Crucified: The Rise of an Urban Legend (Swann Series Book 9)

by Ryan Schow

  Holy shit, I can’t help thinking. This isn’t a person, this is a bomb.

  Everything in me compacts and stretches out, my body severely at odds with itself. If a war is brewing, am I ready for it? I’m not. But I can be if needed. Shaking away the nerves, my muscles strained and ready, I force my body into fight mode. Alice Jr.’s black eyes zero in on something, someone.

  What are they sensing that I’m not?

  “Ten seconds,” this timeline’s version of Alice says. Turning ever so briefly, she says, “It’s good to see you, Savannah, but this is not your fight. She brought you here to watch, so relax, and watch.”

  Some of the tension leaves my body, but some remains.

  Alice Jr. extends a hand before her, palm up, her other hand churning the air above it. A wraithlike glow appears, brighter than the sun, torrid. I take a step back as it expands in size and temperature. What the hell is coming, and how is young Alice summoning this kind of fire?

  More of the haze has burned off, showing me the park. People appear in the roasted gloom. Like sheep led to slaughter.

  I watch, and oh my God, a pack of bone thin men appear before a family of nine. The pack is five; the family is herded by the men until they are trapped in the circle of wraiths. The family is corralled together, terrified. These five wily creatures could be coyotes for how lean and hungry and predatory they look.

  One of the girls in the family makes a run for it, heading for the widest gap in the circle. She races through, but this is a game to the predators. They can stop her. They let her get away instead.

  Then, one of the men leaps into the air to impossible heights, landing on her back, both feet crushing her spine. The girl is driven face down with an ooof!

  She can’t breathe, even though she’s still alive. The four members of the family break into terrified, protective screaming, but the remaining men hold them captive as they just stand there, silent, brooding, smiling their creepy smiles.

  “We should do something,” I hear myself say.

  Alice of this time doesn’t reply.

  The beast attacking the girl, he grabs her by the hair, and I swear to Jesus, half his face opens up to a maw of teeth and a long, forked tongue. I zero in on them, my vision better than ever. The tongue moves gracefully, like a snake ready to strike.

  “Alice, you need to let me intervene!” I turn and say.

  The air is nearly clear at that point. I turn back around and, my God, those teeth! There are double rows of them, all Parana sharp, all perfectly capable of shredding whatever they tear in to. When the creature’s mouth finally clamps down, it’s on the girl’s neck.

  Like an attack dog sinking its fangs into its prey, the thing whips its head violently back and forth, the spray and slop of carnage downright vile. When the creature’s mouth finally rips free, there is no arterial spray as much as there’s just a ruined, drained girl.

  “Vampires?” I ask future Alice beside me, mortified, confounded, scared.

  “Sort of,” she says. “These ones are immune to sunlight.”

  Sitting on the plane, I’m wide awake, my face pale, a pain in my gut that feels like an air bubble, one so large I nearly double over from the pressure. Even though my eyes are open here, I can’t stop thinking of there.

  I remember everything…

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene unfolding. The remaining family tried to reason with those things, but the pack was not listening. It was almost like they couldn’t understand the language, or even words for that matter.

  One moved forward. The leader. He was large, his fingers long, at least twice the length of my fingers and claw-like.

  I drew my gaze away from the horror unfolding, turned to Alice Jr., who was twenty feet away, and now putting off blast furnace heat, her body lit to a bright, unexplainable glow.

  The creatures in the park rushed the family in a blur and it all got bloody from there. That’s when I realized the heat coming from young Alice was burning my clothes, my skin, my hair. I don’t care. I told myself I’d heal.

  But this…this family…they weren’t going to heal at all.

  A hot hand took mine again, pulled me back. It was future Alice. “You can’t do anything for them.”

  “I…I can’t…those things…” I stammered, unable to form complete sentences.

  “Young Alice will deal with them now.”

