by Julie Kagawa
Chapter 6
The human moved like it was drunk-shuffling, swaying from side to side, nearly tripping over its own feet. It would hit a car or the side of a building and lurch back, staggering and confused. I gave a soft growl, resisting the urge to pull away. Maybe because it reminded me of the animals bitten by rabids: stumbling around one moment, trying to eat your face off the next. Or maybe because there was just something off about it. Humans, even drunk humans, never ventured out this late at night. Save for a few of the more vicious gangs (and one very stubborn street rat who, incidentally, was no longer alive), all residents of New Covington fled inside when the sun went down. They had nothing to fear from rabids, of course, but wander the streets after dark, and you were just begging to be noticed by a vampire out hunting for live prey.
As the human drew closer, pawing blindly at its face, it tripped over a curb and fell, striking its head on the pavement. I saw its skull bounce on the asphalt, and the body collapse, twitching and gasping, in the gutter. At first, I thought it was dead, or at least dying.
Then, I realized it was laughing.
"Nice. Bloodbag's either too drunk to live or has gone right off the deep end," Jackal said, in what would've been a conversational tone if his fangs hadn't been showing through his gums. "I don't know whether to laugh or put it out of its misery. "
At his voice, the human raised its head, regarding us with eyes that were as blank and glassy as a mirror. It was a woman, though it had been difficult to tell at first. Her hair had either been cut or torn out, as the top of her head was sticky with blood. Long gashes ran down both sides of her face, bleeding freely over her skin, but she didn't seem to notice the open wounds.
I resisted the urge to take several steps back. "Are you all right?" I asked, ignoring Jackal, who snorted. "You're hurt. What happened?"
The woman stared at me a second before her face contorted in a gaping, laughing scream. Baring bloodstained teeth, she lurched to her feet and charged me, swinging her arms. I leaped aside, and she ran headfirst into a cement wall, hitting the bricks with a muffled thump and reeling back. Shaking her head, she turned, spotting me through the curtain of blood running down her face, and shrieked with laughter.
As she lurched forward again, I drew my sword. At the sight of the weapon, she paused, still giggling, and suddenly clawed at her face, tearing open the already bleeding scars. More dark blood oozed down her cheeks.
"Is it. . . someone new?" she rasped, making my skin crawl. "Someone new, to make the burning stop?"
"What the hell-?" Jackal began, just as she lunged again, howling. Again, I dodged, but she followed me this time, swinging and flailing in complete abandon.
"Back off!" I snarled at her, baring my teeth. But the sight of fangs seemed to incense the human further. With a screech, she leaped, swiping at my face. I ducked her wild slashing and drove my sword hilt between her eyes, knocking her off her feet.
The human fell backward, her skull giving a faint crack as it hit the pavement again. She twitched, moaning, but didn't get up. Stepping past her body, I shot Jackal an evil look.
"Thanks for the help," I growled, and he smirked back.
"Hey, I am forbidden to kill any more bloodbags. " Jackal crossed his arms and peered down at me, enjoying himself. "You were the one who told me to stop killing indiscriminately. I'm just following orders, here. "
I bristled. "You can be such a-"
The woman screamed and, this time, I reacted on instinct, spinning around. As the human lunged for me, my blade sliced through ribs and out the other side, nearly cutting her in two. The body struck the curb with a wet splat, and though it thrashed and spasmed for a while as we watched it warily, it did not rise again.
Jackal and I exchanged a look as the body finally stopped moving. The night seemed deathly quiet and still.
"Okay. " My blood brother nudged the corpse's leg with the toe of his boot. It flopped limply. "That's something completely new. Any guesses as to what that was all about?"
I peered down at the body, though I certainly wasn't going to touch it. "Maybe a rabid got in somehow," I mused. "Maybe that's why they shut down the city. "
Jackal shook his head. "This wasn't a rabid. Look at it. " He nudged the body, harder this time, flipping it over. He was right, and I had known it wasn't a rabid from the beginning. The rabids were pale, emaciated things, with blank white eyes, hooked fingernails and a mouthful of jagged fangs. This wasn't a rabid corpse. It looked perfectly human, except for the deep gouges down its cheek, and the wild, bulging stare.
"Smells human, too," Jackal added, taking a slow breath before wrinkling his nose. "Or at least, she doesn't smell dead. Not like they do. Though she must've been pumping herself full of something good, the way she put a hole through those bricks. " He nodded at the cement wall, where the cracked indentation of a human skull sat in the middle of a bloody smear. "What did the crazy say to you? Something about making the burning stop?"
"Jackal," I growled, lifting my sword again. My blood brother looked up, following my gaze, and his eyes narrowed.
