“But why would they do that?” Peg asked.
For the first time Pig turned his unsettling gaze away from her. “Because I almost escaped. And I saw.”
Peg moved as close to him as the bars would allow. “Tell me what you mean.”
“I think I was the second one that got close to escaping. The first one I saw got as far as the top of the stairs, I think. So when I saw my chance to punch in the face of one of the minions while it was trying to feed me, I didn’t go that way. Instead I went…”
The door at the end of the aisle slammed open and the two creatures that had kidnapped her walked swiftly down the aisle into view. As they reached the other two that had been milling around they fell in behind them without any word. They stopped about thirty feet down from Peg and stared at the cages.
“What’s going on?” Peg asked Pig.
“Three of the minions went out after your sister.” He stopped as though that explained everything.
“So?” Peg asked, trying her best to be patient although she had a horrible feeling that time wasn’t on her side.
“Only two came back. The mish-mash usually likes to have at least five.”
Peg did her best to get a better angle of view on whatever was happening down the aisle, but in such a small place there was only so much she could do. She tried putting her face against the bars but she could only do that for so long before she felt like the pain might fry the eyeballs from her sockets.
She didn’t have to strain for much longer anyway. The minions slowly walked closer, occasionally stopping to stoop and look in at various people in their cages. Every single one scrambled away from them as far as the cage would allow. Finally all four stopped at the cage with the guy reciting Shakespeare. Unlike the others he seemed to be too out of it to react to their presence. Although Peg couldn’t even begin to guess why, this seemed to be exactly what they were looking for.
One of the minions pulled out a ring of keys from the pocket of its hoodie while another came forward with something cradled in its hands. Once the cage was open the remaining two minions reached in and grabbed the kid by the arm and leg. Only then did he appear to realize that something was wrong, and with his free arm and leg he began flailing about wildly. The action knocked one of the minions against the side of the cage, forcing it to let go, but the remaining minion kept its hold and dragged the boy out of the cage on his stomach. The boy screamed, although his voice was hoarse and pathetic. Everyone else in the cages stopped their own noises at the sound. The hush had an eerie quality to Peg, like the moment of silence before a tornado descends on a trailer park.
The boy tried to call out again, but before the sound could completely come out of his mouth the minion with the keys slammed his head down hard into the stone floor. Peg thought she heard the sickening crack of his nose breaking. The other two minions went down on top of him, one pinning his legs while the other held down his arms. The boy stopped trying to scream and instead started sobbing. Peg went numb at the sound. He might have been older, probably much, much older than he looked, but in this moment he sounded disturbingly like Brendan crying out for his mommy after a bad dream.
The last minion knelt by the boy’s head, its hands still cupped in front of it, and Peg finally had a view of the thing in its hands. She had absolutely no clue what it was supposed to be, but she had seen something just like it only hours before. It was a putrid, shining gob of flesh that pulsed softly as though it might actually be a living creature, although what remained of Peg’s rational brain tried to reject that anything so alien could possibly be alive. As the boy was held down the minion carefully placed the thing on his neck.
Immediately the boy’s sobs changed to choking coughs. He sounded like someone was crushing his windpipe, but the formless mass on his neck wasn’t actually doing anything. Despite this the minions waited for some seconds for a sign that apparently only they could understand. Then the minion who had put the thing on his neck gently put both its hands on the back of his head. Its movements were gentle, and for one crazy moment Peg almost expected it to give him a massage.
Then the minion crushed his head.
The sound was unlike anything Peg had ever heard before. Saying it was like an egg cracking didn’t do it justice. The noise was thicker, meatier. Peg looked away, again feeling the urge to dry heave. At the same time, though, that need to know stayed with her. As diminished as her hopes of escaping were, she still had the suspicion that any little detail about all of this might be the difference between living and dying. She forced herself to look back.
Despite the sound, Peg realized that the minion had only damaged the back of the boy’s head, leaving the front intact. The minion picked away hairy pieces of skull, carelessly tossing them to the side and revealing the smushed remnants of his brain underneath. Now the rest of the minions joined in, ignoring his limbs which still twitched with every jab to his ruined brain. Each of them ripped and scooped pieces of the meat away, leaving it in steaming piles at their sides. They made short work of the brain, although guessing from what Peg had seen earlier she was sure they weren’t very neat or thorough about cleaning out every scrap of gristle or bone. Despite the complete lack of anything remaining in his head, however, the boy continued to twitch. Peg noticed the throbbing blob move on his neck, moving to the exposed top of the spine. It disappeared in the cavity, and all four minions stood up. After just over a minute the boy got up as well.
There was no more twitching, no more Shakespeare. Just one more inhuman creature.
The four original minions went back down the aisle to the door. The new one hesitated and stumbled at first, as though it were a baby taking its first steps, and then it followed them. Once all of them were out of Peg’s sight the vampires in the cages around where the boy had been started reaching out for the pieces of his skull and brain. Peg finally turned away, but she couldn’t avoid the sounds of slurping and chewing.
