“Have you checked out the homeless camps yet?” Jerry finally asked after they’d driven in silence for most of an hour.
“No,” Robert said. Why would he do that? He’d met Jamie in the best bar in town. In his wife’s clothes, she’d looked classy. But once Jerry said it, Robert realized he’d been looking in all the wrong places.
“Partner… I know you like her,” Jerry said. “But––don’t take this wrong––when we first met her, I think she was staying in a dive. And I didn’t want to tell you this before, but there were reports of a new call girl in town who met Jamie’s description.”
Robert flushed, gripping the steering wheel tight. “People do what they have to do to survive,” he growled. Why was he angry? Was being a prostitute any worse than being a vampire?
“Uh, sure,” Jerry said. He was obviously trying to keep the disgust out of his voice. Robert had long known that his partner was as conventional and straitlaced as they came: fat wife and three fat kids, Little League baseball, church every Sunday. But he was also a cop, and he’d been exposed to a lot of different lifestyles over the years, so Robert thought he should know by now that people were, underneath it all, just people.
Jerry was wise enough not to say anything more as Robert turned the car toward the spot near the railroad tracks where the largest contingent of homeless stayed.
Chapter 24
“We shouldn’t have let her go,” Pete said as they finished eating the boy who had been torturing the cat. That psycho had deserved it. Pete felt nothing for humans anymore, but he still kind of liked cats––carnivorous little bastards. He could relate.
“Who?” Jimmy said, covering his mouth politely as he spoke. Pete almost laughed. That was Jimmy: always polite, even when it didn’t matter.
“You know, that lady vampire––what’s her name.”
“Jamie?”
“Yeah…” Pete mused. “She was smokin’ hot that first night, and now she looks like some skanky old bag lady.”
“Why shouldn’t we have let her go?” Jimmy asked.
“You ever wonder what it would taste like to drain another vampire?” Pete said, raising his eyebrows.
“That’s disgusting,” Jimmy said. But when he thought about it for a minute, it didn’t actually seem disgusting at all. Vampire, human, what did it matter? In fact, not only was it not disgusting, it was exciting. Besides, it was becoming harder and harder to find live prey of any kind. It was getting more dangerous to break into houses, and some of the homeless were armed with stakes. Even the wildlife had grown exceptionally wary of them.
Ever since the massacre at the kegger, the cops had been out in full force, and it was rare that Jimmy and Pete could walk down a street without seeing a police car cruise by. To the cops, they just looked like teenagers out and about the town, and they always smiled and waved. But getting caught in the act of bloodsucking was getting to be more and more of a danger.
After their meal, Pete and Jimmy walked out of the woods and down the side of the highway south of town. Before long, they came to a restaurant that had been burned out, sitting next to a motel that had been damaged by a tsunami. A teenage boy was sitting on the steps of the abandoned restaurant, staring at them.
“Isn’t that Hoss?” Pete asked.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him outside of school.” The little ninth-grader had been called Hoss as a joke from the moment he had arrived at the high school, and no one knew his real name.
“Hey, you little nerd,” Pete called out. “Out past your bedtime?”
Jimmy expected Hoss to run or at least act frightened, but the runt sat calmly, waiting for them to approach. He stood up when they were a few feet away.
They all started sniffing each other, walking in circles around each other.
“We sound like a pack of dogs,” Hoss said, and the other two started laughing.
“When did you become one of us?” Pete asked. “How did you become one of us?”
“Well, I was asleep the other night when Jodie Fergus climbed in my window and crawled into bed with me. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. Instead, I died and… well…”
“She drained you?” Pete asked wonderingly.
“Yeah. Right before I died, she looked down at me and smiled. ‘You’re such a cute little guy,’ she said, and left.”
Jimmy turned to Pete. “I thought you ate Jodie.”
“I planned to, but then her dad showed up and we had a fight, so I ate him instead.” He looked to Hoss. “So after she sucked you, you became a vampire?”
“I think the term is ‘Turned,’” Hoss said. “Believe me, no one’s read more vampire books or seen more vampire movies than me. I’m an expert.”
