Vicious

by Olivia Rivard

  However, there was no tiger in the cage. Instead, a young man of some sort of Hispanic decent was sitting on a cot and staring at me wide-eyed. I would have thought this was some sort of torture had I not seen those amber eyes with the dark black rim around them. He had that same smooth and flawless skin, but his was an olive tone, and his black hair was slightly curly and cut short in a messy mop on his head. He smiled a little at me in that same curious fashion that all of the vampires smiled at me.

  A red-headed young woman was perched in a chair just outside of the cage with her hand on one of the bars protectively. She seemed to be watching over the Hispanic boy in the cage, and the cautious stance she held near him indicated her intense love of the prisoner. What was she afraid I would do to him?

  Her hair was thick and wavy, and it flowed like a red downpour to the middle of her back. Her eyes were probably hazel once, but now they practically screamed with amber in the middle and a sharp yellow-green towards the outside with a thick rim of dark brown holding it all together like the rim of a stained-glass window. She looked almost translucent she was so fair, and I could detect the slightest traces of pale freckles around her nose and just below her eyes. They were all so frighteningly beautiful.

  “Everyone, this is Grant. Grant, this is Marshall here with Lulu. The redhead over there is Cat, and the one in the cage is Gabriel.”

  “Anna, why is he in a cage?”

  I watched Cat stand up and move a little closer to Gabriel in a protective way as I spoke.

  “Because Gabriel is…uh…new. He hasn’t been around humans much as a vampire and this is a precaution since you are here.”

  I suddenly understood Cat was not afraid of what I would do to Gabriel. She was afraid of what Gabriel might do to me.

  “Ah, come on. I won’t do anything. I’ll stay if you want, but really I’m fine,” said Gabriel like a child whining about having to go to his room.

  “You are staying in there for now,” responded Anna.

  Marshall came forward and shook my hand, but Cat just nodded with a smile from her seat by the cage.

  “So what is the plan now?” asked Marshall after the introductions were over.

  “We wait for Lea to come, and after she has gone, we return Grant to his college safely, no matter what her answer is.”

  They all nodded in agreement, but I had had enough. I had been nearly killed and kept in the dark for far too long. I needed some real answers.

  “Wait a minute. I think I should have a say in what happens to me.”

  “Grant,” started Anna coaxingly, “if we let you go now, Lea might find you. If you can stay with us a little longer, I can better ensure your safety.”

  “It’s not that I want to go. I want to stay and know what the hell is going on here. I nearly get killed for talking to you, and you tell me just enough to string me along but not enough to explain. If I’m going to put myself on the line again, I think I deserve an explanation. A full explanation.”

  Anna looked shocked for a moment, pinched the top of her nose and then sighed as though she didn’t know what to do.

  “I don’t want you to get any deeper here than you need to, Grant. I’m trying to protect you.”

  “I don’t think you can protect me much longer while still keeping me in the dark. I already know so much. Why not explain the rest so I know what I’m up against here?”

  I knew I was breaking that iron resolve of hers, and the new knowledge that Lulu had given about Anna liking me gave me the confidence to fuel my fire. What I didn’t expect was the help I got.

  “Kid’s got a point, Anna,” stated Marshall plainly. “He should know what’s happening to him. It’s not like we can hide what we are from him anymore. It’s his neck on the line tonight, not ours. Might as well tell him.”

  The air altered. Whoever this Marshall was, everyone listened to his opinion. Anna looked exhaustedly at him as if she had just lost a battle. She turned to Lulu and asked, “What do you think?”

  “I agree with Marshall.”

  “Of course you do,” whispered Anna. “And you Cat?”

  “Just tell him. I’m nervous about it too, but we need him to stay right now, so you might as well tell him.” She then looked at me and added, “But don’t you breathe a word of anything you hear here to anyone.”

  I shook my head vigorously. I wouldn’t dare say any of this to anyone knowing what the five of them could do to me.

  “What about me?” Gabriel whined from the cage. “Don’t I get a say?”

  “It’s not your story to tell, Gabriel,” said Anna just before she turned to me. “I will tell you about how we came to be, Grant, but you need to understand that our story isn’t a pretty one.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Anna

  “Lea and I were the first, or at least we were the first we knew about. There had to be some before us or else they wouldn’t have been able to make us. My first clear memory was lying strapped to a table across from Lea while they pumped some sort of vile liquid into us. Later, I found out the liquid was infected blood. At least, that’s what they called it.”

  “When we came to, we found ourselves freed from our bondage and in a disgusting room that had certainly once been a shower of some sort because there were sprinkler heads on the ceiling and drains on the floor. The walls were dingy and the only door in or out of the room was a giant metal one with several large locks and dead bolts.

  “Once a day, the sprinklers would come on and soak us through. At first, the water frightened me and sent me running hysterically, but after a while, it was a welcomed event that ran over me and dragged the dirt and filth and blood from my body and sent it spiraling down the drain in a terrifying whirlpool.”

