by Jeff Abugov
“Oh you’re so adorable, I could just eat you up.
“Anyway, the problem is that the lit on you guys is like all over the map. Some say garlic harms you, some say not. Crucifixes—some yes, some no. Almost all of it says sunlight kills you in a jiff, only a couple of very old tomes and one or two recent novels say it’s only the sun itself. So who can know f’sure, right? And on that note, ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“To find out which of your lore is true and which is bogus, silly. Haven’t you been paying attention? Bad boy.”
And with that, she placed three silver crucifixes upon his naked chest. They sizzled and burned into his flesh. The holograms showed his heart beating rapidly, his lungs swelling, the lobes of his brain quivering, and he cried out in pain.
“Cool,” Mary said pleasantly. “Awesome start.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Africa awoke inside her casket feeling refreshed. Gone were the burn marks and scars that the sun’s rays had inflicted upon her body, and her heart was pumping strongly. She could sense that there was no sunlight outside the casket even though it was only late afternoon. She willed the lid open then slowly rose, now strong enough to easily break through the aliens’ metallic net and cast it aside.
She saw that she was in the penthouse suite of the Omni Hotel that the humans had assigned as her and Prague’s quarters. The windows were sealed—the entire hotel had been rendered sunlight-proof the day prior—but Africa could only focus on the empty spot where Prague’s casket had once lay, and it made her cry.
“Did you sleep well?” asked a voice that only added insult to injury.
Africa turned quickly toward the sofa. “What brings you hence, slayer?”
“We have matters to discuss,” Laurel answered. In truth, the slayer would have far preferred to be by Denison’s side right now, saying her last good-byes to her Guide, her mentor, her lifelong best friend, but Denison himself would have insisted that she fulfill her duty first. This was for him. “Do you know about Prague?”
“Yessss,” Africa answered with a venomous hiss. “I know about Prague.”
“And Julius?”
“What about Julius?!” Africa snapped, but she didn’t need the slayer to answer—she could sense her leader’s absence from the world. “He’s dead,” she said softly.
“Most likely,” Laurel said, trying to keep her conflicted feelings concealed and remain professional. “He has been taken. If not dead yet, he will most likely be soon.”
“You must be so pleased.”
“Believe it or not, I am not.”
“Liar.”
“Be that as it may, we—you—have much work to do, Queen Africa.”
“What did you call me?”
“With Prague no more and Julius taken, you are the eldest and the strongest, and hopefully the wisest. Either way, you are the new queen.”
“Why are you telling me this? If not here to slay me, is it not the custom of the Guide to relay such information?”
“Denison has passed as well.”
“Good.”
“Excuse me?”
“Guides are just as bad as slayers. Worse. They’re the ones who strategize our demise, who train you slayers to do their bidding while they sit on the sidelines like the cowards that they are. That’s your precious Denison, a murderous coward.”
Laurel wanted to slap the bitch, ram her wooden stake through the monster’s ugly heart, but she knew that there was a far more important task at hand.
“I was under the impression that you were amongst those who like humans.”
“Yesss, I am fond of humans. But I detest your kind of human.”
“Well, as queen, you would have the authority to end our truce,” Laurel said sadly, hoping that the new vampire leader would never choose such an option.
“Stop calling me that! Julius never referred to himself as ‘king’.”
“My apologies. What wish you to be called?”
“Nothing. I am Africa, nothing grander, nothing lesser. I cannot be the senior.”
“Yet you are. And if you so decline, then who in your stead? Plato? Trung Nhi?”
“Plato is but a boy.”
“A two-thousand-year old boy with much strength and little discipline. What if factions arise to support Plato and Trung Nhi each against the other, since neither has rightful claim? You know the lore that preceded Julius’s reign—the tragic, bloody contest that brought Athena to rule. Is that what you long for?”
“You understand nothing, slayer. Despite my centuries, I have always been with Prague. From the moment I was made. When she became an elder, I was but her precious, pretty tagalong. I was the playful one, the silly little girl. I paid no mind to the ways of leadership. Only she did. She was the one ordained to succeed Julius, not I. I would not know how to perform such a burden if I desired it, which I do not.”
“The role has fallen upon you by right, Africa, but also, from what I have studied, by qualification. So I ask once more, if not you, who? Good luck with your decision.”
And with that the slayer walked out of the room, leaving the would-be-queen to fall back into her casket to ponder.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The hotel bar and the restaurant alongside it were packed to capacity as human and vampire alike celebrated their monumental victory of the night before. Civilian trainees served as bartenders, and every kind of music from Mozart to Kanye blasted through the loudspeakers so that all could experience the varied lifestyles of their new compatriots.
“To Prague and Julius!” Plato shouted as he raised his clamato juice to the air.
“To Prague and Julius!” responded the humans and vampires around him, even though most of the humans had no idea who Prague or Julius were.
“I love Vs!” shouted Johnny as he burst into the joint, fashionably late to the party. He took an open stool at the bar next to a knockout Marine Lieutenant, then turned to the bartender. “Beer please!”
