by Adams, Nancy
The outfit she brought for me was almost identical to what I was already wearing, but had all the buttons and wasn’t ripped to shreds. She’d gotten me fresh panties and a bra and socks, too. I started to go behind a tree to change when I noticed that all the others were simply stripping where they stood, so I steeled myself and did likewise—and suddenly wished I’d taken off at least my outer clothes before I’d fed. The thought held a certain appeal, and washing or rinsing blood and gore off of skin and underwear would be much easier than out of the rest of my clothing.
We burned and buried the clothes we’d been wearing, and climbed into the pickup. The back was covered with a cap, and the windows in it were painted over well enough to keep out the light when the sun came up. The three women and Rudy climbed back there; Horace drove until we got to the highway, and then he had me take over.
Horace talked to me as I drove, told me more of what he had in mind for me. All of the identities he had for himself, he said, were for European men who were rich and very eccentric; they all had reputations for being reclusive, and tendencies to sleep all day and party all night. This covered their nocturnal nature, of course, but it wasn’t the main reason.
“When we’re not rushed, as we were with you,” he said, “we try to always avoid killing anyone, but not out of any altruistic compassion—it’s just that we try very hard to avoid leaving behind any evidence of our species’ existence, and bloodless corpses will tend to suggest exactly that. Instead, we find it easy to seduce victims, and since we need only a pint or so of blood to sustain us—and that’s provided we can get it daily—a bit of sex in exchange seems to satisfy them. We’re sterile, we vampires, and cannot contract or carry any form of disease, so there’s no risk. And being exotic foreigners seems to hold some appeal for most of our donors, so we play on it.”
I thought about what he’d said for a moment. “What about me?” I asked. “My—well, victims—they’re not gonna get up and go home when I’m done with them.”
“No, and that’s why we need to be near a city, because there are always those in a city who will not be missed. Bums, derelicts, runaways, addicts—as long as you plan and make certain not to leave a trail, you’ll be fine. We’ll teach you to hunt, and how to lure your prey to a secluded place to feed.”
“Okay—but no runaways, no kids. I couldn’t handle that.” He nodded, and I went on. “But what about—um, sex? Can I get pregnant? Or catch or carry disease?”
Horace looked at me. “Amber-luv, I’ve never heard of a female grue, so I’m not sure, but I doubt you could conceive a child; and as for disease, I know the one from my own past seemed immune to everything. I’m not sure about venereal disease, of course; I’m not sure whether he ever had sex at all, but I know he ravaged a village full of plague and never suffered any ill effects.” He fell silent, and I glanced at him just in time to realize he was looking me over appraisingly. I blushed, definitely this time.
Horace really was tall, and dark, and yes, handsome, for all he was nine hundred years old or more. His hair was as black as midnight—okay, so midnight wasn’t all that black anymore, but it’s still a classic metaphor—and he had the most piercing blue eyes. To look at him, you’d guess his age at maybe thirty-five or so, and he was lean and muscular—and, to feel his eyes on me like that—well...
“You’re a very pretty girl,” he said, “and quite appealing. I think you’ll have no trouble using that to bait your trap, and any man who was lucky enough to have making love to you as one of his last experiences in this life would probably be less angry in the next.”
I blushed again, and gasped in shock. “Horace!” I exclaimed, “Are you saying I should—that I should let them...”
His eyebrows went up. “Darling, there are men who would willingly let you eat them, after a night of passionate adventure; and after all, they’re giving you something far more precious than an enjoyable romp in the sack, eh? It’s not their flesh or bone or blood that you eat which keeps you alive, Amber-luv, it’s the life that’s still in it, the life force, the chi, the ka—the energy—that’s what you’re taking from them, drawing it out of each and every cell that you swallow! Is the kind of pleasure your body can give them too high a price to pay? Really?”
I stared through the windshield at the road ahead, flustered because he made perfect sense to me. It took a minute, but I finally managed to squeeze the words out.
“Horace, I’m—a virgin.” Horace laughed.
“And you’re really eighteen? Well, fortunately, that’s an affliction that’s easily cured; or are you one of those girls who swings the other way?”
My eyes couldn’t have gotten wider. “NO!” I almost shouted.
“Hmmph,” he snorted. “Then the lads back home must be blind! I’d’ve not let one like you escape my attentions, and in my day, I could’ve been flogged for seducing you!"
I kept quiet and drove, fanning myself with my fingers when Horace looked out his window.
We pulled off the road about twenty miles short of Corlin, as the first light was just beginning to glow on the horizon. Horace picked a place to park, so that the vampires could sleep, and he and I piled brush all over the truck.
“Well,” he said as we finished, “time for my nap. I think you might want to use the day to explore some of your abilities, get used to them. Don’t let anyone see you, of course, and be back here by the time the sun is ready go down so we can put this show on the road, as they say.” He climbed into the back of the truck, where the others were already dead (literally!) to the world. I heard his breathing stop only a few seconds later.
