by Ben Stevens
Ratt slid from the street-alley intersection where he had been standing to a position where most of his profile was obscured by a light post with a trash bin at its base. Trying not to draw attention to himself, Ratt reached into his pants pocket, brushing aside the pre-Storm vintage skater chain that dangled there, and withdrew a hand-sized clear plastic bag. He casually dumped the bag on the lid of the trash bin and opened it with nimble fingers. He proceeded to drag out the motions of rolling a cigarette while he studied the bread line, attempting to look as aloof and indifferent as possible.
What he saw there disturbed his freedom-loving sensibilities, but it wasn’t necessarily hellish or horrific by any means. He watched in mild disgust as each human citizen at the front of the line offered up their arm to the vampiric tenders of the process, tilting their heads to allow their neck tattoo to be inspected and scanned in, like a barcode upon a pre-Storm grocery shop’s inventory.
The tenders took the offered arms without so much as a word and plugged a large catheter-like needle into the citizen’s port; the blood tax paid. Quick and painless, and Ratt only saw a few dozen people faint from dizziness, while the majority simply finished paying their toll and received a small bag of maize and a bottle of milk for their trouble and were sent on their way.
So that’s how things work around here, huh? Blood for food. Freedom for security. Well, I think I’ve seen enough of my fellow humans treated like a commodity. Time to head back to the palace.
Ratt popped his freshly rolled cigarette between his lips and, cupping his hands, lit it up.
He took one last lingering look at the blood-line, then, turning to leave, exhaled a cloud of blue-tinged smoke into the night air.
He arrived back at the palace’s front entrance without any further adventure and was allowed in by the same pair of human guards who had let him out earlier.
Sheesh. These guys not only roll over for, but also serve and protect their overlords. Makes me sick, man.
As he wandered through the darkened corridors, lit here and there by decorative Colonial-style wall sconces, he began to ponder if there were any citizens whatsoever who weren’t so willing to give up their blood to a class that lived at such a higher standard than them, especially when the lower class seemed to be doing all the work.
From what Ratt had seen, it was the humans that made repairs to the roads the vampires provided. They were granted space to make their dwellings, but only the most basic of raw materials were available to them, while all the fine stone and lumber—those materials more rare in this post-Storm world—were saved for the vampires, who then used human labor to build the mansions and human labor to guard the same by daylight.
It was the humans that toiled in the garden plots, the humans that grew and then harvested the maize with which they were paid. The land was within the walls of the vampire-ruled, vampire-owned, and vampire-protected city, and so it was accepted as fair. As he continued to ponder, it seemed more and more to him that the entire system was based on and supported by acceptance alone. Acceptance and belief in the “rightness” and “fairness” of the ruling class and working class. On the surface, it would seem that despite having access to the means of production, and in actuality being the ones who produced the food and maintained the infrastructure, the thought of turning against the ruling class that lived in luxury was as alien to these people as anything that ever crawled from a Drop.
Maybe they accept the situation because they get protection from whatever might come from those Drops…
But what lies on the surface and what probes the depths of men’s dreams are two different things entirely. Ratt pondered this deeply, no longer paying attention to where he was going, but simply walking along the palace corridors, lost in his musings.
Surely they must resent their situation but feel too scared to act… Surely some among them wish to avoid this blood tax and better their lives… but maybe not. Maybe, as ugly as it is, we need to leave these people to sleep in the bed they’ve made? Bending the knee to the bloodsuckers may seem abhorrent, but in this broken world, full of potentially worse monsters, say, Harvesters for example, perhaps living under the yoke of the vamps is worth the protection they receive…
Lost in his thoughts, Ratt failed to recognize that his steps had gone awry three turns ago, and he was nowhere near the suite. He had also failed to notice that the ornate sconces no longer decorated the walls. In their places were ancient, medieval-looking torches in iron brackets, burning loudly with snaps and pops, dripping small flaming bits of tallow to the stone floor.
