What Happens in the Darkness

by Monica J. O'Rourke

  “Probably not.” Martin shook his head.

  “I saw my daughter,” Paula blurted, sounding wistful. “She recognized me, wanted to come to me. But then when she saw what I am, she threatened me with crucifixes.”

  “That’s how humans are,” Lana spat. “You were human just a short time ago. I’ll bet you didn’t even believe vampires existed.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “Not outside of Bela Lugosi movies. But I remember what it was like. If I’d seen one, I doubt I would’ve believed it anyway.”

  “Should we approach them?” Nelson asked. “Maybe try to work something out?”

  “First things first,” Martin said. “I have to find Patrick, find out what he’s up to.”

  “I told you what we saw,” Rebecca said. “It looked like he was trying to kill Jeff.”

  “Yes he was,” a voice said from the shadows near the entrance. “That’s exactly what he was trying to do.” Jeff joined the group and sat across from Martin.

  “How do you feel?” Martin asked, and Jeff turned away.

  “What did he do to you?” Rebecca asked, taking Jeff’s hand.

  “He threw me out at sunrise. I was able to avoid the direct sunlight, which is the only reason I survived. When he came outside at sundown, he saw that I was still alive—sort of—and began to kick the crap out of me. That’s when you came along.”

  “Patrick’s the one who sired you,” Martin said. It wasn’t a question.

  Jeff nodded. “Yes, it was Patrick. He blamed me for everything that’s happened to all of you, especially for waiting so long to let you out.”

  “That’s crazy,” Dagan said.

  “I need to know where you stand,” Martin said to Jeff. “You were changed against your will. I understand if you have no loyalties to me, but I need to know. Where do you stand in this fight?”

  “I stand beside you,” Jeff said. “I have a loyalty to Patrick, but I’m fighting it. But you’ll always be my friend, regardless of the circumstances. This wasn’t your fault. I know you forbade this—Patrick disobeyed you.”

  Martin smiled. “I’m happy to hear that.”

  Paula cleared her throat. “So how do we fit in out there? How do we get humans to accept us?”

  Martin, Dagan, and Rebecca exchanged glances and then burst out laughing.

  “Not going to happen,” Rebecca said.

  “But we saved their asses!” Paula cried. “If it wasn’t for us, they’d all be speaking—” She scratched her head. “What? I don’t know, anything but English, goddammit.”

  “I know,” Martin said. “But it doesn’t change anything. They fear us. Hate us. Want us dead. Yeah we saved them, but that doesn’t matter. We’re monsters.”

  Jeff rubbed his healing, bloodshot eyes. “We should try, I think.”

  “He’s right,” Rebecca said. “Some people out there actually seemed grateful.”

  “Okay then,” Martin said. “We try. But first—I have some vampire ass to kick.”

  Chapter 22

  “My mom’s a vampire.”

  “That sounds like a bad movie title or something.” Thomas handed Janelle a candy bar. The store they raided was dark and stank from the food that had begun rotting weeks earlier. Cloying scents of decayed fruits and meats hung thick in the air. The walls were almost bare, but they found a handful of food everyone and everything else had overlooked. Rodent droppings were an inch thick on the floor.

  “I wish. But it’s true—I saw her. She’s one of them.” Janelle remembered her face—how it had been the same yet different. There was something very different about her mother. Something terrible and frightening.

  “I saw my folks get killed,” he said, chewing on his Snicker’s bar.

  “I saw mine get killed too. But I guess Mom didn’t get killed enough.” Janelle frowned, suddenly no longer in the mood to eat her Milky Way.

  “Where do you suppose they go? During the day, I mean.”

  “I know where they go,” Janelle said.

  “You do?”

  She nodded and wiped the chocolate on her fingers on her pants. “One of them told me. She was really nice till she became one of them. Then the head vampire—Martin—he wanted me to go with him. I told him no way and shoved my crucifix in his face, and he got pissed off.”

  “No kidding? That really happen?”

  “Uh huh. He saved my life though.”

  “Now way! A bloodsucker saved you?”

