Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  I unfolded it. It was a map of Lakeview Cemetery.

  26

  I drove away from Sam’s apartment building knowing that to find Gail, I had to find Childe’s people, his thralls. A knot of rage burned through my gut, at myself, and at them. I had to get to them before they harmed her—

  I couldn’t complete the thought. The emotion made it hard to think clearly, and I needed to think clearly. I only had two things to act on. I had a map of Lakeview, and I had a memory of dams and mausoleums. I had a memory of running from the teenager with the blood-black smile, of Cecilia’s animate body on the blackened snow, of the mausoleum from which she emerged, and of the flood-control dam that had hovered over the whole scene like some gigantic memorial.

  Clearly marked, on the map of Lakeview, was the location of that dam. At the moment, that was all I had.

  As I drove up Mayfield from University Circle, I passed a large wrought-iron gate that said, “Lakeview Cemetery.” My destination.

  I felt pressed for time, and parked opposite the gate as soon as I saw it. The cemetery was shut up and dark, long past closing. The sidewalk on that side of Mayfield was deserted. The dark quiet beyond the fence seemed to have reached out to claim Mayfield as part of itself.

  As I got out of the car, I glanced up toward the well-lit intersection of Coventry and Mayfield, with its BP station, its bars, and its people. All of it bustled in the distance. From where I was, cloaked in the silence next to the cemetery, it looked like another world. They even seemed to have less snow up there.

  I dashed across Mayfield, and up Lakeview’s driveway, stopping at the gate. The gate was large and wrought iron, flanked by shorter fences. I walked to the right of the main gate, staring into the darkened foliage beyond the fence, and waited for the traffic on Mayfield to die off for a moment.

  During a pause in the traffic, I took a step up and vaulted over the fence. The ease with which I did it-the fence was seven feet tall—surprised me. Somehow I was exploiting both the energy of my anger and of the fresh feeding.

  God help anyone who harmed my daughter.

  I came crashing down in the snow-covered mulch on the other side of the fence. I stood still for a time, listening for signs that someone had seen me cross the fence. I heard nothing. The snow absorbed the sounds of traffic.

  I slipped through the naked winter bushes and into the cemetery. The sense of entering another world was complete. I stepped out into a world of naked trees, rolling snow-blanketed hills, and a total absence of people.

  There were footprints here and there, where people had visited, or tended a grave. But, like the graves themselves—mostly marked only by blank humps of snow—the signs of people seemed distant and irrelevant when weighed against the omnipresent stillness.

  The silence allowed it to sink in, what had happened. The worst of my fears, the fear that one day I would be hunting down someone’s child only to discover the child was my own. My fears had been a self-fulfilling prophecy. I had brought all of this down upon us, and it wasn’t hard to believe that my own anger was the only thing keeping the guilt from paralyzing me.

  I followed the map as well as possible in the darkened cemetery. More than once my haste threw me down on an ice-slicked road. In my blind rush, when I did see a ghostly figure emerge from the woods, I had drawn my gun and almost shot before I realized who it was.

  I held my gun upon the white-clad figure and stared for a moment before speaking.

  “Gabriel,” I said in a puff of fog.

  “Indeed, sir. Now, Mr. Tyler, would you put aside that weapon.”

  “Give me a good reason.”

  “You try my good graces, sir. You’re in no position to test me.”

  “Am I not?” My hand was shaking. “I had the impression I left whatever grace there was between us when I stepped out of your house.”

  “You try my patience, Mr. Tyier—”

  I steadied my gun with both hands. “You pedantic, pretentious—You have about five seconds to explain why you’re here or you’ll feel what it’s like to have a fifty-caliber bullet pass through that smug expression.”

  “You’re threatening me?”

  “It won’t kill you, but I’m curious about what might happen to your motor skills.”

  “Mr. Tyler!”

