The Vampires Of Livix Twin Pack (Volumes #2 & #3)

by Smith, J Gordon

  “Anime,” my hair hung straight and short with thick spikes and some temporary neon pink streaks with matching eye shadow. “I get bored with the same style for myself.”

  “You inspired me. So I cut my hair shorter. It helps with my new hobby, not hanging in my eyes when I skate. I do loops around town, take a shower, and go to work.”

  “That’s a good idea. I should try that too. It could take my mind off things.”

  “– the shower?” he joked.

  “Yes.” I blushed and almost returned to my book, “No, the skating taking my mind off things.”

  “It helps. Skating outside forces you to stay focused. I’ve narrowly avoided three cars and a sport utility – their drivers didn’t look when they turned or backed up.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe I should rethink skates? I burned through a box of bandages my tenth summer learning to skate.”

  “That’s what this scrape is from.” He lifted his shirt to an angry red pavement burn on his hip and side.

  “Ouch. That must have hurt.” I also noticed his tight stomach. Almost too touchable and I felt weak.

  “It’s getting better now.” he dropped his shirt, “You could start with a few laps around the park. Dogs and kids are the only worries and they aren’t out in the morning.” He spun a little in the sun, anxious to ask something other than the weather. “Hey, I don’t mean to pry, but while I have seen Garin in the coffee shop I haven’t seen you, one of my favorite regulars. Hope nothing I did or said?”

  I quietly scooted the coffee from the candy store behind my arm. “No. I broke up with Garin. Too many differences – too intense, unhealthy and dangerous.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “One example, he built his car from the hulks of other cars people died in.”

  “Using them because they killed people?”

  “Oh no, not because people died in them.”

  “Or re-using parts from broken cars?”

  “His environmental view on recycling and reuse. But too crazy for me to think about and his other things.”

  “Extreme environmentalism like chasing down an armed whale ship in a dinghy?”

  “No. The idea of dismantling these other death cars and reassembling the pieces like a Frankenstein monster. But that’s a small issue, only symptoms of the other problems. I didn’t feel safe. So I wanted out.”

  “That’s too bad. If I can help some time let me know.” Brett remained silent for a moment before he asked, “Well … I was serious before when … when I inappropriately asked you on a date. I’d still like to go out with you some time.” He fidgeted, handsomely rolling from side to side on his skates, “I like that you’re a triple threat in the relationship department: smart, pretty, and driven.”

  “Thanks for the compliments,” my face blushed, “Some guys stop talking when they find out I can think about more than shopping and hot-tubs, that I’m a patent attorney … or at least studying for it, anyway.”

  “I’ve seen those guys. Too insecure or cowards deep down that are afraid of anything but a diminutive personality. A smart girl sincerely interested in you … is great. More challenging – but great.”

  “Doesn’t that lead to more arguments from differences of opinion?”

  “Yes but that’s part of the charm and the challenge.” He spun off more nervous energy in his skates under the warm sun, “So … if you’re up for it how about we try a date next weekend?” His movement distracted me, not the barista I had earlier tended to ignore. Brett glanced at his watch, “Oops, I’ll be late for work. Sorry. If you decide you want to do something look for me at the coffee shop and let me know when.” He rolled closer to the bench, leaned toward me, and said in a quiet voice, “And if you want to really talk … I know about vampires.” He spun around in his skates like a sailboat searching for the wind and when he found it I watched him cross the street and recede into a quick dot down the side alley on his way home. I sat there. Are the vampires so transparent that only I didn’t know they existed until Garin? Or what does Brett know?

  I gave up reading and any intentions of doing patent work. Maybe I’ll check my Faceplate account. I opened my computer and booted it up. The soft drums at boot reminded me of Garin and the smell of the coffee shop when he had introduced me to this new Ubuntu software. But I already had the Firefox web browser open and typed in my Faceplate login credentials. Pushing through the feelings in a valiant attempt at keeping me distracted.

