“I didn’t want that to happen,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I’m sorry.”
“I figured.” Gun’s expression was hard, and his pistol hand didn’t waver.
I looked him right in the eyes, and it was like he didn’t recognize me. What I saw in his stare reminded me of Joe the night he carved my face up. I’m sure no bystander would ever guess that just two weeks before, Gun had kissed me on my forehead and confessed that he loved me. Just like they never would have guessed that he’d wept alongside Bear over the body of his tiny nephew.
He pressed the revolver up under my chin and moved in close.
“I get that she’s your sister.” Gun whispered in my ear, too quietly for anyone but maybe Lady to hear. “But Bear was my brother and a club officer. If you were anyone else, I’d have killed both of you by now. Fact is, you’re too damned useful to kill. So that means you get to live this time. But there’s a price to pay.”
He called two guys over to haul Bear out to the dead shed, where his son still lay wrapped in his baby blanket, waiting for the weekly cremation out in the field.
“Clear off that pool table and put my chair over there,” he ordered. “Rentboy! Rentboy, get your skinny ass over here!”
A young, model-handsome prospect ducked out from behind the bar, hurried over, and stood at attention in front of Bear. I could see the hard-on in his Levi’s; it was impressive even to men raised on a steady diet of hard-core porn. He looked completely terrified. That’s why he was a joke to all the guys: fear made him pop massive wood, every time, unless he was close to passing out from booze. On one of my many nights of insomnia, I found him drinking at the bar by himself. He started weeping and told me his aunt did something awful to him when he was little. But that was as much as I ever knew; I didn’t press for more details, and I kept it to myself. He probably wouldn’t talk about it even to a sympathetic counselor—boys don’t get raped by women, right? They just get lucky—and so there was no way in hell he’d confide in any of the Freebirds. He pretended like it was a fun thing, a party trick, and so scaring him into an erection was an unending source of hilarity around the club.
“We need us a show, Rentboy!” Gun pointed at the cleared-off pool table. “Take the lovely lady over there and show us what you can do.”
Rentboy’s eyes bugged out of his head and he stammered, “But . . . but I don’t think she wants to.”
“I don’t care what she wants.” Gun was impassive, immovable.
“Please, sir, don’t make me.” Rentboy looked like he might start crying.
At that, Gun turned his revolver on Rentboy, and in the back of my mind I knew I could grab the weapon, but I was still the center of attention in a room full of armed men. I’d die, and so would my sister. I had to wait for a better opportunity and pray that one actually came along.
“Do you want to get patched, son?” Gun demanded harshly. “Or do you want to get carried out to the shed?”
“Please don’t do this,” I whispered. I’d spent enough time around Gun to know he was capable of awful things, but until that day I’d seen him commit his crimes only out of need. I couldn’t think of him as a monster. Not yet. But I knew the pressure we were all living under was burning away his decent parts bit by bit. Maybe monstrosity would be all that was left of us, whether we ever got bitten by vampires or not.
He turned the revolver back on me. “Did you say something, you ugly whore?”
His question was loud and clear. No respect offered me in front of the club. No admission of the feelings he’d declared to me in private, not even a simple nod to all the blood and sweat I’d poured into the club’s common good. I didn’t even rate the consideration the other females got because I wasn’t anyone’s old lady.
Sure, Gun could have stepped up and told everyone Bear got what he had coming to him. Gun could have told everyone that I was his lady, had been for over a year, and he could have made me the new sergeant at arms, because I’d be a fuck of a lot more competent at the job than his brother had ever been.
Gun could have done all that. And monkeys could have come flying out of my ass, too.
“Did you say something, whore?” he asked again.
I shook my head, my mouth clamped shut, rage firing through every synapse in my body. The train had left the station, and there was no easy way of stopping it now. Gun was acting how he thought a boss should, and what he was doing made sense by a certain sociopathic logic.
Problem: a strange, beautiful woman shows up, and you know your men are going to fight over her because they don’t see her as anything more than some kind of trophy to be won.