  I took a step forward, staring into Gabriel’s eyes. They were closed and dead to me, almost opaque. Even so, I looked into them and poured all my anger into my words. “You’re so fond of form. My chosen name is Raven.”

  Gabriel shook his head, “I don’t believe I can accept you as a peer, sir.”

  “Fuck what you believe. Tell me what you’re doing here, now!”

  I don’t know if it was the force of my anger, the threat of the gun, or the blessings of Jaguar, but Gabriel backed up.

  “Don’t you dare move,” I shouted at him.

  His glare raged with a fury mirroring my own, cold where mine was hot. “All right, Raven, ask me what you will.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The same as I was doing when first I crossed your path. I felt the intensity of a feeding. I came to investigate.”

  “Looking for Childe?”

  “Looking for Childe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he breaks the Covenant—”

  I shook my head and felt a glare colder than the snow that soaked into my shoes. “Everyone looks for Childe. He’s convenient, isn’t he? No one seems to pay attention to the radical change in behavior his thralls have undergone. Or that he disappeared with his last recruit, the first person he’s taken that anyone seems to have missed. Childe’s been around too long for all this to happen at his hand.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Childe’s being set up. And at the very least you’re looking the other way. At worst—”

  “Mind your accusations. You do not know what you’re dealing with.”

  I closed the distance between us and pressed the gun barrel to his temple as he had placed a sword against my neck. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. My daughter is in the hands of those people. Childe, or the people who’re scapegoating him. If I find you’re involved, I will tear out your heart. What’s down the hill?”

  “Nothing you should concern yourself with.” His face was remarkably calm.

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “There’s a young woman down there with a tale to tell.”

  Those words were enough to send me scrambling down the hillside, toward a fenced-off access road that led to my destination. “Don’t pursue this,” Gabriel called down after me. “Let Childe sink under the weight of his excesses.”

  I ignored him as I jumped over the gate blocking the snow-covered road. I didn’t know what Gabriel was, but at the very least he acted like a cop who simply ignored inconvenient evidence. He disgusted me.

  “You’ve made an enemy today,” he called after me at last. I couldn’t have cared less.

  I ran down the road to a large bowl-shaped valley close to the center of Lakeview. I emerged on the floor of that valley. Towering to my left was the wide concrete face of the dam.

  It was just as surreal as I remembered it, a wide slope of concrete hovering over a flat field of snow marred only by one paired set of footprints.

  Near the base of the dam, opposite a tiny, snaking river escaping from its base, huddled a small hill next to the wall of the valley. The footprints pointed me directly at that hill.

  As I’d remembered, mausoleums were set into the side of that hill. As I ran out onto the dam’s flood-plain, following Gabriel’s steps, I noticed no sign of graves on the field between me and the hill. The mausoleums down here had to predate the construction of the dam.

  My memory of Cecilia’s sacrifice kept replaying itself in my mind. I received no new insights, only more and more vivid shots of adrenaline. Little had changed down here, down to the blue-tinted moonlight.

  I had t
o stop between a pair of barren trees, because it was the spot where I had seen Sebastian’s daughter die—and perhaps be reborn. I was directly in front of the tomb from which I’d seen her emerge. Gabriel’s footsteps led directly to the tomb’s door. And so did others.

  It was hard to tell, but where the flood-plain had been virgin except for Gabriel’s footprints, here, by the hill, there were signs of two, or maybe three other people walking around the site. I felt even more unease when I remembered why Gabriel said he had come here.

  A feeding.

  More footprints led to the mausoleum than left it.

  This mausoleum seemed typical of the other half-dozen granite boxes set into the hillside around it. It had the same peaked temple roof supported by two polished granite pillars flanking the single door. The door was gated by a latticework of eroded green bronze. The only decorative carving on the tomb was an Egyptian sun-disk on the lintel above the door. I was certain that this was the place from which I’d seen Sebastian’s daughter emerge.

  What disturbed me was the fact that this tomb bore no name.

