by Lee Hayton
I felt like a neon sign was mounted on the car as we pulled out into the evening traffic. As the hood nosed under the streetlights, it glared an angry yellow. That was meant to be the best color for a vehicle. Yellow. The safest because it stood out as an eyesore, drawing attention.
Well, if the cops were out in force tonight, they’d get a hell of a shock. Perhaps he could skate by if he took his hands off the wheel and pretended the car was a self-driving one. Probably not. Unless the cop was human, the bots automatically knew.
“Here, here,” Erika called out, thumping on Norman’s arm in case he’d missed her shrill cries. “Turn here.”
She flung her hand out in front of my face, pointing to the left. I turned, following her direction, his back now rigid as a board as I waited for another shocking cry.
It came within a few minutes, and I turned the car into a quiet street with large elm trees lining either side. A dead leaf floated down to land on the windscreen. Fall coming. Winter soon. Things got hard for fugitives in winter.
“Here!” Erika threw both hands up in the air. When I turned to her in confusion, she cackled with laughter again. “Right here,” she said, pointing at a house to the right. “This is home.”
Shit. Erika had money then, even if she didn’t have sense. As I pulled up the drive, more and more of the house came into sight. She mightn’t live in one of the gated communities that had sprung up when the rich objected to sharing their cities with the poor, but it wasn’t far off. No wonder Erika hadn’t seemed upset to wake up in a dumpster. I bet that there’d never been a situation that daddy’s money hadn’t managed to buy her out of.
Of course, that was sexist. Although it was apparent to me that Erika had never worked a day in her life, it could equally be her mommy’s money keeping her out of trouble.
She clambered out of the passenger seat, finding it so much trouble that Erika ended up on her hands and knees on the driveway. Gravity was not this woman’s friend.
I turned around and looked at Jimmy, shrugging. We couldn’t stay around here. Half the neighborhood would take one look at us loitering and phone the police.
They were high enough up the social strata that the damn cops would probably come, too.
I looked back out at Erika as she pulled herself up to her feet, using the door as support. If she stepped away, I could steal the car and move onward. Sure, it would be reported stolen—either in a few minutes or the next morning when Erika woke up with a hangover—but I thought we could probably get somewhere a bit more ‘blend-friendly’ before anybody caught up to us.
Instead, Erika hung on the door and poked her head back inside. “You coming in, then?” she asked with a big grin. I glanced at Jimmy and shrugged again. This was too easy.
“Sure, why not?” I said, opening the door.
I followed along behind Erika’s weaving steps, sitting down in the lounge when she flung an arm in the direction of the couch. “Make yourselves at home,” Erika said with a giggle before walking upstairs.
I tensed as she started to pull off her shoes while holding onto the banister one-handed—that was a hell of a fall waiting. Her lucky charms must have been looking out for her, though. Although one of her shoes made the leap downstairs, the rest of her continued up.
I had no idea what making myself at home entailed, but Jimmy slouched straight down on the couch. While he wriggled his bum and his toes, he looked around in amazement. After a few moments, I joined him—perching on the edge.
“Do you think she’s a billionaire or something?”
“Either that or her parents are,” I whispered back. “It’ll be good to hide out here for the day, but tomorrow we need to think about where we’re going. To stay out of the empire's clutches, we’ll need a solid plan.”
In return, Jimmy decided that the best course of action was turning on the TV. He pressed the buttons on the remote with urgency as the sound blared out, loud enough to wake the undead.
“Give it here,” I said, reaching over to take it.
Jimmy held it out of my reach. “No. I’m doing it!”
I stared at him, annoyed beyond belief. Jimmy had that effect on me from the first moment I’d come to, chained to this ridiculous fool, down in the vampire slave pits.
Chapter Three
Three days earlier
The silver chains burned. They were meant to, of course, even I knew that, but it didn’t stop it from hurting.
The empire had a century worth of experience in restraining vampires, and still, the best they could come up with was a metal that ate into our flesh. The only respite was to move the chain along. The burned tissue would heal while a new area charred.
Bastards.
I’d been out of captivity for long enough to start to forget the million small miseries that collected into a day of slavery. The burned wrists were terrible. The dank smell of sweat and fear down in the pits was worse. That scent grew until it was a physical force punching against my nose, trying to crawl into the small gap of my mouth, clambering over my teeth and tongue until it could dive down my throat.
I hated that smell.
Sometimes, I even dreamed of being human again and able to shit. That way, I could have created a new stench strong enough to cover over the old.
Vampires don’t shit, though. It’s funny the things that I miss the longer I remain undead. Everything that used to be awkward or uncouth about being human seems like a treat that I’m missing out on.
“Hey,” the vampire next in line to me said.
I looked in the other direction. This wasn’t a good time for conversation. Not with the last shred of freedom still caught between my teeth.
But he persisted. “Where’d you come from, mate?”
When I was a kid, my mother had sent me to a Catholic school, even though there was a perfectly good state school just down the road. This was long before all the kiddy-fiddling revelations when religious institutions were still considered a good thing. It meant taking a streetcar and a bus to get there every morning and waking up at six-thirty to be assured of arriving on the dot of nine.
