by J. X. Evans
“Where are the children? Why are they taking them?” Rob asked sternly.
“What children? I don’t know anything about any children.” George said waving his slime covered hand in front of his face in a negative gesture. Rob landed a punch at George’s stomach, not too hard, and the man doubled in pain coughing and spitting on the alley, trying to regain his lost breath.
“Talk.” Rob stated. He was not fond of violence, but experience has taught him that it can get the job done well enough.
Some time passed before George was able to speak another word. “I am not high on the hierarchy, some would say bottom. I really don’t know anything about any children!” George gasped.
Rob believed him. He was not so sure earlier, but now he believed him. He stood back up. “Well, what else do you know then? You had better give me something!”
9. DARK AND BLOODY
Ulrik reached the base, a secluded mansion a little outside of Athens, a place called Malakasa. Thirty minutes by car from the Brakas’s home. The owners of the mansion had apparently taken a really long trip to Hawaii as a second honey moon to rekindle their marriage and got so lost in one another, that no one had heard of them since. He drove up to the big metal gate and the tired yet alert guard opened it for him.
He drove up the road, snaking through large gardens. The grass had grown tall despite the season, and weeds had started to appear left and right all over the place. No surprise there; lack of care will do that to anything, much more to a garden. They were still beautiful though, lots of firs scattered around…he liked that. He parked the ugly stolen vehicle next to the fountain standing at the feet of the entrance of the imposing house, its presence to the whole scenery so obviously out of place it was akin to physical abuse.
Ulrik got out of the car with the sleeping girl in his arms, slamming the battered door behind him twice to get it to close. He carried her up the marble stairway, long silky black strands of hair waving in the cold night breeze with every step, the tips of the girl’s hair coming almost past his knees. He pushed the heavy double chestnut door which slid open without the slightest sound of creaking and lead him to a big dim light room, the only light coming from a squad of lamps, symmetrically placed on the walls, emitting a heavy yellow light. He walked in, his footsteps silent as a wolf’s in a noisy forest, leaving big muddy footprints on the expensive carpet. There was a set of stairs on each side of the room, both leading to the second floor. He climbed the left one, it was closer to him. He walked down a quiet hallway, even darker than the previous dim room, paintings hanging here and there on the walls. He reached a door, far smaller than the previous one, leading to a room much smaller than someone would expect for this estate’s standards. That room would be used as a servant’s bedchamber, under other circumstances. He walked in the small room, cold and dusty from the lack of someone living in it for a long time. He took a deep breath, the air was starting to smell a bit musty from the dampness of the air. He placed the heavily sleeping girl in the narrow dusty bed. A slim blanket was folded at the feet of the bed, he picked it up, and tossed it over her. There were lots of rooms like this one in this part of the mansion, Ulrik chose that one at random, even though there were a couple of others closer to the entrance. He definitely did not choose this particular room for the fact that it had an air conditioning system. He stopped on his way out for a bit, grabbed the A/C controller from the small, sad desk in the corner of the room and turned it on, pondering how it will not matter at all in a little while.
He walked out of the room and locked the door behind him, not that the girl would wake up any time soon. He would not hear the end of it though if the brat started running around the estate, never mind the fact that he would have to be the one to go get her again. He left the key on the lock and he headed for the other side of the floor, towards a room that probably used to be some kind of personal work space of the architect that used to live in the house, before Ulrik and the others had taken the place over. Duncan had turned it into his personal office and room of operations, he was the one ‘in charge’ of their little group.
Ulrik knocked on the door twice. The wood looked and felt to be of high quality and it had intricate geometrical patterns carved all around it. Ulrik stood staring at the design for a second. It was pretty, sure it was, but it seemed a lot of work for just a door. There was no answer to his knocking, but he could hear Duncan speaking on his cell phone as clearly as if he was standing next to him. Ulrik placed his hand on the golden plated door handle, twisted it and entered the room. There were tons of books on a big library consuming an entire wall of the big room to the left, a lot of engineering books and history of architecture as well as a lot of novels. Duncan, a bald black skinned man was talking on his cell phone, one hand folded behind the small of his back, staring outside the tall window at the almost full moon, half engulfed by fleeting clouds, shifting with the winter wind.
