by C. W. Ashley
After a few more seconds of searching, Clarissa found a door which she assumed led into the house. She turned the knob slowly with the pistol trained on the door only for it to be pulled open for her. With the dim light coming from outside of the room, a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway. The figure raised his hand and waved before flicking a light switch next to him. Illuminating the ‘barn’ in yellow light. Iggy blinked and Clarissa squinted as the man in front of them came into view.
He was a Blight, typical in every way apart from his clothes. The rotting yellow and green skin on his gaunt face clashed with his high-quality sky-blue shirt and the dark brown sweater vest covering it. He wore academy slacks and beige loafers to complete the outfit. Iggy thought he looked like a zombie professor and wondered if he was ever going to get used to looking at Blights.
“I assure you Miss LaVaye, you don’t need a pistol as fine as that to kill someone as fragile as me, you could shove me down these two steps and save a bullet,” the Blight said to Clarissa, his rough but eloquent voice confirming him to be Hughes. The vampire lowered her pistol and stood still, unsure of how to respond, as her single eye still scanning the shack around her.
“You wanted to talk to me?” Iggy asked, taking a few steps forward towards Hughes.
“I do, Mr. Gainsborough. There is quite a bit to discuss and I inferred that you are probably limited on time, so please join me in my living room. The windows are quite small and I have thick curtains so Ms. LaVaye won’t have to worry about sunlight.” Hughes explained.
“Landlady,” she said curtly. “Call me Landlady, and then you can tell me how you know my family name.”
“Of course, Ms. Landlady. Come through.”
The living room was something straight out of a storybook, oak furniture, a few bookshelves, ornate tea sets and large plush armchairs with patterns of deer and birds. With the windows blocked, the main source of light was a few scented candles that smelled like roasted chestnuts and grape juice. As suspicious as Iggy and Clarissa were, it was impossible for them not to feel comfortable.
After taking their places at three separate chairs, Hughes offered them tea which they declined in unison. After pouring himself a cup he took a gentle sip which looked strange to Iggy. A man that looked like a walking corpse with table manners fitting of a central Citi-zen.
“I know we don’t have much time, even though I am curious how a former top ten derby racer came to be in the company of the most notorious leaseholder in the Folsom shell,” Hughes said calmly with a sip.
“You said you recognized my family name. Who’s Alana Gainsborough?” Iggy asked while folding his arms.
“I had someone…who I wrote letters to, you could call them a long-distance sweetheart of sorts.” Hughes said as he lowered his ornate teacup. “She wasn’t aware of me being a blight so I sacrificed the hope of seeing her in person to keep my...identity a secret.” Hughes continued with a melancholy tone.
Iggy’s gut pinched with guilt as he considered the reality of being a Blight in the Big Waste. Hughes' pale eyes made contact with Iggy’s before taking another, slower sip.
“Like me, she lived ‘off the grid’ in a house out in one of the south zones...5th, I think. She was a kind lady, a foster mother of sorts. Used to take in runaway children and raise them as her own, even some mutants,” he went on.
“So, she looked after mutants but you didn’t want her knowing you were a blight?” Clarissa quizzed.
“Different levels of tolerance, Ms. Landlady. Mutants are only really looked down on in Citadels. Blights are hated everywhere, given our…history with humanity,” Hughes said while trying to avoid looking at Iggy directly.
“This woman was Alana Gainsborough?” Iggy asked
“Yes, but I only found this out recently. She was going by the name Celia Cors publically, but when she hadn’t written back in over a month, I got worried. Against my better judgment, I initiated a background check. Alana was her birth name.”
“Background check? You said she was off the grid,” Iggy said curiously.
“A lot of blights are ex-military, but for him to be able to pull background check in the present day means he must have been pretty high ranking. That’s how you know my family name, right?” Clarissa declared assertively.
Hughes’ nightmarish face stretched into a smirk. “Chief Engineer of R&D. If I stayed in the field, I probably would have been a Captain. But that was another century, back when I still had smooth pretty skin like you two,” Hughes said with a tone of resentment.
