by Lee French
Beside him, Stephen pulled the envelope out of his pack and turned it over in his hands. He ran his fingers over the lettering on the front, then found it unsealed and peered inside. Sliding the thick stack of papers out, he held them so Bobby could see, too.
The top page began Hanamidi’s last will. Several pages under that appeared to be legal documents of one kind or another. Next, they found pictures, both loose and mounted on scrapbook pages. Stephen flipped through them, showing all family and kids’ school pictures. The rest of the papers had scribbled notes in Arabic with drawn diagrams. Some boasted coffee stains.
Tucking the stack back into the envelope, Stephen said, “I wonder what kind of space-time anomaly it was.”
“I wonder if anyone at the farm’ll be able to understand any of this stuff.”
“I also wonder how long it’ll be before we can get back there, and if we’ll be relieved of all these documents before then.”
Pleased to discuss anything other than what happened to Hanamidi, Bobby scratched at the few days of beard on his chin. “Maybe we oughta mail ‘em.”
“Maybe. That would mean a mailman would have to go there, though, which might be counter- productive.”
Bobby grunted to concede the point. If only Hannah had a Post Office box set up someplace, but why would they do that? To make sure they could get lingerie catalogs? “We could mail it to Kris.”
“We could mail it to Adesha,” Stephen tapped the address already on the envelope.
“I dunno.” As good as the idea sounded, Bobby figured there had to be a downside, even if he couldn’t think of it. “If mailing something to her was all what needed to be done, Hanamidi coulda done that anytime.”
Stephen grunted to acknowledge the point. “I don’t want to involve Kris in anything she can’t back out of yet.”
“I guess the best choice right now is to hold onto it all. S’pose if’n we gotta, we could stash it someplace and come back later.”
Nodding, Stephen tucked the envelope into his pack again. For several seconds, they sat in silence again. “It felt really good.”
Bobby shifted with discomfort. He looked down at his hand and made a fist, remembering the satisfaction he felt for a flash when it connected with that man’s face. “Mmm.” He wanted to deny it until it went away. Stephen deserved better from him. Covering his mouth, he coughed. “It was kinda scary how much I really needed to beat the crap outta someone.”
Stephen picked up a dead leaf and crumpled it in his hand, then let it fall to the ground. “I’ve fed before, plenty of times, but I’ve never killed anyone doing it. Gotten close, but never all the way to death. Killing Hanamidi, it was like really great sex, and part of me wants to do it again. Not right this minute. I’m completely sated right now, but I can feel how it’ll be harder to stop myself the next time I feed. It’s like…”
He stared out at the darkness, breathing slow and even and deep. “Like having chocolate for the first time. You’ve had ice cream, cake, maybe cookies before that, but then you get to have chocolate, pure and perfect, and nothing else is ever as good.”
Bobby didn’t have that kind of feeling towards any particular kind of food. He got the idea anyway. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. It’s the same difference as between having a little snack and draining them to unconsciousness. I can stop, but why should I? Every pint past the first tastes better than the one before, and that last one, when I had to suck it out instead of letting it dribble into my mouth, it was like pure fucking ambrosia. If I hadn’t felt it coming on, I would’ve made a mess of my pants.”
That kind of admission had to be tough to make. Bobby couldn’t relate to it. Sure, he got a rush out of beating that guy up. For him, it had been nothing more than a way to exorcise some frustration, and had nothing to do with sex or pleasure. On top of that, he’d felt… It confused him, because he went out of control, but while it happened, he’d thought he had total control.
He flexed his hand and wondered if some of that came from the dragons. “Thanks for stopping me. Sorry I couldn’t do the same for you.”
Stephen nodded, still staring off at nothing. “We were so worried about Matthew. We’re just as dangerous as he is.”
Sitting around brooding got them exactly two places: no and where. Bobby breathed in deeply, wanting to shake off the impulse to be horrified at the pair of them. What could he do about that? Not be himself anymore? Somehow kill Stephen? “We just gotta do what we can to fight it.” The absurdity of his statement made him huff. “C’mon, though. Night ain’t getting longer.”
