Peg didn’t have the chance to pay the vampire any more attention as the minions reached her. She had at least enough momentum on the cage to smack one of the minions in the side of its chest, but the other leaped at her and knocked her against Pig’s cage. The pain of her naked spine hitting the hard metal was enough to make her vision black out for a second even without the added burning sensation. The minion grabbed her by the throat and started choking her. Peg had no idea if that could be enough to kill her now, but the last thing she wanted to do was test the possibility. Peg reached up to the minions face with both hands and pushed her thumbs into its eyes. She’d never tried to actually blind someone before, but her expectation from the movies was that the eyes would offer some resistance and then pop like she’d stuck her fingers through the skin of a rotten tomato. To her surprise, however, they offered barely any resistance. They just popped out of the sockets, falling back on their thin remaining strings of muscle and dangling off the back of its neck, the pulsing mass of mystery flesh the only thing keeping them from falling straight to the floor.
The effect was immediate. The minion, no longer able to see anything other than the ground at its heels, let go of her and flailed around wildly. It looked like it was trying to reach behind itself to grab its dangling eyeballs, but they kept swinging just out of its reach.
By this time the other minion had recovered and dashed around it comrade, its hand aimed straight at Peg’s heart. Peg dodged just enough for its nails to scrape the skin alongside her breast. With anyone else this would have left her in the perfect position to put the minion in a headlock, but the minion didn’t have enough of a head to lock. Instead she grabbed the only thing that was available, the twisted tumor-like mass holding the inside of its face together. As soon as she put her fingers in it she regretted the decision. There was no pain, but the sensation that reached her brain from her fingers was one of sudden numbness, like she stuck her hand in a bowl of Jell-o that just so happened to be laced with some kind of crazy anesthetic. She thought she could feel a form of consciousness in there trying to communicate with her, or maybe take over, invisible tendrils of slimy flesh trying to worm their way into her mind and take over her body. Before this could become anything more than just a fleeting sensation she pulled her hand back out, pulling as much of the mass as she could with it. The minion jerked like its entire body was being tested for reflexes. Peg threw the gore aside, desperate to get every trace of it off her fingers. Even the black-red slick of viscera it left behind felt like it was trying to merge with her and take over. She could feel something’s presence, something close by, watching her through the simple touch. She wiped the hand on the minion’s hoodie as she grabbed it by the shoulder then smashed its impossible face against the bars. Pig sat in the cage watching with fascination as the shattered remains of its impossible face showered down around him.
The minion fell limp against the side of the cage, its body slowly shriveling and cracking just like the one had in Oconomowoc. Peg turned to face the other minion only to find that it had fallen to its knees, still trying to make sense of what was happening to it. Before it could regain itself she shoved it headfirst into the stone floor. That appeared to be enough to kill it.
Peg saw something gleaming from the first minion’s pocket and reached in to find the keys to the cages. For a moment she fought with herself about what to do. She didn’t know how much time she had but it couldn’t possibly be much. But if she went in and never came back out then without letting everyone out of their cages first then they might forever lose their chance to escape. She didn’t even know if letting them escape was the right thing to do. They were vampires, after all. They were all victims and not a single one of them had probably done anything worthy of being here, but there was no telling what they would do when unleashed on the world. Especially since very few of them seemed to be sane anymore.
It’s not your place to condemn them, the inner voice said.
Shit. The voice was right, but she didn’t have time for this. It suddenly occurred to her that the entire room had fallen silent again as all eyes watched to see what she would do. Something rattled nearby, and Peg looked over to see the vampire in the damaged cage pull her arms back inside, her hands smoking from touching the lock. She was a blond, probably not even old enough to be out of high school yet, and unlike some of the others she still had intelligence and sanity in the way she stared at Peg. If Pig’s explanation was correct then she would probably have been here for only a short time. Peg bent down long enough to toss the keys into her cage and say “Free everyone” then ran down the aisle to the forbidden door.