“We are not ready yet, we need more time.” Duncan was saying softly as he slightly turned his bald head to acknowledge Ulrik’s arrival with a slight nod, the muscles on his temple flexing under his perfectly smooth skin as he kept tightening his jaw. “I understand”…”of course”…”don’t you think I know that?”…”very well then.” Duncan hang up the phone and tossed it on the huge wooden desk. Ulrik closed the door behind him and walked in the room.
“So… tomorrow?” Ulrik asked, sitting himself on the Victorian style couch beside the window; way too uncomfortable for its price tag, yet pleasant to look at. Couches are for sitting though, not for getting stared at.
“It is the right time. Everything is in place and ready to go… Apart from us apparently.” Duncan said, sitting himself in the leather chair and turning a bit to look straight at Ulrik.
“Don’t you think they give us a little too much time to prepare? They should have called us half an hour before the operation was to begin.” Ulrik said mockingly.
“We will have to make do.” Duncan said, realigning a hardcover book and an expensive parker pen that had been accidentally shifted from there place by a millimeter.
“We are not ready. Helena is still creating her thralls. Even if she stopped right this moment, she will be too weak to follow through at such a short notice.”
“Don’t you think I know that Ulrik?” Duncan paused, staring in Ulrik’s pale blue eyes, “Still it is decided, we will have to move tomorrow or miss our chance. The plan is the same only without Helena. Bill and Themos will manage the kid on their own.”
“Those baby junkies do not stand a chance, they are dumber than rocks and softer than marshmallows.” Ulrik said in a low voice, more to himself rather than Duncan. Still, Duncan continued staring at him, stiff as a broomstick, his eyes begging Ulrik to disagree with him a bit more. He felt pressured about tomorrow, even if he would not admit it.
“I suppose it will be fine. From what I have gathered, the kid is an idiot as well.” Ulrik said, staring up at the elaborate chandelier hanging from the ceiling, not meeting Duncan’s glare. Not because he was afraid mind you, he was fairly positive he could take Duncan on…he just didn’t see the point in tempting fate or fighting about things he did not care about.
“The girl?” Duncan asked after a second, returning his gaze to the almost full moon outside the window, the dark clouds letting it free from their grasp for a minute.
“She is here. Sleeping, in a room on the other side of the floor.” Ulrik said, still studying the chandelier’s pattern. It vaguely seemed like an upside down tree, a modern note in the classical style of the chamber. The poor man must have really liked this room, every detail seemed carefully studied and picked. Now there was not even a decomposing body left behind and his wife was slowly decomposing in a big storage room along with several other of Duncan’s thralls.
“Take me to her.” Duncan said in his authoritative voice, lifting himself from the leather chair, moving to the door with his hands clasped behind his back. Ulrik did the same and lead Duncan
to the room that Kate was sleeping in.
“Take some food to Helena please. After all she will not be able to make it in time no matter what. No sense in exhausting herself too much.” Duncan said, walking next to Ulrik.
“Certainly.” Ulrik nodded.
“And don’t forget to fill the blood bags in the boy’s room.”
“I already did that today. It needs to be done again tomorrow.”
“Fine, then. There is no change in his condition, is there?”
“None that I can see.”
“Hmm… I see.”
They reached the small bedroom and Ulrik unlocked the door and stepped to the side. Duncan walked past him, into the room. Ulrik closed the door and left the girl in Duncan’s tender care. He heard the sound of the A/C being turned off and the old springs of the bed creaking under his weight as he sat on the bed.
