Focus, the inner voice said. You’re not getting out of here through the help of anyone else. The burden is all on you. And I sure as fuck know you’re not going to let this happen without making it very hard on them. Right?
Right. But Peg wasn’t even sure what else she could do at this point. Nothing else could happen until she got out of this cage.
Well then, Sherlock, I guess that means you should do something about that, huh? Jesus, I don’t even know how you function sometimes.
“Great, now I’m being insulted by my own brain,” Peg muttered. She skooched closer to the front of the cage and got as close a look at the lock as she could from this angle. Unlike the rest of the cage it didn’t seem to be made of silver, just an everyday over the counter combination lock. Zoey would have been able to crush it easily, which had to mean that there was something else preventing her. Peg reached a hand through the bars, wincing every time her skin accidentally brushed the metal. She had to figure out what was causing that. It could be the secret to her escape. When she touched the lock she felt the same thing, that unpleasant scorching tingle, and she let go quickly.
Peg sat back on her haunches, thinking and very much aware that she didn’t have a lot of time before those two came back and ended any chance she had at experimenting. Maybe the cage was electrified. Something like that would require a power source, though, and she didn’t see anything remotely like that. So, not electric.
It could all be in your head, the head voice said.
“Yeah, sure. Just like you.” Except there was something too that, maybe. Obviously she wasn’t imagining the pain, but just how much of that pain could she take? She touched the bars again, this time forcing herself to keep a grip for several seconds. When she let go she realized she felt oddly invigorated. It really wasn’t too much different than cutting. Any and all pain in her hands was nothing compared to all the mental pain she had tried to drown for all those years.
Except that wasn’t going to do her any good right now. She heard footsteps approaching the van again, and she huddled up in the center of her cage trying to look confused and broken. Honestly, she didn’t have to try too hard. It was a feeling she had learned in intimate detail throughout most of her life.
Neither of the creatures said anything to her as they pulled her cage out of the van. Peg noticed before they grabbed the bars of her cage that their hands were still gray and smoking where they had touched Zoey’s. She could smell a sickly sweet, pungent odor as they held her own, the smell of garlic on frying meat. Neither of them flinched at this. Holding the cage between the two of them and not making any effort to keep Peg from being jostled inside, they took her around the side of the van and finally gave her a better look at their environs.
The lake was indeed within easy walking distance from here, but the only other feature of the landscape other than the occasional tree was the collapsing ranch-style home ahead of them. Judging from what little remained of the paint job and decorations Peg’s best guess was that it had been built sometime in the seventies. It might have been a quaint little place in its infancy, but now half of it had fallen in on itself. The decorative hedges and plants outside had been left to grow unchecked, with one bush even growing in through a broken window, catching the ragged and moldering remains of a curtain fluttering in the breeze off the lake.
The house had a door, but it hung on the frame at an angle that made it obvious that it couldn’t close. The cage was large enough that the two creatures had to shove it through the doorframe, although the deep gouges in the wood on either side implied that they had done this many times before. Peg had to wonder just how long this had been going on. She didn’t think it should have been possible for people to just disappear so often for so many years without these things ever getting caught. Someone should have caught on by now, or somebody should have accidentally wandered onto the property and discovered something amiss. Of course, Peg realized, it was highly likely that someone had done exactly that. These things could have turned them away with their hypnotic abilities, though, and the people would have never been the wiser. Or maybe they hadn’t even bothered with that. Peg could easily envision a pair of teenagers, perhaps looking for a place to screw away from the eyes of their overly-watchful parents, thinking the old abandoned house on the lake was the perfect place to get away and then never be seen again.
Even though she knew the thought wasn’t doing her any favors, Peg had to wonder if anyone had ever gone through this door and come back out again.
The inside of the house was in even worse shape than the outside. Maybe it was Peg’s imagination, but she thought she could hear the walls creaking under the sagging roof, the sound of one side of the house desperately trying to match the other. The front room would have been a living room at some point, although the only thing living in it now were a couple of seagulls that took wing through the gaping holes in the roof when they came in. The carpet, which once might have been shag, was now nothing more than a forest of mildew, fungus, and a few stunted plants that had somehow managed to eek out something resembling life among the ruins. Although she hadn’t been able to see it from the outside, Peg now understood why the roof must have collapsed: it was because part of the floor itself had collapsed along with it. Much of the wreckage of the roof hung precariously over the hole in the floor. Peg couldn’t see too far down the hole from her angle, but judging from the echo of the birds’ flapping wings she thought it might go down quite a ways. A sinkhole, she realized. Her theories about limestone caves would appear to be at least partially right.
Rather than heading to the sinkhole the two creatures steered her cage in the opposite direction toward the kitchen. The kitchen looked like it had fared somewhat better than the living room, if only because it was farther from the open elements. There was another door here, and this one at least closed. The creature in the front opened the door, assaulting Peg’s nostrils with an awfully familiar smell. Mildew, blood, body odor, human shit. Almost a mirror match of the odor from her own basement only a day earlier.
