by Adams, Nancy
I waded in, and looked down at my reflection. I half expected not to see one, since the legends all said vampires didn’t have them, but I saw my blood-smeared face peering back up at me. A sneaky peek at Simone and the water around her legs showed me that the legend was false, anyway, as I could see her own reflection smiling up at me. I blushed at getting caught staring, went deeper and ducked under to scrub at myself with my hands, the way the vampires had done.
My clothes were a mess. The jeans I’d put on however long before were ripped in spots and soaked in blood, and bits of other gore speckled them; my blouse was just as bad and was missing buttons, besides. I stripped down to my undies—even they were gory, because blood soaks through most kinds of cloth—and rinsed everything out the best I could, but Horace’s comment about getting me some clothes was sort of appealing all of a sudden.
I dressed again; with the blouse tucked into the waistband of my jeans, I was at least decent, and we all climbed out of the water. Horace and Rudy dragged up a couple of logs and set up what looked like a campfire, and we all sat down to talk.
“Amber-luv,” Horace began, “I told you that you have some rather amazing powers. I’m going to tell you about them now, and the first one I want you to know about is this: you have the uncanny ability to generate intense heat from your body, hot enough to ignite wood and other flammables. I’d like you to pick up a piece of kindling, there, and start us a fire, please, so that we can dry ourselves and our clothes more quickly.”
I’m pretty sure my expression must have been comical, because all of them were hiding smiles, or trying to; Simone didn’t bother, she just giggled at me. “Go on, ducklin,” she called out, and giggled again.
I reached out and grabbed a short piece of broken limb, dry and light. I held it out and stared at it, willing it to bum. I imagined laser beams coming out of my eyes, and everything else I could think of—but nothing happened.
I cut my eyes to Horace. “Um—wanna give me a hint, here?”
“I’m not sure how it works,” he admitted, “but the grue I knew centuries ago did it often. Try this: concentrate on the palm of your hand, will it to get hot, very hot.”
I looked at the hand holding the stick, and did as he suggested. After only a couple of seconds, I felt a heat beginning. It was warmth that built rapidly, until smoke began to emerge from between my fingers. I kept waiting for it to become painful, but it didn’t; it didn’t even grow uncomfortable, really, just a hot feeling—and suddenly the stick burst into flame.
I shrieked and dropped it, and rubbed at my hand, but I was uninjured. After a moment, I reached over and waved my fingers through the flames, and though I could feel the heat, it was not painful to me at all, and my skin didn’t blister; it didn’t even turn red.
I picked up the brand and used it to light the fire, smiling in childish delight as I did so, and then turned back to Horace.
“That’s so awesome!” I said. “What else?”
“Some you’ll have noticed, like that you can see even in pitch darkness, and you can run forever without getting tired or breathing hard. You’re incredibly strong, now—a normal girl could never have bitten off chunks of raw meat so easily. And you’ll heal very quickly, when you’re injured. I see the hole under your sternum is gone already—you’ll always heal like that now, if you’re hurt, and you likely will be at times. You can breathe under water, and could swim across the ocean if you chose to, but I don’t recommend it—you’d get awfully hungry, and there are other dangers, as well.” He let out a sigh.
“Amber, until now, my kind has been the strongest of mankind’s predators—but now you, you are far more dangerous to him than we are, for several very valid reasons. For example, we must sleep during the hours of sunlight; oh, one such as me can function during the day, so long as I am not subjected to the sun’s direct rays, but the rest of these are too young. When the sun is up over wherever we are, they will be as if they were dead in fact. Seems its rays literally turn us off, when they aren’t blocked by the mass of the earth.
“You, however, and I’m sorry to say this, will not sleep again, ever! So, even when we are at our most vulnerable, you will still be strong and active, ready to hunt and strike at any moment. You are almost completely indestructible, as I said, only vulnerable to a fire such as might be in an iron foundry. Besides your vision, your other senses are also enhanced, all of them. You can hear a whisper at a hundred yards, a bird’s call at a mile. You can catch scents that you never knew existed, feel the smallest particle of dirt, and as for taste—just wait until you taste chocolate, now...”