We’d holed up in part of the Shawnee Forest, just south of Mount Vernon, and there was a huge lake not far away. I was nervous at first about the risk of being seen. This close to home, there were surely posters out with my pictures, and I’d have been all over local television news (channel eight out of Carbondale, channel three out of Harrisburg, twelve from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and maybe channel six from Paducah, Kentucky). I reminded myself that I would hear anyone who might approach long before they would see or hear me, so it shouldn’t be too hard to remain out of sight. I sat on the grass near the truck for a bit, and thought as the sun came up.
Goodness, how amazed I was at my wonderful new senses! I could hear the world around me as I never had before, and found myself trying to identify sounds that were entirely new to me. A high keen was the cry of a bird circling far off in the distance, while a soft crunching was the sound of a grasshopper having breakfast on a blade of grass.
And yet, it wasn’t overwhelming. I expected a clamor, an uproar of clashing sounds; what I heard was a chorus of such incredible harmony that it was delightful in the entirety, or easily divided into individual components. I heard everything at once, but didn’t miss any single sound. Awesome!
The same was true of smells; they were all around me, but I could tell each one from all the others. Oh, I could smell the earth, and the trees and all the many different flowers, and all of the many animals that were hiding around me. My eyes were so sharp that I could count the feathers on a flying sparrow, I could feel the air brush my face when his wings beat, and I already knew my sense of taste was out of this world!
And all it cost me was to become a monster? Sounded like I’d gotten a bargain!
I got up and wandered for a bit, looking at the world with all of these new senses. I picked up a dead leaf and ignited it, just to watch it burn on my palm without hurting me, and lifted a boulder the size of a footstool, just to see if I could—and it was easy!
I heard water gurgling and went toward the sound to find a finger of the lake. I noticed a slight thirst—okay, more like just a slightly dry mouth—and scooped up a double handful of water and drank it. It tasted good. On a sudden impulse, I stripped and waded in and swam out into its depths—and dived to the bottom. Horace had said I could breathe underwater, and I was going to try.
The air in my lungs made it hard to stay under, so
I blew it out and kept going, but it was almost impossible to get all the air out. I expected to need a breath within a few seconds, but after a minute passed without a panicky need to breathe—I just opened up and inhaled water.
And then I did panic, at least for a few seconds, but it didn’t hurt. I felt like I was breathing in and out, although slowly—water doesn’t flow as easily as air does. A last few bubbles rose from my mouth and nose, as I settled my feet on the lake’s muddy bottom.
I looked up and saw the surface, like a mirror on a ceiling, except where the light of the sun was hitting it. The sun was still low; so much of the lake was in the shadow of the trees at the shoreline. It didn’t matter, though, for even there at the bottom, thirty or forty feet down, I could see almost as well as I could out under the sky.
I saw fish swimming by, all kinds, including one nasty-looking fellow with a long snout and lots of teeth. I’d been fishing with my dad and uncles enough to recognize it as an alligator gar, a small one about a foot long. A big catfish scavenging along the bottom tried to decide what my foot was, and turned and sped away when I jerked in surprise.
A couple of turtles—snappers—gave me a wide berth, and I watched a snake wiggle along the surface. I swam along a couple of yards below, and followed for a moment, but then the rumbling sound of an outboard motor reached me and I swam back the way I’d come. A moment later, I waded out under the trees—and stumbled. I was off-balance, and it took me a moment to figure out that the reason was that my lungs were full of water!
Humans aren’t used to the weight of an extra gallon and a half of water in their chests; it threw me off. I bent over and let it pour out of me, and drew in a deep breath of fresh air. I was still soaking wet, of course, so I concentrated a moment—and steam rolled off my body. I giggled with delight, but then realized that it didn’t dry my long hair, so I did it a few handfuls at a time. It was only slightly damp when I got dressed again ten minutes later.
All in all, it was a pretty nice day. I walked through the woods, I sang, I sat on a stump and thought about my life and how it was changing. Once, I saw a deer, a young buck, and when it took off running, I chased it; it was so shocked when I caught up with it that we ran side-by-side for almost half a minute, and then it suddenly turned away and I let it go. There were so many new sensations, so many new experiences, that I didn’t have a moment to be bored in the whole day.
Chapter Six
Amber
Sundown was only moments away when I finally got back to the truck, and I was giddy with excitement by the time the vampires rose and climbed out of its covered bed. I actually hugged Horace, and he was so surprised that he seemed embarrassed. That made Simone giggle, and she came for a hug from me, too.
“I like you, ducklin,” she said. “We’re gonna be good friends!” She had a quality to her voice and speech that I found charming, delightfully so, and it struck me right then that Simone almost seemed somewhat childlike; my grandmother would have suspected her of being “simple.” I could easily imagine her sitting down to play with dolls, the way my youngest sister Angie would, and I could even imagine Angie and Simone playing together, and the thought was a chilling one until I remembered that these vampires avoided killing when they could, and especially avoided killing children.
I know it made no sense, but as I hugged Simone I knew that if she ever met my little sisters, they’d be perfectly safe—as long as Simone wasn’t too hungry to control it. And now that applied just as much…
To me.