Across the street, two more humans shambled from a skeletal building, heads and faces torn, bright mad gazes searching the road. They muttered in low, harsh voices, garbled nonsense with only a few recognizable words. One of them held a lead pipe, which he banged on a line of dead cars as he crossed the street. Glass shattered and metal crumpled with hollow booms, ringing into the silence.
And then, another human emerged from an alleyway, followed by a friend.
And another.
And another.
More torn, bloody faces. More glassy eyes and mad, wild laughter, echoing all around us. The mob of humans hadn't seen us yet, but they were steadily drawing closer, and there were a lot of them. Their raspy voices slithered off the stones and rose into the air, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Vampire or no, I did not want to fight my way through that.
I snuck a glance at Jackal and saw that, for once, he was thinking the same. He jerked his head toward a building, and we quickly slipped away, ducking through a shattered window into the gutted remains of an old store. Dust and cobwebs clung to everything, and the floor was littered with rubble and glass, though the shelves were bare. Anything useful had been ripped out and taken long ago.
Outside the windows, the mob shambled about aimlessly. Sometimes they yelled at each other or no one, waving crude weapons at things that weren't there. Sometimes they shrieked and laughed and clawed at themselves, leaving deep bloody furrows across their skin. Once, a man fell to his knees and beat his head against the pavement until he collapsed, moaning, to the curb.
"Well," Jackal said with a brief flash of fangs, "this whole city has gone right to hell, hasn't it?" He shot me a dangerous look as we pressed farther into the building, speaking in harsh whispers. "I don't suppose the population was like this when you were here last, were they?"
I shivered and shook my head. "No. "
"Nice. Well, if we're going to pay a visit to old Salazar, we need to hurry," Jackal said, glancing at the sky through the windows. "Sun's coming up, and I don't particularly want to be stuck here with a mob of bat-shit-crazy bloodbags. "
For once, I agreed wholeheartedly.
Silently, we made our way through the Fringe, ducking into shadows and behind walls, leaping onto roofs or through windows, trying to avoid the crowds of moaning, laughing, crazy humans wandering the streets.
"This way," I hissed, and darted through a hole into an apartment building. The narrow corridors of the apartments were filled with rock and broken beams but were still fairly easy to navigate. Being inside brought back memories; when I'd lived here, I'd often taken this shortcut to the district square.
A moan drifted out of a hallway, stopping us. Sliding up against the wall, Jackal peered around a corner then quickly drew back, motioning for me to do the same. We both melted into the shadows, becoming vam
pire still, and waited.
A human staggered by, clutching a length of wood in one hand. He passed uncomfortably close, and I saw that he had clawed at his face until his eye had come out. Pausing, he glanced our way, but either it was too dark or his face was too ravaged for him to see clearly, for he turned his head and continued walking.
Suddenly, the one-eyed human staggered, dropping his club. Gagging, he fell to his hands and knees, heaving and gasping as if he couldn't catch his breath. Red foam bubbled from his mouth and nose, dripping to the ground beneath him. Finally, with a desperate choking sound, the human collapsed, twitched weakly for a moment and then stopped moving.
Jackal straightened, muttering a low, savage curse. "Oh, damn," he growled, more serious then I'd ever heard him sound. "That's why the city is locked down. "
"What?" I asked, tearing my gaze away from the dead human. "What's going on? What is this?" Jackal stared at the human, then turned to face me.
"Red Lung," he said, making my blood freeze. "What you saw right there, those are the final symptoms of the Red Lung virus. Without the crazy muttering and tearing the eyes out, anyway. " He shook his head violently, as if remembering. "I've never seen it, but Kanin told me how it worked. The infected humans would bleed internally, and eventually they would drown in their own blood, trying to throw up their organs. Nasty way to go, even for the bloodbags. "
Dread gripped me. I glanced back at the body lying motionless in the hall, in the weeds poking through the floor, and felt cold. I remembered what Kanin had told me once, in the hidden lab when I first became a vampire. I'd asked him about the virus, why there was no Red Lung in the world anymore, if the scientists had found a cure. He'd given a bitter smile.
"No," Kanin said. "Red Lung was never cured. The Red Lung virus mutated when the rabids were born. That's how Rabidism spread so quickly. It was an airborne pathogen, just like Red Lung, only instead of getting sick and dying, people turned into rabids. " He shook his head, looking grave. "Some people survived, obviously, and passed on their immunities, which is why the world isn't full of rabids and nothing else. But there was no cure for Red Lung. The rabids destroyed that hope when they were created and escaped. "
And now, Red Lung had emerged again, in New Covington. Or a version of it had, anyway. Jackal and I exchanged a grave look, no doubt both thinking the same thing. This was what Sarren wanted, why he'd taken the virus samples. Somehow, he'd created another strain of the plague that had destroyed most of the world, and he'd unleashed it on New Covington.