  “I mentioned we were soaked with blood, and that is unfortunately true. At least three times a week, a new person, sometimes more, was forcibly shoved into our room. They were always screaming and clawing at the walls. It was the way they fed us.”

  “When Lea and I awoke on those tables, we were reborn to new bodies and minds full of wants and needs that had to be fulfilled at all cost. The principle need was to eat, and the only thing we craved was human blood. Those poor souls who were thrown into that room suffered more torment and horrors than I could ever imagine possible. We hunted them with our new superior strengths, and we devoured them like animals to appease the horrible nagging thirst that always returned.”

  “Every once in a while, someone would come in and shoot us with tranquilizers. We never knew what happened until we woke up, still in our same ugly room with our arms sore and feeling weaker. Later, we found out they had been taking our blood to use to make others like us. That was the only life we knew for eight long years.”

  Grant looked at me, shocked. He and the others had taken seats around the living room and listened like attentive children as I spoke still standing and facing them all. I was like one of those human campers telling ghost stories to my friends around a fire in the woods. Sadly, these ghost stories were real.

  “Where were you? Why did they make you?”

  “The world was changing. Miracle cures and drugs were evolving and keeping people alive longer. Families began to grow as fertility drugs made it easy for almost anyone to conceive multiple children at once. Overpopulation was affecting everything, and it still is. One thing that was especially hit hard was the prison system. Lots of people meant more criminals. More children meant more responsibility, but there were no more parents to police them. Soon, more and more adults and children turned to crime to make a living, and thus, the prison system became dangerously overcrowded. Riots broke out regularly because the guards couldn’t seem to invoke any fear in the massive amount of prisoners, and they were often overtaken.”

  “Public outcry over the riots and the early releases reached a fever pitch. We are not sure who inside the government began this plan, but someone figured out that a psychological as well as a physical threat would yield better results. These p
risoners needed to fear something, but with people from all nationalities and cultures occupying the prisons, how did you make one thing frighten everyone? They figured out if they played to everyone’s fear, the prisoners would be better behaved. Every culture in the world has some type of vampire folklore or another. Everyone cringed at vampire stories when they were children. Why not create a real vampire?”

  “Of course, we are not real vampires as far as the legends are concerned. We are not the walking undead, nor are we the minions of Satan, fearing everything shaped like a cross. We live and breathe, and our hearts beat just like any living creature’s might. We can see farther, smell better and react quicker than any animal. We are three times stronger than a large man, but with the ability to be terrifyingly seductive. They created us to be the nightmares of normal men, but eventually, they used us for so much more than that.

  “We began to realize we were being held in a prison. All of the people they had brought into our room wore the same orange jumpsuit and referred to the men in charge as guards. It became apparent they were feeding us prisoners who had committed some crime inside the prison. The prisoners would beg for their lives, and they would plead with us to spare them while apologizing for stabbing or killing whomever. The word got out fast that Lea and I were the punishment for insubordination, and the prisoners reacted exactly the way the authorities had wanted. They began to behave out of fear.”

  “However, there was a problem. How do you feed two hungry vampires when all of your inmates are behaving? And what do you do when you have packed your cells to the breaking point and still don’t have enough room for everyone? So we started to become their own personal garbage disposal. If they were past their maximum allowance, they fed the extras to us. Soon, we had prisoners pleading with us that all they had done was cough during cell inspection or sneeze in the dinner line. I don’t know what they told their friends and family after they died, but I’m sure it wasn’t the truth.”

  “Didn’t you feel anything for these people?” Grant seemed to search my face as he asked, looking for something to hold on to. All I had to offer was the terrible truth.

  “Yes. At first, neither of us felt anything but fear, anger and the desperate need to quench our thirst. I took part in those killings like a drone. I did what I had to in order to survive, and I felt very little in the way of regret or pleasure. Soon, I began to recover some of my human characteristics, and I started to feel remorse for the lives I had taken.”

  “I justified any new killings with the understanding that I had to live, and the men I devoured were rapists and murderers. It still never sat well with me, and I often hesitated to kill when new people were presented to me. Things got worse when the others began to appear. At first, it was just a few sharing our room, but soon we had ten vampires living and feeding in that horrid room.

  “They had made these new ones with our own blood. In the beginning, they were only women because, as I found out later, females reacted more favorably to the treatment than men. But then a few males arrived too. They chose young people from the ages eighteen to twenty-three who were physically fit. Some of us we knew to have been prisoners from a nearby women’s facility. Cat and Lea were both wearing orange jumpsuits when they were turned, but none of us really remember where we came from or who we were. Some of us don’t even remember our original names. Lea, Marshall and I remembered our names, but Cat and Lulu didn’t. We gave them their names later.”

  “When the others came, I began to realize I was not the only one who felt remorse about killing. You see, Lea never felt like I did, and she seemed to relish every kill. She would even play with some of them for a while to give them hope before she bit into them. They were criminals and food to her and only that.

