I don’t have time for this, she thought. The Monster could return at any moment while she mourned for a toothbrush. Get out! Get out now!
She hurried to the front door and examined it. There was no doorknob.
She almost despaired, but then she caught sight of scratch marks on the small, square piece of metal that would have held the doorknob. She might not have noticed it if her dark-vision wasn’t so clear. There was a pair of pliers on the windowsill next to the door, just under the curtains, and it was obvious to her that that was how he opened the door.
She reached for the pliers, and her fingers brushed aside the curtain and extended into the daylight.
Her hand started to hurt; then, before her disbelieving eyes, flames started to curl up from her blackening fingers. She pulled her hand back, the pliers landing with a thump on the floor.
Simone held her breath and lifted her fingers before her face. Even as she watched, the blackened skin was repairing itself. There was no time to think about it. She picked up the pliers again and fumbled to open the door. She gripped the handles strongly and turned the little square extension. The handles almost bent, she was clamping down so hard, and it occurred to her that only a few weeks ago, before this transformation––whatever it was––she probably wouldn’t have been strong enough to accomplish this.
The door opened and sunlight flooded in. Simone jumped back just in time. As she wondered what to do, the sunlight blinked out. She peeked around the door and saw that heavy black clouds were rolling in. She could stand the dimmer light, though it hurt her eyes and made her skin ache.
Simone saw a windowless panel van parked on the street outside. “Parker Plumbing,” it said on the side.
She ran back down the hallway to get her fellow prisoners.
#
Laura and Patty watched her silently as she came down the stairs. She went over to the metal bar she knew was hidden under the trash heap, trying not to look at the maggots that heaved over the pile. She took the bar over to Patty and pried apart the links of her chain.
“We shouldn’t do this,” Patty said uneasily.
It was equally simple to get Laura free, and Laura was just as uncertain about her freedom. “What if he comes back?” she whimpered.
Now that it was done, Simone was surprised how easy it had been to get loose. In her heart, she had always known it wasn’t the chains and locks that kept them imprisoned, but their own minds. She wasn’t certain she ever would have summoned the courage to escape if the strange transformation hadn’t come over her. For the first time since the early days of her captivity, she felt strong and certain, and willing to fight for her freedom.
It wasn’t easy to convince either of her fellow captives to leave. Finally, she grabbed Laura by the arm and said forcefully, “You’re coming with me.”
Laura gave in and followed her meekly up the stairs. When they reached the top, they stopped and looked down at Patty, who was staring up at them, her stubborn expression turning to one of indecision.
“Do you want to get out of here or not?” Simone asked her.
Patty seemed confused for a moment. Then she muttered, “Of course I want to get out of here.” She followed them up the stairs.
Simone held the other girls back when she saw daylight coming through the open door again. When the light dimmed, she urged them forward.
“There’s a van across the street!” she said. “Get in the back.”
She watched them run across the road and saw Patty reach for the handle on the van’s rear door. They slipped inside and closed the door behind them.
Simone stood in the doorway. Why am I hesitating? she wondered. I don’t have anyone to give me orders. I only have myself.
Then the clouds parted, and she couldn’t leave the house. She stood back from the doorway and waited for another wave of shadows.
What would life be like outside? How would they be treated? What kind of world were they entering? In the distance, Simone could see smoke, and there was a steady cacophony of sirens of different tones and textures, police and fire and other emergency vehicles, all with their own unique sonic signatures.
She didn’t know anything more than a frightened thirteen-year-old girl, she suddenly realized. At least a decade had passed outside, and she didn’t know anything about it. Even the cars parked on the street looked strange. Who was the president? What kinds of inventions and devices had been created while she was gone?
She almost felt like turning around, going downstairs and putting the chains back on again. At least she knew that world.
A heavy black cloud passed overhead and she sprinted for the van, even as she saw a man emerging from the house on the opposite side of the street. She slipped into the darkened van before he could turn around and see her.
Only a few moments later, the young man got into the driver’s seat with a sigh. Slender but athletic-looking, sporting a crew cut, he didn’t look old enough to own his own business. In fact, he looked like he was barely out of high school. “Idiots,” he muttered. “All they had to do was turn on the water.”
He shook his head and put the keys in the ignition.
Simone moved swiftly from behind his seat, grabbing the top of his head. Her fingers were exposed to the sunlight for a second. The pain flared until she wrenched his head back out of the light and placed the steak knife against his neck. She almost surprised herself with how fast she moved.
“Don’t move, don’t shout, just do as I tell you,” Simone said.
The man started to turn his head to look at her. The pressure of his movement made his skin grow taut under her blade, and he had second thoughts and stopped moving. His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. There was nothing there. He looked puzzled for a second, then closed his eyes and groaned. “I knew it was too soon to go back to work. But everyone was so insistent. Offering double and triple the usual rates.”
“Drive us out of here,” Simone said.
“Listen,” he said urgently. “I’m taking you where you want to go because I want to. Of my own free will. Just because you need to get there, OK? No need to get weird about it.”
“Drive,” Simone repeated.
“Sure,” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “Where to?”