Solution: tarnish her shine and break her, then hand her off to a lieutenant like a toy you’re tired of.
Problem: the woman you love just killed your brother in defense of said beautiful stranger and challenged the club’s power structure.
Solution: humiliate her in front of the club and break her, too. A boss has to make personal sacrifices sometimes. Besides, you can always find another gun hand and another woman to declare your secret passion to.
“Good,” Gun replied. “Keep your whore mouth shut until it’s time for you to open it.”
He waved the Redhawk toward the pool table. “Get over there and kneel in front of my chair.”
At least I knew where I stood, right? My whole body shook with the anger I couldn’t express, but I did what I was told.
He settled himself in the worn leather recliner, unzipped his fly, and pulled his cock out. Rapped me on top of my head with the barrel of the revolver like I was a misbehaving dog. “Do what you’re good at.”
Goddamn it, I thought. Goddamn him and this whole place all to hell.
Meanwhile, Rentboy hadn’t taken a single step toward my sister. He stood there, his eyes closed as if through sheer force of will he could make himself teleport to someplace far away.
“Boy, what did I tell you?” Gun barked.
“Yessir!” Rentboy hurried over to Lady and took her by the hand.
“No.” Lady tried to pull away, but the kid held her fast.
“It’ll be okay,” I heard him plead, his voice low. “There’s no choice—let’s just do it and it’ll be over soon.”
“It’s over when I say it’s over,” Gun replied loudly, lord of all he surveyed. “Someone bring me a TV table and a beer.”
Two prospects hurried to obey him. He rapped me on the top of my head again, harder. “And what did I tell you?”
So I started doing the thing I’d done a hundred times before, always in the dark in Gun’s room, always under the illusion that I was doing it for a man who cared about me. A man who wasn’t a complete and utter fucking bastard. I focused on Gun’s hardening tool, tried to block out the sound of my sister’s and Rentboy’s misery on the pool table behind me.
I chanced a glance around; almost nobody was looking at me. A few horrified or titillated gazes were aimed at the table; most everyone else I could see was staring at the floor, unfocused, sending their minds someplace else.
You guys could stop this, I thought to them all, wishing I were a vampire so I could project the idea into their heads. But they should have gotten that idea all on their own.
Someone stop this.
Nobody did anything but watch.
After that, I let my faster hand trail down to the cuff of my boot, where a dagger rested, and kept track of the Redhawk out of the corner of my eye. I prayed to every god I could remember for some kind of a chance.
I heard my sister choke, then the sound of her vomiting. Puke splattered on the floor behind me. Gun’s cock went soft.
“Goddamn it!” He slammed the Redhawk down on the wooden TV table in frustration.
I remember what happened next in quick strobe flashes. I drew the dagger and rammed it up through his balls and into his bladder. Then the Redhawk was in my hand and I was blasting away at all the people who’d just stood and watched my betrayal and my sister’s violation. Some
thing inside my head disconnected for a few seconds, and when I came back to myself, I had another pistol in my hand—a svelte little .38 semiautomatic—and my naked sister was standing between me and Rentboy, her hands up, pleading. Thin vomit dripped down her chin and her face was very white. He was curled up in a ball under the pool table, sobbing and wailing like the world had come to an end.
“Louise, Louise, stop, please stop,” Lady begged. “You did it. They’re all gone. Just stop. The boy didn’t want to.”
Dazed, I looked around. I’d murdered everyone in the clubhouse. Patched members, officers, old ladies, prospects . . . everyone. Faces and chests were blown apart. I’d slit a prospect’s throat with my other knife, and try as I might, I couldn’t bring up even a hazy memory of doing so. But my blood-covered hands and shirt told the tale. I couldn’t find any wounds on myself except for a couple of scrapes and a bloody nose.
“Are there any other biker guys?” Lady asked. Her voice and expression were supernaturally calm. I wondered if this was what PTSD looked like on her.
I counted, realized we were seven short, and remembered that the vice president had taken his favorites to search for food in a nearby abandoned town. They’d be back at dawn. His old lady lay among the bodies; I’d put a round through her pretty left eye.