She’d partly expected it to be locked, but instead it didn’t even close all the way. Apparently the minions, whether they were just walking eyes and hands for the “combination of things” or not, were truly terrible craftsmen. Beyond the door the passage shrunk back down to its naturally made original state, forcing Peg to stoop. From the echo of dripping water she guessed that it went along for quite a ways, but the absence of light here was near absolute. Even though she understood the importance of speed she still stepped carefully, and the floor here hadn’t even been smoothed, leaving jagged spots on the ground where she frequently and painfully stubbed her bare toes. She thought her missing toe might be bleeding again as well, since the going was particularly slick, although that could have just been from the perpetual moisture.
Something from farther down the passage groaned, a low, haunting noise that echoed for many seconds before fading away. Peg had almost gotten used to the stench in the cage room, but that couldn’t compare to this. Every time something knew assaulted her nostrils down here she kept thinking there was no way anything could possible smell worse and she kept getting proved wrong. If she ever made it out she wasn’t sure that her sense of smell would even work anymore. If it was possible for a person’s nostrils to be permanently damaged, this was the place that would do it.
Oh shit, Peg thought, just what exactly is it I think I’m going to do? She looked down at herself, and even though she couldn’t see much more than her outline in the darkness she knew what she had to look like. She was naked, not even having the simple protection afforded by clothes, and she didn’t have anything that could be used as a weapon. She had no idea what she was about to face, but she knew full well that it wasn’t going to feel threatened by her in the slightest. There were things back in the cage room that might be useful, though. She might be able to pry a bar off a cage to use as a stake, or she could look for the garlic oil that Pig had said they used on the cages. Or at the very least she might find something sharp…
The emotions hit her all at once, almost crippling enough to send her falling to her knees and clutching her head. She understood now what this was, or at least she thought she did. Zoey had said she’d been connected enough to Peg to follow her emotions to Oconomowoc. And once Zoey had shared her blood with Peg the ability went both ways. In the empty store Peg had felt Zoey’s emotions clear enough, but this was so far beyond that. Zoey was close, and she was just sad or resigned or frightened. This was absolute, sheer terror on the most primal level. This was abject horror beyond what a person should be capable of feeling. Peg’s heart skipped several beats, as though her body itself didn’t think it could contain such uncontrollable fear.
At no point did Peg even consider turning and running while she could still salvage her life. She ran flat out down the tunnel, not caring anymore about ripping apart her bare feet and somehow managing not to slip or trip, heading straight ahead to Zoey.
She heard the change in the corridor’s size before she saw any difference. The sounds of her footsteps echoed off a higher ceiling, and she was no longer able to reach out and touch the sides of the tunnel. She got the impression that the tunnel continued to expand as she went. Somewhere ahead she could hear Zoey, her soft repeated “no no no no no” amplified by the expanded cavern.
And there was another noise. Movement. Something slipping o
ver the surface of the rock. Squelching. Squeezing. Sick wet, smacking sounds. Grunts. Whispers. Thousands of whispers. Sighs and moans and sobs. So many voices, all of them quiet, all of them babbling to themselves.
Peg finally stopped. Her eyes had adjusted as much as they possibly could to the near total blackness of the cave, just enough that she could see Zoey ahead of her. The three remaining minions stood around her, one behind her and one on each side holding her arms straight out at her side like a sacrifice tied to two posts. The minion at the rear turned to look at Peg, but all the others continued staring straight ahead.
Something beyond them was moving. Something massive.
Don’t look, the inner voice said. Dear God, whatever you do, don’t look at it. For the first time ever that inner voice actually sounded petrified. For the first time, too, Peg knew she had no other choice but to ignore it. She ran straight ahead, going right for Zoey. She didn’t care if she had to run right over the minion in her way to do it. Because this couldn’t happen. After all this time, after all she and Zoey had been through, there was no way she could let this end any other way than…
Something flashed out of the darkness. Peg only had the impression of something like a tentacle, yet not nearly uniform enough to rightly be called that, something flesh colored. It wrapped around Zoey and yanked her deeper into the darkness. Zoey screamed, a high, shrill lance of sound that became muffled almost immediately.