The Plan required the vampires—other than Horace, of course—to stay out of sight, so Horace and I would run the rest of the way to my house, about twenty-two miles. I wasn’t so sure I could run that far, but Horace reminded me that in the running I’d done the night before, I never got tired or had any trouble breathing at all, so after a quick talk with the others we were almost ready.
And then Horace showed me something incredible. It was an ability that vampires had that I did not. It seemed that vampires also healed quickly, though not as fast as I would, and they didn’t feel real pain except from sunlight, fire or silver—so without giving me any warning, Horace motioned to Rudy, and Rudy hit him in the face three or four times.
I could hear the bones of his face snapping and breaking, and I almost grabbed Rudy to try to stop him, but that was when he stopped and leaned close to Horace. “Okay, we need to soften your cheeks a bit,” he said, “and round the chin,” he said, and then Horace nodded as Rudy punched him a few more times.
I was floored, but Horace just reached up and took hold of his cheeks and squeezed them to make his cheekbones appear lower and rounder, and then pulled his chin on each side until he looked like he had an iron jaw! He turned to me and asked, “How’s that? Look different enough?”
I simply nodded at first, and then said, “Uh-huh...” I’m sure my eyes must have been huge. Horace only smiled.
“The nice thing,” he said with a grin, “about not bruising is that we can make temporary adjustments to our looks without it being overly obvious. This’ll last a good ten, twelve hours, and then by tomorrow night I’ll be back to my own handsome self!"
“You’ll want this,” Rudy said, and pulled a revolver out from under his shirt and handed it to him. I hadn’t known he had a gun; I mean, why would he need one? But it was to be a prop, part of the act he would put on as my abductor. He’d already promised me a dozen times that my family would not be hurt. And somehow, even though I was nervous, I believed him.
We left then, and a half hour’s running put us in the woods across the road from the house I’d grown up in. I was surprised to see my car in the driveway, but I guess it was natural they’d have my dad come and get it.
The house wasn’t a big one, a moderate two-story with three bedrooms and two baths. It was just like half of the farmhouses in Milton County, and it sat on an acre of grass that was surrounded on three sides by fields of corn and soybeans. The nearest neighbor was almost a mile away.
We waited until about nine, and then crossed the road. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, and then knocked while Horace stood just out of sight to my left, in a shadow at the edge of the full-width porch.
I knew my parents were awake, and a moment later the porch light came on. The door flew open instantly, and my dad threw both arms around me, yelling to my mother to come running.
“Beth, it’s Amber! Amber’s home, she’s here!"
Needless to say, my sisters weren’t asleep, and came stampeding down the stairs as Mom rushed from the kitchen. “Amber!” she screamed, but it was drowned out by Angie and Molly, both of whom were shrieking, “Amber! Amber!” at the tops of their lungs. Within seconds, they were hugging me, all asking me where I’d been, what had happened, and did I know where Floyd was—
“Y’know, I love family reunions as much as the next guy,” said Horace, sounding more like a wild-west outlaw than an Englishman, “but let’s move it inside before somebody drives by.” He brandished the gun, just to be sure he had my family’s attention, and I suddenly felt a painful guilt at what we were about to put them through.
Still, I didn’t have much choice; if I wanted to keep my own name, then everyone, including my parents and sisters, had to believe I’d been nothing but a victim, rather than turning from victim to a willing participant in murder.
“Who the hell...” my dad began, but I shushed him, sliding into the act I’d been rehearsing in my mind as we ran. I threw myself between him and Horace, and took his face in my hands, pleading.” Daddy, no,” I pleaded. “Just do what he says, please! He—he killed Floyd, Daddy, don’t try anything, please?” There were tears in my eyes, and in my voice.
“Better listen, Daddy-o. I don’t have any reason to hurt you or your lovely family—not yet, anyhow. You surely don’t wanna give me one, do you?”
We went inside, and Horace (who called himself Allen for this) began making demands. This was all part of the Plan, of course; to preserve my “inn
ocence” in the eyes of the law, and therefore my identity, there had to be a reason for him to bring me home. Robbery was the one most likely to be believed.
My parents kept a safe, and I cried as I told them how I’d been so scared that I’d told him about it. “He swears it’s all he wants, Daddy,” I said with tears flowing. “If we give him money, he’ll leave, and we’ll all be safe!"
If looks could kill, Horace would have withered under my dad’s gaze. He was sitting at the dining room table, with me and Mom and the girls, as he made it clear how serious he was. Up to this point, he had merely waved the gun in our general directions, but now he pointed it straight at my head.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “You bring me the cash in that safe, I leave and nobody gets hurt, but if you try anything, or if I hear a sound outside, your pretty little daughter here gets a bullet through an eye, see? And you’ve got three pretty little daughters, so she’d only be the first one. Any questions?”
Dad was seething, but he kept his cool, and went into his little office and moved the picture that hid his wall safe. He opened it and pulled out a bank bag that probably held about ten thousand dollars, then brought it back into the dining room and handed it to Horace.
“That’s all I keep here,” he said, “but it should last you a while. Take it, and get out, you miserable son-of-a-bitch!"