Nerves of Steel

by Lee Hayton

  Inch by inch, minute by minute, I got closer. Fending off one final attack from a man composed mainly of teeth, I fought my way out into the hall.

  Bodies were piled in the corridor, and I kicked them aside to stagger onward to the lobby of the conference center. Blood was spattered in such a swirl of color that it looked like a pattern woven into the carpet and dyed into the wallpaper.

  On the staircase to one side of the reception desk, I collapsed and brought out Miss Tiddles, kissing the soft fur of her face as though it would provide a kiss of life. Slow tears fell, leaking onto her coat and matting it down, diluting the blood.

  Outside, the sullen stomp of boots warned me of the soldier bots’ arrival. I watched with dull eyes as they kicked in the door, trooping through in a never-ending stream.

  They paid me no mind, not even turning their heads with a view that I might cause trouble. The silver chains that the soldier bots carried jingled as they marched by. Sleigh bells ringing. Ho-ho-ho. Merry Christmas vampires. Soldier Santa has a present for you.

  The screams continued, changing in timbre and volume. If the vampires really did have a plan for overtaking the city, they needed to step it up a notch. As the soldiers tramped past the other way, slaves in tow, it appeared that the second part of the plan hadn’t worked.

  Change a whole lot of citizens into new recruits—check. Take over the world—crossed out. Fail.

  I sat on the stairs and watched for hours as the slow-moving action scene played out. Vampires fought for their lives and lost against the implacable dominion of titanium and steel. Just as they hadn’t been able to overcome me and reduce my body to limp garbage, they couldn’t overpower the soldiers.

  What’s the second part of the plan meant to be? I wondered, as the vampires were dragged past—some old, some new—each in chains. Unless there was a second wave of this rebellion planned, then the whole thing would be cleared up by morning, the city waking to a glorious new vampire-free day.

  The children, of course. Weren’t they meant to be a part of it?

  I frowned and hugged Miss Tiddles’ body closer as the soldier bots stopped taking out their prisoners en masse and started to root out singular slaves.

  I couldn’t remember seeing any teenagers in the room, apart from my one brief glimpse of Norman, and he didn’t count.

  No human teenagers. No sparkling prom dresses being stained crimson with blood. No tuxedos with crisp pleats softening and tearing as the boys inside fought for their lives.

  What happened to the joint prom?

  I placed Miss Tiddles on the stairway, next to the copper pot of a fake plant, and stood up, looking for signage.

  The posters in the lobby advertised trade conferences, banking, insurance, accounting, the stuff a good night’s sleep was made of. Signs pointed out the conference centers amazing features; rooms, reception desk, a vaping lounge for those so inclined.

  What it didn’t have was the announcement of the most exciting event in any high school senior’s life. An occasion made even more exciting by the cooperation of other schools to throw a shin-dig that would make a beauty queen cry Vaseline tears on cue.

  As the last of the newly-turned slaves were led out through the lobby and the soldier bots started to stack the dead, I realized the terrible truth.

  I’d led a pub full of men and women in here to their deaths or their forcible enslavement. They weren’t heroes, coming to the aid of the city’s children when nobody else would. They were fools following a leader who’d been hoodwinked into believing a lie.

  I’d led an army of men and women to the empire and handed them over, to consume as it would.

  I was a fool.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dawn was breaking, shoving its feeble light into my face as I arrived home. The walk through the back corridors lined needles and used-condoms just didn’t have the usual thrill of a homecoming. The apartment was empty except for me, and I didn’t have the spirit left to fill it.

  In the shower, I examined the damage done to my body and made repairs as necessary. A large split along my hip bone would need proper fixing with a specialist to make it as good as new. I didn’t need that, though. I was the queen of just getting by.

  At this rate, only two or three more encounters with my foolishness and I’d be ready for the scrapheap. If I wanted to last for the thousand years the empire promised, I needed to take more care.

  I lay in bed, knowing that I needed sleep but unable to work out how to do it. My mind raced through a thousand scenarios always coming back to the same destination.

  You were played.

  I thought of the man with a loudspeaker leading his own troop of life-worn soldiers into a mistaken battle. His surprise had been short-lived, a vampire caught him and tore his throat out by the door. If he’d turned, his recovery would be slow. The process of getting him into useful slave service might not be worth the cost of care. If he was a lucky man, right now he’d be dead.

  What lies had the empire’s henchmen spun him to get him there at the same time on the same night? Had he been in another cavern tunnel, listening to the same conversation of the free vampires with the same level of horror? Or had his information been parceled out through an entirely different channel?

  Welcome to the club, sucker. How many more members did we have?

  When the dawn’s watery light strengthened into the stronger rays of mid-morning, I gave up and pulled out Norman’s tablet. Mrs. Pennyworth had called the matron of her school to arrange her daughter’s night elsewhere. Surely, that indicated that a dance had happened somewhere.

  In Upper Middlestoke.

  Well, of course. As soon as I saw the venue, I felt more wool being pulled down over my eyes.

