by Unknown
She’d fled to the streets above, feeling powerless and hating herself for it. She had roared, wept, screamed, and begged whatever was out there — God, the universe, the devil, she didn’t care — to give her the power to repay them, all of them for what they’d done to her, to him.
Now, as Chelsea grew faint from blood loss, she looked away from the mouth clamped on her wrist. She heard someone groan. Before she could register it as her own voice, she slipped back into her Place of No-Hurt.
She holds a rifle. She fires it at the man who shot Brian. The bullet takes off half his head, spraying skull fragments and grey brain into the air. But in this fantasy, he does not die. Blood washes over what remains of his face. He begs her to stop. She aims at his stomach, fires. Guts splatter. But in this fantasy, he doesn’t die. He screams, waving his hands in surrender. The sound of his pain is soothing music to her ears.
She feels a hand—
—patting her cheek, jerking her out of her fantasy.
Chelsea opened her eyes and took in the Offish-people, their strange faces highlighted by the glow of the torches, and creased with flickering shadows. She was in an armchair. The same woman she’d seen outside sat opposite, patting her cheek. Chelsea waved the hand away.
“Wake up, sugar,” the woman said.
“I’m awake, I’m awake!”
Chelsea saw the bracelet, still on her wrist. A cloth was tied below it, serving as a bandage. The blood had been washed away.
She looked at the woman. What she’d imagined to be a long coat was actually a pair of wings, thickly webbed with veins, and attached to the hooked thumbs. Chelsea thought of a bat. A vampire bat.
“I know what you are,” Chelsea murmured.
“Do you now, Sweetie?” asked the woman. She tilted her head, smiling, but her eyes stared coldly.
“You’re the Offish-people.”
The woman arched an eyebrow. “What?”
Chelsea thought, Let her be confused.
“Desmond,” the woman said, “get her some water.”
A moment later, the same man who’d knocked her unconscious held a cup to her mouth. Chelsea finished the water in one gulp.
Offering her hand, the woman said, “My name is Jessica. And yours?”
“Chelsea.” She looked at Jessica’s hand with a mix of horror and disdain and didn’t take it. Jessica withdrew it.
“Fine. Let’s get down to business. As you’ve probably already guessed, we’re a colony of vampires. The way we work is, we hibernate for twenty years, then hunt and feed for one. We don’t have to do this. We chose to when your kind began hunting us back. We’re a young colony, most of us less than two-hundred years old. We’ve followed this pattern for all that time. When we woke up yesterday, though, we encountered a problem.”
Yeah, I bet you encountered a problem, Chelsea thought. A big fucking problem.
Chelsea tried to hear Jessica’s think-voice. It was no use. Though she felt much better than the last two times she’d awoken, she lacked the strength to tune in. She figured she was too weak from the blood they took. “I guess you didn’t hear about The Scorching?”
Jessica’s cold stare remained unchanged. She clapped her hands together in a let’s-get-started manner. “Now, this is exactly what we need from you, Chelsea. Information. So please, tell us about The Scorching.”
“How come you never asked anyone bef—?”
“Why we do things isn’t your concern,” Jessica scowled, and leaned forward into Chelsea’s space. “When we awaken, our first priority is taking care of the weakest in our colony. That answer’s free. Any more questions you want to waste my time with?”
Chelsea thought of the reason Brian had been shot. She compared that to the vampires’ priorities. Though she felt a chasm between herself and them, she also felt a reluctant respect.
“The Scorching, that’s when an asteroid hit Earth. Before it struck, the news said it might be coming. Most people thought it would be a false alarm. Nobody was prepared.”
“So, how come you’re still alive?” Jessica asked.
“Some of us got some supplies together and went under the streets, into the Metro stations and tunnels.”
“We’ve been down there. There are only bodies.”
“A lot of people died from radiation, and starvation. A lot were murdered. Like my boyfriend.”
Jessica leaned forward. “Help us find them.”
“Why should I help you?”
“What choice do you have?”
“I’m not afraid to die.”
