All Rotting Meat

by Maleham , Eve

  ‘We can talk about this later,’ Clarence said, tugging her forward.

  ‘That’s a yes, then,’ she said.

  ‘We can talk about it when you’re out of immediate danger,’ Clarence said. ‘Now, come on, Khalida.’

  Khalida pulled away from him. They stared at each other for a moment. Khalida shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Even if it was possible to outrun Clarence, she knew that she couldn’t get far; a dull heavy ache, sharp at her hands and lungs, echoed through her body. She needed to know that Cain was okay.

  Clarence’s body stiffened, his eyes alert and searching for something.

  ‘We need to go,’ he said, ‘right now.’

  ‘Clarence?’ she asked, as he turned back towards her and picked her up, easily carrying her in his arms. ‘Hey!’

  She tried to push against his chest, crying out as her damaged shoulder and neck muscles strained against him, but his gentle hold on her was like iron.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ he said, ‘and you cannot run. Just swallow your feminist pride for a moment, and let me save you.’

  She heard the roar of a car engine tear through the quiet air.

  ‘Fuck you, Clarence.’

  Clarence gave a grim smile and steadied his hold on her before breaking into a run. She had only just enough time to realise that he was heading for the wall of the car park and, hating herself, she instinctively flung her arms around him as he leapt. Her handbag dropped to the floor, as a sharp jab of pain raced through her broken fingers and her grip loosened. Air whistled around her as he landed on the road with a jolt, and set off at a run. Her heart hammered as the streets flew by them.

  Clarence came to a halt in front of a familiar, black Bentley, which she used to tease him about, and placed her lightly on the ground, offering his arm, which she was forced to hold as her legs buckled. She glared up at him, trying to infuse as much defiance and fury as she could muster into her stare, but he only smiled.

  ‘Best not to dawdle,’ he said, opening the door for her. ‘They are right behind us.’

  She gave him another hateful glare, then stiffly climbed into the seat, gritting her teeth as her pulled muscles ached in protest. The inside of the car was immaculate and smelled new, as if it had just been rolled off the production line, but she knew that that was just because Clarence routinely had it deep-cleaned.

  ‘Am I still, as you so lovingly put it, ‘an arsehole,’ for owning such a car, then?’ Clarence asked as he sat in drivers’ seat, his eyes glancing up at the rear-view mirror as he switched the ignition on.

  ‘Couldn’t you drive in a less conspicuous car?’ Khalida asked.

  ‘There wasn’t any time,’ Clarence said, as the engine started. ‘This isn’t ideal for me, either, Khalida.’

  His eyes darted up to the rear-view mirror again. Khalida saw from the side-mirror a dark figure running towards them.

  ‘Christ,’ Clarence muttered, putting his foot down on the petal, ‘hold on.’

  Two more figures appeared behind the first one as the car shot down the streets. Khalida was thrown back against the seat. The vampires behind them were fast, already closing in further on the car; Khalida watched them as the car thundered around a corner. A few seconds later, they skidded down the street after them, their bodies leaning against the tarmac. She looked at Clarence, whose face was pale in focus. Streets passed in a blur around them.

  ‘Don’t you have any weapons?’ Khalida asked.

  ‘Just let me get the anti-tank missile from the boot,’ Clarence said, his knuckles tight over the steering wheel, as the speedometer rose up, now pushing seventy.

  ‘They’re going to catch up!’

  ‘I’m very aware, Khalida!’ he snapped back, as the car mounted the pavement to clip another corner. The car veered into a sharp turn; Khalida was thrown against the door as the engine roared.

  ‘Thank god for the bus strike,’ she said, as they shot down a completely deserted road, all empty but for a taxi.

  ‘Who knew that unions could be good for something?’ Clarence muttered, glancing back in the rear-view mirror as the car veered round onto Euston Road. If there was anything blocking the road ahead of them, then they would die.

