by Jeff Abugov
A third swarm of bugs ran onto the road with their rifles drawn. Were the bugs changing strategy? Prague wondered. Had they now been ordered to kill her? Had they not learned that their puny weapons were useless against her?
But the bugs aimed their rifles upward toward the mouth of the cylinder and began to fire. Prague realized that a helicopter hovered above, and the fact that she hadn’t sensed it, hadn’t even heard it, was great cause for concern. How many of her other abilities were gone?
Johnny worked his helicopter wizardry as he dodged the alien blasts that whizzed all around his aircraft. Frank clipped Harve to the harness but there were too many white beams for the new Lieutenant to safely descend from the bird.
“I can’t get out!” Harve screamed. “Get us to a safe angle!”
“You won’t be able to drop in from a safe angle!” Johnny shouted back.
“I can’t drop in this way either!”
“Then throw the harness down without you! Frank, unclip him!”
“What good will that do?!” shouted Frank.
“Let’s at least give the girl a fighting chance!”
“That’s crazy! We’ll get blasted ourselves!”
“Do what the Captain says, Frank!” shouted Harve. “Now!”
Prague continued to keep her predators at bay as she watched the rescue harness fall toward her. She recognized the precarious situation of her human rescuers and how wrong she had been about these creatures, risking their own fragile lives to save hers. They were noble allies indeed. The harness dropped into the cylinder, and Prague immediately grabbed onto the line and started to climb.
“She’s got it!” Harve shouted. “Bring her up!”
Frank flipped the switch on the pulley while Johnny shot the bird skyward. Two bugs leapt toward the harness and grabbed hold of Prague’s legs. The beautiful blonde vampire kicked the closer one in the head who fell back into the second one. Both fell to the ground as she rocketed upward, her escape imminent. She cleared the top of the cylinder only to suddenly find herself face-to-face with the sun itself, the tippy-tippy-tip-top of its scalp shining violently upon her face.
Despite the wretched agony that consumed her, she knew that she had no time to scream. With only a second of life remaining, she rang out her final thought.
Africa, my eternal love, the sunrise is as beautiful as you remember it, as beautiful as you. Live happily, my cherished one.
Then she burst into fire and fell backward into the cylinder. Four alien soldiers tried to catch her in a synthetic blanket to keep her unharmed by the fall, but by the time she landed she was nothing but ash.
Africa, safe within her casket, received her lover’s message with perfect clarity, and tears rolled down her cheeks.
*****
The hearse seemed a tiny dot miles down the road, and whether it would arrive in time was anybody’s guess. The sun was fully visible over the horizon, and their tiny island of shade was rapidly shrinking.
Laurel sat on the ground with her back leaning against the giant oak, Julius seated in front with his back pressed against hers. Her bare, toned arms were wrapped tightly around him so that the weakened vampire wouldn’t tip over into the light, and the perfect, yellow sun shone brightly behind them. The only sounds were the chirping birds and the soft breeze brushing through the leaves. In any other context, it would have seemed a very romantic image, and they both knew it.
“How long have you yearned for this moment, Laurel?”
“What moment?” she asked, offended by his presumption.
“Watching me die.”
“Oh, that moment. Most of my life, actually. But you’re not going to die. Not unless I’m the one who kills you, monster.” He laughed slightly at this, and she liked the feel of it, and she didn’t like that she liked it. “Thank you, by the way,” she added.
“You’re thanking me?” he smiled. “For what?”
“For joining forces with us. For envisioning a truce and bringing it to fruition. You fellows were pretty fierce out there.”
“It’s easy when we’re not at odds with one trained to slay us. You should have been out there with us.”
“Slaying aliens isn’t exactly what I’ve been trained for,” she said with a smile.
There was an awkward silence. They had never spoken to each other this way before—even when they had made their truce it had been with deep suspicion and distrust. It was unsettling for them both, but especially for her.