  Just then a deluge of fire thundered from Alice Jr’s hands, almost like dragon’s breath, consuming the vampire things and the family, who were already too far gone. When she was done, the park was in flames. The fire wielding child hunched over the slightest bit, breathing heavy, covering her mouth so as not to ingest the ash, or the smoking ruins of the dead.

  She collapsed, sat down hard, planted a hand to keep her weary body from collapsing completely.

  “You should have done that,” I told older Alice. “Not her.” I go after the child, sadistic as she is, but future Alice’s hand grabs my arm, burning it.

  “Don’t touch me, Alice.”

  She held on, not letting go even the slightest bit.

  “She needs to do this alone,” future Alice said, only steps behind me now. “This is how she learns to control her fire. This is how she learns to manifest flame without taking it from herself. She must fall a thousand times before she realizes the truth of what she is.”

  “Which is?” I’d asked. Glancing down at Alice Jr., I shook her hand off my blistering skin.

  “A psychic vampire, but not like them,” future Alice says. “She does not sustain herself through the blood of others. Rather she can pull from the energy of others to strengthen the fire within herself without falling before its effects. She hates that I force this upon her, but she also understands the necessity. And that is why she is so mad at you. Why I was so mad. You did not do what you were supposed to do. You did not stop Adolf Hitler in the twentieth as you were supposed to, and so you didn’t stop this.”

  “What does Hitler have to do with anything?” I asked, dumbfounded that he would have something to do with this.

  “Who do you think set off the first bombs? Those in 2024? You can’t even begin to imagine the series of events that catastrophe kicked off. This is a domino effect.”

  “Is Hitler dead?” I asked.

  She laughed, a small chuckle at first. And then she laughed a little louder, more of a bitter ruckus leaving her throat. But then, thankfully, she stopped.

  “Of course he’s not dead,” she all but hissed.

  Slowly I shook my head. Not at her divulgence, but because I’ve now realized the full affect me not killing that shit bird dictator has had on the world.

  The air was growing unnaturally thick again, a choking heat boiling over like a steadily mounting fog. A dirty, smelly fog. The park and its carnage became cloaked before me, cutting my lines of visibility to about ten or fifteen feet.

  I turned to Alice and said, “I can stop this.”

  “And you will. And then this timeline and I will cease to exist, never having known we ever existed at all. This is the beauty and the calamity of time travel. You throw chaos into an otherwise balanced system, and it counterbalances beautifully.”

  “Yet here you are, training a child to kill.”

  “She needs to learn to harness her power, to unleash it, so that it is not a mystery to her, or something that happens when she gets upset. This is about control.”

  “Sure it is,” I say, studying the healing wounds on my arm from where Alice just burnt me.

  “Watch,” future Alice said. “Just watch what an experienced pyrokinetic can do.”

  “A pyrokinetic?”

  “Someone who can conjure and control fire,” she said.

  She looked left, then extended and arm, like she was reaching for something. Then she reached right with her other hand and the air around me crackled to life with energy, making the hair on my arms stand once more, but for a very different reason. She then thrust both hands into the sky
and her entire body pulled in on itself with such tension, a funneling of the air around us drew the raining ash toward her.

  Light and heat infused her arms, but strangely, that was not the most startling thing. What looked like twin pillars of fire exploded out of her hands and into the sky a hundred feet. The flamethrowers set the sky on fire, searing the edges of the ash in a glittery show of fiery brilliance. The drawing of air sucked the ashy fog from the park, revealing dozens upon dozens of these vampire things now going after new people who were clearly in the fight of their lives.

  I didn’t know how this was possible. It didn’t seem possible that this was happening, but my eyes weren’t lying to me, that much I could say.

  Alice then dropped her fire on both vampires and humans alike. The last of the flames shot from her body and her smoldering arms dropped to rest at her side.

  One look at her told me she was unaffected.

  “I will no longer exist, but young Alice will have what she needs in your timeline, so she is ready for whatever future unfolds.”