The bus was just for the school, so wasn’t too much hassle. As soon as I got aboard, I could rest my head against the window and doze.
The first part of the journey, though? That one was just your bog-standard public streetcar full of the great unwashed. No matter if I tried to wrangle a double seat by pretending my school satchel was a person, half the time I ended up with an adult crammed in next to me.
At least once a week, that adult would be ‘Tinhat Fred’ who didn’t understand conversational cues. He would jabber at me for the entire journey while the helmet that supposedly saved his life during the first world war bobbed about on his head.
It only took a few minutes before I put my new neighbor in the same category.
“I saw that they brought you in with a new truckload,” the fool jabbered on as though I’d given him an open invitation to talk. “I guess the empire decided to sweep the streets clean again, hey?”
The only thing I hated more than forced conversation was inaccurate babble. “I wasn’t in a truckload,” I protested, turning a scowl toward the vampire.
Too late, I saw his eyes dance with glee. The idiot had engaged me. Ugh. What a dimwit I could be sometimes.
“It was just a friend and me,” I finished lamely. If the chains hadn’t been shackled around my ankles as well as my wrists, I would have kicked myself.
“Your friend somewhere down here?” The vampire’s eyebrows shot up in a query.
I wondered if he’d been the last vamp in the chain for so long that he’d grown lonely. Whatever the reason, lucky me.
“She’s been taken somewhere else.”
I tried not to think about where they’d have taken Asha. Better not to dwell on what happened in the upper levels and what they might be doing to her there.
“Have you heard about the planned uprising?” my new best friend asked.
“Fo
r fuck’s sake, Jimmy. Shut your trap!”
The command came from a dim figure on the other side of the pit. The troublemaker side. There, rather than having a line of vamps shackled together, cuffs hooked each one separately to steel bolts in the walls.
If only the shackles were made from steel, too, it would be a simple matter to pull free. Try that with silver and it made no difference what your pain threshold was, the strength in your arms would be sapped and weakened as it burned through the flesh. By the time it ate through to the bone, its nasty effects would travel all the way through the musculature of the entire arm, eating its strength the same way it bit into flesh.
The troublemakers weren’t usually talkative. Leastways, they hadn’t been the last time I’d been down in the pits. Every day brought some new level of disgusting torture for them to perform. If they didn’t, then the burning of silver would be the least of their worries. The guards would let them try sunlight on for size, instead.
Now, that stuff REALLY burns.
“When’s feeding time? It seems like it’s running late.” Jimmy asked.
Offered a reprieve by his easy distraction, I went back to sulking and staring at the cement floor. The respite was short-lived, however. Soon an elbow was nudging into my ribs.
“So, did you hear about it?” Jimmy whispered. Or attempted to, anyway. The result wasn’t what I’d call a success.
“Jimmy. For fuck’s sake. What’d I just tell you?”
“He’s down here like the rest of us,” Jimmy protested. “What the hell’s he going to do with the information? Tell a policeman?”
“Sell the information to the guards and use it to free himself at our expense.”
Judging by the frown and widening eyes on my next-door neighbor, the thought had never occurred to him.
“I wouldn’t do that,” I interjected. There was no way that I needed suspicion to be added to my list of woes. “Don’t worry about telling me your plans or whatever. I just want to get some kip. It’s been a long day.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall. The one good thing about being the end of the line was the luxury to fall asleep with one side of my body free from the touch of another vampire. I mean, sure, they’re the same as me, but down here that’s the problem. Hygiene isn’t top of the list for slaves. The empire’s guards thought that washing was synonymous with giving us a quick hose down.
“Where are you from?” This time the guy asking questions was the troublemaker who’d just told Jimmy to shut his trap.
“Does it matter? I’m from down here now, aren’t I?”
I don’t remember vamps being so chatty down in the holding pits before. Back during my first time around, everyone kept pretty much to themselves. It was hard enough to exist with other creatures always living just a few inches away. Add conversation to that mess, and we lost the only privacy we had—our own thoughts.
“How long were you out for?”
The troublemaker again. I gave an exaggerated sigh followed up with a yawn and put my head down on the hard concrete. Sheer luxury.
“Hey, kid. The elder asked you a question!”
Gee. Thanks, Jimmy. I hadn’t heard.
“I’ve been out for a few years. Three, four. It doesn’t make a lot of difference, does it? I’m back here now.”
“Where did you live?”
Come on, guys. Take a hint. “What the hell does it matter to you? If you were planning on going there, I’m pretty sure the empire wiped the place clean.”
“We need bolt-holes around the city. The more, the better.”
“What?” I stared at the troublemaker, trying to make out his features in the dim lighting. Yeah, he looked pale and dried out enough to be an elder. The vamp should know better than to be chatting away when the guards could be along at any time.
“You’re stuck in the pits, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t think a crummy apartment in the lower western suburbs is going to help you out much.”