  She nodded. “Enemy soldiers caught me. One was tryin’ to do nasty things to me, you know? Martin broke the jerk’s neck—”

  “That his name? Martin?”

  “Uh huh. He snapped his neck like a chicken bone. Snap! Broke the other guard’s neck too. Snap! Snap! It was kinda cool. In a scary way.”

  Thomas shuddered. “So where are they? Where do they sleep?”

  “Some army base upstate.”

  “But where?”

  She shrugged, and stuffed candy bars off the rack into her backpack. “I forget. If I hear the name again, I’ll remember.”

  “If you hear the name again you won’t have to remember.”

  “Duuuuh. You know what I meant.”

  He laughed. “So you wanna go?”

  She stopped cramming candy into her pack and considered his question. “I guess. I do wanna see Mom again … but I’m scared of what she might do. You know? I mean, she’s a vampire and all.”

  He nodded and jumped up on the counter, swinging his legs. “I know. But what else are we gonna do anyway?”

  She shrugged and cautiously moved toward another aisle, wary of possible rodents. Damned rats were huge in the city, and the last thing she needed was a rat bite that could take off her arm and give her rabies. “I don’t know. Things are getting back to normal around here. Do we really need to go?”

  “It would be an adventure.”

  “Right. Do you really need more adventure?”

  He stopped swinging his legs. He leaned back and looked behind the counter. The register was wide open, and he grabbed a fistful of dollars.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “It’s not like we need cash!”

  “No, maybe not, but maybe someday!” He slid farther back and started pulling packs of cigarettes from the overhead racks.

  “Cigarettes, Thomas? Really?”

  “You ever seen prison movies? Maybe we can use them like money, or trade them. Can’t hurt.”

  “I guess.” She shrugged, heading back up front. The store shelves were almost bare, and the boxes had been picked through by mice and rats. She reached another aisle and started packing canned foods into her bag.

  “So would we try to stop them?” he asked. “Run stakes through their hearts?”

  “I just got done telling you my mom’s one of them!”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Most of the bags of potato chips had been chewed open, but Janelle found a few intact and pushed them into her backpack. “No one around here will even talk about them.”

  “I know. I saw.”

  “We have to make them talk. Because we need help.”

  “Help with what? You just said we can’t kill them.”

  “We can’t kill my mom.”

  “We can kill the other ones?”

  She stopped packing her bag and stood for a moment considering his words. She stared at the ceiling. Then she resumed packing, ignoring his question because she had no idea how to answer.

  ***

  Traveling the hundred miles over a countryside layered with newly fallen snow took minutes. The bleached whiteness outlined the hills and silhouetted the trees, and the almost-full moon spotlighted the landscape.

  Still, they moved with such speed they were invisible, were sensed by the animals and surviving humans they passed. They perhaps smelled the vampires’ scents—musky and earthy and frightening.

  Rebecca led the way, bringing Martin, Jeff, and fifty other vampires back to where she had last seen Patrick. Sever
al hours remained before sunup. Plenty of time.

  They arrived at the cabin, and Martin smashed his fists against the front door, breaking through like it was kindling. His entourage followed as he made his way downstairs.

  No one was there. No indication they were returning from a hunt. No personal belongings, no candles burning, nothing. It looked as if no one had been here at all. But telltale signs told a different story: desiccated human husks were stacked in the corner like a cord of firewood. Blood lay a new pattern on the floor and adorned the walls like a Pollack painting.

  Patrick had been here all right.

  What a messy eater.

  “Where the hell is he?” Jeff sputtered.

  Martin pointed at half a dozen vampires. “Go keep an eye out upstairs. I don’t want this to turn into an ambush.”

  Jeff massaged his temples with his fingertips. Not that he had a headache, he just had an old habit not abandoned in his death.

  Rebecca did a 360 and shook her head. “How many were there? With Patrick.”

  “I’m not sure. I saw about twenty in here. But that doesn’t mean anything.” Jeff turned away from the human discards. “I remember something disturbing though. They were all wearing Global Dominion uniforms. Full uniforms, or parts of one, but there was no mistaking it. Those vampires used to be enemy soldiers.”