“Enjoy the show?” Pig asked. “Don’t worry. It’s not one we have to watch very often. The mish-mash doesn’t create any more minions than it absolutely needs. After all, every walking set of eyes it creates for itself is one more it doesn’t get to keep closer to home.”
Peg couldn’t make herself speak. Her mind didn’t want to accept anything she had just seen. This had to be the worst thing this place had to offer, because she couldn’t imagine a vision more soul-crushing and insanity-inducing than that. All she wanted to do was curl up in her cage and put her hands over her ears. She wanted to go to sleep. She wanted to wake up and find that she was back in her bed with Tony at her side. She wanted… she wanted…
Fuck what you want, the inner voice said. No shutting down. If you shut down then both of us are screwed, and I’m not fucking ready to go down yet. Do you understand me? Pull yourself together, woman up, and figure out some way to fuck all these sick bastards right in their empty fucking earholes.
Breathe, she thought to herself. Just breathe. Okay. Good. She could keep going. She knew it. She’d managed to get through everything else in her life, and even if all the other horrible moments in her life paled to all this, she knew from experience that she could keep on. She could. All she had to do was keep repeating that to herself and maybe she would eventually even believe it.
“Oh, welcome back,” Pig said. “I thought you were going away there for a second. Wouldn’t blame you. Most people down here go away when they first see something like that. Quite a few of them don’t ever come back, either. Not everyone can be as sane as me.” He punctuated the sentence with a flash of his fangs.
“You saw,” Peg said.
“Of course I saw. Couldn’t miss it with them putting on the show right there in front of us.”
“No. I meant what you were saying before. You said you tried to escape and you saw. What did you see?”
“Me? Didn’t see nothing. Can’t see nothing. I’m probably just a figment of your imagination. You’re talking to yourself.”
; Peg could see that he was uncomfortable though. “Tell me.”
Pig grabbed the bars of the cage and pulled himself closer, not even flinching at the pain. “I went the other way, you see.”
Peg nodded, motioning for him to continue.
“I thought there had to be more than one exit from here. See, before me, no one ever knew what was beyond that door. All anyone ever knew was that the people who went through never came out. So a way out. It had to be. So when I had the chance, that was the direction I went. But it wasn’t a way out.”
He stopped. It was obvious that he didn’t want to continue. “You can’t stop there,” Peg said. “Tell me. What did you see?”
He hesitated before saying. “A combination of things.”
Peg smacked her hand against the bottom of her cage in frustration. “God dammit! I am sick and tired of everyone giving me the same meaningless answer. Just tell me what it is!”
Now it was Pig’s turn to sound angry. “You want an easy to categorize answer? Well tough shit. You can’t have one. Because there isn’t one. There is no word for what’s beyond that door. There might have been a word once, but not anymore.”
Peg didn’t know what to say to that. Even for everything she had seen, she wasn’t sure if she could accept that someone or something was beyond that door that couldn’t even be named. Instead some other detail of his story stuck in her head. “So you did get out of the cage once?”
“Yep. Not that I could do that anymore.”
“And Zoey did, too. And you said there were others.”
“No one ever escaped for long. Your sister was out there the longest that I’ve ever seen.”
“But it’s possible.”
Pig moved closer to her, a rather unstable-looking smile on his face. “Oh-ho! So here you’re thinking you’re going to be the one person to get out of here, huh?”
“No, not the one. I’m taking Zoey with me.”
Pig snorted, although there was something sad in the way he did it. “I suppose you really haven’t been paying attention as we’ve been talking, have you?”
“What do you mean?”
The noise came to her then, then one she hadn’t realized she should be listening for. The sound of a cage at the end of the aisle being opened.
“I mean they were so desperate to get your sister back for a reason,” Pig said. “The mish-mash needs to eat. And there’s only one person here who’s ripe enough to be picked.”
Peg grabbed the bars at the front of her cage and again tried to force herself into a position to see down the aisle. “Zoey?” she called. “Zoey!”
“Peg,” she heard back, Zoey’s voice low and resigned. “I’m sorry.”
“Zoey? No! Zoey!” But Peg had no way of knowing if Zoey heard her, because all Peg heard in response was the sound of the door at the end of the aisle slamming shut.
Chapter Twenty
Zoey!” Peg kept screaming her name over and over again. A few of the others echoed her either in mocking or out of a lack of anything else to do. She gripped the bars tightly and tried to shake the door, but it only rattled slightly. There was no chance that the hinges might be loose enough for the door to come off. Unfortunately for her the minions appeared to keep at least that much in working order.
She continued holding on to the bars for as long as she could, but the pain eventually became too much. She screamed out every cuss word in her extensive repertoire and let go to look at the dark spots on her hands where they looked like they had been singed. Although it was slow, she thought the spots were fading the longer she didn’t touch the bars.
“I’m out of time,” Peg said to Pig. “You’ve got to tell me how you got out.”
“I did. I attacked the minion when they opened the cage to feed me. But they don’t do it alone anymore. They may not technically have a brain but they still learn from their mistakes.”
