Vampires Don't Cry: The Collection

by Ian Hall

  “Oh,” Elena gulped, her eyes as wide as saucers.

  We remained silent for a few moments, then she looked up at me like I was Gandalf or something. “What happens now?”

  “Oh, Elena, honey. Now we have a few glasses of wine, and finish off what you started back in the backseat of my car in New River.”

  After another trip out into the field, bringing another busload of ‘fodder’, we all met for the first time in days. Finch told us about the draining of the bodies in the university morgue. Just the fact that we were ‘farming’ the community made the whole vampire thing kinda icky.

  “Why so much blood?” Valérie asked. “When I report to Howard, he’ll want to know.” She paced the carpet in the hotel room, holding her chin.

  “Well,” Lyman began, lounging on the sofa as usual. “We know the kids didn’t come alone. Steve, the New River boss is here. He’s only acting as a janitor, but he’s here.”

  I sat, hardly even listening. I’d had a coffee, but still felt lifeless. Lyman, bless his pumpkin heart, had snagged me a bag of blood from their ‘blood drive’ in Nogales, but I’d only snacked on it, and even that hadn’t invigorated me the way it usually did.

  “We’re no nearer to finding the reason for the buildup, are we?” I said, not looking at any of the three. “I mean, why don’t we just fly around the building and vamp-nuke them all?”

  “Because we need to find the answer,” Valérie said, all condescendingly. “We need to know the vampire purpose; they’re not here to just attend university.”

  I sat up, suddenly awake. “Then why don’t we shake the tree? The tactic’s worked before.”

  Lyman broke the silence. “Mandy’s right. We got into the Harris group by giving them a bit of a shake. Why not do it here?”

  Finch sat on the floor, her legs tucked up into the lotus position. “Might not work, though. There’s almost two hundred vampires here.”

  “Has there ever been as many before?” Lyman asked.

  Valérie shook her head. “I was with Amos in the fifties. We had maybe a hundred if we were lucky. They bickered constantly. The hardest thing was to get them to work together.”

  Finch nodded in agreement. “We vampires almost have a species limiting chip in our heads. We don’t work well as a team. Not usually.”

  “So how come it works here?” Lyman asked.

  “What?”

  Lyman looked animated. “Well, have you seen signs of vampires not working together?”

  The look exchanged between Finch and Valérie seemed to be in slow motion.

  “What’s up with you guys?” I asked. “Cat got your tongues?”

  “What’s the fastest courier to get to Unicorps?” Lyman got to his feet.

  Valérie seemed to come out of her trance. “Eh, probably overnight by FedEx or something like that.”

  “Whoa,” I said, catching Lyman’s enthusiasm, although I wasn’t really certain why. “How about car to Gregor? They’ve got a facility there, remember?” I looked at his face, but he looked intent on Finch and Valérie . “Why do you need Unicorps?”

  Lyman rounded on me. “Because I think they’re putting something in the blood. Something that stops you guys from squabbling.”

  “How do you come to that conclusion?” Valérie looked incredulous.

  Lyman glanced around the room. “Look at the three of you, you’re almost listless!”

  I thought I’d take the idea one step further. “So if the vampires have a drug in the blood that curbs our self-destructive trend, they could plan something bigger than normal.”

  He looked at me. “But what, exactly?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know what’s in this,” Lyman waved the half-empty bag at us. “But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”

  Lyman took a bag of blood up to Gregor that night, and still got back for school the next day.

  I felt happy that we had another day in class. Whatever lessons they had for us seemed better for my soul than another trip into the desert.

  When I met Lyman at lunch break, Elena sat in her usual close attendance, perky tits stuffed under Lyman’s nose. I mean, I’m not really surprised; after the trick with the disappearing body, she must’ve thought he was the second coming or something. It wasn’t until I’d gotten kinda pissy at her, and started to analyze exactly what she had that I hated so much, that I realized that I’d not had sex of any kind for weeks.

  Maybe months. I felt wound tight as a spring.