  Clarence slammed his foot down on the accelerator. Khalida gritted her teeth as she was thrown back in her seat, her heart in her mouth as the speedometer rose to a hundred. There was the blare of horns around them, as Clarence weaved the Bentley between taxis, cars and vans. The vampires behind them darted around the traffic, barely losing any of their momentum, but the distance between them grew. There was the flash of a speed camera as Baker Street flew past them.

  As they pulled up onto the Westway carriageway, the vampires finally vanished from sight. Khalida exhaled and leaned back in her seat, her palms sweating, and looked out at the tops of houses and trees from the elevated road. The car maintained its speed, effortlessly soaring down the nearly empty tarmac.

  She looked to Clarence, who hadn’t dropped his focus, his eyes staring out onto the road ahead of them, periodically glancing back at the mirrors behind them as he drove out of London. There was blood on the cuffs of his jacket. The only sound was of the engine. The buildings began to lapse around them as the city fell away. As they passed the M25, Clarence sighed and loosened his grip on the steering wheel.

  ‘Whose blood is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Someone from Rebirth,’ Clarence said. ‘I needed to get to you in a hurry but didn’t know your location, and Faizan wasn’t very forthcoming with that information.’

  ‘So you tortured him?!’

  ‘No, but I did have to get physical,’ Clarence said. ‘He’s a strong man. A bruised ego more than anything else; it’s nothing he can’t recover from. And,’ he continued, seeing her look of indignation, ‘you would be dead if I had not have done so.’

  ‘I can’t believe you,’ she said.

  Clarence shrugged. ‘Given the chance, you would easily kill him. There’s little difference.’

  ‘Where are we going, Clarence?’ she asked.

  ‘Changing the subject?’

  ‘I’m too tired for a debate – just tell me where you’re taking me.’

  ‘Somewhere safe,’ he said, ‘and away from everyone else.’

  ‘So, is Cain in danger, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Clarence said, ‘but he brought it on himself. You look a little faint. There’s a bottle of water down there. Drink it.’

  Khalida fished around for the water. ‘And did you call him, or anything? If he’s in danger, he’s got to know.’

  ‘It’s probably too late for him now, anyway,’ Clarence said. ‘I don’t see why you are so keen to keep him safe. He’s my brother, and I’ve known him for a very long time now, so please trust me when I say that he is a bastard. I am honestly surprised that Cain lasted so long without raising suspicions that something was wrong with him,’ he said, ‘though there are many more supplements around these days. How much coconut water does he drink?’ he asked. ‘And let me guess, he hates the taste of garlic, and has super sensitive skin?’

  Khalida licked her lips. ‘Then…when was he born?’

  ‘He was born in eighteen-ninety-five,’ Clarence said, ‘six years after Cecilia and I were born. We were adopted by his parents as new-born babies. Our adoptive mother was thought to be barren, so my father quietly has us adopted as soon as Cecilia and I were born from our true mother. The Old Hunters…you know what they were, right?’ he asked, glancing to Khalida. She nodded. ‘Good. The Old Hunters had thought it too cruel that a pregnant woman should be executed. They had, of course, gone soft then by,’ he explained. ‘In the old days, they would have killed her, and my sister and I as babies. They knew that she was a vampire, but apparently thought that we would be born as humans, so they postponed her execution until she gave birth. Father didn’t believe in any of it,’ he said. ‘He seemingly thought that the Blood Coup…and you know what that is, too?’ he asked, again K
halida nodded. ‘He thought it was organised by human traitors against the crown. He knew his place, and didn’t ask questions. He just wanted a family and passed Cecilia and I off as his own, but then, by some miracle, Cain was born six years later. He nearly killed mother; she was very weak, and confined to bed rest for months after his birth, and he was an awfully weak child. No-one thought that he would live for very long at all.’

  ‘Clarence,’ she said, ‘what about Cain? And my friends and family? Are they safe?’

  Clarence sighed. ‘I only had time to get to you, Khalida, and you saw how close that was. Rebirth are monitoring the phone lines, too, so we can’t call. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So, you’re just going to let Rebirth kill them?!’

  ‘If they’re smart, then they’ll be gone already,’ Clarence said, ‘and your cousin and her wife will be fine; they weren’t involved, and to have you all disappear will be far too suspicious.’