The wooden stairs groaned beneath them as they went down. The two creatures had to hold the cage at an angle, causing Peg to slide up against the bars to light up her naked skin with searing pain. She repressed the urge to cry out and instead tried to concentrate on the physical agony, letting it overtake her fear and anger and humiliation. It was no different than the razor. All the negative emotions racing through her mind burning away, leaving only the will and determination to escape, to save herself and her sister, to be able to see her son again.
At the bottom of the stairs the basement was faintly illuminated by the light coming from the floor above. The far side of the basement was missing most of its wall where the concrete had fallen into the earth, but otherwise there was nothing of particular interest. Peg was confused at first, trying to figure out where they’d put Zoey, before she realized they weren’t finished descending yet. An incredibly makeshift and rickety stairway had been built at the edge of the sinkhole and led even farther down into the earth. As they brought her to the edge the stench became even worse. She also thought she could hear noises, inhuman screeches or occasional howls and whimpers.
Don’t take me down there, she thought. Please. I don’t want to understand what’s going on anymore. Nothing down there could possibly be sane.
Your sister’s down there, her inner voice said. You know as well as I do that you’re not leaving here unless she’s with you.
Once again, she really hated how right that voice always had to be. She grabbed a hold of one of the bars and let the pain overwhelm the panic.
At several points during the descent Peg was certain they were going to drop her. Although she couldn’t see beneath them she could see the stairs that were higher up as they went, and she realized that in several places the steps had given away beneath someone in the past. The two creatures had to be very careful with their footing, and once or twice they had stopped and gone back up several steps while the one on t
he lower side looked down behind it to make sure the wood would hold it. Peg tried to see down into the sinkhole, but for a while she couldn’t see a bottom. When they finally reached it she saw at least one broken body among the debris from the roof high overhead. It looked like the long-decomposed body was missing the back of its skull.
The floor at the bottom of the sinkhole was rough-hewn rock, the product of hundreds or thousands of years of water eroding away the limestone. A couple of passages led off from the center, all of them the work of nature rather than human hands. Water dripped down the walls in several places, leading Peg to wonder just how much more natural erosion it would take before the nearby Lake Winnebago would break through the stone and drown everything down here. A few small stalactites could be seen down one of the passages, but the creatures took her to a different one. Whereas the other cave might have allowed them to go through standing up this one was low enough that they had to get on their knees and push the cage through on the ground.
All the while the stink became worse. Peg would have thrown up, but it suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t actually had anything to eat all day. Nor had she gone to the bathroom. She didn’t expect either of these two to let her out long enough to use a toilet.
After a minute the cave widened into a cavern, this one with clear marks on the soft stone walls that let her know there was nothing natural about this place. The general cacophony she’d first heard at the top of the sinkhole was deafening at first, but as the two creatures picked up her cage again the noise vanished into a disturbing hush. There was no light to speak of down here, not even torches or fire or lanterns, but Peg’s eyes adjusted to the light surprisingly quickly. She almost wished they hadn’t.
The room was long, maybe half the length of a football field from what she could see, with a width of maybe twenty to thirty feet in places and about ten feet high. There was a central aisle that ran down the middle leading to a door at the far end that looked like it had the same drunk-ass carpenter as the stairs, but the sight that really stopped her heart were the cages. She wasn’t sure what she had expected. She hadn’t really thought she and Zoey would be alone, but this was beyond belief. Cages filled the entire room on both sides of the aisle. Just at a rough guess she figured there had to be well over a hundred.
And each and every one held a person. Men and woman, or in many cases people young enough to more accurately be called boys and girls. Many were white, but at a glance Peg could see that pretty much all ethnicities were represented at some point. All of them locked away, most of them covered in years of filth. And as far as Peg could see, each and every one had that same mouth full of ragged fangs as Zoey.
Zoey’s words came back to her. Animals eat plants, humans eat animals, vampires eat humans. The only question was what came after.
Peg finally truly understood what this place was. It was a farm. These vampires were the cattle. And even though she wasn’t a vampire, Peg was now cattle too.
Chapter Nineteen
The hush throughout the room continued as the two creatures set Peg’s cage down at the end of the line and slid it into place so it was flush against the next. Then the sounds slowly began again, a few sobs here or there, a wail from somewhere far down the line. One person across the aisle, a young man who looked to be perpetually sixteen, started jabbering to himself and rocking in his cage. It took Peg a moment of straining her ears to recognize his words as something from Shakespeare. She couldn’t recall exactly what it was from, but he kept repeating the same five or six lines over and over like a prayer against the monsters in the darkness.
The two creatures that had brought her here immediately took off down the aisle. There were multiple other cages now blocking her view of the door at the end, but she could hear it open and shut as they went beyond. Peg had seen a couple more creatures like them walking around at the far end, but she hadn’t been able to see what they were doing. Guards, most likely.