“Yeah.” Stephen rubbed his eyes and got up by virtue of floating until he could unfold and put his feet on the ground. “I can control this. I’m the one in control, not the Hunger. It can go fuck itself off a short pier with a dead armadillo.” He set off across the rocky steppe, paying attention to his footing.
obby struggled with that mental picture, then shook it off as unimportant and flowed into the swarm to avoid tripping over anything. A handful of dragons landed on Stephen’s shoulders and the rest swirled around behind him.
A quick glance to one side then the other made Stephen smirk and murmur, “Exit light, enter night. Take my hand, off to never-never land.” Bobby didn’t recognize the tune or the words, but the dragons didn’t get brushed off, so he left them there. They seemed to like Stephen, in a different way than they liked Sebastian. Maybe a better word for it was ‘respect’. He thought the kind of respect a body gave to a tiger was more appropriate, but he didn’t have much say over what they thought. Which was demented, of course, since they were him and he was them.
Despite efforts made to camouflage it, Stephen easily found the entrance to the cave they’d come looking for. A few shrubs and creative door placement didn’t defeat the vampire’s senses. “There are definitely people in there someplace,” he said softly. “I can…tell.” That wasn’t at all the word he was going to say at first.
Right then, for the first time, he wondered if he could re-form only enough of himself to speak, and what that would look like, and how it would feel. He imagined a disembodied mouth being held up by a bunch of dragons. If he could shudder at the thought, he would have.
Stephen took the disguised handle and gave it a little yank. Two animal hides had been lashed together in a wood frame decorated by sprigs of plant material. When it had opened a tiny crack, Bobby heard a jangling noise like a bunch of small metal things hitting each other came from the inside, and Stephen swore under his breath. “So much for the element of surprise,” he muttered. Ripping the door off because he could, he tossed it for distance and strode inside. “Time for Plan B. Go ahead and scout the place in clumps, confuse whoever you find, and lead me to whatever I need to deal with.”
This plan sounded a lot like all their other plans so far, giving Bobby no reason to object. He sent the dragons inside, choosing to see this as an opportunity to get more comfortable with his ability. The swarm flowed around Stephen, then down the earthen tunnel. It had just enough space for one person to walk, two if they were really friendly. It twisted and turned, and within half a minute, Bobby found the small room where the door chime must have been before Stephen pulled it out, along with the door.
Two men lurched to their feet from crate chairs with woven blankets falling to the floor from their laps. They looked how he expected terrorist-types to look, which reminded him of those folks in that first village. Those men had been ordinary folks, doing what they could to protect and feed their families. He saw one major difference: those people lived above ground, and these people lived under it. Otherwise, they all had the same clothes, the same weapons, and the same general appearance.
That village turned out alright, giving him pause. Klein had called Hanamidi a warlord, and he’d said that village needed to be wiped out. Both had been one hundred percent wrong. Without any evidence of these people doing something they oughtn’t to, attacking them struck Bobby as fulfilling t
he monster label. He wanted to grumble, because he had no idea how to tell the good guys from the bad guys if everybody looked the same.
Stephen would react to whatever those two men did, and Bobby had no particular reason to interfere. He could spook them, in the hopes they’d take pause and not get violent the second they saw him. The swarm spilled into the room, spreading out and filling it. The two men freaked in a foreign language and tried to bat away the dragons. Fortunately, neither had a taser or anything like it, and neither tried to shoot the swarm. It meant Bobby could keep the dragons from hurting the two men.
“I’ll take it from here, Bobby, keep going.” Stephen appeared in the tunnel mouth and shooed the swarm away. The dragons withdrew, and as they did, Stephen moved in and beat on the two men, putting them down without killing them. It may have happened by accident, but the vampire didn’t rip anyone’s body parts off or throw them too hard. He did, however, pick up a rifle and look it over.