“No!” Peg screamed as she hit the minion, her arm ramming forward into its chest with a speed and force she hadn’t realized she was yet capable of accomplishing. Her fingers clenched an organ she could only assume was the heart and she squeezed. The minion, who she could now see was formerly the Shakespeare, sighed and crumpled as she pulled her arm back out, her forearm now slick with black fluid. She expected the other two to come after her but they just stood there. They looked hypnotized, or maybe empty. Yes, that felt more like it. There was nothing inside them at the moment. Their bodies were on just enough of an autopilot that they didn’t just collapse where they stood, but their minds, or whatever mind-like thing controlled them, was elsewhere.
Before either of them could come to she rammed her hands through both their chests, repeating her feat from moments earlier. As they dropped to the ground, the remains of their bodies crumbling to nothing, Peg stooped down for a search of their clothes. They had to have some form of light on them. Anything at all. Even they must have needed to find something in the dark that had been beyond their eyesight from time to time. She found it in the pocket of one of their jeans, a small Maglite that didn’t look like it would do much at all in darkness this thick. But she grabbed it, pointed it ahead of her, and prayed to her higher power that she would see Zoey perfectly okay only feet away from her.
She didn’t.
The beam of light created a small circle ahead of her, and faint, but it was enough. At first her mind couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. In fact, later, she would still never be able to fully comprehend it. The mere memory, blurred in her head to nearly nothing in a futile attempt by her mind to assert that world could still possibly be sane, would be enough to send her crying and puking to the toilet, where she would hug it and try to deny that it had ever really happened.
Zoey and Pig’s descriptions were correct, after a fashion. It was, indeed, a mish-mash, a combination of things. But those words meant nothing. They were approximations of a concept that humanity had never dared to come up with.
The circle of light illuminated a part that she could only refer to as its midriff, although it was too asymmetrical to be said to have a “mid.” It was flesh, human flesh, mostly white but with many spots of black and brown and tan and every variation in between. Another second of staring and Peg realized it had protrusions sticking out all over, all human body parts of all shapes and sizes. Arms, legs, fingers, toes, body hair, pubic hair, breasts, nipples, ears, noses, penises, vulvas. The first three fingers of a hand, its nails grown impossibly long, wriggled and stretched at her from around a belly button. Beneath a single brown eye, darting here and there at random intervals, there was a shriveled piece of skin that could only be a scrotum. Mouths showed up on it sporadically, each and every one snarling and hissing and crying. Most of it was incomprehensible, but from several she thought she heard the mumbled word “help.” From others, louder, came the words “kill me.”
This thing, this enormous thing of which she could only see the smallest portion, was made purely of people. Immortal people, vampires, fused together by… Peg couldn’t even try to understand the mechanism by which it did this. She couldn’t tell how old this thing might be, but its form came from an uncountable number of people. And each one, she realized, was still conscious, still alive in the most rudimentary sense, still very much aware of the unending Hell.
“Zoey?” Peg whispered. She didn’t hear a response, but she felt it in her head. Despair. And agony. Pure agony.
Peg looked up. About fifteen feet in the air Zoey hung from a… again, calling it a tentacle was inaccurate. It was certainly an appendage of some sort, but its structure matched nothing that should exist in nature. It grew so slim in some places- the width of a single leg- that it shouldn’t have been able to support its own weight and yet it waved in the air effortlessly. It had a muscle and bone structure that appeared to have been designed by a drunk on an all-week bender. Peg thought she could see the impression of a spine poking out from the skin underneath what might have once been a scalp. An arm ended in a chest, where a woman’s face was stretched over a rib cage. And a flat end of this appendage was wrapped around Zoey, covering her face and preventing her from screaming even as her legs dangled out from underneath, waving in a horrible spasming rhythm.
