by JN Moon
“What the shit just happened?” Marcus spluttered. Even for us, we were both out of breath.
“I have no clue. What the Hell was all that?” I sat down on the floor to cool down and get my breath back.
“Where did those drones come from, and Rachel’s house!”
“As much as it makes me feel sick saying this, and even saying it makes me feel like I’m jinxing something, have we fallen into another time loop? Is that what that roar of thunder and blackness was? At least we both have experience and should be able to get our way home, as long as we don’t end up dead first!”
“I don’t know, Anthony, this is nothing like the time loop we were in! This is our world with drones. And the houses—that security, bars on windows. Something’s definitely screwed up here. We need to find the others. We’ll have to edge around the city, stick to the tree lines and plan it out. Why were they firing at us? And who the fuck are they?”
The building we took shelter in was an old Victorian industrial structure. It hadn’t been used for decades, and I wanted to speak with the others hidden thereabout to find out what was happening. Almost midnight now after that bizarre and terrifying incident, the adrenalin sweeping through me and pangs of hunger stabbed at my belly. As we crept around, we both jumped suddenly when we heard sirens going off around the city. What now? It was like being in a dystopian parallel reality.
Marcus looked at me. I saw blue lights flashing outside, but to my relief they kept on going past the window. I sensed tension in that place from others hiding there and through the thick dust and rubble of the decay, I went in search of answers.
I didn’t have to look far as the other immortals there were seeking us out. They looked ragged, not like the foul beasts that turned me, but their clothing and appearance made it obvious that they lived rough permanently.
“Who are you?” a voice barked at me.
I could see a vampire partially hidden in the shadows. I had so many questions, but better to answer his first. Marcus answered, “I’m Marcus, and this is Anthony. You’re vampires, like us?”
The vampire looked apprehensive and his group of four stood with their backs to the entrance of the room as if ready to flee at any second. Grime so thick it looked like a coating of brown skin mixed with rust red on the archaic machinery that lay to waste, and a fierce wind blew through the vandalised windows.
Trying to muster his authority and courage, the young male vampire stepped forward a little into the light, “Where are you from? You’re not like us. We haven’t seen you before. Why is that?”
“We haven’t been here before,” I answered honestly.
“Are they hunting you? If you’ve been seen, they won’t stop until they’ve captured you.”
“No, we just arrived here. We’re looking for some old friends. Nathaniel, Damien, and Nicolas. Do you know of them? Two of them at least are vampires. Damien is a hybrid.”
At that last word, the young vampire’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. He looked at me with hostility. “You’re looking for a hybrid? Are you fucking mad? You are friends with them?”
I knew there was something wrong here—terribly wrong. There is bigotry in the supernatural world, but generally not this fierce.
“Damien is half vampire, half demon,” Marcus answered calmly.
The vampire nodded and looked somewhat calmer. “I see, I thought you meant...the blood angels. Where have you come from and how do you both look so clean? How do you exist?”
By this point I could detect no threat from him. I looked to Marcus who nodded slightly in agreement. We would need help in this Hellhole and that meant trusting someone. We had to start somewhere.
“Before we tell you, can we go somewhere else? It doesn’t feel safe here, even for a vampire.” But as I finished speaking, I heard a screech so loud we had to cover our ears. He didn’t speak, just signalled his head in the direction of the door to follow him.
They led us to a damp basement and two of them pushed shut a heavy wooden door, and we all waited in silence for ages.
Whispering he spoke, “That was close.” A tiny candle barely lit up the room filled with ancient looking machinery and rubbish. And dust. But it smelt worse than it looked. I couldn’t discern much more of our surroundings, and then I told them what had happened.
“We were following a child in the city, and found him speaking to some vampires. They were dressed in Victorian costume and wearing masks. Then a flash of lightning, a roar of thunder, and the next thing they had vanished and we were chased by drones! Drones; where did they come from?”
He frowned, looked at the others who shrugged, then asked me, “What do you mean? Where do you come from? We’ve had drones for nearly a decade now. I don’t understand you.”
Marcus interjected, “This must be a time loop or something, we live in Bath. But it seems not in the same time...or something.” He joined this vampire in frowning, too.
“A time loop? No, this isn’t a time loop, this is the twenty-first century, pure and simple.” Closing his eyes for a second, the vampire continued, “There was a tale, more of a legend, that said the first of them was stolen from time and taken back to the year of eighteen-hundred and something.”
“Who was taken?” I asked. As soon as the words left my mouth I could feel Marcus’s stare boring into me. “Orion? Those masked vampires? No, that’s inconceivable. I’ve heard some stuff, seen more than I’ve wanted, but no...” I shook my head in disbelief.
Marcus wasn’t always known for his patience. Or his sense. Rather than continue with the story of the fact that we may have witnessed the incident that caused this shift, he asked, “These blood angels, have you ever seen one?”
“Most of us haven’t. Few have and lived to tell. They’re ruthless. They like nothing more than to feed on other immortals, our blood being more potent. They don’t look like us, they’re bigger. Their hands are like claws, their wings and skin are dark and touched red from all the blood they gorge on. No one, not even us, goes out after the alarms. And like you, they have wings.”
