A dog’s high-pitched whining knocked him out of his thoughts. A pickup truck had pulled up next to him and a Rottweiler inside the cab was going nuts, its paws scraping against the passenger-side window in a frantic attempt to break itself free. The owner, a big beefy guy with a buzz cut and goatee, looked like he had his hands full trying to subdue his dog. He yelled out orders for the animal to heel, all of which the Rottweiler ignored. After some struggling he got the dog on a leash. When he opened the passenger door, the dog shot out as if from a cannon and nearly dragged the owner onto the pavement. Cursing, he righted himself and, as his eyes met Jim’s, he shot Jim a pissed-off look as if he were blaming Jim for his dog’s bad behavior. Sonofabitch, the guy was perceptive, because it wasn’t as irrational as one would think. Jim knew that the dog’s reaction had nothing to do with fear but an odor that fell within the spectrum a dog could pick up but humans couldn’t. As best he could figure out, the virus caused a change in his body chemistry that resulted in the emission of an odor that affected dogs, along with a host of other animals and insects, the same way that mustard gas affected humans. They couldn’t help themselves with the way they reacted to it—they’d do anything to try and escape it.
Jim watched as the Rottweiler strained on its leash and pulled the owner away. The man looked like he wanted to tie his dog up outside the diner, but after some more struggling he gave up and let the dog go inside with him. Before the door closed behind him, the man turned and shot Jim one last enraged look.
The incident made him think of his old dog, Buster, a beautiful almost pure white Bull Terrier with only a few black smudges on his ears and some pink on the tip of his nose. That breed is so damn loyal, and as long as they have physical contact with you they’re content. Before joining the army he gave the dog to his sister, April. He often thought about Buster, wondering if he could still be alive, and if he were, whether he’d recognize him. In his mind’s eye he could imagine Buster whining in agony but still crawling over to him so that he could lay against his feet. Thinking about Buster reminded him of his previous life. It seemed so long ago now. A different lifetime ago. To think at one time he had been a human being…
The noise of a door slamming shut distracted him. Carol had left the diner, her face a hard white, a bag clutched tightly in her fist. She tried to smile when she saw Jim, but it didn’t stick. She stormed her way to their car and banged the door open, then slid into the driver’s seat.
“Those assholes. It’s okay for them to let some flea-bitten mutt walk in there without any argument, but you they treat worse than a dog. I want to find a payphone. I’m going to call the Department of Health and see those assholes shut down!”
“Babe, it’s not worth it.”
“You should’ve seen the way that dog was wheezing and drooling at the mouth. That’s okay with them. But with you, a little sweat… Goddamn it! I really want to report them! You know what that bitch cashier had the fucking nerve to tell me? That it’s customary to leave a tip for takeout food. I wanted to shove the change down her throat!”
“Babe…”
“I’m so angry right now.”
Massive understatement…
Her lips curled up and nearly disappeared as she smiled a bare-fanged smile. Straight but slightly yellowed teeth showed through it. Shaking her head, she pulled a cheeseburger from the paper bag, unwrapped it and took an angry bite out of the burger.
“You’re not going to enjoy your food if you eat angry like this.”
“I’m not going to enjoy this greasy shit no matter how I eat it.” She took a hesitant look at Jim and apologized. “I’m sorry. God, I know with the way you’re feeling you don’t need me to act this way. I just can’t help it. I hate that they think they can treat you like this.”
“I know.”
She turned to give the diner one last angry stare. “Fuck them. Let’s just get away from this dump. The quicker we find a motel, the quicker you can lie down.”
She handed Jim the rest of her food to hold, then with the cheeseburger in one hand and gripping the steering wheel in the other, she put the car in reverse, hit the gas, and nearly spun out backing out. Sending up a cloud of dust, she shoved the car in drive, spun the wheels some more and, with her foot heavy on the gas, sped out of the parking lot and back onto 90 East nearly sideswiping a minivan. Fortunately the driver was too startled to honk or give her the finger.
