“My master.”
“Master?”
“I was a slave.”
CHAPTER 21
“Really?” I said.
Wash nodded.
“I don’t know what to say to that,” I said.
“It doesn’t require that you say anything,” said Wash. “It’s just a fact.”
I suddenly had a million questions, most of which weren’t related to vampirism. “What was it like?”
Wash looked the way my grandfather used to when I asked him something he really, really didn’t want to talk about. “It’s a very long story,” said Wash. “And I don’t think my history is why you’re here.”
“Fine,” I said. “Why did you kill Smitty?”
Wash’s face moved from pained to hardened. “I told you. I didn’t kill him. I helped him die.”
“I’m not seeing a difference.”
“You’ve heard the phrase, ‘Putting him out of his misery?’”
My mouth fell open. “You’re telling me what you did was an act of euthanasia?”
Wash nodded.
“So it wasn’t revenge?”
“Not as far as I was concerned.”
I was enjoying talking to Wash less and less. It was like trying to do four 1,000-piece puzzles that were scattered all over the floor. I started walking around, hoping my jumble of thoughts would straighten themselves out with the help of body motion.
They still failed to line up.
I kept moving anyway, talking as I walked and bounced on my heels and twiddled my fingers. “I can tell that you want me to ask you questions,” I said. “But I don’t know what questions to ask. I don’t know what I don’t know, which is,” I stopped. “Let me try again. I feel like to know anything, I have to know everything.”
Wash shook his head. “I can’t tell you everything.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are things that I can’t tell you. Just knowing about vampires, period, has probably shortened your life expectancy by more than a few years. Bringing you in here, talking to you, is putting you in danger, and I have to live with that.”
The corners of my mouth turned up. “Live?”
Wash was less amused. “I don’t appear to be dead, do I?”
I looked at him. To the naked eye, he appeared to be alive, and I finally realized why that was. He never stopped moving.
If you look at a human being, you’ll see that it’s impossible for them to be still. Even sitting in a chair, relaxing, their chest will rise and fall as they suck oxygen into their lungs.
“Are you breathing?” I asked.
Wash’s forehead crinkled in thought for a moment. “Not in a way that’s useful to me. When you’re a vampire, you don’t actually require oxygen. I can sit underwater for a month if I have to. But since you breathe before you’re a vampire, you get into the habit. After you’re a vampire, you keep faking it, otherwise people would sense something wrong about you. Plus, you need air to talk. It’s a science thing.”
My mouth opened to ask another question and Wash cut me off. “Look, I know you’d love to sit around and play Q and A with a vampire. Most humans do. But you have to believe me. I quite literally cannot tell you certain things.”
“What can’t you tell me?”
Wash grinned. “Do you want to rephrase the question?”
“What can you tell me?” I said, emphasizing can.
“I assume you came here to talk about Smitty and the dead homeless people. Your grandfather.”
I nodded.
Wash continued. “As far as your grandfather goes, there isn’t much I can tell you. I saw the picture with him and Smitty. At least, I think I know which one your grandfather was. You’ve got his nose.”
I nodded again. “Yeah.”
“That means you have as much information as I do about your grandfather’s vampire…” He trailed off. His facial features flickered, a touch of anger. A trace of discomfort.
“Slaying?”
Wash blanched. “I was going to say murder.”
CHAPTER 22
“I see how it is,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” said Wash.
“No, no. I get it. When you decided to suck all the blood out of Smitty, that was a mercy killing. But when my Grandpa D decided to repay one of you in kind, that’s murder.”
“It’s a lot more complex than that.”
“Then tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t!” Wash stood, and the tension in the room doubled. I waited for him to take a step towards me, or to order me to leave. Instead, he sat down, his anger gone as quickly as it appeared. “You have to understand, I’m not the only vampire in the world. I’m sure you’ve guessed that.”
“I did.”
“You need to realize whatever I tell you involves them, too. Our existence is a secret for a reason.”
“Which is?”
“Nice try.”
“Fine. Then why did you help Smitty die?”
“You were right.”
“What about?”
“You don’t know what questions to ask.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “What question do I need to ask?”
“Why did Smitty ask me to take his life?”
I finally stopped moving. “He did what now?”
Wash nodded once, as though he was imparting great wisdom to me. “Smitty asked me to end his life. First, he knew he was dying. He might have lasted another two weeks or another two months, but he wasn’t going to make it for two more years.”
“How could he know he was dying?”
“He was a doctor. A long time ago, I suppose, but he knew medicine well enough to know that he had cancer.”
The pile of rags and bones that barely looked like a human when we found it—Smitty—on the floor all those weeks ago. Of course he had cancer. He was like a poster child for someone wasting away with no medical care. Why didn’t I realize that?
Wash kept talking as I thought. “I didn’t think it was my place to share Smitty’s existence with you before he died. It was his story to tell. But now, there’s no one to tell the story but me.”