“Juice and sodas only,” said the civilian trainee. “The President’s orders, we’re all still on active alert. But I can mix ‘em anyway you want.”
“Cool. Mix me a gin and tonic,” he told the boy then turned to the pretty Marine beside him. “How ya’ doin’?”
“You’re the pilot, aren’t you?” she asked, Johnny’s achievements preceding him. “Is it true that you saved one of them?”
“Yeah,” he answered sadly. “But I really wanted to save two of them.”
“Oh,” responded the girl, slightly less impressed than before.
“But hey, I’ll take credit for the one,” he countered quickly then turned back to the bartender. “Whatever the lady wants! Put it on my tab!”
“They’re free,” smiled the Marine.
“In that case, make it a double.”
“Oh you’re terrible,” she laughed.
Just outside the bar in the lobby proper were tables that hotel management had set up to create a faux outdoor experience. All but one of the tables remained vacant because most everyone wanted to be part of the celebration.
Harve sat outside the bar deep in thought but perked up when he saw Johnny enter. He had gone to question the pilot at his quarters over an hour earlier because that’s where the log had said he would be, but there had been no answer when he banged loudly on the door. He had looked everywhere, asked everyone—but at a time of active alert, when all whereabouts were to be accounted for, his sole suspect had been nowhere to be found. Harve had a bad feeling that something nefarious was about to happen, and that had been the time during which Johnny had set it up.
He had spent all day combing the computer banks, forgoing sleep to find even one other suspect. He had questioned countless officers and enlisted men, anyone who seemed even remotely suspicious, but they all checked out. With Johnny it was just the opposite—the questions were mounting. Where had he been? What was he up to? And how had he dodged all those alien blasts? Yes, he had pulled o
ff some super-fancy flying, all sorts of tricks, but could anyone be that good? Or was it truly that the bugs didn’t want to lose their inside man? Not hard evidence, true, but it was the only answer that made sense. Besides, the newbie detective had no more leads to follow, not a single other suspect before him.
“Lieutenant!” he heard the Captain-with-the-scar bellow from across the way. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Harve snapped to his feet and saluted. “Yes sir!”
“At ease, Lieutenant,” said the Captain. “About this spy business, I need to take a look at your notes.”
“But the President said I should report directly to him.”
“And you shall continue to report directly to him,” the Captain indignantly snapped. “But as head of base security, I need to know how your investigation is proceeding. You’ve never done this sort of thing before, and I have, many times. So hand ’em over.”
“But –”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
“Yes sir,” Harve said, as he gave the superior officer his little notepad.
Harve watched with dread as the Captain-with-the-scar skimmed through his chicken-scrawled findings. It wasn’t only the conflicting orders that concerned him, but also whether his notes would make sense to anyone else, if there was a proper way to run an investigation that he had never learned, if he was totally off base with Johnny, and he was embarrassed. It felt like high school again, his shabby homework being graded by an admonishing teacher while he stood by helplessly.
“You have no hard evidence here,” criticized the Captain-with-the-scar. “This is nothing but raw speculation and theory. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Yes sir,” answered the humiliated Lieutenant.
“But the theory is solid, I’ll grant you that,” the Captain conceded as he kept reading. “Definitely holds water. Strong. Not bad, Lieutenant. Not bad at all. Now go get me some real evidence to back this up. No matter what it takes. Be a cop.”
“Yes sir!” Harve shouted with an internal sigh of relief as the Captain moved off to the bar to join the party. Harve smiled, vindicated. If the security chief concurred that it was most likely Johnny, than Johnny it certainly was. He sat back down when he noticed that the dark vampire was now seated at one of the tables across the way.
Africa had just concluded her conversation with Laurel, and she had to admit that the slayer had made some strong points. Both Plato and Trung Nhi would make abysmal leaders, and the power struggle that would ensue would quite likely lead to a savage vampire civil war. She knew that Julius would command her to assume the coveted role as a moral imperative, and that Prague would say she deserves it.
She knew that her first decision, if she were to accept the post, would be whether to continue the truce with the humans. Julius would, she knew, while Prague most likely wouldn’t. Which one would be right? She thought she could gain some insight on the matter by watching vampire and human in harmonious celebration, but her confusion only worsened as she watched them. How can the vampires rejoice when their leader had been taken, when her lover had died? How can the humans laugh and smile when so many of their kind had perished? With no insight to be found, she asked herself the most poignant question of all. How can she assume leadership when she simply didn’t know what to do?
Her eyes met Harve’s, and she sensed in the human an inner conflict not too dissimilar from her own—and it made her rescuer even more attractive to her than when she had first laid her eyes upon him.
“Thank you for saving my life,” she said to him.
“Was just following orders, ma’am,” Harve responded curtly yet honestly, feeling wholly uncomfortable around these disciples of evil.
“Then thank you for following your orders.”
He smiled. That was a polite and clever response on her part. Despite his abhorrence for these creatures, they were his allies whether he liked it or not—the Commander in Chief had decreed it, so it would be rude to be rude. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he offered.
“As am I,” she replied. “Why are you not celebrating with the others?”
