“We’re here at the site of a hostage situation on Grant Street,” the reporter said. “This is the tenth such situation that local police have been called out to in the past three hours. News Ten is sending teams to the other locations. We will update you as we get more information. It’s not clear if this is some terrible, violent coincidence or if it represents coordinated terrorist activity. Police are asking that people stay in their homes—”
My boyfriend switched off the TV and stared at me. The madness was wearing a new face, and he seemed to recognize me again.
“They’ll kill you,” he whispered. His eyes had turned so yellow they looked like they’d been carved from brimstone. “You’re not of the body. You’re not in His image.”
Joe went into the kitchen and came out with a sharp boning knife. “If they don’t see the sign, they’ll kill you.”
I started struggling in earnest then, desperate to get loose, but he dodged my kicking legs and sat on my chest, pinning me to the scarred hardwood floor. He grabbed my hair with one hand and slashed the left side of my face with the other. The pain of the blade razoring through my flesh was bright, intense. The second slash nearly made me vomit. The third made me pass out. I came to a little while later. Joe was licking the tarry pool of my blood off the dirty floor. When had his tongue gotten so long?
“I saved you.” He grinned, pleased, his teeth red with gore. “I’m your savior.”
I passed out again.
The next week or so is still pretty hazy; I can’t sort out what was a hallucination, reality, or nightmare. I heard voices and screaming. When I was finally fully conscious, my head was baking with fever and the slashes on my face were a throbbing agony. My left eye was swollen shut, and for a while I was scared he’d cut it out.
Joe came in and out of the room, sometimes just staring at me, sometimes pacing and rambling about cosmic signs. The words coming out of his mouth sounded like English, but they just didn’t make any sense.
Joe must have realized my mutilated face was horrifically infected because he started feeding me his antibiotics along with water and occasionally a piece of bread. But he didn’t seem to understand the part where I needed to go to the bathroom, or the part where the antibiotics would give me diarrhea. I was lying in terrible filth; I could feel my skin blistering and ulcerating under my clothes. I prayed for death.
I was a disgusting wreck, and so was the house. But Joe looked clean and healthy, his hair combed, wearing his good khakis and best button-down shirt. He appeared that way as long as I was looking at him straight on, that is. When I glimpsed him from the corner of my eye . . . I couldn’t quite make out what I was seeing, but the shambling, tattered-looking thing wasn’t the Joe I knew.
I finally awoke one morning and my fever had broken. I was weak as hell, but at last I had the focus to grasp a fragment of broken lamp between my toes, and flip it up toward my hands. I finally realized that after six flips I wasn’t going to catch any shards, and even if I did, my fingers were too numb and clumsy to do anything. So I concentrated on trying to stretch the cords again. After what seemed like fifteen years, I was finally able to slip off one of the loops. The others were easy to shake off after that.
I climbed painfully to my feet, back and sides aching, and dropped my ruined pajama bottoms and panties. Joe kept his grandfather’s shotgun in the back of the coat closet. He’d shown me how to handle it once. I found the weapon in its tan canvas case and the shells under a pile of winter hats on the upper shelf. It took me a couple of tries to get them down, each sending sharp pains through my strained, stiff shoulders. Once I got my hands working well enough to load the old double-barrel, I crept through the house with it, dreading what I would find. I remembered the corner glimpses of something terrible and I knew Joe wasn’t simply insane. Something much worse had happened. My hands ached and the weapon seemed impossibly heavy in my weak, shaking arms.
Upstairs was empty of any life but a few scuttling cockroaches and spiders. I took a deep breath, held it. My aching guts told me he was still in the house, but he had to be down in the basement. The very last place I wanted to be.
Once I got my hands to quit shaking, I ducked into the bathroom to wipe off the worst of the filth, slipped on a pair of his boxer shorts and some old sneakers, and slowly went downstairs. The stench of spoiled meat hit me the moment I pushed open the basement door. I wanted to puke, but there wasn’t anything in my stomach.
