The Other Kind (The Progeny of Evolution Series)

by Arsuaga, Mike

  With terrified eyes he gasped, “Stand back, Roger.”

  I relaxed my grip. “I am leaving now,” I said. “You will accompany me until I have departed the ship.” I glanced at the stain on the crotch of his slacks. Part of the urine had trickled to the carpet beneath. “Afterward,” I added, “you might want to change your clothes. My attorney will be in touch with you shortly about my winnings.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Girl Who Loved Well and the One Who Didn’t

  It was about a one hour drive from the port terminal to our apartment, interstate all the way. It took no small amount of self-discipline not to floor it. Above all I couldn’t be pulled over. My excuses wouldn’t fly: “Yes officer, well you see, I am a vampire. My lycan mate is in labor, about to give birth to the first progeny of lycans and vampires. I am sure under the circumstances you can see…”

  By the time I got on the road, moonless night descended like a great raven wing. The expressway stretched ahead in my headlights, straight and flat like the fresh cover on an ironing board. The passing air made whistling sounds as it flew over the less than perfect window and door weather-stripping of the Corolla. I gripped the wheel like grim death with the green glow of the instrument panel lighting the inside from below. Outside the headlights punched white shafts into the night. The green and white mile markers seemed to creep by as I counted them off. Paradoxically, the highway signs quickly grew to size in the headlights to shoot by with an abrupt swishing sound.

  I passed fields with dark rows of spring planting where the fog gathered in the low spots. I remember a single house sitting on a small rise, a dark wood cube of lapped siding with a high roof. A single outside light weakly challenged the power of the surrounding night. The illumination showed brief detail of a swing suspended from the ceiling of a front porch. I wondered who the light burned for and if the occupants had any idea of the momentous events afoot on this warm May evening.

  Lulled by the steady engine noise and the hum of tires on the concrete, my mind drifted to the events that brought me to this watershed night.

  * * * *

  In one of my first memories I stood and peered out the upstairs window of my room. I determined to do this even though my weak legs trembled with the exertions.

  Observing the outside world for the first time, I saw a dirt road curved between two fields of grain. My father rode his Morgan stallion toward the house. Sunset bathed the scene in a warm golden hue. The trees at the edge of the field, the distant mountains, the barn, and out buildings, even Father appeared to glow pale gold at the moment of the day when afternoon folds into evening and all nature goes silent.

  Father served as an Army surgeon for the South. After the Civil War he started a practice. He bought a small holding in Dunwoodie, a town outside of Atlanta. In 1877 he returned from business in Mississippi with a bride, the former Cassandra Waldrup, my mother. She was barely sixteen. I remember only one picture of her, a beautiful, dark, fragile woman. She died having me. Father gave me his name, Thomas Watkins. His work kept him away the majority of the time. Some of my caregivers served conscientiously, but soon lost the will and patience to deal with a dull-eyed lump of flesh capable only of eating and soiling.

  Others were simply cruel.

  On the day I first stood and saw Father riding to the house, I also observed he had a companion. In a dark green riding outfit, sitting side saddle on a mare, rode a woman. Father considered it fortunate to have found her. The last caregiver, a young sassy mulatto named Sarah, ran off without warning not two days before, leaving him in a spot.

  Carole Henson differed from the others. She was an adult. From the beginning she looked after me as if charged with the most important task in the world.

  “How is my little man today?” she cheerfully asked each morning. Leaning over, she hovered far above as she swept long brown tresses across my narrow little chest. I made a deep connection with the act.

  Slim, she had small shoulders and hips. Brown eyes gazed at the world from a thin diamond shaped face, widest at the cheekbones. The eyes went with the innocence of sharing secrets on a garden bench, belying the cool, calculating intellect underneath. She hated the long and slightly crooked nose I thought gave her face character.

  By the age of seventeen I progressed further under Carole’s care than Father ever imagined possible. Additionally my hearing and other senses improved.