“Are you okay?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, I just need a minute.” She hesitated for a moment, then asked how he was feeling.
“Better.”
She accepted the lie, but gave him a long uneasy glance as she took a bite of her burger.
“We’ll find a motel soon,” she said.
Jim nodded. He dug out of the paper bag a container of French Fries so she could eat them while wolfing down the burger. He knew she liked ketchup on her fries. He took a couple of packets, struggled for a bit, but got them open, and spread the ketchup on the fries. When she was done with the food, he handed her a chocolate shake. At least she’d have to take her time drinking that. Maybe she’d even end up tasting it. Jim turned the radio back on and found a hip hop station. She started to argue that he should find a classic rock and roll station for himself, but he told her this was what he wanted to listen to. She didn’t put up too much of a fight. She needed something to take the edge off her anger and listening to her music usually did the trick. He closed his eyes and tried to keep her from seeing how much he was hurting.
It was an hour later that she drove past the airport and then a row of strip clubs before pulling into the parking lot of a cheap motor lodge inside the Brook Park area of Cleveland. A sign out front advertised king-sized waterbeds, but other than that the motor lodge seemed typical for where they’d been staying since going on the run. Two stories, and mostly a grim dirty-looking concrete eyesore. The type of place that usually had shag carpeting from the seventies and a few mass-produced uninspired water colors hung on the walls. It was also the type of place where the furniture was bolted down, and more likely than not, had a bedspread growing more germ cultures on it than a lab full of Petri dishes—and if you were smart you didn’t lie down on it; if you were even smarter you’d cover your hand with something when you removed it from the bed. Also you’d keep your shoes on at night so you wouldn’t step on any needles left behind by one of the previous occupants. Carol sighed as she looked at the building. She gave Jim’s hand a quick squeeze, then left the car so she could rent them a room. When she got to the front office door, she turned to give him a wistful smile before disappearing inside. Five minutes later she came out of the office with key in hand.
“Forty-nine dollars a night for this rattrap,” she told Jim when she got back to the car.
“Sounds like a bargain.”
“Yeah, I just hope it’s not infested with bedbugs.”
Jim couldn’t help smiling. While there was a resurgence of bedbugs going on nationwide, and while this motor lodge seemed like a prime candidate to find an infestation, this was something they didn’t have to worry about. The only positive he could see about his infection was that blood-seeking insects like mosquitoes, bedbugs and lice reacted to his scent the same as dogs. If this dump did have bedbugs, they’d scatter as soon as he entered the room. Fuck, if he could only advertise he’d make a fortune clearing pests from motels and residences.
Carol brought him back to reality by mentioning how they were running low on cash.
“We’ll get some more soon.”
“We’d better. Three nights here and we’re broke.”
Jim nodded, then moved slowly as he pulled himself out of the car. Carol looked on, her hard smile turning fragile. She grabbed a suitcase—they’d been traveling light with only a couple of changes of clothing each—and walked slowly to keep pace with him so she’d be able to reach out to him in case he stumbled. She had gotten them a room on the first floor knowing he’d have trouble now with the stairs. The room did
have a king-sized waterbed, but other than that it was as Jim expected; dirty, dingy, the walls concrete cinderblock, the ceiling water-stained and the furniture looking like it had been picked out of the city dump. It also had the unmistakable musty smell of a gym locker-room. Jim made it to a cheap padded wooden chair, dragged it away from the window and collapsed in it. Carol moved quickly to close the blinds. The room darkened enough to where Jim no longer felt like a fire was raging under his skin. He breathed a little easier, but now more than anything it was his hunger overwhelming him.