Three pale, bloodless corpses lay on the concrete basement floor. Two were neighborhood kids; one was the old lady who’d lived next door. Their throats had been torn open, their exposed flesh pale as raw chicken meat. Not a drop wasted. They were still wearing all their clothes. Perversion paled in comparison to murder, but it was nice to know that Joe’s madness had its limits.
I hadn’t thought of the word vampire until then, but with all that evidence spread before me, nothing else made sense. In my mind, I could picture Joe reaching out to them, trying to bring them to the house to protect them like the good guy he was. But once they came inside, he saw me tied to the radiator and realized that if he saved them, he’d have to drain me. Because a guy has to eat, right?
My heart beating so hard I was light-headed, I stepped over the corpses and opened the utility room door. The creature my boyfriend had become was curled up in the corner by the washer, asleep in a nest of soiled clothes and pages torn from old books. The sight of it should have made me want to run screaming, but that demanded energy I just didn’t have. Its hairless skin was a dark yellow, and its body was practically skeletal. I remembered that birds have hollow bones so they can fly. His spindly arms hadn’t quite transformed into batlike wings yet. There was a little of Joe left in the thing’s distorted face, enough to make me sure it was him, but not enough to make me pause before I blew its head off.
The recoil from the shotgun knocked me flat on my blistered ass. After I got myself up, I found a bottle of Drano on a shelf and poured the gel all over the creature’s still-twitching body. The caustic goop made its flesh sizzle like bacon in a pan. The stink was incredible, and made my eyes water and nose run, but I wanted to be damned sure the thing was dead. I’d have set it on fire, but I knew I was too weak to abandon the house. I shut the utility room door, blocked it with an old trunk, then went upstairs and locked the basement door behind me.
We still had electricity. I found my cell phone in the bedroom but the battery was dead; I plugged it in and tried 911. Got a busy signal. I tried my friends’ numbers; they all went to voice mail.
I stared down at the phone, feeling sick again. I left it charging on the middle of the bed and went to get cleaned up and examine my wounds. The bathroom looked about the same as I’d left it; I guessed vampires weren’t much for hygiene. I killed the cockroach I found in the tub, flushed it, and took a hot, soapy shower to get the filth off my skin. My crotch, ass, and thighs were covered in a constellation of sores and pustules. Some broke at my touch, and I soaped up again and tried to clean out the wounds as best I could. At least the antibiotics Joe had given me had seemingly prevented the worst infection. After I dried off, I found a tube of diaper-rash cream left over from when we’d babysat Joe’s infant niece and slathered myself up.
Then it was time to check the real damage. I wiped the steam off the mirror and took a look at my face. The left side was still puffy under a scab the size of a saucer. It itched something fierce, but I didn’t want to touch it to risk reopening anything. I didn’t know if Joe had bitten or licked me while I was unconscious. But neither my skin nor my eyes looked yellowed. I hoped for the best.
I got dressed in a pair of loose palazzo pants and a T-shirt and raided the fridge. Half the food was fuzzy with mold, but the tortillas and lunch meat still looked edible, as did a couple of tangelos. You wouldn’t think you’d be able to eat knowing you were standing just twelve feet above three dumped murder victims and a dissolving vampire, but you might surprise yourself. Hunger is a powerful drive. I made m
yself eat and drink slowly so I wouldn’t get sick. I knew I couldn’t afford to waste food.
My adrenaline finally ebbed after my belly was full, and suddenly I felt as though I were wearing a lead bodysuit. It was all I could do to drag myself upstairs and brush my teeth before I passed out on the bed. I had exactly the kind of nightmares you’d figure I’d have, but I slept for over eighteen hours anyhow.
When I woke, I ate again, washed again, and tried to figure out what I should do next. My eyes and skin still weren’t yellow. The TV stations were all static, so either the cable was out or something far worse was going on. I tried my friends’ numbers again and left messages.
