Eyes of Ice

by J. C. Andrijeski

  That faint wariness remained in his eyes.

  “Something on your mind, brother?” he said politely, as Nick set down his third empty glass. “You seem to want to ask something.”

  Nick nodded, watching him grab yet another clean cup.

  “I do,” he admitted. “I heard something tonight, brother… from human cops. Cops I know. Who are friendly, at least to me. When I told them I was down here, they said to be careful. They told me to watch my back.”

  The vampire bartender glanced sideways at him.

  Studying Nick’s eyes and face, he frowned, handing over another full glass.

  “Did they say why?” he said.

  “They did,” Nick said, blunt. “Dead vampires.”

  He saw the bartender flinch.

  “––A whole lot of them, apparently,” Nick added. “Drained of blood and venom. Hearts ripped out by alligators. Bodies left outside the dome shield to rot.” He paused, noting the pinched look that came to the other’s eyes and mouth. “You hear anything about that, brother? I’ve been on leave for a while from my department, so it was news to me.”

  The bartender hesitated.

  Nick took a sip of his fresh glass of blood. He was savoring it now, hovering at the edge of full. His eyes never left the bartender’s face.

  The bartender stared back at him.

  Nick definitely got the feeling the other male was weighing him openly now. He also got the feeling his instincts had been right; the vamps in here definitely knew something.

  “You wouldn’t want to put our brothers and sisters in danger, would you, friend?” Nick said. “You wouldn’t stay silent about something like that, would you?”

  The bartender moved so fast, Nick barely saw it, even with his vampire eyes.

  White fingers clutched his wrist. Cool lips brushed his ear, a low voice speaking in a murmur––a murmur so low, even nearby vampires wouldn’t hear.

  “Don’t ask about that in here,” he murmured. “My beautiful brother… shut the fuck up. Speak to no one of this in here. You are playing with fire.”

  Before Nick could blink, the bartender released him.

  The tall, blond vamp leaned back to his side of the bar.

  Nick continued to stare at him, bewildered, as the other’s irises bloomed with a scarlet flower in the center, his fangs extending so that they slightly pushed out his narrow lips. Noting the warning––no, the threatening look in the other’s eyes––it took Nick a second more to realize it wasn’t anger he was seeing.

  It was fear.

  Nick was still sitting there, frowning, trying to make sense of what he saw, trying to decide what to say back, what he could say to get the other to talk to him––

  When rough hands grabbed him from behind.

  Nick didn’t think.

  He was on his feet in a millisecond. He fought to turn, even as his mind clicked on, cataloguing his attackers in rote.

  His mind tracked four of them. Human.

  Big.

  Really big.

  The size of tanks. The size of Farlucci’s people by the gate earlier. He writhed in their hands and arms, in the chokehold one of them had him in, snarling––

  A syringe jabbed into his neck.

  Thick fingers pressed down the stopper, expelling the entire cylinder directly into his vein before Nick managed to whip his head around.

  For the second time that night––

  Everything went abruptly black.

  Chapter 12

  Cold

  Michael frowned, staring around the back of the garage outside the warehouse.

  He felt it, even before he saw it.

  Even before he made sense of what he saw, what was wrong.

  He was still outside the chain-link fence.

  His mind tracked the motion then, even as he blinked at the bright light. He watched the bare light bulb swing back and forth, creating disorienting shadows against walls stained with rust and long lines of mud and mold.

  He’d seen it swing before, when the door opened or closed to the room at the other end of the docking bay. He’d never seen it swing at that exact arc––or for that long.

  He stood on a dirt lot on the outskirts of Brooklyn, not far where the swamp seeped under the edges of the dome.

  Michael had heard alligators, real ones, out here.

  He looked up the noise on the network to confirm what he heard; during the day, he’d seen their heads poking up like bits of wood, half-submerged in red reeds that choked the deeper pools of water. He knew they’d been recorded walking down the streets here, at the very edges of the dome, near what used to be JFK International Airport.

  The water was fresher there, apparently, or at least half-and-half.

  Where they came from, Michael didn’t know.

  They may have been someone’s pets once; or maybe they escaped from one of the zoos during the wars. That, or the alligators had simply adapted so that they could swim all the way up to New York from where they used to live in the southern states.

  Either way, it was wet here.

  Everything smelled like it was decomposing.

  They’d opted to use this part of the city after the bodies hit the police network. Once the cops knew about the harvested vamps found outside the dome walls of Manhattan, they switched to the swamps, and the Brooklyn side of the dome.

  No one came out here.

  Most criminals didn’t even come out here.

  The swamps swallowed everything.

  The swamps were wild, not part of the human world at all.

  Now, Michael felt like he had eyes on him, animal-eyes. He felt like he’d been found by something that lived out here––something higher on the food chain than himself, perhaps.

  Had an alligator wandered into the garage?

  Or was it something that looked a lot more like him?

  Michael glanced carefully around the orange-lit garage. As he stood there, he felt a shiver of misgiving so intense, he froze in place, like a rabbit shocked by headlights into standing unnaturally still.