  ***

  They were hungry.

  Ravenous.

  They sped across fields and highways, barely leaving tracks in the new snow, determined to arrive quickly and strike while the bloodlust ran thick in their veins.

  They passed people along the way but moved in a pack, moved as a force of one, a single entity, unwilling to stop or rest for fear of disturbing the momentum.

  Not that they needed to rest.

  New York City was minutes away.

  They’d traveled down through New Jersey this time, through the Palisades, passing rest areas and nearly deserted parking complexes. Across the George Washington Bridge, they entered the Bronx.

  It was here they planned to start their feeding frenzy.

  But at one in the morning, where would they find pockets of people?

  The celebration at the Cross County Mall.

  Banners had been hung, proclaiming a new Independence Day. November 27. Red, white, and blue balloons floated from strings, adorned lampposts and streetlights and trash cans.

  How original, Patrick thought. Red, white, and blue.

  Red worked, anyway. Probably not for the same reason. Then again, he thought, those damned Americans and their bloody revolutions. The red probably represented the same thing.

  Shortly after, they stood at the entrance to the mall. Even at one a.m. the festivities were still going strong. Music blasted from speakers the size of small cars. The bass was turned up so high it tickled the soles of their feet.

  Patrick smiled.

  This was going to be fun.

  People drinking. People eating. People fucking. Everyone wandering around like it was midday, getting drunk, falling over one another, laughing and screaming and twirling and whirling—

  “Do not change anyone,” Patrick told his small mob. “Remember. Feed only. Do what you want with these … humans,” he spat, “but do not sire any of them.”

  Word quickly spread from one vampire to another until the entire group, about two hundred in all, had heard Patrick’s instructions.

  Patrick inhaled deeply, smelling the perfume of fresh blood in the air, the rich scent of the fluid just under the skin’s surface, the aroma of musk and sweat and body odor, thick and meaty. The taste of residual fear, of compassion, of passion.

  Lightheaded now. Too exciting. Like horses at the starting gate they waited, and he held them … held them … held them …

  Then … released!

  Two hundred vampires. Several hundred partiers. It was like releasing a pride of lions into a heard of wounded gazelle.

  Patrick had grabbed the first victim because they were his, all of them, his property, his cattle, his chattel, his victims, his prey, his slaves, his food. None would dare oppose him—not vampires, not humans. He might as well be God as far as they were concerned.

  He attacked the man with such savagery he even scared his vampires. He plucked the human out of the crowd and slammed him on the ground, splitting his skull. He growled, clutching the man’s face with both hands and pulled back, flaying the skin in a single piece. The man screamed so loudly, so intently he hurt Patrick’s eardrums. Patrick punched him in his raw, stripped face and tore at the exposed muscle and tissue, licked the blood and fluids off the husked skin. He immersed his own face into the skin he had shucked off and inhaled deeply, sticking his tongue through the mouth-shaped hole. Patrick straddled the man, who writhed beneath him, his palms slapping the concrete, his left leg kicking in a spasm. Patrick jumped off the man’s crotch, looking down at the darkening stain spreading across his jeans. He scowled and snorted and grabbed the man’s head with such ferocity he tore it from his shoulders. It separated from the shoulders with a tremendous riiiiipping sound, and he casually tossed the head away, his furious bloodlust temporarily sated. The head bounced awkwardly away, like a SuperBall from hell, refusing to jump in a straight line. It bounced half a dozen times before doing a final spin and coming to rest on its raw, now-filthy exposed facial tissue.

  The people around him had been staring in horror, stunned into paralysis, and had barely thought to react.

  Now they reacted.

  Screams first … screams of fear mixed with shrieks of fresh pain, the scent of blood hitting the air, people running blindly because they couldn’t see the massacre around them, it moved too fast, could only sense trouble, could taste the danger but still couldn’t see anything, nothing at all but the person standing beside them seconds before now flopping on the ground like some dying fish, writhing as something sucked the very life from the gaping, spurting wound on their necks and throats and heads.