It wasn’t until he reached the end of the hallway that he realized he was in the wrong place.
Uh-oh. Way to not pay attention, Ratt. Where did I get to?
Where he had expected to find the stairs that led up to the suite, he instead found a set of older, sinister-looking stone steps that curved downward, not upward. They bent toward his right as they disappeared into darkness, the path appearing to be swallowed by shadows. He felt a wave of cool air rising from below, a too-chilly-to-be-refreshing draft.
He was then suddenly struck with that familiar feeling one gets when doing something they shouldn’t or being somewhere they shouldn’t. Ratt glanced over his shoulders, first left, then right. He was alone.
“How did this happen?” he wondered out loud, his spoken voice giving a tactile quality to his circumstances.
For a moment, he thought it best that he turn around, seek out the suite, and apologize to any vampire he might accidentally come across—for it was wise, he thought, to be polite to the wolves when you were the new sheep in town. And turn around he almost did, until he heard a woman’s sobs from down below, the absolute and complete terror in the sound causing goosebumps to rise all over his body.
Silence.
No, he could now hear the crackling of the torches behind him. And his breathing.
The deathly stillness of the hall was interrupted by another scream, the kind of scream that was all too familiar to him. This time, the scream was a word—no, two words.
“No! Please!”
Ratt froze, his mind and body suddenly possessed by the ghost of slaughters past. He had heard those same two words screamed by a woman before. It was the last two things his mother had uttered on this Earth before being gunned down by soldiers from the Human Republic. In the silence between that plea for mercy and the next scream, Ratt relived the terror and trauma of watching his family die at the hands of men who’d thought it their right to rule over others, to squash independence in order to consolidate natural resources and establish a new, fair order, a government that would do what it must for the greater good. War was war, they said, and rape and murder and “collateral damage” was bound to happen. Deal with it, kid. You should be grateful that we’re here to protect you from the Drops, from Strange, from Beasties, from Drop-trash. Your parents were terrorists. Ad nauseum.
“Enough!” Ratt exclaimed, probably louder than he should have. All thoughts of self-preservation were banished by those words, and upon hearing the third scream, Ratt snapped out of his possessed reverie and bolted down the stairs recklessly. The way quickly became dark, but he dared not slow his descent. He was, however, forced to pull his goggles up onto his forehead so he could see a tad better. Like a blind man, he put one hand out in front of him, probing the black before him, the other hand flat against the wall for stability as he spiraled down the steps in a run, praying not to roll an ankle or trip, should he land wrong, as he skipped several steps with each run-jump down.
Just as the last vestiges of the light above and behind him faded fully, forcing him to slow his run to a walk, light from ahead and farther down began to creep into the edges of the shadows. Another full turn down the long, winding staircase and solid enough torchlight had returned.
The next scream was louder, and more sounds echoed down here—growling, snapping, wicked laughter. Even knowing he was unarmed, Ratt did not slow his run or make any attempt at stealth. He w
as mad, driven by the memory of his dying mother.
Tears began to blur his vision, making polychromatic snowflakes out of the torchlight when he, at last, came to the final step and beheld a large chamber. He blinked hard, pushing the teardrops away, then took in the scene.
The room itself was vast; it seemed to take up the entire footprint of the palace above it. Were he not distracted by what he saw, Ratt would have surmised that this was the basement or dungeon. The room had an arena-like quality to it: a large, ovoid lower-part of open space surrounded by a high wall and landing, complete with seating that was broken up here and there with structural support walls and pylons obviously holding up the enormous palace above them.
The air was damp and musty, fitting for an underground crypt or ossuary, and a cold draft blew through it, the origin of which eluded Ratt’s quick assessment. The stairs that he’d taken down ended on the upper landing that wrapped around the lower arena space. It was onto this landing that Ratt stepped and saw just a short distance beneath him a woman clutching a bundle of rags. Her hair was messy, and she looked as though she had just woken up from a long and restless sleep.
