All Knight Long

by John G. Hartness

  I didn’t bother to argue with him, just pointed down the tunnel. Rabbit started walking, drawing a pair of long daggers from somewhere in the jumble of hoodies, cargo pants, and long jacket he wore. I had my pistol, and Greg brought up the rear with his pistol-grip Mossberg twelve-gauge. We moved through the pitch black like a trio of shadows flowing along the ground, needing no light to see, even in the pitch black of the sewer.

  The tunnel was huge, way bigger than anything that should have been under a mall parking lot, and it didn’t smell right for a sewer. “What the hell is this place?” I asked in a whisper.

  “I don’t know,” Greg said. “I remember there being rumors of an aborted attempt at a subway back in the 50s. Maybe this was part of that.”

  “I never heard anything like that,” Rabbit said.

  “Me neither, but Greg’s the expert on urban legends. But wherever we are, this is no sewer,” I said.

  “It also ain’t empty,” Rabbit said, pointing ahead. “There’s light up there.” He was right.

  I looked over his head, and it was definitely brighter. We walked another fifty yards or so, and I put a hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. “Hold up,” I whispered, holding a fist in the air to signal Greg to stop. It didn’t work. He ran right into my back and almost bowled me over. So much for watching all those SWAT shows on TV.

  “Why are we stopping?” Greg asked.

  “That’s why,” I said, pointing at the walls ahead of us. On one wall, in foot-high letters, red spray paint shouted out “NEVER FORGET” while pictures and mementoes were stuck to the tunnel wall beneath the words. On the other wall, an arrow of black paint pointed ahead to a single word scrawled in the same black spray paint. “Sanctuary.”

  “What the hell is Sanctuary?” I whispered.

  “I have no idea,” Greg replied.

  “I don’t know either, but I hear something up ahead. Sounds like people.” Rabbit put his knives away, straightened up, and started walking forward like he belonged there. I took a cue from the little Morlock leader and holstered my pistol. Greg slung the shotgun across his back, and we all walked toward the promised Sanctuary with our hands empty and palms open in plain view. We were presenting as little threat as possible. I just hoped trying to appear friendly wouldn’t get us killed.

  We passed the rough memorial, with Rabbit trailing his fingers across several of the pictures, lingering in front of a tattered driver’s license and leaning close. I watched his lips move, but if he actually spoke, it was too low even for me to hear. He turned and looked up at me. “These are Morlocks.” He waved a hand at the wall, his dirty fingernails almost scraping the corners of some of the photos where they peeled off the wall. “All of these people. They’re dead Morlocks.”

  I froze. There were literally hundreds of pictures on the wall. “Wait,” I said. My voice wasn’t much more than a whisper as the enormity of Lilith’s mass murder sank in. “There were . . . this many of them?”

  “No, man,” Rabbit reached out and took hold of the front of my shirt. “There was that many of us. There were hundreds of us, man. At least five hundred scattered around the city. We didn’t all live in the tunnels. Some of us liked it better upstairs, at least at night. Then we’d just duck down into the nearest tunnel for the day. Or we’d hide in an abandoned building, or sometimes just rent a hotel room and sleep in the bathtub. But there were hundreds of Morlocks, Black. Hundreds. And that bitch killed us. She killed us all.”

  He wasn’t kidding, either. I thought back to the vampires I’d seen in the tunnels just hours before. If there were fifty Morlocks left, it was a miracle. “Holy shit. I never knew.”

  Greg reached forward and put a hand on my shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault, Jimmy. Lilith was psychotic. You can’t beat yourself up for what she did.”

  “Can’t I?” I didn’t look at him. I didn’t take my eyes off Rabbit, who looked up at me as fat pink tears streaked down his face. “If I’d kept my nose out of Lilith’s business, would she have killed all those people? Would she have even made her move against Tiram if I hadn’t gotten in the middle of them?”