“Yeah. We better get the hell out of here.”
While Lady put herself back together, I washed the blood off at the bar sink and then quickly gathered supplies—weapons, ammo, food, a medical pack, and jerry cans of gasoline, plus my rucksack of clothes and what little personal stuff I’d kept—and got my battered Yamaha V Star ready. Lady had arrived on her own bike, a shiny Honda NC700X. Meanwhile, Rentboy wouldn’t stop crying and didn’t want to come with us, and frankly I didn’t want him along anyhow.
“Are you okay?” I asked her as we walked out of the clubhouse to load the bikes.
“I’m fine.” Her face was a pale mask.
For the first time, I noticed she was wearing an antique gold signet ring and was twisting it round and round her index finger.
I knew all about trauma, but I sucked at knowing what to say to help people through it. I guess if I had any talent for it, I’d have majored in counseling instead of English. “If you need to talk—”
“I don’t. Honest.” She flashed me a quick, unconvincing smile. “What’s done is done, and once we’ve left this awful place, I can put it all behind me.”
“Okay,” I replied gently. “Where do you want to go?”
“Our father wants you to come home,” she replied. “He wants our family back together.”
I stopped in my tracks. My first thought was, No fucking way. The second was, That old bastard’s still alive?
“Seriously? This is for real?” I asked her aloud.
“Of course,” she said. “Father wants you home.”
“He didn’t exactly beg me to come back after I left,” I said. “In fact, when I called Mom to let her know I wasn’t dead in a ditch, she said he’d disowned me.”
Lady shrugged. “I know he wasn’t very nice to you back then. I was there for most of it, remember? I know how hard he was to live with.”
I let out a short, bitter laugh. “But he liked you. You were his little princess. I was just a tomboy who never liked what he liked and never did as he ordered.”
“I promise you, he’s had a change of heart. The world is different, and so is he.”
I thought back on all his narcissistic rages and Napoleonic mood swings, and my stomach twisted in dread. But I also remembered his hugging me and telling me he was proud of me, once. Maybe that could happen again. “Really?”
She nodded, smiling brightly, and drew an X over her chest. “Cross my heart.”
We hit the road and put three hundred miles between ourselves and the massacre before we stopped to rest at an abandoned gas station along I-10. I did two searches of the property to check for vampires before we set up camp in the part that used to be a convenience store. The shelves still held stale candy bars and boxes of crackers under a thick layer of grime blown in from the road through the broken glass doors.
“Did you know our family’s royalty?” she asked as I set up my camp stove to warm some water for tea. She was fiddling with her gold ring.
I laughed. “All you need to be royalty in this country is money, and Father always had plenty of that.”
Our father got his money the old-fashioned way: he inherited it. And despite his talent for waste and alienating other people, he did have a certain knack for playing the stock market, and he started out life with enough capital to keep the cash flowing in.
“No, I mean we’re actual royalty,” Lady insisted. “Father showed me the documents. We’re the most direct descendants of Duke Louis de Calvados Castaigne. You’re even named after him. Alfonso the Third promised he would rule over New Spain once it was reclaimed in the name of the King.”
She pulled off her ring and showed it to me. “See? Our father inherited this. It bears the sign of the King.”
I paused, not sure how to respond. “But that whole reclaiming thing never happened, did it?”
“Look around,” she said. “Who rules the land now?”
I shivered.
After a sleepless night in which I thought way too much about Gun and Bear and the stillborn baby, we rode on for my parents’ house in Mill Valley. The morning sky was a flat, gray-yellow expanse, and the air smelled of sulfur. Xinantecatl was blowing ash down in Mexico. The new eruptions of the long-dormant volcano started a few months before the first vampire attacks were recorded, and so some people claimed that the mountain had released the ancient, parasitic race from hibernation deep in the rocks. I didn’t know if the tale was true or not, but the coincidence was compelling. People told all kinds of stories about the vampires. Some folks claimed NASA brought them back from Mars. Ultimately, their natural history didn’t matter. Staying alive did.