“Chocolate?” I cried. “You said—you said I could only eat human flesh!"
“No, I said that only living human flesh will give you the nourishment your body now requires; however, you can eat anything at all, and enjoy many, many flavors, far more than you ever did before—though the intensity of some of them may make them a bit unpleasant, at first.
“But we are discussing your new nature, and what you must know about it, and what it may mean for your future—as well as ours. I will tell you of the particular dangers you present to man, besides the obvious one, and the dangers you present to all of our kind, the vampires, ghouls and other revenants that walk the earth. You must know about them in order to safeguard against them, do you see?”
“Okay,” I replied. I was starting to get bored; Horace was being sort of long-winded.
“Good. As I said, you will heal rapidly from any injury. This extends even to such a severe wound as losing a limb, or any part of your body other than blood—if you lose a finger, or even an arm or a leg, it will grow back, and quickly. In fact, if your head is cut from your neck, you would grow a new body—but your body would also grow a new head.”
“There’d be two of me?” I asked. “I’d be twins?” A full-grown twin sister? Hmm…
“No, dear,” Horace said, “for your mind, the part of you that is you, would be in only one of the pair; the other would be a true zombie, a mindless man-eater. And the same would be true of a severed hand, for instance—you would grow a new one, but the one you lost would grow a new you!"
“Okay, wait,” I said. “How could a hand grow a new body? Or a head, for that matter?”
“Because each part would transform itself, changing into a smaller, but complete, copy of you. Each would be identical except for size and intellect; the copies would attack and feed from any human, be it man, woman or child, even an infant, and as they feed, they grow. Eventually, there would be as many of you as there were severed parts, running insensibly amok in the world.”
My eyes were wide. “Um—I can see that would be sorta bad...” I understated.
“Indeed, which is why you must never let a part of yourself be taken, or if it is, then you must make certain it’s destroyed, to prevent such a disaster. Could you imagine what it would do to the world if a dozen of you went on a bloody feeding frenzy? That was what happened to the last of your kind. He couldn’t adapt, and became a monster, so the bloody villagers ganged up and chopped him to bits! A week later, most of the village was dead, with little grue-bites all over ‘em, and the hungry little bastards were up to three feet tall and still growing! There were hundreds of them—if we vampires hadn’t stepped in, Britain would have been uninhabited within a few decades.”
“What did you do?”
“We took advantage of another strange thing about your type, the fact that two grues cannot touch each other; if they do, that power of yours to make heat goes rather wild, and keeps building until it burns both of ‘em up! It took several of us to catch each one of them, but when we tossed the buggers into a deep well shaft, they incinerated each other! Took us ten years to get the lot, but we did, and then we went back into hiding.
“And that’s the other reason you don’t want to swim across the ocean, luv, cause if a shark were to bite off a bit, it would grow in its belly—you’re completely indigestible—and rip its way out. Since it can’t dr
own, sooner or later it’d find its way to land, and people. Or worse, what if it were to be caught by a government? Chop the little bugger up and toss the pieces around an enemy’s cities, eh?”
My eyes were wide. “What about, like, hair and fingernails?”
He shook his head. “No, luv, those are dead, the only parts of you that do die. And your blood won’t do it, either—has to be your own live flesh and bones. And remember, only a few seconds after it’s cut off, that part is basically another distinct grue, no matter how small it is; you can’t touch it, unless you’re trying to commit suicide! But, long as you’re the only one, there’s not a lot to worry over.”
I looked into the flames for a moment. “So I’m the only one—the only grue. Horace, what do I do now? I mean—well, can I stay with you guys, for a while, at least? We’re all sort of alike, I mean, cause we all live off people—I don’t know how to—how to survive, how to be alone like this...” I trailed off as I realized I was starting to cry.