  “Maybe not, but if you don’t kill Lilith, we’re all true-dead right now, remember? She wasn’t just going to kill all the vampires. She was going to kill all the everybody. You had to take her down.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to focus on the task in front of me. My fight with Lilith, for good or ill, was over. I couldn’t bring these Morlocks back, and I’d done all I could do to get justice for them. Now was time to get justice for Julia O’Connell. If I was going to be Master of this City, it was time to suck it up, own my past mistakes, and lead. “Yeah,” I said. “I took her down. And Tiram. And all her lackeys. Just like I’ll take down every son of a bitch that threatens my city from this moment forward. Now let’s go find out who thinks they need to singlehandedly repopulate the Morlocks of North Carolina, one innocent teenager at a time.”

  I looked at Rabbit, and he nodded. His eyes told a long story, and I knew we still had some unresolved issues between us about my part in the death of the Morlocks. But for now, he was with me, and that was all I could ask for. I stepped past him, my long coat flowing out a little as I strode forward down the tunnel. The time for skulking and sneaking was past. The time to be the Master was upon me, and for maybe the first time, I was ready.

  Chapter 15

  ABOUT TWENTY YARDS past the memorial wall, we came to a corner. Rabbit knelt down and peeked around the corner, then pulled his head back and stood up. “It’s empty,” he said, not even bothering to whisper. “There’s a door maybe fifteen feet ahead, and there’s a sign that says Sanctuary.”

  “I guess we found it,” I said, stepping past him and starting down the hall.

  Greg immediately reached out and dragged me back. “Dude! Come on! You gotta check for traps and surveillance and shit like that first! What if somebody’s watching?”

  I looked down at my best friend of over thirty years. “Dial it down a little, Gygax. We ain’t knocking on Tiamat’s back door. We’re walking up to a door in a tunnel under an abandoned mall in North Carolina. Besides, what kind of camera can see in pitch black? It’s not like we put off a lot of infrared.” I shook off his hand and walked around the corner.

  Rabbit was right, set into the tunnel was a standard metal door, the kind you see in buildings all over the world. There was a sign on it that read “Sanctuary—Abandon All Pain, Ye Who Enter Here.” I walked up to the door and put my hand on it. From the other side I heard a low thrum, like machinery, or a lot of people talking. I put my head to the door to listen closer, but nothing came through.

  “Oh well, in for a penny, and all that,” I said, turning the knob and pushing the door open. I had a fleeting hope that the sign wasn’t some modern-day “Arbeit Macht Frei” irony, and stepped through.

  I immediately covered my eyes as light flooded in from the opening. Blinded, I side-stepped and ducked the attack I was certain was coming, and rammed my shoulder right into someone standing by the door.

  “Ooof!” came a grunt, then, “It’s okay, calm down. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Just give your eyes a second to adjust.” A pair of hands latched on to my upper arm and steadied me, then straightened me up a little. Another pair of hands materialized in front of my face, these holding a pair of dark sunglasses. The hands slipped the shades onto my eyes, and I could see a little better. The hands in front of me belonged to a slim girl vampire turned at about twenty, while a stocky male vamp turned at around forty held my arm. I straightened myself and stepped back a step to survey my surroundings.

  “Thanks,” I said, disengaging from the man on my arm. “I appreciate it.” My eyes felt pretty good, so I took off the shades, thankful for the speed of undead healing.

  “Holy shit, it’s bright in here!” I heard from behind me as Greg and Rabbit came through the doors.
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br />   “It’s okay, guys,” I said. “Let them help you.”

  “I’m good,” Greg said. “You let enough light into the tunnel that I covered my eyes.”

  I turned to look at my partner, and almost fell over laughing. He was original, no doubt about that, but fashion-conscious wasn’t exactly a term I’d use to describe Greg Knightwood. He had a black balaclava on, of course, because what self-respecting superhero/Special Forces operative wannabe wouldn’t wear a balaclava with his tactical gear? But Greg, being both inventive and impatient, didn’t wait for his eyes to adjust to the light, he just spun the high-tech ski mask around so that his face was completely covered, cutting out most of the light. And making him look like Frosty the Blackface Snowman. I had to hand it to him, the man knew how to make an entrance.

  “No ski mask, Rabbit?” I asked.