Jimmy began to chuckle and rock back and forth. “We have a plan, though. We’re all going to escape and live free forever!”
“Yeah,” I said, “on the outside, we heard rumors about that. Good job keeping it on the down low. I guess half the city knows about it by now.”
“You heard about it?” Jimmy’s voice cracked with disappointment.
I understood his frustration. It was probably the first time in ages he actually had a good story to share with someone and here I was, taking the wind out of his sails.
“It doesn’t matter what rumors were going around topside. It’s too late for anyone out there to stop us.”
“Michael. Perhaps we should be more careful.” Jimmy turned to me and peered at my face closely. In a whisper, he said, “This one could be a spy.”
The laughter that burst out of Michael was strong enough to make his chains clink against the wall. “Good one, Jimmy. I’ll remember that.”
I ignored the two of them, putting my head back down on the concrete and closing my eyes. Back home, I would have been lying on my bed with Miss Tiddles sitting on my chest, purring. Sometimes she didn’t find my body the right shape for comfort and would push her paws into me, alternating them until I transformed into a more comfortable bed.
“The plan is to free all the vampires held by the empire, all at once.” Jimmy again. What a dickhead. At least it showed that the information Asha had pretty much traded our freedom for was the truth. Idiotic but true. If only I could take back the past few days, I’d be a lot happier.
If only I could trade in Jimmy and Michael for my cat, I’d be ecstatic.
“You don’t have to be on board, nothing like that. But if you gave us the information about your apartment, that could be worth something.” Michael clicked his tongue a few times, as though mulling it over. “We might be able to offer you a better position in the army in return.”
“I don’t want a position in your force, thanks, mate.” If only the chain wouldn’t have eaten deeper into my wrist if I flipped to the other side, I could switch so my back was to him. “I’m fine not being part of your imaginary army at all.”
The two vamps quietened down after that, leaving me alone long enough for me to fall asleep.
I didn’t actually do that, though. Instead, I kept my eyes closed and saw all the mistakes I’d made, leading up to this moment. Petulant, sulking, forcing Asha into doing things that were better left undone until we ended up back in prison.
I was a stupid kid at the best of times. It seemed no matter how many years of practice I had, it didn’t lead to better decision-making.
Call the vampires idiots for believing that their plan could ever have a chance of succeeding, but I was the bigger idiot. I actually thought I was smart enough to change.
The amount of stuff I’d forgotten about being held in slavery was staggering. Not just the chains and the smell, but the way the guards woke us in the night. No need for subtle alarms when you get a quicker response from a klaxon horn.
The noise gave me the fright of my life.
With all thoughts of sleep gone, I staggered to my feet and fell into line behind Jimmy. They led us through into the feeding station, parking us all in front of a long bar with paper cups already set out.
The blood in the cup was cold and congealed. Bad enough, but it had also been mixed.
Asha’s blood was always slightly sweet. It tasted of honey and metal shavings. After I finished, I’d have a tingle on my tongue the same as sucking on a 9v battery.
This blood was laced with the alcohol from the drunks who’d supplied it. ABO mixed together, regardless of flavor. I can’t stand O blood types. The universal donor was synonymous with bitter, as far as my taste buds were concerned.
Once, when I was a kid, my dad let me take a long swig of his coffee. The stuff that Mom occasionally let me drink was always piled full of sugar and cream and tasted like a milkshake. His coffee was out of a thermos and poured out as black as midnight.
A few swallows and my throat buzzed with energy while my taste buds buzzed with distress. O positive was like that, O negative tasted more like nettles. Either way, putting it together with the other groups just tainted everything into a big jumbled mess.
While fighting not to vomit the stuff back up, I let myself be pulled along to the next room. Here, the guards unhooked and rehooked our chains until we all stood in new configurations. Each in a group of four, rather than a line of twenty. From there, we were shuffled down the tunnel to the outside world, ready to work.
At no point did anyone explain what was happening. As we were bundled into the back of a truck, the driver didn’t bother to illuminate us as to the destination.
After the years of Asha going on in monotonous detail about where she was going and what she was doing, the lack of information brought its own new shocks.
Still, it didn’t take too long to work out where the truck was headed. The stench of human waste grew stronger as we drove farther from the holding center. Only one workplace smelled like that. The fertilization conversion center on the edge of the city.
Forget missing being able to take a shit. Within minutes of being led out of the truck and put to work, I’d no stomach left for that at all. If only my sense of smell had died along with my heartbeat, I’d have been a much happier vampire.
It may not be hell but processing raw human sewage into plant fertilizer sure came close.
My watch had been stripped from me when the guards first caught Asha and me. I hadn’t had to pay attention to the passage of the moon and stars for so long, I found it hard to relearn the skill set to tell the time. After struggling for a few hours, I gave up.
What did it matter, anyway? All I had to look forward to was getting back on the truck as morning came and returning to the pit. A day of silence if I was lucky and maybe a few hours of snatched sleep. Then back out to the waste plant or some equally noxious destination.