by J. Thorn
“Not for all of us,” Silven said. “Not for the Vampire Independents.”
“That’s because your aristocratic arrogance demands a lifestyle we cannot have. One we will never have again, thanks to the pandemic.”
Silven shrugged before continuing.
“We will put down the Bloodline-like dogs. I tire of this same conversation with you. The stem cells might even be able to improve, uh, your outward appearance?”
Voldare growled, trying to ignore Silven’s taunt.
“We choose this way,” Voldare said.
“Yes, yes, of course you did. My army is hungry. How many bald bats are you going to serve up to us today, my dear Voldare?”
“The Bloodline will bow to no creature, man or immortal.”
“Very well. Your yeoman brain cannot fathom opulence through cooperation. Our scientists will modify the stem cells. We will increase our food production. And then we will crush you and your band of ugly heathens. I have no need for your nostalgia, your desire to go back to the way things were. To hell with humanity and living in its shadows. This world may be ruined, but we’re stronger and more prosperous than we’ve ever been.”
Voldare straightened his back and opened his wings. “This is no way to live.” He turned on Silven and flew back to his army, who now stood shoulder to shoulder on the northern end of the parking lot.
Silven chuckled and shook his head, swinging around and striding back across the field.
Sam remained hidden, hearing every word of the exchange between the two vampires. She wanted to scream, to rush out of hiding and demand answers, but that would not have been wise. Whatever these vampires were, whatever they had become, she was nothing like them. They seemed to have evolved—or devolved—and the future of the creatures rested on the shoulders of their leaders.
As Voldare and Silven readied their armies, Samantha crawled back into a pile of rubble to conceal herself from the two warring vampire factions. Her arm brushed the remains of a red velvet theater chair and the simple artifact from another time brought a lump to her throat. Samantha cloaked her thoughts, doing her best to hide her presence from the other vampires.
I will return home to my children, she thought. I will not die here.
As if to stab her heart with doubt, the first shrieks of war rose from the battlefield as the two armies rushed at each other.
Sam blinked and rubbed her eyes. The scene unfolding before her looked like it came straight off the big screen. The army on the northern side of the battlefield moved first. These were the vampires calling themselves the Bloodline, the primitive, horrifying creatures led by Voldare. The front line leapt into the air, their translucent wings pushing them up while they shook their taloned hands at the enemy. Voldare stood in the middle of the line. He said something to a vampire on his right before he turned and charged back to the middle of the battlefield where moments earlier he had talked to Silven, the leader of the Vampire Independents. Some vampires flew while others bounded across the parking lot, their wings allowing them strides of fifteen feet or more.
At the other end, Silven and his V.I. warriors stood tall. Each vampire drew a sword in unison and Samantha heard battle commands issued from Silven and then verbally passed down the front line. The V.I. vampires held, unmoving. It appeared to Sam as if their strategy was to allow Voldare’s army to approach, to lull them into the battle.
And just how are they going to kill each other ? Sam thought.
She had never seen anything like this before. Sam had learned more about vampirism as time went on, but she was still a relatively new turn. She did not spend hours studying vampire history or culture. In fact, most of what Sam knew about vampires came from Hollywood. Light did not kill vampires. This, she’d discovered from her own experience. It burned and it hurt like hell, but it didn’t kill a vampire unless they were left in direct sunlight for days and that was more about exposure than anything else. She believed a stake through the heart would kill a vampire and some believed decapitation could have the same effect. When Sam saw the combatants engage, she surmised that beheading would be the goal in hand-to-hand combat because the V.I. wielded massive swords while the Bloodline used their talons in the same manner.
Voldare led the charge at Silven and the V.I. army, but a few of the faster vampires raced past him and engaged the battle first. Sam lost sight of Voldare in a flurry of steel, blood and black. The Bloodline who flew across the battlefield descended like screaming hawks. They dove at the enemy with talons ready to slice. The Bloodline who ran with Voldare arrived a second or two later, each one also with talons raised.
Silven’s army remained disciplined. No soldier broke ranks and each one remained in battle position as the Bloodline converged on them. Just as the first winged vampires fell on the front line, Silven screamed. He pushed a guttural call down the line and his vampires raised their swords in one motion.
Sam gasped as she watched. The V.I. force appeared as a single, black, menacing mouth, their swords raised like silver fangs. When the Bloodline vampires landed, a V.I. vamp pierced their chest with a sword, yanking it free and removing the head of their foe in a second, deadly swing.
Beheading. That’s how vampires make war.
Further east on the V.I. front line, Voldare’s soldiers landed, overpowering and killing the V.I. vamps. The Bloodline used their sheer strength, slicing through V.I. armor and decapitating their enemy with sharpened talons.
Samantha winced, catching quick scenes of violence that stuck in her head. She estimated there to be at least a thousand soldiers on each side and every vampire was now fully engaged, a battle to the death in the realm of the undead.
Several times, she tried to relocate Silven and Voldare, trying to find them in the midst of the chaos. But the violence spread fast and the battle kicked up dust, now obscuring the parking lot. The daylight seemed to cling to an eternal twilight diffused by red clouds speeding across the sky.