  The three elite colleges of the city had banded together to throw a dance to remember. No way were they staging it in a mid-class hotel usually frequented by white-collar workers. While I’d spent the night watching vampires recruit adults into their failed cause, the elite youth of the city had been dancing in a hotel more befitting to their station. Where a year’s rent might buy me the use of a ballroom for a night.

  Idiot.

  I sat in my apartment, filled with such malaise that I couldn’t rouse myself to make a meal, fetch a glass of water, or even walk to the bathroom.

  I sat and stared out the window, feeling the emptiness of the apartment crawl toward me like a living thing.

  What use was moving, when every movement was orchestrated by someone else for their singular purpose? If I shifted to close the curtains, wouldn’t I just be falling in with another nefarious scheme?

  As the daylight faded into the night then brightened into neon pink, my mind ran through everything that had happened, over and over until it was a worn track in my brain.

  But going over what I’d done didn’t give me answers.

  As the morning sun started its slow creep up the side of the facing wall, I made a decision.

  I’d pay a visit to Nika since she knew the whereabouts of the man I needed to speak to. If she couldn’t tell me, then it wouldn’t end happily for her.

  If I couldn’t put my mistakes right, then I may as well keep heaping on the errors. One more dead body on the pile wouldn’t hurt much.

  First, though, I wanted to revisit the scene where I’d heard the vampires plan for the first time. A cave hidden in the back of an abandoned community hall in a deserted town.

  A location that seemed crafted out of every horror movie I’d watched through my fingers as a kid. A set for a set-up.

  This time I’d look for the things I should have seen the first time. This time, my eyes were wide open.

  Pete’s car was parked outside The Waterside pub, exactly where he’d left it. I had no idea where Pete himself was, and the less time I spent dwelling on the possibilities, the better.

  Nowhere good. I think I could state that with some degree of certainty.

  Wherever Pete was, the car keys were keeping him company. I co
uldn’t override the system with my computer sweet talk, but a show of brute force soon did the trick. I mangled a good portion of the steering wheel mount getting out the wires I needed, but all of that could be put right later.

  The route up to the defunct mining community was emblazoned in my head. I traced back the way we’d driven a few nights before. Back when there were three of us, and I still held high hopes of Norman’s return.

  Minus that mind clutter, I could see the scene in excruciating detail. The town with no residents, the one road in and out, the buildings in remarkably good condition considering they’d been shut up and left alone.

  On the second ride through, with the sun rising overhead, the town held more in common with a movie backlot than a community where people once lived. At one corner, I got out of the vehicle and stared up at the road signs. Not a single one of them was pockmarked with a thrown stone or grazed with the old markings from a fender-bender.

  The roads were pristine, the town built-to-measure. A prickle of distress began at the base of my skull and dug sharp fingernails into my hair.

  What had I been thinking?

  I climbed back into Pete’s car and made the turnoff to the community hall. And that was another thing that rankled in daylight. Who the hell would build the hub of the community halfway up the hill?

  Nobody, that’s who.

  The slam of the car door echoed out over the sloping hillside, startling some birds out of the nearby trees. They took to the air in fright, the swish of their wings loud in the silence.

  A silent wood. A silent town. A silent community hall set in the wrong place.

  Get out of here! What’s done is done.

  Excellent thoughts from the craven coward who lived inside my head. Instead of abiding by the caution, I reached back into the car and popped open the glove box, relieved to see a small crank flashlight hiding there amongst the box of plasters and iodine spray from a nana’s first aid kit.

  I turned the handle a few times, earning a weak glow as a reward. Drowned in the daylight, it would glow like a lightning strike in the darkness of the tunnels.

  I looked over my shoulder before I went in through the busted entrance. The trees stood silent, leaves not moved by any breeze. It was as though the valley and hillside formed a blip in nature, a bubble operating outside its laws.

  The houses below me stood undisturbed. I wondered how often their plasterboard walls had housed escaped vampires. Probably so many times, it had become part of the standard way of things, not that any individual trapped inside would notice.

  The trip under the stage and down into the curving claustrophobia of the tunnels didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Without a mind heightened into a state of terror, the trip was easy, and the flashlight made it seem like no distance at all.

  The cavern where the vampires had held their meeting crowded in smaller now that it was empty. I walked across the breadth and looked at the trails leading off.

  Five in all, at least visible. With the crates still stacked around the space, it could easily be more.

  Five was more than enough to start with, though. I ducked my head as I entered the first.

  The noise underneath the ground was dulled, damped down by the weight of the earth above my head.

  After a ten-minute walk, the rock path led to a small circular clearing, the tunnel bending at an angle to continue up, like a chimney. On the ground, the rocks showed signs of hard landings; flesh embedded into the rocks, the earth stained into clay with leaking blood.

  I shone the torch up to meet the sunlight pouring down. The steep drop must be fifteen yards high. Easily enough to kill a man, or hurt even a vampire, if he fell at the wrong angle.

  I wasn’t about to waste my time ascending that tunnel just to find out where it led. I backtracked and tried the next entrance along, walking at a faster clip now that I had a better idea of what to expect.

  This tunnel ended in a metal grating dug into the rock on all sides and crisscrossed with heavy silver chains.