  I relaxed back into the soft seating best as I could and looked around. No one took my immediate fancy, so I determined to get out at night and see what Phoenix had to offer.

  As I trawled the cafeteria, I noticed a couple stand on the periphery, doing the same; a nondescript man, and a pretty good looking woman. Then the guy pointed in our direction, and they began to weave across the room towards us.

  Not to alarm Lyman, and make him look immediately guilty, I said nothing.

  “Elena Diaz?” the lady asked, stopping at our booth.

  They both looked up, and I swear I saw the blood drain physically from Lyman’s face. He tried to hide it, and he actually did it quite well, but I knew him. I knew better: he was spooked.

  “Yes?” Lyman’s Latino asked. “Who wants to know.”

  The man edged closer. “Missus Ballantine is the Dean here at PMU.”

  “Oh.” Elena looked a little nervous.

  “We’d like to see you in my office.” The Dean motioned with her index finger that Elena should stand.

  She pulled her folder from under Lyman’s and with a shrug of her shoulders, she left us alone in the café.

  “What was that all about?” I nudged Lyman’s arm.

  He turned and gave a nervous laugh. “That was Alan McCartney’s vampire mom.”

  The name flew to my lips. “Angela?”

  He nodded. “The very same.”

  I got a text right at the end of the lesson before lunch, but since Elena sat right next to me, I tried not to look at my phone. When we walked to the cafeteria, I glanced at the screen.

  Mark Brennan.

  So I sat with the results of the blood tests in my phone all through lunch, and when Alan’s mom appeared in front of me, I just about shit myself. Seems she had a habit of surprising me.

  “Elena Diaz?” Alan’s mom, or Sandy, as she’d called herself in the bar in Sedona.

  “Yes? Who wants to know.”

  A kinda burly guy next to Sandy/Alan’s mom pushed forward. “Missus Ballantine is the Dean here at PMU.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’d like to see you in my office.”

  As I watched the three of them walk away from the booth, I had to notice that Alan’s mom’s butt looked just as good as Elena’s.

  “What was that all about?” Mandy brought me back to reality.

  “That was Alan McCartney’s vampire mom.”

  “Angela?”

  Alan’s mom/Angela/Sandy/Missus Ballantine. “The very same.”

  “It can only be about Antonio, can’t it?”

  I nodded. “Probably.” Then I remembered about the text from Unicorps, and got my phone out quick.

  Initial test came back positive for a form of benzodiazepine. The depressant is in relatively high quantities. Best if our guys don’t imbibe till we find out more.

  I handed the phone to Mandy.

  As she read, I realized I’d kind of neglected her, probably in my conquest of Elena. Mandy’s skin looked almost grey in pallor.

  “You feeling okay?”

  She gave a grimace as she handed me the phone. “Yeah, I’m okay. I think I just need to jump somebody.”

  I gasped. “Well, go all ‘sister’ on me, why don’t you?”

  She laughed. “Well, it’s all right for some; you’ve got the Latino to take your frustration out on.”

  “She’s got a name.”

  “Yeah, and I’m sure you moan it just fine.”

  I gr
inned; glad to see some humor cross her face. “You could always jump me.” I wasn’t certain of where the words came from, but they were out of my mouth before I knew it.

  She gave me an over-the-spectacles look without having glasses, sighed, and shuffled her butt around the booth till our thighs mashed together. Her hand crept under the table, and she dragged her nails across my fly. Man did that get a reaction. I got solid in a couple of seconds flat, and sat all painful and jutting the wrong way in my pants.

  “Lyman, I could have you right now, sprawled across this table, with everyone looking on and cheering.”

  She started to rub my penis through my jeans with her fingertips. Oh boy. I gave a quick look around, but no one else had noticed.

  “I could take that hard rod in your trousers, and slip it right here.” She opened her mouth, sticking her finger right inside. Far inside. Then she tapped me. Right on the end, you know. Ouch, that hurt. “But I’ve told you before; I don’t eat vinegar-flavored burritos. Get your Latino bitch to do that for you.”