Despite the coolness of the room, her forehead was covered in a collage of sweat drops. Her face was as pale as cream and her eyes as wide and round as saucers. Her clothes were as ragged as her hair, and dirty.
She clutched the bundle of rags tightly to her bosom as if her very life depended on it, yet she slowly removed one trembling hand from the bundle and pointed left of Ratt. Her mouth opened to speak, but only the cool, damp breeze moaned its woeful song.
He felt it before he could see it—that sensation that had been a hallmark of the ancient cinema that Ratt loved so much. A common line from some of his favorite movies popped into his mind. They are right behind me, aren’t they?
Ratt’s armored wall of adrenaline-fueled vigor faltered and his senses crept back in, bringing with them familiar friends such as self-preservation and caution. He gently closed his eyes and exhaled as if to mime “Fuck me” and made to spring into action, but it was too late.
A clammy hand gripped the back of his neck, as cold as the gusts that issued from the unknown depths of the dungeon and rippled across his face. He could feel a thumbnail, as stout as the stone beneath his feet and as sharp as the regret he felt for rushing in, push into his neck flesh and puncture skin. It hurt, and the strength in this hand reminded him of Lucy’s raw power. Ratt knew there would be no overpowering the owner of this stern grip. He relaxed, his legs turning to water.
“Well, well, look, Sofia, more meat to play with,” a low male voice dripped into Ratt’s ears. It spoke in Spanish; a language that Ratt knew and expected. The vise-like hand on the back of his neck turned him around as easily as if he were one of the burros he had seen on the streets above, fitted with bridle and reins.
“Is that true, meat? Did you come down here to play with us?” A woman stood before him, next to the man who held him fast. The woman smiled mischievously, revealing a set of gold-clad teeth and fangs. She wore an outfit that was paradoxically made of high-quality materials but designed to look like the lower-class gangsters of Earth’s past. “Hmmm,” she purred. “Are you a bruja? Why do your eyes look like that?”
He could also see now, in his peripheral vision, the man who held him fast by the neck. Ratt couldn’t see much, but he had the impression that his captor was similarly dressed to the many palace guards he had seen coming and going all night. Ratt’s mind was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions: fear, audacity, courage, terror.
Continuing to smile, the woman playfully bit her bottom lip with a sharp, golden canine. The light from the torches caught the gold and glinted in Ratt’s double eyes.
“The queen asked you a question, meat!” the man barked and tightened his superhuman grip. Ratt heard his neck pop and felt a trickle of warm blood running down the side of his neck, under his shirt collar, and down his chest. The cold breeze felt cooler against the warmth of his blood. He made an involuntary whimpering sound, and the man relaxed his grip slightly, not as much as before, but less than the excruciating crush that he’d felt for a moment. The man noticed the crimson rivulet running down Ratt’s neck and announced, “This one is ripe!”
“I’m not a witch. I, I just got too close to a Drop,” Ratt grunted.
“And why are you down here, meat?” Sofia pressed closer and ran her tongue over the pointed tips of her gold-clad canines.
“I got lost, I heard screams,” Ratt tried to explain, unable to keep the fear inside from raising the pitch of his voice higher than normal.
“Awww. You got wost.” Sofia mocked Ratt with feigned sympathy, tilting her chin and pouting her plump lips, causing their deep red tint and black outline to stand out all the more. She stepped toward him slowly with a gait he had seen before, and it made him tremble with fear.
It was the way Lucy walked. It was the way a jaguar walked when approaching its prey. It was simultaneously alluring and frightening. She tapped at her lip with one of her impossibly long, lacquered fingernails. Ratt secretly thanked the gods that it wasn’t her nails digging into the side of his neck. She stepped as close as one could get. She smelled like expensive perfume. Her manicured hand disappeared from Ratt’s line of sight, and he felt her cup his balls. Ratt inhaled sharply from shock.