  I glanced to the tombs to the left and to the right, “Forbes,” on the one, and another name, illegible in shadow, on the other. The place I faced was unique. It must have been built just before the dam, just before they stopped using this place where the dearly departed could be washed away the next time they opened the sluice.

  I glanced at the dam. Close as I was, it filled half the world, ground to sky, at an oblique angle. I felt as if I had fallen into a surrealist painting. Some element didn’t belong here, the dam, the hill, the nameless tomb, myself....

  Not a place I’d chose to be buried. Not a place I’d choose to die.

  I stared at the footprints leading to the door of the nameless mausoleum. I felt the same dread that I had felt when approaching Sam’s bedroom.

  It seemed an eternity before I had gathered the courage to walk up to the gate in front of the door. I stared in, past the green metal scrollwork, trying to see through the one window in the door beyond. The darkness was impenetrable, even to my sensitive eyes. The little windows set into the recessed door seemed to be painted black.

  Just like the bedroom in Childe’s apartment. Perhaps for the same reasons. It was easy to believe that all my answers lay beyond the bronze scrollwork in front of me. I listened for a few moments, trying to sense if anyone was here.

  I let the silence hover a little longer than was comfortable. I felt alone. I hooked my fingers into the cold metal scrollwork, next to the lock, and pulled.

  The gate flung open, unlocked. I expected the mechanism to protest more upon opening, but it glided open on well-oiled hinges.

  I now faced a heavy, studded, wooden door.

  I looked around and listened again. This time I heard something—

  I backed, slightly, and began raising my gun. I wasn’t quick enough. The door was yanked open from inside. A stench of rotting death billowed out, piercing the cold, worse than anything my gangrenous hand had emitted—the warm, wet smell of decayed meat.

  The smell pushed me back like a fist. I saw the source of the smell and wondered if the gun was going to do me any good.

  I saw its clothes first, maybe because I didn’t want to see the rest of it. What I saw was typical teenage Gothic-punk. Black jeans, black T-shirt, black leather, black everything. At least everything used to be black. Everything was torn, ragged, splattered with mud and darker filth.

  It emerged into the moonlight, following its smell, a first-hand example of someone who did not wear vampirism well. Its hair was gone except for a few random patches. Feral red eyes burned inside sockets sunk into craters of tattered white flesh. Black sores pockmarked its skin. I saw tendons working through holes in its cheek and the backs of its hands. Fingernails and teeth were absurdly long.

  It hissed like an angry cat.

  I leveled my gun and tried to stare it down—a move that had been successful lately. But, behind those bloody eyes I didn’t see much I could influence. And what was there was dedicated to being permanently pissed off.

  The thing leaped at me, screaming something shrill and inarticulate. I ducked to the side just in time to avoid having a bite taken out of my left shoulder. I felt its hand brush by me. Its touch felt unclean.

  Before I’d turned fully around, I felt claws rake across my left hip. I backpedaled and saw the thing trailing bloody pieces of my shirt and my jacket. It was fast.

  It advanced toward me, a moving corruption.

  I fired the Eagle. The zombie and I were connected for a microsecond by a tongue of flame, then it fell backward into the snow, a ragged hole kicked into its chest. Of course, it started getting up again. I walked closer and fired again, this time into his head. Its face caved in and chunks of skull blew into the snow. It stopped moving.

  I knew, despite appearances, that I hadn’t finished it off. Looks weren’t anything. It had looked dead before I shot it, and I’d survived a bullet in the face myself.

  Though, looking at the mess in the snow, I realized that the bullet I’d taken was not into the brain-case, and hadn’t been fifty-caliber. From the look of things, at the very least I’d slowed it down a bit.

  The mausoleum still hung open, behind me. I ran back up to it.

  The first thing I saw, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, was that Sebastian had left his spoor here, in the form of two dead soldiers. The two crumpled bodies cluttering the marble floor, dressed and armed as they were, were unlikely to have come from another source.

