Even though Rene let go as soon as he could, the impact made his wrist a screaming focus of agony. But none of it mattered, because he had seen Pons’s look of extreme surprise, as he crashed to the ground, pouring the black blood of vampires onto the flagstones.
And then the pain overwhelmed Rene and he lost consciousness, knowing that doubtless some vampire would kill him while he was unconscious. But he’d killed Pons. And Pierre was safe.
* * * *
Someone was torturing Rene by thrusting a hot poker into his wrist. That was his first impression, followed quickly by a second, that someone was binding his wrist as carefully as he could in the circumstances. That it was a he was confirmed as a voice said, “Bear up, young man. If you’re going to vomit, wait a moment for me to get out of the way.”
Managing to bring his eyes barely open, Rene was surprised to see one of the amazing fighters he’d been watching before. It was the blond man. He was kneeling by the chair – chair? – on which Rene sat and was binding Rene’s wrist against a wooden splint.
The question of where the other fighter had gone was answered by the giant appearing at Rene’s other side, carrying a cup of something. “Drink,” he told Rene. “Drink.”
He put the cup to Rene’s lips, and Rene drank deeply, only to cough at the burn of brandy pouring down his throat.
“I hope you don’t make him drunk, my friend,” the blond man said, tying a neat knot and cutting off the ends of the strip.
“Who?” Rene managed. “What?”
“We are musketeers,” the giant said. “Recruited by Monsieur de Treville. I am Porthos and this is my friend Athos.”
“Athos is not a man,” Rene said, blustering, not sure of much, but sure of that. “It is a mountain. There is a monastery there!”
The man introduced as Athos laughed. He looked up at Rene as though evaluating him carefully. “Some of us in Monsieur de Treville’s regiment are running from vengeance or... minor infractions. Minor infractions committed when fighting vampires.” He looked into Rene’s eyes, and Rene was startled to find the man’s eyes, which looked, at first glance, black were in fact a very deep dark jade green.
The man called Athos sighed. “But from what we gathered during your fight, and after, when you were... I’m afraid, raving out of your head in pain, you too are running from something and in much the same circumstances. On your honor, will you keep our names?”
“I– Yes.”
“Then I am Raphael, Comte de la Fere. And this is my friend Monsieur Du Valon, who prefers to answer to the name of Porthos. And you?”
“I am Rene D’Herblay. I suppose... Chevalier D’Herblay until my son– That is, most will consider me the Chevalier D’Herblay.”
“But you’re not?” the giant rumbled.
Rene shook his head. “No. I am Father D’Herblay.”
For a moment, he thought he’d scared them. They looked at each other. The taller man raised his eyebrows. The blond man shook his head, but it wasn’t a denial, more of a concession.
“I’ve never heard of a priest fighting like you,” Athos said.
“We... The bishop said we needed a different kind of priests to... to protect the people.”
“Warrior priests,” Porthos said. He paused a moment. “Monsieur de Treville–”
His friend took it up. “Has given us the power to recruit trustworthy musketeers who will not be afraid to confront and kill vampires. Will your vows prevent your doing that?”
“No,” Rene said. “I don’t believe so.” He looked down at his wrist. “I don’t know how much good I will be. I–”
“You have very good technique,” Porthos said. “It needs only practice, and I promise you’ll get plenty of that. I know you have the making of an exceptional swordsman, and I should know. I was once a fencing teacher.”
Rene blinked at the thought. He’d tried to avoid the church to become a warrior, and now... and now he found the church led him to be a warrior.
“And we’ll look out for you, while you learn. There is an oath Athos and I have made, since we started going out fighting vampires together. One for two and two for one, but now...”
“But now we’ll change it,” Athos said.
Rene’s hand was wresting upon his knee, and Athos lay his own upon it. “One for all,” he said. Porthos grinned broadly and put his hand on top of their two hands, “And all for one.”
“You’ll do,” Athos said. “Are you enlisting under you own name? You’ll have to tell your real name to the captain, anyway, but if you are a priest, it is perhaps better to go under an assumed name so it won’t be so obvious. What would you like to be called?”
It took no time at all to think about it. A million dreams of leading men in war, a million school boy fantasies rushed in on Rene, and it was with a smile for his foolishness, and an embracing that his path did, indeed, lay in fighting that he said, in a voice that seemed to him older than he’d ever been, “Aramis. I am Aramis.”
Created He Them
MOM, CAN WE TAKE THE KITTENS?” five year old Rosalyn asked. She’d just come into the dining room, trailing her backpack from her right hand, as if it were too heavy for her hand to hold. Which I wouldn’t bet it wasn’t. Despite my instructions, both she and her eight year old sister had taken “pack essentials” as “pack every toy and book you own, including the disks for the game systems we are not taking.”
But her question stomped me, nonetheless, as I piled the essentials on the bed – document box, clean underwear. Change of clothes. I hesitated, my hand hovering over the laptop that sat beside the document box. The radio had said essentials only, and who knew what kind of accommodation the shelter would offer? Would laptops be safe? But if I left it here, would it be safe? I had all my translation work in it and–
“Mom, the kittens. We’re taking the kittens aren’t we?” Rosalyn asked.
