Clan Novel Gangrel: Book 3 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  A few minutes later, Leopold pulled away from the lifeless body on the edge of I-81 and cut across the median to the empty southbound lanes.

  There was a truckstop not far back, he thought. I will persuade a driver to provide shelter for me.

  The driver would not leave during the day. Of this, Leopold felt certain.

  part two:

  bone

  Thursday, 22 July 1999, 1:02 AM

  Old Hayesburg Elementary School

  Hayesburg, New York

  Ramona lay on her back on the slick, hardwood floor and stared unseeing into the dim heights of the vaulted ceiling. She squeezed her eyes closed. All her will was absorbed in resisting the urge that had tempted her the entire night. The footsteps that she felt and heard coming toward her were both relief and distraction. Ramona recognized Jen without looking—the quiet approach, hesitant not stealthy.

  Jen stopped a few feet away but didn’t speak. Ramona opened her eyes. The only light in the cavernous room, from streetlights outside, filtered down from windows near the ceiling. Jen nodded with a nervous smile. Her lips, once pouty like a beautiful model’s, Ramona imagined, were pale to the point of bluish.

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” Jenny said. Seconds passed. She seemed increasingly uncomfortable with the silence. “I thought maybe you were—”

  “Sleeping?” Ramona asked with a disdainful harumph. “Do you really sleep? Even in the daytime?”

  Jen pulled up a chair and sat. The only chairs they had found in this boarded-up elementary school were child-sized—apparently all the adults had taken their chairs with them when the building was closed—and Jen, sitting there in the center of the otherwise empty gymnasium, instead of dwarfing the small seat, seemed to shrink to fit it. She looked the part of a child alone in a vast, dark space.

  “No,” Jen answered. “I don’t feel like I sleep. But I do… I guess.”

  “Dreams?”

  Jen shook her head slowly. “Not that I remember.” She stared down at her feet. “It doesn’t feel like being asleep. It feels like…”

  “Being dead,” said Ramona. The words hung in the grave-like silence of the gym.

  Jen squeezed her eyes tightly shut and continued shaking her head in an attempt to deny what she had to know was the truth. Ramona knew what the girl must be feeling. Ramona had been through it herself, was still going through it to some extent, but not to the degree that Jen was. Maybe Jen had lost more with her mortal life and that made it harder.

  A single crimson tear dripped from the corner of Jen’s eye, betraying her inability to accept their new reality. The drop of blood struck the shiny grain of the floor. Ramona raised a finger and wiped the track of the tear from Jen’s cheek, pressed her finger to her tongue.

  Vampire, Ramona thought.

  As she tasted the rich blood, the word stuck in her mind.

  Vampire.

  Darnell was right. How could Jen pretend they had become anything else? But, Ramona also thought, badgering Jen wasn’t going to bring her around. Couldn’t Darnell see that? Hadn’t he felt any of what Jen was laboring with? Didn’t he have qualms about the monster he’d become?

  I’m afraid of what I’ve become, Ramona thought.

  “When is this going to end?” Jen whispered. Blood lined the bottom edges of her eyes.

  “Don’t know.” Ramona closed her eyes again. She could still taste Jen’s blood. Again, she felt the urge she’d been denying all night.

  This is the next step, Ramona thought.

  Unlike her friend, she had accepted becoming a vampire, but now she was finding out what that really meant. “Sometimes you just have to suck it up,” Ramona said aloud to herself.

  With Jen’s sharp intake of breath, Ramona realized too late what her comment must’ve sounded like—a flippant dismissal of Jen’s worries. Ramona sat up, intending to set the record straight, but Jen had hopped up and was already halfway across the gym. She was trying to suppress her sobs, but drops of blood marked her path.

  Ramona sighed. That girl has gotta toughen up some time, she thought. But Ramona could’ve used the company tonight.

  Where has Darnell got to? she wondered. He’d been rummaging around in the basement earlier, climbing over the piles of discarded furniture, searching for a sub-basement or deeper storage area that would be even farther removed from sunlight.