  One day I heard two of the servants doing something in the potato storage room involving a lot of rapid noisy movement. It left me confused and edgy.

  Later in my room I asked Carole what I heard. She stood with her back to me, arranging things on the dry sink where she kept grooming and hygiene items. Her hair swept upward, revealing a long white neck, like a cygnet, and small shoulders with long back, but the slim lifted rear end elicited the most interest, an interest I didn’t understand.

  She turned toward me with a guileless expression. The brown eyes washed over me. “You heard them? Was the door open?”

  “No ma’am. I heard them through the door. I never did before.”

  She quickly joined me, kneeling on the floor beside my chair. “Tell me Tommy,” she said quietly but with excitement, “are there any other things better now? Sight? Smell?”

  “Yes, all of them,” I answered with trepidation, afraid she might discover I smelled faint scents on her, similar to those of the servant girl in the potato storage room.

  A few nights later she came to my room. When I startled awake she put a finger across my lips and whispered I should be quiet. “Do you like these,” she whispered in the dark, pressing my hand to the open bodice of her night gown. I saw the outline of hardening brown nipples and touched warm firm flesh, fascinated by way she reacted.

  “I have much, much more to show,” she whispered, getting on top of me and reaching for my member. She stroked it slowly with one hand but I didn’t get hard. After a few minutes she leaped onto the floor in a single movement I thought humanly impossible. “You’re not ready yet,” she kissed my forehead and left.

  Years later, I learned she ran across my scent in Philadelphia and followed us home. Killing Sarah allowed her to take charge of my care and emergence.

  The next day Carole explained the meaning of what I experienced. She didn’t say I would become a vampire, but that I was special and soon would be superior to all others.

  “But what about the things you did last night?” I asked.

  She took a deep breath. Her breasts swelled under the pinafore. “It is complicated.” She told me how to make babies and things concerning the two sexes giving one another pleasure. She demonstrated on herself.

  Carole stood in front of me and lifted her dress. The sight of two slim legs and what nestled between them drew my gaze. “Touch me,” she ordered. “Go on. It’s all right.”

  My trembling hand moved close to her hirsute female core.

  “Go on,” she urged when I hesitated. Finally, with patience exhausted, she exhaled loudly, took my hand, and applied it directly to her forbidden place. My mind raced, trying to understand all the strange new events happening. The alluring smells as I touched the warm, wet tissues of a female confused and even frightened me, but I couldn’t stop. Under her instruction I inserted two fingers inside her as another rotated slowly on a small knob of flesh I later learned pleasured females. Her hips swayed in slow ardent undulations. She frequently glanced down for signs of arousal. I remained limp as a cooked noodle.

  Carole’s nightly visits continued until I emerged. She fondled me, using sweet smelling salves. When erections began, she assured me the emergence was close at hand. On the night it happened I penetrated her in the usual way, but soon I felt a new sensation, the beginning of a contracting tingle roll through my body. She lifted her narrow hips, expelling me from her.

  “No,” she whispered hoarsely, “not inside of me.” Embroiled in the torrent of the new agitation, I did not understand what was never supposed to happen “inside
of her.”

  I watched in confusion as she took my wet and slick manhood in her hand and stroked it. A brownish purple shaft contrasted vividly with the paleness of her abdomen. In her manipulations I loosed several spouts of watery white liquid. The first spurted as far as the pillow supporting her head. Another splashed down in a line of droplets across one breast. The rest landed on her stomach in random, curving whitish tracks. Afterward I crashed on top of her in a wild embrace, smearing the seed between us. The edginess and tension building in me since she started the nightly visits collapsed. I lay in her arms, drained and relaxed.

  Vampire emergences are more cerebral than those of lycans. Within a few hours and three more orgasms, I controlled my transformations. The physical changes are more gradual, taking several days.