The highways were holding up pretty well considering they hadn’t had any maintenance in two years. Everything seemed pretty well deserted, even the parts of Los Angeles we traveled past. I’d braced myself to have to flee from roving paramilitary or urban gangs, but the city was a ghostly expanse of silent concrete, decaying buildings, and weed-eaten blacktop. San Francisco was nearly as desolate, although I glimpsed a few figures hurrying to duck into buildings or behind vehicles when we approached.
It occurred to me that I might have single-handedly wiped out a double-digit portion of the remaining human population in Arizona, and I didn’t feel very good about that.
We got to the house shortly before sunset. The roads leading up to it were choked with vines and ferns, but everything inside the tall iron gate was pretty much as I remembered it. The rolling expanse of lawn was weed-free and freshly mowed. I could even see the lights of the dining room chandelier.
“I’ve kept the place up,” Lady said as she punched in her security code. The gate creaked open. “Me and a couple of the servants, anyhow.”
Servants. That used to be a normal thing for me: living in a house with a butler, a couple of maids, and a gardener. Some of the people I related my story to shook their heads and told me that I was crazy for walking away from so much money and privilege and choosing to live in a world where spilled Tylenol mattered, but I was miserable in Mill Valley. I could remember happiness in my life: it was with Joe, before something bit him in the dark.
She saw me gazing at the chandelier. “The solar panels cost six figures, but they were an excellent investment; we were off the grid well before the King awoke his minions.”
“That’s good,” I said absently. My sister’s talk of the King was starting to get on my nerves. She’d always been a little strange, but now I was starting to wonder if she was delusional. Still, her eyes were clear of jaundice, and the house looked fine. I knew to stay on my guard—I was always on my guard—but I was pretty curious about what my family had been up to since I’d been gone.
We rode u
p the long driveway and parked our bikes in the circle around the bubbling marble fountain; Father had it imported from somewhere in France.
Lady eyed my gun belt and the machete I wore in a leather sheath strapped across my back. “You don’t need those in the house.”
“I’d feel naked without them.”
She shrugged, smiled dreamily, and knocked on the front door. Our old butler Mr. Yates answered and escorted us inside. He didn’t look much different than he did back when I still lived there. The inside of the house was bigger than I remembered, and all the marble and mahogany and brass fixtures were burnished to glossy shines.
“This way, gentle ladies,” Yates said. “The rest of the family is gathered in the parlor.”
We followed him back, and he pushed open the double doors. My father sat in his favorite easy chair. My mother stood behind him, and my aunt Hilda and her grown children Constance and Archer sat on the sofa nearby, drinking tea from bone-china cups.
My heart soared, and I forgot my old hatred of my father. The whole family had survived? It was nothing short of a miracle.
“Welcome home, Louise,” my father said.
But then Yates moved off to the left . . . and I caught a glimpse of him from the corner of my eye.
Instinct took over before I had a chance to think. I drew my machete and swung at the elderly butler. My blade met its mark and the vampire scrambled back, shrieking and hissing, clutching its severed wing.
“No!” shrieked Lady, cowering away from me.
At that point I’d glimpsed the rest of the family sidewise, and what was still human in me wept while I drew the .38 and started pumping hollow-points into everything that moved.
A huge vampire flapped toward me, its wings yellow tatters, the gunshot wound in its leg dripping ichor like amber sap. “Explain yourself!” it boomed in my father’s regal voice.
I danced aside like a matador, met it with the machete, and took its head raggedly off.
And when it died, the house around me changed. The light sconces glowed not with electricity but guttering oil lamps made from old cans; I recognized the smell of burning human fat. The brass was green with corrosion, the windows shattered. The fine couches were torn and stained with blood from a hundred victims. What I had taken for plush, clean carpet was a matted pile scattered with human remains, and in the dimness beyond, I saw the gleaming eyes of dozens of vampires huddled against the walls.
Seize the Night Page 42