by Diana Graves
“The police are on their way!” Greg yelled. He was holding onto a hysterical girl dressed as Cleopatra. Mascara was running down her face with her tears. She was bent over her cell phone, crying to someone on the other end, screaming about what had happened, like a lot of people. Most of the kids ran away on foot or piled into a car and speed down the road drunk and scared.
Greg and I both jumped a little when we heard someone pounding on the front door from inside the house. My first thought was that someone was trying to get out, get away. Guilt hit me. But something stronger than human was shaking that door right down to its frame.
“Shit!” I cursed for what seemed like the hundredth time tonight. I really need to pick a new favorite curse word. Greg looked a question at me. I gestured hysterically toward the door. “Mark’s trying to get out!” the phone was still in my hand, Mato was still on the line, listening.
I could hear him telling me to run! I was running, but not in the direction he wanted me to run. I was heading toward the house. I needed to stop Mark from busting down that door before the police got here. I needed to buy these kids some time. The house was built well, but that door wasn’t going to hold him off forever. It wasn’t locked, but Mark was in a blood rage, like Paul had been. He’s slower, dumber. I was hoping to use that to my advantage.
I leaped onto the low porch. The door shook violently with Mark’s efforts. It would be easier for him if he remembered how to use a door handle but if he remembered that he wouldn’t be eating his friends. I walked carefully toward a window that overlooked the porch. It was low and it was open, big enough for a man to fit through. See, newly dead plus blood rage a dull witted vampire makes.
With a shaking hand I pealed the curtains aside. Greg was shouting at me to come back, no one else cared. Some made comments about my intelligence. Fuck um, I was saving their lives.
The television was still one. I could see a lot of blood, people crying, more people turning probably, but I had to stop him, at least until the professionals got here. Mark was about five feet to my right, clawing at the door like an animal, beating it with his fists, throwing himself against it. Carefully, quietly, I stepped one foot into the house, onto a chair that was set just in front of the window.
“Help me!” screamed a woman. I hadn’t seen her, just on the other side of the chair. Her legs and chest were shreds of meat but she was alive, poor thing. “Fuck, help me!” she screamed past me, to anyone else who might be more helpful. “Help me! Help me!” She shouted over and over again.
“Please be quiet,” I whispered at her, but it was no use. She was hysterical and I couldn’t really blame her for it. “Oh, fuck,” I said, because she finally got someone else’s attention, Mark’s.
With my one foot solid on the chair I launched myself into the house, away from the woman and her screams and into the large kitchen. Mark was moving slow for a vampire, but he was still fucking fast for a human! Bloody floors and high heeled boots are so not a good combo. I felt like Bambi trying to stand up for the first time.
Mark’s face was red with blood and skin and bits hung from his mouth as he dived for me. Cesar was back for revenge as the undead. He grabbed me by my arm and I screamed as he bit into it.
“Get the fuck off me!” I screamed as his tongue explored the wound, lapping up my blood and meat into his mouth faster than he could swallow it. With his free hand he grabbed my hair and pulled me closer to him. He wrapped his body around mine and rode me to the floor. Fingers digging into me, mouth exploring every newly opened wound like my body was one large sampler tray. Surprisingly, I could hear police sirens over my screams and the screams of Mark’s other victims. The red and blue lights flashed rhythmically through the house like a great colorful strobe light.
I heard the door being kicked in, and then gun fire lit up the house. Mark ran away from me but I stayed on the floor, where guns hopefully weren’t being pointed. The gun fire followed Mark around the room, and sprayed in the direction of any other people who stood up too fast to take a chance with.
Bullets were flying like a blizzard of lead. It was a war zone. Automatics, shot guns and pistols all. No one was left out. I think they would have used flame throwers and grenades if they were allowed.
The EI officers were in full riot gear as they made their slow way into the house through the door, window and the walls. Damn.
