by Gwynn White
18
Things were looking up, but also revealing exactly how difficult their task might be. Borona had been ridiculously delighted at being given permission to hack to his heart’s content, and he’d been quick and thorough in the doing of it.
The girl—when she was Christina and not Thalia—had been a child, but one who was given more permissions than most children her age. It likely had to do with her being ill, and then terminally ill. Telling a child that they can’t watch a movie until they’re older isn’t logical when a child will never get older.
Her electronic trail was one that started much like any girl her age. Princesses, cheesy romances with perfectly happy endings, finding young love. But then things had taken a much darker turn, though in a roundabout way. The cohesive image provided was one of frustration turning to anger. First it was superheroes who weren’t quite so heroic, then darker films with more violence.
It was a picture of rage against the machinery of the modern world that would deny her a life.
Her search history outlined this change in stark, black and white, progression. Leukemia. Documentaries and conspiracy sites outlining the rise of the disease and linking it to irresponsible corporate and industrial behavior. From there it was other diseases caused—or potentially exacerbated—by more greed-fueled behavior.
The bottom line was that the girl Thalia took was filled with a seething rage at her fate. She blamed the modern world and those who made fortunes from poisoning others. Her rage was further fueled by her absolute inability to do anything about it. She would die, but without even causing a ripple of disquiet in a world gone mad for more stuff, no matter the cost.
It was not a good mix, Thalia and this girl. And the way Thalia had spoken when she talked to Girard about tasting the air and water convinced Girard that Thalia was, in fact, very locked into the human girl’s emotions. But was it accidental or on purpose?
Had that girl been chosen for her rage? Or had it merely been that she was a ticket out of Egypt, a pretty girl with sky-blue eyes and parents with a little money? There was no doubt that Thalia must have stolen a different body upon waking, some anonymous missing person from the crowded Egyptian underclass that found her tomb. But that body would have been of little use to an ancient who truly believed she was a goddess, or at the very least, an eternal queen.
A pretty girl from the shining land across the sea was another thing altogether.
Her followers were a little easier to track now as well. Thalia had acquired a burner cell—Yadikira had confirmed that when she saw the pink phone—and she was communicating, which meant at least some of her followers were well entrenched in the modern world. In two cases of commercial fires, there was evidence of a missing employee or former employee with a clear grudge against the company.
Pictures and names of those persons who were sought for questioning gave Borona an excellent place to start looking. While they too had stopped using their original phones and disappeared, the information allowed Borona to backtrack and find a place to connect them with Thalia. Eventually, the police would make those same connections, so the Guardians were now also pressed for time, in a race with law enforcement to find the perpetrators.
One thing was absolutely certain. Thalia and those working for her could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to be taken by human law enforcement. A conspiracy like this would draw their biggest guns eventually, and there’s no way her vampire nature would remain undetected once captured. A single x-ray would reveal the vampire inside. Even a physical exam would provide enough hints that any doctor worth his or her salt would search further. Girard felt that they had to capitalize on their head start, and find them very soon, well before any human organization might.
Thalia was working out of Chicago or its close environs. At least, all the trails led back to that city. Two vampires of unknown age registered by the North African Guardians were tracked via their passports from Cairo to Chicago’s airport, neither of them having ever come to North America before. Both vampires’ phones were discarded at the airport and all computer use came to an abrupt end there. It was too suspicious and coincidental not to be connected with Thalia.
Feeds from CCTV followed another group of entirely unregistered vampires leaving a chemical warehouse only moments before it burned to the ground. Though covered from head to toe and unidentifiable, human law enforcement couldn’t know what the Guardians did. The tell-tale glint behind dark glasses and the ridge of heat tentacle scars at the base of a palm exposed for just a few frames told the tale of vampires.
To humans, it looked like a fire set to cover a theft. Sure enough, those vampires were pushing carts filled with something covered in quilted moving blankets. A tantalizing, but fear inducing hint that they were on the right track. Thalia had something very nasty in the works, something that needed chemicals. But what exactly? Bombs?
Even more alarming for the Guardians were the recent fires and deaths—or maybe disappearances that might have been covered by deaths—at two pharmaceutical research and manufacturing facilities.
Marcus had inadvertently led to them looking at such fires in a different light by remarking on Thalia’s use of plague rats almost two thousand years ago. The combination painted an unsettling picture of what her endgame might be. Germ warfare; the most deadly and difficult to defend against type of warfare anyone could wage. Only a global thermonuclear war would extract a higher toll and that was—luckily—out of her reach. While they had been tempted to think her interest in burning down these firms had something to do with her disease, it was far more likely that she was seeking material for something else.
But what materials was she taking? There was no way to be sure yet. And who did she have following her that could make diseases? What poor human had been taken by a vampire in order to use the knowledge in his or her hijacked head?
Girard was collating the latest results with Lila and a reluctant Marcus—who was still deeply in the hold of his new body’s interests and had an attention span which needed some work—when Borona burst into the room.