“So, this Alana was hiding her real name? Why did she stop sending letters?” Iggy asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me that. I’m aware of the world we live in and the constant death that persists here, but when the poachers mentioned your surname I wondered if Alana meant anything to you,” Hughes said. “Plus, the fact that the poachers are after you for losing some flowers didn’t sit right with me.”
“Losing some flowers? The cargo-?” Iggy couldn’t quite wrap his head around that.
“Yes, sorry. The sapphire vine flower, an uncommon plant that Celia used to grow She said the scent made the children feel cozy and at home,” Hughes explained whimsically. “So, in addition to having them growing in the garden, she used to make perfumes out of the crushed petals to spray the house with. So, a while after she stopped responding, I wanted to start my own sapphire vine garden, mainly for my daughter.”
Those bandits nearly killed me over some fucking flowers?
“Sounds like she was a real saint, but living off the grid with a bunch of runaway kids outside the protection of a Shell or Citadel is a death sentence,” Clarissa said bluntly. “Um, no offense Crasher.”
“None taken, I never knew her. Could have been a grandmother or an aunt or something. How many did she have living with her?” Iggy asked.
“She spoke of at least a dozen in her letters but there could have been more. Some only stayed a day or a week, but her house was open to all. Which was dangerous of course, but the way she spoke of her home, it was like it had a soothing effect on everyone who came in,” Hughes said. “She attributed it to the smell of the flowers. She actually sent me a perfume bottle years ago. The scent is quite potent.”
"If this lady had a chemical that could tame runaways it's possible someone would have been trying to get it. Not difficult to see the value in that," Clarissa mused
Rising up from his chair he walked over to a nearby oak drawer, humming to himself as he rummaged through it. Iggy watched as Hughes pulled out a pear-shaped bottle with a small amount of dark liquid inside it.
"A sample she sent me a year ago, still few drops left," he said while smiling softly, his mind very much on his memories of her.
Hughes sprayed the air around Iggy twice. Clarissa immediately covered her nose and mouth with her forearm in a defensive reflex. Iggy's curiosity led him to lean forward and inhale.
The scent was subtle, dry and fruity. It had the trace of fresh plants that Iggy never would have come in contact within the Citadel, but there was also something oddly familiar in the aroma.
With her face still covered Clarissa questioned Iggy with a muffled, but sarcastic voice. "Does it make you feel all cozy and at home?”
“Maybe if I was twelve,” Iggy responded dryly. Hughes couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Just based on what she told me in the letters, the scent had mixed results. But it did manage to calm down a shifter, a dangerous one at that,” Hughes mentioned while putting the bottle in his breast pocket.
“Shifter?”
“A person that transforms. Celia had a very troubled girl who would turn into a large dog-like creature-”
Hughes paused with the shocked expressions of both of his guest’s faces. Iggy’s head felt cold and heavy as the scent lingering in the air became slightly more familiar. Clarissa turned to him with a similar look of surprise before looking back at Hughes. Before any of them could question further, the softest s
et of footsteps entered the living den.
“Home...I’m home…” said Sil in a tone of disbelief.
Completely naked and with a glassy stare in her eye, the newly-awoken Sil paced over to the middle of the room seemingly oblivious to everything around her. Hughes almost fell backward in shock before taking a longer look at the young werewolf in his house. He noticed that she was breathing deeply through her nose, smelling the air where he sprayed. His voice croaked with disbelief within seconds of studying her.
“Sylvia? My lord is that y-”
There was a sound that started as a loud crack of breaking the glass that ended with a heavy piercing of flesh. A bullet slammed into Hughes’ chest violently, causing him to fly backward and crash into his own desk drawer. Multiple more cracking sounds rattled through the room breaking more glass and tearing across the room; grazing limbs of Iggy, Sil, and Clarissa as the latter dived to the floor hastily dragging the others into crouched cover.
“Shots from the window, Crasher, get your gun!!” Clarissa barked at the top of her lungs while drawing her own pistol and pointing it at a bleeding Hughes who was slumped and gasping for air.
