Forever Young

by Daniel Pierce

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” Tess made a face. “She’s...well, she’s not one for Ferin unity. We’re not friends. We’re not even friendly. But Margaret was right. With everything that’s happening right now, you need to learn how to use what’s inside you...and fast. If Kamila deigns to teach you, she’ll be able to get you doing what you need to do a hell of a lot faster than Mort can.” She sighed and looked out the window. “I just wish we had more time, you know?”

  My throat tightened at the thought of how much time mattered, and how little we had. More time in the mansion, more time with Margaret, and more time to get used to immortality before we all had to die. “It’s a beautiful day,” I tried. “If we’re at war, we might not get too many more of them. Why don’t we enjoy the open road, stop and smell a few roses, make sure every day counts? It’s a gift.”

  I hated inspirational posters, but I did like inspirational shit.

  She smiled up at me, and her dark eyes brightened a little bit. “Okay, you romantic sod. Let’s make sure we do.” She chugged back the rest of her coffee while I guzzled mine, and we headed back out to our bikes, shoulders squared for the road.

  And war.

  16

  New Jersey might have been known as the Garden State, but I certainly couldn’t see it from our route as we drove south. Maybe it was just the way we were going. We weren’t speeding down a highway with open lanes and endless room; we drove back roads, and most of those were littered with strip malls, half-empty outlet centers, and condo complexes I wished were empty. I gave thanks when we crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, but as it turned out, Pennsylvania was no better.

  In fact, it was worse. Pennsylvania had everything New Jersey had to offer but with near-constant construction and the horror of I-81, which ranked somewhere between dental surgery and being tarred and feathered.

  We wound up having to make a long detour at Philadelphia. I wouldn’t say we got lost, because we knew we were in Philadelphia, but we didn’t exactly know where we were. For a while, I banked on Tess knowing where she was, and I had just enough pride to never ask for directions. We hit one cluster of traffic after another, including a serious wreck near Lancaster, and in the end, we wound up having to get a room in Harrisburg.

  I wouldn’t care to repeat that experience. By that point in my life, I’d been to a lot of places in America, but I’d never seen such a celebration of the Confederacy as I did in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As a good Mainer who grew up across from the local Civil War memorial, to say I was horrified would be putting it mildly.

  “Aren’t we in the north? And the twenty-first century?” I asked Tess, who cut her eyes at me with a wintry smile.

  “We are. Sort of,” she said, and we entered our room like an avenging army. It was good, the bed was big, and the towels were clean. In minutes, we rode in a cab to a brewpub downtown, and I vowed that if the beer were good enough, I would revise my opinion of the local atmosphere. As we stood at the door, I didn’t think we’d get in, and the bartender took one look at me and scowled. Then he caught a glimpse of Tess and gave her a short nod.

  “Is he Ferin?” I whispered to her as we settled into a high-top table in the back.

  She nodded. “His name is Chuck. He was probably turned in the eighties, but he was born in the late thirties or early forties.” She grinned. “It pays to know people sometimes.”

  I nodded and scanned the menu. Tess and Margaret had been adamant about me not being able to live among humans or keep a job, but here was some guy who was doing just fine pouring pints in the wilds of central Pennsylvania.

  “How come he didn’t live up at Owl’s head?” I decided not to rehash the question of him having a job directly. I didn’t think any good would come of it frankly.

  She shrugged. “He did for a while. Once he got his Ferin legs under him, he decided he wanted to wander for a while.”

  I found myself wondering whether Margaret had rifled through his mind by sleeping with him too, and I pushed the thought away. It couldn’t do me any good now, and such childish things had no place in my head.

  Chuck approached a couple of minutes later and hugged Tess, kissing her on both cheeks. I held out my hand to shake, but I got the same treatment Tess had.

  “Hi, I’m Chuck. It’s good to meet a fellow traveler.” He smiled and set a tray down holding a pitcher of beer, three-pint glasses, and an appetizer platter. “Tess, I haven’t forgotten how much you liked stuffed mushrooms. I even put them on the menu in case you came wandering through.”