“Who says we’ll kill you? We can do a lot worse than that. In two-hundred years, we’ve had a lot of practice making people suffer.”
Chelsea’s will hardened. Suffering didn’t frighten her. Suffering defined her. “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you wanna scare me.”
Jessica’s hands balled into fists.
“Want my help? Fine. There’s something you gotta do for me.”
Jessica gave a tight-lipped smile. “You’re hardly in a position to negotiate.”
“Make me one of you,” Chelsea blurted out. “Turn me.”
Jessica threw her head back and laughed. “You think you can handle immortality? Once you realize you can’t be in the sun, that you can’t contact loved ones anymore if you want the colony’s protection, you’ll commit suicide like most of the ones we turn.”
“I have no friends or family. And I hate this world and the people in it. They’re selfish. They’re evil. If I would’ve had your power—”
Jessica raised a hand. “Okay, okay, enough. If we turn you, you’ll help us?”
“Yes.”
“If you don’t help us, or if you create problems, you’ll be killed for treason. I’ll cut your head off myself.”
Murmurs and nods of approval.
“So,” Chelsea asked, “how does it work? Does someone have to bite me?” Chelsea tilted her head to expose her neck.
The group burst into laughter. At that moment, her confidence shriveled. There was a fierceness, a knowingness in that laughter.
“No Sweetie,” Jessica said, setting her hand on Chelsea’s thigh, “that’s not how we turn you. You’ve watched too many movies. And a Vampire 101 lesson for ya — we’re not mind readers, and stakes through the heart don’t work.”
You aren’t mind readers, Chelsea thought, but I am.
“Then what do you do? Or … is it something I have to do?”
Jessica stroked Chelsea’s thigh and gazed into her eyes. “For you to become a vampire, one of us has to impart to you their being. Make himself one with you.”
Chelsea’s face scrunched up. “I don’t get it.”
More laughter.
“Sex, sweetie,” Jessica said, her hand stroking slowly and sensuously now. “One of us must have sex with you.” She waved her hand and the one that had knocked Chelsea out came over. “Desmond, please oblige the girl.”
At the word sex, Chelsea felt like a trapdoor had opened beneath her. A falling sensation filled her chest and she found it hard to breath.
Desmond rushed forward. He seized her by the throat and shoved her to the floor. Pain exploded in her skull. He straddled her, knocked the air from her lungs. Chelsea struggled, twisted her body, clawed at his hand.
Finally, she realized he’d been still the whole time, patiently waiting for her surrender. Up close she could feel his hot breath. His piercing stare filled her with dread.
He spread her legs and the reality of what was happening crashed down on her like water breaking through a dam. It drowned her mind, soaking her thoughts with bloated images and Desmond’s features turned into her father’s.
A scream welled inside her. He pressed a hand to her mouth. She steeled herself as he seized a handful of denim and tore. One pant leg came off with a quick, dry raspy sound. Goosebumps prickled her leg as her body trembled. Her throat constricted. And tears gushed from her eyes. He snatched the crotch of her panties and ripped
them off too.
“You’re such a brave, brave girl,” Desmond said. It sounded as if there were two voices speaking through the same throat — the above voice a normal person, the underneath voice composed of millions of swarming, skittering insects.
His eyes changed. The irises spread like ink stains until there was only blackness.
His face changed too, blanching, then webbing with purple veins. Features reshaped themselves as seamlessly as liquid metal — his face elongated, extending his eyelids to droop like hound dog eyes; his nose flattened into double-slits on wrinkled flesh; a snout emerged, as if molded by invisible hands; lips blackened, stretched up to the ears and fangs, dripping with saliva, sprouted from his gums. She realized that the offish features were a disguise for his true form: vampire bat.
He roared. That skittering insect sound became the top-voice. Chelsea now understood humanity’s instinctive loathing for insects. The sounds they make — sizzling maggots, chirping crickets, skittering cockroaches, buzzing flies — pronounce the names of demons. These are the creatures that can articulate the names and the voices of the dead.