  The next night I hunted and killed my first prey, a nubile young black woman living on the outskirts of town. A seamstress by day and streetwalker by night, she was only twenty or so. Carole previously screened her, anticipating my needs, and waited outside in the shadows while the prey took me to a room opening directly onto the street. My heart raced at the prospect of a sexual kill.

  I remember smooth skinned brown legs and a tight round bottom. As she bent over I leisurely observed her womanhood. My mind desperately tried to recall the differences between hers and Carole’s. I remembered the starkness of its pink inside contrasted against the dark flesh and black hair.

  “Quick,” she said, “let’s get your things off.”

  She went to work on my clothes, uttering a trill when she touched my member. Carole never made a fuss over it, providing no basis for comparison, so her admiration surprised me.

  I smelled a full measure of odor I soon indelibly associated with sexually aroused human females. The prey opened her arms invitingly. In my blood lust I pushed her into the soft bed and fell on top. The plush comforter swallowed us. A second later, I found her wet sex in the voluminous folds of bedding, plunging my eager member directly in. She gasped with pleasure at the vigor of my ardor, wrapping me in her legs. The heels of her feet pressed firmly in the small of my back, feeling warm and soft.

  At the moment of our mutual orgasm I gasped at the nearly unbearable pleasure of climaxing inside a woman as her feminine enclave avidly pulled at my swollen member.

  After finishing, I prepared to take her. Recognizing my intention, as the morph began to transform me, she struggled and begged to be spared. I pulled out. My manhood glistened with part of my copious outpouring and dripped on the sheet, adding to the luxurious stain already there. I completed the transformation, ready to end her mortal existence in the pre-Kutzu fashion, but, moved by her pleas and the terror in her chocolate colored eyes, I stopped. I turned back to human and started to get off her.

  “You will forget this ever happened?” I demanded.

  She huddled on the bed in a fetal position, her face buried in her hands, crying hysterically. “Yes. Oh, Yes. I promise.”

  I dressed and prepared to leave, unsure how to explain this to Carole when she burst into the room shouting, “This can’t be! You have to finish her. There are never witnesses.”

  I started to argue on the girl’s behalf, but Carole ignored me. Stepping to the bed, she took the girl’s head between her hands and broke her neck. It was as casual and practiced an act as the farm wife stepping out to the backyard on a hot afternoon, choosing a plump hen for supper and wringing its neck.

  “Carry her out, Tommy,” Carole ordered. “We’ll drain her somewhere near the house.”

  I lifted the dead weight. It had once been a vibrant living creature with a lifetime ahead. Never again, I promised myself, would I take a young life without a compelling reason.

  “Stop that, Tommy,” Carole chided mildly one morning a week later. I completed emergence. “Such vanity is unnatural.”

  I stood naked in front of a full-length mirror. Not from vanity. I couldn’t believe the tall, lanky young man with the healthy muscle tone reflected back was me. I possessed a man’s wide shoulders, smooth, tan, and streamlined, tapering to narrow hips. The muscles of my lean abdomen rippled with new found strength. The emergence did nothing for the knobby nose or long face but the eyes gained brightness and depth.

  “You will get used to it, my boy.” Carole put out a set of clothes on the comforter. “Get dressed. We have plans to make.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, obediently pulling on the trousers.

  “Look at you. How do we explain this to your father, not to mention the servants? We have to leave right away and not come back for a while.”

  “Father is not so young now. He will need me. Servants can be replaced. He will accept me because now I am the son he always wanted.”

  Carole and I asked Father for his blessing to marry. We met in the parlor. Carole kept it dimly lit so the barriers of darkness and shadow, as well as Father’s diminished eyesight, obscured the changes in me. He hesitated, suggesting privately to me she was too old. Eventually I convinced him the age difference did not matter. He insisted we marry before leaving. A week later we left in a new carriage drawn by a Hackney Pony with two hundred dollars as a wedding present.