  He stood there, prey-like.

  He stood there, ready to bolt like a deer… and waited.

  He’d left the docking garage about forty minutes earlier, leaving his comrades to hold down the operation long enough for him to pick up a coffee-soda mix shake, a protein-paste sandwich, and some bean-cake cookies.

  He’d been working for over seven hours at that point, without a break. He’d needed the jolt of energy, despite their tight timeline. He also knew if he leaned too heavily on sugar, he’d end up more tired than if he ate nothing at all.

  These days, he got tired more easily.

  A tenser vibration rose to his mind at the thought.

  You work too much… a voice murmured, soft. You work too much, brother.

  The voice was faint. It was fainter now, with distance, with time––but he still heard it. He heard it, and the words calmed him.

  The faint agitation in the back of his mind dimmed.

  That was it. That was all it was. Michael worked too much.

  He was tired because he worked too much.

  Exhaling, he focused back on the warehouse, back on the work he had to do tonight.

  They still had six more of the walking corpses to do after they finished with the cop. He had to power through a few more hours of harvesting, then aid in the disposal of the bodies. But he could do that. He would make it until dawn.

  Then he could sleep most of tomorrow.

  Before going in search of ways to boost his energy for the remaining time, he’d waited until the three of them––Michael, Felix, Melissa––dragged the muscular vampire up to the edge of the stainless-steel table. He and Felix then lifted him the rest of the way up, with Melissa holding his arm for reasons Michael couldn’t fathom.

  Felix grabbed his shoulders while Michael grabbed him by the knees.

  Even with Felix’s help, even with the muscles both of them cultivated from months and m
onths of doing this work, Michael heard his spine pop when they hefted him up to the stainless-steel table. They got him there in the end, muscles staining, Felix cursing, but it convinced Michael he needed food before he did the rest of the vamps.

  Once they had him down, Michael stayed to help them arrange the cop’s body on the slick surface. They positioned him near the pumps and started attaching needles and electrodes to drain him as fast as the pumps could operate.

  Fifteen minutes later they finished, using their last working rig to monitor his bodily functions while they completed the harvest.

  Felix agreed to stay inside, to work on extracting the venom from the cop’s fangs while the pump went to work on his veins. He told Michael to go, assuring him it was his turn to watch over the extraction––and Melissa––and that he was fine to work the next few hours without a break. He even agreed to start prep on the next vamp in the cooler if he had time before Michael got back, so they could transition faster once they finished with the cop.

  Michael was grateful.

  Despite being a nonbeliever, Felix could be touchingly generous at times, especially after he’d gotten a nap and popped a few uppers, both of which Michael suspected had recently transpired.

  Michael didn’t begrudge the other man for it.

  Harvesting nights were tough.

  It was nonstop, backbreaking work, pretty much from one dawn to the next, between picking up the bodies from the designated drop-off points to bringing them all here, setting them up, and extracting each one before disposing of the remains afterwards.

  Even Melissa worked hard.

  They got through it how they got through it.

  Whatever Felix’s personal reasons for participating in their good work, whether those reasons were devotional or not, Michael ultimately didn’t care. He considered the other human a brother in this, even if hadn’t yet found his way to the Light. In the meantime, knowingly or not, Felix accrued blessings to himself, doing this work.

  While Felix did that, Michael went to the nearest twenty-four-hour food dispensary.

  That dispensary ended up being over a mile away.

  Michael should have known that.

  His headset provided a map, along with detailed GPS directions, but Michael hadn’t bothered to click it on until he was already halfway there, and wondering why he hadn’t yet seen the glowing, blue-green sign.

  He should have borrowed the truck.

  He should have driven down and back, not left the two of them alone for so long. He’d thought the walk would do him good. He thought it would wake him up, clear his head.

  It did those things, but it took longer than it should have.

  The sandwich was stale and overpriced, the cookies were powdery, but the caffeine was already working its magic.

  In some ways, he envied Felix’s more aggressive means of staying awake––mainly in the form of the little purple pills he took. According to Felix, the one time Michael allowed himself to ask, those pills kept him up easily for twelve-hour stints, and without much burnout, at least not until the following day.

  Turning that over now, Michael decided that if this didn’t work, meaning the sandwich and the caffeine shake, he would make an exception tonight. He would ask Felix if he could purchase some of his stash.

  It wasn’t the clean way to do it, but the work had to come first.

  The work came above everything––even the purity of his body.

  Michael finished the protein-paste sandwich before he was halfway back to the warehouse. Now following the GPS thread on his headset, if only to gauge the time and whether he needed to call ahead, he munched the bean-paste cookies over the last part of his walk, washing them down with the coffee-soda shake, which had the added benefit of wiping away the worst of the taste of the sandwich.

  He didn’t notice anything until he was within sight of the chain-link fence.

  That’s when he noticed the swinging light.

  It was a little thing.

  A light swinging––it wasn’t a major red flag.