Four officers with EI in yellow lettering on the back of the riot jackets drove Mark down the hall, guns aimed at his head. I lay back on my good elbow and held my shredded arm to my chest and watched as the second line of defense came in and stared chopping off the heads of those who were dead so they wouldn’t get up again. Normally it’s illegal to just kill any old vampire but in cases like this the public and courts gave the police a rather long leash and they gladly took advantage. One of the head choppers looked at me. Shit.
“I’m Raina!” I shouted over the music that was still blaring. So appropriately, it was now God Smack’s, Dead and Broken.
The head chopper walked toward me. They had what looked like over sized hedge trimmers. “No, wait!” I yelled. “Stop!” I put all my demand into that word. Fuck, why had mind control not occurred to me before?! “Stop!”
The officer stopped, “yes, ma’am.”
I was in shock and hyperventilating, but I managed to say, “Take me out of here unharmed.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, and she helped me up and out of the house safely. Shit. The police were almost scarier than the vampires.
30:
DETECTIVE TRAVIS, IN all his mundane glory stood in the door frame of my hospital room. He was in a sagging grey suit with very shiny black shoes on. What little hair he had was combed to the side and jelled into place. I watched him knock on the open door with his large knuckles: once, twice.
“Come in,” I said.
I had been watching breaking news, which meant I was watching myself on the TV. The officer I used mind control on was officer Fillips, a highly decorated member of EI. Every station kept showing the same footage over and over again: kids crying, police raiding and Fillips helping me down the porch while gun fire was going off in the back ground.
Detective Travis stood over me, smiling wide. “Hello Raina, how are you feeling?” he asked.
Most of my injuries were on my right arm. I looked down at the wrist to elbow bandages. Mark had taken chunks of meat, rips of skin and gnawed on my bone, but I was healing fast and it was itchy! I wanted to scratch under the bandages so badly. It took almost all my focus to resist the urge. The rest of my body was riddled with bruises and swollenness.
“I’ll survive,” I said.
He nodded, as he fingered the machines in the room. None of them were on. I wasn’t that badly hurt anymore, but I was waiting for the doctor to agree with me on that.
“You had a personal vendetta, is that it? You lied your way into police business, seduced Sherriff Mato, all for revenge.”
“Hey, Mato is the one trying to seduce me and lying was Ruy’s thing. I didn’t even know he told you that I was his apprentice until after the fact.”
He ignored me. “Things could have ended very badly for you tonight. Do you understand?” he asked.
I wanted to yell that I wouldn’t have been there at all if he had moved on Mark sooner. And I wouldn’t have been there alone if he hadn’t gone to Mark’s father for some damned reason. But, I held my tongue. His incompetence put me in that house and cost more innocent lives. He had to know that already. He couldn’t possibly be that dense. And, now he was here to take it out on me? I can’t stand it when people blame others for their mistakes.
“If it weren’t for me, the body count would have been at least double,” I said as coolly as I could when all I wanted to do was shout.
Travis lifted his massive shoulders and sighed. “We’re going to need you to fill out a statement. We have some footage of what happened. A lot of people are regarding you as a hero. I’ll admit it, you saved a lot o
f lives.”
“I’m glad I could help,” I said after I filled out the report he handed me, but I couldn’t keep the distain out of my voice.
“You should be in trouble, but given your sudden popularity right now that wouldn’t be wise.” Travis moved toward the door.
“Hey?” I asked after him.
“Yeah.”
“Why haven’t any of the other attacks been on the news? So far I’ve seen none but this one. I know EI tries to keep preternatural crime off the news so people don’t panic, but what about public awareness? How many deaths must there be before people are told? I saw Mark’s wall. There were so many faces—so many.”
Travis seemed to think about it. “You’ve seen the news,” he gestured to the television, “but you haven’t seen the streets, Raina. There are people out there right now using this to hurt preternatural citizens. We’re anticipating three months of hate crimes against vampires because of tonight. People can’t handle monsters killing humans. They go mad with fear. And this is when the vampires responsible are truly dead. Can you imagine how safe the streets would be for preternatural creatures such as yourself if they knew vampire killings were happening all over Western Washington?”