As horrified as Sam had been when the fight had begun, she became desensitized to the violence after watching for just a few minutes.
I wonder if this kind of indifference happens to humans, too, she thought. It would explain a lot about their thirst for war.
The battle continued and Sam noticed an increasing number of slain vampires now motionless on the battlefield. The way Silven and Voldare spoke to each other led Sam to believe this was a battle, not a war. They had had that conversation before, either on this same battlefield or on another. This was a fight of attrition, neither side looking to exterminate the other, but rather, weaken them.
She noticed several of the V.I. warriors retreating to the edge of the parking lot where it emptied on to what was once the 57 Freeway. At the other end, the Bloodline vampires gathered in a clump near another pile of rubble. They flew across the battlefield and landed like injured birds. Samantha reasoned that even these vampires tired and that this skirmish would be ending soon. That thought triggered another.
Then what? Where do I go? Will they find me?
Sam felt her throat tighten and she struggled to take a deep breath. She clutched her purse out of habit and then laughed at herself. She opened it, rummaging through a checkbook, a tube of lipstick, a pack of tissues and her phone.
This is all worthless now, she thought before tossing the purse beneath the theater chair. I can always come back and get my lipstick if I get a hot date with Voldare.
The thought of that encounter made her shiver.
Sam got on her hands and knees and crawled out from her hiding spot. She glanced at the parking lot and saw the last of the combatants retreating to their respective sides, the skirmish coming to an end.
She hesitated, looking back and forth between the two armies. Silven and the V.I. could be called elegant warriors. They wore uniforms and moved with grace and agility. And yet, there was something about Silven’s conversation with Voldare that raised her hackles. Something felt off. Whether it was woman’s intuition or her heighten
ed vampire senses, Sam made a split-second decision to avoid the V.I. She would circle back around the remnants of the movie theater until she got back to her minivan. There, she could hide and decide what, if anything, she could do next. While she didn’t trust Silven, she didn’t want to interact with Voldare either. For now, Sam decided to hide and think through her options.
The remains of the back parking lot bordered the edge of the 57. The collapsed movie theater sat between the battlefield parking lot out front and the alternate lot around back. As long as Voldare’s vampires didn’t take to the air, Sam didn’t think she’d be spotted moving across the back parking lot as the movie theater would prevent the armies from seeing her. Sam considered flying, but she didn’t feel confident enough yet to expose herself to them and be able to outfly them. Compared to these vampires, she had only a bit of experience with her vampire wings and flying would make her more noticeable.
She sprinted from the rubble that hid her during the battle, running for another hump that sat in the middle of the back parking lot. Sam saw the tireless rims and dangling side mirror sticking out of the weeds and recognized it as a car, the only one in the lot. She dove behind it and then crawled to the far side, keeping the car and the movie theater between her and the battlefield. She looked up into an open door, the passenger side of the vehicle. A skeleton sat upright in the rotting seat, its skull leaning back on the headrest. Sam swallowed hard and her mind raced, despite a feeling of vulnerability that rose like bile in her throat. She wanted to explore the car, the skeleton. Sam had a quest for knowledge about this place, her future, her children’s future.
Pandemic? Didn’t they talk about that?
Her vampire senses flared and she realized she could not indulge her intellect. She had to get out of the shopping center, away from the parking lot and back into the safety of her minivan. Based on how it looked when she discovered it, nobody had touched the thing since the night she had tumbled down into the gulley.
Twenty years ago? Thirty? Fifty?
Stop it, Sam. There’ll be time to figure things out later. Get going.
With one last glance at the skeleton frozen in a silent scream, Sam crouched around to the back of the car. She looked at the hulking mass of the movie theater, hearing an occasional shriek coming from the other side. Sam thought it was the Bloodline, although she also knew that deep down, every vampire looked like them at the core. Silven and the V.I. may have chosen to hide their appearance out of vanity, but the truth was that each vampire was a primal beast at the core. Even her.
Sam leapt up and sprinted for the edge of the back parking lot. She couldn’t run in a straight line because trees and wild bushes sprouted up through the cracked asphalt, forcing her to run around them. The total distance was no more than fifty feet and yet, Sam felt as though she was running in slow motion. She pumped her arms and leapt over debris, all the while expecting to be spotted by Voldare’s vampires swooping down on her with their razor-sharp talons. She pushed harder, dodging a tree. She was now only twenty feet from the guardrail that separated the parking lot from the old highway. A leap over that one, a dash across the two lanes and another leap over the guardrail on the other side and she would be out of sight.
Fifteen feet.
Ten feet.
Sam saw the ivy choking the guardrail, now brown with heavy rust. A smile broke on her face when she thought about looking both ways before crossing.
Hit and runs are probably way down after the apocalypse , she thought.
Five feet.
Sam planted her right foot and lunged upward with her left leg with enough momentum to clear the guardrail, land, and then leap again across the other. In a matter of seconds, she’d be down the embankment and hidden beneath the canopy of trees. She went airborne, fully expecting gravity to pull her back down, except that didn’t happen.
