by Mark Woods
But then they’d been picked up, and ended up on this ship.
Viktoryia had a very bad feeling about this ship.
She had a very strong sense that something was wrong, and all was not as it appeared, but at the same time, it also felt like something - fate, or destiny, or some such - had a plan for them all. Even though Viktoryia didn’t really believe in all that, you had to admit it almost felt like something was pulling all of their strings, bringing everyone who’d escaped The Bellastaria all back together again this way.
The young mother, Rosita, still clutching her child firmly to her breast, was struggling with the two men trying to take her blood. She was fighting them as they attempted to remove her child from her so they could test her daughter as well.
As Viktoryia was led downstairs, below decks, into the belly of the beast as it were, she heard the Captain, or whoever he was, barking orders for them to let the mother go.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Leave her be for now. I don’t want any more bloodshed up here on deck today. Just take her below, separate her from the others and we’ll take samples of her and the child’s blood downstairs. I know that’s against protocol, but this is all taking far too long and we need to get moving again shortly, before we start drawing attention to ourselves. I’m pretty sure we’ve all had enough aggravation for one day. Just take her down below decks and we’ll process her down there.”
“But the rules…” one of the men holding her started saying.
“Fuck the rules,” the Captain said. “We’ve been out here, stuck in one place, for far too long already. If there’s going to be any fallout, I’ll take it on the chin and deal with it later. You can tell Herr Doktor it was my decision if he decides to give you any trouble about breaking the rules. It’s about time he was reminded again who’s really in charge here.”
The two men seemed reassured by that, but before Viktoryia could hear any more, the door back up top slammed shut behind her.
“Who is this ‘Herr Doktor’?” she asked one of her captors. “I want to speak with him,” but the man holding her refused to answer and merely tightened his grip upon her arm.
They began descending several more sets of stairs. As they reached the very bottom, several decks down, Jaqueline glanced back at her with a stare, as though warning her to shut her mouth and not attempt to stir up any kind of trouble, but Viktoryia ignored her.
“It’s okay,” the other man walking beside her answered, the one holding the gun. “You’ll meet him soon enough…”
He looked at her and grinned.
Viktoryia extended her fangs, then looked back at him and grinned back.
She felt a small measure of satisfaction as the man visibly paled and his bladder let go.
“Fuck,” he said. “She’s one of them!”
He lashed out with the butt of his rifle and Viktoryia let herself gently fall to the floor.
It was all a ploy, he hadn’t really hurt her, but Viktoryia wanted Jaqueline and Charlotte out of her way. The last thing she saw before the man hit her again was the two women hurriedly being dragged away, around the corner – a worried look upon both their faces.
She reached up and gripped the man who had hit her tightly around his wrist as he made to strike her once more, baring her fangs again for all to see.
“You know,” she said. “You really should not have done that.”
She sank her fangs into his wrist as with her other hand, Viktoryia effortlessly reached back and grabbed the neck of the other man attempting to come at her from behind, instantly crushing his larynx.
The man fell back, choking to death,
Once she had finally finished drinking her fill, Viktoryia left both bodies where they had fallen and set off to explore the rest of the ship.
She could come back for the girl, Charlotte, later, Viktoryia thought, for there was no danger of her losing her. Wherever Charlotte went aboard this ship, Viktoryia knew she would be able to detect the girl by tracking her through the twin marks she carried upon her.
But first things first…
For now, Viktoryia needed to find out what secrets lay on-board this ship, and what the hell was actually going on here …
Four
While the men guarding Viktoryia, Jaqueline and Charlotte escorted the three women down to the holding cells in the bottom of the ship, to await the results of their blood tests, two more guards took Rosita by the arm. Still refusing to relent her grip of Sacha, they led her down another couple of sets of stairs to one of several laboratories that had been built here especially, here on-board The Daedalus.
Doctor Hilary Francis was not just the only female scientist on-board, but also the only woman on the ship full-stop, other than their test subjects – and as far as the crew were concerned, they didn’t really count seeing as how the majority of them were not even human.
Didn’t stop them having their little fun with them though, Doctor Francis thought.
The two guards had both made the same decision to take the mother and child down to Doctor Francis, because they both figured that as a woman, she was probably the most qualified to try and reason with Rosita.
A woman’s touch and all that…
While one of the guards led Rosita and the girl she was still holding inside, the other waited outside to guard the hallway.
“What’s this?” Doctor Francis asked, looking up from her work as the guard escorting Rosita entered the room.
“We got another couple of test subjects for you,” the guard said. “The mother was causing a scene up on deck, and refusing to allow either of us to take blood from her or the girl – so the Captain told us to bring her below decks instead and we just figured we’d bring them both to you to take their blood, you being a doctor an’ all.”
“Doesn’t the Captain know how busy I am?” Doctor Francis demanded. Already their research was way behind schedule, and time was really of the essence right now.
