by Phil Wohl
of an hour. He would have normally been able to go the distance, but his hard drive was now working overtime and needed the extra sleep time to make preparations to come on line. The other person that remained in the house during the battle was Kayla, but she hadn’t slept a wink. She was too busy worrying about the safety of her family, and the health of her husband.
Kayla had flashbacks for the last hour-or-so since Samuel went to sleep, about the time when she almost put an end to Max’s life. Her overriding concern for peace pushed her to jump off the sidelines and come to the aid of her hunter family by attacking the vampires. She picked up a sword and glided toward an unsuspecting group of vampires that had circled her father, Andrew. They had toyed with Brewster by poking long straws into him and extracting his blood like a human sippy box. She could not watch the torture any more, as the last of her family was fighting for survival in this particular battle. In those days, it was forbidden for Max and Kayla to come off the sidelines because they had not reached the magical internal age of 18, and would be confined by the boundaries of their mortality.
Kayla walked into the room looking tired and depressed, as her grandma’, uncle, and great grandfather noticed the morbid nature of her disposition.
“Are you okay, Kay Kay?” Thaddeus asked.
“I see that my protective vision worked,” she said. “Where are the others?”
“In the sun room…” Emily said before Kayla zoomed out of the room in advance of Emily finishing her thought, “but I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”
Kayla faced all of the expired people, who were propped up with their body parts scattered among their individual chairs facing the East. She noticed that a few of the parts were mismatched, so she spent a few minutes completing the puzzle that was in front of this mercenary.
“You should go talk to her,” Thaddeus said to Emily.
She took a huge bite out of a ham and cheese sandwich that muffled her reply, “You’re right. I’ll go talk to her.”
Emily strolled through the halls into he came up on the dimly-lit sun room, where her granddaughter was sitting against the huge bank of windows and blankly staring at all of the bodies in front of her.
“Why didn’t I protect them?” Kayla asked as tears continued to flow from her eyes.
“You can’t protect all of them, Kayla,” Emily replied.
“No, I mean my parents and Maxwell,” Kayla said, specifying her intended targets.
“Okay,” Emily simply replied as she was hurt at first that her granddaughter had such little regard for her life.
Kayla broke out of her haze when she internally felt her grandma’s insides cool of and then visually confirmed her inner feelings by viewing her facial expression.
“I love you grandma’, Kayla said as she stood up and hugged Emily. “I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. It just bothers me to see them like this.”
Emily realized from the first time that Kayla revealed she was able to protect people that it would be a burden on her to watch the other unprotected people suffer. The guilt associated with such an exclusion/inclusion decision-making process was started to wear on the girl after only one day of the battle, so Emily had to set her granddaughter straight before she was rendered ineffective.
Emily, in one of her softer moments, held Kayla’s hand and led her to sit down with their backs against the windows.
“You see Kayla, these bodies that we have are just vessels for our spirits. You might look straight ahead and see piles of body parts and destruction, she said pointed to the bodies in front of them, “but I see spirits hovering over us and preparing to seize the new day once it is upon us. Death, for us, is just an extension of a long life that we will live together. A lengthy journey that only pauses at time to catch its breath.”
She then made the most pertinent point that she had, “Look at me.”
Kayla turned and looked at her grandmother, and then Emily continued, “I have died so many times that we both don’t have enough fingers and toes to count it. You know what the best part of dying in this world is?”
“What?” Kayla asked.
“It’s the peace that comes with being off-line for a few hours. I’ll tell you, no sleep that I have ever had has been so calm, restful and restoring.”
“Does it hurt?” Kayla asked.
Emily tried to be as direct as possible without throwing Kayla back into her pity party.
“Only for a split-second when you’re alive. Once you die, you go to another place with sunshine, fluffy clouds and soft, caressing breezes. Come to think of it, it’s like going on a four-hour vacation.”
Kayla smiled as she wiped her moist nose off with the sleeve of her shirt, “Really?”
“Really. And you’re lucky none of these vampires witnessed what you just did, because they would have disinfected you and everything else in this room.”
They stood up and hugged again, and a flash of the past rocketed through Kayla’s brain.
“How did you survive?” was all that she asked her grandmother.
Emily stepped back and they started walking out of the room.
“What do you mean, how did I survive?”
Kayla followed Emily into the main room, where Thaddeus and Cal were still eating.
“I mean, how did you all survive after the protection was broken?” Kayla questioned.
It had been some time since the hunters had been in a battle, so they weren’t so sure of the order of things when it came to Kayla protection.
“We just jumped under a pile of bodies,” Thaddeus replied.
Kayla was already emotional, but now she was starting to become uneasy.
“As each person on the team dies so does your protection.”
“So we weren’t protected when that black cloud of Lowery descended on us?” Emily asked, although she was now more confused than ever.
“You were protected up until the point that everyone but Mr. Hartwell was killed. Where was he on the line?” she asked, knowing that Maxwell must have employed some sort of form strategy.
“He was in the front when we were doing the wave…” Thaddeus said, as he, Emily and Cal did the wave with their paws, changing into two grizzlies and a pit bull on its back legs jumping into the air.
They changed back as Cal had somehow gained some clarity of the positioning when he changed.
“He was in the middle.”
“That means that once he dies, the fight for the night is over,” Kayla stated.
“Why do you say that?” Emily asked.
“Because if that wasn’t the case, then they would have kept chopping and we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now,” Kayla replied.
“Good point,” Thaddeus added.
Cal was one to always cut to the chase, “So, why wouldn’t we always put him in front of the line?”
Thaddeus never liked to hoist the white flag of surrender up so early, “Because that would mean that we’re giving up.”
“I’m just saying that there’s no reason to sacrifice everyone until we can figure some way to fight on a more level playing field.”
Emily always backed up her twin brother, “Cal is right. We took out probably half of their army, but we were much more effective at combating them in small doses. There is no way they won’t throw everything and the kitchen sink at us right off the bat tomorrow night.” It was already the next day, so she adjusted her statement, “Make that tonight.”
Thaddeus processed all of the information and then put his two cents in, “I’ve never seen something like that in my whole life. Let’s see what happens tonight and then we’ll move on from there.”
Cal and Emily were willing to give it another go, if not for themselves, for their father. The both nodded in agreement and said, “Okay.”
“Are you okay with that Kayla? Same plan again tonight?” Emily asked.
Kayla was also behind her family and replied, “Okay,” although she w
as not in favor of letting her parents and husband flap in the breeze of death much longer.
TWENTY-SIX
The huge sun of the day was making its way above the horizon and there were no clouds in the sky to impede its ascension. The Eastern exposure of the sun room was designed with the reawakening in mind: no trees or other objects between the window, the ocean, and the sky.
There was much truth to the assertion that death got easier and less painful over time and this proved and tested theory was being played out on Maxwell, who had died for the first time since becoming a vampire. The light hit him first and he was in excruciating pain as his body parts and organs reattached and his brain was rebooted and came back on line. He screamed and then zipped to where Kayla was in one decisive action. She was half-asleep with Samuel taking up most of the bed, as he came in early in the morning and was now sprawled out.
Samuel eyes opened at the scent of his father as he jumped into his Max’s arms and excitedly said, “Daddy!”
Samuel may have been fast asleep for most of the night, but when he awoke a few hours earlier, he realized that something was amiss, something was wrong. So he ventured out of his room and into the darkness of the sun room, because that was where his instincts guided him. He stood in the room with his back to the ocean and stared blankly at the collection of barely unrecognizable bodies in front of him.
It had only been a few weeks of life for Samuel and already he was being exposed to the grittier side of the family activities. The sights and smells heightened his sensitivity and made his being