“Friends of yours, Frank!?”
Frank coughed and sputtered as he tried to talk but no coherent words were coming from him. Iggy scrambled behind one of the sofas pulling Sil with him, trying to peer toward the direction of the bullets only to be met with a hail of broken glass exploding from the window.
“Do you hear that!? Those are assault rifles! They’re fucking Poachers!” Iggy yelled over the hell-storm of gunfire.
Over the chaotic noise, a cold, emotionless voice of authority blared through the room, propelled by an amplifier.
“Doctor Francis Hughes, you are guilty of aiding and housing a wanted fugitive; Randall Gainsborough. You have 5 seconds to exit the house and surrender…”
The blaring voice spoke in tandem with the gunfire. Iggy shook his head at Clarissa while clutching one of his bullet-grazed triceps as he saw the bleak reality of the situation.
“Out of zone poachers...they won’t take us alive...that demand is just a formality,” Iggy stated bleakly.
Clarissa turned to Iggy and Sil with a look of pain mixed with desperation. Her leg had been hit as she dived, but her surging adrenaline was preventing her discovery of any other wounds at that moment. She saw Iggy’s shoulder was grazed but Sil was left unscathed.
The most shocking thing for them both was Sil’s demeanor. She was quiet and docile, still in a trance with the blank stare that she entered the room with. She was whispering “I’m home” to herself gently in a very soft human voice repeatedly.
Raising her pistol above the cabinet she was ducking behind, Clarissa let off a few shots of blind fire with her pistol out of combat instinct. Iggy covered his ears in terror.
He called her Sylvia?
Hughes fidgeted in pain, slowly twisting himself into a seated position before extending his hand to Iggy. His blood gurgling slowly forming into the audio of speech.
“Rand..al...my daughter...in the…base...ment. Save...my..daughter...she...can..help you.”
Mouthfuls of very dark red blood seeped down his fine sweater as he spoke in labored rhythms. His pale blue eyes were clear windows into his fading thoughts; a century and a half of life on playback through his old mind. His extended fist dropped a set of two keys in front of Iggy before slumping backward desperately gasping for his last breaths of air.
Broken plates, shattered wood, wall plaster, and brick fragments rained over all three of them like a monsoon, and the jagged splutter of bullets assaulted their ears as if death itself was banging on their doors.
Clarissa cursed wildly as she raised her hand to fire over the cover, poorly trying to establish some level of offense in the gunfight. Only for a high-velocity bullet to tear into her exposed hand. Grunting in pain she dropped her trusted pistol and clutched her new wound, quickly discovering she was now missing her ring finger. Clarissa scowled at her new deformity and shot a look of panic at Iggy, who could only stare blankly at the grisly injury in horror as he covered his head from the cascading debris.
“Fuck! I can’t see how many guns are on us! Get Sil up, we gotta fight!” Clarissa shouted at Iggy as a burst of gunfire chewed up a coffee table a few feet away from her.
“S-she’s exhausted, I don’t even think she knows where she is…” Iggy responded weakly before crawling over to the rapidly-fading Hughes and grasping the bloodstained keys from his hand.
“I’ll get your daughter, I promise. But you know Sil, I need to know how!” Iggy demanded over the sound of gunshots.
“Save...my daughter...she...knows…mor-” were Hughes’s last words before his breath gave out and his eyes rolled back far into his head.
His torso slumped forward and he didn’t move again. Grabbing Iggy’s ankle, Clarissa yanked him out of his exposed position and into cover with her. Both of them watched Sil curled up like a gentle baby. She was robbed of all energy from her last two transformations and still in the same daze since smelling the spray.
“I’m gonna get to the basement. I can’t shoot anyway. If those really are poachers then we aren’t getting out alive without help,” Iggy said with hurried breath as he handed Clarissa his revolver.
“Unless he’s keeping a Blight mercenary squad or another werewolf in the basement, then that ‘help’ won’t count for shit!” Clarissa snapped back in an angry panic.