“Don’t look at us,” the first man said. “The Captain already made an example of one of the other survivors we picked up from The Bellastaria who, likewise, was refusing to cooperate. I guess he just didn’t want to rile up any of the others anymore, which is why he probably told us to bring these two down here for you to deal with instead.”
“As if I haven’t got enough to do already,” Doctor Francis sighed. “On the one hand, he keeps moaning because we’re not making fast enough progress and on the other, he keeps giving me more to do and adding to my work-load.
“I can’t win.
“Wait until Herr Doktor hears about this.
“I’m supposed to be a scientist, not a wet nurse – what exactly does the Captain expect me to do with her?”
“Reason with her perhaps?” suggested the guard. “You know…woman to woman.”
Edith glared at him.
“I don’t know,” the guard shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Taking blood samples is a bit out of my remit as it is.”
“Come on, sweetheart,” Doctor Francis said, approaching the woman and putting on what she hoped was her most reassuring sounding voice. “It’s only a little prick, a little blood sample. No-one on-board here wants to hurt you – you or your daughter. I take it this is your daughter?” she asked.
Rosita nodded.
“No-one wants to hurt you, either of you; we just need to take a little sample of your blood – both of you – as a precaution, so that we can test it for anti-bodies and make sure you’re not carrying anything harmful that might in any way be detrimental to what we’re trying to achieve here.”
The woman was crying, sobbing in fact.
Afraid.
Doctor Francis did her best to comfort her, all the while attempting to prise the child from out her arms.
“Look, let me test your daughter first, okay?” she said. “Then you can see there’s nothing at all to be worried about or scared of. Then, when we’re done, we’ll take a tiny little sample from you as well, alright?”
&n
bsp; “No, no…please don’t…” the woman said and for a minute there, Doctor Francis thought she was talking to her.
She had no idea Rosita was talking to her daughter.
Not until it was too late…
Sacha let loose her grip around her mother, and clamped her arms tight around the doctor instead. Taken by complete surprise, Doctor Francis did not even have time to reflect on exactly what was happening before Sacha was upon her – opening up her mouth, exposing her fangs, and ripping out the doctor’s throat to get to the crimson, coppery goodness that sat there waiting, just beneath her skin.
As the little girl drank, and drank deep of the scientist’s blood, even as it pumped out of her veins, Doctor Francis in her final moments – who had never had any children of her own – found herself randomly wondering if this was how it must feel for a mother when a baby suckled at your breast.
She felt herself slowly being drained, and almost imagined she could feel her veins slowly deflating as the blood was sucked out of them. Although in some ways it felt as if her last dying moments seemed to go on forever, in actual fact it took no more than a few seconds. A tidal wave of darkness finally descended upon her…and just like that, she was gone.
“Sacha… Sacha, sweetie…please…it’s not too late, you can stop this, please stop,” Rosita pleaded with her daughter, but Sacha simply carried on drinking and ignored her until she was done. Then, she turned towards the guard, and started focusing her attention on him instead.
The guard, despite having spent all his time here on the ship guarding Vampyre and Lycanthropes, was totally unprepared for what happened next.
Still trying to come to terms with the grisly scene he had just seen played out in front of him, the man barely had time to raise his weapon before Sacha was upon him as well, leaping at him just as she had with the doctor.
“No, not my daughter, not her…NO!” Rosita shouted as the man threw her off. Seeing the man raise his gun, Rosita threw herself directly between him and her daughter, trying to protect her.
The man opened fire, and Rosita collapsed on the deck, dead instantly.
He began to back away, heading for the door, horrified at what he had just done, the innocent woman he had just killed, but Sacha was on him before he could even think of trying to escape.
She jumped upon him, seized his head, and smacked it hard, once, twice, upon the heavy metal door until he was seeing stars, before opening up his throat as well.
As the lifeblood gushed out of him, once more Sacha began to drink her fill.
Sacha was one of those rarest of things – a Vampyre created when she was still a child – but though she had the appearance of a five year old, and would for the rest of her existence, Sacha was, in fact, over a century old.
Looking at her, you might have been forgiven for thinking that because she possessed such a small body, this might mean that she required less blood on which to feed, but you’d be wrong.
Because she had been created when her body was still growing, this meant she required more blood, not less, and as a direct result, was always, always hungry.
This was just one of a number of reasons why the creation of a Vampyre child was strictly forbidden by the Vampyre Council, and punishable by death, and this was also why, back on the lifeboat, Sacha had kept herself hidden away in her mother’s arms, and clouded her true nature so that the other Vampyre on-board with them, Viktoryia, could not detect her.
Had Viktoryia realised what Sacha was, there was a very real danger she might have tried to kill her – after all, that was what all the laws they were supposed to follow decreed. So Sacha had remained hidden, and not revealed herself, even though for Vampyre, as with all preternatural creatures, there was often safety in numbers.
Sacha looked back at the dead body of the woman who, ultimately, had sacrificed her life for the child she believed was her daughter, and felt nothing.
Rosita was not even her real mother.