“What do you mean, expert?” Jimmy asked. He sensed this was important. He knew that he and Pete weren’t necessarily the smartest kids around. Even Stuart wasn’t that much of a student, though he was the only friend Jimmy had who read books. But Hoss––he was known as the smartest kid in school. He was small for a ninth-grader, but that was because he’d skipped at least a couple of grades.
“Haven’t you wondered what we are?” Hoss asked, sounding exasperated.
“We’re vampires,” Pete shrugged. “What’s to know?”
“But what kind of vampire? For instance, we not only suck blood, we eat flesh, too. So that makes us vampire-ghouls, kinda. Obviously, we can’t fly or shapeshift.”
“So?” Pete said dismissively.
“So what kind of rules are there? What are our powers?” Hoss looked at them with an intensity that almost made Jimmy step back. He thought, Hoss always was a creepy little kid.
“It’s important, don’t you see?” Hoss asked intently. “For instance, what can kill us? Didn’t you hear what happened to Greg Foster?”
Oh, yeah… Greg, Jimmy thought. Now, why hadn’t he wondered where Greg was? Maybe it was because he didn’t give a shit. Greg had always been a shallow person, and being a vampire hadn’t made him any deeper.
“I live on the same block as Stuart, right?” Hoss continued. “I saw Greg leaving his house early this morning, just before dawn, and then two men in black jumped out of an SUV, and they whipped out some big crosses to hold him back and sprayed him with something that seemed to hurt him, and then the sunlight hit him and he went up in flames.”
“Wow,” Pete said, after a short silence. “He’s gone?”
Hoss nodded solemnly. “He’s a black scorch mark on the sidewalk.”
“Wow,” Pete repeated.
“So I’ve been experimenting,” Hoss said. “My parents are Catholic and they have crosses all over the place, so my room is the only comfortable place in the house. Crosses not only hurt, they also keep me from going toward them. I tried to pick up a Bible, but it repelled me, too. I had my sister say some prayers out of The Book, and it hurt. I went down to St. Francis and tried to go inside, and I couldn’t. I’m betting that the two men in black sprayed Greg with holy water.”
“I’m betting that a stake in the heart would do the job, too,” Jimmy contributed.
Hoss nodded. “But we have advantages, too: like, we’re super strong and fast. Oh, and we have blue blood. And direct sunlight kills us, but we can stand daylight as long as we’re covered or in the shade, though it’s painful. So obviously, UV rays don’t hurt us.”
“Anything else?” Jimmy said dryly.
“We turn into vampires if we’re bitten and drained, but not if we’re physically damaged beyond restoration. Once vampire, we seem to be able to take some serious damage, though it hurts and takes time to mend, and…” He trailed off and frowned. “That’s all so far,” he said. “But I’m sure we’ll learn more as we go along.”
Pete laughed. “So what you’re saying is that we’re, like, Catholic ghoul-vampires who can walk in the shade?”
Hoss’s face turned kind of blue, which Jimmy guessed was the equivalent of a blush in a human. “Well, if you put it that way… yeah. I guess
.”
“Great. I’m not sure how that helps us, but good to know.”
As they’d been talking, dawn had been approaching. Pete looked up in alarm, noticing how light it had gotten. “We’d better get back,” he said. He turned to Hoss. “Want to come along?”
Hoss looked delighted, as if no one had ever asked him to join them before. Then he looked crestfallen. “Well, actually, I’ve been staying here,” he said, waving at the abandoned restaurant behind them. Then his face lit up again. “You’re welcome to stay here, too!”
Pete and Jimmy looked at each other and shrugged. It was too late to find anywhere else.
They followed the little guy into the boarded-up eatery.
Chapter 25
When Jimmy woke up the next afternoon, Hoss was already awake, bent over his phone, texting like crazy. His small fingers flew over the tiny keyboard.
“You’ve been up all day?” Jimmy asked.
Hoss didn’t look up. “I don’t think we need sleep at all.”
