by David Lee
Soon, the nights and days hiding Underground would be over and the Vampire Nation would resume its rightful place at the apex of society, the top of the food chain. Before he could put his plan into action, though, he needed troops who were ready, hungry and trained. They needed blood from the source, fresh blood gotten from a Human, not a rat plucked from the sewer or a plastic bag purchased from a store, but a terror stricken human on its knees pleading for its life.
Once he introduced them to, oh how he loved the phrase, “free range Humans,” they would be free of the corruption of modernism and ready to take their rightful place in the world. And while they were at it, perhaps he’d have them tear down these glass and steel boxes and put up some proper buildings made of stone with gargoyles on the roof and a lion or two guarding the front door.
Under the guise of a private paint ball battle that promised to be as close to the real thing as you could get, he lured his quarry to the city. They met each other for the first time and he was gratified to notice that they had all taken his suggestion to heart and had come armed with their favorite handguns, in addition to their paintball guns. He had stressed to them that verisimilitude was all and he was heartened that two had strapped the large knives that many of this urban tribe affected to their thighs.
He took them to the Underground through a utility access tunnel, not concerned that they would learn one of the secret entrances, as none would be leaving. They immediately set about daubing paint on their faces and seeing to their weapons, as ridiculous as children at a costume party. They believed they would be fighting another team, so none of them was concerned at the approach of the Vampire pack. It was only when they noticed that the Vampire team had no equipment, no guns, no face paint, no silly commando knives that questions were asked. Of course by then it was too late.
Oliver suggested, “You should all abandon your paint guns, as they certainly won’t help and might slow you down.” Of course, they objected. In their cosmology, there were rules governing the end of the world. Nervously clumping together like baleful, succulent sheep who notice the village dogs gathering at a hole in the fence, they gabbled about rules. “To make the exercise real,” continued Oliver, “only the winner will be going on, so defend yourself at all times,” like he was the referee at his favorite television show, cage fighting.
“How do you win,” asked one of the knife boys, “I mean, what are the rules?”
“There is only one rule,” hissed ugly, hungry Vampire Oliver, “if we catch you, we eat you.”
“Wait a minute,” said the large tattooed one, putting his hand on the butt of his holstered hand gun, “what’s going on here?”
“This one will be mine,” said Oliver, as he flashed to knife boy, “The rest of you have a five minute head start.”
He turned to knife boy who was unsnapping the holster strapped about his waist and seized his wrist. The other players stood watching as Oliver bent knife boy’s wrist, forcing him to the ground. As he leaned over to savor the pulse beating in his captive’s neck, he turned his head to the dumbfounded Humans saying, “Time to run.” Stimulated by the sight of an impending bloody death, the Vampires crowded round. The Humans watched as Oliver tore into the offered throat and began to suck at the severed artery; behind him, he heard the sound of retching as the Humans stumbled off down the corridor.
Looking up at the Vampires edging after them he ordered, “No cheating. Wait, my friends; we act with honor.”
He leisurely counted off the minutes as the hunters watched him feed. Their hunger lust hung in the air like the potent musth of bull elephants. Each minute reinforced his dominance and increased the potency of their desire. He’d brought six recruits so that there would not be enough food for all of them, not enough to go around. They would soon learn that only the successful feasted and the weak fell by the wayside, for only the strong would live in the new world order he’d dreamed about all those years in his tomb.
Finally, looking up from the savaged neck, the blood dripping from his jaws, he casually nodded his head and started the six into the tunnel to hunt down the remaining three Humans. He felt like a lion teaching young males how to survive in the wild, how to hunt and kill, skills that would be necessary in the days to come.
Peering from the rubble to the side he noticed the beady eyes of rats watching as he chewed the flesh from the neck. I don’t remember there being so many, he thought. Perhaps I didn’t notice them before. Ignoring them, he turned back to his meal. The rats, unnerved that he had seen them, scurried off.
