“How can you sit there and say that like it doesn’t bother you?” I asked. “You and your so-called siblings were human once. How can you stomach having become such fucking monsters?”
“Let me answer that with a question of my own. Which is worse, that monsters lurk in the dark corners of Man’s existence, or that Man is such a brutal, vicious creature in his own right that he’s scarcely even noticed?”
“I’m pretty sure the answer to that is, ‘Fuck you and the giant tidal wave of evil you rode in on.’”
“Samuel, that stings. But not, I fear, as much as this ritual is going to. For you see, the sigil’s dry. It’s time to begin.”
Outside, I heard the traffic’s din build, a diesel engine revving somewhere outside the wobbly translucence of Grigori’s protective bubble – weaker, it seemed, than the one erected around his castle, but present nonetheless. It seemed strange to me, this showdown, this potential end to my life’s story, taking place inside a dime-a-dozen chain restaurant situated in a strip-mall parking lot in a bland commercial district beside a highway. It could have been anywhere in America. It felt like nowhere at all. Time was, they’d’ve had the decency to make a trophy outta my sorry undead ass inside a nice little mom-and-pop place, at least.
I glanced toward the broad expanse of tinted glass that faced the road. Saw the dim reflection of my own unfamiliar body, and across the room, Kate’s as well, while between us stood three ancient, twisted, repugnant creatures nothing like the physical forms they each projected, but somehow instantly recognizable nonetheless. I guess they could not hide their true selves from us entirely.
Beyond the glass, and the reflections, I saw the yellowy stare of headlights looking in.
“Kate,” I shouted, “avert your eyes.”
“That’s sweet,” said Grigori. “You not wanting her to see your final defeat.”
“It’s not that,” I said.
“Then what?”
“It’s just, my ride’s here.”
Grigori tilted his head and regarded me with confusion. Kate’s eyes widened, and then clenched shut. She knew me well enough to listen first and ask questions later when I start spouting the crazy.
And then the big rig plowed into the restaurant in an explosion of crumbling drywall, rent metal, and shattered glass, collapsing half the fucking building, scattering the Lovers and the newborn vamps – two of whom were crushed to pulp beneath the eighteen-wheeler’s many tires – and pinning Grigori to the far wall before grinding to a hissing, ticking stop.
When Grigori slammed into the wall, his face contorted in agony and sudden fury, and his human aspect faded to nothing, revealing the knotted, ancient mass of scar tissue that was his true self. Likewise, without his efforts to maintain it, his protection spell flickered and blinked out. The driver’s side truck door opened, and out stepped a lithe, muscular black woman damn near seven feet tall – eight, if you counted her afro – a sawed-off shotgun in her hands. One of the young vamps bum-rushed her, and she unloaded, turning its head to so much pulp. Her sightless eyes blinked rheumy white against the sudden spray of blood and brain, and she called out, “Hey, Sam Thornton, are you in here?”
I laughed despite myself. “Sorry, Theresa,” I called, “no one here by that name. Guess you took out the wrong damn Pancake Palace.”
“That’s what you get, letting the blind chick drive.”
“Hey fuckers!” called a gruff voice from the street. “That eyeball-cooking mojo down yet, or is my fat ass stuck outside while you get to have fun knocking baddies’ heads together without me?”
“Sam?” Theresa, deferring to me.
“It’s down, Gio!” I shouted. “Welcome to the party, pal!”
Gio ran, screaming bloody murder, through the hole the truck left in the side of the restaurant, brandishing in one hand a makeshift cross of pencils stuck together with a wad of gum, and using the other to shield his eyes. I started to open my mouth to tell him how goddamned ridiculous he looked, his cross all droopy and lopsided, his face buried in the crook of his elbow, but at that moment, a wild-eyed newborn vamp in the unholy-hunger-warped body of a middle-aged woman pushed free of the rubble at his feet and launched itself at his throat.
I croaked a warning. Theresa swung the sawed-off toward the sound of the impending vampire strike, but she hesitated, unsure in her blindness whether the man she loved was in the shot or not.