  He looked at Greg feeling his way along the wall. “Nah. I’d rather be blind than look like that. So what is this place?”

  “Like I know? I got here ten seconds before you did.” I turned to the man beside me. “So what is this place?” I repeated.

  “Welcome to Sanctuary,” the man said. “I am Brother Ryan. This is Sister Sandra. We have welcome duty today.”

  “That’s a nice way to say sentry,” I said with a wry smile. I handed Sandra back her sunglasses. “Thanks.”

  “We are not guards or sentries,” the girl said. “We are the welcoming committee, if you will. It is our honor to bring you into Sanctuary and make you feel at home. You can relax. You’re safe now.” From the mild smile on her face, I could tell that she actually believed what she said. I looked her and Ryan up and down and didn’t see a weapon anywhere. They really weren’t guards, because if anything got in, these two sure weren’t going to stop anybody with ill intent.

  “What exactly are you welcoming us to?” I asked. “What is this place?”

  “It is nothing more or less than its name,” Sandra replied. “This is Sanctuary. It is a haven for our kind, far from the dangers of the surface world. Here we can live as we choose, without fear of the sun and its fire, without being hunted by the humans, and without the rule of false masters.”

  I felt that one a little. I was pretty sure that meant me, whether she knew who I was or not. “So what? Nobody’s in charge? You’ve just got a nice little hippie commune of vampires in an abandoned subway tunnel and nobody fights? Sounds . . . even better than I heard,” I corrected mid-sentence to add in that last bit when I saw suspicion start to blossom on her round face.

  Her beatific smile returned, and it looked like I dodged that bullet. “Oh no, we certainly have our arguments. But we settle them amongst ourselves. We have the same challenges as every family does, with the added challenges of needing to forage for food without running afoul of the surface leaders, the sewer-dwellers, or the humans.”

  “Seems complicated,” I said. “Why not just ally yourselves with either the Morlocks or the people topside?”

  “Alexander says that neither group would accept us living the way we want to live. He says the Morlocks are all dirty hooligans who would want to take away our nice things, and that the Master is a false leader who would draw us into his petty wars and get us all killed. Alexander keeps us safe here.”

  I had to admit, the place was nice. While she talked, Sister Sandy walked me from the door down a wide tunnel that opened out into what must have at one time been a planned subway station. It was huge, big enough for a couple of basketball courts to fit side by side, and tall, too. There was plenty of light from warm yellow LED fixtures, and a couple dozen big tents and small outbuildings like toolsheds ringing the room. More tunnels led off from the main area, and there were at least thirty vampires roaming to and fro, carrying laundry and chatting, some just sitting at tables reading. There was a small stage at one end of the room, maybe fifteen by twenty, with folding tables set up with chairs around them. The seats were empty at the moment, but the arrangement looked like where the boss would sit during meals.

  “Looks like a medieval feast hall,” I said. “The king sits up there and looks down on his subjects, I guess?”

  “Oh no,” Sandra corrected me. “Alexander does sit at the front table, yes, with two or three advisors, but the rest of the table is open to whoever wants to join them, or anyone who has ideas for Alexander. I sit there at least once a week just to chat with . . .” Her voice trailed off, and a faint blush crept across her face.

  “You got a little crush on King Alex?” I teased.

  “No!” she said. “Alexander is way too old for me. I’m barely fifty. He’s been around since before the Civil War. No, I’m . . . friends with Jacob, one of his engineers. He’s a little younger than me, only about thirty, and turned just a couple of years ago. But he’s very smart. I think he’ll do well with us. He’s the one who figured out how to tap the gas lines and get the stoves going.”

  “How long has all this been here?” Greg had caught up to us by now, along with a very subdued Rabbit.

  “Two years. Ever since the murders.” Sandra’s face darkened, and I knew she didn’t want to talk about the massacre. I didn’t care, I needed to know.

  “Were you here then?” I asked.