  We agreed to live away from Father for two years, enough time to plausibly explain the changes, but it didn’t work out like that. After the time elapsed, we visited only briefly, usually on holidays. The affliction slowly taking hold of Carole was behind it. Soon after we left my father’s house, she developed an intense, irrational fear of discovery by the outside world.

  Our relationship continued to go bad as Carole’s personality turned. She became moody and ill-tempered with the hormonal rages tearing through her. She had what was known today as “Vampire Menopause,” but to me it seemed an incomprehensible and frightening change in a person I loved for as long as I could remember.

  When I returned home from work I never knew which Carole I might find. Sometimes the passionate one greeted me with hot eyes, plying my desire with avid hands and select parts of her body, demanding we do it on the spot. Other times, it was the sad or whining Carole complaining the last kill wasn’t fresh or I failed in another way. When an argument precipitated, enforced abstinence inevitably followed. In the beginning I swallowed my pride, promptly surrendering to her formidable temptations. At the time, sexual gratification meant more than self-respect.

  Carole refused to hunt and demanded I bring prey home alive for her to take. Most were females. For males we developed a special routine. After introductions I suddenly remembered a lengthy errand I needed to run and returned ten minutes, or so, later to find them making love. When Carole ejected him and took his member to finish the climax, I moved in. Men dying for her sexual favors with unrequited orgasms excited her above all else. She liked to watch their faces as I strangled them. We made hot love next to the naked corpse before feeding on it.

  As time passed, the occasions when her sex did not compensate for the loss of self-respect became more frequent. My ability to endure imposed abstinence increased so by the end of our time together I lasted almost as long as she. When I became particularly stubborn she left, returning hours later reeking of other men. I began to hate her.

  We lived like this for ten years, during which we learned about Kutzu from an itinerant Eastern European.

  On a cold fall night in 1912, an elderly black man presented himself at our door. When he entered the light I recognized him as Elias, Father’s foreman. His frame filled the doorway, massive torso, large brown face, and iron gray side burns.

  “The Doctor is dying and calls for you.”

  Elias’ words rang in my head. How could this be? Father was Father, the imposing yet reticent figure who stayed on the fringe of my life while completely controlling it. He grew slightly grayer each time we visited but remained vigorous. I took his perpetual presence for granted. Perhaps it was why I didn’t mind our infrequent visits. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, he stood at the end of his mortal course. For the first time in my life, I understoo
d what dying meant.

  Carole did not want me to go to him. I forget the reason. A terrible argument ensued, but I remained adamant. I needed to be with Father, although I didn’t clearly know why, and followed Elias.

  “I won’t be here when you return,” were her last words to me.

  When I arrived the servants marveled over how much I changed. A few crossed themselves. Except for a brief hunt for prey, I did not leave Father’s side from my arrival until he died.

  The cold warmed to Indian summer. We sat on the verandah in side-by-side rocking chairs, sipping iced tea, sharing last precious moments on a golden sunny afternoon like the one I remembered when I stood in my crib the day Carole came to live with us.

  “You know, Thomas,” Father said. “For a long time I hated you.” He paused, taking a labored swallow of tea. I gazed down at the frail creature crumpled in the next chair and waited for him to continue.

  Taking a small, liver-spotted and blue-veined hand in mine, I began to speak. “No need to explain.” I said, but he cut me off.

  “You don’t understand,” he snapped with the impatience the old have when they think the young don’t get it. “I hated you in the beginning but I changed. You never gave in to your infirmity. You prevailed over it. I became proud of you. My lifelong regret is I didn’t tell you more often.”

  Holding the delicate frigid hand of my father, for the first time in my life I appreciated the value of life and the cost of missed opportunities. Gazing over the distant yellow fields a tear came to my eye. When I turned to reassure him I loved him, his hand slipped from mine. It came to rest with the knuckles grazing the porch floor. On a mild sun drenched afternoon overlooking the newly harvested fields, forest, and the far mountains, all buttery as from an inner glow, Father passed on.