Ulrik started making his way towards Helena’s bedroom on the third and final floor of the mansion thinking about the turning process. Duncan would turn the brat, just like Helena was turning the one hundred and eighty-six men and women in the ball room for the past two days. The turning process was a difficult and a relatively lengthy one, without guaranteed results. The vampire would draw as much blood from the victim’s body as possible, biting at the carotid arteries with its sharp fangs and sucking the blood out with all its strength. After that, the femoral arteries would follow on the inside of the victim’s thighs, and the ulnar arteries at the victim’s wrists, and the tibia arteries on the inside of each ankle, until the laws of physics, and human anatomy prohibited them from drawing any more blood without greatly disfiguring and destroying the body. Then the vampire would infuse the victim’s blood coursing through its stomach and guts and the rest of the body with energy and essence, concentrating actively for a time at the strenuous task while sitting beside the recently deceased body. After that important step of the process, the vampire would return a portion of the blood to its previous owner’s body, traditionally done by either slicing the vampire’s wrists open and placing the gushing wound in the corpse’s mouth. Or more commonly by placing the vampire’s own mouth against that of the fresh corpse and retching the undigested blood back into its owner’s body. A lot of vampires of yore argued about the efficacy of each method, some saying that the blood from the vampire’s arteries would be richer in the vampire’s essence and thus better, while others supported that the retched up blood from the stomach, even though poorer in essence and energy in comparison to the arterial blood, would have better results since it would be far larger in quantity, and also the new thralls or much more rarely the new vampires were somewhat less thirsty for blood once awakened, usually somewhere between one to five days later. But after syringes and the concept of pressure difference where discovered by the vampires a long time ago, everyone accepted that blood transfusion via tubes and needles was obviously the better, easier and far less messy process. Though it does seem to lack the ritualistic character of the more traditional methods.
From a number of corpses undergoing the turning process, more than half of them will not be turned at all, they will remain cold, dead and rotting. The remaining half or so will rise and live again, though in the most basic definition of the word. Thralls live their counterfeit lives for a sort amount of time, as their body is still decomposing, at a slower rate than that of the conventional corpse but at a much faster rate than that of the conventional alive human being. Thralls are human like creatures on the exterior, though no one would be fooled if they took even a glancing look at them. They are monstrosities resembling something between a man and a corpse. Thralls are stronger and faster than they were in their human lives, advantages of having your body infused by vampiric essence, and they are driven by their need to devour the flesh of any living organism they can get their slowly decomposing hands on, the slight disadvantages of having your body infused with vampiric essence. Thralls are also subdued to their vampire master, the one who created them and will do anything their master tells them to do through their blood bond, a kind of psychic connection between the vampire and every single one of its Thralls. But if the vampire dies, they will go berserk and attack anything they can get their hands on and even one another in the lack of any other pray until their decomposing bodies are unable to move any more. It appears that even though they have some form of intelligence still clinging to their rotting brains, evident by their rarely used ability to form coherent speech with their hoarse vocal cords, their need and hunger for flesh makes them unable of using this steadily crumbling logic of theirs. Lastly, sometimes, not too often, the turning process produces a full-fledged vampire, the ultimate life form, although still not alive in the conventional definition of the word as explained in modern biology textbooks taught in high schools all over the world, but neither should the donkey be considered alive then, since it cannot produce offspring, and it would just be stupid and flawed to think that the donkey is not alive. Strong and swift like the coursing rivers and timeless as the ever flowing wind, untouched by illness and decay. Their only basic need, the price to be paid for the continuation of their existence is the hunger for the blood of the over-populous humans, drawn to it and dependent on it. In order to keep their perfect bodies going through the fast and continuous repair that counterbalances any changes nature tries to inflict on them, human blood is the only necessity they have. Ulrik considered himself lucky enough to find himself awakened as a vampire instead of a thrall; the next best thing would have been to not have found himself awakened at all.