Even in the midst of so many shocking changes, I knew that my normal old life was over. I couldn’t go home and pretend everything was the same as it had been, I couldn’t go back to work at the Kewpee, or hang out with my old friends, or even Vince. Granted, in many ways I felt normal, or at least not terribly different than I had before; but I had just killed a man, by—by eating him to death, for pity’s sake! I felt a little remorse, though no more than I might have if someone had pointed out that the burger I’d eaten the other day used to be part of a cow. To be honest, though, the only thing I really felt was an electric, naughty thrill each and every time I thought about how he had tasted—and how he had screamed.
A few months earlier, I had stumbled across a book about the Marquis de Sade; it was shocking but erotic, how he described the seductive thrill of inflicting pain on someone as part of a sexual episode, and I had responded secretly, by fantasizing about being on the receiving end. Now I suddenly and completely understood what he was saying. As I fed on Ronnie, his screams and cries and futile attempts to fight me off were more exciting to me than anything else I had ever known.
Yes, a part of me thought it sad that a person would have to die in order for me to eat. However, after only my first taste of human flesh and its accompanying savors, I knew that there was absolutely no doubt that I would willingly feed again when the time came—even if it meant having to figure all this out on my own.
Horace interrupted my thoughts. “Actually, Amber-luv, that’s just what I was going to suggest. We can be of some potent mutual benefit to each other, if you’re willing.”
I looked up at him quickly. “If I’m willing? Horace, I’m desperate! I don’t know how to hide in the woods like this, or find caves or anything—I need to learn how to do whatever it is that...”
Rudy and Simone were laughing, I’d have sworn Madeline was glaring at me, and Horace was smiling. “Whoa up, girl,” he said, “let me explain—and hiding in the woods, incidentally, is not the favorite for us, either. We greatly prefer a nice house and clean clothing and the company of other people! Until just a few days back, we had all that, but as we do have to sleep in the day, some ruddy young assholes decided last week to burgle us. They found the lot of us on our beds without breath or pulse, so one of ‘em tossed back the curtains and set me on bloody fire! Naturally, I woke, and after getting out of the sunlight, I killed the bastards, but they’d left a mate in a car outside. He heard ‘em screaming, and called the coppers, and I had to drag my little family down into the cellar and bury us all in the old coal bin, hide us until dark.
“People roundabout had always thought us an odd bunch, sleeping all day and carousing all night—now we were thought to be murderers, as well, and fugitives. We ran cross-country for a few nights, avoiding being seen. The morning we took you was the first time we’d fed in nigh a week, and I wouldn’t have fed then, but Rudy, Mad and Simone were already on the edge of madness. Another day, and we’d have all lost our senses, and that would have meant risking discovery. I couldn’t let that happen.”
He fell silent a moment, so I asked, “So—where would I fit in?”
Horace grinned at me. “You don’t sleep—we need someone who can keep watch in the day, prevent things like that. A normal person, to play caretaker to our eccentric ones.”
I barked a laugh. “Ha! I think my new diet sorta knocks normal out the window, doesn’t it?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me “Amber, do you feel that different? Really?”
There he went again, voicing the things I’d been thinking only moments ago. “Well—no...”
“A grue can pass for human, Amber, far better even than we can, and we do it fairly well. As I’ve said, you can eat human food, move about in the sun and do other things to make yourself appear perfectly ordinary. As long as you don’t show off your differences, they’re not visible at all. We take you to a city where there are millions of people, and it won’t be noticeable that a hundred or so go missing each year.”
I thought about it. “But what if someone finds out I’m the missing girl from Corlin? How would we explain that?”
“I’ve got a lot of identities set up, Amber, for each of us. This is something we’ve learned to do. It might take a couple of months, but I can create some for you, too,"
I stared into the fire again, and then began thinking out loud. “Too bad I can’t go home, first. I’ve got my car, and a fair bit of money saved up—but they’re probably looking for me and Floyd, so I’d never be able to explain...”
“Wait,” Horace said, his expression calculating. “If you did go home, even for only a few days, you could keep your own name for some time—and you’d have a background, a good one. That would give me time to build new identities for when the time comes for you to become someone else...”
