by Alan Ryker
“This is how it’s done,” Randall said. And he spoke the truth. You almost felt bad for the alien invaders the way he tore them up—shooting them, grenading them, all while jumping around and evading attacks. He hadn't lost a single life. Randall was good.
Kroger breathed out the lungful of smoke. “I miss Dennis.”
“That’s because you’re a faggot.”
“Fuck you. You’ve been talking about getting even for all that shit. Like, avenging him.”
Randall didn’t look away from the big TV as he spoke, but kept tearing through big, ugly, bug-looking bastards.
“He was my cousin, so what happened to him was an attack on me. It’s like they think I'm too big a pussy to do anything about it. Second, Rob won’t sell any product here until Jessica is gone.” Rob was the dealer who'd supplied Dennis, and who would supply Randall. “He’s paranoid as shit. I guess he thinks she’s going to come after him or something. And from what I heard, he’s getting some pressure from some big players over in Krendel. I don’t know. I don’t care. If she’s all that stands between me and running this whole county, then she’s gone. Dennis was a pussy. That’s why he stayed out here slinging small time instead of coming to Wichita to work with me.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Son, I’ve seen shit you can’t even imagine. The fucking Laotians, Christ. Do you know what they do to people? They cut them up. They will hang you up by your nutsack and carve you to pieces to get a single goddamn block of your territory, and they got it out for me.
“So I get this free place to live, a wide-open market and the worst I have to worry about are some stupid hicks? Do I have to explain any further, dumbass?”
Kroger got up and grabbed his skateboard. He knew he shouldn’t say anything, but Randall got on his nerves. So from the door he said, “And Dennis was the pussy?”
Randall started to stand, but Kroger ran out the door, down the long driveway and hopped on his skateboard out on the street. The trailer was right on the edge of town, so there were no sidewalks. But there weren’t many sidewalks in town, either. Kroger skated in the road. Let a stupid goat-roper hit him with one of their jacked-up pickups. He’d sue the shit out of them and wouldn’t have to stay with Randall anymore.
Kroger squinted into the hot sun. He wished he’d thought to grab a hat. He decided to steal one from the QuickStop and then wear it right outside. He laughed. Roger the owner would shit.
Kroger rolled past other trailers, then into town proper, with its tiny single-story houses in various states of collapse. What a shithole. He skated down the main street, with its abandoned brick buildings. His parents used to tell him about what the town was like when the railroad still went past, how it had a hotel and a movie theater and restaurants. It was hard to imagine. Now it had a gas station.
And now his parents didn’t talk to him anymore. He’d thought that they had an agreement: he stole small amounts of their money and in return he didn’t make them fulfill too many parental responsibilities. He cooked for himself, he stayed out of their hair, and he occasionally stole pot and beer money from them. Yeah, he used to catch a beating from his dad when he got caught, but that was all part of the agreement. At least he thought it was until they finally kicked him out.
That’s how he’d ended up staying with Randall. He kept going to school at first, but with people partying and showing up to buy all night long, he gave up soon. He didn’t really miss it, though he missed home. His parents were kind of messed up, but it was still home.
The air was cool enough if you stayed out of the sun, and some of Kroger’s crew had gathered in front of the QuickStop, where the overhang provided some shade. They shouted his name as he narrowly avoided getting run down by a truck pulling away from the pump.
The sun was just going down as Kroger returned to Randall’s trailer. He had Ben and Stacy in tow. He and Stacy had fooled around before, and he was hoping for more.
When he stepped through the door, Randall was sprawled on his usual place on the couch, but a bigger guy Kroger didn’t know sat in one of the recliners.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Randall asked as Kroger came through the door. When Ben and Stacy came in after, he growled, “Get the hell out of here.”
Kroger turned just as Stacy was about to speak. He grabbed her by the wrist and shook his head. “I’ll see you later, right?”
Stacy snorted. “Maybe.”