  “You don’t have to do that, you know,” Ramona had told him, but he’d only grunted and kept on with what he was doing.

  Both he and Jenny had reacted strangely to Ramona’s most recent discovery.

  They’d left New York City four nights ago. The first night they’d covered little ground. Ramona had stolen a map from a convenience store, and they’d found a condemned tenement where they’d weathered out the day.

  The second night they headed north, toward Hayesburg. It was slow going initially. Sabbat killers seemed to lurk in every shadow. Even Darnell was jumpy. Ramona watched, to no effect, for signs of both the Sabbat and the mysterious stranger, who carried an air of danger but had also made possible their escape. Again, the three sought out an abandoned building to pass the day in relative safety.

  The next night, however, found them much farther north and without shelter as the first pink and orange stains of morning began to spread above the horizon. Ramona and the others were on the outskirts of one of the small towns sprinkled along the Hudson River, and there was no obvious choice for a temporary haven.

  “Any luck?” Ramona asked Darnell, who had just made a third sweep of the town. “Burned-out building?”

  “Nothin’ with a basement,” he growled.

  Jen picked obsessively at her fingernails and sat in anxious silence.

  “Why you worried about the sun?” Darnell taunted her. “You ain’t no vampire, remember?”

  Ramona blocked out their bickering. She didn’t have time for it. The three, along with their other companion, Eddie, had crossed much of the country in a light-sealed van—that had been Eddie’s idea—and had never lacked for a place to spend the day. Maybe, Ramona thought, they should’ve held on to the van longer, or gotten another. But more and more, as the weeks had passed, she’d hated being cooped up inside a vehicle of any type. The two nights of travel on foot from the city had been long, but they’d allowed Ramona and the others to be active. It would’ve been worse being shut inside a car, wondering if every other car that appeared carried a Sabbat hit squad. Besides, with their preternatural physical capabilities, the three had made good time.

  A car’s no good, Ramona decided. The night was for exploring, for smelling the breeze, for feeling the ground beneath her feet.

  She looked down at the clawed extremities that her feet had become—both Darnell and Jen had noticed, she was sure, but both had had the good sense not to question her—and she dug her toes into the soil. Cool comfort enveloped her feet, as if she partook of a natural kinship with the earth itself. She dug a bit deeper, then, startlingly, her feet began gradually to sink into the ground. Unexplained and unexpected as it was, it felt right somehow; it seemed what she was meant for.

  Words of her lost mortal faith came to her mind—Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  “Come here,” she enjoined her friends.

  Perplexed, they did so, and each took the hand that Ramona held out.

  “Close your eyes. Don’t think about anything,” she told them.

  Through her fingertips, Ramona could sense the blood that lay beneath the undead flesh she grasped. She could feel the unease with which Darnell held her hand, and the tension in Jen’s every muscle. But Ramona could also feel them through the soil beneath their feet. She felt the coolness, the kinship of the earth, and, instinctively, she let that kinship spread to them. They began to slip into her trance without realizing, and the earth welcomed them also.

  Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  “What are you—” Jen began to protest weakly beneath the weight of the trance, but Ramona gripped her hand
fiercely and was met with silence.

  The chill began to spread upward from her feet through her legs. She could tell somehow that the others felt it too. Abdomen, torso, were accepted by the earth. Ramona stretched out her will to calm Jen. Darnell accepted this embrace passively, if not comfortably. Their bodies sank into the ground, melded with the soil to which they should already have returned permanently.

  Ramona imagined the first rays of the sun breaking through the leaves. In her mind, the leaves burst into flame. They joined the smoldering and burning of her flesh as the light touched her face. Was she burning? She had sunk too deeply into the stupor of the dead to know, to care. Regardless, the earth drank her in, extinguished the fire, encompassed every fiber of her being.

  Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  Darkness. Cold. Safety. Oblivion.

  When Ramona opened her eyes, night had fallen. The vengeful sun was again banished until the next morning. She lay on the ground in a shallow depression, as did Jen and Darnell on either side of her. The other two stirred, blinked awake as if aroused from a dream. Ramona lay still, savoring the coolness, the same chill that permeated her flesh.