  On the floor where it had been mounted on the rock, I saw metal shavings that glinted in the flashlight’s beam. I picked up a few between my thumb and forefinger, held them to my nose and sniffed. The taste of metal filled my mouth. The shavings were fresh.

  The grate had been installed recently, most probably within the last day.

  Did the vampires who’d escaped down these channels really believe they were running down paths to freedom? Did they spread tales of the ones who came before them, who carved escape tunnels into the side of a hill?

  To my newly seeing eyes, this was a trap. A gathering place to collect all the vampires with ambitions of freedom. A nice pen to keep them warm and safe while they thought they were living free. A larger cage with bigger bars to give the illusion the vampires had escaped. Once they were safe in here, they could plot and plan to their heart’s content, while their captors knew precisely where they were.

  But why did they do it?

  Stupid question. The answer to that had been staring me in the face all along. Nika had told me, whether or not she meant to, back when we first met.

  The halted construction project that could revitalize the suburb, if only the manpower could be found.

  The problem with vampires as slaves was that you couldn’t impregnate them with replacements when the numbers started to dip too low. It didn’t matter how much of a bonus you paid to the slaveholders, the essence of a vampire was they’re dead. You couldn’t grow a live thing in a deceased womb, not even a new something that’s really undead.

  Vampires were made, not born.

  No vampire would ever betray their species by creating a new being to be subjected to the same conditions of slavery they were bound with.

  I stumbled away from the silver threaded grate until my back scraped against the side of the tunnel wall.

  No vampire in their right mind would take a human being and turn them into a fellow slave. Even the lowliest of them—the ones consumed with bloodlust—wouldn’t fall in with such an evil plan.

  No new vampires and the old ones were running out of steam. That happened when your city grew, but your working population didn’t. Add to that the ones lost to punishment, the vampires pushed out into the sunlight to burn down to ash as a lesson to their comrades.

  If our city was built on the backs of slaves, then it had no room for expansion. Not unless you could trick an entire species into procreation under the guise of an escape plan.

  I covered my face with my hands, though it didn’t stop the dreadful images from forming. The desperation of the men I’d led into that ballroom. The fear on Miss Tiddles’ face as she was drawn down into a deadly crush.

  Like children dancing to a piper’s tune, I’d replenished the slave stocks for a generation to come.

  Good girl. Stupid cyborg.

  I thought I could outwit everyone, live under the radar and be a hero, all at the same time.

  I’d fed the machine with my ego, and it spat back a crimson stain for my soul.

  Eventually, I turned and made the long trek back up to the surface. There was nothing down here for me, nothing at all.

  Time to visit my final stop. The only cog in the machine that I had a chance to poke a stick in.

  Chapter Twenty

  Nika wasn’t home. She had been—recently, based on the liquidity of the blood-spattered against the kitchen cabinet—but for now, the place was empty.

  I straightened a chair as I tried to think of what to do next. A table lamp had smashed on the floor, despite it being carpeted. Whoever threw that down had been pissed about something. I hoped it wasn’t me.

  Don’t get me wrong, I had no qualms about taking Nika to task or using my superior strength to force her to reveal the name and address I wanted. However, having someone commit violence against her in my name was different. That struck at my chest like the assault was also carried out on me.

  I stood in the center of her apartment and turn
ed in a circle. The woman I knew always had an escape plan. She lived her life on the edges of society where dubious morals could blossom into full-blown criminality.

  Like mold growing at the back of the fridge, Nika could hang on in the direst of conditions, using the untold refuse of the community to structure her complicated life.

  An escape plan meant cash stored someplace she could reach for at a moment’s notice.

  Whatever violent acts had befallen Nika, they’d taken place in the living room and the kitchen. I walked through into the bedroom, as well, but there was nothing there to see.

  I checked under the mattress, opened the drawers and squirreled my fingers into gaps looking for false backings. Nada. It stood to reason that the bedroom was too obvious a place to hide a stash. I continued through to the bathroom.

  The cabinet held a cocktail of illegal drugs. Whoever had taken Nika hadn’t been looking for a payday. I guessed the pharmacy on easy offer disguised a fortune tucked more thoroughly out of sight.

  Not in the cabinet, though. I pressed against the walls and back of that so hard, my fingers punched straight through. The Formica sink top was solid, nothing floated in the toilet cistern except the refill ball.

  The tub was wall mounted, and there I struck pay dirt. One press on the side nearest the taps and it bent inward, revealing a small recess hidden behind.

  Passport, driver’s license, cash, credit cards. All the trimmings for a neat getaway still sealed inside a plastic bag.

  It told me that Nika was in a world of trouble, rather than having escaped. Unfortunately, it gave me little else to go on. I popped it in my jacket pocket, then went back through to the bedroom, scouring the drawers again.

  “Think,” I muttered to myself. I turned in a semi-circle, my gaze picking up and discarding every item it latched onto.

  Nika had always been intelligent, not educated, but with enough street smarts to erase the difference. Her survival in an industry that chewed women up and spat them out when it was done proved that. To reinvent herself and deal in bets and fake goods demonstrated her versatility.