by CT Grey
Jane straightened her back and took out a cigarette from her case. “Just to make it clear, we don’t call it resurrection but siring - making one of your image. Resurrection is God’s business. But don’t think for a minute I’ll tell you how siring works in practice. It’s nothing you need to know. Is that clear?”
“Um…”
“Just say yes ma’am,” Jane said, but it wasn’t just a suggestion as there something magnetically hypnotic in her voice, in her demeanour. It was almost like she was radiating the greatness of a sovereign person, and I felt absolutely compelled to say: “Yes ma’am.”
“There.” She smiled. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No,” I said robotically, before I suddenly realised I really felt sad that her greatness was gone in a blink of eye. “What the hell...?”
“Darling,” Jane said softly as she caressed my cheek gently. “Don’t be alarmed. There’s nothing to worry about. Everything’s all right. But you have to understand that you cannot under any circumstance trust the Damned. They’ll betray you the moment you turn your back on them. Do you get that?”
Just as I was about to say, “I do,” she looked my eyes and said, “There’s one more thing you need to know.”
I flipped open my notebook and picked up the pen, knowing that clicking its end this time wouldn’t set the any of automated machines on. “Go ahead. I’m listening”
She took a drag from her smoke. “Jaq is under my protection.”
Even though I wanted to say we cannot negotiate, I said: “Meaning?”
“You touch her and you’ll see what happens,” Jane said bluntly. “Is that clear?”
As I wrote down her ultimatum I said, “Absolutely. That is perfectly understandable, but I need to know why you hid her condition from us?”
Jane smiled as she finally slid into her seat. “I did it because it was easier for me to let you assume she was dead than let you observe her transformation. If I had, who knows what you could have done with the information? I couldn’t trust you not to use the knowledge to advance your studies on the undead subjects.”
I felt stunned. I remembered that Jaq had hinted about the monstrosities, but I had no idea that she’d gained knowledge, as all she’d implied earlier was that her knowledge was based on the mainstream media headlines. Then as if she’d read my mind she said, “Damien told me about them.”
I blinked my eyes. “Damien told you?”
“Yes.” She blew smoke rings towards the ceiling and then she lowered her gaze and showed me a wicked smile. “Among other things.”
*** Jane ***
So there I was, standing behind Jaq, a hand hovering in the air, while I wondered should I stop her or let her climb out of the window, when behind me the hidden door crashed under the sheer number of screamers ramming against it.
“Jaq!” I spun around with the machete in one hand while I readied the dagger in the other. But Jaq wasn’t listening. If she was, she didn’t react, while I severed the first screamer’s outstretched hands. She wasn’t with me when another screamer pushed the first one aside and jumped on me. We fell against Jaq. The tattooed screamer shrieked as my dagger pushed into his belly and came out the other side. And even though that would have dropped any man, the screamer shrugged it off as if it was nothing. He locked my arm, pushed my chin up and exposed the skin on my neck just as I let my vampire out. Although it happened fast, he wasn’t fast enough.
Not by a long stretch.
With adrenaline pumping through my veins, I could see behind his barcoded head five, eight, probably twenty more, ready to take his place. I let go of my dagger, pulled a hair pin, and stabbed him in the eye, just as the screamer opened his ghastly black mouth. As he rolled aside, howling like a demon, I tried to jump to my feet. But I wasn’t fast enough. Not as Alison’s mob launched at me.
My dear friend – Jaq’s lover – crouched down and screamed like a banshee as one of her soldiers slashed at me. I dodged the strike and stabbed the screamer in the neck, when another slammed into me. In the blink of an eye, I was back on the ground, under her mob that started pulling my arms and legs apart. Alison moved over me and opened her salivating mouth.
But as I was closing my eyes, with a final prayer on my lips, I saw a silvery flash and felt blood splattering all over my face. And before I knew what had happened, there was whirlwind action all around me. Who they were? I didn’t know, couldn’t care. Instead I felt happiness wash through me as I realised I’d not met my end. It’d been a desperate moment, which had ended with blood splattering my face and clogging my eyes. As I was wiping it off I heard: “Jane, my love. Are you all right?”
“Damien?” I frowned. I felt a hand on my face, wiping blood from my eyes.
“Yes dear.” Damien looked at me. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you exactly the same question. Of all the places you could be at the moment, you chose to be here. Don’t you have better things to do than...”
“Than rescuing damsels in distress?” Damien grinned wolfishly. “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He pushed his hand into his grey suit pocket and pulled out a white embroidered handkerchief, just like he’d done in 1789 at the Bastille. “Here, take it.”
I grabbed it from his hand and used it to wipe my face, while he backed away to stand in the middle of the room as if owned the place, and all the corpses in it. Maybe in that moment he did, as he suddenly thrust his rapier down and pierced one of the loose heads. In one swift move he brought the blond head up, looked in her still-moving eyes and brushed her lips with his, just as I heard sobs coming from behind my back.
“Seriously,” I said, as I tried to shield Jaq from Damien’s sight. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m celebrating rescuing you from these abominations,” Damian answered. “Honestly. And you cannot claim I arrived a moment … too late. In fact, you could say I arrived at exactly the right time.”