  The site hissed at me in a spit of red letters angrily telling me I used an incorrect password or account ID. I started fresh and carefully typed in both my user name and password with single deliberate key strokes. Again it sputtered and hissed. I tried again and still no luck. About as futile as fighting with the neighbors cat. A small line at the bottom said ‘password secret phrase’. I tried that and got “Germany Mexico Canada England Belgium China Hawaii”. Other than seeing the state of Hawaii listed among countries, I didn’t recognize the puzzle. I normally used lines from Elizabethan plays for my secret hints. I clicked on ‘send your password details to your email account’. Maybe their servers got corrupted and needed time to reboot. I can check later.

  I stuffed everything in my shoulder bag and stood to go.

  A face flashed and disappeared behind the corner of the jeans store across the street. “Garin? Is that you?” I squinted. Maybe it’s my mind playing tricks. A reflection of the salesperson hanging more pants in the window display flickering back and forth. The jeans guy might have made the movement I saw. His frosted tips and black eyeglass frames moved frantically in there. The pair of too-tight-jeans didn’t cooperate with the stiff manikin he attempted dressing.

  Even if Garin lurked there, the vampires are much too dangerous for me. I needed someone safe – even if not filling my life with True Love and princess dresses. I would remain alive and human. I emptied my coffee cup and dropped it in the nearby trash receptacle.

  -:- Two -:-

  Garin sat in the coffee shop with his back to the wall. He brought in his large-screen nearly importable laptop. But this work required so many command line text screens arrayed like tarot cards across the screen that something smaller would be too difficult. And two or three monitors fanned out on the little table might seem too unusual and draw unnatural attention.

  He sipped at his coffee and thought about laughing at the irony. He planned hacking into the business account servers at his own business, Ramsburgh Industries. He owned the place but since they did such high level government contract work he didn’t have the government security clearances to know what products the company produced. Let alone the detailed financial records. A passive investor.

  What cowered in those financial records that caused Yashar sufficient fear to kill my mother and attempt killing Anna and I?

  His laptop came to the ready prompt. He set up secure tunnels from the coffee shop out to a pair of servers he bought the previous day with another account on a compute cloud server. The coffee shop setup he used as a peering post on the screens running those two servers. His data traffic, if anyone cared, would have the heft of a regular business person checking and responding to their email. He set up a script to pass meaningless email chatter back and forth to another server on a public email address to keep any curious hackers busy. Eavesdropping on his tunnel might cause some difficulty as he used a secure shell with the latest 4096 bit length key.

  The familiar Slackware operating system icon returned on both servers. Blinking. Waiting. Still panting as if hounds from their operating system post install steps but now ready to run. Garin plugged his headphones into his computer and looped music in the background. The big screen on the computer hid the speed of his typing. A trick he’d figured out included typing many of his keystrokes in bunches so casual listeners heard slower and lazier key pushing. The screens scrolled. He could hear the tight electronic hiss of the graphics chip pushing content to the liquid crystal display only to have it replaced by more commands and fu
rther responses. The hounds raced on the hunt.

  He busted through the firewall and the subsequent six security layers. The facial recognition and fingerprint pads seemed laughable to circumvent with his code. Especially since, they had chosen a too common commercial operating system solution. Many of the advanced IT groups in Europe switched to Linux long ago to avoid this ease. Sales reps and marketing still worked too many wonders in the US to convince non-technology executives what their IT groups needed instead of the other way around.

  A few more tugs on the ties using lightly modified rainbow tables and the security apron fell. Memos and email database searches revealed notes from Yashar to Dr. Theron Aravant of The Bank of Draydon regarding potential sale to one of the business’s smaller divisions. A meeting with Garin’s mother Thyia and Aravant hosted by Yashar showed her official response of No Sale. Then reports of her murder. Transfer of assets to Garin. Nothing useful.

  Garin backed out of the email server and dove into the finance accounts. He started at the top layer summaries. These are what did get published to him and while he knew the documents had been faked his problem became finding exactly where the fictitious work hid. Siphoning off accounts receivable or accounts payable? Excessive markups? Payments to fictitious companies for services never actually received or needed? A lot of avenues for the clever financier, and Yashar had been clever.