He’d thought about the Queen while in his tomb, thought about her reign and the way she’d tamed the Clan so that a quiet peace had settled over the Northwest. Her control extended to all and that, he thought, was the weakness in her plan, for not only had the malcontents been deprived of the hunt and war but so too her supporters had been tamed. The balance of power would tilt to whoever could build an effective fighting force of experienced killers. He needed time, time to recruit and time to train; then he could move to the next phase.
The only problems were Petru and the Bitch. Petru, the 13th century anachronism, had somehow escaped the civilizing polish of the last seven hundred years; granted, he could drive a car and use the phone to order a pizza, but he remained a medieval warrior at heart, implacably bound to the Queen and completely ruthless in her service. Petru and Arabella, warrior and assassin, remove them and she would fall. The rot was inside the Queen’s house, a rot he’d started those many years ago and now he would nurture the traitor on the inside while he attacked the outside.
For now, the task was simple, he thought, as he rose from the corpse at his feet and flashed down the corridor. Encourage his Vampires to hunt and feed as they did before the Clan became civilized, then mold them into a fighting group.
A scream reverberated up the corridor and he rushed, encouraged to witness the denouement of today’s festivities. Around a corner, he came upon Tomas greedily drinking from one of the men while two other Vampires lurked nearby, clearly hypnotized by the intoxicating rush of murder. He watched as the two lurkers edged closer, hoping to share in the feed.
Oliver recognized the powerful attraction of the struggling Human’s blood smell upon the two, but he wanted them hunting, not scavenging, so, stepping in front of them, he said, “No, today you eat only what you kill.” The two looked at him, the desire writ large in their eyes, and continued to move closer, their hunger overwhelming their obedience. “Go,” he commanded, pointing down the corridor, “or you go hungry tonight.” Snapping out of their mesmerized state, they ran by their greedy brother noisily slurping at the throat of the Human and, with a last envious glance, shot down the corridor.
Stopping for a moment, Oliver stroked the long hair of the eating Vampire. “You have done well,” he said. The Vampire softly growled deep in his throat and Oliver smiled. This would be easier than he’d thought; the veneer of civilization was thin and Vampire nature was strong. Gunshots reverberated down the darkened passage and he hurried off, leaving the first to his kill while he went to see how the others were doing.
He’d chosen the hunt site carefully, exploring until he found a bit of the original Underground left over from fire that had been forgotten by City Hall and abandoned by the People of the Night. The passages in this part were unsafe for both Humans and Vampires. Treacherous pits had opened in the ground from subsurface water and the old wooden structures had long ago rotted, leaving skeletal corpses of rotten buildings. Waste pipes and utility lines jutted from odd angles in a complex mess. What light there was came from the century-old glass embedded in the sidewalks above and a string of pale bulbs he’d haphazardly strung down the old walkways. The weak light and collapsed structures made this area more like battleground Stalingrad than tourist Seattle, which suited Oliver’s purposes perfectly. His future looked more like Russians and Germans slaughtering each other in rubble than Seattleites sipping coffee on the patio.
When he caught up with th
e hunt, he saw that his five Vampires had the remaining two Humans surrounded. The Humans were making a stand behind the debris from an old cave-in with the wall at their back. The Vampires were in a semi-circle slowly moving closer. He stopped to observe. “Let the youngsters work the problem out themselves,” he thought, resisting the impulse to organize the attack.
One of the Humans, the female, was threatening, “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot,” waving her pistol from Vampire to Vampire. The other, a stocky male who looked to be brimming with blood, stood still, aiming at the center Vampire. This one held his weapon rock steady, using his left hand to support his shooting hand.
From the midst of the Vampires stepped forward Usher, a tall slim Vampire that he’d had his doubts about. Usher walked toward the male Human who fired into his chest several times. Usher stumbled without going to his knee, then reached out and calmly twisted the pistol from the Human’s hand saying, “You need a bigger gun.” He nonchalantly flipped the gun off into the darkness, then deliberately and slowly pulled the Human to him and, stretching the man backward over his leg till he was curved like a bow, began to drink at his neck.