  The smoke of a hundred bonfires rolled through the park like a fast moving cloud in our direction, but then he was there: the creep in the three piece suit, the unaffected thing. The smoke boiled around him, never enveloping him, just swirling out of his way, like it knew something…

  Half his face yawned open, the right side falling lower than the left, its mouth torn open, his face and teeth stained and dripping red. Face taught, eyes shivering mad, his hands at his side became claws—long, bony talons. The screech that came from its mouth was one of unfettered rage. Alice killed his pack. I had to kill it.

  “I see you mother fucker,” I growled, hands at the ready.

  The vampire was suddenly a blur, launching after us. In those fractions of a second, I was preparing to turn this terrifying thing inside out when something blasted him hard from the side: Alice Jr.

  “What the hell?” my mouth said.

  “It’s time for you to go,” future Alice answered. She was pulling off her hood, assessing the situation with new eyes. “You need to fix this and now you know how.”

  “What about Alice Jr.?”

  “What about her?” future Alice asked.

  “She’s not ready for this.”

  “She will be,” Alice answered. Those eyes of hers were no longer seeing me. They were elsewhere, sensing the threats, scoping out the landscape, preparing.

  “What about you?” I asked as Alice Jr. mounted this thing and pumped fire into his body by touch alone.

  I turned back, looked at future Alice. With a wicked, serial-killer-like grin, her eyes turning so black again they were as hard looking as polished diamonds, she said, “I’m ready for anything.”

  New layers of smoke and ash were drifting down, becoming alive with the start of vampire screeching. It got louder, like coyotes, but worse. It almost sounded like they were coming for us. I couldn’t leave Alice Jr. I refused to.

  Then like a boss, future Alice conjured her flames and sent them blasting toward the source of the noise with an earth-shaking roar. I stood back, the heat explosive. Fire exploded out of future Alice’s mouth, blowing back the smoke, revealing hundreds of vampires pouring into the park from surrounding buildings. The wall of fire consumed them all and that (and my absolute, unabashed horror) was my cue to leave.

  “Let’s go, Alice,” I screamed at the younger one. She turned and was glowering at me, but then her face went perfectly blank, which was her entering her return time and coordinates into the time travel dashboard in her mind. I wasted no time doing the same.

  So yeah, that was just a couple of days ago.

  “Would you like another drink?” the stewardess asks me, pulling me back into the now. Awareness returns as I blink back into reality.

  At this point, we’re somewhere over Arizona.

  “Sprite, please,” I say.

  My stomach is unsettled. Part of me thinks I can still taste the ash from that apocalyptic wasteland. Somewhere in my stomach, it’s there: the airborne residue of 2147. But I can’t think about it. I can’t think like that.

  I must fix this.

  “Thought you’d gone into a trance,” the woman next to me says. “Just sat there with your unblinking eyes for like ten minutes straight. Sort of freaked me out.”

  I look at her, at the serious nature of her, and I say, “I appreciate your concern, but your kid’s over there trying to steal that boy’s iPad.”

  She turns and looks at the struggle across the aisle. Her son is trying to wiggle another boy’s electronics out of his hands, and now the parents are getting involved. There’s squealing and it reminds me of the future I just came from. Dread pours into me. A kind of PTSD. With my mind, I crack the iPad in half and split it down the middle, then everyone is dumbfounded.

  And me?

  I turn to the window and stare outside, wondering if this life of mine will ever be as uncomplicated as those blue, blue skies.

  Chapter Seven

  Adolf Hitler landed in the middle of a small, medieval room with a very tall ceiling that appeared to be constructed entirely of quarried stone and hand scraped woods. The chill hit him immediately. It cut straight to his bones. He stepped backwards, bumped into a tub—the rim catching him mid-thigh. His olfactory senses flared. The air smelled dank, coppery, old. He hugged himself to ward off the chill, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  The absolute silence alone was bitter and compressing!

  Overhead, at the top of what looked like a twelve foot ceiling, was the 16th century answer to a skylight. Slivers of indirect moonlight made seeing possible, but only after his eyes had a chance to adjust to the lunar light.

