by Alan Spencer
Her childish face hardened into a menacing concentration. “Fuck him. I want that blood. The smell, the taste, even the way it looks, it’s not what’s naturally in our veins. It’s the blood he lives off of, and it’s in that barrel. How else has he sustained himself underground? He’s been down there for years; why else would he harbor provisions?”
“I-I don’t know."
He eyed the barrel longer.
Annie brewed about the mill seeking a bludgeon. "I'm prying that lid off."
He feared Ruden’s wrath, but the seed of curiosity had been planted and was germinating. He motioned towards the work shed outside, knowing where the best tools were located. “Wait. I can find a crowbar. We’ll see for sure what’s inside those barrels. You’re right. Forget Ruden. He’s the one who’s addicted us to this blood, so let him deal with the consequences.”
He returned with a crowbar only to discover Annie’s face was plunged into the stock tank. Bubbles and belches frothed around the sides of her submerged head. She finally surfaced, her face a coating of red, her hair and dress sodden through and dripping down to her feet. “This isn’t what he made me drink. It’s close, but it’s nowhere near the real thing.”
“I know,” he said, moving towards the barrel and urging her from the tank. “I tried that already.”
She collected the blood pasted on her face by her fingertips and licked them dry, smacking greedily. Next, she shoved her entire hand in her mouth and sucked it clean. “Mmmph! Ummmm! Unnnnnnnnn!”
He yearned to give into his thirst, but he kept restraining himself. He sensed Ruden’s watch. Distant. Peripheral. The creature was too busy with another problem to keep complete focus on him, he believed, and this was the perfect opportunity to exploit his mistake. And Annie was out-of-control, and she’d only recently been introduced to the blood.
Before he could reason with her, Annie stole the crowbar from him. “I’ll find out for myself what’s inside those barrels. Ruden’s gone. So what if he comes back? I saw the car in your front yard. We can drive and never turn back. We’ll escape, easy. He can’t control us.”
“Promise me we do everything carefully from here on out. Nothing careless or impulsive. He’ll track us. Maybe you don’t feel him in your mind, but I do. It’s a form of radar. We can run, but he’ll catch up eventually.”
“Open it." She handed him back the crowbar. “Let him kill me. I’d rather be dead than not taste the blood that twisted fucker fed me ever again.”
He wedged the crowbar under the rim. Before he finished, he said one last thing, “Then we face the consequences together.”
“Yes—now open the Goddamn thing!”
A hermetic pop, and the lid jostled loose. Frantic movements, she worked the edges up with her hands, Dale’s efforts being too slow and delaying. Annie’s gusto launched the top across the room and banging into a back wall.
They both stared inside, instantly hooked.
“This is it." She licked her lips with an insatiable lust. “This is the blood I wanted.”
The smell intoxicated them, provoking heavy mastication from them both.
The impulse couldn’t be denied.
They dunked their heads into the barrels and fed.
8
Chippie hunkered into the shadows cast by the trees, staying hidden. He'd stood vigil for hours in the woods, determined to locate the source of the screams he'd heard earlier today. He feared to walk too close the cider mill. He'd heard violence in there. Bone snapping. Metal banging against metal. Dale Birchum and his workers were missing, he gathered, after casing the apple nursery. Blood speckled the cobblestones in a trail that stopped at the double doors of the cider mill.
He chewed a wad of "Big Bear Tobacco" nervously. He was pensive by indecision: investigate or stay safe? Exit the trenches and face the enemy come hell or high water or retreat? You must identify the enemy before strategizing. Who is the perpetrator?
Chippie traced down his leg for a boning knife. He clutched it with the blade pointed downwards ready to drive into a collarbone. It would immobilize an enemy long enough to complete an escape if an ambush occurred.
Hours he'd waited for somebody to leave or enter the cider mill. A Mazda truck came and went, but the man driving it wasn’t in plain sight. Fed up with doing nothing, he darted between the open path and a stack of baskets chest-high. He lowered to his knees and looked through a nearby window.
What he witnessed paralyzed him.
