by J. Thorn
The world outside the cave appeared solemn, depressed. The raging storm from the night before had dissipated—even the leaves had shed the remaining water, leaving no evidence of the rain. Samantha looked down at the path leading out of the cave and saw dry ground.
“This should be sloppy and muddy.”
She stopped and stood in the middle of the opening, now only two feet from the mouth. Samantha gazed into the forest, looking east where she expected to see smoke rising from her smoldering minivan. She saw none. Sam turned her head slowly, scanning the trees for any sign of her scramble the night before. She saw no broken saplings or trampled weeds, yet she knew she’d come through here in a wild hurry to get into the cave. The trees swayed back and forth as if taunting her memory.
Sam reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. She hit the power button and saw the “no signal” icon at the top of the screen.
“Deep breaths, girl. That minivan knocked you around pretty good. Yeah, the flesh healed, but you might still have some cobwebs upstairs. Let’s retrace our steps back to the minivan and then to the highway. Someone will drive by, eventually.”
The branches reached for her clothing and Sam had to brush them away as she picked through the saplings and undergrowth, heading in the direction she believed would lead to her minivan.
The sun rested several degrees off the horizon but well below the treeline, forcing its rays to weave through the branches. The light reached the forest floor in dull, ragged strips filled with floating dust. The temperature felt comfortable, most likely in the 60s and yet, Sam shivered twice as she walked. She concentrated on her enhanced vampire senses, listening and smelling and yet, she could detect no evidence of any living thing. No birds chirped, no bugs clicked. It was as if she was walking through a dead forest.
She stopped and moved the purse strap from her near shoulder and over her head to the opposite one in order to keep it from sliding off as she climbed over fallen trees and rocks. Several times, she placed a hand over the locket as if to convince herself it was still there without knowing why it mattered if it wasn’t.
An altar, a box and a locket in a cave?
Sam had been so preoccupied with the cave and her predicament that until this moment, she had not thought about the question. Why was there an altar in that cave and why did it have a locket in a box sitting on top of it? And what about the cave paintings and the strange glyphs around the cavern?
Sam began to turn these over in her head when she saw an unnatural break in the trees. A massive, green hump nestled itself between four trees. She approached, stepping over branches and rocks scattered about. She paused, looking back over her shoulder. Her vampire sense told her the cave was no more than a half mile west, even though the forest appeared to swallow it. While a normal person might panic at the thought of becoming lost and disoriented in an unknown forest, Sam was not normal. Her powers could guide her back exactly the way she came if she so desired, the same way they guided her directly to…
My minivan.
She leapt over a rotting tree trunk and grabbed a strand of dense ivy covering the hump. Sam pulled at it, the sticky leaves popping off one another and the object being strangled beneath. She used both hands, one over the other, as more and more ivy came off in layers. The smell hit Sam first. She winced at the visceral memory of burning plastic and melted rubber. Sam worked faster, tossing the strands of ivy over her shoulder. Some of it piled on the forest floor and some stuck to her hair, making her look like an insane hippie goddess.
“No, it can’t be,” she said.
Sam stared at the red rust eating away at the white paint on the license plate. Her license plate. On her minivan.
“What the hell is going on?”
Sam spun around, expecting Detective Braden to be standing there, laughing and slapping his khakis with a meaty hand. But she saw nothing but the trees painted in a twilight sun, swaying back and forth. She turned back to the minivan and tore more ivy away, revealing the rest of the mangled license plate still attached to the bumper by one bolt. Sam recognized the crumpled hood, although the smooth black paint was now replaced by a thick coating of orange rust. She stopped and reached for her purse before remembering her phone would not even power up. Sam stomped one foot into the ground and ran a hand through her hair.
Okay, Sam. Think.
She pulled another strand of ivy from the minivan until she saw the steering wheel that had slammed into her chest, probably what was less than five hours ago. And yet…
It looks like it’s been here for decades. The rust, the ivy…
Samantha decided not to waste any more time or energy uncovering her minivan. It would not change the situation. Something had happened, something weird.
“Am I in the future?” she asked the empty forest.
Samantha chuckled and sat down on a fallen tree. She sighed and wanted nothing more than a cigarette even though she didn’t smoke and even though the nicotine would have no effect on a vampire.
“Something in the cave,” she said before grabbing the locket and yanking it over her head. Samantha held it up in the dying sunlight, letting the feeble rays caress the golden edges. A brilliant light had shot from the center of the charm when she was in the cave, but now, it hung there like an ordinary medallion. She put it back on, not really knowing if it made any bit of difference.
Sam closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. She needed to focus, to clear her head of emotion and think rationally about the situation. By utilizing her experience as a private investigator and her sharp, amplified vampire powers, she would come to a logical conclusion.
I crashed the minivan. Went into the cave and found the locket while the shit was hitting the fan. I came out and found the minivan, but it’s covered in decades of ivy and rust.
“The cave or the locket. Or both. They’ve transported me to the future.”