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered, struggling to unscrew the water bottle with her twisted fingers, before the lid came off and she took a long drink. The road stretched out in front of them, and she pushed down a burning lump in the back of her throat.

  ‘So,’ she said after a while, ‘Cain wasn’t born a vampire, then?’

  Clarence shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he was born human, to human parents. I know that father always preferred Cecilia and I over Cain,’ he said, smiling at the memory. ‘I was sent away to school at the age of ten. There was no crying or whining from me, unlike some of the other boys. Meanwhile, Cain was too sick to go and sobbed at the very prospect, so he was tutored at home alongside Cecilia. Mother doted on him too much,’ he said, his voice turning bitter slightly. ‘He honestly ought to have been born a girl. We used to tease him that Cecilia was stronger than he was; she could certainly deal with the unpleasantries of life far better than he ever could. She went on to nurse in Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Service, where there were plenty of sick and dying men for her to feed on. By then, of course, we knew what we were; an ally of the Blood Coup had tracked us down and explained everything to us. Vampire children are much more similar to human children than we are as adults, but we always knew that we were different, that we were better. We continued to live as humans though, not knowing any different, and we had good lives. I married and started a family.

  ‘Then, the Great War broke out,’ he said, ‘and I was particularly excited, and enlisted straight away. Meanwhile, Cain had miraculously survived to adulthood. He was still weak, though. He had married some ridiculous Suffragist woman who made him a vegetarian, and of course, he objected to the war. He said that he was a conscientious objector, though the truth was that he was just too cowardly to do his duty to his country.

  ‘In the end, he was still made to go to war, but as a stretcher-carrier, and we ended up on the same front together with Cecilia working in the field hospital. Apparently, none of the other cowards could stand him much,’ he smirked. ‘I was told that he was constantly crying. However, the war was a little more dangerous than I had assumed it would be,’ he said, ‘out in the daylight. I asked to be switched to night watch, and there was so much shrapnel; some men were killed by wooden splinters, which would kill me just the same. I ended up being hit directly by a shell during the Battle of the Somme. It killed everyone next to me but only knocked me out. I was taken to the hospital where Cain was dying; he had been hit by shrapnel while trying to carry back the rest of the wounded. He had been hit in the stomach,’ Clarence said, his brow furrowed. ‘That’s a slow death. Nothing could be done to save him, nothing could be done to comfort him. So, I bit him,’ he said.

  ‘I had never seen someone be transformed into a vampire before, so I wasn’t sure of what to expect. What happened was that, for a few days, I was overcome with a tremendous sense to care for him. I could barely leave his side, and the pain he was going through caused me great emotional distress. In the end, Cecilia and I left in the night, and I carried Cain with us several miles back until we came across a cottage. We killed the family inside for food, and fed them to Cain while he turned. A lot of people were killed that night we left; the hospital was partly hit by a stray shell, and we were then missing, assumed dead.

  ‘And I must say, vampirism was really an improvement for him. He wasn’t nearly as whiny and weak-minded, though he did get very panicked at the notion of eating humans and drinking their blood. He even tried to abstain from it and ate only animals, but he kept almost succumbing to black eye.

  ‘We knew that there was no turning back now, and to be quite honest it was a relief; Cecilia and I were wondering what to do with our lives. Being raised as humans, we were instilled with a sense of finality. We were now free from that, so we travelled. The war made it difficult, but as soon as we could get passage we left for Egypt, and then onwards through the colonies. My only passing regret is that we couldn’t return to take our father with us; he would have made an excellent vampire.’

  ‘Was Cain upset about leaving his wife?’ Khalida asked.

  ‘Of course, he was,’ Clarence said. ‘He kept trying to go back to her, or trying to write to her. It would have been a disaster if he had gone back to England, though – this was when he would purposefully starve himself, only to snap later on and feed on whichever human happened to be around. Cain would have probably killed her himself.