“What, honey? Oh, the kittens,” I said, thinking of Trixie cat and her brood in the closet of the back room. Normally they were honored members of the family, but now that our SUV had become a sort of arc against the encroaching cataclysm, space was at a premium, and what would I do with a white Persian and her six kittens – the result of an unfortunate escapade into the wild blue yonder outside our loft before we had a chance of getting her fixed – when I didn’t even know where we would sleep tonight? “I tell you what, we’ll leave Trixie plenty of food, and she’ll look after the kittens while we’re gone. How about that?”
Rosalyn opened her mouth as if to protest, then turned abruptly and left, trailing the backpack behind her.
I turned back to the pile. t-shirts. t-shirts packed easily and I could fit a lot of them in a suitcase, and Michael and I could wear them, and the kids too, in a pinch. It would serve us as clean clothes. I knew the TV said only one change of clothes, but how long would it be till we could return home? And would home be here when we returned?
As I started rolling up t-shirts into tight little bundles, as my roommate in college – an ex-army-Sargent – had taught me to do, and stuffing them into our most portable suitcase, the TV news interrupted for an on-site report. “Here, where the center of Chicago used to stand,” they said. “As you can see there is nothing but primeval wilderness, of the sort that one imagines existed when humans first arrived in the Americas.” The camera panned over a wide expanse of vegetation and serene lake shore. “No one knows what happened to the people here, nor the people in other similarly... naturalized areas of cities.”
I looked up at the pristine landscape and back at the bed. The truth was that we didn’t know that the house would even be here, if we were ever allowed to return. The TV had it right that no one knew what had happened. All anyone could say, with any degree of certainty was that where high-rises had once stood, now there were trees and rock, and nothing else that indicated humans had ever lived there.
When this had started happening, three days ago, we’d sat in fascination in front of the TV, watching scientis
t after scientist come on camera to give a more outrageous science fictional explanation. It ranged from time travel of the afflicted chunks of landscape, which sounded strange enough, to something that a scientist described as quantum universal fluctuation. My husband Michael, himself a scientist, though versed primarily in anthropology, had snorted at that explanation and said it was just a fancy, made up way of saying “I don’t know.”
He was probably right, but all the same, I wished he hadn’t picked today of all days to go to work. He’d said something about securing things against looting, which I supposed made some sense, since he worked in the Natural History Museum. But how much looting did he expect if everything were transported back in time, or whatever?
I didn’t know and I suspected he didn’t either. I thought that in the maelstrom of uncertainty, he’d only wanted to make sure that his treasures were secure and that he was away from the news, in a place where he could pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
Of course, it would be my luck that they called for evacuating every town with over a quarter million population the minute Michael was gone. I bit my lip. Thereby leaving me to pack the car, get the kids organized and battle through downtown traffic to the museum to pick him up before we could make it out of town.
And I didn’t even want to think what sense all this made or didn’t. The same scientists who had no idea why people were disappearing – with their buildings and their entire surroundings – were convinced what triggered the disappearance was a certain number of people. It had started with the largest cities, and it was not moving lower, and they wanted to evacuate the cities.
But where were they going to put the displaced mass of humanity? And wouldn’t anywhere they sent us immediately be raised above the threshold?
“Mom!” this was Caroline, the twelve year old, a coltish sketch of future womanhood, all legs and cheekbones, with hair that permanently hid her face and eyes that seemed too large for the rest of her. And an expression of extreme concern. Ah, the concern. Caroline could be concerned about everything, but right now her expression looked like she was on the verge of hysterics. For which I, looking at what lay on the bed, which might be all I saved from the last twenty years of my life, could not blame her.
“What Caro?”
“What about the kittens? Rosalyn says that you want to leave them. You can’t want to leave them. The TV says areas are just turning to wilderness and people are disappearing. You wouldn’t want Trixie to disappear. And the kittens! You can’t want the kittens to disappear.”
How many times had I played in my mind what I would do in an emergency? We lived in Colorado after all and wildfires threatened us almost every summer. Goldport had yet to be intruded upon by flames, but areas had been evacuated before. In my mind, it had always been clear. I threw the kids, the clothes, our documents and maybe the laptops in the car, and we got out. But all those plans had been made before Trixie Belle entered our lives nine months ago.
I probably wouldn’t have left Trixie to face the wild fires alone, and I probably shouldn’t leave her to face becoming a wave or a particle, or whatever. Knowing that all those serious people on the TV had said to leave pets, making sure they got water and food, I felt as wobbly as my children.
I couldn’t leave them. I simply couldn’t. Not all alone and without humans to protect them. “But,” I temporized. “What about food? And water? We don’t know how long we’ll be in the car, Caro. Where will they go to the bathroom? Won’t Trixie get bored?”
She smiled, the smile that indicated I’d asked her exactly the question she wanted me to ask. “The rabbit hutch,” she said.
It took me a moment to understand what she was talking about, and then I remembered. Though Trixie was our first pet, we had one of those odd things that families accumulate – in this case a rabbit hutch given to Caroline by her best friend in elementary school whose last pet bunny had died. She’d given the hutch to Caroline as a way to pressure Michael and I to allow Caroline to have bunnies.