“I’m sorry,” Kroger said quietly. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“Get out!” Randall shouted. “You punks have never bought shit anyway, fucking moochers.”
Kroger closed the door behind his friends and turned to Randall. “Dude, cock block.”
“You wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had it,” Randall said. Randall’s big friend laughed at that. “I let you stay here because you’re useful to me. So when I need you, you need to be here.”
“But how was I supposed to—”
“I don’t care. You like smoke? You like my big screen TV? You like a place to sleep? Be here.”
“I was just at the QuickStop.”
“You weren’t at the QuickStop when I went by.”
“Then we went to Ben’s, but—”
“I must be giving you the impression that I give a fuck. Shut up.” Randall gestured to the big man. “This is Tony. He’s from my crew in Wichita. We take care of shit tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“We do Jessica Harris tonight and I establish myself in this shithole.”
Kroger moved his mouth in preparation for words that wouldn’t come. Randall had talked about this for months, but Kroger thought it was just talk. He and his friends talked about bumping people off all the time—the sheriff, the gym teacher, Roger the QuickStop owner. They probably discussed at length killing at least one person every day.
But you didn’t really kill people.
And Jessica, they'd been in the same crew, back before her crazy uncle crippled Dennis. She and Kroger had kind of been friends before that. She was crazy now, but she’d been really nice.
And those legs.
How many times had he imagined working his hand up those legs and into those cutoffs she always wore?
“I think we broke him,” Tony said, laughing.
Randall laughed too, but there was no laughter in his eyes when he looked at Kroger. “You’re going to take us out to her place. Then you’re going to keep watch.”
Randall and Tony stood up. Randall took his 9mm Ruger from between the couch cushions and they walked out. Kroger followed.
Chapter 3
Another heifer had birthed. It was an easy one. Jessica had feared another difficulty, but the hip lock had been a fluke. For whatever reason, being born in the winter gave calves abnormally high birth weights. That sounded like a good thing, but one reason Jessica hadn’t had to deal with the common problem of hip lock was that a spring calf was born at the correct size to fit through their mother’s pelvis. Tamper with Mother Nature and any number of things could go wrong.
But Jessica had no idea how the creature she was about to face fit into Mother Nature’s plan. She couldn’t believe that it did at all.
Jessica called Mr. Nelson, the veterinarian, at home. She explained that she had to go on a surprise trip in the morning, and asked him to send his assistant Mark over every day or two to check on her cattle and feed her dogs until they heard otherwise. She said that the key was in its usual place.
It was not a strange request. Farmers in the area who didn’t have close friends or didn’t want to bother them often took advantage of the service Mr. Nelson offered. If Jessica won the coming fight and wasn’t hurt badly, she’d explain to Mr. Nelson that she didn’t have to take that trip after all. If she was hurt, she’d go stay in a hospital or hotel room in Wichita and recover for awhile. If she died in that silo, at least her animals would be taken care of. She’d leave the dogs in the utility room because their baying reverberated in
the silo and distracted her, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted.
As the sun sank, Jessica geared up methodically. She put on her BDU pants and rash guard shirt and then her knife-proof vest. All had started out black, then become mottled gray after being regularly soaked in diluted bleach.
Jessica sat on the edge of the bed and put on her combat boots. She didn’t like combat boots. Though she prided herself on training how she fought, she refused to run in boots, which would destroy her feet, knees and back and leave her with weak ankles. She made a concession by performing some of her agility training in them to accustom herself to moving quickly with the extra weight on her feet. She wouldn’t wear them at all, but when you were kicking or stomping a vampire’s razor-sharp fangs out, you didn’t want to be wearing Keds.