“Boss, you gotta…I got…ugh,” he stopped there and bent over, out of breath from running through the complex. When he looked up, he asked, “Are you sure they’re vampires? I don’t think they’re vampires. I mean, you can’t believe—”
Girard interrupted him there. The poor man looked like he was going to faint. “What do you mean? Just calm down and say it slowly.”
Marcus stood up and tossed a wadded up paper across the room and directly into the trash can. “Whoosh, nothing but net,” he said, then added to Girard, “Dumper. Bet you twenty bucks.”
Confusion creased Borona’s face, but he sucked in a deep breath and tried to organize himself. “You have to see for yourself. And also, they stole an elephant.”
“An elephant?” Girard asked, thinking he absolutely must have heard that wrong.
Holding his hands apart, Borona nodded and said, “A big one.”
They clustered around the screens and watched in horror as Borona pulled up the feeds. The same snippet of dark and jerky video was being shown all over the world, on every news channel. It was a vampire nightmare come to life.
If this was a vampire.
Taken during the dark of night, the being in question was only visible as a blurry smudge, but there was no mistaking what happened in the video. Outside the entrance to a zoo, under the big sign arcing over an open area at the entrance, a few darker shadows moved across the area to disappear into the gloom. The footage was clearly taken by some sort of security person, because a male voice close to the camera shouted, “Don’t move! I’ve already called for backup!”
The second that fear overtook the man was evident in the way his breathing changed. The sound shifted from the rapid breaths of a man who was excited and perhaps moderately fearful, to a wheezing, deep push of air with a hint of whimper to it. Girard gripped the back of the chair Lila sat in so tightly that the frame creaked in pro
test. He really didn’t want to see, but then again, he really did.
A rapid movement drew the guard’s attention and the phone bounced, blurring the image as he turned toward it. His flashlight began moving erratically. He seemed to understand that he was being surrounded. The phone focused on his feet when he used his radio, the crackle of it loud against the speaker.
“Front gate needs backup! Front gate! Something’s really bad. I don’t know how many. Get the cops here!”
A scratchy return of two voices stomping over each other acknowledged him, but the words that they would be there soon didn’t comfort the man, because he whipped around, letting out a whine of fear. “Who are you? What do you want? Go away!”
Everyone in the room tensed as the fear ratcheted up, fully palpable to anyone watching the raw footage. Girard had the passing thought that he hoped this man’s family never saw this.
“Holy fuck!” the man shouted, but the phone or body camera didn’t see what he saw, only two feet wearing black shoes darting with unnatural speed out of sight. The man spun, but it was obvious by the strangled noise and jerking motion that he wasn’t doing it himself. The camera caught his other hand as it pushed out and away, then the scream began.
Borona hit pause rather abruptly and they all saw why. As the phone fell from the man’s hand, a brief and all too grainy glimpse of what had him passed in front of the lens. Girard almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. That couldn’t be a vampire. No way.
“Dumper,” Marcus pronounced, peering closer at the screen. “That’s disgusting.”
Girard couldn’t marry what he saw on the screen with any potential physical reality. The person—or whatever—was male and shirtless, a dark swath of cloth still hanging from one frozen arm as he flung it away. The chest was normal, but below the ribs all the nightmares began in earnest. Two fleshy pipes reached from the abdomen, the color a grayish-pink in the poor light. From other spots on the abdomen and flaring into view from the back of the man were feeding arms, but bigger than any Girard had ever seen, and spatulate at the ends. The man wore a ski mask, but the fabric near the mouth had been torn away and more arms extended from his mouth. Even worse, Girard could see them coming from under the edge of the mask, from the front and back of the man’s neck.
It was hideous beyond belief.
Borona was watching them all, then glancing at the screen, waiting for some explanation. Girard had none to give him other than what Marcus had told him about dumpers. But that couldn’t possibly be a normal configuration for a vampire. How could one function in daily life with that mess going on inside them?
“Well,” Borona prompted, jabbing at the screen. “What the hell is that? It isn’t a vampire.”
Marcus snorted, then said, “Yes, it is absolutely a vampire. Just a really old one.”
Borona stared in disbelief, his mouth opening and closing a few times. He looked back at the monstrosity on the screen. “Is this what happens when we get old? No one told me about this! No wonder hardly any of us make it to venerable and even fewer to ancient. No one wants that. I will not let that happen to me.” His final words were punctuated by another jab at the screen.
For all Girard knew, that would happen given enough time, but if so, he’d never seen it before this moment and he’d seen a lot. He was old for a vampire even at seven hundred, but his youth in France meant that he’d been at the crossroads of history at the right time. He’d met many of the old ones. And there had been many more venerables back then. Times changed more slowly back in those days, advances came less quickly and life remained much the same through the generations. It was only since this country was born that time had sped up.
And with that speed came those who could not tolerate any more changes. That was what killed vampires: change. It might technically come from sleep, or from not switching bodies, but the true cause was too much change and too much time. He’d felt it himself, that sensation that he wasn’t like others anymore. His care with this body was partly because he didn’t think he could handle entering a young person of today. Marcus had given him some hope for that, but perhaps that ancient was merely one of the few who could handle it. One of the few who might last.