  “The new ones fed blindly at first too, but later they began to develop personalities and opinions of their own. Once, when a new batch of prisoners was fed to us, I walked to the corner calmly and sat, refusing to eat, even though I hadn’t eaten in a week. I saw that Lulu and Marshall had stopped their hunting and joined me with my protest in the corner.

  “That act was the first that opened up a critical line of communication. Talking had become difficult because we realized they had placed cameras everywhere to watch us. We began to communicate with one another via small gestures and writing messages to one another on the blood-stained floor and wiping it away before anyone saw. Soon others joined us, but others also joined Lea and her way of thinking as well. Several of the other vampires just hadn’t been able to hold onto their human remorse, and thus, reveled in the slaughter along with Lea.”

  “It wasn’t long before three distinct and organized groups formed. There was Lea’s group, my group and the neutral group, who hadn’t made up their minds about which way to go. My group would stage protests and refuse to attack prisoners presented to us for as long as we could, but eventually, we had to give in and kill to stay alive. Lea’s group and the neutrals didn’t understand the heavy burden of our guilt, but we had each other to lean on. When we had to kill, we tried to make it as quick and painless as possible, no matter how despicable the man.”

  “Even though we had split into the different groups, we never fought each other. Our groups may not have agreed, but we would not fight because we had one major thing in common. We were all prisoners and wanted freedom from this place. So we banded together to plan our escape.

  “It was a simple plan. There were ten of us at this point, and one of us was strong enough for at least three guards. We would simply overpower them when the time was right. One day, a group of guards were struggling with two prisoners outside our door, and before they could even see what we were doing, we had organized and swarmed the door waiting for them to unlock it. The people watching us through the cameras saw what was happening before the inept guards did, and they triggered the alarm, but it was too late. None of them survived.”

  “This all seems like a lot of effort just to police the overcrowded prisons. I mean kidnapping, torture and murder just to stop the riots? Why would they do this? It seems so extreme,” said Grant.

  “They wanted us for more than to just police the prisons. We discovered that too. It was something we had always suspected. We were an experiment. They tested, observed and trained us to be ruthless killers. You see, the prisons being overcrowded was just a bi-product of the global population skyrocketing. With more people but the same amount of resources, there would be more unrest and conflict. The country that built the next best weapon was the country that got all the resources it needed without argument. We were that weapon, or at least they had planned on us being that weapon.”

  “But why test your abilities in a prison?”

  “Why not? Humans have been testing out things on their prisoners and slaves for centuries. All of the ancient civilizations tortured and abused their prisoners and slaves for profit or educational gain because who are the prisoners going to run to? No one. Hitler’s people did countless scientifically horrendous experiments on their prisoners during the holocaust.

  “Since there are no slaves anymore and the global media is what it is, they used a prison, the closest thing we have to a barbaric society, as their science lab. Who do you turn to when the authorities are the ones doling out the torture? So they had planned to keep us there while they observed our brutal strength and agility until the day came that they decided to put us into use. Whoever controlled the lethal force of their ready-made vampires controlled the most unique weapon in the world. They thought they would tame us or appeal to whatever in us was still human to get us to work for them willingly. Obviously that didn’t work out in their favor.”

  “How did you learn all of this?”

  “There was this folder I got from a scientist before we torched the place. It was my folder. I had hoped it would tell me who I was before all of this, but it didn’t. However, it did tell me how they made me and why.”

  “We don’t know what happened to whomever or whatever provided
the blood for Lea and me, but it was stronger than what they used for the others. They used the blood they extracted from us to make the others. They had found the best formula to create a vampire without complications or death was to drain as much of the human blood as possible without killing the person before they injected a good amount of vampire blood directly into their heart. The less human blood there was left, the easier it was for the virus to take over their system. They also felt less pain and the transition happened quicker. I burned this information because I could never trust it in anyone’s hands. The last thing any of us wanted was more of us.”

  “But how did Gabriel come to be?”

  Grant eyed the young man across the room.

  “Cat found Gabriel one night a few weeks ago, battered and beaten almost to death in an alleyway. He had lost a lot of blood and was going to die, so she brought him home to us. After much deliberation, we decided to save his life by giving him a new one. It was Cat’s decision, and we supported her. We injected our blood into his heart and managed to change him into one of us. He is less ruthless and blood thirsty than we had been at first, and we are still trying to figure out if this has something to do with his environment or if he is just different. We tried to keep his transformation under wraps, but Lea found out.”

  Grant seemed to perk up as though he had had a realization.

  “So the other night with Lea. She thought you might be trying to recruit me or change me or something?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t have time to say anything else. We all became tense at the sound of moving pebbles and cracking twigs as a car drove into the driveway. We listened as it came to a stop and three car doors opened and shut. Grant watched us alert but without understanding. His human ears had not yet heard what we all already knew.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Marshall and Lulu, I need you to guard Grant. Cat, I need you to watch after Gabriel. I’ll talk to her when she arrives.”

  They all took their protective and defensive positions as Grant stood up, clearly terrified by the sudden alarm without knowing the reason.