She stood and slipped on her shoulder holster with her .40 Smith & Wesson beneath her left arm and three extra clips beneath her right. She twisted her upper body back and forth to be sure of the fit. On her belt, she clipped a serrated folding knife, a fixed hunting knife, handcuffs. Her favored hand-to-hand weapon—her machete—she strapped to her long thigh. One of the benefits of being leggy. The machete wasn't of the pressed-steel, bargain variety. It was extra heavy, with a slight concavity near the end of the blade. A limb that was tough enough to have slid all the way to that could be caught and sliced through. It was intended for tree limbs, but she’d found it worked just as well for vampire limbs. She’d ground away the convex roundness on the back of the tip. It made for a slightly lighter swing, which was bad, but it also offered an advantage. Vampires weren’t the smartest foes and often did the work for you by impaling themselves on your blade, but only if the tip was sharp.
She put on the elbow pads she’d picked up at the police supply store in Wichita. They had a hard cup over the padding and would make good blunt-trauma weapons in a desperate situation if the vampire got too close. She flexed her arms. She hadn’t had time to train in them yet, and she wasn’t used to the slight resistance they provided when she bent her elbows. She thought about taking them back off, but remembered how close she’d come to infecting herself by blindly elbowing the last vampire in the head and left them on. She put on her gel-filled handwraps and then her tightly-meshed chainmail gloves, cinching down the heavy leather straps just above her forearm muscles. A year ago, there wouldn’t have been anything to keep those gloves from sliding down, but her long, once-soft forearms bulged with muscles and tendons strengthened from ranch work and weight training.
Finally, she tightened the tether of her last-ditch weapon to her left wrist: a two hundred kilovolt stun gun. She’d practiced flipping it up into her hand so many times she couldn’t even hazard a guess. A hundred thousand? A million? As she ran around her worn track, she flipped it up into her hand over and over until the movement became automatic. As she ran through the high-grass of her pastures, she practiced catching it at a moment’s notice. She even did it during her agility training, hopping in and out of the spaces of a ladder laid on the ground or practicing foot work around cinderblocks.
Jessica walked out of the house with her helmet in one hand and her stun gun in the other. As she walked to the silo, over and over she unconsciously snapped the stun gun into her hand and hit the trigger, only the safety switch preventing the blue arc and menacing crackle.
The sun was just beginning to set. She could have fought the monster during the day, but it would be lethargic. She told herself that this would be her final fight. She knew that she was pushing too far, that if she didn’t stop she’d eventually create a vampire too powerful to beat, or even worse, one that could escape the silo. She couldn’t be responsible for more deaths.
As she stood before the ground floor door to the silo and put on her paintball helmet, she thought of her parents and her uncle Keith, who would still be alive if she hadn’t gotten tangled up with Dennis. As she pulled the straps on her helmet so tight they hurt—one of her greatest fears was a vamp knocking the mask around, blinding her—she thought of how Keith had battled Dennis in his dirty work clothes with his camping gear. He didn’t need armor or fancy weapons. But she was a one hundred and sixty pound, seventeen year-old girl. She did what she had to do.
Once her helmet was in place, she put on what she considered her most important piece of armor: the rattlesnake rattle necklace Keith had given her. Jessica wasn’t exactly superstitious, but it seemed that she should have died before then. She should have died a year ago. But Keith had told her that legend said the tail would protect her from fanged creatures, and it had. He’d also told her that keeping the skull was bad luck, and it had been for him. Snakes bit even after they were dead, and so did vampires.
She only wore the necklace while she hunted, so as not to diminish its powers.
Jessica opened the padlock and set it aside, then put her hand on the handle. The vampire knew she was there. She could feel it waiting, though it had never seen her go in through that door. She gripped her stun gun in her left hand. It wasn’t a fair weapon. It was like a pause button. It stopped a vampire as surely as it stopped a human, though a vampire recovered almost instantly. If she wanted an unfair fight, she’d just shoot it from one of the upper openings, or pour gasoline on it and light it on fire, as she’d done to a previous vampire. The small explosion of flame out of the top had caught her by surprise and she’d almost toppled backward off the ladder. Another surprise came when the flames covering the vampire went out, and it was still moving. The vampire itself wasn’t flammable enough to sustain the burning until it died. So she ran to the porch, got a bottle of lighter fluid and kept squirting it she’d emptied the bottle. Eventually, it burned until it didn’t move and didn’t heal. She later dragged it out into the sun to properly dispose of it.