  ‘In the end, Cecilia and I forged an obituary for her, saying that she had died of the Spanish Flu, just to stop him from going back. To be honest, I’m not sure why he was so insistent about it. I had a wife and daughter who were left behind too, and his wife was demanding that she, too, could bring in a wage, so, by her own ideology, she ought to have been fine by herself.’

  ‘You left your own wife and child behind?’ Khalida asked, glaring at him.

  Clarence sighed. ‘You make me sound so heartless. It was the best option; they were left with all of my assets, a house, plenty of money to keep them well, family close to hand, plus my war pension. I would have had to leave them at some point, since by then I had stopped ageing, and being a war widow left Helena with some dignity in the matter. There would have never been a more ideal time to leave. We can only pretend to be human for so long, and my time was running out. But I did love them, Khalida, and I do miss them.’

  ‘That was cruel,’ she said, ‘what you did to Cain.’

  ‘Which part?’ Clarence scoffed. ‘Saving him from dying, or saving him from accidentally murdering his own wife?’

  ‘All of it,’ she said.

  ‘So, you would rather die as a human than live as a vampire?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You’re acting as if I’m some callous monster, and Cain is a saint,’ Clarence said, ‘but it was never that simple. If you knew what happened in Malaysia, then – ’

  ‘What happened in Malaysia?!’ Khalida asked, the words pouring heavily out of her mouth as her heart stopped beating. Clarence looked at her and took a deep breath.

  ‘Firstly, he didn’t kill your family,’ Clarence said, ‘and nor did I. I had been sent there to forge diplomatic links between Rebirth and another organisation called the Blood Thieves, though instead of actually doing any diplomacy, we ended up being tasked with guarding the leader of the Blood Thieves’ younger, simple minded brother. Cain accompanied me on the journey. I secretly befriended your sister, Akmar,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t much else to occupy myself with, and she was one of the more interesting people around. She was a very intelligent girl, and we could hold a conversation.

  ‘Then, the brother was killed, thanks to your father, when the brother had wandered away and tried to hunt by himself. Your father blinded him, and he couldn’t find his way back, so he was then burned to death as the sun rose. Rebirth had to step in to ensure that I wasn’t executed, and I was sent back to England while the situation calmed down. Nearly a year later, I was asked to return to Sabah with Cain. I assumed that our negotiations were to continue, and I wa
s anxious to see if your sister and your family were okay, and you all were. I went back to visit your sister every chance I got.

  ‘It was only coming up to the anniversary of the brother’s death when I began to feel anxious. It was Cecilia who learnt that Tycho Feigrey, the co-commander of Rebirth, had arranged with the leader of the Blood Thieves that Cain was to be killed, a brother for a brother, and that you and your family were also going to be killed. I tried to go back to your house to save your family, and I needed Cain’s help, but, once again, as soon as he was able to he fled to save himself and, in the end, I was only able to save you and your sister. He left you to die, Khalida,’ he said. ‘And even when you told him what had happened, and he realised who you were, he kept on lying to you. I was going to tell you the truth, but we never dated for very long, and an appropriate time to tell you never came up. It wasn’t just telling you that I was involved in the deaths of your family, but that vampires existed as well; that’s not a topic of discussion that can be rushed into.’

  ‘How do I know that you’re not lying?’ she asked. Her voice struggled to find an even pitch, and it felt as if her lungs were suddenly encased in ice.

  ‘You don’t,’ Clarence said, ‘but it sounds right, doesn’t it?’

  As the car pulled off the motorway, the roads winding down until they were driving through isolated country lanes, a dull tiredness settled onto her. There were boundless questions to be asked, but she had heard all she could for now. She settled back into the car. The throbbing pain of her fingers and torso had subsided, along with the familiar ache in her legs and feet after hours of standing for work. The road ahead kept slipping out of focus. The thought of Cain sitting in a dark, French cottage, desperately eating human flesh, swam into her mind. She shut her eyes to rest, and then, nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It’s A Bone Structure Problem

  The rumble of the car roused her. In her half-asleep state, she wondered why she was in a car, thinking that perhaps Cain had picked her up from work. With a flash of clarity, she woke with a start and turned to Clarence, who had put on sunglasses.