One dragon stayed behind and perched on his shoulder again. Bobby figured he could use it to lead him when he had a reason to. The rest of the swarm found branches off the main tunnel and explored them. He found other men along the way and avoided them by flying fast and along the ceiling.
He flowed through a labyrinth of curves and unexpected drops and ladders into upper chambers, all lit at irregular intervals with bare light bulbs on what might be a continuous wire. Evidence of human effort in the digging out was minimal, mostly limited to rounding corners or enlarging individual chambers, and perhaps joining a few here and there. Some had generators chugging away, the wires from the lights connected to them, small holes shooting out from those spots to the outside. He found a few computers and plenty of weapons caches.
It felt big enough that fully exploring it would take months. He had the dragons splinter again and again to follow the various tunnels until they flitted about in groups of nine or ten. His mind floated around between them, getting the input from all their tiny eyes at once and painting a picture of a female-free zone focused on survival above anything else.
In one deep, dark, dank chamber, a group of dragons freaked out until he focused on one and found five men in partial US military uniforms, all hog tied, gagged, and lying on the floor. He quashed his first impulse: getting the dragon on Stephen’s shoulder to goad him into trashing the place to reach them. Until he knew whether these soldiers still lived or not, he saw no point to rushing through.
Instead, he flowed his mind into one of the dragons there and looked around. One guard sat nearby, smoking a cigarette with a paperback book and a gun. The book had characters on the cover that Bobby assumed must be Arabic, though he’d never seen text of it before. As he watched the guard turn a page, obviously absorbed by the text, it occurred to him that dead bodies didn’t need guards.
He flew the dragons down, avoiding getting into the guard’s peripheral vision, and landed on the man farthest from the guard. His skin felt warm and his chest moved in the even rhythm of sleep or unconsciousness. This close, he could make out the others breathing, too.
With only five dragons—the number currently present—Bobby had no confidence he could handle a single guard on his own. If he could free these men, though, and they were capable enough, that would give him time to bring down the rest of the swarm, then these men could follow him as they fought their way back to meeting up with Stephen. He’d had worse ideas.
While the swarm changed direction to converge on the spot, these five dragons landed on the one soldier’s legs and arms. They chomped on the rope bindings, using their sharp little teeth to saw the fibers away. The last few strands snapped and the soldier slumped, making Bobby freeze. When nothing happened, they moved to the next one.
This soldier, who appeared to be about Bobby’s age, had no major, grievous injuries. On the way to the next, he had his one dragon fly up and down his body, checking, and he found a black eye, a split lip, and some purplish bruises on his bare feet. His plain gray shirt had smears of dried blood and minor rips with older bruises showing through. His camouflage pants appeared to be intact, aside from the mud and blood staining them.
All four of the others had received similar treatment. The oldest one by Bobby’s estimation had cuts and bruises on the bottoms of his swollen feet. At a guess, he’d been tortured, maybe for being the highest ranking man among them, or just the one who resisted the most.
Rage simmered in the dragons. Though soldiers had been the enemy at Hill, he still considered them overall to be the good guys, especially here. Seeing them treated this way pissed him off. Whatever his feelings on the subject, though, he sternly reminded the dragons that five couldn’t do anything useful to that guard, because they wanted to go rip him to bits. Freeing the rest of these men should at least distract them long enough for the swarm to gather.
None of the soldiers woke while he worked. All five had been freed by the time the swarm converged on the dark, empty space between the open doorway and the ladder up. He had the five dragons slip around to the rest of the swarm and re-formed, concerned about them going berserk. Without using them, though, he only had the element of surprise.
He took a deep breath, then rushed the guy. Unafraid of hurting himself, he slammed his body into the guard’s and knocked him against the wall. The guard took the impact with a grunt, his eyes bulging. Both the book and the nearby assault rifle fell to the floor with a clatter. Bobby threw a solid punch across his jaw, kicked him in the gut, and stomped on his head.