She heard something sniffing just a few feet away. Peg turned with a start, bumping her head against the top of her cage in the process, to see someone in the next cage over staring at her intently. The man had probably been in his mid-twenties when he’d been turned. Despite the muck smeared in his long hair Peg thought it might be blond, or possibly red. He was just as naked as everyone else and made no effort to cover up his penis, nor the fact that it was erect. He looked like she’d caught him in the process of masturbating.
The man saw where her gaze pointed and let go of himself. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s not like we have privacy down here. And when you’re in a cage twenty-four seven it’s not like there’s much else to do to keep yourself occupied.”
“Um, sure,” Peg said. Considering there was a pile of his own feces in the corner of his cage she supposed there were a lot more disgusting things to catch him doing other than playing with himself. Even when he stopped touching himself her eyes stayed at his lower half, although it wasn’t his crotch that interested her. His legs had been chopped off at the knees. Although it looked like it had been done long ago the scar tissue looked twisted and unhealed.
“This is the point where you’re going to want some kind of explanation about what’s going on, I suppose,” he said.
“You’re all vampires,” Peg said. “And this is some place where you’re treated as livestock.”
“Hey, pretty good,” the man said. “You’ve already figured out much more than the others usually do.”
“Others?” Peg asked.
“The fresh fish,” the man said. He sniffed in her general direction again. “Although you’re not as fresh as most.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
The man stared at her for several seconds. It was impossible for Peg to make sense of his expression. There was a distinct note of craziness to his wide-eyed stare, although depending on how long he had been down here Peg supposed that was understandable.
“Nothing,” the man finally said. “Not my place to tell you. You’ll figure it out really soon, I’m betting.”
“Right,” Peg said, doing her best to pretend that she understood.
“I’m Pig, by the way,” he said.
“Pig? What the fuck kind of parent would name you that?”
“None. Not the name I was born with. It’s the one I picked for myself. I figured it was much more appropriate, given the circumstances. Would you like me to rename you, too?”
Peg didn’t answer, mostly because she didn’t want to imagine what her new name down here might be. Instead she focused her attention across the aisle at the other cages, but she didn’t see Zoey in any of them. “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“My sister. The one they brought down right before me.”
“Oh, her. Your sister, huh? That explains why you seem to know a little bit. And how you ended up the way you are, I’m guessing.”
She almost asked what he was talking about, but she didn’t really expect a straight answer. “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. They put her back where’s she supposed to be.”
“Which is where?”
Pig pointed down the aisle toward the door. “Near the end. Back in the right order.”
“And how do they determine the right order?”
“Based on how long you’ve been here,” Pig said. “You’re new. So you’re at the end. Once someone is turned into a vampire they slowly get moved down the line.”
“Why?”
“Because the change into a vampire isn’t quick. You notice some differences right away. But some things take time. The fangs. And most importantly, the immortality.”
“So, vampires really are immortal?” She said this as she looked out at the other cages around her. Peg could easily imagine a cave-in collapsing the tunnel they’d come through. They could be trapped in here for years, decades, who knew how long, and there would be no way out and no way to die. Or at least that was what would happe
n to everyone else. Peg hadn’t been turned yet. If they were trapped she would just starve to death.
“There’s very little that can kill a vampire who has ripened.”
“Ripened,” Peg said, turning back to Pig. “Zoey kept saying that over and over. What does it mean?”
“The point of no return. The moment where you have been a vampire long enough that the only thing that can kill you is the heart. And once you’re ripe, you get picked.” He mimed the motion of picking some invisible low hanging fruit outside his cage, then pretended to eat it. His face screwed up in disgust and he spit the nonexistent fruit out. “Uck. Got a worm.”
Peg stared at him. His explanation at least made a little more sense than anything Zoey had said, but that didn’t mean she really understood yet. “How do you even know all that?”
“Been down here a long time, fishy. Hey, how about that? Wanna be called Fishy?”
“You can’t have been down here that long,” Peg said. “You’re in the cage at the end.”
“Ha!” he barked. “That’s only because they don’t know what to do with me anymore. I’m no good for picking, and they can’t use me as one of the minions. They don’t even bother to feed me anymore. Not even one of those scrawny stray cats they’ve been using lately! I’m telling ya, I can’t tell you how much I would kill to have a nice raccoon to drink dry right about now.”
Peg again tried to look down the aisle for any sign of Zoey. She would much rather be coming up with some kind of plan than listen to this loony, but despite himself he was giving her a few tidbits that might be important. “Why won’t they pick you?”
“Cuz I’ve gone all rotten, Fishy,” he said, pointing to his legs. “Just because I’m a vampire don’t mean I can’t be full of infection. That’s what happens when its minions chop off my legs and let the festering stumps lie in shit all day.”
Peg instinctively pulled her ruined foot closer to her body and away from his cage.
Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit Page 14