Yet not even Marcus had seen a dumper vampire before. He’d heard of them only as fantastical stories of imaginary beasts. Not even those had come close to this reality on the screen. Vampires could never co-exist with humans in such a state.
Lila seemed to be least affected by the sight, her eyes traveling the exposed vampire on the screen with clinical interest. Waving at the screen in general, she said, “I have two questions. One, what are the humans saying about this and two, how quickly can we get Doran here? I think we’re going to need him.”
Girard agreed with her, but had one further question. “What happened to the man in the video and did they leave a body behind to be studied?”
“We’d all be packing to go live in huts somewhere near the south pole if that were the case,” Lila said, her tone aggrieved. A blinking red light on the comms panel made her sigh. “Okay, well, we might need to pack. The Council is calling.”
19
The questions that wouldn’t leave Girard alone rang around in his head for the thousandth time. Like every other time he’d asked these questions of himself, he had no answer this time either. He sighed.
Marcus, who had been relegated to the back seat of the car due to his frequent squeals and near-screams at every turn or swerve, reached up to smack him on the shoulder and asked, “If you keep sighing like that, I’m going to start composing sonnets of lost love. I’m good at that. Well, limericks are what I’m good at, but I’ll still compose a few.”
Borona—who happily took the legroom available in the front seat during the switch—snorted. “Yeah, if you do that then you don’t know him very well. Love is never on his agenda. If he’s sighing, it’s because he’s got a puzzle he can’t figure out.”
Lila said nothing, but when Girard glanced at her in the rearview mirror, she gave him a little smile. Love was definitely in the air with her. Doran would be arriving at the Guardian compound before they returned and despite everything going on, it was obvious that Lila was very much looking forward to it.
Marcus, on the other hand, made a rude noise and said, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard! Love is the whole point of this life. You should grab it, let your heart break when you lose it, then grab it again like it’s the first time! It’s the only thing that can nearly kill us, but leave us stronger for the next bout.”
Shifting his gaze back to the road, Girard asked, “Is that your secret to a long life? Love?”
Marcus yanked on Girard’s seat as he pushed himself up between the two front seats to talk to them. Despite his memories, he was simply too excited about riding in a car to have much in the way of manners. “No…well, maybe. I always say it’s because I’m eager to see what happens next, but it might be love. I do fall in love quite a lot.”
Lila grinned slyly. “You mean like that Germanic harridan you keep talking about?”
Marcus snorted and made a warding sign that Girard hadn’t seen in centuries, the kind people used to keep away the evil eye. “Don’t even bring her up! She’ll show up if you mention her too often. My gods, that woman will be the death of me yet.”
Borona shifted to look at Marcus. “Wait. She’s a vampire? You never said that.”
“I didn’t? Well, of course she was…is. Maybe was. Who knows? Anyway, she came to see the wonders of early Rome, same as me. Only she kept going back to that nasty place in Germania. They had the most barbaric tribe you’d ever want to see! I found myself in battle against them…oh, that would have been when that egomaniac Gaius was coming to power—”
Lila grabbed him by the arm to interrupt him. “You mean Gaius Julius Caesar?”
“Yes, yes. That one. What a prig! I was young and wealthy, itching for battle, so I went. Anyway, we met up again there and well, all the rest is history
as they say. Stayed married for, what…maybe three hundred years or so? She took bodies, of course, and we weren’t always publicly married once I decided to play in politics, but it was a long enough time.”
“But she tried to kill you?” Borona asked in all seriousness, even with his man-bun making him look like a trendy man of the day. Large, but trendy.
He let out one of his big laughs—Marcus had promised to teach Girard the skill of controlling hearing sensitivity—and smacked Borona’s arm. “Of course she did! All the time. She could get madder than Venus with a cheating mortal in her bed. I think she thought if she could keep me in a fishbowl without a body, I might be a better husband.”
Girard could only shake his head. What an amazing life Marcus had led, truly.
The ancient wasn’t going to let him off easy it seemed, because he said, “Then tell us what you’re sighing about. It’s rude to leave others guessing.”
He might as well tell them. They were probably all thinking about it in one way or another. “It’s just questions I have. Why would Thalia take the body of that guard away to stop anyone examining it, but otherwise make a huge spectacle at the zoo? What is she doing with all the things she’s stealing? What’s her endgame?”
Lila added a question of her own. “And what the heck does she want with an elephant?”
“That too,” Girard agreed. “I’ve got more, but I really don’t have answers to any of them. That just makes it hard to figure out if I’m asking all the questions I should.”
Marcus plopped back in his seat, then stared as a big semi passed them, shaking the car in the way they do. When it pulled ahead, he said, “Maybe she thinks it’s a war elephant.”
“A what?” Lila asked. “You mean like they did in ancient times to scare enemies?”
“Yeah, sort of. I mean, the last time she was running around free, that still happened. Not often, but it did. I remember this asshole who brought a couple of them to pull his chariot during his Triumph. What a dick! They didn’t fit through the gate. It was hilarious.”