Chapter 11
Last Victims
Nicoleta asked Oana, “What was that about?”
“She wanted to know whether you’re alive,” Oana replied.
“It makes no sense. Why would she care? What did she think would happen when she handed me over to the vampires? As far as she knew I was supposed to be dead and eaten by now.”
Nicoleta wandered away from the large “barred room” and went deeper into the caverns of the humans’ vast pen. A few narrow and barred holes in the ceiling supplied air from the surface and some dim snatches of light.
She walked towards the so-called “arena.” Unlike the clearly artificial walls of the barred room, the arena appeared to be one of the original natural caverns the coven was built around, since the ceiling was populated by a forest of stalactites that hung in long spikes. The ground had been smoothed out and mostly flattened, with many random pieces of furniture scattered about, but the ceiling and many of the walls were untouched. Many people sat in the room, some relaxing, some talking, others sleeping, and others alone and preoccupied with thought.
Nicoleta sat down on the cold floor and also became preoccupied with thought, wondering what would happen to her here. She had already learned that there were people who had been here for decades, even a few children who had been born here. Was this to be her permanent home from now on?
Many events had transpired since the night she was taken from the convent and Nicoleta recollected them in order. It began when Madalina had suddenly woken her from a sleep, tightly wrapped in her own sheets, her mouth gagged and Madalina ominously looming over her. She had been carried on Madalina’s shoulder, stuffed through tight orifices and ultimately placed at the feet of the vampires like a pagan offering. Then she was placed inside a net and carried by the vampires’ rapid steps through the woods to the entrance of their cave.
Once inside, she remembered seeing that vast room with vampires in numbers she simply couldn’t count. She’d repeatedly tried to swing her head this way and that to catch all that was going on. While being carried through the forest, her fears had been able to slowly subside and hibernate in her chest, but seeing such sights and in disbelief that there could be such vast numbers of vampires hidden under the surface of the ground, her fears were potently revived. The only possibility that crossed her mind was that she was to be food for these monsters and that they would tear her body limb from limb and eat her every fragment of flesh until she was finally relieved from the suffering by the oblivion of death and her soul’s ascent to heaven.
However, that wasn’t what they did. The one vampire, that female who entered with such a regal presence, ordered her and Oana taken away, and so they were. Passing through halls and rooms, until a door was opened. She and Oana were untied and thrown through the opening, just before the door was closed behind them.
When she stood up, she grabbed Oana for comfort, and they looked around terrified, not knowing what horrors to expect from the shadows. They cautiously began to explore the space, with great trepidation, staying close to protect one other.
The first person to approach them walked with a crooked step and had black hair that splashed out in all directions atop his head. He seemed to have only one good eye, and bent his ugly face towards them to give them a good look.
He asked them, “What’s your names,” and likewise introduced himself as “Dragomir.” He was, in a sense, the leader of the humans of the pen, and only advised them of one thing, “Stay out of the way of the vampires if you want to last.”
The next day, Nicoleta would discover what Dragomir meant when she witnessed a person being removed from the pen. She first noticed Mir stalking through the pen covered in a heavy, hooded cloak with leather gloves to protect his hands and boots to protect his feet. As he walked through the halls, looking from person to person as if in search of a suitable subject, people stepped aside, and many tried to avoid his eyes. They seemed to believe, perhaps quite reasonably, that if he didn’t see them, they might escape, but, in fact, it appeared as if he was looking for someone. When he saw a woman who was trying to discreetly hide her wrists, which were stained with two red X’s, he grabbed her.
The woman in question appeared to be past middle age, with grey hair on her head and traces of wrinkles. Mir reached out and grabbed her from behind, restraining her arms, which almost immediately began to flail about. The woman screamed and cried and pleaded for help, but no one moved.
Nicoleta herself was at first afraid to move, but she gathered courage and ran at the vampire with all her strength. She expected that if she knocked him down to the ground, others might follow and help. But, knocking into Mir’s body was more like running directly into the trunk of a tree than knocking into a person. Nicoleta painfully thudded into Mir’s side, and he nonchalantly kicked her away, sending her skidding across the ground.
Seated on the ground, defeated, Nicoleta shouted at the other humans, “Why don’t we all attack him? Together we can overpower him.”
By this time Mir was gone, dragging the screaming woman out the door into another room. The distant screaming accelerated into a crescendo before it was abruptly stopped. Though for the other humans this was a daily experience, for Nicoleta it was the first time she’d ever seen such a horrible thing, and she could do nothing but cry several tears as she sat upon the ground.
Oana stepped forward to comfort Nicoleta, at which point Dragomir finally spoke up in answer to Nicoleta’s question, “Don’t you think we’ve tried before? We’ve attacked them. We’ve ganged up on them. We’ve lied in wait and ambushed them. It never works. It takes so many of us to overpower just one, and then another vampire comes to help and all we get for our efforts are bruises and broken bones and a few more of us dead and eaten. The faster you learn to give up, the better things will work out for you little girl. Just be happy that young girls are more valuable as baby-farms than as food.”
Oana and Nicoleta together went to the dining hall where food was being served. The pen had its own kitchen, where several of the humans acted as cooks, with the raw ingredients being regularly supplied by the vampires. The food was an almost unremitting monotony of the same meal day in and day out: large batches of stew, made from onions and potatoes, and a bit of bread and cheese on the side. The chefs prepared cauldron after cauldron of stew, intersected with a continuous chain of loafs of wheat and barley bread. There were several hundred humans that had to be fed multiple times each day, from an almost completely unvarying supply of raw ingredients, leaving very little room for creativity.
After Oana and Nicoleta sat down with their food, a woman decided to join them as they ate. She introduced herself as Crina. She had brown, ratty hair, which she kept cropped short around a pretty face. She had the appearance of a person who can take delight in anything, and when she spoke, her eyes frequently flashed with excitement.
“Just ignore Dragomir. He’s right that we’ve tried many times and failed, but that doesn’t mean we have to give up. He doesn’t want us to try to escape because he prefers the life he’s made for himself down here. But there’s quite many of us who haven’t given up. I’ve always found that even after every disappointment, there’s always just a little bit more hope, even as you think you’re scraping the bottom of the bowl,” Crina said, as Nicoleta ate up her last spoonfuls of soup.
“I want to believe you,” Nicoleta told her, feeling somewhat better.
As Nicoleta sat in the arena and recalled all these events, from her kidnapping up to the conversation with Crina, she still had some hope.
Elixir of Flesh Page 27