“I have never felt ill toward you, Laurel,” said the vampire. “Many of my kind hate you, but –”
“They have no cause to hate me. I’m a defender of man, no more no less.”
“And how would you like it if every time you went to your market for a fine roast beef, you were stabbed in the chest by some magical cow?”
Laurel suppressed a laugh. “Okay, I can see why they may not be fans.”
“But never have I hated you. You have been a most worthy foe.”
“Stop talking like you’re dying.”
“But I am dying,” he admitted. “Dying in the loving embrace of my mortal enemy. If that’s not a kick in the pants, I don’t know what is.”
“This is not a loving embrace,” she said emphatically.
He looked deep into her naked eyes. She was being kind to him, tender, and he to her. Their bodies were so sensually comfortable pressed against the other, and he knew that she knew it. Why did humans feel the need to deny the obvious?
And her only thought as she fell lost in his gaze was what an extraordinary looking man he was—but it was quickly interrupted by a second thought. No! Michael, Michael.
“Okay,” was the vampire’s only reply.
“And never have I admired you, by the way,” she went on. “You are a monster and a fiend, and never have I felt anything but hatred and contempt toward you.”
“Until today,” he answered. “Today you felt gratitude. That is what you said.”
“Yes, all right. Today I felt gratitude.”
“And all that hatred and contempt and the passion which fueled it for a lifetime had nowhere to turn. And here I am now in your loving embrace.”
“It’s not a loving embrace!”
“Okay.”
“It’s not! When this war ends, we shall be enemies once more—like the US and Russia after World War Two. Once Germany was defeated, they returned to their mutual hatred.” Julius only smiled. “What’s so darn funny?” she demanded.
“I was just imagining Roosevelt and Stalin in a loving embrace.”
This time, she couldn’t stop a tiny laugh from taking hold. “Shut up, monster.”
“As you wish, slayer.”
The words hung awkwardly yet sensually in the air when the hearse screeched to a stop yards before them.
“We made it,” sighed a relieved Laurel as four soldiers bolted out of the vehicle to retrieve the vampire’s ornate casket, then sprinted it toward them.
Without warning, the ground shook. A wormhole opened behind them, and a swarm of aliens emerged to gun down the four soldiers. Six of the seven jogged out to retrieve the casket while the smallest positioned herself in front of the tree to study Julius.
“Like, what’s wrong with him?” she asked the former First Lady.
Laurel was startled by the insect’s use of English, surprised by the female voice, but hoped that it might imply some degree of compassion. “He’s been shot!” she lied. “He needs urgent medical attention! Please let me get him back home!”
“Nah,” the alien said pensively. “I think it’s probably the sunlight.”
Her voice seemed familiar to Julius, hauntingly so, and he needed to confirm whether he had lost his faculties once and for all. “Do I know you?” he inquired of the apparent swarm-leader.
“How can you even ask me that, Julius?” the lady bug answered. “It’s only been like a few days for you since we were together in that graveyard.”
“Mary,” he sighed with a bemuse
d smile. “You lost the accent.”
“Told you I would. ’Course it’s been like five years for me so, you know, not really all that impressive, right?”
The other aliens set the vampire’s casket on the ground beside him. They wrapped him in a synthetic cloth to shield him from the sunlight then lifted him into the box, all while Mary prattled on.
“And sorry we gotta kidnap you and torture you and stuff, but we gotta figure out what makes you guys die, you know? Decades of studying humans, and vampires trip us up. Go figure, right?” She sealed the casket closed as she summed it up. “Okay, so we’ll like chat later, ’kay? Have a good one.”
The bugs carried the coffin into the wormhole as one of them coughed out some sort of reminder to Mary.
“Fine, whatever,” she snippily responded, then she turned to Laurel with what appeared to be genuine sadness in her eyes. She removed the time-space weapon that hung over her thorax, and took aim. Laurel gasped at first, then closed her eyes tightly as she prepared to be with Michael once more.