Chelsea screamed. Her head beat against the floor as she thrashed. Desmond guided himself inside her, writhing and slithering like a snake. The horror plunged her to the rim of madness. If her father had shattered her, then this undead thing was grinding what remained of her soul to dust.
He clutched her head and forced her to stare into his black eyes. His mouth opened and his red tongue, tapered to a point, slid out, stretching longer and longer until its slimy wetness touched her face.
He grabbed her hair and jerked her head forward so she could see her belly.
She screamed, “NO! NO! NO! GET IT OUT OF ME!”
She saw her stomach distort. She screamed for oblivion, desperate to un-see, to un-know, unable to do so.
In her mind she raced towards The Place of No-Hurt. Where was it? She couldn’t find it!
The colony of vampires gathered around them in a circle chanting, their voices rising, becoming one, the howl of a demon. They were chanting a name of the dead. Her name!
She awoke changed. She was filled with a power that had eluded her. Until now.
In the wide, torch-lit chamber, the new Chelsea propped herself up on her elbows. Desmond no longer seemed a monster to her. She felt a strange kinship with him now.
The friendship bracelet was lying on the floor, a broken chain that released her from her former life.
Desmond knelt before her, spoke to her in tender tones. “I must feed you. You’re weak because you’re young. Soon you’ll have the power to hunt on your own. I’ll teach you how. Colony law says if you turn someone, you become their protector.”
“You were so fierce. You hardly seemed—”
Desmond put a finger gently on her mouth, silencing her. “Shh. You’re weak. You need your strength. I was fierce because you were my prey. I was a hawk staring into the eyes of a rabbit. Things are different now.”
He put his face over hers. “Here, I must feed you. Look up and open your mouth.”
She obeyed.
His jaws opened wide. With a guttural retching sound, blood spilled from his mouth and into hers. Warm and hot and delicious. It coated her mouth and throat and ignited her fragmented soul with a rippling current of black life.
She hungered for the blood. Lusted for it. She moaned and shuddered as she rose up and kissed him hungrily, deeply. They were one now — the same.
She laid her head against his chest and trembling, clutched his body against hers. Clutched him with her new hands, with long taloned thumbs.
She could hear every think-voice in the room. Each one was clear, sharp. None of them had her ability. In fact, when it came to telepathy, they were…
…blind as bats.
I’m a new kind of vampire, Chelsea realized, the revelation calming her. I have more power than any of them, than all of them.
She considered the desolate landscape of the city and the refugees that hid beneath it, starving, desperate as the vampires that surrounded her now.
The world is mine, she realized. I will rebuild it.
I will have revenge.
* * * * *
Born and raised in Northern British Columbia, David Tocher, now lives in Montreal, Quebec, where he’s currently at work on a novel. He appreciates literature which explores the paranormal and the dark side of human nature. He also loves heavy metal music. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and International Thriller Writers. You can find his recent short story, Letters from a Dead World, in the Dreamspell Nightmares anthology, published by L & L Dreamspell.
Blood That Burns So Bright
By Jason S. Ridler
Knuckles? What Ned taped together was closer to jagged turtle shells hiding under torn, red calluses. Sakura’s hand remained calm and still in his palm while the tape made its long way around.
“You shouldn’t have called time out,” she said, voice a thin mist in the fetid air. “I had him.”
“Deep breaths,” Ned said. “Remember to breathe.” She complied while he pulled out another a stretch of tape. “Fine, my bad. Make him eat my words when you get back in the cage.”
“Tighter,” Sakura said, legs dangling over the edge of the ancient massage bench, body still and poised despite the agony. It made Ned’s silent heart ache. Chains of sweat dropped from her chin, past her boots, and turned the dirty floor into a fresh mess. Each drop hit with a rusty echo. This was the change room for a slaughterhouse, once upon a time. Fitting, Ned thought.
Down the hall around the killing room floor, the frenzied crowed hungered for the last round.
“You want a little flexibility,” Ned said, as the tape made another lap. “So the impact has somewhere to escape besides your wrist. And you need a grip to grapple.”