Carol pulled the bedspread off and kicked it away into a corner, then opened the suitcase and removed a small medical kit from her nursing school days. From inside of it she took out a rubber hose and a syringe. She wrapped the hose tightly around her upper arm, then walked over to Jim and sat in his lap while he pulled the hose even tighter and tied it. She walked back to her medical kit, sat down on the bed and flicked on her arm until she could spot a vein. She had such thin arms, and it was hard for her to locate a good vein. Once she had one, she pushed in the syringe and took a blood sample, her face a complete blank as she did this. Jim kept his eyes squeezed shut. He couldn’t risk seeing blood now, not in the state he was in. He heard her remove the plastic vial from within the syringe, then the rush of blood filling up a second vial as she took another blood sample. After a minute or so, he could hear the hose being untied, and then the door opening and closing. He was ashamed of the fact that he was salivating.
When Carol returned, she brought an ice bucket with her. On the bottom of the bucket covered with ice were her two blood samples. He’d have to wait until later to drink them—while there was far less than a pint of blood in those two samples, it would still revitalize him enough to give him the strength for what he needed to do. If he drank it now, though, it would make him want to keep feeding until he was satiated. It would be too dangerous. Carol knew this also. She placed the ice bucket in a drawer so it would be out of sight. Then she helped him out of the chair and onto the bed. While he lay flat on his back, she sidled up next to him and rested her cheek on his stomach and took hold of his arm so she could wrap it around her shoulders.
They lay together like that for several minutes before she spoke.
“Try and get some sleep, Darling,” she whispered. “In a few hours it will be dark. You’ll be able to feed then.”
He nodded, his chin moving up and down a fraction of an inch.
“It’s too bad you can’t feed on infected blood,” she said, sighing softly. “Otherwise you could just infect me and we could feed off of each other forever. How would that be?”
Again, he nodded because there was no harm in doing so. The virus changed a person’s blood chemistry, making drinking it intolerable to an infected vampire. Early on in his infection while in a half-dream-like state and without any real conscious awareness—only his hunger driving him—he had tried feeding on Serena. Only a bare taste of her blood left him as sick as a dog. Serena got a kick out of it, then explained the ropes to him while his body was wracked with dry heaves. It didn’t matter, though. Even if he could consume infected blood, he’d rather cut out his own heart than infect Carol.
Carol moved her hand lightly over Jim’s chest, trying to soothe him. “Sleep, my darling,” she whispered. “Just a few more hours…”
Chapter 2
When Metcalf left the modest three-bedroom ranch-style house he was decked out in a lightweight trench coat, Indiana Jones-style felt hat complete with rattlesnake-skin band, dark shades, chinos and racing gloves—all of which he needed to protect himself against the oppressive Southern California sun. Like every other infected vampire, his body had gone through radical changes since his infection—losing all body fat and becoming leaner, narrower, his face more angular, but even with these changes he was still massive. Six and a half feet tall and two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and tendon. A thick scar ran from his right eye to his chin, and stood out against the paleness of his skin. His shades hid the same dead pale blue eyes that he had since birth.
He moved quickly across the field that separated the house from an equally modest looking barn, his head turned down as if he were racing against hurricane gales even through the air was dead still. Although he was covered head to toe, the damn sunlight still made him nauseous.
The inside of the barn held a tractor, some standard farming tools and bales of hay. On the other side of the barn were the stables holding four beautiful golden Palominos. While the altered blood chemistry of a vampire secreted an odor that was noxious to most animals, especially dogs, horses didn’t seem to have a problem with it. Metcalf loved grooming and riding his horses. It probably seemed crazy for an infected vampire to move to Southern California and the intense sun, but for Metcalf, once he decided to split from Serena and open up operations on the West Coast, the spot proved ideal. He had access to all the transients and other such disposable people that he needed and the farm was situated in an isolated rural area seventy miles outside of Los Angeles giving him total privacy. He could still get into the city at night for the music scene or to the beach for surfing. And he had all the space he needed for riding his horses.
Metcalf took off his shades. Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness he walked to the back of the barn where he crouched so he could fit his fingers between the wall and concrete flooring. Straining, he lifted up a twelve-hundred pound slab of concrete flooring that exposed a well-lit staircase. The concrete slab had been reinforced throughout with steel to keep it from breaking apart. None of the other infected vampires at the compound had the strength to lift the slab which was the way Metcalf wanted it. He held up the flooring until he could get onto the staircase, then he lowered the concrete behind him with one hand.