“Anywhere!” she shouted. “Away from here!” Without meaning to, she pressed down on the knife a little too hard and it penetrated the man’s skin. A trickle of red blood ran down his neck. Simone felt herself salivating and averted her eyes.
“All right, all right!” He fumbled with the gearshift, stalled in first gear and tried again. He pulled out into the light traffic.
“What happened out here?” Simone asked, staring at the wreckage around them. Every block seemed to have a burned house, or a car wreck, or some other kind of destruction. There were police and National Guard troops everywhere. She looked out the passenger-side window and saw, in the shadows between two large houses, what appeared to be a couple of cops kneeling over a dead body. One of the cops swung an axe, and it looked as if the head fell away from the body. She shuddered. It had been a small girl, from what she could see.
“You don’t know?” the man said. “Oh, you said, ‘out here.’ Been shut in, have you?”
“Yeah…” Simone drawled. “You could say that.”
“Everyone went crazy there for awhile. As soon as it started happening, I locked the doors to my house and took my family downstairs, and we hid out. When all the gunfire stopped, I came out. Then the phone started ringing off the hook. Everyone needs repair work done, all over the place, will pay me anything I want.”
“So you don’t know what caused all this?”
“They’re saying vampires,” the plumber said quietly. He tried again to look at Simone in the rearview mirror, and again, there was nothing there. This time he dared to turn his head all the way, and she knew he could see how gaunt and pale they were.
Laura laughed shakily. “Vampires? Has everyone gone crazy?” She sou
nded so sincere that Simone could see the man relaxing.
“All I know is, I heard some very strange sounds outside my house,” he said. “People screaming, people snarling like animals. When it all finally stopped and I went outside, there were burned-up bodies everywhere. Just cinders, as if they had burst into flame. I saw cops running around with crossbows. Crossbows, for Christ’s sake! So yeah, I almost believe it. Vampires fit.”
In her astonishment at his explanation, Simone almost relaxed her grip, and she noticed his fingers edging toward the door latch. She pulled his head back and hissed. Did I just hiss? she wondered. Is that what we are? Vampires?
It made sense. The sudden strength and speed, the hunger for raw meat. The effects of sunlight. She could smell the droplet of blood underneath the point of her blade as strongly as she’d once been able to smell a complete banquet. She realized that she’d been suspecting it ever since the Monster had attacked them, even before they began their escape.
“What’s your name?” she asked the plumber.
“Rod,” he said. “Rodney Parker. I’m a good guy. I’m married; three young kids. It hasn’t always been easy, you know? Crescent City is a poor town, so I understand when people are desperate. I’m totally on your side.”
Patty spoke for the first time. “Sure you are.” Her tone was so sarcastic that he gulped and shut up.
“Just do as we ask, Rod, and we’ll let you go,” Simone said. They had left the outskirts of town and were on a winding road that led into the foothills. There was the occasional redwood stump or stand of surviving trees amid mobile homes, trailers and a few small, stick-built houses. She recognized the neighborhood.
“Turn here,” she said.
Rod pulled off the main road onto a small lane that made a sharp u-curve and turned back in the direction they had just come from. They hit another dogleg to the right and drove onto a dirt road. Awbrey Lane, the road sign said. Simone had lived out here for a couple of years when she’d worked at the Wal-Mart just over the hill.
“There,” she said, pointing to a small manufactured home in a dense grove of trees. She’d driven by the place a thousand times. The house was just as she remembered, in the dark on even the brightest days. She had often wondered how the owners could stand the gloom. But then, no one had ever seemed to be home.
As they pulled into the driveway, she saw the broken windows that weren’t visible from the road and realized the building was abandoned. It was perfect.
Rod pulled up to the door and stopped.
“I mean it,” he said desperately. “I won’t tell anyone. As far as I’m concerned, you hitchhiked out here. Please, let me go.”
“Get out,” Simone said.
He hesitated, and she could see that he was preparing to run.
“Don’t,” she said. “I’m faster than you, and stronger, believe it or not.”
It was obvious that he believed her. Something about the certainty in her voice had convinced him. Plus, it was clear that he knew what she was.
They broke into the house, and she marched Rod to the hallway closet and told him to get inside. He meekly followed her orders.
As the door closed, it occurred to her that she’d come full circle. The morning had started with her as prisoner of a monster and had ended with her taking a man prisoner. Did that mean she was a monster?
She wasn’t sure what that meant, but it seemed right.
Chapter 4
Every time Fitzsimmons awoke in the cold and darkness, he’d forget who he was. As he lay in the silence, he would forget what he was. He’d dream of the day ahead, a humdrum kind of day: shopping, working, dining, lazing about.
Then he’d try to move.
And he’d scream.
Sometimes Peterson or one of his servants was nearby and would come and lift Fitzsimmons out of his enclosure. Other times he’d lie there for days in his own filth, helpless and raging. If he could have killed himself in those early days, he would have.
Peterson found it useful to keep him alive. He would hold a phone up to his former boss’s mouth, placing a piece of paper with the lines he wanted Fitzsimmons read in front of him. Fitz was forced to try to sound normal, like his genial old self. The other Council members thought he was traveling and had left Peterson in charge in his stead.