Sacha had ‘adopted’ Rosita and her husband a few years ago and bent them to her will, forced them to do her bidding, to hunt and kill for her, after her last ‘Renfield’ had been killed; viciously murdered by one of those who worked for the sinister organisation that called themselves ‘The Hunters’.
She had been controlling the two of them for some time now but, just lately, her hold on the husband had begun to slip.
He had started experiencing more and more moments of clarity – something that often happened after long periods of time – and had begun plotting to kill her, so Sacha had arranged for him to have a little accident instead.
This done, she had then booked her and her ‘mother’, Rosita, passage on-board The Bellastaria, so she and her ‘fake mommy’ could flee New York and start a new life abroad, perhaps in Europe somewhere. She had then planted the idea in Rosita’s head that this had been the plan all along, and that she and her husband had already planned on taking Sacha with them to Europe.
Poor Rosita was so far under Sacha’s control, she had no idea she was not really Sacha’s mother, and this had worked in both their favours – right up until the moment Sacha first realised she had just walked them both into a trap, when everything had all gone to shit back on-board The Bellastaria.
The two of them had been forced to flee, had ended up on the same lifeboat as that Vampyre bitch, Viktoryia, and then finally ended up here.
Sacha did not know what was going on aboard this ship, this ship that had rescued them, but she did know that she had a very bad feeling about whatever seemed to be going on here. She would have much preferred to have taken her chances back out there on the ocean, but knew only too well, from all her many years of previous experience, that sometimes life did not work out that way.
The best laid plans and all that…
Now Rosita was dead, and even if Sacha managed to survive long enough to get herself off this ship, she would be left with the tiresome task of trying to find herself another ‘Renfield’ with a mind malleable enough to mould.
She glanced over again at her dead ‘mother’; lying there with a series of gaping, great big bullet holes in her chest, the blood slowly pooling out around her, and thought the exact same thing she’d thought back on deck when that young lad had been shot.
Such a waste…
She could have gone and lapped up all the blood if she were so inclined, and if it had really bothered her that much, but blood gathered straight from the source always tasted so much better, and as soon as it left the body always quickly began to spoil.
Instead, Sacha lowered her head, and began to feast upon what was left of the dead guard in front of her once more.
God, she was just soooo hungry, she thought, but then, other than the dead scientist a few moments ago, it had been a while since she had last fed.
Suddenly, the door to the corridor outside opened up and the other guard, having heard the sound of gunfire and all the commotion inside, slowly began to enter the room; his gun raised, ready for trouble.
He was just about to ask if everything was alright, when he looked down and saw the sight of Sacha, blood and gore still dripping from her face where she was feeding on his friend and former colleague.
Terrified as he might be, this guard remembered his training and instead of engaging the enemy, turned tail and fled instead.
The first thing they were always taught was that in any kind of emergency, their first response should always be to sound the alarm - and engage the enemy only if back-up was confirmed to be on its way - and as he ran now, this was exactly what the guard proceeded to do.
Raise the alarm.
Activating the walkie-talkie strapped to his chest, he started shouting out a warning to anyone who might be listening.
“Code Red! Code Red! We have a situation here. We have a Vampyre loose! I repeat, a Vampyre loose!” he screamed down the mic.
Before he could say anything more, Sacha leapt upon his back and pushed him down towards the floor. Taking a hold of
his head, she began smashing his face into the deck, quickly reducing it to no more than a bloody pulp.
She thought she heard his skull crack like an egg, and then saw something leaking out that she thought might be brains.
Sacha lowered her head and for the third time in as many minutes, once more began to feed.
She really was insatiable…
Waste not, want not…she thought.
From somewhere else on-board the ship, an alarm suddenly began to sound…
***
Back up on the top deck, Lukaas and his three wolf-brothers – Toneye, Roman, and Scott – watched as the three women from the other lifeboat were roughly pulled away and taken below decks.
The Lycanthropes had only been on-board the ship about ten minutes themselves, having been picked up only moments before the other lifeboat had been spotted, and so had not even had a chance to have their own blood samples taken yet. They were dressed in clothes that had been stored in the lifeboat for just such an eventuality, should any of the wolves escape in their wolf form and need to pass later as human.
Toneye noted where Lukaas was looking.
“Is that her?” he asked. “The bit of tail you were obsessed with back in England, and that saw you being summoned back to New York by the Alpha a few years back?”
Lukaas nodded.
“How can you tell?” he asked.
“Because you’re looking at her with those soppy, puppy dog eyes of yours,” Scott joked, playfully punching him in the arm and answering for Toneye.
Roman remained strangely silent, having already warned Lukaas off from getting involved with the girl again when he’d first spotted him staring at her a few minutes earlier. He was looking at the mother now, tightly clutching her child, curiously watching them both as though sensing something about them that none of his other fellow wolves seemed able to pick up.
“Can’t believe you’re still pining over that bitch after all this time, even if you did mark her all those years ago,” Scott said.