  As Gabriel had said, a woman sat here. In the darkness I was allowed one momentary illusion. I almost whispered, “Gail!”

  Then I saw through the shadows and saw the face of Cecilia, Sebastian’s daughter. She didn’t look as bad as the thing I’d pumped lead into—the corpses on the floor didn’t look that bad—but she didn’t look good.

  She sat at the far end of the tomb, one of the corpses crumpled at her feet. She glared at me and demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Nice Catholic girl, I thought. I glanced at the bodies on the ground and said, “Someone who isn’t working for your father.” Saying that severed whatever ties I had left with Sebastian. It felt better than it should’ve.

  “Like the last guy?”

  I heard a rattle and as I stepped forward, over the first corpse. She was handcuffed to a wrought-iron bench set into the narrow far wall.

  “Are you a cop?” she asked. “I told everything to the guy with the cane.”

  I bent over and rolled one of the dead men onto his back. I didn’t know him, but the wound was familiar. His neck was half gone, the wound a black crater in the darkness. In one hand he clutched a rosary, in the other a thirty-eight. Neither appeared to have helped him much.

  I picked up the rosary, which didn’t seem to hold any special power. Maybe he hadn’t gone to church enough.

  “Who are you?” she repeated.

  “Where’re Childe’s people? Where’re the rest of his thralls?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I rolled over the second body, whose wounds were less severe, smaller, and just as fatal as the first’s. Two generic hoods with the job of scouting locations for Dad. “How long ago?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “How long since you and the zombie feasted on these two?”

  “I didn’t—”

  I knelt down in front of her. “No games. I know what you are. This guy has most of his neck, unlike the zombie’s dinner. That, and you’re pretty damn fresh for someone who hasn’t had a drink for a long time. How long have you been here? Since Childe’s little ritual? You should be starving.”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” She was crying, and I backed off. She looked down at her feet and whispered, “I was insane with it. Dominic—” she indicated the corpse “—was dead before I realized I knew him.” She sobbed. “I’ve had to sit here with him for a whole day.”

  Sebastian had ha
d over twenty-four hours to realize his hoods were missing. I looked back out the door. I could see the bloodless zombie out there on the ground, looking even more cadaverous and thin even though his chest had reconstructed itself.

  In the distance I heard sirens. My gunshots had not gone unnoticed.

  “You have a choice, Cecilia. I can leave you here for the cops, or I can take you, and you tell me what I want to know.” I stared into her eyes, and I didn’t know if it was vampiric persuasion or the unambiguous options that made her say, “Take me.”

  I holstered the Eagle, reached down, and pulled the handcuff chain apart.

  27

  Fortunately, I was able to lock the mausoleum shut on the corpses. I collected my brass and left zombie-boy where he was. I pulled Cecilia along, through the cemetery, without running across Gabriel again. And, despite the sirens, we reached the gate before any police showed themselves.

  I pulled her over the fence and we dashed across Mayfield to the Chevette.

  “Who was that he left guarding you?” I asked. I wanted her talking.

  “Joey,” she said. There was a long pause. “At least I think he’s still Joey.” Her voice was small and leeched of any of the earlier bravado. I suddenly felt for everything she was going through.

  Despite the wave of empathy I felt, I had to remind myself that she was one of Childe’s thralls now, which meant she was involved in whatever happened to my daughter. “How did Gabriel get by him?”

  “Who?”

  “The man with the cane.”

  “I don’t know. He just looked at Joey, and Joey didn’t move.”

  Rank hath its privileges. Apparently Gabriel had better luck staring down the opposition than I did. “I need you to tell me about him, and Childe’s people.”

  She looked up at me, and I stopped next to the Chevette. I wanted her in the car. Her dress was gore-stained, black with dried blood, and I didn’t want anyone to see her. “They have my daughter.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I opened the passenger door and set her in the car. “Talk to me.”