  It happened when they opened the back door. Felix might have opened that door––for a number of different reasons. He might have come out to get something from the truck. He might have come out to grab a snack, or take more drugs, to pull a bottle of water from the cooler.

  The lamp swinging, on its own, didn’t matter.

  But it was swinging too wide; the arc was wrong.

  It felt wrong.

  It felt really, really wrong.

  Michael couldn’t explain that part, even to himself.

  He didn’t stop walking.

  He walked right up to the fence. He saw the gap someone left between the fence wall and the gate and his misgiving worsened.

  Unlike with the swinging lightbulb, there were no good reasons Felix would have come out here. No routine reasons. None that connoted “business as usual.”

  Michael shut the gate when he left.

  He was sure of it.

  He’d rolled the whole thing sideways, and it got stuck before he managed to hook the chain, then clip the lock back on. He’d had to put his whole weight into yanking it those last few inches. His arms were shaking by the end, after all the lifting he’d done that night already, including of the big vampire cop.

  He’d definitely closed that gate.

  He remembered being annoyed with the rusted wheels, with how easily they wanted to jump out of the ruts in the cement. He remembered when he finally got it closed, and yanking on the heavy padlock to make sure the mechanism had caught.

  Now it was open a good four feet.

  Would Felix or Melissa have come out here?

  It was against protocol to leave the gate open. Their rules were oft-repeated and strict, and with good reason. Those rules were for their protection. Melissa might be a space cadet, and a junkie, but she’d never broken those rules before. She had a healthy respect for what they were doing, and for what they risked.

  Felix was even more paranoid than Michael.

  The drugs he took didn’t dull that paranoia; they intensified it.

  Now breathing harder, his heart hammering in his chest, Michael set the remnants of his shake on the sidewalk, keeping to the shadows and making as little noise as possible.

  Reaching into his coat, he pulled out the modified handgun he carried.

  They were all required to be armed.

  That was another of their rules.

  Even Melissa carried a small, hand-held plasma weapon, although Michael had never asked her where she carried it on her person. He’d asked to see it once, just to check in on those rules, and she disappeared for a few seconds into the cooler, and reemerged to show it to him.

  Michael checked his own gun every day before a harvest.

  He also did his best to keep his skills up, visiting a shooting range or going out to the swamp to shoot at moving targets several times a week.

  He liked the gun, which was dead metal merged with dark-green organics, giving it a dated yet somehow futuristic cowboy feel. The original barrel probably got built during or shortly after the wars, but when he bought it from the underground dealer, the man assured him it had been completely revamped since––no pun intended.

  While projectile-based, not a plasma, the bullets the gun used were thrown out with five or six times the force of the old combustion weapons from the wars.

  Michael held that gun down by his leg now, his finger resting on the barrel as he walked softly towards the open gate. After scanning the shadowy parking area with his eyes, he darted forward, moving low to the ground, keeping the gun aimed at the cement.

  He reached the next set of shadows, to the right of the gate, and stopped again. He kept his body behind one of the cement pillars that held up that part of the garage, putting it between himself and the loading dock.

  His next run forward got him to the van.

  Felix wasn’t inside.

  No one was.

  The orange lightbulb s
till swayed lightly at the edge of the garage nearest to the loading dock, but it was slowing now. The shadows and slashes of light it created were less dramatic and more soothing.

  Michael peered out from behind the van, his eyes seeking out the door to the back of the warehouse.

  He still hadn’t heard a damned thing.

  His eyes found the door, and then his heart pounded harder, almost painfully in his chest.

  The door was open.

  Not a few inches. Not even a foot.

  Someone left the door wide, wide open.

  Blue-white light filtered softly out the opening, more or less killed by the orange lights of the garage a few feet past the cement steps that led up to the door. Michael could see the blue-green light on the white walls inside the processing room. He could see the walls, even sections of ceiling, since he was at a slightly lower angle, but he couldn’t see much of the floor.

  He saw no movement whatsoever.

  He should have been able to see them.

  If Melissa and Felix had been in the room, and working, he should see them. He should at least see them walking back and forth from the control panel for the pumps to the rig on the vampire’s veins and teeth.

  If Felix left the door open to start transferring the already-harvested vampire corpses from the cooler to the van, Michael definitely would have seen him, unless both of them were inside the walk-in freezer unit for some reason.

  Anyway, if Felix decided to take time in the lull to lug some of the corpses to the van, he still would have closed the door between trips.

  And why would he do that now?

  Why not just wait for Michael to get back?

  The job went twice as fast with two people.

  Michael checked the timepiece in his headset.

  Frowning as he refocused on the open door in front of him, he held the gun up, now gripping it with both hands.

  He’d been gone almost an hour.

  As the thought penetrated, it hit him that he knew.

  He knew.

  Not only that something was wrong, but that something had gone badly, badly wrong.

  His life was in danger.

  Michael’s mind continued to look for reasonable and/or logical explanations for what he was seeing and feeling; his mind continued to try and fit the puzzle pieces together differently.