After the disaster in Crescent City, they’d flown into London during the daytime, when no vampires were around to observe them. Peterson had stuffed Fitzsimmons’s truncated body into a suitcase and wheeled it past the tight security that surrounded the headquarters of the Council of Vampires. No one but Peterson and a couple of his closest progeny knew Fitz was here.
If Fitzsimmons didn’t do as Peterson asked, he’d be tortured again and again, to the point of death. And the next day––the next night, to be exact––he’d awaken and start screaming again.
At first he wondered if his arms and legs would come back. He was vampire, after all, and all injuries eventually healed. But Peterson kept him starved, with just enough animal blood in his system to keep him alive.
Once they brought him a child, bound in ropes, as helpless as he was. He drank the young girl’s blood and spent the next hours, and then days, waiting for transformation. His wounds ceased to leak blue blood, but other than that, nothing changed.
He didn’t take up that much space anymore, so he didn’t need to be in a big room. The one he was in was a closet, really, with a bare bulb hanging overhead so that he could see to read what Peterson put before him. Sometimes when his captors left, they forgot to turn the light off, and Fitzsimmons wasn’t sure which was worse: the darkness, or the light that showed the barrenness of what was left of his life. He memorized the cracks in the ceiling, made creatures out of them to keep him company.
In the end, he was left alone with his hate. It festered and oozed inside him until he was nothing but a raw and open sore. The vampire, the Wildering, who had done this to him was dead, but those who sought to take advantage of his weakness were very much alive. He planned his revenge, certain that the night would come when he’d arise.
Once a week, a servant came into the tiny room and scooped out the waste. At first, Fitzsimmons endured the humiliation without a word. One day, uncharacteristically, he mentioned how hard it must be for the vampire to have to clean up his mess.
The vampire, who looked like a young woman, smiled.
Fitzsimmons’s mind started churning. He knew that his anger and resentment was off-putting, but his moment of empathy had resulted in a moment of relaxed vigilance. On the servant’s next visit, he smiled at her and asked her name.
“Chloe,” she said.
“I’m sorry you have to do such a dirty task, Chloe.”
She shrugged and bent down to wipe something from his face.
From that day on, he talked to Chloe as if she were a friend or a family member, a niece, perhaps; perhaps even one of his progeny. Their little talks grew longer, more familiar, with each visit. It seemed to Fitz that she started coming to him every few days instead of once a week. He was winning her over, he was sure of it.
“If only I could get out of here,” he ventured one night. “I bet if I had enough blood, my limbs would regrow. You wouldn’t have to do this anymore.”
She frowned slightly, as if she was considering it.
I’ve planted the seed, he thought. Now I must nurture it.
The next visit, they talked about where they had grown up as humans. He told her the story of his Making and then waited for her to reciprocate. She mentioned she was French and had been Made in the mid-twentieth century, which made her old enough to know the ways of vampires, but still relatively young. She would say nothing more about her Making. They talked about their human childhoods, which, as was typical for vampires, had been miserable and hopeless. It was the downtrodden who most often found themselves the victims of vampires. They even shared a laugh or two as the weeks went on. Finally, they were talking like old friends from the moment she walked i
nto the room.
It is time, Fitzsimmons decided one night. She might turn him down, but he didn’t think she would report him.
“You wouldn’t have to do this anymore if I could just regain my mobility,” he said. “Bring me some blood, Chloe. Perhaps an animal, or a small child. I don’t believe it will take that much. Then you won’t have to do this demeaning job any longer.”
“I don’t find it demeaning,” she said.
“No? But surely you don’t like doing it?”
“I don’t mind.”
“But how did you get assigned to it?” he pressed, certain that there was a story behind it.
“Oh, I didn’t get assigned. I volunteered.”
“Volunteered?”
She laughed at the look on his face. “You are so obvious, Fitzsimmons. I wondered how long it would take for you to actually ask.”
“What do you mean?” He started feeling dread as he saw her sneer at him.
“My Maker was Southern,” she said. “You killed him, remember? You betrayed him.”
“He was a traitor,” Fitzsimmons muttered.
Chloe laughed. “Oh, come now, Fitz. We both know that isn’t true. He was in your way, that’s all. You had him eliminated.”
“Then why are you here?” he asked, and he hated the tone of dismay in his voice. He’d been getting his hopes up, he realized. He’d really begun to think she was going to help him. Now, it was worse than before.
“Well, I didn’t want you rotting away too soon. I want you to be like this for a long time. For eternity, if I can manage it. I’ll teach my progeny to come in and do this nasty job after me, and their progeny after them, if need be.”
Fitzsimmons was silent. He closed his eyes as she kept talking.
“But I need not come quite so often,” Chloe said. “I’ve had enough of your manipulative bullshit. I think maybe once a month is sufficient for keeping your waste from eating away what’s left of you.”
“No… please…”
“Please?” She sounded as if she couldn’t believe he’d said it. “The great Fitzsimmons, pleading for mercy? How pathetic.”
The Vampire Evolution Trilogy (Book 3): Blood of Gold Page 3