Before he could get carried away this time, the dragons burst out of their own accord and fell upon the man, little claws scraping, little mouths blasting tiny jets of fire. The guard rasped and gurgled and mewled, all of it goading the swarm into a frenzy. When they finished killing the guy, Bobby got control back and re-formed standing beside the grisly corpse.
Staring down at what his swarm had done, Bobby swallowed down the urge to throw up. This time, he’d done it on purpose, except that he’d really done it to save those soldiers. That guard deserved to die for whatever part he’d had in cutting up the one soldier’s feet. He nodded to himself, sure in the truth of it.
When he looked up, he found five pairs of eyes staring at him. Though he could see all around as the swarm, they’d been so focused on the guard that he hadn’t noticed them waking up. For a few beats, he stood there with no idea what to say. The weight of their eyes made him squirm, so he raised a hand and cut through the air with it in an unenthusiastic wave.
“Hi. I’ll be your rescue today.”
All five had cloth gags Bobby hadn’t messed with. The one in the back discovered they’d been freed and reached up to pull his gag out. “What are you, man?”
Bobby pursed his lips and dropped his gaze to the ground. That left him looking at the mangled body. He frowned, then he shrugged. Right now, they needed to get out of here, and him fussing about the state of his immortal soul wouldn’t accomplish that. “The guy what’s getting you out of here, that’s what.” He offered the nearest man a hand to help him to his feet. “You guys hurt, or just roughed up a bit? ”
The man with the cut up feet recovered from the shock of Bobby first. He pulled his gag out and hefted a foot to take a look at it. “I don’t think I can walk.” He kept his voice low, yet Bobby could hear command in it, that certain something his daddy always had that made other people listen. “We’re all that’s left of our unit, the ones that weren’t hurt or killed in the initial skirmish. Don’t know what they did with the rest.”
Nodding along as the man spoke, Bobby backed off and went to the doorway to see if he’d attracted any attention. No one had popped their head down or called out, so he turned back. They rubbed their wrists and ankles, and generally needed some vacation. “Y’all look like hell. I ain’t much with a gun, so you guys should grab whatever he’s got,” he jerked a thumb at the dead guard, “but let me and my buddy do most of the work.” At this point, he had the one loose dragon lead Stephen in.
“‘Yo
ur buddy’? Is that a freaky way to refer to…um—”
“No. That’d be a ‘them’, not a ‘he’. I mean I ain’t alone. Brought me a vampire to help out.” Rather than take the time to explain that, he sent a handful of dragons to scout it ahead. Behind him, the five men quietly freed themselves the rest of the way, searched the guard, and figured out how to get the one injured man out of here. Paying more attention to his scouts than the soldiers, he didn’t hear if they said anything about him or a vampire, but figured they’d probably decided he must be insane.
Whatever they thought, these guys had their heads screwed on right. Two men hefted the injured one up and the other two had the guard’s two guns between them. With their faces set in grim determination, these men obviously would do whatever it took to get out, and Bobby knew he had to take the same attitude if he wanted them all to survive.
“I’m gonna do whatever I can to keep you from having to use those to get outta here. Just so you know.” Taking the lead, he approached the ladder and wondered at the best way to get the injured man up it.
The dragons wanted to dive in and take more of these men down with a disturbing level of eagerness. Bobby pressed on his forehead, trying to make them understand that one scream would make this much harder, and so would gunfire. Getting shot wouldn’t help, either, and neither would senseless rampaging.
His solo dragon let him know that Stephen waltzed through the place, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. They might be unconscious. Bobby watched the vampire grab two men and smash their heads together as he breezed past. They might have survived that, and he chose not to have his one dragon investigate. Some things, he figured, should be left unknown as long as possible.
Bobby peered up the ladder, knowing they’d find men up there, playing cards. His handful of dragons reported that nothing had changed. He held up a hand, put a finger to his lips, pointed up, and showed five fingers. They could wait for Stephen here, though it felt cheap and cowardly.