The other Vampires, realizing they were down to the one remaining Human, fell upon her and she disappeared beneath a frenzy of the black clad Vamps, each fighting for a vein or, hopefully, a cascading artery. Her cries were silenced and her gun fell useless to the ground as Oliver watched the violent scrum.
“Next time,” he commented to no one in particular, “if you want your own meal you must learn to be quicker.”
Chapter 15
The gloom stretched away from him down the sidewalk until the shadows merged into black and form became indistinguishable from imagination. The yellow light spilling from the basement of the Blue Anchor decreased as the inverse square and the amethyst colored glass embedded as skylights in the sidewalks above painted the walls, doors and windows of the old shop fronts violet, until he felt that he was as far from Seattle as he’d ever been in his life. Overhead the streets rumbled with the passing of trucks and buses and, while city noise comforted him at first, the deeper into the maze he went the more the noise became ominous and distant thunder.
He tried to read the hand drawn map he’d prepared, but it was too dark and his lines became squiggles. Here and there, tunnels jutted off at odd angles and vaults like random cloches imported from the Maginot Line stood guard at intersections. He’d researched the Underground and the reports made little sense. No one seemed to know exactly how many blocks of Seattle had burned in the fire. The more he tried to reconstruct pre-fire Seattle and compare it to building records, the more it became apparent that someone had confused the records so that there was no certainty concerning the streets or, more importantly, the Underground.
Estimates of the fire ranged from twenty to sixty square blocks, a number larger than all of downtown at the time of the conflagration. The only fact everyone agreed on was that one million rats perished in the blaze. A curious fact repeated in all the accounts and histories as if it was very important to someone.
The Underground had a geography separate from City Hall reality. Reporting his findings to Arabella she’d laughed, cautioning that while Humans owned the City Vampires controlled the Underground. He was beginning to believe that their influence extended from the dark into the civil corridors of power.
Snagging his sweater on a rusty nail jutting from a board hanging in his way, he paused to disentangle himself and take stock of his situation. Finkelstein had said, “don’t go down; you aren’t ready.” Swinging by her apartment to bring her up to date on the investigation and hopefully to hang, he’d gone to their unofficial headquarters the Blue Anchor when she hadn’t answered. Mr. Finkelstein mentioned that she’d been there but went into the tunnels, alone. That was all he needed to know and, pushing by Mr. Finkelstein, he started down the passage looking for his partner. Actually, technically, they weren’t partners, as whenever he mentioned it to her she replied, “No, we are not partners.”
The last sound he’d heard was Finkelstein yelling, “Don’t go past the light,” as he plunged down the corridor, that and the rumbling overhead. He wished he had his flashlight. He was craving light and he knew from history it made a terrific club.
He tried to memorize the turns so he could retreat, but quickly lost track; the Underground was a maze with no discernible pattern. If everything went bad, Plan B was to break into the first available basement, make his way upstairs and out into the light. But, and it was a big but, unlike the Blue Anchor most of the basements he came upon were boarded up, sealed long ago from the Underground. Here and there someone or something had punched openings through walls, but most of the time the windows and doors were rudely boarded up, leaving him no way out if something bad was coming down the passage toward him.
He thought about turning around but there was no way he was going to face Arabella and admit he’d started in but quit and abandoned her. Even if she didn’t think they were partnered, he did and that was enough. He’d had enough of being treated like a rookie, he was a SPD veteran and done his time on the street. “Aint nothing here that I haven’t seen and can’t handle,” he said to himself, “all I have to do is find her.”
He thought he was heading east since the walkway slanted up. In places it got steep, steeper than he thought the streets were now, but then it would dip down or level out and any correlation with the surface slipped from his mind. From his research he knew that they’d regraded the streets when they’d raised them by sluicing the hillsides down to fill in the walls they put up next to the sidewalks.