Mary fired. The blasts from her weapon were deafening as white beams whizzed at the tree. Only once the noise subsided did Laurel realize that she was still alive, and that one-inch voids in the giant oak tree surrounded her like a chalk outline.
“I admired your husband,” Mary whispered confidentially. “Woulda voted for him if I’d been a citizen.”
She winked her bulging bug eye then crossed back into the wormhole to join her brethren, then tapped on the keypad that was strapped to her lower forearm. The ground shook, the wormhole snapped shut and vanished, and the mightiest vampire of all was gone from our world.
PART FOUR
EXTERMINATION COMPLETE
INTERLUDE #4
Dinah lounged in the shade as her hatchlings gnawed the meat off the adolescent T. rex’s carcass. Dizzy had the best spot by the large upper ribs, while eldest-born Donald was by the smaller ones, and the big brother didn’t like the arrangement at all. He head-butted his little sister to shove her aside when Dinah eeked out a soft shriek. Little Donald dropped his eyes to the ground then returned to his original spot.
From out of nowhere, a cacophony of rapid, heavy footsteps was heard. Dinah looked up to see two enormous Tyrannosaurus rexes charging toward her at full speed. It didn’t take much for the highly intelligent Deinonychus to deduce that the fourteen feet tall, forty feet long beasts were the parents of the adolescent on which her pack had been feeding and that they were now seeking a vengeance of their own. Let’s call them Rex and Tyrene.
Dinah instantly grabbed her hatchlings in her mouth and scurried up the nearest tree as fast as she could, but the dreaded T. rexes were fast upon her. Rex opened his giant jaw and snapped it down hard over Dinah’s backside, his knife-like teeth catching only a few of the Deinonychus mother’s butt feathers.
Dinah and hatchlings made it to the top of the tree, but it was only a few yards taller than the T. rex parents themselves. She yelped out an ear-piercing shriek, a cry for help, as Tyrene leaned her massive body against the trunk, causing the tree to bend sideways and the top to tilt lower toward Rex’s gaping mouth.
Dinah covered her hatchlings like a blanket to shield them from her predator’s wrath, sacrificing herself as the first to go. She could feel Rex’s stinky, hot breath upon her. There was no escape, no hope. The T. rex male readied himself to chomp down when fifty shrieking Deinonychus suddenly leapt out of the trees! Half of them landed on Tyrene, the other half on Rex, each one cutting and slicing with their razor sharp claws, all with flawless precision and teamwork.
Claw wrapped himself around Tyrene’s head, slashing at her eyes and ears. The female T. rex lurched back in pain and let go of the tree causing it to whip out in the opposite direction, sending Dinah and her hatchlings flying. The hatchlings landed in the soft brush unharmed, but Dinah’s head hit a rock, rendering her unconscious.
The fifty Deinonychus sliced at their enemies’ throats and underbellies, gouging thick chunks of hide from their leathery frames. The T. rex couple smashed themselves against trees and boulders as they crushed their assailants to bits.
Then all of a sudden, the ground shook violently—the equivalent of an eight-point-two earthquake. The dinosaurs stopped dead in their tracks to look toward the source of the shaking, and they were utterly confounded by what they saw. Even the highly intelligent Deinonychus could not make heads or tails of it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Julius had no sense of how long he had been asleep, nor did he have any idea where he was. There was so much to process all at once that he had to consciously slow down his racing brain and work things through one at a time, even though it only took him a matter of seconds to do it.
He quickly deduced that he must have had quite a long rest because the wounds that had been inflicted upon him by the sunrays were gone, his vision and hearing were clear, his thoughts lucid, and his determination to survive intense.
He lay naked on a gurney bound by leather ties, with wireless electrodes taped to his body. The gurney was in the center of a large space with clean, white, cracked walls, suggesting that he was in a building a hundred or so years old—the kind you’d find in a northeastern city like New York or Boston. Metallic carts on wheels sported all sorts of surgical tools, as well as human weapons both modern and archaic. Two bugs in white lab coats moved about with purpose, and holographic images of his skeleton and organs hovered in the air. A third alien, also in a lab coat, sat at a holographic keyboard, manipulating the angles of his hovering innards.
