by Tim Marquitz
I tried to rise, to fight back, but my strength had gone. My resistance was little more than a gurgled complaint as the vampire reached for my throat. I closed my eyes and cast a prayer to the heavens.
“Leave him alone.”
Spoken in Arabic, the words were so fragile, so delicate, that I doubted I’d even heard them. If I hadn’t still suffered the pain of my wounds, I would have believed them imagined, a figment of my dying mind. But the vampire had heard them, too. He straightened and glanced over his shoulder. My gaze followed on the tail of his.
Near the shattered warehouse wall stood a boy. He was no more than eight years-old. Darker of skin than even the vampire, he almost faded into the shadows of the building.
“Go away, child,” the vampire said, reverting to German, though I doubted the boy understood.
Little more than an emaciated skeleton, he stood his ground. Shirtless, I could count his ribs, his chest puffed out almost unnaturally with his challenge. His dark eyes held the vampire’s gaze without fear—or more likely with ignorance. He couldn’t have known what the man standing over me was, but to the boy, it didn’t seem to matter.
“Please, mein kind, go…leave us.” The vampire returned to broken English, his voice almost pleading.
The boy continued to ignore him whether he understood or not. In his hand he held a slim branch, its knots and skin scraped away to smooth its length. He raised it up and pointed it at the vampire. The boy said nothing, but even as broken as I was, I could sense the threat in his posture.
“No, child, go…please,” I begged. Moments from death, I didn’t want his blood on my hands.
The vampire grunted and turned toward the boy, a sneer peeling his lips back. He took a threatening step forward, showing his eyeteeth. He’d had enough. “Last chance to flee,” he warned.
The boy extended his stick. His eyes narrowed as a glimmer of red appeared at the point of the branch. The vampire froze at the sight of it. I stared at the dot, blinking to see if it went away, a figment of my damaged mind, but the flicker seemed to grow larger by the moment. The subtle tang of burnt wood wafted over as the child advanced on the vampire. The boy grinned, his face taking on a maniacal expression as he wielded the stick like a gun.
Then it went off.
A brilliant flash of ruby stole my sight. I felt a sudden loss of pressure, my ruined lungs emptied of breath, and then the air was back. It hit me like cannon fire. I was yanked off the ground and tossed about. My body was peppered with debris, and what bones had still been whole, crackled and broke apart beneath the hurricane force. A rotten sickness welled inside, the world spinning into a blur. I tasted the rubbery foulness of dead meat and smelled the putrid stench of old death. Then the winds were gone.
I fell like a stone, dropping to the dirt, a broken sack of grain, limp and weak. Gratefully numb, I barely noticed. I gasped to draw a breath. My lungs resisted the air, and I wondered if this was how it felt to die.
Unable to explain what happened, I cracked my eyes and saw the young boy standing over me. A crooked smile twisted his lips. He was unhurt. I hurriedly looked about, but I could see nothing beyond the wreckage of the warehouse and a body charred beyond all recognition. It appeared as though a bomb had struck it dead center. The vampire was gone.
“Are you well?”
My gaze went back to the boy when he spoke. He held a small, calloused hand out to me. I resisted a moment, expecting the darkness to whisk me away, but I remained; just me and the boy. I thought him an angel. No air circled through my lungs, the thump of my heart still in my chest, yet there he stood. I could hear none of the distant bombs or the shouts of dying men. There was no more pain. This could only be death.
He waggled his fingers in my face, calling me up. “Come, Katon, he is waiting.”
My name sounded in my ears. The boy knew me. It was the proof I’d dreaded. I was dead.
The realization hit home like a raindrop in the ocean. I expected to be sad, to break down and cry, but there was nothing. No tears clouded my eyes, and no sorrow weighed upon my silent heart. There was simply nothing.
“Come,” he repeated, an impatient wiggle shaking his hand.
I gave in to the phantom child and reached out. A blackened hand grasped his in place of mine. My vision wavered at the sight, but yet I could feel his thin fingers against my palm. I followed the strange arm down its length, spying the ebony shoulder that sat beside my head. Another dark hand kneaded the leathern flesh there. It stopped at my behest. The sense of it made my head spin.
“What—“
My panicked question was interrupted by a gentle voice beside me. “I’ll explain everything, but we must go, Katon. We have little time before the Germans resume their shelling.”
I looked past the dark flesh of the strange shoulder to see a young Mexican man. His hair was full and dark and wild above the thick glasses he wore. Bright green eyes appraised me through the lenses. Wiry beneath his nondescript outfit, he slipped his hand under the dark arm and lifted. I rose along with it, feeling a strange sense of dislocation.
“Lead the way, Rahim,” the man said.
The boy nodded and jogged off. I was tugged along behind. My feet were leaden and stepped out of time, but I feared looking down at them. Shadows flickered in my peripheral vision as I let the man cart me off.
“It will all be clear soon,” he said. “I promise.”
About the Author:
Raised on a diet of Heavy Metal and bad intentions, Tim Marquitz writes a mix of the dark perverse, the horrific, and the tragic, tinged with sarcasm and biting humor. He looks to leave a gaping wound in the minds of his readers like his inspirations: Clive Barker, Jim Butcher, and Stephen King.
A former grave digger, bouncer, and dedicated metalhead, Tim is a huge fan of Mixed Martial Arts and fighting in general.
He lives in Texas with his beautiful wife and daughter.
www.tmarquitz.com
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