  I could stay there, she knew suddenly. I could sink deep into the ground and not come back. The thought was appealing. But what of her friends? What of Zhavon?

  Jen sat and stared ahead blankly. Darnell brushed the dirt from his clothes. Neither spoke. They avoided Ramona’s gaze.

  Finally, Jen, her face tinged with fear, turned to Ramona. “How—”

  Darnell scrambled to his feet, smacked Jen across the back of the head. “Shut up! And you…” he turned his attention and a long, accusing finger to Ramona. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Then he whirled and stomped off toward the town.

  Jen, too confused to be angry at Darnell, still watched Ramona like a sparrow watches the hawk.

  “It just happened,” Ramona answered the question Jen had started to ask. “It just happened.”

  She climbed to her feet and started in the direction Darnell had gone. After a moment, she heard Jen following as well.

  “I couldn’t stop it,” said Jen from behind.

  “If you had, the sun would’ve got you,” Ramona growled.

  She didn’t understand everything that was happening. How could she explain it to them if they couldn’t feel it?

  The next night, they’d arrived in Hayesburg. Ramona had known that Zhavon wasn’t far away. Again, Ramona didn’t know how she could tell. She just knew. There hadn’t been time to seek out the girl right away, however, because Darnell and Jen, in a rare instance of agreement, had insisted on seeking shelter if this was where they were going to stay.

  Ramona had been about to suggest that they didn’t need a building for shelter any more, but she’d seen the anger in Darnell’s eyes, the fear in Jen’s, and decided against it. They’d found the boarded-up school and spent a day there.

  Now, Ramona lay on the floor, her fingers touching the synthetic sealant that protected the natural wood, as the sound of Jen’s footsteps and sobbing receded into the distance.

  I let them have their way this time, Ramona thought. She’d stayed with them this past day here in the school. But what are they afraid of? she wondered. Sinking into the earth to escape the light of the sun had come as naturally to her as… as drinking blood. It’s another part of this… this thing that we’ve all become. Part that they’re not ready for.

  Ramona sat upright on the slick floor, stared at her feet, curled and uncurled the gnarled, clawed toes. There were some things she wasn’t ready for either. Only she didn’t have a choice. Maybe there was nothing wrong with Darnell and Jenny hanging on to what they could of the days before.

  I shouldn’t rush them, Ramona decided. Besides, she had her own problems without making more.

  All night, before Jen had approached her, Ramona had been lying there trying to pinpoint the cause of the urges she was feeling. Back in the days before the change, she had always been very conscious of her own moods and motivations. The change had brought on a whole new set of causes and effects, most of which Ramona had learned through trial and painful error. The laundry list of danger had become a mantra of sorts:

  Beware the sun; it burns flesh.

  Beware lack of blood; the hunger will take control.

  Beware too much blood, the sight and smell; the hunger, again, will take control.

  Beware your own kind; they are everywhere.

  Strangely enough for Ramona, who had never been poetic, the flow of the words had evolved naturally, the rhythm emerging from some hidden place within her, from an inner song that was no longer masked by the sound of a beating heart.

  Tonight, however, Ramona was struggling with a new urge. Or if not new, a compulsion much stronger than she had felt it before.

  Zhavon.

  Ramona knew that the girl had been sent to Hayesburg, her mother hoping that a small town would be more forgiving than the city of the kind of mistake that had almost gotten Zhavon killed— would have gotten Zhavon killed if it hadn’t been for Ramona. The mortal girl’s presence was the reason Ramona had brought her friends here. The Sabbat attack had been a useful excuse. Otherwise Darnell, at least, would’ve put up a struggle, not because he had any better ideas, but because that was what he did. He and Jen had followed Ramona because they were adrift in this new world of the night. Ramona, unintentionally, had stumbled upon a purpose—or rather the hint of a purpose.

  Zhavon.