I almost wet myself with joy when 911 answered. A pleasant-sounding young woman took down my details—I told her my boyfriend had killed some people but didn’t detail the bit about his becoming a vampire because I still cared about whether people thought I was crazy or not. She said she’d dispatch an officer to my house.
Sure enough, fifteen minutes later there was a knock at my front door. I answered it, and a nice-looking, red-haired uniformed policeman stood on the porch.
“I’m Officer Curtis,” he said, polite and pleasant as a Boy Scout selling candy bars. “May I come inside?”
“Sure.” I turned to set aside my shotgun—
—and got a glimpse of the thing at my door from the corner of my eye.
When the smoke and haze of blood in the air cleared, I realized I’d blown a hole in the screen door and had blasted the vampire’s head clean off its spindly yellow shoulders. The rest of the bat-winged body that lay sprawled and jerking on the concrete steps was practically a clone of what Joe had turned into.
I shivered. It wasn’t even wearing any clothes; nothing about the vampire actually looked like the cop I’d seen. I glanced up at the sky. It was early morning and overcast to boot . . . but it certainly wasn’t dark, either. These things could stand daylight, or at least some of it.
As I got more experience killing vampires, I learned that they went blind in bright light. The sun would never make them burst into flames, but fifteen minutes was enough to give a vampire a blistering burn and after that, the light made their bodies sprout grotesque tumors. Their mutability always made me uneasy about leaving one staked out to die in the noontime glare, lest it turn into some day-stalking monstrosity. Their wiry strength was formidable and they were plenty tough, but they weren’t immortals that could be slain only with a stake through the heart or decapitation. A couple of solid body shots with hollow-point bullets would settle any flapper’s hash, as would a dozen crushing blows with a Louisville Slugger.
Their biggest weapon was their psychic camouflage. And even after three years, I still had a hard time seeing through their glamour. But I knew full well that a clever vampire could wreak diabolic chaos in a room full of people by making everyone see something different.
So, as my sister, Lady, stood there in the bikers’ clubhouse looking nearly as improbable as the angel Gabriel bearing two large supreme pizzas from Donato’s . . . I was doing all manner of eyeball calisthenics to try to glimpse her sidewise. No matter how I gazed upon her, she still looked the same.
Lady finally broke the silence that had fallen on the room.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” She stepped toward me and reached out to touch my cheek.
I flinched away from her, wishing I hadn’t left my pistol back in my bunk. I had my KA-BAR strapped to my belt and a throwing dagger hidden in the top of each of my tall boots, but you don’t take a knife to a vampire fight if you can help it. She didn’t seem to notice my discomfort.
“You’ve got the sign,” she whispered, gazing in awe at my scars.
I reflexively covered my cheek with my hand. “What?”
“The sign.” She held up her wrist. Just below her delicate blue veins was an ornate tattoo, a beautiful version of the weird symbol Joe had carved into my flesh. Seeing her ink was like being hit with a Taser. Until that moment, I hadn’t seriously thought that the marks on my cheek meant anything outside the confines of my boyfriend’s fevered mind. Some people had claimed it looked like part of a misshapen Chinese character for fate or death or whatever, and one old man claimed it was a stylized Arabic curse, but I’d figured it was just a living Rorschach blot.
“What does it mean?” My voice shook.
“It’s a sign to the minions of the King.” She gazed at me earnestly. “It tells them that although you are not of His body, you are not to be touched.”
She leaned in close and whispered, “Someone must have loved you very much to mark you so.”
I remembered the agony of steel cutting skin and muscle, the torment of lying bound and bleeding in my own filth. That didn’t feel like love. If that was supposed to be genuine love, I wanted no part of it.
“This fucking thing is supposed to protect me?” I couldn’t keep the anguish out of my voice. It made me feel naked in front of everyone, frail in front of people who already mocked me for my supposed weaknesses, and I hated her a little for it. If my face hadn’t been all fucked up, they probably would have called me Brownie Scout instead. “I’ve had plenty of creeps come after me.”
