezed hard enough, Nick would.
He fell to his knees in a coughing fit.
“Get up and continue toward the light.”
Nick crawled for about a foot, maybe not even that far. He held a hand up in front of him and pitched forward onto his face. It was like his body had fainted, but he was still wide awake. He felt his limbs moving, like he was treading water, though he knew he wasn’t going anywhere. His mouth filled with blood and his eyes felt too wet. He blinked and there was a film of red in one of them.
Nick’s muscles seized and a moment later he began shuddering like he’d been submerged in a pool of ice. He felt himself be picked up; he couldn’t open his eyes to see by whom.
A moment later a door closed and he heard the shuffling of feet.
“What’s wrong with him?” someone said.
“I think it was the light. This one is supposed to be like those others and they don’t like bright light. I think it gave him a seizure or something.”
“Well, let’s get this freak back to home base and let Leonard deal with it.”
“What about the rest of them in there?”
Before the other man answered, something heavy shut around Nick, sealing off sound.
Nick shook more violently than before, trying to regain control of himself, and couldn’t. It was like all his wires were crossed. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. All he could do was lie there, hot blood tears streaking out of his eyes and into his ears.
Chapter 5
Friday
“How long… how long have I been out?”
Nick sat up, looking around. He was in a dimly lit gray room. A man stood in the corner wearing a lab coat. He was bald, mid-fifties, wore glasses. Nick didn’t like the scent of him and a moment later smelled some sort of illness riddling his body.
“You’ve been asleep thirty-four hours. We’ve been monitoring you and you are just about ready.”
“Ready for what?” He swung his legs out of the cot and rubbed his head. “Where are my pills?”
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