Jessica opened the door and tossed in three glow sticks. Enough light came through the open door to discourage the vampire from charging. Instead it roared, and the stink that Jessica could never get used to blasted across the silo into her face. Holding the stun gun out, she shut the door behind her with her handcuffs in her hand. That was the most dangerous moment, because shutting the door wasn’t enough. If she didn’t survive the fight, she couldn’t allow the vampire to escape. So she tried to quickly clamp a cuff across the exposed levers of the latching mechanism to prevent it opening.
Jessica kept her eyes on the vampire, but couldn’t get the cuff latched, and the longer she took, the more likely it was to attack. Finally she risked a peek back at the door. When she looked back at the vampire, it was in the air. She dropped the cuffs to the concrete and hurled herself to the right and onto the ground, rolling through to her knees. The vampire slammed into the door and pushed off, redirecting at her.
It shocked Jessica, how aggressive the creature had become. Over the multiple battles it had won, it had grown accustomed to its increasing power. It was no longer a parasite, but a predator.
Jessica hadn’t yet recovered from the first charge, so she cheated. She stunned it.
The vampire maintained its feet for a moment and tried to back up, but she pressed forward, and it dropped to the ground, convulsing and raking its claws against the concrete.
Jessica had just enough time to stand and draw her machete before the vampire rose. It didn’t immediately charge again. It seemed to have learned some caution.
With her left hand held forward and the machete in her right hand settled lightly on her right shoulder, ready to swing, Jessica got the first close look at this creature that she’d gotten since she’d dropped it into the silo more than a month prior. It had changed.
It had always been an ugly, paunchy old man, but it had gotten even uglier. Its shoulder joints had gotten looser and wider. Its forearms had grown so that it could drop to all fours when it needed to. The muscles jumped and twitched ceaselessly beneath its skin, as if the small body couldn’t contain the evil within it. But its face was its most horrible aspect, because as it stared back at her, it looked almost human. Then it roared, an
d its mouth stretched and its already enormous fangs flexed out even further.
It wore a watch. A big, metal watch.
Jessica shuffled forward like a fighter, keeping her base, never letting her feet cross. She knew that keeping her left hand out confused it. It didn’t know how to get past to attack a vital spot.
She used its confusion by sliding forward and slashing, once high right to low left, then high left to low right, then back to her shoulder. It was a balance between attack and defense. The tip of the blade slid through chest muscle on the first swing, but the second hit only air.
The vampire moved so quickly. If she wanted to really hurt it, she’d have to dedicate to her attack.
She normally didn’t have a problem doing that, but its initial aggression threw her off her game. Watching it stand back and consider the pain in its chest as thick, black blood welled out brought back her confidence. She charged, putting her whole body behind a swing at the crook of its neck that should have hacked it from gullet to groin. But it wasn’t there anymore. It stepped to its right then lunged. Jessica had just enough time to get the tip of the machete pointed forward and cup the palm of her left hand beneath the pummel before the vampire hit. The machete went through its torso easily, and its eyes widened even as it slashed at her chest. Its claws glided over her vest, but she planted her heels and wouldn’t be moved. That fucking animal wasn’t going to determine the pace of their fight, even if she had to stay in the pocket.
Jessica pressed down on the machete and it slid through abdominal muscle and gut until it stuck on the creature’s hip bone. Before she could yank the blade out, the same hand that had impotently raked across her armor smashed back-hand against her helmet.
The helmet was intended to stop paintballs, not wrecking balls. The next thing Jessica knew she was lying on the concrete watching the vampire drag the machete out of its belly and toss it aside. It looked at her with even more menace than before and roared, and its guts began to fall out of the huge wound. It gathered them and shoved them back in with hands made awkward by long claws. Holding its stomach with one hand, it came at Jessica.