The rider, however, showed no signs of turning his mount in that direction. Not displaying the slightest hesitation, he rode forward without evincing a mote of fear. All he had for the village that stank of blood was a stern indifference. Had any survivors known of this, they might’ve held it against him for the rest of their lives. No, they would’ve undoubtedly forgone that. That way, they were spared having to choose death over a life of writhing pain.
After the young man had gone five or ten feet past the road to the village, his ears caught a faint sound and a voice. The sound was footsteps, and the voice was that of a young woman.
“Help me!”
The young man’s action betrayed the image he projected. Halting his horse, he tugged on the reins and wheeled it around. He gave a light kick of his heels to his mount’s flanks, and the cyborg horse began to trot back in the opposite direction.
On passing through the gate the rider was greeted by a scene like any other Frontier village. Wooden houses were scattered between the trees. There was a square and a well, stock pens and rows of storehouses. However, no one called out to the visitor, and there was no sign of vigilance-committee members to surround him with swords, spears, and firearms in hand.
The rider went straight down the main street of the village. But despite everything that was wrong about this scene, he didn’t seem to raise so much as an eyebrow of that cold and beautiful visage.
On the left-hand side he saw the sign for the general store. Yarai’s. It was the local branch of a chain that had stores far and wide across the Frontier. At the same time the horse halted in front of it, the door swung open from inside and a pale figure staggered out. Taking a couple of steps down the raised wooden sidewalk, she then thudded down on her face. Her flaming red hair shook.
Getting off his horse, the rider went over to the girl. Before he came to a stop, the girl put both hands against the sidewalk and tried to rise. Surely she’d noticed the rider’s approach, but she didn’t even look at him as she got back up. Though she was gritting her teeth, her face was that of a beautiful young lady of seventeen or eighteen. Rubbing her tear-wearied eyes with one hand, the girl then looked up at the rider. Her eyes instantly opened wide with fascination, and a rosy hue tinged her cheeks. For even mired as the girl was in weariness, resentment, and despair, the rider had a countenance so gorgeous it made her lose herself.
“Who are you?” the girl asked in a dazed tone. “I’m Rosaria.”
“D.”
At that point the wind blew by, stirring the young man’s hair and making him hold down the brim of his hat.
“That sounds like someone saying goodbye,” the girl—Rosaria—said, squinting her eyes.
“What happened?” D asked.
“Everyone’s been killed,” Rosaria replied weakly. With a pale finger she pointed to her neck. To a black scarf. “You must know without even looking. There are a pair of teeth marks under this. I was bitten by a Noble.”
The sky glittered. Half of the girl’s face lit up, while thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Show me,” D said.
“No. I don’t feel particularly good about it, and if you were to run off on me, I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.”
“I’m a Vampire Hunter.”
Rosaria’s eyes opened as far as they could go. Yet they still seemed to have a sort of gauze over them due to the beauty of the young man before her.
“You’re a Hunter . . . Would you by any chance be a dhampir?”
“Yes.”
With that, Rosaria collapsed on the spot. The threads of tension that’d supported her had been cut. Shoulders rising and falling as she took a deep breath, she looked up at D with hatred in her eyes.
“So, this is the end for me?” she asked.
“Why do you say that?”
“Don’t play innocent with me. I’m a victim. When a Vampire Hunter finds someone like that hanging around, he doesn’t let it slide. It’s your ilk that did this to the village!”
So, Vampire Hunters put the stench of blood all around the place?
“What happened?” D asked once again.
“Your colleagues came in and ran around killing everyone. That’s all—why don’t you see for yourself?”
Suddenly Rosaria got right back up on her feet and headed for the door of the same general store she’d come out of. She acted as though her earlier call for help had just been the sound of the wind.
Stroking the neck of his horse, which seemed somewhat on edge, the Hunter then followed after Rosaria.
The interior of the store was soaked in blood. Not the floor or the ceiling. The very air. By the counter, two villagers lay face down. Apparently they’d been attacked from behind, and the ends of iron stakes jutted from their backs. Judging by the length and thickness of them, the stakes had to weigh over twelve pounds each. Even if they’d caught those people off guard, the person who’d used them must’ve been endowed with incredible strength.
“Back behind the counter is old man Meadow. He was the manager.”
D had already caught the scent of another person’s blood rising from back there. Turning to Rosaria, he asked, “Did you hide?”
The girl nodded. “I worked here part time. I was just in the middle of putting some sacks of flour into the storehouse out back. And then, all of a sudden, I heard these screams.”
Though she’d thought about coming out, her whole body had just frozen. The screams had been that intense.
“Actually, they were screams from Mrs. Judd and Mrs. Laroque lying there. It’s unbelievable the noises a person makes when they’re dying . . . Then there was the sound of something hitting the floor, and old Mr. Meadow said, ‘Who sent you?’ But right after that . . .”
“Wasn’t there an answer?”
“Not a word. Once I heard the manager fall, there was some laughter. I’m sure there were four of them.”
Terrified as she was, this innocent young redhead had still been able to deduce their number from the murderers’ voices.