  He found a countertop, myriad candles. He felt through them, finding the longest, thickest one. He then fingered the wick, felt the stiffness in one and found it waxy, unburnt. He took that one, but knew in the bathroom he’d find no way to light it. He could see now, though, with the overhead light, so he moved around the room, not only to get a better idea of the space, but to find a door out of there.

  He returned to the bathtub, stopped. The moon was directly overhead now, nearly full, and it provided direct light into the tub. Inside, rust colored stains looked thick and dry, but once heavy and viscous. Squinting his eyes, he peered deeper inside, then stood back in awe. It looked like entire cows had been slaughtered in there. The blood, however, was not of bovine descent as much as he knew The Countess preferred to bathe in the gore of young girls.

  Hundreds of them.

  Overhead, two giant meat hooks hung directly over the bathtub. This had his imagination spurring to life.

  In his mind, he could see Countess Bathory now, luxuriating in a bathtub filled with the blood of the young, a child or two overhead, hanged upside down and gored, their life-force generously filling her tub.

  Moving from the bathroom into the castle itself was daunting, even to him. The hallway was wide, bare stone and wooden floors, and the ceilings were inordinately tall and shrouded in so much darkness, his eyes had no chance to adjust. It took him the better part of an hour to find her, and only because he’d been fortunate to have enough moonlight cutting through enough windows to make his way to the kitchen where a constant fire burned, one he could use to light his candle.

  The Countess Bathory had been caught.

  The common folk who caught her had locked her in her own castle, bricked her into a room with a heavy door locked from the outside. Because she was royalty, her slaughter of more than six hundred girls earned her not a death sentence, but life confined to a prison cell inside her castle built specifically for her. The guard assigned to watch over the imprisoned countess was asleep. He was snoring heavily, as if he’d found his way into the otherworld of night at the bottom of a few pints of local ale.

  The keys to a heavy wooden door sat on the table beside him.

  Adolf collected them slowly, silently. The guard’s snoring stopped and he shifted in his seat. Adolf was prepare
d to end the man’s life if needed, but he did not want the struggle.

  The heavy breathing returned, the snoring, the open-mouth noise making.

  Adolf moved forward, sliding the big metal key into the wooden door’s oversized lock. The hanging mechanism sprung open easily. Quietly throwing the latch, his hand pressed to the iron to muffle his entry, Adolf opened the door, taking the big lock inside with him. No sense in risking capture like that.

  Ever so quietly, he eased the door shut behind him.

  The Countess was asleep on the floor, her body in mild disrepair. A thrill shot through him at the sight of her, at the labored sounds of her breathing.

  To be here with her, as I live and breathe!

  He was a bit star struck. As an avid student of history’s most notorious mass murderers, Adolf considered this moment to be one of the most exciting highlights of his very, very long life.

  As quiet as he could be, he sat down on the cold, hardwood floor next to this enchanting murderess. Could she really be history’s first vampire? Even if she wasn’t, she’d been graced with the honorary title of the world’s first female serial killer, and that in itself was thrilling!

  To Adolf, she was a legend, something to behold. She did not have legions of men and women spanning an entire continent put to death as he had, but she was no slouch either. The woman knew what she wanted and she took it.

  As a member of high nobility, The Countess was not only given the castle, she was given the seventeen surrounding villages as well. From her kingdom, she lured young girls inside where she slayed them, bathed in their blood and drank them like wine, all with the idea of preserving her beauty, her vitality.

  Though modern day men and women believe in the buoyancy of youth—so much so that drinking the blood of the young is thought to not only preserve but even restore their own youth and vitality—Elizabeth Bathory was simply mad with bloodlust. In studying her methodology, he believed the kill was every bit as important as the spoils of such a routine conquest.

  He brushed her uncut hair over her face, studied her sleeping form. The way the candlelight flickered off the walls and off her pale skin made this new version of Adolf Hitler simmer with lust. He roared with need not for her body—a body now withering away—but for the power of a child in possession of both his and her DNA. Slowly, he rolled the woman on her back. Several times she stirred, but did not wake.