“You didn’t answer the question, meat. Do you want to play with us? Eating makes me so horny,” she whispered lustily into his ear, and nibbled on his earlobe. The sensation was pleasurable at first, but then she bit down hard, turning his ear flesh into a torn, bloody flap.
“Ahh!” Ratt exclaimed, despite his attempt to hold back the pain and appear tough.
He wasn’t sure if playing with them meant getting laid or getting eaten, but he knew he wasn’t interested in either option. He hesitated to answer and wiggled uncomfortably in the grip of the vampire duo. Sofia signaled her impatience by tightening her claw-like hold on his nuts. The pain was extraordinarily unique and mighty. Ratt moaned as a sickness rose through his lower abdomen up into chest. He squirmed and would have collapsed to the cold floor if the vampire behind him were not holding him up by the neck.
His moan turned to a high-pitched shriek as her nails came closer together. He was sure that his skin was punctured in more than one place, and his groin felt wet, like he had pissed himself. His mind became plagued with unwanted, white-hot images of cherry tomatoes and grapes sliding onto a kabob skewer.
As if by some blessed act of providence, her sadistic game stopped suddenly, and she all but brushed Ratt aside, her attention caught but something urgent.
“Raphael! They are getting away!” she shrieked, releasing Ratt’s traumatized scrotum and running past him.
The man, Raphael, also released his grip on Ratt and ran after Sofia.
Cursing himself for not being strong like Lucy, or the new guys, Jon and Carbine, Ratt slumped to the ground like a tired canvas bag filled with ground maize.
They? he wondered as he lay there. He rolled over, turning his gaze out to the arena, and watched in helpless grief as Sofia and Raphael leapt down from the landing onto the ground below and ran down the fleeing woman and her bundle of rags, which had begun to make sounds horrifyingly like the cries of a human baby.
Oh God, no.
Ratt hated himself. He was the helpless child who stood by and watched his family shot down like dogs in the street all over again.
The human woman, clutching her child, tried to run, but Raphael sprang into the air and landed in front of her, cutting her off. The vampire thug turned and spread his arms out wide, shimmying to the left and then the right as the terrified mother tried in vain to dart around him.
In the time it took for the mother's panicked heart to pulse a single beat more, Sofia was upon her.
The queen of New Puebla grabbed her human ward from behind by the hair and pulled her to the ground. The mother spun around so fast her feet left the ground, and she was thrown several meters when So
fia released her grip. The mother hit the ground and slid across the dirt floor.
Somehow, she’d managed to maintain her grip on the crying baby through the spin and slide. Her screams for mercy joined the wails of her child, but she remained on the ground.
Ratt could take no more and willed his fear and pain away. He pushed himself up and staggered to the edge of the landing just as Raphael and Sofia pounced on the mother and child like two cats springing onto a trapped mouse.
“Stop it, you animals!” Ratt yelled. Both vampires heard him and, surprisingly, stopped what they were doing to look up at him. Even from this distance and with only the light of the wavering torch flame to illuminate the scene, Ratt could see that both Raphael and Sofia had bloody maws. They looked the way a toddler did on its first birthday, with the remains of cake smeared all over its mouth, cheeks, and chin; but the ghastly mess on their faces was not cake, and their victim would surely never have a birthday again.
The killers studied Ratt for an absent heartbeat and then returned to their meal. Ratt could still hear the cries of the infant, so he pulled himself over the rail on the edge of the landing and dropped down to the sandy ground below. His feet hit the soft sand, which gave way more than he had anticipated. With a sharp pain, his right ankle rolled, and he fell to his side hard. Ignoring the pain that stuck to his ankle like glue, he pushed himself up, spat out a glob of sand-flecked saliva, and yelled once again at the monsters, who ignored him as they savaged the woman.
“I said leave them alone, you bastards!” Armed with nothing more than his fists and his sense of chivalry, he charged the gruesome scene before him, tears streaking down the sides of his face.