Somehow, what he was saying didn’t sound right to me. Especially when I knew that he’d not even lifted a finger to rescue me from the morgue, nor had he come to help at the Victorian underground station, or organised an escape from Camp Four. According to what Bee had told me, he hadn’t even bothered after that evening to ring my house to see if I was all right, although the Hospital I’d gone to had been all over the news. But even then, even after all his letdowns, I was willing to play along. “Well, you could have been here a bit earlier.”
Damien rolled his eyes and sighed as if he was already bored talking to me. “Always complaining. But really, why are you here?”
“Me,” I leaned down to grab my dagger. “I came to rescue Alison. That’s what I’m doing here, but I take you were taking an evening stroll, were you?”
“Alison, Alison…” Damien tapped his lip with a gloved finger. “Where do I know…” Then he pointed at the head on the point of his rapier and asked, “You mean her?”
In that moment whatever had held Jaq together broke, and she starting crying aloud. Her wails of sorrow carried out in the night louder than the walking dead could howl. And they were not holding back, as their bellows mixed up into manic cacophony just as I sensed Jaq moving behind me. I turned around and saw her half way out of the window. Her hands were wrapped around the frames, when I grabbed her jacket and pulled her back in.
“Let me go,” she screamed at me. “I want to die.”
“Shush.” I grabbed her chin and started wiping away those tears. “Take it easy, girl. Now is not the time to end your life.”
“Don’t say that to me.” She tried to push me away. And although she moved quickly, she wasn’t any match for my speed as I slapped her.
“Pull yourself together,” I shouted. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’ll make it quick,” Damien commented behind me.
“You,” I said loudly. “Stay out of this. You’ve already done enough.”
“Let me go.” Jaq wriggled in my hold. “
You have no right. I want to—”
“Listen to her,” Damien moaned. “We’ll do it quickly, painlessly.”
We, ringed in my ears as I glanced over my shoulder and saw a large black African, dressed in an old grey duster and a Stetson, standing alongside Damien, while on the other side, under my husband’s arm stood a thin, red-haired woman, stroking Damien’s chest with her gloved fingers. Every bit of her dark green velvet clothing told me about high clan status, while the African’s blooded double-sided battle-axe spoke of his fearlessness. And there was something else about him that I couldn’t put my finger on straightaway. And in that moment, I realised Damien had not just decided to take a casual night stroll in this part of the town.
“You’ve been behind this all along. Haven’t you?”
Damien burst into low, hollow laughter. “You took some time to put that together, darling. Seriously, my love, what do you see in these mortals?”
“They’re my friends,” I snapped, as Jaq made another attempt. I just managed to turn back in time to see her climbing through the window, when a whip snapped in the air, wrapped around her neck and pulled her back to the floor.
“Jaq,” I shouted and slashed out my machete to the whip string in half.
“Oi!” the woman shouted. “You didn’t need to do that. I—”
“You,” I growled at her. “Shut your face. You—”
“Now, now my love,” Damien said calmly. “She saved her. You should show her some appreciation. She did you a favour. In fact, you should show all of us some gratitude for saving you, and your precious mortal from certain doom. If we hadn’t intervened I wouldn’t have my beloved wife and you, your so-called friend.”
I pulled the unconscious Jaq close to my chest and stroked her cheek. She had gone through so much, and I couldn’t blame her for feeling desperate, when the world she’d known was crumbling around us. Where she was going be at the end of the night, I didn’t know, but what I had in my mind was a quite different destiny than Alison had faced.
“My love,” Damien said. “Have you calmed down?”
I nodded. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, when all I wanted to was to turn around and slash that mocking head off from his shoulders. But no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t. There was no way that I could have turned against him. You could say that it would have been easy, but the side of darkness you haven’t ever experienced is ruled by different laws. Old laws, which prevented me from killing him, even if I wanted to. And they had been set in stone a long time ago by the Fallen One, when God had cast him out from Heaven. And although man, with his free will, would have just shrugged his shoulders, we, the Damned ones, didn’t have such a privilege.
In return, we were granted an immortal life that more or less most of the time feels as if it’s a curse. We are not allowed to enjoy life in the way humans are free to do. But then again we are not allowed to take the crown off the Lord’s image and govern them as if they are sheep.
“Excellent,” Damien said. “Then maybe you’ll now have some time to listen what I was about to tell you, when I asked you to have that dinner with me.”
“What,” I frowned. “…are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember?” Damien looked me questionably. “I had a proposal…”
“I don’t know what you were after, when that African…” And in that precise moment, I realised why the black man on his right reminded me of someone. “Is he...?”
“Oh yes.” Damien grinned. “Canaan is the father of the man who fell on the floor of my dining room. It wasn’t meant to happen that way, and all we can assume, is that the virus he’d been carrying started reacting sooner than we’d expected.”
“You knew all that, but—”
“Yet I decided to act innocent?” Damien stepped forward, and pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket and placed a smoke between his lips. “I had no choice. The ambulance was there and what they said about the fever told me that the plan was already going forward quite nicely. But—”
I raised my hand. “Stop.”