  What was it, Ramona wondered, that attracted her to the girl, that had, so many nights, consciously or otherwise, directed Ramona’s steps to that neighborhood, that fire escape, that window? She wished she knew, because again she felt drawn to the streets, and though Ramona had not yet explored in any detail this new town, she knew where—or with whom—she would end up.

  As she had for the past few hours, however, Ramona denied herself and remained in the elementary school. She sat alone in the center of the gym and stared, only half-seeing, into the shadows where once children had played, exercised, probably been forced by some sadistic teacher to square dance.

  Why don’t I go to her? Ramona thought. It’s why we’re here—why I brought us here.

  Barely had the unavoidable thought been given voice in her mind than Ramona was outside. She instinctively shied away from the harsh glare of the streetlights. Vague thoughts tugged at her, but they were kept at an arm’s length by her protective armor of hyper-alert physical senses: the chorus of crickets almost drowned out the sound of flapping bat wings around the eaves of the school building; the rich, earthy odor of lawn fertilizer mixed with the diffuse fumes of industry that hung over the town; asphalt underfoot scraped against the pads of her thick soles.

  Ramona gave herself to the sensations. Her powerful muscles and keen reflexes didn’t need her direction to move quickly but warily, to keep out of sight—not that anyone stirred at this hour in the sleepy town, but Ramona’s exposed, monstrous feet didn’t lend themselves any longer to mixing unobtrusively with mortals. She wandered without purpose but knowing full well where her meandering path would inevitably lead.

  The school was no longer in sight. Several blocks away, a dog barked, began a small chain reaction as two more joined in and continued for maybe two minutes—well beyond any memory of what had started them barking. Ramona ignored the lesser urge to find one of them, to curl up beside it and enjoy the warm comfort of a beating heart and a wet tongue. She was very much like them in some ways, but she was also far different.

  Eventually, Ramona found herself standing before a small, ranch-style house in a line of others, a concise rectangle of red bricks shaded near-black in the darkness. How little, Ramona realized, the people in these safe little houses would know of the type of life she’d led as a mortal, much less of the existence that now had been thrust upon her.

  Zhavon’s mother was right to send her here, Ramona thought. There were too many traps in the world without going looking for eve
ry danger the city had to offer.

  Ramona climbed onto a low branch in the tree facing the window—the window. How do I know? she wondered briefly, but she no longer tried to answer all of those questions that confronted her. I know.

  And as her bestial gaze parted the obscuring darkness, she knew also why she had been right to fear coming to this place.

  Thursday, 22 July 1999, 2:31 AM

  Meadowview Lane

  Hayesburg, New York

  Red, gleaming eyes haunted Zhavon’s dreams, and as she crossed the threshold between sleep and wakefulness, everything else faded away, changed.

  But the eyes remained.

  Zhavon blinked hard. She knew that she wasn’t still dreaming, but she felt less than awake. The eyes were still there, outside the window.

  Shouldn’t they be gone? she wondered groggily. I’m awake. They should be gone.

  She half-heartedly thought of calling Aunt Irma—Aunt Irma was as mean as Mama and three times as big; nobody messed with Aunt Irma—but for Zhavon, the proximity of her aunt, the very walls of the house around them, seemed less real than those red eyes.

  Watching.

  Zhavon hadn’t been startled awake. She didn’t run screaming from the eyes beyond the window, but there was a voice deep inside her urging caution. Get Aunt Irma, it said. Call the police. Do it now.

  Was that Mama’s voice, or was it the voice that was always there within Zhavon, the one she usually ignored? She knew it was right this time—the hair standing up on her arms and on the back of her neck told her that much—but it was such a little voice, and every second it seemed so much farther away.

  Her mind dredged up old dangers—the attack, the strange pair of shoes on the fire escape. But those had been back in the city. Back home.

  Get Irma… call the police… now.

  The voice was breaking up like a weak radio station. No. It wasn’t static drowning out the words, she realized. Another sound. The white noise of her own blood flowing, the sound of her pulse amplified as if she held giant seashells over her ears.