The staircase led thirty feet below ground level to an eighteen thousand square foot compound that had been separated into four areas: the “cattle” pens, a research lab, Metcalf’s own private lab and living quarters for the fifteen vampires who were housed there. The cost to build the compound came to over six million dollars, but money was not an issue, not with the amounts that Serena was able to get her hands on. The owner of the construction company Metcalf had hired to do the job was later found brutally murdered, as well as his family, several months after completion of the compound, all of the bodies drained of their blood. The construction crew had been made up of illegal immigrants and all of them disappeared at the same time also, at least as far as the authorities were concerned. Of course, the police were still looking for them thinking that one or more of them might’ve had something to do with the massacre of their boss and his family, but the authorities weren’t going to find any of them. The ones that were still living were “guests” within Metcalf’s private lab, the others were long since dead and disposed of. As far as Metcalf knew, aside from Serena and her people, no one outside of the compound had any idea about its existence, and he was going to keep it that way.
The walls leading down the staircase were covered with two-inch thick sheets of titanium. It would take two of the other vampires to lift the cement slab that he had just lifted, and that would only be if they could get the proper footing to support themselves which they wouldn’t be able to do on that narrow staircase. Any of the other vampires that found themselves in this area would be stuck. They wouldn’t be able to lift the slab, nor would they be able to tunnel through the titanium walls. He had made it impossible for any of his staff to leave the compound unless he let them out.
Metcalf reached the bottom of the staircase and unlocked a four-inch thick titanium-reinforced security door that led into the compound, then entered the “cattle” pen area. This was where they housed their collection of transients, hookers, runaways, street people and illegals for daily milking; a total group of ninety such disposable people—or livestock as he thought of them. They were kept nine to a pen, with each pen being fifteen by fifteen feet and containing three army cots, along with a toilet and water faucet. The “livestock”
were milked twice a day, taking a pint of blood during each milking. The average stay in a pen was six months—once they got ill or became too anemic to milk they would be drained of whatever blood they had left and disposed of; the same if they showed a hint of belligerence or disobedience. After each restocking there’d always be a few demonstrations needed before the rest would fall in line. Over time, though, they’d give up whatever faint hope they held and become merely ghosts—nothing more than shadows of their former selves. They’d never utter a word or dare to meet Metcalf’s eyes or show any resistance. Like cattle they would leave their cells when commanded and lie quietly during their milking.
Vanessa was taking a pint from one of the livestock. She nodded at Metcalf as he approached, he nodded back. She had been a prostitute before he infected her. Originally he had picked her up to be a replacement for one of the dead livestock, but he liked the way she looked—long red hair that fell halfway down her back, sultry lips, almond-shaped green eyes and a thin waist with near perfect legs. Her breasts were smaller than what he typically liked—no bigger than what would fit in a champagne glass, but they had a perky quality to them so he decided to overlook that flaw, and besides, the infection would shrink them anyway. The infection had since bleached out her hair and had shrunk her tits to the size of small apples, but she dyed her hair the same reddish color as before and even with the changes to her body that the infection caused, he still liked the way she looked. There was something else about her that he found himself instantly attracted to. It took him a while to figure out what it was, but he eventually understood it. In her own way she was as ruthless as he was, even reminding him a bit of Serena, although she wasn’t nearly as cunning or as crazy. Since the other vampires were complaining about how overworked they were—and because of his immediate attraction to her—he infected her and added her to the staff. He was glad he did. Unlike the others, she accepted her situation and never showed any self-pity. As far as her competency, well, she never really developed a touch for drawing blood and was rough with the livestock, but it didn’t much matter. She’d get a pint out of them regardless of how many times she had to poke them searching for a vein. And it was not as if any of them were going to complain. All in all, Metcalf was glad he chose to infect her instead of making her one of the livestock.
Blood Crimes: Book One Page 2