“I was paralyzed in the storehouse. And then I saw this huge flesh-eating rat down by my feet. It didn’t surprise me, but it managed to knock over a mountain of canned goods. I was certain I was dead. They came into the storehouse!”
“How did you survive?”
“I don’t know,” Rosaria replied, shaking her head in denial. “I just pressed my back up against the storehouse wall like so and shut my eyes. I was so nervous I thought my heart would stop. Now, that storehouse is a little prefab job that couldn’t hold three people. I knew as soon as they came in I’d be right in front of them. They absolutely had to have seen me. Yet all they did was grunt about how there was no one there, and then they just left.”
After he’d finished listening to her, D spun around and stepped outside. Crossing the street, he went into the saloon in the middle of the block. It was a bloodbath in there, too. Nearly a dozen men lay in their own blood. Stakes jutted from their backs or chests, and there were three decapitated corpses.
“Not a single person escaped, you know,” Rosaria said in a hoarse voice, having followed him there.
Undoubtedly these sudden attackers always prided themselves on being exceptionally skilled at slaughter. One corpse stood over by the wall with one hand going for the machete on his hip. He’d been killed while trying to resist. A stake about a foot and a half long nailed him to the wall, right through the heart. The man over by the window who’d been impaled with arms still outstretched had obviously made an attempt to escape.
“They must’ve been remarkably fast,” Rosaria said, shaking her head.
It was obvious that, having wielded those heavy stakes so easily and slaughtered ten people in a split second without letting anyone escape, they weren’t average Hunters. What’s more, they hadn’t pulled the stakes back out. Each must’ve had a number of them—how many pounds of weapons did they carry around?
“Have you seen the heads?” D asked.
His que
stion related to the decapitated corpses. Although it seemed a shocking query to put to a girl of her age, this was the Frontier. And it was D asking.
“I’ve seen nothing of the sort!” Rosaria said, turning her face away.
Had the butchers carried them away, then? For what purpose?
D went outside.
“After they left, I went around and checked every house in the village. The massacre was complete. Not a single person was left alive. Our village didn’t have much of a population to begin with. Wherever you go, you’ll find nothing but corpses here.”
“How about the women and children?”
Rosaria closed her eyes and shook her head. The winds of death had blown off with every life in the village, irrespective of age or sex.
“Did you see the killers?” D asked as he looked across the street.
“Nope. You can laugh if you like, but—I didn’t leave the storehouse. At least, not until the sound of their horses and wagon had gone down the road to the gate. But while I was in the storehouse, I heard screams and shouts and people begging for their lives outside the whole time.”
“Was it an ordinary wagon?”
“Now that you mention it, there was a huffing sound like steam.”
The reason D had asked must’ve been because he’d seen the number of deep ruts that’d been left in the dirt of the street.
“Do you know who they were?”
Not answering that, D asked her, “How long has the village been going?”
Rosaria’s eyes gave off a troubling gleam, but she soon seemed to give in, saying, “I guess there’s no point in hiding it from you, is there? Apparently, it’s been about fifty years. They took a village that’d fallen into disrepair and patched it up. You know, don’t you? That this was a village for victims.”
“They all had scarves on,” D replied.
Taking off any one of those would’ve exposed a pair of fang wounds.
“Why didn’t you look under them? When you see a person with a scarf around their neck, isn’t it perfectly natural for a Hunter to tear it off and check, even if that person happens to be one of your own parents? All the Hunters I’ve ever known would’ve done that.”
“What was the population of the village?” D asked her.
“Two hundred—or a few over that.”
“Were you planning on seeing to them?”
It took the girl a few seconds to grasp the meaning of those words.
“You’d bury them?” she said, her eyes quickly filling with tears. “I can’t believe it. You’re a Vampire Hunter, aren’t you? Isn’t it your job to kill people like us?”
“There isn’t enough time to bury them. We’ll cremate them.”
Rosaria nodded and sent glittering bits flying.
“It doesn’t matter which it is. Just so long as they get a proper human sendoff. I’m sure they’d appreciate that. Thank you.”
-
II
-
“Victim” was the term generally used to describe people who’d been fed upon by the Nobility but had been left, for whatever reason, before the job was done. Ordinarily they were banished from villages and isolated under strict surveillance, or else quickly disposed of. Although there were people who had no qualms about driving a stake through the heart of someone who up until a day earlier had been a friend or relative, they were few and far between. Some villages employed special “cleaners.” It was unavoidable that this task occasionally fell to a Vampire Hunter, but at the same time they were probably also perfectly suited to the job.
However, these victims didn’t merely wait for death.
A vacant gaze, a predilection for seeking shade to escape the sunlight, a fondness for wandering in dark forests, and an unpredictable thirst for blood—these were the characteristics of those who’d become slaves of the Nobility, and they’d been recognized since the ancient time when the Nobility had first made themselves the rulers of the earth. Some victims exhibited a number of these symptoms and others lacked them entirely, but they might escape a speedy death at the hands of their own kind and flee to someplace where no one knew them. However, they couldn’t hide the wounds on their throats. Due to the unholy nature of the vampire, they could burn the wounds with flames, melt them with acid, or even have the flesh surgically removed and replaced with a graft of new tissue, but like the immortals who’d left them there, the wounds would suddenly regenerate.
