Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

My feet would not lift from the pavement; my mind would draw nothing but blank after blank. The Hollows did nothing at first. They stared. And I stared back, mesmerized by how positively motionless they were.

  And while I stared, I tried to make sense of the second thing about them that frightened me so much. This one’s fairly easy to explain:

  They were all wearing Jesse Cannon T-shirts.

  That’s right. Un-dead groupies.

  Who knows how much longer our staring contest would have lasted. Maybe all night. Or maybe they were about to spring, to tear me into pieces on their way to the tour bus. Before that or anything else could happen, though, a scalding roar and a wave of distant screams erupted close by. The Hollows were just as surprised as I was, and our startled focus converged at a corner of the building, where bursts of orange were blooming upward against the night sky.

  The back of Odette's studio was on fire.

  I didn’t pause to consider why or how. Neither did the Hollows. Without a single word between them, they bounded into immediate action. Two of them darted around a corner, moving like beads of sweat around the perimeter of the building, running toward the flames.

  The other two ran toward me.

  I motored backwards until my shoulder blades smacked against the tour bus door. Had I locked it? Had they? I started banging on it with everything I had, gawking over my shoulder at the two Hollow fangirls moving closer with fluid, steady speed.

  It was Corin who opened the door. My hasty re-entry toppled him to the floor, and I spun to shut the door and scramble with the locks without apology or explanation.

  "Back so soon?" Jesse said loftily, holding a cold can of orange Fanta to his eye.

  "Drive," I gasped to no one in particular.

  Corin picked himself up off the floor. "What?"

  "Drive."

  Something thudded against the door. The handle shook. I heard the sound of what I correctly believed to be a metal stair-step being broken off. And then a dent the size of a perfect karate chop busted into the door.

  "Hey!" Jesse frowned against his Fanta.

  Jackson peered out a tinted window, seeing exactly what I expected he would see: women in Jesse Cannon shirts going absolutely crazy. He let out a low whistle, then looked at Jesse. "You deal with this all the time?"

  "Drive!" I repeated myself to the top of my lungs.

  The window above the bar shattered.

  Jesse dropped to the floor. Ghi ran in an ambiguous circle, falling all over himself and knocking Corin down again. Another dent appeared along the door frame, and the door itself was starting to buckle in like a piece of scrap metal. I braced my back against the bar and looked to the driver’s station.

  Jackson was already climbing into the seat.

  "I got this!" he shouted. "Keys!"

  Without pausing to consider the similarities between fire trucks and tour buses, I grabbed my set of keys from the glass-sprinkled counter and tossed them into his waiting hand. "The black and gold one!"

  "Got it."

  He fired the bus up, just as the window above the door was smashed through. And then he floored it.

  Ten wheels left rubber all over that parking lot. Jackson steered in a huge circle to get us going, and I dropped to the floor. Loose objects—magazines, shoes, sunglasses, martini glasses, CD’s— went flying. The bus bounced as we ran over something—or someone—and then bounced again when Jackson plowed right through the flimsy, unmanned gate and onto the access road. He picked up some speed, but not much. The street was short, ending at a busy intersection.

  "Where to?" he shouted over his shoulder.

  Ghi and I answered at the same time. "Anywhere!"

  I pulled myself to my feet with caution, just one inhalation away from a sigh of relief when something thudded against the roof. I snapped my head upward. Whatever was up there, it didn’t hold my attention for long.

  "Oh god! Oh god!" Jesse was bouncing up and down, pointing at the bar.

  A bloodied woman was climbing through the broken window.

  We all screamed in perfect four point harmony.

  My mind reeled. This girl couldn’t have been more than twenty, younger than all of us, her face pretty except for its starved sneer, her tour shirt tidy except for fresh bloodstains. In my short career, I had fought off my share of groupies. I had been trampled by stiletto heels. I had tackled nearly naked men, men much larger than myself. But I had never been up against anything quite like this bitch.

  She poised in the jagged window frame, stretching a hand down to the bar to steady herself, her eyes darting between us. Her arm streamed with ribbons of blood, but she took no notice of that, showed no pain—nor did she seem to care that the blood itself was turning darker and darker and darker ...