Never having had much interest in rabbits, I hadn’t given in, but neither had I had the courage to definitely say no by getting rid of the hutch. Instead, I’d temporized and said maybe and another time, and I’d think about it. Meanwhile the hutch – in point of fact a metal cage about four feet by two feet – had gone in the garage, waiting for long-eared tenants that had never shown up.
It was about the size of the cage in which we’d boarded Trixie at our vets when we’d gone on vacation. Enough space for a little cat box and some bedding for herself and the kittens. A water bottle, from which she could probably learn to lick water, and a food dish could go on the cage wall itself.
“Oh, Caro,” I said. “It’s so big.”
“Nah,” she said. “We can put stuff on top of it, you know? They won’t mind. Mostly they just nurse and play. And Trixie won’t mind either.” She flashed me another of her fugitive smiles. “Don’t you worry. Rosalyn and I will take care of everything.”
Which is how when we set out, less than half an hour later, our trunk contained, in addition to two suitcases, a couple of laptops, a small portable file box filled with essential documents, a couple of backpacks filled with – the girls assured me – only the most cherished of toys and coloring books, a rabbit hutch filled with Trixie and half a dozen long haired, vari-colored kittens, all meowing at the top of their heads.
Their meows mingled with the honking of the cars that clogged the road, between the tall buildings. This being Colorado, there were at least three pods of bicyclists with backpacks on their backs pedaling among the cars. At least they were mobile, I thought, with some envy, before smiling at an image of myself holding the cats strapped to the back of a bicycle.
It would never work, anyway, since Rosalyn would not be able to bike very far.
Traffic moved and as I drove two blocks down Fairfax, my cell phone rang. Caroline picked it up and turned it on, since I needed all my attention to navigate the bewildering traffic that obeyed no signals.
“Daddy says he’s waiting by the road next to the museum,” she said. “So we don’t need to go into the parking lot.”
Rosalyn, who had been almost asleep, looked up. “Oh, are we going to the museum? Are we going to greet the t-rex?”
Her greatest joy in our expeditions to daddy’s place of work, since she was very small, had been to be held aloft by Michael while she pretended to shake hands with the giant T-Rex skeleton in the lobby.
“Not today, darling,” I said, and spying an opening in the traffic, turned left into an alley that was barely wide enough to hold the Expedition without touching the sides, but which was, in fact, traffic free. Partly because of its location which made it look like a driveway, I thought, and partly because it ran behind the back of a lot of restaurants, and didn’t lead anywhere near the expressways out of town, but only ten blocks down, to the back lot of the museum. Which was, in fact, where I wanted to go.
I cut through it handily enough, bouncing along to the accompaniment of Trixie’s indignant shrieks, seconded by higher squeaks from the kittens. They were six weeks old, had just opened their eyes, and we hadn’t even, in fact, sexed them. I was fairly sure the two little calicos were female and that the two marmalade handfuls were male. The black and white one and the grey tabby were anyone’s guess. We hadn’t got around to asking friends if they were looking for kittens, much less to putting an ad in the paper looking for good homes. And now...
Caroline leaned forward, and pressed the on button on the radio, whether for the news or to distract herself from the anguished meows in the back.
From the radio poured a litany of disappeared cities. Detroit – where I thought vast tracks had already been returning to natural state through urban blight – Cleveland, Miami.
I listened with half an ear, as I turned out of the alley and onto the side street beside the museum. And managed to get in the flow of traffic, just in time to see Michael waving at us. Fortunately – or not �
�� the traffic came to a standstill, allowing him to approach the car. I opened the door to him, and while Caroline slid between the seats to the back, I slid onto the passenger seat and let him take the driver position.
Relief flowed over me, not only because Michael – who’d grown up in Goldport – knew every possible shortcut in the city and would be sure to get us out of town faster, but because at least now we were together. After twenty years of marriage, I was aware that Michael’s presence didn’t exactly mean I was safe but it did mean that things were as they were supposed to be. The family was together. Whatever happened now, it could not break us.
He started the car and immediately justified my confidence by taking advantage of the next movement in traffic to pull crosswise into a path that ran across the natural park that ran East to West in Goldport like a great triangular slice through the city. Like the alley, it was relatively free of traffic, probably because it was not the shortest distance between any two points. It was shaped – my husband had often said – like a pair of glasses, with two ear pieces. The circuitous route went over hillocks and down little valleys, revealing panoramas now of city and now of rock outcrops, of the sort tourists gawked at every year.
In normal times, it was packed, and full of cars pulled over to the side too, to take pictures or picnic. Now it was empty, save for another two cars, whose occupants must have had the same idea we did. And though it did not follow a straight route, it was faster than being caught in traffic.
“They said to evacuate North to the mountains,” I said.
“Uh,” Michael said. “Perhaps. Or perhaps an alternate route to New Mexico? If this thing is triggered by population, New Mexico has to be one of the safest states there is.”
I didn’t argue. Michael had become prized by the museum for his ability to think outside the box – and limited in his career by his occasional inability to find the box. And the path through the park would bring us to the extreme west of town.
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 6