Luckily, Kate – who’d freed herself of her bonds during the attack – was not similarly paralyzed. She rocketed out from beneath the semi’s trailer with such speed and grace I could scarcely believe my eyes, sailing over the lunging vampire and wrapping the length of rope that had until recently affixed her to her chair around its neck. She tucked as she landed, and rolled such that she wound up once more on her feet. The force of her roll yanked the young vamp off-course, and flipped it hard into the far wall. Kate didn’t hesitate. Dropping her rope in favor of a nearby steak knife, she pounced on the vamp, yanked back its head with a handful of gray-brown hair, and drew the knife hard across its neck. Blood gouted as flesh parted in vulgar parody of a smile, but the creature did not die, instead bucking like a bronco trying to toss a stubborn rider. Kate wouldn’t be shaken, though, she just kept sawing and sawing, gore spewing across the room like the devil’s own sprinkler, until finally, the body she rode slumped to the floor, and she rose, her smile a gleam of white amidst the spattered red, holding the woman’s fanged head up by the hair as an angler might a large-mouth bass.
I said nothing for a long second. Just stood and stared. As, for that matter, did Gio who, as the scuffle erupted inches from him, seemed to’ve abandoned both his useless pencil cross and all pretense of protecting his eyes from going melty. As our gazes met, he said, “Jesus fuck, Sam, who’s the skirt?”
“Gio…” said Theresa, like a teacher chastising a recalcitrant student.
“I mean, uh, who’s your lady-friend,” he awkwardly corrected.
“Gio, Ter,” I said, “meet Kate. Kate, meet Gio and Theresa.”
“Pleased to meetcha,” said Kate, and then. “Hey blood-breath, head’s up!” She winged the head she was holding at a vamp who’d been slinking toward the gaping hole in the restaurant wall; it caught the head, and gave the dripping severed neck a sniff before recoiling in revulsion – dead vamp blood apparently proving useless to fellow vamps. Theresa followed the sound of the head’s landing, and let loose a quick blast of her sawed-off, blowing a hole through the young vamp’s chest and leaving it, slumped and lifeless, against the wall.
“Sweetheart,” said Theresa to Kate, “You and me are gonna get along just fine.”
“Where the fuck’d you learn how to do that?” I said to Kate. “Kill vamps, I mean. The White Hats juice you up with some warrior mojo?”
She looked at me like I had two heads. Funny, since she briefly had herself, if you count the one she’d just wung across the room. “Warrior mojo? Not hardly. Fact is, when the forces of evil try to condemn your innocent ass to hell, you start to take a vested interest in your own personal safety. And as for that,” she says, nodding toward the headless mess that was, until recently, a vampire, “head or heart, Sam – that’s the rule. Vampires or zombies or whatever, it’s all the same. I swear, it’s like you’ve never seen a movie in your life.”
“You shoulda seen his face when I tried to get him to use Google,” Gio said to her.
“Great,” I replied, smiling. “The three people in the whole world I can fucking stand, and they’ve decided to gang up against me.”
“Hey, I didn’t ask to get dragged into this one,” said Kate. “These creepshows found me.”
“Us neither,” said Theresa. “In fact, this place was hard as shit to find. It’s got a freaky vibe about it, or at least it did. Even when Gio pointed me and the truck right at it and told me to just hit the gas, it was all I could do not to turn away, like it didn’t want me getting too near, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it
rings a bell.”
“Sam Thornton,” Theresa said with a grin, “why can’t you ever take us someplace nice?”
“The day a Collector agrees to meet you someplace nice is a day you oughta worry,” I said.
“Uh, dude?” Gio, looking around. “Where’d your friends go?”
I looked around as well. Grigori, Drustanus, and Yseult were nowhere to be seen. The latter two, I’d lost track of in the course of Gio and Theresa’s Big Damn Rescue, but last I’d seen, Grigori had been pinned to the wall by Theresa’s semi. Now the truck sat a good foot from the wall, and Grigori was gone.
“Son of a bitch!” I said. “We cannot let those three outta here alive. If they disappear–”
“They won’t,” said Kate, peering out the gaping hole in the restaurant and into the street. “I’ve got a bead on ’em. If we get moving, we can maybe catch them before they get to where they’re headed.”