And that’s how the plan was hatched. I would go home as a prisoner of my “kidnapper,” played by Horace, and while he would be pretending to rob my family, Rudy would use a pay phone to call the police and get them to “rescue” us. The kidnapper would escape, of course, but I’d be home safe—and a few days later I’d suddenly decide I needed to be out on my own. I’d clean out my bank account, pack up, and move off to California!
Of course, I’d actually swap the Mustang II for a van, pick up my new “family,” and we’d all go west together. The only hitch, Horace said, was whether I could act.
“Why, Horace, ol’ mate,” I said, in a fair imitation of his accent. “You just happen to be lookin’ at the female lead in the West Milton High School play for the past three years runnin’! I’m bloody Oscar-worthy, luv!"
Chapter Five
Rudy
Amber was interesting, but I told Horace I’d reserve judgment for a time. She’d made it through the first test, granted, but sometimes it took a bit for the reality of the change to sink in.
“Remember Marilyn?” I asked him. She’d been a girl he’d taken a fancy to a century earlier. She’d begged to be turned, and he gave in, but once she realized what she’d become, she couldn’t accept our no-killing limits. She’d wanted the immortality, at first, but the power—that’s what often gets them. We had been in Arizona, then, and she had gone mad in the midst of a small mining town, killed everyone there and gorged herself for a week on their blood.
Horace had to kill her himself, and it hurt him to do it. He’d truly cared for her, but she just couldn’t live our way, and without self-control she’d be discovered eventually. We couldn’t risk that.
He sent me and Mad into town, to get us a set of wheels and some clean clothes. I was ready for that, I’ll confess; the rags I was wearing were a week from fresh and covered in filth. We jogged to the edge of a big highway, and followed it toward some lights that lit the sky.
It was a big truck-stop, with the number 76 on a tall, lighted sign. Mad was cleaner than me, so I told her to go in and buy the clothes we needed; Horace had given her some money, and she had cleaned out the pockets of the man Amber had eaten, too,
so she had enough. I went into the parking lot, looking for a vehicle no one would notice easily.
I found one, a not-very-old pickup truck with a cap on its bed. For some reason, the windows in the cap had been painted black, so it was perfect for our needs.
Of course, the bloke sleeping in it might have objected if I’d given him the chance. It seemed a better idea to just take him along, so I waited until I saw Mad come out, and called her over to me.
“Fancy a drink?” I asked her, and nodded toward the man who was sleeping in the back of the truck. She smiled, and we both slid rapidly over the tailgate. I had my hand over the fellow’s mouth before he was even awake, and I bit into his throat as Mad ripped open his trouser leg and sank her own fangs into his thigh. She tore him a bit, getting to the good arteries she wanted. The bloke put up a fight, at first, and if I hadn’t been paying attention he’d have gotten a bullet into Mad. I saw him bring the gun up, though, and snatched it before he could shoot her. The gun was a bonus, and I was glad to see it.
We tossed the body out once we were back in the woods, and I buried it quickly before we went back to the rest. I’m sure they smelled the fresh blood on us, but no one said anything, and we all stripped down and changed. Mad, Jen, Simone and I all got in the back, as Horace took the wheel of the truck, and we headed back to where we’d found Amber.
Amber
I was surprised to learn that we were almost a hundred miles from Corlin, near a town in Indiana that had a large scrap metal business. Horace was very blunt: “If you’d refused to eat, or gone starkers and rampaging, the lot of us would have dragged you to the smelter and seen you charred to bloody ash!"
I swallowed once, fully aware that he meant exactly what he said, but my only reply was, “You know, you say ‘bloody’ an awful lot.”
“Yeah? Then perhaps it appeals to my bloody grim sense of humor!"
It was nearly three in the morning, according to the watch I was still wearing—and I cringed when I realized that it was a miracle it was even working; it wasn’t all that waterproof—so we decided to move fast. The town was less than five miles away; Horace sent Rudy and Madeline into town, he to steal a vehicle, and she to find us—and especially me—some clean clothes. They were back before four, and Madeline hopped out of a pickup with a truck-stop bag; the store was open all night, so she’d just gone in and bought clothes for all of us, excusing her own messy, muddy ones with a story about a boating accident that got a laugh from the woman at the register.