I’ll be back, the biker had said—like a bad rerun of a Schwarzenegger flick. Was this stranger part of the Sabbat as well?
Ramona glanced up at the window again.
Or is he luring me away so he can come back? she wondered.
Like so many nights over the past few weeks, she found herself torn between staying and watching over the sleeping mortal and going to those of her own kind. Without consciously resolving the dilemma, Ramona found herself following the scent, and though it soon faded away to nothing, the first steps had set her on a path to the George Washington Bridge.
After half a mile, Ramona realized that she’d left her shoes behind on the fire escape, but she had dithered long enough. Besides, her malformed feet moved easily over the pavement. Neither gravel nor broken glass pained her tough, leathery soles, and the rhythmic tap of claws on asphalt lulled her into a loping trance.
Who will you leave unwatched?
The blocks and miles fell away behind her until she was crossing the bridge, passing a car that swerved away from the shadow flashing, only for an instant, through the driver’s peripheral vision. Then the bridge, too, was receding in the distance. Ramona passed the spot where she’d faced the biker the night before. She pressed onward frantically, urged ahead by the great dread building within her. What if she was too late reaching her friends? What if she’d made the wrong decision, and something terrible happened to Zhavon?
As the garage came into view, Ramona felt not relief but an instant of inexplicable terror. All seemed dark and quiet from without.
Normal quiet or too quiet?
The question had scarcely flashed through her mind before she was at the door. She ripped it open. The chain on the handle shattered as the links were met with a force they couldn’t resist. The clinking of the chain fragments scattered across the parking lot was lost to the explosion of the metal door slammed open against the aluminum wall of the building. Ramona charged in ready to attack.
Darnell jumped up from where he sat and spun to face her. Ramona caught only a brief glimpse of Jen as she scuttled down into the nearest pit.
“Mother…!” Darnell started to yell, but his curse trailed off as recognition slowly replaced shock on his face. “What the hell you doin’?”
Ramona quickly scanned the darkened interior of the building. “Has he been here?” she blurted out.
“What…? Who?” Darnell, already angry and more than a little embarrassed at having been caught off—guard, was not calmed by Ramona’s near—frantic manner.
The biker, she started to say but then realized that wasn’t who she was most worried about. The stranger. “Anyone.”
“Nobody but your crazy ass breakin’ down the damn door!” Darnell said.
A light flickered to life in the pit where Jen had fled. She poked her head into view and lifted up her mechanic’s lamp. “Ramona? That you?”
“Turn off the damn light!” responded Ramona and Darnell in unison as they shielded their eyes.
As the light went out and all three were bathed in total darkness, Ramona heard, for the second time that night, the screeching of car tires. Earlier, she’d expected a crash. This time her expectations were fulfilled.
A roaring engine burst into a sudden crescendo of destruction, twisted and torn metal, as a car barreled through the garage’s left bay door. A headlight shattered into a blinding spray of glass and sparks. The car ripped the tall door from its track and slid to a stop near the pits.
Ramona dove away from both car and falling door. Darnell wasn’t so lucky. The sliding car struck him squarely on the right side and flung him into the air through the darkness.
Ramona rolled and jumped to her feet. The remaining headlight cast an eerie light through the garage as the dented old car jerked to a halt amidst the smell of burnt rubber. Almost instantly, three of the four doors opened, and out stepped the biker and two others wearing similar, unofficial uniforms—ratty T-shirt, faded, tight jeans, black boots.
“Hiya, sweetmeat,” the biker called out to the darkness. His companions flanked him on either side. “Ready to play with the big boys, or do you wanna practice that swan dive for real?”
Ramona felt around and found a large crescent wrench on top of a stack of boxes. The tool’s weight was solid and comforting in her grasp. The crack along the handle was not a problem for Ramona. With a quick, axe-like motion, she launched the wrench at the biker.
It struck him on the temple and snapped his head to the side. He staggered back a step but didn’t fall, and when he regained his balance, to Ramona’s dismay, an evil grin spread across his features.