I followed Kate’s gaze. Saw the three Brethren, no longer projecting their human guises, bounding across the four-lane blacktop on all fours. Well, all threes in Drustanus’ case, since it seemed his left arm had been severed in Theresa’s attack; his stump left spatters of fresh blood bright red in a trail that snaked across the street after him. I followed the trail back inside to its source with my eyes, and saw his missing hand jutting out from beneath one set of the semis’ double-wheels, fingers curled inward like the legs of a dead spider. Wondered what was behind the worry in Kate’s tone. Then I saw the sign beside the entrance to the half-empty parking lot they were traversing, leaping parked-car to parked-car, and I feared I knew.
“Kate,” I asked, “what’s over there?”
“A school,” she answered, wiping her knife off on her pants and starting after them. “Across the street’s the middle school.”
19.
It was Saturday, at least, which wasn’t nothing. Meant there’d be fewer kids. Fewer, but not none. The cars in the parking lot spoke to that fact, and the lights burning in every third window or so.
Clubs, I thought, inasmuch as I thought anything at all. Chess. Math. Anime, for all I knew. Heard once on the news that was a thing. Kids getting together to watch overdubbed cartoons or some shit. I remember thinking at the time, aren’t all cartoons overdubbed?
Lights showed too in the windows of the gymnasium, all placed high up so you’d have to work to knock one out with an errant ball. Meant I couldn’t see inside from the pancake place. Could be it was full. Could be just a janitor, waxing the hardwood floor. What did middle schoolers play come spring – basketball? Floor hockey? I had no idea. The fields outside the school were empty, which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it meant three injured, weakened Brethren looking to recharge their batteries with a fresh helping of life’s blood couldn’t swing by the drive-through and nosh to their blackened hearts’ content, they were gonna hafta go inside. Bad because that meant we had to follow after, and find them before they made with the snackin’.
“Let’s move,” I said, heading toward the school at a trot. Kate didn’t need telling, she was already across the parking lot and out into the street – horns blaring as traffic swerved to avoid her, because she didn’t so much as break stride. Me, I was ready to follow, and Gio, round fellow though he was, looked keen to as well, but Theresa was just standing there, mucking with her sawed-off.
“Ter…” said Gio, egging her along.
“Just a sec,” she said, and then I realized what she was doing. She was breaking down her weapon. She unscrewed the barrel cap. Dumped the spring and her spare shells. Then she removed the barrel, hefted it in one hand like a club. The rest, she chucked to the ground. “You think I’m bringing a gun into a goddamn school, you’re fucking nuts,” she said, “but that don’t mean I’m leaving it here where folks might do ill with it, neither. Now let’s go save some kids, shall we?”
We sprinted across the street after Kate, following the jagged line of Drustanus’ blood. Me lumbering out front in my sturdy new trucker meat-suit, Gio and Ter trailing behind. It was awkward the way they were forced to run. She was damn near twice his height and athletic to boot, while the body he was stuck in was as squat as it was short, but her blindness forced her to rein in her natural grace and shuffle alongside him, her hand gripping his upper arm. But like everything about those two, as odd and clumsy as it seemed, it worked – albeit slowly, in this case.
Sirens wailed in the distance, fast approaching. They’d be too late to save those kids, though, and so would we, if we didn’t hurry.
I scaled the front steps to the building two at a time, this big guy’s knees protesting against the strain. Gio and Ter fell behind – horns honking, tires squealing, the two of them cursing as they navigated as best they could across the street. The double-doors at the front entrance had been kicked in. Their small, square panes of glass had shattered, but were held in place by diamond-patterned wire. A foot-sized dent was in the middle of each, the doors buckled all around. The left one still rocked slightly where it lay just inside the entryway. Meant they weren’t far ahead.
“Sam!”
Kate’s voice, hoarse with panic, from the direction the blood drips veered. Away from the sign declaring open auditions for Guys and Dolls, thank God. I woulda thought that too sumptuous a meal for the likes of the Brethren to pass up.