A fourth alien, this one an armed soldier, stood by a window with stylish synthetic blinds pulled a quarter of the way down. Julius could see the endless multitude of shining stars, more brilliant and infinite than he had ever seen on the darkest night on Earth, as well as the sun itself shining directly upon him.
Why it hadn’t scorched him into nonexistence he could not decipher, but the rest was obvious. Despite the Earth-like feel of the place, he was in a medical operating room on the alien vessel, and he was soon to be tortured.
“Morning, sunshine,” Mary said brightly as she entered the room wearing her human skin under a white lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck. She tapped on a keypad next to the door, and Julius could hear seven dead bolts lock in place.
He immediately tried to transform to mist, but it didn’t take. When that failed, he tried to tear through the leather straps but he couldn’t do that either.
“Don’t bother, boo,” she said affectionately. “The sun’s shining right on you.”
“Then how am I alive?”
“Special filter on the window,” she explained as she crossed to the sink to wash her hands. “We actually designed it for ourselves long ago ’cause, like, moving through space, sometimes we’re really far from a sun and sometimes like really close, and too much sun isn’t good for anyone, so it’s got all these different intensities. Right now it’s set to let in just enough UV to keep you weak, but not enough to like totally kill you. It’s a teensy brighter than we normally like it, but we can’t have you flying all over the place wreaking havoc, you know?”
She pulled up a round stool, grabbed a tongue depressor and flashlight from a cart, and proceeded to examine him. He could see on her face the five years that had passed for her since their last encounter days ago. Still beautiful, she had gone from bashful teenager to confident young woman. He found the change alluring, even though he knew he would have to find a way to kill her before she killed him.
“I actually kinda owe you,” she said sweetly as she shoved a tongue depressor into his mouth. “I was originally sent to Earth to be an observer spy—like, our bottom level. I was to keep a low profile, find out what people were up to a few days pre-invasion, then report it back to five years ago and let our planners plan. But after you tried to kill me that night—which seriously hurt my feelings ’cause I was so into you—still am, actually—I get home all beat-up, and everyone asks what happened so I tell the
m I was attacked by a vampire. And they’re like, ‘The vampire is of human fiction. Such things do not exist.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah they do. One just attacked me.’ And they’re like, ‘No they don’t.” And I’m like, ‘Yeah, they do.’
“They thought I lost it. They wouldn’t let me work on anything. So just to prove my point, I scoped out everything I could find on you guys—every book, tome, scroll, movie, TV series, but no one cared—they figured that if humans didn’t believe in you, then you couldn’t be real. I also watched a ton of Hannah Montana and Gossip Girl to like make my English awesome. Oh, and baseball too. Wow, that was random.” And with her stethoscope now upon his chest, she added, “Cough please.”
Julius complied so as not to disrupt her train of thought—despite her incoherent rambling, she might divulge some useful information to help his escape.
“Anyhoo, cut to flash-forward. We’re at war, kicking human butt, all as planned, then you guys show up and turn the tables. Everyone like freaks—even our Commander who never freaks, freaks. But to me, what you guys are was so obvious.
“So I go back to my boss with my data, and now he’s willing to really look at it, and he sees what I’ve been saying all along. So he takes me to his boss, who takes me to his, who takes me to his, yadda yadda yadda, next thing I know, the Commander’s back on the vessel, and he summons me to an audience.
“And he frikkin’ loves me! Swear ta God! I’m like the only one who knows what you guys are and how to defeat you, and he even wants to do me now—me, the dumb chick who couldn’t make it as an observer spy is suddenly like his top advisor with her own department. And it’s all thanks to you, sunshine,” she said as she kissed his forehead.
“Then how about letting me go?” Julius replied.