“Come to papa, baby,” he said, as he licked his lips and stepped forward into the darkness, retracing the path the wrench had followed. He seemed oblivious to the trickle of blood that ran down his face, and to the blow that would’ve killed a mortal.
Ramona looked around for any other weapon at hand as she backed away from the advancing biker. Could this, she wondered, be the same person who, last night, had shied away from a confrontation with her? It was, but tonight he had numbers on his side.
Or so he thought.
Suddenly, a bestial roar erupted over the hum of the idling car. From the darkness across the way, Darnell came hurtling through the air like a demonic bird of prey. He crashed onto the two Sabbat behind the biker, driving them to the floor beneath his furious attack.
As the biker whirled about at the commotion, Ramona leapt for his throat. He sensed her attack at the last second, but only enough to deflect, not to evade, her blow. Ramona’s force carried him to the ground.
For a moment, five vampires writhed in a mass on the floor like maggots on carrion. Pale bodies flailed, struggling for leverage. Ramona and the biker were the first to untangle themselves. Each rolled away and sprang up.
Darnell climbed onto one of his two foes and clawed and bit his opponent’s face. The unfortunate creature struggled to defend himself, but had little success against Darnell’s savagery. Behind Darnell, however, the other Sabbat stood and took from his belt a .38 special, which he aimed at the back of Darnell’s head.
Ramona moved to save her friend, but the biker, taking advantage of her distraction, struck her across the back of the head with his iron-hard fist. Ramona stumbled to her knees as time seemed to freeze before her very eyes.
Suddenly, Jen rose from the pit immediately behind the Sabbat holding the revolver. She held in each hand the clamp of a set of jumper cables, and at once she hooked them onto the unsuspecting gunman.
The cables must’ve been hooked to a battery in the pit, because sparks shot out of the clamps, and out of the Sabbat vampire. The revolver fell from his hand as he contorted into an unnaturally rigid pose. Crackling electricity danced around his body as he jerked spasmodically and his eyes rolled up into his head. Acrid smoke and the smell of seared flesh seemed to fill all the garage at once. In slow motion, he fell to one knee, then, mouth agape and drooling, he toppled to the floor.
Jen, horror etched on her face, stood back away from her victim. The other Sabbat vampire took full advantage of his friend’s demise and scurried away from Darnell and, holding his bleeding face, continued out of the garage.
None of this was lost on the biker. For the briefest moment, he froze in indecision, caught between staying to fight and running with his buddy. His hesitation cost him. Ramona kicked with all her strength across his jaw. The staccato snap of bones cut across the continuing buzz from the jumper cables.
The biker landed hard several yards away and lay stunned. When he sat up at last, his jaw was set at quite an odd angle to the right. He raised a hand but only gingerly touched his chin.
Ramona strutted toward him. “You said something about the big boys,” she reminded him. “They showin’ up soon?”
A flicker of doubt crossed his features.
“Maybe you’ll be practicin’ that swan dive off the bridge,” Ramona said.
She and Darnell stepped closer to the
biker. Jen, giving the electrically live body on the floor a wide berth, circled around nervously behind them.
The biker still seemed stunned from Ramona’s roundhouse kick. Rather than respond to her taunts, he spit blood onto the floor, an action that obviously caused him great pain.
Ramona stepped closer still. She didn’t harbor any illusions that he and his companions would’ve spared her. The little she knew of the Sabbat from first the West Coast and now the East, they weren’t the forgiving types. He hadn’t counted on Darnell and Jen, and wasn’t that just a pisser for biker boy?
But her next step was interrupted by the sound of more engines gunning nearby—cars, several of them, and coming closer.
Ramona turned back to the biker. Broken jaw and all, his face was twisted into a maddening sneer. “Better be quick,” he muttered painfully, as laughter, deep in his gut like a smothered cough, began to wrack his body.