  Tess beamed at him, and I pretended I wasn’t jealous. “I’m Jason,” I told him. “I’m new.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh? How new?”

  “Maybe a week,” Tess told him with a grin. I couldn’t believe how easily she said it, like she was reporting the weather. After all that emphasis on secrecy, she was speaking openly about us and what we were. I hid my shock with a bland grin. “Jason’s a quick study, though. He’s moving right along through everything.”

  Chuck laughed. “That’s probably making Mort absolutely nuts. Serves him right, too. Sometimes, I think Mort needs to be taken down a peg or two.” He poured out beers for each of us. “Fortunately, my shift just ended. I’ve got to say, Tess, I’m surprised to see you this far south. What was it you said to me once? ‘Anything farther south than northern Massachusetts is an abomination’?”

  Tess ducked her head, letting her bobbed hair fall into her face. “I guess no matter how old we get, none of us can see the future.” She popped a stuffed mushroom into her mouth. “Although if you think about the times I lived through, I stand by my opinions. I’m a bit of a Yankee at heart, it seems.”

  “I’m not going to try to sell you on the South.” He sipped from his drink. “You know what you lived through. What would possibly bring you all the way down here, though? I truly never thought I’d see the day.”

  “We’re going to visit Kamila.” She sat up a little straighter, chin up and defiant.

  I drank my drink quietly, watching the dynamic between them. My comfort level on this trip didn’t increase when Chuck pulled back. “You’re visiting Kamila? Do you have a death wish or something? She’s not exactly fond of other Ferin, or the Owl’s Head crew.”

  Awesome. I put my beer down. So, our last best hope was in someone who would start out hating me. I dialed back my estimate of our success.

  “Circumstances are a little different now. With any luck, Kamila will be willing to listen.” Tess gripped her beer with two hands before lifting it to her lips. “Owl’s Head has fallen.”

  Chuck’s face drained of all color. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “I wish. Three survivors, as near as we can tell. Me, Jason, and Mort. The rest are gone. Mort’s off to find another group of Ferin someplace else. I wouldn’t bother you with it, Chuck. I know you want to be free to do your own thing—and you are—but you should have all the facts when you do. It was vampires. A lot of them. More than I’ve ever seen working together at one time. They knew what they were doing, where they were going, and they had no intention of letting anyone get out alive.”

  Chuck covered his mouth. “My God. This is a disaster. Do you think they’re...”

  Tess lowered her gaze. “There’s no way to know. They didn’t exactly give a villainous speech before striking, you know? They came, they slaughtered, and we followed the emergency plan. But I’ve never heard of them working together like that, not in a swarm. One or two, maybe. Not like that. It doesn’t bode well for the future.”

  I cleared my throat. I had concerns, of course. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why an escape plan had been there until I knew vampires were pretty much solitary monsters. “I think groups of Ferin are more of a threat to them, obviously, but if the swarming behavior is new to them, I don’t think anyone’s safe. It doesn’t matter how well we’re hidden.”

  I met Chuck’s eyes, and I could see he got my point.

 
“Well, shit.” He sighed and glanced toward the door. “Do you think you were followed?”

  “I can only hope not.” Tess drained her glass. “We’ve been careful, and I think they’d have taken us out at the safehouse if they could have.”

  He nodded a couple of times. “Right. Well, I’ve meant to explore Mexico anyway. There are some gorgeous beaches down there and plenty of silver.” He winked. “Enjoy the beers.” And with that, he left.

  I blinked as I watched him go. “He doesn’t waste much time, does he?”

  “Nope.” Tess took his half-empty glass and finished it. “He never did. I don’t blame him, either. He’s been embedded here for too long anyway. Someone’s bound to notice how he doesn’t age, you know?”

  And there it was, the reason we couldn’t be around normal people. If we pretended we were part of a human community, eventually we’d stand out. We didn’t age, and we didn’t change. People picked up on things like that.

  “What’s really going on here, Tess?” I toyed with my glass. I couldn’t eat. I just couldn’t make myself do it. “Something doesn’t feel right. If it’s war like you said, why aren’t we all getting together to stand and fight? Why are we scattering to the winds?”