  Ancient words slid out of her mouth, words with lots of menace and very few vowels, and with them the dark, almost syrupy substance trickled from the corners of her chattering lips, oozing down her chin, down to the glittered marble countertop. She ducked further inside with one fluid motion, suddenly way too close to all of us, her wide eyes clouding over with that same inky material.

  Corin was closest to her, with his back pressed to the connecting counter and his arm reaching around wildly for something, anything at all. The Hollow's attention snapped to him. She calculated. She got some traction.

  She lunged.

  Corin met her with the first available blunt object, which happened to be my weathered George Foreman grill. Wielding it like a shield, he drove her back toward the window, while she grappled and hissed and squealed, spewing black matter all across the countertop. After several clumsy seconds, during which no one could decide exactly how to offer any assistance whatsoever, Corin reared the grill back in both hands. He swung out, cracking it against the Hollow's head with such force that I fully expected excess grease to spew from her ears.

  No grease. She took the blow without insult or injury, wiped more tar-like liquid from her nose, and, with one inhumanly fast motion, grabbed Corin's wrist and bit down. His hand disappeared between her gnashing, sawing teeth. Then his wrist. By the time his forearm disappeared, physics and logic were out of the question. In a mere second, she had swallowed him up to his elbow―and she was still going.

  The George Foreman grill fell out the window and to the roadside.

  "Christ Sakes Mary Mother!" Corin bid it a blood-curdling farewell. With the better part of his arm still down her gullet, the Hollow lurched through the shattered window, pulling most of him out with her.

  By some miracle of unprecedented valor, Ghi and I both acted to grab Corin's flailing legs. We braced and heaved, attempting to haul him back in, but it was a useless of tug of war. The Hollow kept ripping away at Corin's arm, he kept yelling religious obscenities and kicking us into one another, and we kept losing hold on him, inch by inch.

  "How’s it going back there?" Jackson hollered.

  Our reply did not come in the form of actual words, but he got the idea. He sped up.

  Dents were beginning to dot the ceiling, as if the tour bus were driving through a triple-gravity hail storm. Something banged heavily against a vent hatch, which just so happened to be positioned above the very spot that Jesse had chosen to hop around and do nothing in. A shrill scream sounded from the roof, and I glanced up just in time to see the hatch get pummeled a second time.

  "Jesse, what are you doing?!" I shouted, fighting to maintain my grip on Corin’s bucking leg.

  Just dancing around, that’s what he was doing. Just staring at the damn hatch and waiting for it to open.

  "Lock it!" I roared.

  Jesse reached up to turn the little red knob but withdrew his hand the instant another dent appeared. He cringed at me. The hatch flapped open for a fraction of a second, before the jet stream of air against the bus slammed it shut again.

  "LOCK IT NOW, JESSE!"

  Jesse grimaced, stood up resolutely on his toes, and turned the handle. The lock clicked.

  With an
entirely disproportionate amount of relief on his face, Jesse turned to me, expecting I don't know what. A high-five? A medal? I glared at him with as much resentment as possible before Corin kneed me sharply in the nose. And then the hatch burst off of its hinges and dropped into the bus.

  Jesse threw his arms out and fell flat on his million-dollar ass when Jackson cut the bus sharply onto Randolph Street. And then our newest threat slipped her head and shoulders through the vent above, emerging upside-down into our current chaos and absolutely exceeding even the most horrifying of expectations.

  There was no comprehending what we were seeing. There was only confusion, confusion which momentarily paused all terror. Although she was much the same as the first Hollow, there was one very significant difference about this one:

  Her head was on fire.

  The Hollow dropped through the hatch and landed on top of Jesse, her limbs ablaze and flapping. She twisted, she shouted. Jesse wailed. Ghi and I screamed, side by side. Corin was all out of breath by then. Jackson, because he felt left out I guess, just kept sounding the air horns.

  Amid all this hellish noise, the competing tension on Corin’s upper half suddenly went slack. He tumbled back through the window and Ghi and I dropped his legs, abandoning him on the black-splattered countertop. I didn't pause to see whether or not he still had two arms. I had more pressing concerns. The hems of my jeans were on fire. There was a demonic being writhing on the floor, much too close to me. She flung herself to her feet, roaring with what sounded like several different voices at once, and the rest of us scattered.