“What?” Damien stretched his arms to the side, trying to look innocent.
I sighed and extended my hand. “This is a bit too much. Could I have a smoke?”
He looked at the case in his hand and took a step forward. “I don’t want you near me,” I said, quickly. “Just, please…” Damien rolled his eyes and tossed the case. I caught it in my hand and pulled out a smoke. “And a light?”
“You get your own damn light,” Damien said. “I know you. The moment I give you this one, I’ll never get it back.”
I shook my head unbelievingly. He hadn’t changed since the late nineteenth century, when the government banned opium smoking from the general public.
“You are never going to let me forget I lost your Ronson, are you?”
“It was the original one from the very first batch,” Damien claimed vehemently. “Do you know how much I would get for it now?”
“Nothing. Have you looked outside? It’s hell out there,” I said as I turned around and pocketed the case before I started rummaging around the office desk for a lighter.
“I wouldn’t call that hell,” Damien argued. “It’s nothing like it.”
“Really?” I turned around with a lighter in my hand.
“Yeah.” Damien nodded, and then he pointed with his cigarette at the broken window and asked, “Morgana what would you call that?”
“An opportunity,” Morgana answered. “A bloody good opportunity.”
“To do what...” I asked, even though I wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say. Instead I was far more interested in formulating some sort of escape plan, like there was no tomorrow, as I knew from experience how my husband’s parties often ended. And I didn’t want that sort of ending for Jaq. “…exactly?”
Damien used his rapier as a walking stick as he stepped over the screamer corpses on his way closer to me. “Darling,” he said, “I did it in order to get back our rightful place as the governors of the Earth.” He stopped at front of me to ask: “What other reason would I have to do what I did?”
“But…”
“There are no buts, my love,” Damien shook his finger in my face. “They changed the game. The humans started this. They brought the disease out from the dark pits of Africa, and then they fled away from all of it, as if the genocide meant nothing but an opportunity for them to purge some of unwanted humans from the face of the earth.”
I glanced at Morgana as she moved after her master to pick eyeballs from the mangled corpses as if they were berries, before I asked: “How do you know this?”
Damien laughed. His shoulders shook in the rhythm of bellows that burst from his mouth. After a while he calmed down and wiped the tears from his eyes, while he started explaining: “Because, my love, the Overseer appointed me to this task years ago, when he’d learned that the elite was considering dealing with human overpopulation, as if it was a disease. I didn’t believe it at first, but then another council member agreed, and informed me the Authorities were desperately trying to find a way to reduce overpopulation – ‘trim the excess fat’ I believe they called it, and in the aftermath, give them the chance to emerge as the saviours of the human race.” He turned around and pointed the rapier’s tip towards Monet’s painting. “All they needed was an idea, an inspiration.”
I cocked my brow and asked, “Are you… saying… it was you who gave them the idea?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not. Why would I? All I had to do was to be part of the organisation, and if anything, point out them in the right direction. A direction, which allowed us a chance to move back on top. So there is nothing you can use to argue that I wasn’t the right man, in right place, to give them the right advice.”
He was right, I couldn’t argue that. In all the centuries I had spent with him, Damien had shown he’d always been extremely successful at pulling the strings. The Brooks Men’s club was just a front for his operati
ons, and I can only believe that came about during the last century. The technological information revolution had shrunk the world so much, there was no need for him to travel around the world wining and dining the rich fat cats.
“To be honest,” he said, “in the end it was easy. The men in power had grown so soft. And all they needed was a bit of anarchy.” He paused for a second to stare the painting. “Anarchy is good. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I can relate to Tyrol Durden, and what he says about the modern world, and I’m going to tell you why that is.”
I exhaled smoke through my nostrils as I flicked my gaze towards the broken door. It seemed to be the only way out of the situation, when and if, the opportunity arose. “Go on, then,” I urged him. “I’m listening.”
Damien took a couple of steps towards the middle of the floor and turned around to extend his arms to the side. “The modern world is paralysed,” he shouted dramatically. “Consumer-driven materialism has taken humanity by the throat and made them soft. Just look at them.” He gestured with his hands. “Go on. Take a look. And while you’re doing that, think about why—”
“I don’t have to my love,” I said. “I know you have been taking a huge advantage of their world by exercising your capitalistic ideals.”
“My ideals,” he repeated, sarcastically. “I just took advantage of their ideas; from their set of rules, while I watched them growing soft and weak. As soft as Mister Durden portrays them in his play. And I have to admit I quite like how he says that the world is going to be a better place after the rebellion. He doesn’t fear it. He doesn’t even plan for it. All he cares about is: burning it to the ground.”
I frowned. “What is it you’re saying?”
“Exactly?” Damien took a drag from his smoke.
“Exactly.” I nodded.
Damien was quiet for a few moments before he claimed: “Their world is so broken at the moment. The people don’t even believe in a higher power and there’s no way of fixing it. And with all the dead on the streets, all we have to do is to burn it down, so that the new world order can rise from the ashes like the legendary phoenix.”