  She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Come on. Let’s just go. You’ll figure it out as we go, you know?”

  “Not really.” I finished my beer and followed her out the door. We decided to walk back to the hotel, just to get some of the extra energy out of our systems. I was hoping to get some answers from her, but I found myself doomed to be disappointed. I did try to nudge her a little, but she just sighed and tried to change the subject. She almost seemed frustrated that I didn’t already understand, as if being obtuse was my plan, and not due to her lack of answers.

  I chalked it up to grief, at least for the most part. While she wasn’t showing much of her sorrow, she had to be feeling it. She and Margaret had obviously been close. Margaret had entrusted her final words to Tess. People didn’t do that with casual acquaintances.

  She did snap at me at least once, about how she’d expected me to be a faster learner. “You pick up on some things so fast, but it’s like other things need an anvil to get through that thick skull of yours,” she barked. “Honestly, there’s a war coming. I don’t have time to get ready for a war and to hold your little hand on our way there. Just shut up, hold on tight, and hope you pick up what you need to.”

  I did shut up, but not because I thought learning by osmosis was the best way to survive. I just knew I wasn’t going to get anything out of Tess while she was so preoccupied.

  This whole fish out of water feeling was getting old in a hurry. Before I was attacked, life hadn’t been great, but it had been predictable. I’d known who I was and what my place in the world had been. I knew my job, and I was competent enough that I could train people. Now, I hadn’t just gotten my twenty-year-old body back. I’d been busted back to the status and skill level of someone barely out of adolescence, and it wasn’t a good feeling.

  I only had two ways to cope with it. I could storm off in a huff and lone-wolf it like Chuck, or I could bite my tongue and learn what I could. Storming off had its appeal. I’d learned some things from the Owl’s Head crew, but I also knew they were hiding a lot of information from me—and the information they were hiding might well save my life. This “you’re too young to know this” bullshit had pissed me off when I’d been a kid, and it pissed me off now.

  At the same time, I knew what I’d seen in Owl’s Head. Those vampires had been organized and hellbent on destruction. I didn’t know they wanted to wipe every Ferin from the face of the earth, but they definitely hadn’t seemed to discriminate. I hadn’t chosen to become what I was, but I also wasn’t ready to die yet.

  If I wanted to live, I had to learn everything I could. And sticking with people who’d survived as long as they had just seemed like good sense, even if I didn’t necessarily agree with everything they advised.

  So, I kept my mouth shut and let Tess drive the bus for now. Being a middle manager for an insurance company didn’t exactly prepare me to survive a supernatural war, even if the competition for the chocolate donuts during Friday staff meetings could get intense. But by God, I wasn’t going to take a back seat forever.

  17

  We kept going the next day, cutting south through part of Maryland and then into West Virginia. I liked the area around Martinsburg, surprisingly enough. In my head, West Virginia had always been this weird, barren moonscape strip-mined to hell and back. Maybe some parts of West Virginia were like that, but the area we passed through was lush and beautiful, with more than one wild river and gorges that looked like the gods carved them. The Department of Agriculture maintained orchards in the area, and if the rest of the region was beautiful, the orchards were simply breathtaking.

  Tess and I took a break to rest our backs and cool our bikes under the trees. The problem with buying motorcycles under the table, of course, is that you didn’t have any control over what kind of maintenance had been done on the vehicles before purchase. You got what you got, and that was it. These Harleys were good bikes, but they didn’t like to go for more than five hours or so without a rest to cool down.

  Tess complained about it, kicking at the ground and muttering curses at the bike under her breath, as we sat in the shade of an apple tree that could only be found in this orchard. It was extinct in the wild.

  “You’d think some of these guys would take better care of their bikes,” she groused, flopping back onto the grass. “Don’t they have any pride?”