I followed down the darkened, locker-lined hall, my only accompaniment the echoes of my footfalls. As I rounded the corner, slipping on the buffed-shiny vinyl tiles, I spotted Kate crouched and tense, her back to me. She was a good twenty yards away. Twenty more past her hunkered down a muscled beast, pocked with a crosshatch of thick, pink scars and random, bone-threaded piercings – across his face, his shoulders, his naked haunches, his dangling, mutilated member… and his sole remaining arm. Drustanus. By the angle and the regularity of the scars, they mostly looked self-inflicted. The piercings, of which there were dozens, were amateur and thick-scarred all around as well, through cheeks, through muscle, a couple even looking as though they’d been forced or drilled through bone. Each one looked to’ve been more excruciating than the last.
In his hand, he clenched with bleeding fingers a long, jagged shard of window glass. He must’ve run the whole way over from the restaurant with it in his grasp. But why?
He answered as if I’d asked the question aloud. “My brother tells me metal implements put you at an advantage,” he rasped, his words baring a crowded jumble of jagged yellow-brown teeth, and a tongue forked, black, and glistening. “Which is why I’ve chosen to gut you and your pretty little human here with something less conductive.”
“Good thinking,” I said. “Of course, you should have enlisted your missus to help you out. I don’t plan on going easily, after all, and it looks like you could use the hand.”
Drustanus looked down at his bleeding stump – which had begun to knit itself back together, but still pattered globs of red-black clotted blood onto the floor – and then back at me. I was hoping to prod him into anger, maybe prompt a careless, ill-considered attack, but instead Drustanus laughed.
“I suppose I should be honored to hear the dulcet tones of your sultry, sultry voice,” I said. “I hear tell you ain’t been much for talking these past few hundred years. But then maybe that crazy bint of yours just ain’t worth talking to.”
“Your jibes,” he said, “sting not, for Yseult knows full well the depth of my love for her. Every bit of suffering I inflict, and every bit that I endure, serve to demonstrate my devotion to my own dear, sweet Yseult. She is the sole goddess to whom I sacrifice, and I am the sole god to whom she does the same.”
“Cool. I’ll tell you what, when I kill your ass – and believe you me, I’m gonna – I’ll be sure to dedicate your dying breath to her. It’s just a shame she won’t be here to see you off. I’d hate to rob you of such a touching moment.”
“Fear not,” he croaked, “you haven’t.”
A door shut just behind me. I hadn’t even heard it open. I
wheeled to find behind us the mottled flesh of the no-longer human-looking Yseult, slinking toward us from a once-more shuttered classroom.
Her frame was still small and feminine – almost childlike. Her arched back, small breasts, and duck feet suggested dancer. Her ratty accidental-dreadlock hair and oozing open sores suggested meth-head. The fact those sores crawled with maggots, and that her mottled purple livor mortis skin was sloughing off in chunks – exposing muscle here, yellow adipose there, a gleaming white glimpse of bone at knee, and of tooth through gaping cheek – suggested that this dancer meth-head had taken a long walk off a short pier into cold water and didn’t wash up for a week or two, once the crabs and lobsters had their fill.
It took me a sec to realize the sores that polka-dotted her dead flesh weren’t sores at all. They were too round, too regular, a Venn diagram of overlapping circles, some knotted old scars, others seeping lymph and pus, still others raised with fresh blisters.
They were burns: from cigarettes, from cigars, from orange-glowing coils of old-fashioned automobile lighters. Self-inflicted, no doubt, to demonstrate how much she burned for him.
It’d be sweet if it weren’t so goddamned disgusting.
When I saw a shard of glass in her blue-tinged, black-nailed hand as well, I realized too late what had happened. The words fell from my lips as soon as they occurred to me.
“This is a trap,” I said. “Grigori told you to lay a trap for me, didn’t he?”
The question was, by default, directed at Yseult, since she was the closer of the two, and therefore the one that I was facing. But it was Drustanus who answered. “She won’t tell you anything,” he said. “She can’t.”
“Aw, c’mon,” I chided, trying to buy some time, “cat got her tongue?”
The Big Reap Page 24