  She shuffled around the booth and took off before I could even think of a word to say. I sat for a while before he died down enough for me to even think of standing up.

  Elena returned to class within minutes of it starting. As she sat down, she shook her head at me. “Nothing,” she said in a hushed voice as she got her textbook out on the desk.

  Later, as we walked to the parking lot, she gave me more details.

  “Just vague questions about Antonio, you know, ‘have you seen him lately?’ that kind of thing. I don’t think it’ll go any further.”

  Back at the hotel, it seemed that Mandy had skipped our usual evening meeting, but Finch and Valérie looked at Brennan’s text message for a while longer than I thought they had to.

  “So we stop drinking their stocked blood,” Valérie said, after a quiet moment.

  “Seems that way,” Finch agreed.

  “Oh, and I’ve got news. It seems that all of the vampire high-ups might be here in Phoenix,” I said with some satisfaction.

  “All of them?”

  “Well, the headmaster from New River’s here acting as janitor, and Angela, Alan McCartney’s mom, is the Dean. Mandy and I bumped into her in the cafeteria. We crossed paths in Sedona and Harris last year. She’s pretty high up on the tree, higher than Alan was.”

  Finch stood up, obviously motivated by my news. “Maybe we should do an invisible sweep of the University, taking digital pictures of all the staff?”

  “That’s not a bad idea.” Valérie nodded.

  I had gotten to the stage that when the twins were organizing something, I just let them work away. They were good together.

  But a text from Howard Weeks interrupted their plans for the photo-pic drive by.

  Chemicals arriving tonight for placement in PMU blood bank. Quicker they’re installed, the better. A.S.A.P. Weeks.

  I passed the phone around. “Does that mean tonight?”

  We had only discussed it for an hour or so, when we heard a knock at the door.

  Unicorps packet. A great, big, hulking one.

  Inside were syringes and bags of ampules of a yellow fluid. Dozens of them. Each ampule was tagged “Accelerant”, but I coined the phrase ‘rage’ and stuck to it.

  I didn’t feel comfortable in dealing out more ‘rage’ with all those good folks still stuck in beds in Chicago, but I sure didn’t want to use politically correct terms to disguise what we were doing.

  We were dosing ‘rage’ out to vampires again; simple as that.

  Wonderful.

  Phoenix is mostly a nice city. Four million people live in the area, so it must have something going for it. The architecture’s a mix of old Spanish styles, and new modern shiny glass buildings. But there’s one place you wouldn’t want to be, and that’s in the wrong parts of Phoenix at night.

  When the sun goes down, the seedy types come out to play, and it felt the perfect playground for a vampire on the hunt for some nice clean blood. That and maybe a nice piece of man flesh to take my frustrations out on.

  I scoped out three bars before I spotted my mark. Clean-shaven, tall, muscular, he had the looks of a Brad Pitt in a way, but not as cleverly chiseled. Very hunky.

  I stood behind him at the busy bar, and ordered a drink almost over his shoulder.

  “You twenty-one?” the barman quizzed.

  “What do you think?” I flashed the phony Arizona driver’s license that Reynolds had made for me.

  Brad turned to take a peek, and his eyes told me what I wanted to know; he liked what he saw.

  Shooting fish in a barrel, just like dad used to say.

  Well, we went back to his place and I used him like a blow-up doll. Turns out I’d missed sex more than I thought. I milked his dick ‘til he couldn’t stand any more, then I gave him a nice whisper about forgetting me when he woke up. As he fell back on the messed-up bed, I dived on him, and carefully slid my teeth into his carotid artery. Man, just the fact that these phrases came into my head were signs that I really was learning the crap from class. As I pulled the juice from his body, I envisioned the whole cardiovascular system, and saw the diagram which showed the artery’s close proximity to the surface of his skin. I sucked gently, taking my time, drawing long and easy mouthfuls. When I felt sated, I left him sleeping. He’d probably not wake up until way into the next day, but I didn’t drain him.