  The crowd went insane, running and screaming, banging into each other, trampling each other to death in a futile attempt to escape. The smells of blood and terror rang thick through the night air, escalating the mayhem, the carnage, further inciting the vampires.

  And before they could escape, before they came to their senses and fled the carnage it was their turn to flop and writhe as something sank its teeth into their jugular or their carotid, and they had the briefest of moments to wonder what in the hell had just happened right before death took them.

  Two hundred vampires gathered a short while later, beaming radiantly with the new lifeblood in their bellies.

  Several hundred people lay scattered across the pavement, or sprawled across the hoods of cars, or laid in dismembered sections inside stores they had tried in vain to flee to; they lay half in and half out of the gutters, dead or nearly dead or wishing they were dead.

  The few survivors screamed and cried and ran and stood perfectly still and fainted and vomited and picked up what weapons they could find.

  But the vampires had already moved on.

  Fifteen miles away, they had discovered earlier, was a deserted Ground Round restaurant. They broke in the back door and piled into the storeroom to sleep off their wonderful meal.

  Chapter 23

  The way they came screaming into town, you would have thought they were on fire.

  Janelle heard them, even though they were half a mile away. By the time she and Thomas rushed the ten blocks uptown, a massive crowd had formed and was listening to the hysterical ramblings of the small group that had spilled out of the SUV.

  Vampires. Vampires!

  Well duuuuh, she thought.

  And suddenly, those same people who had so desperately wanted to ignore the existence of vampires were now intent on doing something about it. Suddenly they were believers. It might have had something to do with the blood and gristle and chunks of gray matter that adorned the storytellers’ bodies. Or maybe that most of these people had seen the vampires for
themselves—or had even been rescued by one.

  So that was another matter altogether.

  ***

  “Why would they do that?” a woman screamed, clawing at her cheeks. “Why would they save us if they plan to kill us?”

  “Don’t you see?” The man who’d answered was planted on the hood of the truck, his tattooed arms exposed beneath his leather vest despite the cold. “They rescued us so they could eat us!”

  The crowd yelled at this, mostly disagreements, others nodding.

  “We’re their pets,” the guy in the vest yelled, his fingers stroking the ZZ Top beard that was riddled with popcorn kernels. “Or worse—their cattle. Maybe they saved us so’s they’d have something to eat. Or drink.”

  “Bullshit.” A man wearing a fluorescent orange ski jacket stepped forward. His glasses slipped down his nose, despite the thick bridge that had been built up with duct tape. “They just woulda kept the soldiers if they wanted cattle.”

  “No, man, don’t you see? Free-range humans! They would’ve had to keep those soldiers locked up.” He scratched his exposed arm, leaving red streaks across the navy emblem tattoo.

  The crowd broke into small, heated debates. They argued the merits of vampires, or argued why they all needed to be destroyed.

  A new face emerged from the crowd. He reached the SUV and climbed first onto the hood, passed the bearded man in the biker vest, and stood on the roof of the vehicle. Black leather pants, black T-shirt beneath an open ankle-length black leather coat. Black motorcycle boots glistening from his short hike through the half-inch of newly fallen snow. His long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung halfway down his back.

  “Name’s Rudy,” he bellowed. “Y’all need to listen up.” He planted his boots on the slippery surface. His voice commanded attention, and most of the crowd looked his way and waited to hear what he had to say.

  “Whether or not you agree with the reasons for what they’ve done, the fact remains the same. We got ourselves a vampire problem. Trouble is, what do we do about them? It’s true, they saved our lives by takin’ down the enemy—but what for? To help us win a war they don’t give a good goddamn about? Or to protect their livestock? I believe this is a really dangerous problem. They just butchered hunnerts of people up in a Yonkers mall. Hunnerts of good Amurcins, not enemy soldiers! Do we wanna just stand by and let ’em do this shit ta us? Do we wanna stand here with our thumbs up’r asses while they wipe us out?”