At the same time, Samantha felt a pressure on her shoulders—she looked at her shoes moving away from the roadway instead of landing on it. She heard a flapping sound along with a low growl. The ground shot away from her and she was spun around, now flying over the desecrated movie theater and toward the northern end of the battlefield where Voldare’s army gathered after the fight.
“You so much as blink and I’ll take your head off.”
Sam stiffened. She tried to speak but could not get the words out. The Bloodline vampire who had seized her spoke again before she could.
“Voldare will know what to do with you.”
5
The Bloodline vampire flew with her over the movie theater, past the soldiers tending to their wounds and out over the state park. From two hundred feet in the air, the road cut through the low, rolling hills on the distant horizon. The sun rested a few degrees above the treeline, giving the woods a golden tint. The highway looked more like a precise footpath, the edges sharp but the surface covered in grasses instead of painted asphalt. Sam shivered from the altitude and the wind tearing through her thin jeans.
The vampire had said nothing since his first threat and Sam had no desire to restart the conversation. He was delivering her, presumably to Voldare, and she would not help the situation by pissing off her ride.
“Pull your legs up to your chest. It will prevent them from snapping off when I land.”
Samantha did as the vampire instructed. The creature swung around in a semi-circle before plunging downward toward the canopy. Sam closed her eyes as the tops of trees brushed inches from her feet, so close she could smell the sap oozing from the pines. The vampire clicked his tongue and Samantha opened her eyes. The creature reared back, slowing their descent over the camp.
Several fires burned, smoke spiraling upward into the dusk. The vampires walked through the camp, some limping and others helping them along as they healed. As they descended, Samantha saw a structure in the distance, set back from the other fires in the clearing. She tried remembering where they were along the 57 Freeway, but it all looked the same now, with trees and weeds crawling over what was left of civilization.
The vampire hit the ground with a thud and Samantha’s butt smacked off the hard earth. She now understood why the creature had told her to pull up her legs. He skidded to a stop five feet from the door of a single-story shop and released her from his grip. Samantha rolled to a stop in the dirt and looked up at the door in front of her.
“CD Palace & Music Emporium,” she said.
The vampire who delivered her to Voldare’s headquarters huffed and launched himself back into the darkening sky without another word.
Sam stood and brushed the dirt off her jeans. The metal frame door had once held glass but was now skinned with weathered plywood. The sign remained above the door although the paint faded into obscurity with only “Pal” and “ium” visible, Samantha’s memory filling in the gaps to determine the name of the store from her time. Two guards stood at the door, one on each side. Another vampire came around the side of the building and grabbed her by the left elbow.
“Let’s go,” he said to Sam.
She followed her escort as he motioned for the guards to open the door. He pulled her through into a cramped, dark room. Sam’s eyes adjusted and her vampire sight intensified so she could see the room as if it stood bathed in bright sunlight. A desk sat in one corner with soda cans piled on top of it. They appeared to be unopened but the labels had long since worn off.
What I wouldn’t give for a Coke right now.
And then, she remembered that she could no longer stomach human food, except for blood spooned from rare steaks.
Cardboard boxes filled the rest of the room, stacked to the ceiling and leaving a narrow aisle to a hallway in the back. Sam had been in the CD Palace & Music Emporium before this, as a teenager, long before she’d turned. Other than the sign and the physical building, the place bore little resemblance to that shop of her youth.
The vampire pushed her forward into the aisle, angling her arm toward the hallway. She walked through it, passing a door on each side bef
ore going down a flight of steps at the end. Sam’s instincts reared up and she knew what to expect when being led down into a subterranean room. And it wasn’t good.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“Shut up,” the vampire said. “Keep moving.”
Sam walked down the stairs, turned on a landing and continued down the rest. She stopped at the bottom, standing on a hard concrete floor. She saw a cell, the bars made out of old two by fours. Shackles hung on the wall with chains dangling down like evil serpents.
“In there,” the vampire said.
Sam hesitated until the vampire struck her in the back, knocking the wind from her lungs and pushing her forward against her will. He slammed the wooden door shut and locked it with a rusty padlock. She turned and shook the wooden bars, which did not move no matter how hard she yanked on them.
“Where am I?”
The vampire looked at her for a moment before turning and going back up the steps, leaving Sam imprisoned and alone.
Samantha didn’t care if they saw her crying. She wiped tears away with her forearm, smearing them across her face in cold defiance.
Hours ago, she’d been helping Detective Braden identify a murdering street thug, and had been on her way back to the hotel. And now, she was sitting in a cell in some godforsaken place, in some godforsaken time.
Samantha sat on the floor, not bothering to further test the bars of the cell. If they’d put her here, they knew it was secure. And even if she did escape, where would she go? Sam intended to get back to her minivan, but then what?
She took a deep breath and decided to regain her focus by climbing out of her emotional pit and implementing her refined detective skills.
“Just the facts,” she said between a sniffle and chuckle.
I’ve somehow been transported into the future. At least twenty years ahead, probably more. I came out of a cave and landed right in the middle of some bullshit vampire war. There’s a dispute on how to manage the dwindling food source of human blood because most people died in a global pandemic.