Heads by the dozens were scattered about the floor like the fallen apples. A stock tank gleamed of blood filled to the brim, hundreds of gallons of crimson collected. Bits of flesh, clothing, eyes, shards of bone, and organs floated on top. The conveyor belt was saturated in red with bones tangled between the cogs and flesh coating the blades in the shape of dried up worms.
Stiffening in place, he spied two figures walking in the light.
They were Dale Birchum and Annie McTavey, who suddenly dove headfirst into a barrel—thrashing in red, battling each other for it. When they came back up for air, their faces were awash in blood. They masticated in delight, pink foam bubbling at their lips and pleasure beading in their eyes. Insane gesticulations animated their faces.
The heads on the ground, he recognized them as workers from the cider mill.
Everyone in the cider mill had been murdered.
Acts of treason against humanity aren’t protected under law. These monsters obviously want a war.
He noted the other man who had sped off in the Mazda truck earlier. Who else was out there like them? He wasn’t prepared to battle them until he understood the terms of battle.
Chippie sprinted back into the woods and prepared to enact his own brand of intervention.
It’s about time I got to fight something.
9
Lenora banged her fists against the basement door, nearly splitting the wood with her insistency as she pleaded to those hiding behind the barrier. “Why aren’t you answering me? You have to feed. You need blood. You're going to die if you keep this up."
She could bash the door down, but it was solidly blockaded from the other side. And a part of her couldn’t interfere with her parents’ decision.
Their wish for death.
She kicked the body at her feet; the dead drifter in a bomber jacket whose throat had been slit by her talons. Snarling at her parents, "This is for you, so open the Goddamn door and take it!”
Her parents had boxed themselves in the cellar two weeks ago, and this time, she was convinced they were serious about dying.
She backed away from the basement door and skulked to another part of the house, overwhelmed by what she knew to be true. She walked to the kitchen, eying the oven caked in dried blood; the red spatters were months old. A cooking sheet on top of the stove was crusted in burnt flesh. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, Lenora’s mother used to bake human appendages so they could suck the warm blood through the flesh as it cooled. It was one of their favorite delicacies.
Walking into the dining room, the ceiling was twenty shades of red, black, and brown. Rotten half eaten arms and spit out fingers littered the carpet. A human head had fallen under the table covered in maggots. The victim was a hobo she picked up in an empty boxcar many meals ago. She began to think if her parents died, that left her alone. It was hard enough surviving with her enlarged eyes, the mutation a side effect of drinking human blood over many years. She couldn't blend in with society or lure others in with her sexuality. Finding blood without risking her own life was impossible.
Standing at the basement door again, she decided to try once more to level with her parents. Lenora rolled up the sleeves of her coat to really bash the door when she noticed the condition of her arms. Her muscles had atrophied. Her skin was a deathly shrink wrap over her bones. She was experiencing the early stages of malnutrition.
“Mom, Dad, come to your senses!” She kicked the door, yelling, and pleading, and losing her breath. “The blood is here! It’s you
rs. Don’t you miss the good days?—don’t you miss me?”
Her begging downgraded into accusations. “If Dad didn’t stick it in those women at that strip club, none of us would be in this position. One of those whores spat the blood into your mouth, Dad, and you turned. Do you remember that, Daddy? I bet you do. And you forgave his cheating ass, Mom. You let him infect you. You tied me down, the both of you, and forced me to become this way. This is your fault. Now eat this fucking body." Balling up her fists, she threw back her head and released her torment," I won’t suffer alone!”
Without you, I have nobody, she thought. Ruden’s never coming back for me. He can't save us. We have to save ourselves.
The barricade shifted, and the door was unlocked, though not opened. She stood in limbo a moment before twisting the doorknob and entering. At her feet, her dad was splayed out on the topmost steps. He was literally buried in his clothing. The living skeleton extended his hands out to her, and she cradled him against her. Her father’s words were wisps of air, the lungs unable to inhale after his final words were expelled: “Your mother’s resting...it’s time I joined her.”
She waited for something else, like an explanation or an apology, but none of those things occurred. She clutched her emaciated father in her hands, feeling angry and confused, until she couldn't take sitting there anymore with the corpse.