  I dove for the couch. I don't know why. The immediate threat was a five-and-a-half foot flaming woman, not a rodent. The bus tilted dangerously as Jackson took us around the loop of the interstate ramp, and we merged onto 1-90 doing eighty, westbound and with smoke pouring from the broken vent. Above the screeching of the bus's smoke detector and the Hollow's howls, I heard sirens.

  Ghi rushed past me for the main door and fought it open. Through the smoke I could see the guardrail flying by at a nauseating speed, and orange sparks arching away from the broken steps as they scraped pavement. I looked to him in horror. "What are you thinking!?" And then—

  "OUT OF MY WAY!"

  The snarl made me spin around, not the Hollow's snarl. A familiar snarl. A platinum record, pitch-perfect snarl. I could believe my ears alright, but my eyes had to be kidding.

  Jesse Cannon was driving the Hollow—wrestling her, flames and all—toward the open door with his own bare hands.

  The sight was both worrisome and strangely inspiring, and it was brief. After one exaggerated stage kick from Jesse, the Hollow's journey with us was over. She hit the guardrail with an unforgettable snapping sound and rolled out of sight, still burning and bawling.

  "Bitch!" Jesse called after her, still planted by the door. Livid, he dusted his blackened hands against the front of his designer jeans, muttering about custom carpeting and smoke stench. Jesse really loved that tour bus.

  The howling faded. As the interstate took us on a wide turn, we caught a surreal glimpse of our wake. The Hollow was rolling to a stop in the wet grass beyond the highway. Already far behind us, a second twisting ball of flame lay alongside the entrance ramp―the other Hollow, the one that had shredded Corin's arm. And beyond her, fat plumes of smoke rose against the city-lit sky, hovering over the studio. The flashing lights of several ambulances and other emergency vehicles were converging at the scene.

  My knees spasmed together. I sank into a sitting position on the couch, heaving and quaking, checking my extremities for damage and happily finding none. The smell of burnt flesh was thick, filling my head and gut with unpleasant sensations.

  No one spoke. The door slammed shut, although I did not see Jesse touch it. He turned and, with the prim composure of someone who'd just administered the ass-kicking of a lifetime, walked over and sat down stiffly beside me. Ghi stood by the refrigerator, wobbling. The smoke detector continued to screech until Corin, who had been sitting on the counter gripping his own mangled arm, punched it off the wall without looking up.

  Jackson gradually eased the bus to a less illegal speed. He spared a quick glance over his shoulder.

  "Everyone okay?"

  Something huge pounded on the roof of the bus.

  This time, I was the only one who screamed. Hysterically. I dove behind Jesse, buried my face between his shoulder blades, and inhaled in order to scream again.

  Jesse sighed and snaked an arm around to touch me.

  "It's fine," he said. "He's with us."

  What?

  "Has he been up there this whole time?" Corin wondered aloud.

  I forced myself to look up. Jesse and the others were watching the ceiling, exchanging knowing, tense glances. There was another thump. A set of large, bare feet dipped through the open hatch, followed swiftly by legs, then not so swiftly by a jammed tangle of torso and ... and fur? And―!!

  Jesse gasped and clamped a hand over my eyes.

  There was a wince in Ghi's voice. "Is he stuck?"

  "Unbelievable," Corin remarked. "A little push, Jackson, if you please."

  Jackson whooped and happily slammed the brakes, providing the abrupt force necessary to separate twisted fabric from broad shoulders, and broad shoulders from the narrow opening of the vent hatch.

  Somewhere near mile fifty-four, one very expensive ermine coat landed on the wet highway.

  And, smack in the center of the bus's plush interior, landed one very dangerous, very pissed off, very naked escaped convict.

  * * * * *

  And so let it be known to history that the Vessel, the long-awaited divine punishers of death, united at last on that fifth night of November with the addition of one Su Kim Khan, on a customized tour bus merging onto Westbound US Interstate 90, after leaving a few Hollows and a television studio in flames.