“Yeah, well, sitting around all cooped up with nothing to do ain’t much fun,” Jimmy said.
Hoss looked at him and frowned. “I find quite enough to keep me busy. For instance, I’ve been finding references to vampires all over the Net. Most of it is made up, of course. But some of it was obviously written by other vampires.”
Pete wandered into the room, yawning. “Who’s for breakfast?” he asked, and laughed.
Without looking up, Hoss waved his hand at the sink, and Jimmy and Pete went over to it to find a huge crab, still half-alive, its shell broken open and some of its innards removed. They glanced at each other, then each of them reached in and broke off one of the crab’s legs. It was surprisingly filling, and not disgusting at all.
“Listen to this,” Hoss read as they ate.
“Rules of Vampire:
Rule One. Never trust a human.
Rule Two. Never leave the remains of a kill, or if you must, disguise the cause of death.
Rule Three. Never feed where you live.
Rule Four. Never create a pattern. Kill at random.
Rule Five. Never kill for the thrill. Feed only when necessary to eat.
Rule Six. Never steal in the short term; create wealth for the long term.”
“Rules?” Pete echoed. “What do we need rules for? We’re vampires.”
“No, no,” Hoss said excitedly, “this is exactly what we need! If we don’t start controlling what’s happening around here, we’re all going to be hunted down and destroyed.”
As if on cue, they heard a loud banging at the boarded-up front window. The sun had dipped into the ocean only a few minutes before.
They fell silent. Pete walked quietly to the door and looked out through a crack.
“Huh?” he muttered. He opened the door and Jodie Fergus walked in.
Jimmy started getting turned on as soon as he saw how she was dressed. It was the same way she always dressed, but more so––or, more accurately, less so.
She’d always had a sexy style, even at parochial school. Like everyone else, she had to wear a uniform, but it was the little extra touches that made her stand out. Her dress was always an inch shorter than the other girls’––not so short that the nuns would send her home, but always close to the edge. Her blouse was always little tighter than the other girls’, too. Once, in seventh grade, she’d worn black stockings, and Jimmy had had to spend the whole day trying not to stare at her legs. Jodie had been told not to wear them to school again, but for Jimmy, it was too late: now all a girl had to do was wear black stockings and he was goner.
Jodie’s effect on Pete was equally obvious. His mouth had dropped open and he was looking up and down her lush body. She was short and perhaps a little chubby, but she wore her curves well. She had on a dress so short you could see the tops of her black thigh-highs, and was wearing a red bra outside her torn black t-shirt. She’d put on heavy makeup, with eyeliner that made her eyes look huge and almost tilted. It’s cosplay, Jimmy realized. She looked like one of those anime characters.
No one dressed like that in Crescent City.
She ignored them both and walked over to Hoss, who stood up and looked her calmly in the eye.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, baby,” she purred. “You’re just as cute as I thought you’d be.”
Hoss took Jodie’s hand and led her to a chair next to his. Then he hunched over and started playing with his cellphone again, ignoring her.
Pete glanced at Jimmy and threw up his hands as if to say, What the hell just happened?
There was another knock on the door, and when Pete opened it this time, a strange vampire was standing there. It was some guy he’d seen around town––the guy who rented kayaks down at the harbor, that was it. The blond hunk looked freaked out of his mind. “I’ve heard it’s safe here,” he said nervously.
“Let him in!” Hoss shouted. “I put the word out. We’re going to have guests. Lots of guests.”
#
The vampire was hiding in the basement of her own house. It was relatively easy to smoke her out. Callendar tossed in a tear gas canister and it bumped down the stairs. Then there was silence; then the hiss of gas.
She came screeching up the stairs and Jeffers shot her with a bolt from the lone crossbow they’d brought with them, a last-minute addition they’d tossed into the trunk on their way out of town. The girl, who looked to be about eight years old, tumbled back into the darkness. They waited for the gas to clear, then carefully descended the stairs.
Her parents were dead in the living room and had been partially consumed by the little vampire over the preceding few days. It was the smell that had alerted the neighbors, who had called the police, who had called the FBI.