Inevitably, the victims had no choice but to conceal the marks left by that accursed kiss with a scarf or something similar. For the uninfected, that in itself became the way of distinguishing who’d been bitten. Thus, they were also banished from new areas and sent far into the mountains or deep into thick forests to seek a life in ruins of antiquity, cursed and shunned by others.
-
By the time they’d used a wagon to collect all the corpses in the village and lined them up on the edge of town, the light had fled completely from the afternoon sky. But in this world ruled by darkness, the two continued to work without pause. For Rosaria, like D, had the darkness-piercing vision of the Nobility.
Once they’d piled up the more than two hundred corpses, Rosaria watched gloomily as D splashed them with high-octane fuel, but she didn’t try to avert her gaze from his harsh duty. The fuel had been buried on the outskirts of the village for use in case of an emergency. Everything else had been carted off.
D took out a light stick. One swing brought dazzling flames from the end of the eight-inch baton of concentrated chemicals.
Rosaria was heard to say, “They were all such good people. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in this village.”
D might’ve been waiting for that. There were several seconds of silence—and then the fire was tossed.
The glow pulled the forms of both of them out of the darkness and danced across them. The flames were flickering. Burning at a hundred thousand degrees, the flames looked like a blinding mirage. And within them, the forms of the victims crumbled away without a sound.
“Goodbye, everybody,” Rosaria said, but she shed no more tears. She’d run dry.
Although she knew she wanted to say something, the words wouldn’t come out.
Instead, D said to her, “What will you do?”
If anyone who knew him had heard that question, it would’ve made them doubt their own ears. The very thought of this young man asking someone else’s opinion!
“Can’t stay here. I wanna go west. There’s this village named Valhalla. Ever heard of it? I don’t suppose you’d happen to be headed the same way, would you?”
“I am.”
“Really?” Rosaria exclaimed, her faced instantly brightened by joy. “Well, in that case—take me with you.”
“I’m the same as those who killed your friends.”
“No,” she shot back. As she said the next part, Rosaria realized she actually meant it. “You’re different. I can tell. I like to think I can read people. You’re really scary. You’re probably a lot more merciless and terrifying than the ones who killed everybody, but you’re definitely not a bad person.”
“Go straight down this highway here. After about thirty miles, you’ll hit Dodge Town. Ask there about the rest of the way.”
“Say, you don’t mean to just leave me here, do you?”
“If there’s nothing wrong with your legs, you can walk,” D told her.
“Wait a minute. I—I’m a victim! A poor invalid. Don’t you wanna protect me?”
“So long as you can walk in the light of the sun, you’ll manage,” D said, turning his back to her coldly.
Gazing absentmindedly at his back as he walked away, fascinated as she watched him go, the girl turned after a while to the flames scorching the heavens and chanted a prayer, then began to hurry after him.
She caught up to him in front of the general store.
“You sure do walk fast, you know that?”
The girl was referring to the fact that even running as quickly as sh
e could, she couldn’t catch up to him. And it’d looked for all the world as if D was just walking normally. He wasn’t even taking long strides, yet she hadn’t been able to gain any ground on him at all. The only reason she’d managed to catch up was because D himself had halted.
“You know, you’re just being horrible! Leaving a girl my age to—” Rosaria began to shout when her tongue froze.
A cluster of lights was approaching from the direction of the gate.
Rosaria trembled.
There was a sound. Huff, huff, huff!
Before it’d stopped not three feet from her with a shrill gasp of steam, Rosaria saw what it was. A vehicle hung with a number of lights. The huffing sounds of steam came from the cylinder on the back half of it—a boiler.
The shadowy figures that clung to the vehicle like insects climbed down in unison. The air shook; there wasn’t a sound. And the only way to describe the men was to say they were remarkably athletic. Each wore a cotton shirt and a vest with a staggering number of pockets, and over their eyes they wore thick night-vision goggles.
“Are they there?” D inquired.
He was asking Rosaria whether or not the murderers were present.
“No, they’re not,” she answered him instantaneously.
Rosaria was peeking out from behind D’s back.
“But their outfits are similar, and their vehicle’s exactly the same.”
“Looks like our forerunners left one alive, I’d say,” one of the shadowy figures remarked in a cold tone. It was the sort of voice that made his cruel and callous nature perfectly clear. “We would’ve gone right on by, too, if not for those flames. But if we don’t wipe out every last one of the Nobility’s playmates, the good little villagers won’t be able to sleep all safe and sound.”
The men’s hands went in unison for the weapons on their hips. Bastard swords, short spears, stake guns, throwing knives—though all their weapons were nicked and grimy and spoke volumes of the hard use they’d seen day in and day out for quite some time, it still wasn’t proof they’d ever been used against the Nobility.
Nobles were something else entirely. A lot of punks called themselves Vampire Hunters, but when it came down to how many of them had actually gone toe to toe with the creatures of the night, it was actually less than one percent.
Vampire Hunter D Volume 13: Twin-Shadowed Knight Parts 1 and 2 Page 28