Lenora bolted down the steps in search of her mother. The woman rested on the couch’s pull-out bed wrapped up in sheets, the body unseen except for the indention of her nose and mouth. Lenora didn’t come any closer, knowing she was dead. Standing there, she abhorred their home. Outright detested it. Out there was where she belonged, stalking the night with blood on her tongue.
Over the course of the evening, she recouped from her emotions, while burying both her parents in the untilled cornfield just outside their property. She toiled to clean the dining room ceiling, the carpet, the kitchen, and every piece of evidence of death they’d left behind. Three days later, she fled the house with a new resolve. The blood thirst deep within her needed to be addressed, but from now on, no more hiding and no more sucking blood from slaughterhouse meat, bums, hookers, or losers, because she craved warm human meat, and if that obsession got her murdered, then so be it...
10
Hitching rides wasn’t impossible for a woman with a healthy chest and the night at her back, but for Lenora, the darkness wasn't a deep enough shade of pitch to disguise her mutation. She stalked the edge of Old Highway 29, bordered by hundreds of acres of cornfields, their stalks tall enough to turn the horizon into nothing but land to cultivate—or in her case, blood to let.
Keeping her eyes and vascular articulated skin from scrutiny, she wore a stocking mask—though in the July heat in Summersom, Illinois, the garb brought the same amount of unwanted attention—and a long satchel-brown overcoat. She couldn’t hitch rides like she did nearly fifteen years ago on the busier thoroughfares, when her features weren’t rendered hideous and jilted by the blood thirst. The changes happened without explanation, though many of the bloodthirsty, like her, speculated that drinking large quantities of blood had changed their DNA over time.
Forced to reckon with the situation regardless of the reasons, she kept to the back roads, cradling a stone in her hand, ready to throw it like a curve ball at the first car that crossed her position. Out in the middle of nowhere, it would take time to come upon a vehicle. The plan: the car would inevitably stop after she smashed a taillight or the back windshield. Then the driver would stalk after her, and she’d be ready to open their throat.
She had been chased out of thirteen counties and eleven cities in the last two months, claiming nine corpses in the process—nine corpses she drip-drained from the ceratoid artery by hanging them upside down by the ankles over tree branches and catching their blood in a basin. During the last draining, a local had discovered her working on a young teenager, a boy who was no older than fifteen, and opened fire on her with a shotgun. She still carried the buckshot in her backside, though she’d picked out the majority of the pieces with tweezers and a jig hook. She'd ingested only a quart of blood before the attack.
That intake was nine days ago.
Lenora waited an hour, then two hours, before a truck finally passed her up. Forgoing the hitcher’s thumb, she took aim with the stone. She prayed she didn’t miss. Another opportunity might not present itself for hours, or not at all.
Hurling the stone, her vision heightened by the powers of the blood thirst, she hit home, shattering the left taillight. The truck slammed on its brakes, squealing to a stop.
She lurched through the corn shucks and hid. She was on the prowl, skulking and weaving between the aisles and staying out of sight. The driver was already out of the car; she could hear his boots hit the pavement. Before she reached a position where she could leap out onto the hood of the truck and tackle him, a BOOM BOOM BOOM of a pump-action shotgun sent her in retreat. A shot clipped her right foot, breaking the flesh, but it wasn’t deep enough to need serious medical attention.
The promise of more gunplay, the driver blasted curses as harsh as the bullets. She backtracked deeper into the cornfields, rolling and sprinting, turning her ankle, falling on all fours only to bolt right back up and keep moving. Finally stopping, she crouched low, the shucks slapping her face as if to expel her from the grounds and send her right back out to her would-be executioner.
Her leg panged where the burning hot lead had torn and burned flesh. She was weak from fatigue and food deprivation. Lenora was also bitter from the disappointment of a failed hunt. She was no longer on the prowl, but instead, downgraded into prey. Shivering in the face of the enemy.
Far enough from the driver to avoid more gunfire, she lowered to her haunches and listened. She hoped the man wasn’t after her, imagining a bright mag flashlight casing the field or a bloodhound sniffing after her.