The thought was terrifying.
Voices drifted out from the shadows, and we went still. The corpse in the hall had attracted another pair of humans from a nearby room. They poked it halfheartedly, asking crazy, nonsensical questions. When it didn't move, they quickly lost interest and shuffled back to the room, leaving it to rot at the mouth of the corridor.
We made our way through the apartments, slipping past the room with the crazy humans, and out to the street. I looked back and shuddered. "Why would he do this?" I whispered.
"Sarren doesn't need a reason for what he does. " Jackal curled a lip in disgust. "He and his sanity parted ways a while back, and he's only gotten more deranged since. But this. . . " He gazed around the city and shook his head. "You bloody insane bastard," he muttered. "Why are you screwing with the food supply? We might not survive another epidemic. "
Overhead, the sky was an uncomfortable navy blue, and most of the stars had faded. We didn't have a lot of time to reach the Inner City. "This way," I hissed at Jackal, slipping through the gap in the wooden fence surrounding the apartment. "It's still a good distance to the Sector Four gate. "
We didn't quite make it.
I got us there as quickly as I could, of course. This was still my old neighborhood, my district. I had spent seventeen years of my life in this filthy, dilapidated ruin of a town, scavenging for food, dodging patrols, doing whatever it took to survive. This was my territory; I knew its quirks, its shortcuts, and where to go if I wanted to get somewhere quickly.
That wasn't the problem.
The problem was, back when I was human, everyone else had been human, too. The sane, rational, not-trying-to-killyou kind of human. Now, the streets, the buildings, the side alleys and parking lots, were filled with infected madmen. Madmen who didn't fear vampires or pain or anything, and who would come at us, screaming, if they so much as saw our shadows move. Jackal and I cut several of these humans down as they flung themselves at us with a wild abandon almost like the rabids' single-minded viciousness. Other times, we would escape into the shadows, over walls, or onto the roofs where the infected couldn't follow. I'd never seen so many humans wandering the streets at night, and wondered where all the sane, noninfected people were. If there were any left at all.
A pink glow was threatening the eastern horizon when we finally reached the wall of the Inner City, fighting our way through another group of shrieking madmen to the big iron gates that led to the Prince's territory. Normally, the thick metal doors were heavily guarded, with soldiers stationed up top and two well-armed humans standing in front. Now, the gates were sealed tight, and no guards patrolled the Inner Wall. Nor did anyone respond to our shouts and banging on the doors. It seemed the Prince had drawn all his people farther into the city, leaving the Fringe to fend for itself.
Jackal swore and gave the gate a resounding kick. The blow made a hollow, booming sound that echoed down the wall, but the doors were thick, sturdy and designed to hold up to vampire attacks. They didn't even shake.
"What now?" he snarled, looking at the top of the Inner Wall, a good twenty feet straight up. Like the gates, the wall protecting the Inner City was built with vampires in mind. There were no handholds, no ledges to cling to, no buildings close enough to launch off. We wouldn't be getting into the city this way.
And dawn was dangerously close.
"Come on," I told Jackal, who glared at the wall as if he might take an ax to it when he came back. "We can't stay out here, and we're not getting in this way. I know a place where we can sleep-it's secure enough, we won't have to worry about crazy humans. "
A woman staggered around a corner, her entire face an open, bleeding wound, and lunged at us with a howl. I dodged, letting her smack into the wall, then bolted into the Fringe again, Jackal following and snarling curses at my back.
Several streets and close calls later, with the sun moments away from breaking over the jagged horizon, I squeezed through a familiar chain-link fence at the edge of a cracked, overgrown parking lot. A squat, three-story building sat at the end of the lot, making a lump rise to my throat. Home. This had been home, once.
Then a searing light spilled over the buildings, turning the tops a blinding orange, and we ran.
Miraculously, no crazy humans waited in the parking lot to ambush us. After ducking through the doors into the shade of the hallway, I collapsed against the wall in relief.
"Nice place," Jackal remarked, slouched against the opposite wall, where a row of lockers rusted against the plaster. He gazed down the dark corridor, where rooms lined each wall, and curled a lip. "Let me guess-hospital? Or asylum. "
"It's a school," I said, rolling my eyes. "Or it was, back before the plague. " I pushed myself off the wall, feeling sluggish and tired now that the sun was out. "This way. There's a basement we used to hole up in when the vamps were out. "
"We?" Jackal raised an eyebrow as we picked our way down the hall. I winced, realizing my slip, and didn't reply. "So," Jackal continued, gazing around with more interest, "this was where you lived as a bloodbag. "
"You really like that term, don't you?"