“Whelp!” A different voice caught Ramona’s attention from behind.
She turned to see the top half of the stranger protruding from an opening in the floor where, before, a stack of crates had rested.
“This way. Hurry!” His voice was forceful, commanding. It lacked any sense of desperation, yet hinted that he expected no delay in obedience.
Ramona again faced the biker, who was laughing giddily now. Blood dripped from his mouth.
She sent another kick across his face. He spun and landed in a heap, unmoving, but Ramona’s blood was up. She wanted to take his head off altogether.
But the stranger was waiting expectantly. The position of the opening was such that Darnell and Jen couldn’t see him. Only Ramona. His gaze bore into her.
The cars that had heartened the biker were very close now. The beams of headlights streamed through the gaping hole where the bay door had been ripped away. The biker lay completely still, but the cars had to be more Sabbat. How many, Ramona didn’t know. And she didn’t want to find out.
“Come on,” she called to Darnell and Jen. She led them to the open trapdoor. The stranger was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’d this come from?” Jen asked.
Ramona shrugged. “It was under some boxes.” She paused above the opening. Who was this stranger who threatened her before and helped her now? But a car crashing through the intact bay door chased the questions from her mind. Ramona dove through the opening, and Darnell and Jen followed right behind her. Darnell had the presence of mind to pull the trapdoor shut.
They found themselves crowded into a low, narrow crawlspace lined with pipes of various sizes. The only light was the little that seeped around the edges of the trapdoor.
“Great,” muttered Ramona. Her first thought was that the stranger had hopped out and run while she wasn’t looking, and that now she and the others were trapped—at least until the Sabbat reinforcements turned on the lights and found the trapdoor.
Or maybe the stranger had escaped ahead of them.
Ramona crawled forward into the darkness. Her eyes were adjusting rapidly.
“Ow!” Jen hadn’t kept her head down.
“Shut the fuck up!” Darnell hissed at her in a harsh whisper.
Ramona ignored them and kept crawling. She almost fell headlong into the hole that opened beneath her. She stopped so abruptly that Darnell bumped smack into her ass, and Jen into him.
“Hey…!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Ramona crawled into the hole head-first. “This way. Down,” she said over her shoulder in case they couldn’t see her.
The pipes gave way to dirt and rock, but the new tunnel was no more spacious than the crawlspace. If anything, the walls closed more tightly about her. Ramona had never been underground before. She’d never had reason to suspect that claustrophobia might be a problem for her, but she could suddenly feel air growing scarce.
You don’t breathe no more, bitch, she reminded herself, and crawled ahead so Darnell and Jen could follow her down.
The tunnel ahead sloped downward, and that seemed as good a direction as any. A tiny but putrid-smelling trickle of water led Ramona onward. The ceiling of the passage dropped more than the floor, and the space became tighter still. Soon Ramona was crawling with her face turned sideways, cheek pressed down in the muck. Behind, Jen whimpered and Darnell cursed under his breath. Ramona’s back scraped against the ceiling, but she was already pressed as hard to the floor as she could be.
She scanned the darkness ahead. Her eyes had adjusted as much as they were going to. There was just too little light, and nothing to see but rock and dirt. She didn’t want to wedge herself in, but neither did she want to try to direct Jen and Darnell back the other way to either try the other direction or reemerge into the garage. Ahead was better.
Ramona pushed forward with a little more force and popped through the tight spot. “It opens up a little up here,” she let the others know. The tunnel turned downward more steeply as well. Their pace quickened in the less restrictive space, and soon they came to a rough curve. Ramona could feel fresh air on her face. Twenty yards more, and they crawled out onto the steep bank of the Hudson River, not far from the George Washington Bridge.
Ramona glanced around, but there was no sign of the stranger. She almost asked if the others had seen him but decided this was neither the time nor the place. Discussions with Darnell and Jen tended to degenerate rapidly into arguments, and Ramona wanted a bit more distance from the Sabbat, however many of those bastards were swarming around. Who knew if they might find the trapdoor, or if they had lookouts posted on or near the bridge?