She expelled a celebratory breath upon hearing the car speed off down the road. Lenora brushed herself off and limped on. The field was a maze, but her night vision managed to locate a break in the pattern, east a ways and about a quarter of a mile from her standpoint.
That’s when she perked. She straightened her back, flexed her arms, and even her veins whipped up against her skin, thickening and percolated at the guarantee of blood. A drifter walked down the road with a backpack and a ball cap hung low over his eyes. When she ejected herself forward, she tackled the man and was immediately repelled—outraged—when she discovered it was a fellow member of the bloodthirsty.
She pushed off against the man’s chest to stand up again. “Damn you, I thought you were food!”
The man was sprawled out on the road, his eyes fierce and wide as tennis balls; he’d drunk his fill recently and was enjoying a cigarette and a leisurely stroll through the back roads to cap off the meal.
He got back up to his feet and beckoned her. “Lenora, is that you?” The man hurried to catch up to her; she was already ten paces ahead of him. “It’s Mike—Michael Roman, remember? You infected me.”
“I know I infected you!—now fuck off!”
The failure of the kill—two kills—settled in her bones and stirred up in the ache in her belly.
“Hey, you’re bleeding." Mike was now beside her, matching her stride. “You should wrap that up.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“But you’ll bleed out.”
“I won’t bleed out.”
“But you look terrible." He clasped her arm. “Let me help you. We can share a body, okay? Hey, we’ll catch up on old times too.”
She spat on the road, shrugging off his touch. “Fuck old times. Things have changed. We can't hunt like we used to. Not when we look like monsters."
She’d bitten Michael Roman before Ruden (a hematologist and her lover) decided to go into hiding in Kansas for a solution to their blood problem: they wanted blood, and they couldn’t reap it from the humans without situations like tonight’s arising. People armed to the t
eeth or waiting for a reason to use their prized firearms, or worse, the police getting involved. They were fighting a losing battle, and here she was out in the middle of a field in Illinois with a fellow infected—a man who had a crush on her; all the men did with the woman that had infected them—and starving.
She asked, “Do you have any blood in that backpack?”
He kept his hat low, paranoid someone would catch his bulbous eyes and call the cops. “Well, no, but I can find some.” He smiled at her, his lips bearing a false pride. “You should stick with me. I’ll get you back into health. You look like you’ve missed a few meals.”
It’s what he said under his breath that drove her to kick his knee from the side—dislocating it, and sending him into a hurt locker. The man shrieked louder than the pump action’s barrels minutes ago. She seized his neck with both hands, digging her nails so deeply she claimed ruby red drops of blood. His jaw nearly unhinged from opening his mouth so wide in shock and pain.
-“It’s not like Ruden’s been taking care of you.”
Lenora pressed her face up to his, snarling venom. “Ruden sacrificed his life, his time, his lover—me!—just so you could sup blood without being shot to death like I almost was moments ago, you unappreciative, son-of-a-bitch!”
Mike sent his good foot up, striking the back of her head. The sky tilted, and she spun in a forced summersault, pounding her back and skull against the pavement. He growled like a foaming dog behind a short fence, punching her on the nose repeatedly until she dangled in his grip, her sinuses filling up with blood and overflowing out her nostrils.
His smile was enough to send a chill of revulsion down her back. He would rape her, invade the sanctity of her body—and perhaps drain her dry of every last drop of blood—but first, he chose to grovel.
“Ruden’s a sniveling coward. It’s been five years, and he hasn’t returned. It’s bullshit, Lenora, and you know it. You’re so wrapped up in the idea of him. ‘Oh, he’s such a hero; he’s sacrificing everything for us to provide a blood solution.’” He seized her throat so hard the blood in her sinuses flicked out onto his face. “Nobody knows what he’s really doing down there in his hiding place, but nobody bothers with him anymore. After the first year, weren’t you convinced he couldn’t solve anything? He’s hiding in shame, but you seem to believe he’s doing us the greatest service by studiously hammering out his studies—it’s horse shit! He—has—failed.”