SMITTY’S STORY
I already told you Smitty was a doctor. He told me he was a medic in the army, and a civilian doctor, but when he practiced and which one came first, I don’t know. I don’t even know where he was stationed, now that I think about it. He might have told me, he might not. Being a vampire gives you a lot of special abilities but a photographic memory isn’t one of them.
It was in the military that Smitty learned about vampires. He’d go to ravaged places and try to make things better, was what he told me. He walked into some smashed building or another in the dead of night because he heard someone crying out.
There was a woman, lying on the floor. There was blood next to her, and he saw a man kneeling over her, doing what he thought was a check of the woman’s vitals.
Of course, since this is a vampire story, that wasn’t the case at all. The woman gasped, the man looked up, and Smitty looked into the face of a being with sharp teeth and black eyes. Smitty called them predator eyes, if I remember right, and I think I do.
The vampire ran and Smitty tried to give chase. He pulled his gun and tried to shoot the vampire but he either missed or, more likely, hit the vampire to no effect.
Smitty didn’t tell the other men in his company what happened. Only that he’d fired his gun because he’d seen someone attacking the nearly dead woman he’d found. Apparently, most of them had seen something similar, though they all assumed it was just people taking whatever they could scrounge in a war-torn area. Living in a country where the basics of survival weren’t always available led to that kind of thing.
Smitty kept his eyes open and soon he realized that every time there was a cluster of dead and dying, his vampire showed up to feed. He chased the creature off each time.
His buddies in his unit started to get concerned, b
ut they wouldn’t voice their worries to Smitty. In his eyes, Smitty was fighting off some sort of supernatural creature, but since he wouldn’t tell his friends what was going on, they started to wonder if Smitty was succumbing to paranoia.
Weeks passed and Smitty continued to do his best to ward off the being he thought was preying on the people he was trying to protect. Then he finally caught a break. His team walked into a building and rousted the vampire in the middle of feeding.
Vampires are hard to catch, and harder to kill. But his squad managed to pull it off, thanks to a lucky break and some bayonets.
When a vampire dies, its body reverts to whatever state it would be in if the person had rotted instead of sprouting fangs. Smitty and his group watched the vampire’s body perform a century of rot in the space of seconds. By the time it was done, all that was left were the bones.
Smitty told the rest of the group he’d been chasing the vampire away for some time, which quelled the concerns of his team. They were pretty sure that when something that shouldn’t exist does, it certainly warrants a little paranoia. They all went on high alert, watching for more vampires.
Smitty told me they didn’t see any more vamps during his tour of duty, and by the time everyone was heading home, a few of the guys refused to talk at all about what had happened. They used words like “mass hysteria,” and “I don’t know what I saw.”
A couple of the guys and Smitty made a pact of sorts. When they got back home, they were going to do some vampire eradicating.
Smitty didn’t hear much from the other guys. He got a letter or two those first years back, and a card at Christmas, and then nothing. The longer he was home, the more he started to wonder if maybe they were right. Maybe war had just given them all a shared nightmare.
Smitty was a family doctor and didn’t work a lot of late-night hours. A pretty awful strain of flu blew through town and suddenly there were a lot of medical staff home sick, and a surprising number of people dying.
Smitty took a few night shifts and started covering people in white sheets, calling their deaths as they arrived at the hospital. He said it was almost as bad as the war. The only advantage was most of the time they had enough medication to dull everyone’s pain.
Soon enough, though, Smitty started to pick up on a pattern. People were coming in on the ambulance with dead relatives in tow and their stories all had a similar thread. The dead person would go to bed sick, the husband, or wife, or father, or mother, or daughter, or son, would go to bed, only to wake up to an odd moaning sound. They’d get up, go to the bedroom of the afflicted, and walk in just as their loved one gave a dying gasp. All of them saw something move in the room just before they flipped on the lights. A close examination of the bodies during a routine autopsy revealed they all had nearly invisible pinpricks on their necks.
Smitty knew, just like that, he had been right all along. Vampires were real.
Smitty put a call in to his believer friends, trying to convince them over the phone that something had to be done. All of them, however, had lived vampire-free existences for years now and had slid into the mindset that they didn’t really see what they thought they had seen.
Smitty was on his own.
He considered trying to take the information from the autopsies and medical reports to some of his fellow doctors, hoping to convince them the town was under some kind of an attack. He suspected that at best his they would think he was delirious from lack of sleep and take him out of the rotation just when the town needed him most.
He took matters into his own hands.
It was a lot easier than I think it would have been under normal circumstances. Vampires don’t like to be seen doing what they do and they work under the cover of night, when most of the world is asleep. The deadly flu and the packed beds had drawn some of them to the hospital. Now that all of his senses were on alert, Smitty thought he’d be able to catch one in the act.
He was right. He started watching the charts of everyone. He watched those taking a sudden downturn like his life depended on it.
The bodies kept piling up, at a rate of one or two or three per day, but Smitty couldn’t catch the vampires at it.
Until one night.