"What?" Jackal looked confused.
"Bloodbag. That's all humans are to you. " I turned down another hallway, one even more cluttered with rubble and fallen plaster. "You keep forgetting that you were one, once. "
Now it was his turn to roll his eyes. "Look, sister. I've been a va
mpire for a long time now. Maybe not as long as Kanin, but definitely longer than you. Live a few decades, and yes, they all start to look the same. Like cows. Intelligent, talking pieces of meat. " He ducked under a beam lying across the corridor, barely clearing it. "Granted, I didn't always see them that way, but time has a way of breaking down your convictions. "
Surprised, I stopped and turned to blink up at him. "Really? You?"
"Does that shock you?" Jackal grinned, enjoying himself. "Yeah, sister. I was like you once. So worried about not hurting the poor defenseless humans, only taking what I needed, so scared about losing control. " He shook his head. "And then, one night Kanin and I met a group of men who wanted to kill us. And we slaughtered them all. As easily as killing spiders. " He grinned then, showing fangs. "Right then, I realized we were always meant to rule over humans. We could do whatever we wanted, and they couldn't stop us. Why deny your base nature? It's what we are.
"So, yes," he finished, still smirking at me. "I call humans 'bloodbags. ' I don't need to know their names, or if they have a family, or what their favorite color is. Because I'm either going to outlive them, or I'm going to tear their throats open and suck them dry. And life got a lot simpler once I realized that. "
"You gave up," I accused. "It just got too hard to fight it anymore. "
"Did you ever think there was a reason for that? Because we're not supposed to! Why would I want to keep fighting my instincts?"
"You don't have to be a murdering bastard to be a vampire. "
Jackal snorted. "You don't believe that," he mocked. "Not even Kanin believed that, and he was the biggest softhearted prick I ever came across. Before you, anyway. " He sneered at my dark look. "But, go ahead. Keep telling yourself your pretty little lies. I just hope I'm there when it all comes crashing down around you. "
We'd reached the end of the hall, and I pulled open the rusty metal door that led to the basement. Memories continued to haunt me as I made my way down the stairs, into the cement walled rooms of the school's lowest floor. This was where the gang and I had retreated whenever there was trouble-a rival gang, a vampire in the area, an unexpected patrol. The door could be barred from the inside, and the thick walls and floor made it hard for anything to get at us. Of course, now that I was a vampire, it was chilling to realize how easily I could have blown through that flimsy barrier, locked or not. And with no other way out of the basement, whoever came down here would be trapped.
Shutting the door, I let the bar clang into place. Hopefully, the crazies outside were not as strong as a vampire, because sleep was clawing at the edges of my mind. Jackal, gripping the railing like he, too, was in danger of falling over, looked around the dark, cold room.
"Where exactly do you expect us to sleep?"
"I don't care," I slurred, moving carefully down the steps. "Pick a corner. Just leave me alone. " I found the spot behind several low-hanging pipes where I'd kept a ratty quilt for myself, and found it was still there. Drawing it over my shoulders, I sat down with my back to the corner and unsheathed my sword beneath the quilt. When we were traveling, we'd separated at dawn to bury ourselves in the frozen earth, hidden and safe from each other. Having him in the same room with me as I lay exposed and helpless made me nervous.
Jackal was still wandering around, looking for a place to lie down. I stayed awake as long as I could, listening to his footsteps, waiting for him to find a spot. I forced myself to keep my eyes open, fighting the sluggish pull threatening to draw me under, until the noises ceased.
Finally. Leaning my head against the wall, I let my eyes slip shut, and had just started to relax when his dark chuckle echoed out of the darkness.
"I know you're still awake. "
"Good for you. Shut up and go to sleep. "
Another snicker. "What you have to ask yourself," he continued, "is whether I'm the type who would stay awake long enough to kill you after you fall asleep, or if I'm an early riser who would kill you before you wake up. "
"If you want your head to stay on your neck, you'd better be neither," I growled, though his words sent a cold spear of dread through my stomach. My hands tightened on my sword hilt, and Jackal laughed somewhere in the darkness, unseen.
"I'm just kidding, sis," he said. "Or am I? Something to think about, before you fall asleep. Nighty-night, then. Sleep tight. "
I struggled to stay awake awhile longer, knowing I was playing right into Jackal's twisted sense of humor, yet unable to stop myself. I couldn't see Jackal, couldn't hear him, so I didn't know if he had already fallen asleep, if he was lying awake snickering to himself, or if he was waiting for me to drift off so he could creep over and quietly rip off my head.
I really, really hate him, was my last thought before I finally succumbed to the inevitable blackness.