Again Peg’s inner voice told her to stop watching. She should look away before any of this was permanently burned in her mind for the rest of her now unnaturally long life. It told her that Zoey was gone, that there was nothing Peg could do, that the only thing to do that even slightly resembled logic was running.
And again, Peg didn’t listen. Instead she jumped. Up until today a fifteen foot leap for her would have been impossible but she’d already seen that the minions could do it back at the empty store. She accidently dropped the flashlight, making her lose sight of her moving target so she almost missed. As the flashlight broke and went out beneath her she barely got her hands around Zoey’s foot. Zoey’s legs continued to shake like a rag doll, nearly throwing Peg off until she got a better grip with her second hand. She tried to use her weight to tug Zoey out of the thing’s grip, but all she got for the effort was a muffled scream from Zoey somewhere in the pulsing wall of meat.
Peg reached up and the closest thing she could find to a handhold, something she didn’t register at first as being Zoey’s wrist. The proportions seemed wrong, like she shouldn’t have been able to reach her hand that far down on Zoey’s body, but Peg didn’t take the time to wonder about this. Zoey had to be fighting to make this thing let go, but her strength alone wasn’t enough. If Peg could combine it with her own, though, it was still possible that they could escape.
Peg reached up again, and this time she didn’t touch Zoey. Her hand clasped a twisted knot of skin that might at one point have been either a knee or a shoulder. She resisted the deep seated repulsion and urge to get her hand away from it as quickly as possible and instead used it to pull herself up almost level with Zoey. The knot twisted under her fingers like it was trying to readjust and reform around her hand. Peg could feel an irregular pulse beneath the surface. It must have had some kind of circulatory system, although it was impossible to predict exactly how it worked. Maybe, though, it still worked enough like the vampires it had been built from to share the same weaknesses.
If she had stopped for any blink of time and considered what she was doing Peg would have probably screamed and allowed herself to drop rather than do this, but she instead worked entirely on blind instinct. Bracing herself by wrapping her legs around Z
oey’s, Peg grabbed the nearest spot on the creature—it felt like an eyebrow over the heel of a foot—with both hands. Her fingers sank into the twisting mass without any effort on her part, and she realized with sudden horror that it was trying to swallow her hands and assimilate her with the rest of it. After several seconds of feeling it trying to take over her mind just like the piece of the minion had earlier, though, it stopped and instead tried to retreat from her touch.
She was too young, Peg realized. It couldn’t take her because she wasn’t ripe.
Peg dug her fingers in and pulled. The skin ripped with far too much ease, and a mess of intestines fell out of the hole onto her chest. On the inside she was screaming, but she didn’t stop clawing. She pulled out some other piece of unidentifiable viscera—a kidney, maybe—and threw it away. The appendage began to shake, and Peg thought she could hear another waving somewhere in the darkness behind her. Any moment it might come swooping down to wipe her off. Peg dug deeper, gritting her teeth and she tore away all manner of organs, some identifiable, many more unlike anything she had ever seen. Maybe she was wrong. This thing might not work like…
With her arm shoulder deep in the things guts, Peg finally felt something. Pulsing. Pumping. She got a firm hold on it and pulled. With a faint squelching sound it came out, a human heart, still trying its best to beat, still spurting blood.
The thing screamed.
Peg screamed with it. She couldn’t help it. The sound was so human, and yet not even close. Hundreds, maybe thousands of mouths all at once opening and giving voice to their pain.
The thing didn’t stop, though. The second appendage came out of the darkness and slammed into her. If she hadn’t had one of her arms still deep within the thing’s wound she was certain she would have fallen. The skin around the wound started to crack and peal, flaking off into slimy lumps that fell to the ground below. But one heart couldn’t possibly be enough to stop it. This thing likely had as many hearts as it did victims.
Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit Page 16