Ulrik reached Helena’s bedroom door. It was the second largest bedroom of the mansion, nearly as large as the master bedroom and ten times as large as any bedroom had any right to be. He gently knocked on the expensive wooden door with his huge fist. There was the slightest trembling and creaking as a weight slowly lifted from the luxurious mattress, a sound that no human could ever have heard, but the sound did not come from the mattress itself. There was the sound of slippers being dragged along the expensive hardwood floor wherever it was not covered by the white flokati rug. A man opened the door, slowly, with a faint smile pulling at the ends of his lips even though the little energy required for the contraction of the meager facial muscles seemed to cost him precious energy. His once lively and curious eyes were slightly sunken into his sockets, loose skin and black bags under them, projecting nothing but fatigue. His once young, moderately athletic body withered and bereft of muscle and fat, not fitting for a man three times his age. His once full, vibrant black hair now turned rough and greyish at his temples and sparse at his crown. All those details Ulrik could see even through the darkness, as if it was bright as day.
The man opened the door with his smile pulling grotesquely on the loose skin of his face. He shut his eyes; they seemed to hurt from the dim light of the hallway, though he forced them open once again and his smile faded as he saw Ulrik’s hard face looking at him with his emotionless pale blue eyes. “Of course, Helena would not have k-knocked, s-silly me.” Kostas said in a slow and breaking voice. The vivid stench of rotten apple, a byproduct of excessive breakdown of fats due to malnutrition and the recent mistreatment, from Kostas’s mouth reached Ulrik’s olfactory system, making him curse his sharp sense of smell.
“Good evening Kostas. How are you?”
“I…a-am g-good.”
“Nice. Helena asks if you would like to join her in the ball room for the evening. If you are available that is.” Ulrik said, trying to give the poor man something resembling a smile and failing miserably.
“Of- of course, a-at once.” The boy said, the shadow of a smile he had earlier returning to his face once again. He did not have that speech impairment when Ulrik had first talked to him about ten days earlier. It must have been a relatively new occurrence; brief instances of recurrent brain ischemia could do this to a person, that and much more than that. The young man started making his way towards the ball room, still wavering in his pajamas and slippers. It would be a miracle if he e
ver reached it without toppling down the steps, a fatal blunder in his condition.
‘As if the boy has any choice’ Ulrik thought to himself as he made his own way towards his own bedroom where his own less luxurious mattress resided. Even though he did not need any sleep, he still liked to lie down for a couple of hours each night. He liked to take this time to think and stare at nothing. He would open the window above his bed and listen to the sound of the howling wind, the owls and the other animals of the small forest around the estate, and the distant cars. If you live forever, you find yourself with time enough to do such things…barely though.
10. NICE SHIRT
Mark and Christiana got off the train and headed for the escalators, moving mechanically along with the crowd of people, like it usually happens on the subway. They got up to ground level and took the earbuds off, both of them now hanging loose from Mark’s neck. It was raining slightly so they both huddled under Christiana’s small yellow, flowery umbrella. Mark took it upon himself to hold it so that he could stand without bending over awkwardly, and he thought it a fair gesture since she was the one providing the equipment that he should be the one to provide the work. She grabbed hold of his elbow so that they would stand closer to one another. They walked under tents and balconies so as to be out of the rain as much as possible. Evading douchebags in cars that splashed them with rain water, gathered in puddles by the side of the road next to the narrow sidewalks. And they talked about classes, and the ongoing exams, and grades, and their uncertain future in the quickly crumbling country’s economy. A student’s favorite topic, especially during exam period. Well, at least Christiana was doing the talking on the extremely stressing subjects while Mark was trying not to get bored listening to her. Maybe the problem was that he did not feel the same level of anxiety over most everyday issues people his age were getting stressed over. It was either that, or maybe he had a generally laid back personality. “Only 3 days to study statistics II.” Christiana sighed the familiar complaint once again in a more anxious manner than the last four times this evening. It seemed like no matter the class or the time period given, the deadline for the exam was always too soon and inadequate.