Hearing her own voice speak the words made Sam feel a bit more at ease with the situation. She couldn’t know for sure, but what other explanation could there be? She was not a scientist. But even an eighth-grade dropout knew that rust wouldn’t form overnight. And while ivy could grow fast, the strands were as thick as bridge cables, which meant they spent many seasons crawling over the wreck.
Sam stood and decided the next step was to confirm her hypothesis. If she was in fact, in the future, she could verify that by getting back to the 57 and seeing what it looked like. She took comfort in the task, feeling a sense of power for the first time since the minivan had broken through the guardrail and tumbled down into the gulley. Sam took another look at her minivan before walking around it and climbing the embankment toward the road.
***
The locket bounced back and forth on Sam’s chest, just above her cleavage but not tight on her neck. She placed a hand on it every so often as she climbed the embankment. The minivan had crashed in the middle of the night in a raging storm so Sam didn’t expect to recognize the landscape, but her keen sense of direction enhanced by her vampire blood told her she was headed in the right direction. She saw no evidence of the crash, no broken trees, or branches or tire marks in the dirt. Time had washed it all away.
The daylight held steady, as if the twilight could not quite fade to night. The temperature remained steady as well and although Sam wanted to ponder why that might be the case, she had to focus on getting to the highway. She had to see what was there. Who was there.
She climbed on all fours as the angle of the embankment pitched upward toward where the road should be. Sam felt sweat running down her back and dirt covered the front of her jeans. She crawled higher, looking over one shoulder as the forest spread out behind her. She knew where the minivan lay, and the cave beyond that. Sam glanced skyward, seeing nothing. No birds, no insects. Since emerging from the cave, she’d heard no airplanes either.
Her hand struck a hard object and she immediately recognized the twisted remnants of the guardrail. Like her minivan on the forest floor,
ivy wound around the metal, choking it in an organic embrace. Samantha pulled herself up and over the edge until she stood on a hard, flat surface.
No, she thought. God, please, no.
A wide path cut through the trees populated by tall strands of weeds and grass. She took several steps forward before stopping and yanking a handful of weeds out of the earth. She looked down where the excised roots revealed black asphalt and the fading paint of a double-yellow line.
Sam collapsed in the weeds, sitting in the middle of what was once the 57 Freeway. She let the tears cascade down her face as she thought of her children, Anthony and Tammy. The questions ricocheted in her mind, swirling and searing with a burning pain. If this was the future, how long would it take for the weeds to cover the highway? Were Anthony and Tammy dead and buried? What year was it? What had happened to humanity?
Samantha swooned back and forth, fighting the vertigo that threatened to pull her under. She shook her head and mumbled, unsure of whether she should laugh or cry. The locket sat on her chest, mocking her with its hidden knowledge. She grabbed it and yanked it off her neck. Samantha cocked her arm back, ready to toss it into the forest when she heard something. At first, she thought the sounds originated inside her skull, the manifestation of her trauma. But as they became louder, she saw the first sign of life since she’d emerged from the cave. And she knew instantly what it was.
Vampires.
***
Sam sprinted down the remains of the highway and threw herself into a thicket as the first warrior flew by. She rolled onto her back and watched the black silhouette as it passed over her. Several more appeared on the horizon. The flying vampires shrieked, their battle cries reverberating across the empty, dead world.
She knew they would be able to see her but she also surmised they were not paying much attention to what was hiding in the weeds. They had another objective. She sat up, stood and then crouched behind a fallen tree as the vampires filled the sky like a murder of crows descending on a farmer’s field. They flew past her location and descended at a sharp angle into a clearing.
That used to be a movie theater , she thought. They’re probably landing in the parking lot.
The creatures gathered on the south end of the clearing near a hulking mass of debris on the western border, what remained of the Showtime 12 Cineplex. In the distance, another army of vampires met and scampered to organize on the north end of the clearing. Samantha had no idea who they were or why they were enemies, but she knew the two vampire factions were preparing for war.
Dozens more vampires flew over Sam and swooped down to the ground. They took battle positions while the army at the other end did the same. Samantha maneuvered through the brush, closing the gap between her hidden position and the movie theater parking lot, which was about to become a battlefield. She stopped about fifty yards from where the ticket windows used to be.
I used to take Anthony and Tammy here when they were little.
She could now see the remnants of the neon signage that used to border the exterior walls of the Cineplex. It lay in broken shards on top of a pile of brick, steel and rubble. Samantha could not tell if the movie theater had been blown up from the inside or destroyed by a bomb from above. Either way, what little recognizable elements remained were quickly being buried by wild trees and brush growing amongst the rubble. She glanced into the space that used to be the parking lot. Other than two fallen lamp posts, the natural world had reclaimed the blacktop as well. Low, thick grass coated the surface, matted down in paths where vampires had walked.
Samantha closed her eyes, trying to remember the other buildings and structures that used to be near the movie theater. She thought there had been a convenience store and gas station across the street and a post office a few hundred yards away, but she saw no evidence of any of them. It was as if the earth, devoid of humanity, had reclaimed what it had once owned.