Apparently, when the streets were raised to the second story, people would crawl up and down ladders to get from the new streets to the shops below. It wasn’t until they built the new sidewalks on the second floor that the shops all moved upstairs, and the second floor became the first floor and the old first floor became the basement.
Lost in the maze, he no longer knew where he was; abandoning any pretense of navigation, he tried to go straight hoping he could turn around and walk out the same way. He tried for stealth but stumbled often on the rough uneven sidewalks. Once he followed the walk around a curve and fell off the sidewalk into a nasty hole. Climbing out the other side he scraped the mud from his face the best he could, ignoring his soiled clothes, as there was nothing to be done about the mess. Any thoughts of surprise were gone and he hoped if she heard him she wouldn’t be mad or, worse, mistake him for a bad guy and take him out.
Drawing his revolver, he continued down the corridor, his wet shoes squishing in the dark. Losing track of time he focused on scuttling from one pool of violet light to the next. He gave up finding Arabella, just hoping that he would be able to escape the subterranean labyrinth before stumbling upon the Minotaur. The crazy thought that Sister Mary Virgil, his senior Literature teacher, would be proud of him buoyed him for the moment, although he was sure he wasn’t Theseus.
Passing a side tunnel, he thought he saw a movement. Peering into the savage gloom he wondered if he should say something in case it was Arabella, so she’d know it was him. Not knowing if his imagination was inventing or if there was really someone there, he stood unsure; finally, in a loud whisper, “Hey, its me.”
The only response was a foul odor wafting to him on a breath of air. The smell was worse than anything he’d encountered and could only be described as the combination of raw sewage and rotted flesh. The noxious fumes grew more acute, adding to his anxiety and fear. An irrational impulse to flee gripped him. He tried to breathe but the fumes burnt his nose and throat and he began coughing, pulling his t-shirt up as a filter over his mouth and nose.
The temperature was rising and sweat dripped from his head, soaking his t-shirt. Behind him, he thought he heard a scrape and, turning, squinted to see down the dark corridor but there was nothing there. Continuing, he shifted right so that his shoulder brushed the old storefronts. At least one side was protected if anything was coming.
&nbs
p; As he rounded another corner the lane in front of him was pitch black. In the near distance was purple light from the glass imbedded in the overhead sidewalk, but between here and there it was dark and he would have to grope his way. inching his clumsy, scared feet forward while keeping contact with the wall. He knew he was losing control and felt along the wall for an opening or weak spot where he could crash into a basement and escape.
Pushing off, he stepped into the darkness and instantly was overcome with the foul odor. This time it seemed to be coming from behind him. He looked back over his shoulder and thought he saw a movement but couldn’t be sure. He thought he heard a sound but it was difficult to separate Underground noises from the city rumbling above. His choices were to retreat toward the smell or push on to the next pool of light. Wondering if his paranoia was out of control he went forward, reluctant to turn tail and run. From behind came a sibilant, “Hello Human, welcome to the Underground.”
He turned his back to the wall and pointed his gun back down the walkway. He brought the Glock today for the increased firepower and considered spraying a blind burst down the corridor. At the end of the dark passage was the last faint pool of overhead light, and as he watched something flitted from one side to the other, obscuring the faint glow. “Police, show yourself,” he shouted using his best voice. The only response was deep laughter shooting past him like a staccato drum roll.
“Are you sure, Mr. Policeman, are you sure you want to see us?” the voice came from the other side and he realized they had him in the middle. He began to edge up the walkway, his back to the wall, his gun in front, closer to the pool of light. Wiping the sweat from his forehead he paused; suddenly, a shape materialized in the darkness; instinctively, he went down to his knee. Swinging the Glock up, he fired down the passage at where he thought the shape should be; turning, he put a couple more rounds behind him.