  “No. I just moved to Charlotte about a year ago. I ran into some trouble with the Master in my last city, so I decided to come down here. I heard the Master was dead, and there wasn’t really anybody running things, so that sounded pretty good to me.” It sounded pretty bad to me, like I needed to hire a better PR department. Then I remembered that I didn’t have a PR department. I smiled encouragingly and waited for her to continue.

  “So I was kinda hanging out, doing my own thing, when I was out hunting one night and I ran into some of the guys from here at a club. I didn’t know if I was in somebody’s territory, and if there was going to be trouble, but Ryan just came up to me at the bar, bought me a drink, and asked if I was new in town.” She laughed a little. “It was kinda like when I was alive, back when guys used to try to pick me up. So I told him I was, and he asked if I needed a place to crash, that he and his friends were part of a group that had a decent place to live that was safe in the daytime, and as long as I wasn’t planning on killing my dinner, I was welcome to come with them.”

  “And that sounded good to you?” Greg asked.

  “Man, yeah. I’d been on the road from Miami for three weeks, sleeping in the trunks of abandoned cars, hiding in empty storage lockers, all kinds of shit. I even spent the day huddled in the bottom of an ice machine at a Motel 6 one time! So all I had to do to get in with a bunch of vamps that would watch my back during the day was not kill somebody? I was in like Flynn, man. I don’t kill people. That’s not my thing, never has been. So I came down here with Ryan, hung out for a few days, and then I met Alexander. That’s when I knew I was in the right place.”

  “What is it about Alexander that made you want to stay?” I asked. I was getting a very different vibe from her about this guy than Rabbit had given me. Rabbit made Alexander sound like bloodthirsty megalomaniac who hated me and wanted to wear my guts around his neck like a Grand Guignol version of Mr. T. But now Sandra was making him sound like Buddha, or Jesus. So I wasn’t sure if I was going to be meeting Gandhi or David Koresh.

  “He’s just got a good plan, you know? We hang out down here during the day, some of us have jobs where we telecommute or do contract gigs like web design or copywriting where we don’t ever have to interact with our clients personally. Other folks who have more hands-on kind of skills work to make the whole place better for everybody. Then at night we can hunt, or play, or go out, or party. We do whatever we want, as long as we live by Alexander’s rules.”

  “What are those rules, exactly?” Greg asked.

  Sandra looked at him with a big smile on her face. “I hoped you’d ask. We never kill. We never drink from the same person twice. We don’t hunt e
very day. We don’t hunt the same part of town more than once in a week. We don’t mess with cops, firefighters, or EMTs. Anybody that’s working a job like that, we leave them alone. We don’t turn anybody—ever. That’s like the one unforgivable sin. Alexander says we’re not here to make more vampires, we’re just here to rescue the ones that are already here.”

  “Sounds like paradise,” I said.

  “It’s as close as anything I’ve ever found, and I’ve been looking a long time. We don’t mess with the human crap that the Masters deal with, and we don’t deal with other supernaturals, like the lycanthropes or witches, or other magical creatures. That keeps us out of politics, and keeps us safer. We just hang out, take the occasional nibble from one of the million blood donors topside, and otherwise do what we like. It’s the best place I’ve ever lived, including when I was alive.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said. And it was. The operation looked pretty good. The place was spotless, warm, well lit, and everybody walking by stopped to give a pleasant nod or a wave. And nobody was armed. That was the other big difference between this place and Morlock City. Every Morlock was packing, all the time, no matter what. I’d never seen Rabbit without at least two knives on him that I could see, and I knew full well there were probably another half dozen I couldn’t see. But if these folks were armed, they had their shit tucked away somewhere in their very clean jeans, skirts, and T-shirts.

  “Can I get you something to eat? We don’t keep much blood on hand, but I’m sure I could rustle up a few bags from the canteen.” Sandra waved her hand over to a large tent in the center of the room by the picnic tables. There were several refrigerators humming away, each labeled with A, B, O, or AB.

  “How do you get power down here?” Greg asked.

  “Oh we have everything,” Sandra said. “A couple of the guys used to work in construction, or for utilities, and they figured out how to tap into one of the switching stations and reroute some power between meters. We’ve got cable and high-speed internet, too.”