“The King allows his servants to defend themselves and their hives. And once a servant joins the body, some measure of free will remains.” Her cool gaze moved across the men and women in the room, all of whom had earned at least one felony conviction apiece before the vampires showed up. “Not all choose to obey the laws.”
Bear, the Freebirds’ sergeant at arms, snorted and slid off his bar stool. His booted feet clomped loudly on the wooden floor.
“What’s all this yammer about vampires an’ laws?” His voice was belligerent and slurred by beer. “Ev’r’body knows them things is just giant bloodsucking bugs. Mansquitoes.” He laughed at his own pun.
Lady just watched him warily as he swaggered over.
“Ain’t you a pretty little thing, though.” He reached out to paw her breast, but I pushed his meaty hand away from her. He scowled at me. “Don’t step twixt a dog and his meat, Beauty.”
“She’s not your meat. She’s my sister. You need to step back, please.” I held his stare in mine. Everybody else was silent; if tension were electricity, you could have lit a skyscraper with what was in that room.
I knew it was dangerous to challenge him, but I also knew what the men did to women and girls they saw as pretty enough to be proper bike decorations. And Lady was far more beautiful than any of the strippers, runaways, and drug addicts the Freebirds normally attracted. When the club members found me on the road, exhausted and half-dead after four months of trying to survive on my own, I was deemed too ugly to fuck and therefore probably useless, but the club president took a shine to me anyhow. They assigned me the same scut work they gave the prospects: cleaning toilets, disposing of bodies, cleaning up puke, and degreasing engines. Because I was female, I’d never earn my way to a patch and club colors, but most of the time I thought I’d at least earned their respect, especially considering how good I was at killing vampires. I’d been able to stop rapes and abuse before. So I figured there would be a little staring contest and Bear would back off and get back to his drinking.
But I guess he could see how much Lady meant to me, and he was enough of a sadist to want to hurt me that day. Or maybe his unspeakable grief needed an outlet, and I was a handy target. His old lady had just lost their baby; the stillborn infant would have been his son and the first new child any of us had seen since the horror began. The army had put something in the air and water to try to kill off the vampires, but the only thing it definitely did was fuck up women’s hormones and make us all infertile. It seemed a mercy, really; this was no longer a world fit for children. But Mama Bear’s pregnancy was a great joy for the men and women of the club, and it seemed nothing short of a miracle while it lasted.
Nobody minded when he cried over the tiny body the night she went into premature labor, but after that, the rest of the club expect
ed him to man up and get over it. We saw death every day. But how can a man get over something like that? So Bear had to swallow down his misery, pretend it wasn’t there. I wasn’t surprised that it had grown into something terrible there in the shadow of his soul, and I really did feel sorry for the guy, but I wasn’t about to let him molest my sister. Not for fun or spite or out of despair or anything else.
“I don’t take orders from ugly cunts.” Bear spat on my boots.
“It isn’t an order, friend, but I’m here to protect family,” I said, just loud enough that I was sure the whole room could hear me. “I was there when she was born, and if you or anyone else tries to hurt her, I will stop it by any means necessary.”
His gaze turned hard and distant. I can’t be sure he was suicidal, but I can’t say that he wasn’t, either. He never struck me as the smartest guy in the club, but he’d have to have been an idiot to ignore what I was capable of.
“Fuck you, gash face.” Bear gave me a hard shove and grabbed Lady.
I’d braced myself and he didn’t knock me over. What happened next took less than a second. I drew my KA-BAR and swung the knife at him as hard as I could . . . and I swear to this day I meant to hit him upside his thick head with the flat hammer pommel. I just wanted to knock him out. But he let go of my sister and dropped, and when he lay there sprawled on the floor, I saw I’d sunk my blade into his temple, nearly all the way to the hilt. His staring eyes were empty lights.
“Oh no,” whispered Lady.
I heard the click of a Ruger Redhawk being cocked right behind my head.
“Hands up, Beauty.”
I raised my arms and slowly turned around. Eric “Gun” Gunnarson, the club president, was pointing the huge revolver right between my eyes.
Seize the Night Page 41