“You may be right, but how did you keep it off the news?”
“I’ll let you get some rest,” he said, patting my legs before walking out of the door.
I was in yet another hospital gown. The only clothes I had were those I wore to the party. They sat on a grey chair by the window, cleaned and ready to wear. Saying that I felt silly in the middle of the hospital in that getup didn’t really convey the amount of embarrassment I felt walking from my room to the lobby.
“Excuse me. I was brought in a few hours ago, but I haven’t seen my doctor in an hour. I was wondering if I can leave,” I asked one of the nurses behind the desk.
She looked down at her papers. “Raina A. Kirkland?” she asked, and I nodded. “Doctor Moses says you’re free to go.”
“Thanks,” I said before turning to the door. Where the hell was my car? “I don’t suppose anyone told you where my car was parked?” I asked the nurse.
She smiled, looked down, “Parking space four, reserved for police vehicles, here’s your keys.”
“Thanks—again.”
Outside the sky was still black. Somehow, I expected to find that the sun was out and shining. It seemed like days since I left home but in actuality it had only been a little over six hours. My car was indeed parked in a police reserved area with a note on it, “Ms. Kirkland, Thanks from all of us. EI.” Curious.
I had to readjust everything when I sat down in my car. Whoever drove it here was shorter than me, and that’s pretty short. My knees were hitting the steering wheel and the review mirror was giving me a great view of the ceiling of my car. After I was done making everything match my height and preference I found Greg leaning against the building with his hands in the pocket of his shorts.
“We need to talk,” he said.
I stepped out of the car. Greg lit a cigarette and took a couple long drags, holding the smoke in his lungs for a bit before exhaling it out of both his nose and mouth.
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked as the smoke leaked from his face holes. I hate cigarettes so I kept my distance as much as I could while still having a private conversation.
“It’s not over,” he said. Greg looked at me, eyes almost shut to keep smoke out of them. He took his cigarette from his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, holding his breath he said, “I was the Sherriff’s informant,” he exhaled. I nodded, shooing the smoke from my face with my hands. “I would be in police custody with the rest of the team if I wasn’t,” he laughed, but it wasn’t a funny ha ha laugh. It was a sick laugh. “When I told Sheriff Mato about the party I was expecting loads of police to come to everyone’s rescue before shit hit the fan, but what I got was a little girl dressed like a cat.” He shook his head, his face bitter.
Greg bit down on his cigarette with his lips. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “I can’t trust the police to do shit, but you. You seem capable enough. Mark, me, all us dumb kids mean shit to who’s really running the show.”
He took the cigarette out of his mouth, flicked it to the wet street and blew out a large billow of smoke.
My stomach felt heavy but I had to ask, “More death?” Greg just nodded.
My feet hurt like hell in these boots. The toes of the boots were ultra pointy and my toes felt like they had been run over by a Mac truck. I sat on the wet curb and wrapped my arms around my knees. “Who is behind this, Greg?”
He sat next to me. “The one running the show, the big head honcho is Anax.”
“Anax-who?”
“He likes to be called Anax. And, he’s old and dying. He’s been dying for three years now. He came up with the idea of using vampire blood to stay alive about a year ago. And a few months ago Mark came up with the idea of selling the blood as a cure to make some extra money after his dad cut his monthly allowance down to fourteen-hundred.” He shook his head. “But when Anax found out he just about killed his Dad.” He laughed then and this time it was funny, ha ha. Guess Greg didn’t care for Henry Press. “The first thing Mark did was call MSNBC, Fox news and CNN.”
“Wait, who is this Anax to you?”