  When I got back to the hotel, they’d all gone out, and that felt weird. I tried phoning them, but of course, their phones were turned off. Not that I could blame them, I mean, I’d turned mine off all night.

  Then I checked my texts.

  Out in campus. Check Weeks for more info if required.

  It looked a bit cryptic, but there looked to be no signs of a struggle or anything, so I just settled down with Tomas’s journal again. Man, could that man write.

  I found myself sliding into his words like the finest wine. With my night’s conquest still tasty in my mouth, it seemed easy to find the erotic in Tomas’s words.

  His concepts seemed more applicable to me in my heightened state, and my fingers soon found themselves sliding under my T-shirt, and touching my nipples.

  By the time I’d been reading for half an hour or so, I’d worked myself into a bit of a lather, so to speak.

  I decided to take a shower and cool off. I mean, I couldn’t be this worked up when Lyman came home; that would never do.

  Dozing the Blood Bank

  Inside the package from Unicorps lay a detailed floor plan of the entire University. In three places had been marked ‘Blood bank???’

  We quickly worked out a plan to take a look at all three.

  When Valérie and Finch were dressing for the outing, I tried Mandy’s phone again, for the umpteenth time. Still switched off. She’d been a bit pissy about me and Elena at lunch, and that touching my dick thing had been both exciting and very weird at the same time. I even stared to harden up again just thinking about it.

  Wow.

  Since Unicorps hadn’t been certain of the way the blood would be stored, we’d had lots of different instructions on dosing single packets and larger vessels. It seemed to be quite the complex mission.

  We set out, heading for the campus.

  “We’ll have phones switched off, Lyman, we can’t risk anything getting us into trouble. We’d be in the middle of a hornet’s nest.”

  I nodded, and switched mine off, too.

  Turns out my main part of the mission was to invite them inside. Crazy, dumb vampire rules.

  Valérie picked the lock at the first location, and on her word I walked inside, then turned. “Why don’t you come on in?” I must admit I felt kinda stupid, but it seems they saw the funny side, and gave me wry grins as they passed by. Using the plans, we soon found the possible blood bank, and yes, there were six big silver doors, unlocked, but the rooms beyond the doors proved to be empty.

  No sounds could be heard out in the dark campus, just the usual expected
shrill insect noises.

  The next location was an extension of a classroom complex. Same entry procedure, I asked them inside, they brushed past me, and I followed. There seemed to be more of an electrical ‘buzz’ around me, and I hoped we’d find something.

  We got down into the basement, and along a dimly-lit corridor. Maybe twenty of those same silver doors, but with one difference; these ones had large windows. While Valérie and Finch buzzed off looking for alarms and cameras, I crossed to the first one and flipped the switch on the side.

  “Blood Untreated,” I read from the label inside.

  There were rows and rows of it, hanging from white wire shelves.

  Valérie quickly covered more doors. “Some untreated, some marked ‘for consumption’.”

  “Looks like about half the units have been treated already,” Finch added.

  I grinned. “We could have some fun with this.”

  “How?” Finch asked. Valérie looked up, seemingly interested.

  “Well,” I began. “We swap the blood around, putting the ‘untreated’ blood into the ‘for consumption’ fridges, giving it a dose of the rage drug on the way. That takes care of half the blood. It’s got rage in it. But when the other stuff is processed, they’d be double dosing it with the depressant. Vampire zombies.”

  Valérie nodded firmly. “It also means that we only have to dose half the blood. There is a lot of it. We could be here all night anyway. Damn it, if Mandy had been here, it’d have been quicker.”

  “Well she’s not, so let’s get cracking.” I began to open the Unicorps bags.

  We soon had a system, but to be honest, if someone had walked in halfway through, they’d have encountered the whole floor covered in piles of blood bags.

  In each bag, we measured exactly 4 ml of rage, carefully inserted near the top of the bag. The needles were so thin, the holes sealed up again immediately. It sure took us most of the night, but by five o’clock, we’d finished.

  All tidied away, looking just as we’d found it.

  “One more location to try,” Valérie reminded us as we headed for the door.