At that moment the gunfire stopped. There were faint sounds of clunks and clicks that Clarissa instantly identified as reloading, followed by the careful but deliberate footsteps of a slow flank.
“They aren’t talking...must be silent orders through hand signals. Your poachers aren’t fucking around…” Clarissa scoffed with a quivering smile. Iggy offered a smile in return before wincing in moderate pain.
“Door to the basement is gonna be in the kitchen, Crasher. I’ll have better luck against these softneck soldiers once they are up close. Maybe Sil will find her nerve and join in the fun,” Clarissa continued with forced optimism as she reloaded and cocked her pistol.
Iggy nodded slowly. He knew that despite being a vampire, her chances against multiple poachers after being shot in the leg and hand were almost non-existent. He held back tears with the realization that she probably knew it too. He inhaled long and deep before squeezing the keys in his hand in grim determination, before sprinting for the kitchen. He didn’t quite have the nerve to look at Sil or Clarissa’s face before turning to leave.
With her own pistol in her injured hand and Iggy’s much heavier revolver in her ‘good’ hand. Clarissa propped her arms over a bullet-riddled cabinet that gave her a clear view of the front hallway. Her single eye was darting from the door to Sil to the stump of her missing finger that was bleeding quite heavily and coating her pistol all over.
“Anytime you feel like being a savage werewolf again would be great, Sil,” she whispered in a chuckle.
Iggy was crouched low as he entered the kitchen. Despite the bullet holes across the milky pink walls and the various smashed cups and plates on the floor, the room still had a cozy feel to it. With the ever-apparent low chances of survival hanging over his head, he rationalized that this house wouldn’t be the worst place to die. After a stabbing pain from his shoulder kicked his mind back into survival mode, he clenched his teeth as he scanned the room for an entrance to the basement.
The faint sounds of flanking footsteps around the outside of the house filled Iggy with dread. He knew that they wouldn’t infiltrate the house until they had every exit covered, and Iggy guessed Clarissa’s blind fire had the effect of making their entry a little slower with caution which bought them a little bit of time. After taking a crouched step that crunched a small teacup under his boot, he spun his head around in reaction to the noise. Only to find himself facing an open kitchen cabinet that a draft of air was whistling from.
Upon a closer look, he saw that the doors of the cabinet did not
match the decor of the rest of the room. His gloved hand touched the handle and felt the wind rattling from behind it. As he pulled it open, he felt a gust of air that hit him in the face forcefully like a wave of hope as he realized he found the entrance to the basement. The cabinet was just large enough for an average-sized man to crawl through and the pitch-black darkness made that crawl a very nerve-racking descent further inside. Palming his environment blindly, he felt the studded metal sensation of folding steps which he used to climb downwards, carefully but urgently.
The Vampire was hyper-aware of the beams of morning light piercing through the bullet holes in the curtains, knowing that direct contact with that light could burn her to a crisp. But her main concern was the fact the stump of her severed finger wouldn’t stop bleeding. Her supernatural healing ability had the power to seal it in seconds, but during daytime hours she was weak, sluggish and very mortal. Her pink hair was smattered against her face in wild directions, stuck to her temple and cheeks with sweat.
Clarissa was not convinced she would win this fight but refused to die by bleeding out. Holding her breath and bracing all of her nerves she moved her shaking, four-fingered hand towards one of the thinner beams of sunlight. After pushing a discarded tablecloth into her mouth to bite down on, she placed the stump of her finger to the light. Searing, stabbing pain hit Clarissa like a tattoo gun of lit cigarettes. The tablecloth was just thick enough to muffle her agonized screams as the searing sunlight cauterized the wound, burning the blood-flow dry.
She yanked her hand away the moment the stump was sealed and forced herself to pick up her pistol, trying to ignore the smell of her own cooked flesh which was now fairly thick in the air. A single tear pushed from her eye as she shrieked silently into the cloth in her mouth before spitting it out, choosing not to look directly at where her finger once was. She didn’t have the nerve to treat her leg in the same way, so she hastily tied the cloth around the bullet wound as tight as she could before retrieving her gun and pointing it at the door.