  I snorted. “I don’t know a lot of guys who want to ride for more than five hours at a stretch.” I sat down with my back against the tree trunk. It was a beautiful Fall day, and I felt lucky to be out here enjoying it. If I were back in Maine, I’d be stuck indoors with my face glued to a monitor. “How are you doing?” Now seemed like a good time to check in on Tess’s mental state.

  “Other than being pissed off about the delay? Seriously, who thinks it’s okay to demand a complete shutdown every five hours? This is absurd.” She crossed her arms over her chest and pouted.

  I laughed quietly. “If we didn’t have the bikes, we’d still be in Maine, Tess. We’re making a lot of progress, and you know it. Come on. Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She rolled over to look balefully at me with those big dark eyes of hers. “Why?”

  “Well, because you just lost someone you were close to. Why else?”

  She stared at me. “You mean Margaret?”

  “Of course.” I sat up a little straighter. “Who else did you think I meant? I mean, you may have been close to other people at Owl’s Head, but I don’t know who they were, so I can’t really ask about them.”

  Her face fell for a second. “Yeah. Um. You never had a chance to meet anyone, really. I was pretty tight with a few of them. Lou, he was pretty fantastic. Sara.” Her pink tongue darted out to moisten her lips. “And yeah, Margaret and I were close too. But the thing with being Ferin is, sometimes people come into your life, and sometimes they go out of your life. It just happens, you know?” She jumped to her feet and grabbed her helmet. “Come on, the bikes have to be cool by now.”

  I got up more slowly. The way she phrased it didn’t sound like her, or at least not the way she usually sounded. She sounded sad and almost vulnerable. I wanted nothing more than to wrap my arms around her and hold her for a few minutes, stroking her dark hair and making her feel that everything would be okay.

  It sounded like a perfectly good way to get myself stabbed.

  I got back onto my bike and followed Tess farther down the route toward Virginia. The route meandered through even more beautiful territory, and for a little while, I almost managed to push my concerns for Tess’s emotional state out of my mind. I hadn’t done much traveling outside of Maine, and I was starting to see just how much I’d missed in my short life.

  We passed the usual collection of strip malls and trailer parks
, but we also passed by farms and conservation land too. We had to rest the bikes sooner than usual, thanks to Tess’s apparent allergy to anything even remotely emotional and spent the time hanging out near a llama farm. Llamas might not smell great—livestock didn’t as a general rule—but they were funny and curious, so we entertained ourselves that way for a while.

  I made a mental note to look into getting a fake ID that would pass muster. We needed to be able to get around without having to worry our vehicles would crap out on us.

  “You don’t know how to repair a motorcycle?” Tess scoffed at me, and it looked as though the nearest llama was giving me the side eye, too.

  I knew I was blushing. “You know shop class was discontinued as a requirement in most schools, right? College-bound kids weren’t encouraged to take shop, even if we were interested. We were encouraged to take more math or science, or another language if we weren’t good at either of those things.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Every man should be able to take care of his own things. His own home, his own goods. In my day, if someone had tried to call someone for every little thing, he’d have been laughed out of town.”

  Every muscle in my back got tense. I knew she was just getting defensive because of our earlier conversation about Margaret, but I couldn’t help getting mad. “For real? In your day, cars didn’t have computers in them. Today, mechanics usually specialize in one type of car. Some cars can’t even have their oil changed without moving the engine. That’s not something a layperson can do at home. You need specialized equipment. And there are sensors, timing devices. It’s all run by a central processor. Sure, I might be able to swing a hammer at a nail, but hooking the tire pressure monitor back up to the wheel? That’s going to take a specialist.”

  She scratched a llama behind the ear. It was brown and seemed to be looking for treats in her pockets. “I suppose I can understand that, on some level at least. On another, of course, it all seems more complicated than it needs to be, but I guess when I was young, our vehicles were just belching smoke into the sky. Things do change.” She gave me an arch look. “You have to be prepared for that, Jason. Everything changes, and nothing’s really permanent. Even if people don’t die, they come and go. Forever is a long time. People want different things, and they need new experiences. If you can’t accept the flow of things, people coming and leaving, you’ll go insane. It will drive you mad, and that’s not something you can afford right now.”