“Shit!” Peg grabbed the bars and tried to rattle them one more time, more out of frustration than any belief that it would work. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Eleven years later she was failing her sister again. Peg had no idea how long before Zoey met whatever fate was behind that door, but she knew it was probably measured in only seconds or minutes. Every horrible thing she had ever been told by others, every destructive belief that she had ever believed about herself would be proved absolutely true. She was nothing. She was a waste of life. She was…
Jesus Christ, shut up! the inner voice said. What did you tell yourself earlier, huh? The details. It would be the details that would matter. Don’t you think maybe your subconscious was trying to tell you something? Has it maybe occurred to you that there’s perhaps one very major and important detail that you haven’t been allowing yourself to see?
Wait, what? What was that supposed to mean? She let go of the bars and looked at her hands again. The pain subsided, the marks slowly faded.
“Pig,” she said quietly. “Why does it hurt to touch the bars?”
“They’re made of silver. And the minions go around once a day and rub them down with garlic oil. Both hurt vampires.”
“Right, but why do they hurt me?”
She turned to look at him and saw him give her a wicked smile, like everything he’d been telling her so far had been a joke and he was just now finally reaching the punch line.
“Tell me something, Fishy. Just how do you think a vampire is made?”
She almost answered out loud, but she cut herself off as it slowly dawned on her. Of course she knew how a vampire was made, didn’t she? In practically all the vampire fiction she had ever seen or read it was the same. A vampire drained a person to the point of almost dying, then the person drinks the vampire’s own blood. Once she’d learned that vampires were real she’d simply assumed the real world matched the fiction. But she’d already seen the ways that a real vampire was different, so…
The pain at touching silver and garlic.
The itchy skin under the UV lamps.
The way she’d been immune to the hypnosis of the minions.
Her ability to move almost but not quite as fast as the minion in the abandoned store.
All these memories came back to her, each one helping to form a clearer picture. But one memory trumped them all.
A self-inflicted wound. A slice on Zoey’s finger. A simple, loving touch as Zoey tried to heal the unbearable pain of all the years in whatever way she could.
And then a final memory, that one detail she had so desperately needed: a misshapen lump of metal lying on the stairs in her basement.
There was no time to contemplate the consequences. At some point later she could sit and wonder if Zoey had realized what she was doing to Peg or if it had been an innocent accident. Zoey’s time was almost up for real this time. There would be no coming back after this. Peg had one final chance to fix the mistakes of eleven years before.
With no further hesitation Peg reached through the bars and grabbed the lock.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Pig asked. There seemed to be honest shock in his voice, but Peg didn’t take the time to look at him or even answer. The pain in her hand was immediate. It was no wonder why none of the other vampires had ever tried this before. But Peg’s relationship with pain was different than all of them. Years of self-inflicted harm had taught her how to use it as a tool for her own advantage. All she needed to do was let the pain release the pressure, the mental anguish, the belief that she was unworthy. Release it all, and let only the strength remain.
With all that firmly in her mind, Peg squeezed.
Nothing happened.
“What the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish?” Pig asked. It was a good question, although the better question might be what she was doing wrong. Zoey had done it with ease back at her house, so Peg shouldn’t be any different now. Except Zoey was “ripe,” Peg realized. She’d been a vampire for over a decade. Her strength came to her easily. Peg might not be at that level herself for years. She almost let g
o and broke down sobbing, but the voice in her head would tell her she wasn’t trying hard enough. Even if she wasn’t a full vampire yet she’d still been able to move fast without realizing. She could summon the strength.
Only half-aware that she was doing it, Peg started singing under her breath. “I tried so hard and got so far…”
She squeezed again. The pain was excruciating.
“In the end it doesn’t really matter…”
“Fishy, the minions,” Pig said. “They see that you’re up to something.”
Peg didn’t look down the aisle. She closed her eyes and squeezed harder. The metal felt strong, but maybe not as strong as just a few seconds earlier.
“I put my trust in you, pushed as far as I could go…”
She heard footsteps coming down the aisle, moving fast. Whatever. She could be fast as well.
“Put my trust…”
She twisted. With a sharp metallic clang the lock came off the door.
Her body felt stiff and cramped from the hours in the cage, but she ignored ever protest in her muscles and moved at a speed that should have been beyond the abilities of a mere thirty-four year old mother. The minions were moving at speeds only slightly faster, but Peg had the head start. Not a single one of the others had been able to get away from the minions after escaping, but they had been trying to escape. Peg had no intention of leaving.
Instead she pitched the broken lock at the nearest minion and then, without bothering to see if it hit or did any damage, reached for the only other thing she had at her disposal at this point. Putting both hands on the bars of her cage she twisted, intending to pick it up and throw it at them. The movement was nowhere near as smooth as she had expected. Later she would realize that not only had she been forgetting her strength wasn’t at full “ripe” levels yet but it had taken two of the minions to carry something so bulky. She tried to swing it around the way an Olympian would spin with a shot put but it clipped the cage across the aisle, throwing Peg off her balance. The vampire in the cage scurried back until it realized that the front of the cage had been damaged. Perhaps inspired by Peg’s actions it too tried to grab the lock.
Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit Page 15