“Anax is my grandfather, and he would have killed Mark quietly, without anyone knowing it, if it weren’t for Mark making everything very public. He told the world he was doing research in vampire blood. He gave them our names, even though we had no idea he had been stealing the blood from Anax—He did it to make sure the family didn’t turn on him.”
“Family?”
“We’re all cousins. Mark involved one child from each family to make sure we would take his side against Anax in case his plan to go public didn’t work. Anax doesn’t believe we weren’t involved. He’s paranoid.”
Information was coming at me too quickly. I had to make sure I was following. “Let me get this straight. All the team members are cousins, and the project was a ruse?”
“Yes,” he said with a nod, before he lit his second cigarette.
“Mark made everything up because he was stealing vampire blood from your grandfather, Anax, in order to sell it to people who would pay the most for it, the dying?”
“Pretty much.”
“And more deaths are to come—how?”
“After Mark’s big reveal, Anax thought I was involved with Mark, and he wanted to scare me into stopping. He showed me what the blood did to people. He took me to his labs. He has a bunker of sorts underneath one of his homes near Bonny Lake, where his scientists work around the clock to make Anax’s miracle cure. His guards dragged a woman into the room by her hair. She was screaming so fucking loud that I can’t get it out of my head. They chained her up and injected her with the blood. I watched her become a monster in like, seconds, and then they opened the window, and she burned alive.”
There was a long pause, and I knew that was my cue to say something, to react in some way, but all I could think of was, “I’m sorry you saw that.”
“Don’t you understand? They’re testing it in a controlled environment on people no one would report missing.”
“Who?”
“Bums, druggies, whores, who-ever.”
“And when the tests fail they kill them” I said.
“Anax is a fucking monster. At least Mark was trying to help people, even if it was for profit. He didn’t know what they became.”
He wasn’t going to convince me of Mark’s good intentions. Mark didn’t give a shit about those he hurt. He thought it was cool. The pain he caused didn’t touch the people he cared about so it didn’t mean anything. What happened to him was justice. Some people just need killing. Was how I really felt…in that moment, yeah.
I stood up, dazed and angry. People were dying and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Why did I feel I had to? I don’t know. I climbed back into my car and Greg followed me. He
was staring down at me through my driver’s side window. He felt lost, aggrieved. Not my problem.
“My number,” he said, handing me the torn edge of a piece of paper with a phone number on it. I took it and gave him mine and left. I had a lot of questions but I wanted to be somewhere safe and away from all this madness.
31:
THE CLOUDS MADE a patchwork over the shine of the moon. The rain had stopped somewhere between Federal Way and Fife. I sat in my car in the driveway. I didn’t want to go inside just yet. Mom was definitely going to ground me for the rest of my life—well my living life anyway. I didn’t see her having much control over me when I become a vampire. You would think she wouldn’t have much control of a twenty-one year old, but there I sat, expecting to be reprimanded by my mother. Lame! So, lame!
Oh well, I had to get it over with sometime. The longer I kept her waiting the worse it would be—probably. I stepped out of the car and quietly shut the door, which was a complete waste of effort since it honked at me when I pressed the button to arm and lock it. Damn.
“Raina,” said the figure from the dark.
I jumped and stopped dead in my tracks…that was bad wording. “Yes?” I asked. The morning was dark but it shouldn’t have been dark enough to hide this person so completely. Yet, there it was, standing in complete darkness.
It stepped forward and into the light of the street lamps, but he was still dark, still hidden. Even in the shine of the light he was darkness.
“Damon? You scared the shit out of me”
“Sorry,” he said, climbing the slight upward slope of the lawn.
“What are you doing here?”
“You missed class,” he said.
“You visit all your students at home if they miss a day?”
He put his hands on his hips like Peter Pan, or would that be Peter Pan’s shadow. “I saw the news.”
I nodded, that made more sense. “I’m fine, but thanks for worrying about me,” I said. In the dark of night he was truly blackness, a living breathing shadow of a man.