“This way,” Ramona said, as she started north along the river.
“Where are we going now?” Jen asked. She peeled off her outer sweatshirt, stained down the front with the sludge from the tunnel.
“Hayesburg,” said Ramona. New York City was a bit too hot all of a sudden. Just like L.A., she thought.
Darnell must’ve agreed. Otherwise he wouldn’t have hesitated to argue. “Hayesburg,” he repeated. “Where’s that?”
“Don’t know,” Ramona answered. “Guess we’ll have to find it.” She kept her eyes peeled for any lurking Sabbat—or for the stranger, who seemed, for better or worse, to have taken an interest in her. As she quickened her trot to a run, she tried to decide what she would do if she met him again—thank him, or kick his ass? She didn’t come up with an answer right away.
Sunday, 18 July 1999, 4:39 AM
Interstate 81-North
Near Roanoke, Virginia
The sun and the moon, hand in hand, in all their white brilliance were trapped within the small mirror. Ahead, the rhythmic white lines rushed forward out of the darkness, one after another after another, like beautiful swans, each unerring in the pursuit of its predecessor.
All else was darkness.
The wind of the swans’ passing slapped at Leopold’s face. He blinked away the crimson tears evoked by the sweet, visual cacophony of Sight and unSight. The white light of sun and moon burst forth from the mirror and shattered into a spectrum of hues, each beckoning him to lose himself in its stark purity. Rainbow bands enveloped him. Sun and moon were contained no longer. The twin orbs expanded beyond the plastic edges of the mirror and bathed Leopold in blinding light.
At the same instant, the swans, without breaking their single-file ranks, veered wildly to the right. A deep horn sounded that gripped Leopold in his bones. The noise was from behind him. He looked over his shoulder to face sun and moon, free of the rearview mirror, as they bore down on top of him.
Leopold lurched at the steering wheel, shot right, passing again the streaming swans. Sun and moon roared past. The spectral colors flashed and were gone.
The car’s tires strayed from pavement and took uncertain hold of the gravel shoulder as the vehicle fish-tailed. Instincts honed by distant mortal experience took over. Leopold turned into the slide, overcompensated, turned the wheel steadily the other direction to correct the second slide. Two wheels lifted free of the ground. The car
hovered at the cusp of flight for a second that stretched out toward eternity…then heavily righted itself, slid to a halt.
Leopold could see in his mind the next moment that had not come to pass—the car flipping onto its side, its roof, tumbling along the highway and into the embankment in a shower of glass and crumpled metal.
Silence calmed the swirling mix of Sight and unSight. White lines lay still upon the road where they’d taken the place of the swans in flight. Sun and moon were transformed into smaller, piercing, red lights that had come to rest a hundred yards down the interstate.
The muse’s laughter, bubbling from nowhere, receded into the distance. In the confusion of the moment, Leopold had been unaware of her. Now he spun, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, but his motion sent the world hurtling again toward the shifting axes of insanity.
He laid his head back against the seat and allowed her to escape unmolested.
She would not abandon him. He was growing more confident of this fact every hour. He was her chosen one, a conduit of unguessed revelation. She still led him onward so that he might create perfection. At her urging, he had relieved that young man in Atlanta of his automobile and driven north all last night, all tonight.
The answers lay in this direction. Leopold was certain.
Even so, he realized, morning would be upon him shortly. He needed to find shelter again soon. The journey north would have to continue tomorrow night.
Footsteps. As the world settled around Leopold, he was partially aware of the man approaching from the direction of the semi that had pulled over just up the road.
“Jesus God, are you all right?” asked the trucker. “Are you drunk, or just stupid, or—dear Lord, your eye is—”
Leopold lashed out, jerked the trucker through the open window, and in the space of one heartbeat was feasting from the broken neck.
Clan Novel Gangrel: Book 3 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 6