She exhaled hard now, controlling the pain. Crooked fingers flexed like a dying critter. “Thumbs are all I got that work on their own. Tighter.”
He chuckled. “Fine. Full mummy treatment, minus the thumbs. You know he’ll try a submission now.”
The tape did another lap around her tortured hands. “Try and fail.”
He forced a smile. Outside the deadbloods howled from the stands as the time-out burned like a fuse. “You should be proud, child. Those boos? That’s a kind of cheer. They hate that one of us is getting beaten by one of you. But they love a good fight. And loud as they boo, the cheers in the Scrum amongst your kind must be shaking the roofs. Turncoats will be having their hands full tonight!”
“Only if I win,” she said, chin dripping, voice clearer. “Any bets on that happening?”
He stopped taping. “I never bet on my talent until they win one, so you should feel righteous for making me lose. Sure you don’t want to grapple?”
Sakura’s glare was steady as a cat’s, and just as heartless. He’d hurt her. And it twisted his guts, wishing he’d believed in her then as he did now. “Then make a fist,” said Ned.
Trembling, her fingers tried retracting into the knuckle-bombs she’d dropped on every deadblood she’d fought on her short rise toward arena glory, bombs harder than steel, enough to rupture a deadblood’s brain stem.
Impossible bombs and speed for a brightblood.
And yet here she was. Still alive, but—
“Ned?” Sakura grunted. Her fingers shook like a dying spider. “I can’t—”
“Easy, child.”
Slow, strong, and steady, he taped her hand into a boney hammer. The pain had to be cosmic, but she just breathed in and out like a bellows. As he reinforced the tape at the wrist, his finger hovered above her vein. Her pulse shivered like it belonged to a meth head cornered in an alley, heart burning out and melting down at the same damn time.
He cut the stray tape with his thumb nail. “Give me your other hand.”
She did. It was worse. God, they’d been pristine last week, when he’d watched her for the first time. Tough and strong, but healthy, like deadbl
ood fighters after they’d eaten their kills in a mob match.
But not Sakura. She wasn’t like Ned, or the elders, or the monster Gregor starving for the last round, or even the chump-ass brightbloods normally torn apart by deadbloods. Whatever she was, she was—
“Ned?”
“Right, right.” He began the wrap. Sweat hung off her chin. “Finish some water, but not too much. No sense fighting dry.”
“Ned?”
He looked up.
Eighteen, she’d said. Eighteen and now with the face of a career grinder, starved of blood. He wrapped slow, head down. “Don’t let him rush you,” he said, “but if he does, keep the elbows hammering on the back of the skull, like you did yesterday.”
“Who’d you bet on?” Sweat dropped.
“Child, you have two minutes before Gregor tries to eat your spleen while you watch. Focus.”
She stole her hand back faster than he could sense it, she was that quick. “Damn it, Ned. Who?” she seethed, chin wet, body vibrating. “Who?”
He straightened the frayed lapels of his red sports coat, brushed the dust and stains off. Damn Wallace for shooting off his big, stupid mouth at the last fight. He knew it would rattle her cage. She needed an angry focus, but not on Ned. And he couldn’t lie about it, like he had with Wallace. Just to make everyone feel good. Not again. “Child, either way I lose.”
“Coward,” she grunted. “You really think I can’t take this fangjob out? That it?”
He took the slang-shot. “We wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t. And that’s coming from a fangjob.”
She slid off the bench, the white hammers at the end of her arms hung like a gunslinger’s pistols. “Then say who you bet on.”
Ned pushed his hands tight and down in his coat pockets. “You want to wail on me, spar on my mush, go right ahead, child. You hate us. You have every right to. We’re butchers and slave masters and have turned your kind into chattel and chum. That hate has carried you a long way in a short time. From the first moment I saw you in the mob fights to the roar of that crowd out there. Hate’s made you who you are. Maybe it will carry you all the way.” He shrugged. “Maybe not. Unless you go in packing a little heat.”