“Lots of good people died in this thing. I see nothing to celebrate.”
She nodded her agreement—hadn’t she just been thinking the very same thing herself? Maybe this one could provide her with the insight for which she searched. At the very least, she could rid him of the propaganda he had been hearing about her kind all his life.
“We’re not evil, you know,” she said as she got up and joined him at his table.
“I never said you were.”
“You think it.”
“Who says?”
“Vampire brain,” she answered with a smile. “We know things.”
“Well, you do kill us for food.”
“You kill cows and chickens and pigs and fish,” explained the vampire. “And you enslave them first. We let our food roam free, and we only hunt what we need.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Harve chuckled at the ludicrous argument.
“It is exactly the same thing. Like you to your animals, we are simply higher than you on the food chain for our brains function at a higher level.”
“Look, I know I’m not the brightest bulb on the planet, but we humans have our geniuses same as you.”
“A vampire can hear a new language and be fluent within minutes. We can enter a factory in which we have never been and operate every piece of equipment flawlessly. And we can cause anyone to fall madly in love with us just by willing it.”
This was going too far, thought the soldier. Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, her eyes were so alluring, so inviting. But he was far too strong to let Lucifer’s minion entice him into the darkness. “I’m not falling in love with you,” he said pointblank.
“I have not been trying to render you so. I wished only to make a point. Besides,” she added with a coy, knowing smile, “you are a little.”
This is crazy, thought the Kentucky boy. Even if she wasn’t an agent of hell, it still could never work—she’s black.
But those eyes . . .
*****
The hefty nurse pushed the cart of meds and food toward the quarantine area, and she was just a bit frightened. She had taken extra-special care to make certain that the yellow biohazard suit that she wore had not a single tear, and that every zipper and snap was securely fastened. She had no way of knowing that the air would be the least of her worries.
The last time she had entered the space, all the quarantined soldiers had been asleep. She had left them each a tray of food but none of the meds. Of course, the meds wouldn’t cure the brave warriors of their mysterious virus, but hopefully they would help to ease their pain.
As she approached the door she could hear the banging and howling from within, and her heart went out to the poor souls. She unlocked the wooden door with her key and pushed her cart inside.
“Dinnertime! How are we all feeling today?”
Her mouth dropped open in terror as hordes of snarling zombies staggered toward her. Before she had the wherewithal to run, the two closest were upon her, knocking her down against the door, swinging it shut and automatically locked. A dozen more zombies dog-piled onto her plump body and gorged on all her juicy fat, leaving no openings for the other two hundred, zombie-Sanchez among them.
The sudden introduction of fresh meat without the opportunity to consume it made the two hundred go mad. They howled. They staggered hard into the glass walls once more in their pathetic mindless attempts to break free. The glass vibrated but held, but there was no telling for how long. A small crack emerged in the glass.
“Me want eat!” zombie-Sanchez would have cried if she had had words. “Pretty eat! Pretty pretty eat eat!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“It’s like totally amazing,” Mary said to Julius as the alien soldier tried to force a scimitar through the vampire’s belly. “I mean, the results we’re getting have like no basis in science. I mean, of
course they do—anything that is, is. Science is just what explains it all—but the science we’ve got has no explanation for you. So I may get to discover like a whole new field. I’m so glad you hit on me, sunshine.
“But we’ll get to that when we get to it. For now I’m just supposed to stay focused on like ‘what’ kills you not like ‘why’ it kills you.”
They had been at it for hours, Mary whipping through her long checklist of conflicting legends, lore and literature to find the truth behind them, each result matching some of her source material but only sunlight being consistent with all.
Silver bullets, no; silver crucifixes, no to cause death but yes to cause anguish, and only upon direct contact; crucifixes in general, no; silver in general, no; fire, anguish only; garlic, no (in fact, he enjoyed eating it); twisting or cracking of bones, anguish, yes, loss of consciousness, sometimes, but healing occurred too quickly for it to be of any true value; chopping off his head, too early in the process to risk testing; wooden stakes, most likely—she had stabbed a few into his abdomen and his vital signs went crazy as he screamed in agony, the high probability therefore being that one through his heart would be fatal; the Sangue Debolezza virus (or vampire disease), so far untested, but spies on Earth were searching for a sample.
They had shot him in his arms and legs with fifteen different kinds of guns, and the bullets had merely made tiny dents in his skin—pulling out the compressed slugs being as simple as peeling off a scab. They had blasted him with their own time-space weapons—a one-inch void emerging in his belly then filling up just as quickly. (It was only as mist that the beams sailed straight through him, and they dared not let him turn to mist.) They had stabbed, poked and prodded him with twenty different kinds of swords, and the blades had merely snapped in two.
And through it all, she would not stop talking. She explained in great tedious detail the Dwellers’ strategy of drawing the human forces to a single spot to defeat them en masse, why swarms were arranged in groups of seven and the awesome power of that fourth prime number, how their soldiers were conditioned to aim only at the human heart so that a miss could still render severe damage, and why the aliens were focusing their military attention exclusively on North America.