“That was a curfew?”
“How the hell don’t you know this? Who are you?”
My mind spun with all this new information and this horrible situation. Bloody hell...
My words tumbled out fast. “I think we’ve come from another time or dimension. We know of these blood angels, but where we are from they’re only children and there are only three. In our world, there are no drones that shoot at you, no curfew, and our kind, we live well.”
“I want to visit your world.” The vampire’s face lit up as if we could offer him paradise.
“How do you hunt, if you are hunted?” I asked.
“Not easily. Most of us have survived on the outskirts of cities, going out before the curfew and we have to hunt in packs. We used technology at first. That worked and it was safe, but those bastards, both government and blood angels, managed to decipher that and track us. So now we have to hunt as our ancestors, except they weren’t hunted by something far worse.”
“So how do the mortals cope?”
“They have personal drones, in and outside their homes. Drones fitted with guns, tranquillisers. Cameras monitor everywhere. Everything is on lock down at eleven anyway, unless you have a permit. That requires either signing one at your own risk, but they don’t usually allow that because the blood angels might turn you into one of their own. They increased their numbers before the curfews came. Or you need extra security, and even if you buy it, it has to be from those crazy or desperate enough to provide you with it.”
“Oh God!” I sat back in the filth to try to comprehend the disaster. Marcus figured it out quicker...
“Orion! Those masked vampires snatched him... That must have been why they were dressed like that. They were from an earlier century! A time loop. I think we know how this happened.”
As I heard the words and pieced it together, tension gripped my body. “And that place, I was only thinki
ng earlier how it is the oldest section of the city, and how many paranormals dwell there,” I groaned.
We looked at each other, and I spoke. “If we could get back to that place—it may have to be the same time, hell, the same date—in theory we could skip into that loop and stop all this. Are we on drugs or something?” I had to laugh, to release the fear and the intensity of our situation.
“God, I wish we were. Drugs would be easy compared. That is the best plan we have. What was the date it happened? 30th April 2016? What is it now?”
The other vampire spoke. “18th February; thereabouts.”
“What year?”
“2016, so you’ve only time travelled back two months then!” he sniggered.
“Two months. I don’t want to wait for two months living like this. Can you help us find our friends and tell us of, of this place?”
“What, this old building?” He grinned. I couldn’t blame him, it was incredible but I wasn’t about to live in the gutter, hunted by man and immortals.
“Nathaniel, nope never heard of him. Nor Nicolas. There are very few of us here. We’ll help you, if you help us.
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Kyle. This is Nikki, Anne, and Trish. We live like rats. Once, I’m told, we lived like kings.”
“Kyle, I can’t promise you’ll live like a king, but if you help us, you will be, by default, helping yourselves. We have to try and find our friends, but maybe they’re not here... God, I hate these time loop things.”
Marcus took me aside. “It’s confusing, but if they’ve taken Orion back in time, these blood angels are no doubt his descendants. We probably won’t find the others. They may not even exist in this reality. But that place where we saw the masked vampires, that must be where the time loop or whatever it is, right? I think first we need to know more about this time; we can’t navigate through a terrain we don’t know.”
That was the best start. And trusting Kyle and his friends seemed a good choice; they knew their time and could show us.
“We’d like to be included in your conversations, if we’re to help each other!” Kyle added.
“We know where in the city Orion was taken, and we know who by, although we know nothing about them. He was snatched by masked vampires dressed in nineteenth century clothing, just like your legends told. Once they grabbed him, a crash of thunder blasted and everything went pitch black. Then we arrived here. That must be a time loop, of sorts.”
Kyle spoke slowly, his eyes darting around the room, “So, you’re saying, I think, that you two come from a parallel reality? In your reality, Orion, and the others like him are children. In our time”—he gestured to his friends—“our time now, this is the result of those masked vampires stealing Orion and taking him back in time. Because of that, because of what they have done, he has bred and we have this plague of his kind in our reality?”
“Exactly that!” Marcus replied and sighed loudly.
Trish spoke next. She, like all of them, looked ready to fight, wearing urban combat clothing. Jeans, custom-made armour, and boots, with an array of weapons strapped to their hips and legs. She was tall and curvaceous. Her dark hair fell down her shoulders, but this wasn’t a fashion statement. She hit me as a survivor, a warrior. “If you find the time loop entrance, and you get in, you’ll have to find Orion. Then you’ll have to bring him back, somehow. But how will you know where you’ll end up? You could go anywhere. And even if you get to the nineteenth century, you’ll still have to find him. And, I’m not being rude, but neither of you look like you belong in that century.”
The others looked at each other uneasily. Nikki spoke to us all. Contrary to Trish, her hair was purest white. They all looked like vampire warriors from the future, which I guess they were—an alternative dystopian future that I had no desire to stay in.