The girl was dead at the base of the stairs, the bolt in her heart and her innocent-looking little face smashed into the concrete, her neck at an unnatural angle.
“Hey, have you noticed the vampire population boom is starting to slow down?” Jeffers asked, prodding the body sadly with one foot. “Do you think we got them all?”
“Doubt it,” Callendar said. “The strain is too virulent.”
They’d confirmed that it was a maliciously potent strain of vampirism by sending some of the blue blood to the FBI office in Portland. Uncharacteristically, the results had come back quickly. This was something new––or at least, something they’d never seen before. Anyone bitten who died would come back as a vampire if the body wasn’t too far gone.
Not so quick to respond were their backup squads from New York and L.A. There were only a few specialized two-agent teams like theirs, and they were mostly based in the biggest cities in the U.S. Vampires were relatively rare, and they were extremely good at hiding themselves and their crimes. They were also extremely dangerous and difficult to kill. A major task force was usually created for each identified vampire, and it sometimes took years to track down a single target, if they managed to do it at all. So the vampire hunters weren’t used to mobilizing quickly, and even though Jeffers and Callendar had warned their superiors––repeatedly––that this was an epidemic, they were still on their own.
In truth, they were both kind of glad that help hadn’t arrived yet. It was fun and refreshing to find and kill so many vampires in such a short time, from that first idiotic baby vamp who had challenged them on a public street mere minutes before dawn to the kegger victim who had looked at them with wide, innocent, trusting eyes as they put holy water in his IV.
Most of the other vampires had been equally easy to track down. What was surprising, even with a virulent strain, was that so many had been created, because even newly Turned vampires usually tried to consume their victims. Jeffers thought it was because the baby vamps were so inept that they were letting many of their prey get away. Callendar thought it was because these vampires thought they were only supposed to suck blood, because that’s what the movies had taught them.
In any case, the new vampires were untutored a
nd unwary. And they were so strong and fast compared to when they’d been human that most of them didn’t believe they could be killed. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for Jeffers and Callendar, who had more notches on their crossbows (or crossbow, as the case may be) than any other team.
Jeffers is right, Callendar thought. We’re running out of vampires.
“We haven’t still found the vector of the infection,” Jeffers reminded him. “You know, Jamie––your brother-in-law’s girlfriend.”
“I suspect she’s long gone.”
“Well, Robert doesn’t think so,” Jeffers said scornfully. At first, they had assumed that Robert’s obsessive search was all about finding and killing the vampire who had deceived him, but after a while, it became clear that the cop was pining for his lost love. “Does he have any idea how dangerous vampires are?”
“Well, he lived with her for nearly a week with nothing bad happening,” Callendar said. “You know, over the years, we’ve heard rumors of vampires who don’t kill people. Urban myths, for the most part; but then there’s Terrill.”
“The biggest myth of all,” Jeffers said.
“I wonder,” Callendar mused. “There are so many stories, and the vampires themselves seem to believe them. Maybe it’s true. But I sure wouldn’t put my neck under the fangs to test it.”
They took the little vampire into the backyard and watched her burn in the sunlight. Live or dead, the blue blood was flammable under the direct rays of the sun.
Then they conducted the usual canvas of the surrounding houses, interviewing the neighbors. It was clear that the child hadn’t left the house since Turning. Her second-grade teacher had been Turned, but only this little girl had suffered the same fate. All the students were now accounted for.
For the first time since seeing Jamie in Robert’s living room, the agents had no more leads.
“What the hell is going on?” Callendar wondered out loud.
#
Hoss was holding court. Jimmy, as second in command, was gazing imperiously at the ten or so minions currently in the room. The motel was now completely filled with vampires, nearly two dozen of them in all, of all shapes and sizes and ages. Word had gotten out that it was a safe place for them to hide. They’d knocked out the walls between the motel rooms so they could move around easily, and most of them spent the daylight hours in the restaurant when they weren’t sleeping.
The Vampire Evolution Trilogy (Book 2): Rule of Vampire Page 12