Where are the humans?
Samantha’s brain struggled to process the massive amount of change in such a little amount of time. Her vampire sense detected other vampires. She knew what flew above her before she even saw them. Likewise, she could feel no human life force. Her vampirism, while immature and unrefined compared to those who had turned hundreds or thousands of years ago, worked at a base level. Since stepping from the cave, she had not sensed a live human. No people. No blood. No sustenance. She shook the conflicting thoughts from her head. The questions flooded in faster than she could process them.
If there aren’t people here, where are they?
Are they alive anywhere?
Where is Danny?
Where are my children?
How much time has passed?
What happened to our world?
The war cries grew louder, filling the sky with shrieks loud enough to crack glass. Only a few minutes earlier, she’d heard the first of those cries and now thousands of vampire warriors stood in the clearing, preparing for war.
Sam silenced her internal questions and kicked into survival mode. Yes, she would need to feed on human blood like every vampire before her had. And yes, she would find her children, or discover their fate, no matter what it took.
But for now, she had to survive. She’d fed the previous morning and although the blood craving would blossom inside of her, she could stave it off for another few hours. Right now, a vampire war was about to erupt and that was the most pressing concern.
Samantha darted between trees until she was close enough to the battlefield to smell the warriors. She inhaled, detecting the scent of sweat, tobacco and of course, dried blood. For the first time, Sam looked closely at the warriors.
Although they wore variations, she could tell they all fought on the same side. Each vampire bordering the south end of the battlefield wore a flowing black cape that concealed their wings. They all wore a polished black helmet with a single plume of black feathers on the top. The male vampires wore intricate chainmail connected to a leather belt while the female vamps each wore a steel bustier, leaving their white necks proudly exposed, as if daring another to attack them there. Each warrior held a long sword grasped by black-gloved hands, along with black leather pants and boots.
Samantha sighed, the sheer volume of black darkness surrounding the creatures being frightening and elegant at the same time. They chattered with each other as more landed, their red eyes flashing with laser precision. Their white teeth glistened when they opened their mouths to reveal their fangs, sharpened and shaped into symmetry. Samantha could hear words and phrases, all having to do with the strategy of the impending battle. She managed to tune into one vampire for ten seconds before the cacophony of voices drowned him out.
“Now is our time. The future belongs to the Vampire Independents.”
A few of them raised their fists to the sky and shouted, “V.I! V.I.!”
Samantha made a mental note before ducking behind some concrete rubble scattered behind the main remnants of the theater. She darted back and forth, from one pile of rubble to another, until she was close enough to the warriors on the north side of the clearing to get a visual on them. She heard one of them say, “Brothers of the Bloodline, ready yourselves.”
Unlike their vampire counterparts on the other end, these vampires, wore no stylish armor or weapons, choosing to appear in their natural, primal form. Scaly, black wings extended from their back, the cartilage twisted and sharp at the edges. The creatures had no hair, their skin taut and gray over gristly muscle. Their arms stretched longer than they should have with sharp talons at the end of each finger that glistened in the setting sun.
Each creature wore a tattered loincloth, which appeared to be leather, although Sam’s senses told her it was human skin. Like the vampires of the V.I. on the other side of the field, these vampires also had piercing red eyes. Dirty, yellow, fangs protruded out of their mouths and pulled their faces into constant snarls. Several of the Bloodline vampires wore black leather bands around their wrists and ankles, and again, Samantha
knew they were not made of cow rawhide.
Before Sam could catalog any more details, the vampire chatter ceased, leaving nothing but the sound of a slight wind pulling dead leaves through the clearing. She scurried as far back into a weedy thicket as she could while still seeing the battlefield. A V.I. vampire draped in black walked from the south side, and at the same time, a Bloodline Race vampire met him in the middle of the parking lot. They spoke, amplifying their dialogue so the thousands of vampires amassed for war could hear what their leaders had to say.
“Silven,” one said and greeted his enemy.
“Voldare,” the other said.
4
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Silven said.
“It does,” said Voldare.
Silven leaned back on his heels and sighed. He kept one hand on his sword and the other on his hip.
“Our scientists are close. They’re testing a new round of stem cells and they believe these will work.”
Voldare’s wings flapped and he scowled, shaking his head.
“So, you think you can just grow more humans as if they’re a crop to reap and sow?”
“We will. There will be no need for all of the messy complications involved with breeding them.”
“And when the pandemic returns,” said Voldare, “you’ll have a vaccine to protect them as well? You’re involved in a risky experiment and I cannot convince my counsel that the odds are with you.”
“That’s because you’re not with me.”
“True. I am not. The Bloodline has protected our food supply, with the exception of V.I. raids.”
Silven smiled before speaking.
“You’ve gone soft on the humans, Voldare. You’ve put their needs before your own.”
“We can keep the human survivors satisfied and at the same time, process their blood for our food supply. It can be done.”