“I know what you’re thinking; they’ll need help. As I see it, they need the help of a necromancer, and there’s not many of them left.” Nikki paused here, her eyes scrunched as she thought. “We do know of a few, but they are dangerous and erratic.”
“Your world is dangerous and erratic, I don’t see what choice we have,” I said softly. I was less concerned than them about these blood angels. Heck, I’d drink them before they could kill me. Maybe that would get me killed, but I’d rather that than die on my knees.
“But first, tell us of your world, tell us everything,” I asked. “How long has it been like this? The drones, the blood angels, the curfews?”
Their daggers caught the gleam of that meagre candlelight in the basement of the building. Kyle commanded a towering figure, but he had a gentleness about him. None of them had a mean streak; they were tired of this exhausting existence.
One of the female vampires spoke in answer to my question. “It has always been like this for us. I was made vampire, like Kyle and Trish and Nikki sometime in the last two decades. Those of us with family that are still alive, very occasionally we look on them but we cannot seek them out fully. There is too much danger for them and us. What else do you want to know?”
I nodded as I took in her information. “In my life I live well as a vampire. I have sources of income and a place to live, as does Marcus. We even have an app to trace evil doers. We collect their digital information and those of their acquaintances. Under normal circumstances, though to be honest I haven’t had many of those, we have no threats.”
They looked astonished. “We don’t have money in this age. There is no need, everyone does what their talent or passion draws them to. Everything is on a credit system—food, housing, entertainment. Everyone is registered,” Anne continued.
“As we are not on the radar so to speak, not being human, we have to live out here. Everything is controlled, every person accounted for. The humans live well. About thirty years ago, society changed. Living was too perilous. Blood angels were growing in number, most die at their hands, some are changed. The governments made a decision; humans would strive to be better, to do what their talents possessed, and not to labour for money or materialism. Living so close to death daily inspired a new world order. But with that came control. Money is only available through criminal means, bartering is the only real form of currency now.”
Marcus and I were silent for some time. It was an apocalyptic nightmare. As Anne had said, living in such close proximity of death had made the authorities re-examine human existence, but it also gave people less control.
Marcus asked, “The drones? So many...”
“They are mainly for human protection. Blood angels do on occasion go into the city. They used to go in day or night. Policing that with people is too heavy on manpower so they developed drones with the capability of firing. They obviously monitor the mortals, but I do believe in the main it’s for their protection,” Anne answered. “Either way, you cannot sustain a population that turns entirely into vampires—hybrid or otherwise.”
As she finished, as if on cue, we heard the screeching again far off in the distance of one of those creatures. It sent shivers down my spine and a hush fell over us.
“They are a hybrid of our species, can’t they be reasoned with?”
Nikki resumed the tale, “It’s said that in the beginning they were reasonable and lived alongside other supernaturals. But over time they chose to breed. We don’t know how that’s possible, but they did so between themselves to keep their blood line pure. In short, they’re interbred, much like the aristocracy of the past. And like the aristocracy, madness reigns. They cannot be reasoned with now, because they have no reason.”
“And Orion?” Marcus murmured. “Does anyone ever speak his name? If he’s alive, we may be able to reason with him?”
“We know the name, the tales. We know he originated here in this city after a battle of demons. We know nothing else. Understand every night for us is a battle of existence. It’s already late now,” Kyle added hastily.
“We have to hunt, so we’ll take you with us. We only talk when we need
to. When we’re out, everything is monitored. The old ways still hold, we try and only take the evil, and after curfew, it is mostly only the malevolent mortals that are out there. This tiny city has a strong population of blood angels. If what you’ve told us is true, that would be the reason why. We stay out of the city, especially tonight,” Anne whispered.
“But you said you hunt before the curfew. Is that because of us arriving here?”
Kyle nodded and they readied themselves to leave.
Marcus and I were stunned with the revelations of where we had ended up, but we’d been through enough crazy already and so prepared ourselves for what the night would bring. A more sinister part of my nature revealed that I wanted to see these blood angels for myself, and even try to reason with them. I wasn’t afraid of them and I could sense that neither was Marcus. But more importantly, once we had the lay of the land so to speak, we would need to find a necromancer or the like and get through that time loop. And that in itself raised a thousand questions.
But for now, we headed off towards the city and I saw that Kyle, Trish, and the others, like us headed for the many parks the small city had. There were less drones this far out, the odd one here and there. We heard it long before seeing it, and by then we had all taken shelter. Whispering I asked them, “Why hasn’t any of our kind created something to block the drone’s detection, or signal? I know this can be done; something to do with frequencies?”
“You’re right, and some years ago some were able to do this, but they adapted them and update them constantly. Our predicament prevents us. Had we more money maybe we could try?”
They definitely needed to improve their situation, but I thought it best not to state the obvious. I was new here, so I may have not fared better if I were them. But this was a miserable existence.
We came across a gang of men doing some kind of shady business deep within the park, and slowly we crept forth, circling out to surround them. In the distance, I could hear that infernal buzzing of drones and I knew then that if I had to stay here I would make it my life’s mission to get rid of those things.