You’ve got to understand, vampires are careful not to be caught doing what they do. There aren’t all that many of us, and if people ever started to believe—to really believe—we exist, I doubt we’d last more than a year. Smitty caught one of us in the middle of nowhere because of blind luck and carelessness on the part of the vampire.
The second time Smitty murdered a vampire, I’m guessing it was because the vamp was worn out. Running from room to room, checking on the nearly deceased, trying to avoid detection. A vampire isn’t all human but vampires were human once upon a time, and every human being in the world makes mistakes.
In this case, Smitty had a stake of his own. He’d cut a small branch off of a tree, told his wife he was pruning. He sharpened it and kept it hidden in his belt under his lab coat. Back in the military, people had noticed that Smitty was acting strange. With the flu going on, everyone was strained past caring. Or maybe they saw Smitty was acting odd and chalked it up to sleep deprivation, overwork, or a combination of the two. Ultimately, it didn’t matter.
What did matter was, one night, while wandering from room to room in search of vampires, Smitty actually saw one. It was like a flashback to his military days. The same soft moans, the same careful leaning over the body.
Smitty pulled his stake, stepped through the door and moved towards the vampire. The patient gave his last gasp, the vampire looked up, and then everything happened at once.
The vampire moved towards the opened window where Smitty guessed it had come in. Smitty got there first, brandishing the stake. The vampire turned and ran the opposite direction.
That was when Smitty’s second instance of blind luck slipped into place. Another doctor, hearing an odd noise, came down the hall and walked into the room. The vampire ran right into him and physics took over.
Smitty’s coworker crashed into the wall in the hallway behind him and fell to the floor, still looking into the doorway where he saw black eyes and needle-sharp canines. Smitty raced up and stabbed the vampire in the heart. Just like before, it crumbled right down to bones in the matter of a minute.
I don’t know the exact details of what happened next. The two doctors collected the bones in a bag, complete with a skull whose teeth were still pointy.
They used their combined stories, the bones, and whatever science they had available to them, to introduce the concept of vampires to some of their friends. Open-minded folks who actually could understand what some scary-looking teeth and completely clean bones might mean. A few people thought they were, in Smitty’s term, nuts.
Enough people believed what they were saying to give vampire hunting a try. With the flu raging on over the course of a few months, they managed to kill three more vampires before the hospital cleared out and things began to return to normal.
After that, Smitty didn’t see any vampires for a few years and none of his friends did either.
The pattern of vampire denial repeated itself. At first, everyone talked about what happened. Then some people started using terms like mass delusion. Finally, even Smitty’s doctor buddy, the one who saw the first vampire killed in front of him, didn’t seem to believe it happened.
Then the homeless in the next city started dying, two and three at a time.
Smitty knew that so many homeless folks turning up dead had to mean a vampire was in the area. In a way, it was like he solved a math problem by using the wrong formula. He had the right answer but the wrong reason.
He spent a week trying to figure out some kind of pattern, and eventually determined a kind of central focus point. An epicenter around which all the killings seemed to be happening.
When I first saw that picture of Smitty, and all those other people in front of that house, it seems strangely familiar to me. I finally figured
it out. That picture was where Smitty’s story ends. Or begins.
All of Smitty’s research led him to that house. It was big, it was for sale, and it had been vacant for some time. Smitty thought it was years but I wonder if it wasn’t decades. It was a creepy looking place, and kind of large, which probably kept the price of the thing sky-high. Very few people want to buy a big house that needs a lot of work. Not then, and not now.
Smitty also visited the morgue where the homeless folks were being collected, under the guise that if some kind of disease was shooting through the homeless of a nearby town, it might spread to his own. He took pictures of the pinprick holes on their necks and offered the authorities a theory that involved drugs and needles. I suspect that somewhere in that town is a well typed police report documenting a drug scare that never happened.
Smitty took the pictures to all his old vampire-hunting buddies, which I guess included your grandfather, and about half of them thought that a little physical evidence made it okay to use the V-word again.
A plan was made. When I say a plan, I mean a bunch of smart people grabbed a bunch of useless weapons they’d assembled a few years earlier, blew off the dust, and headed to the old house. Looking at the picture, I’d say it was sometime in the afternoon when they got there.
There was a lot of assuming going on. They thought holy water would be useful. They had guns with silver bullets. They had stakes, the only thing any of them had ever killed a vampire with.
They marched in, closed the door, and split up. Even if you don’t watch a lot of horror movies, you know that’s a bad idea.
After that? Death. A whole lot of it.
Smitty couldn’t tell me very much about what happened to his companions. He had self-assigned himself to the front door in case the vampire tried to make a break for it. All he heard were a few thumps and a handful of screams.
He called out, asking if anyone needed help, and that’s when he saw the vampire.
The vampire stood upstairs, on the landing, and his hands wrapped around the necks of two of Smitty’s fellow vampire-hunters. With one swift motion, the vampire tossed both of them down the stairs like oversized rag dolls.
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 6