  Garin pulled a code snippet from his computer and pasted it into the window. The code, based on Benford’s Law published in 1938, tallied number frequencies in large data sets, particularly useful in financial records. It gave him a first slice through the meat revealing the locations of Yashar’s special cleverness. Garin wrote the custom code based on Benford’s Law when advising the Bank of Draydon in acquiring or avoiding potential companies. Garin uncovered a few situations that Draydon had considered acquiring with books so cooked they reeked brimstone through their core. Garin’s servers worked together digging their thick paws through fifty years of raw data. He piped the information they uncovered into a few charts and let the code continue excavating. Slowly patterns in the dirt pile merged and then several service business accounts listed in both in and out transactions came up with red flags.

  “A tangled web Yashar – and you weren’t alone.”

  -:- Three -:-

  “Hey Shannon. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Are you kidding? This is effectively mid-day for me already. My kids are up before dawn.”

  “Are you staying home today?” I asked. I stood in front of my apartment’s big window in my yellow sweats and an Anime blazed T-shirt I slept in. Water drizzled lazily down the glass. The tops of cars careened by in haste to beat rush hour traffic through the rain. Gouts of frothy water gushed out the sides of their fenders and their windshields only momentarily cleared by fast flicking wipers. “I decided a couple of days ago to take the day off and already gave a note to Marilyn.”

  “Nice to vacation on a rainy Friday,” she said. A bang and something fell crashing like London Bridge and little voices squealing with laughter and shouts suggested her children constructed or dismantled something in the background. “No school today so all four are home. Not doing my normal Friday morning grocery shopping either. One or two are ok but they are too much together. If the kids ate anything other than cereal or macaroni and cheese I’d be forced to go. Plenty of that. So no. I’m staying here all day.”

  That menu basically filled my pantry too – thanks Mom … “That’s fine. They’ll be fun to see.”

  “How soon are you coming over?”

  “I thought after I changed and found some coffee. I know you don’t keep any in the house anymore.”

  “Nope, still no caffeine here. Good idea stopping on your way.”

  “I’ll be over soon.”

  -:- -:- -:-

  “Kids!” Shannon yelled into the house interior, “Aunty Anna is here to see you!”

  “You’ve changed the porch pillars?” I said, closing the door against the continuing rain. Shannon lived in a neat little red brick ranch on a quiet cul-de-sac. A modest home for a CPA and a test lab Engineer. Shannon wanted a fully funded retirement account and the kid’s college plans paid for rather than a big McMansion, fancy cars, and extended credit cards. Michael her husband remained content to build their portfolio too. He had a skill in skipping over the stock market crashes while getting reasonable returns between. Their neighbors assumed her sister struggled like the rest of the world but they didn’t know that actual next-door millionaires lived there.”

  “I like the look of these a lot better,” I said comparing to the other houses around, “it makes the front of the house look more solid and comforting.”

  “Thanks –”

  “Aunti Anna!” The four children burst out among giggles.

  I knelt down and hugged them all. I liked being an Aunt.

  “Did you bring us anything?” asked Joanna, the four year old begged, her little pigtails quivering.

  Three year old Julie hopped up and down clapping. Her spindly legs ringed in tights the colors of Sesame Street puppets and shook like rubber bands while her pigtails flopped up and down over her ears.

  Five year old James remained stoic in his little jeans and black T-shirt yet looked at me hopeful while Josh squeezed my leg the tightest of any two year old and thought hopping might be a good idea too, the buckles on his overalls jingling.

  “What might Aunti Anna have in here?” I let go of my purse against the entry closet door revealing the little white bag I brought from the candy shop. I let them look in. Four little heads blocked Shannon and my sight from the contents.

  “Donuts!!!” They screeched.

  Two swift hands chased the treats into the bag and nearly ripped the paper.

  “Hold on kids,” I said, barely rescuing the bag from spilling everything on the floor.

  Shannon looked at me, “Do they have sugar and cinnamon?”

  I nodded, holding up four fingers.

  “James, why don’t you take the bag to the kitchen table and you each share.”

  Plunder in hand the raiding party scrambled for the kitchen.

  “Anna, give me your wet coat and I’ll hang it up here so it drips over the boot mat.” Shannon tipped her head, “It’s quiet over there. James must have done ok with dividing and sharing. We’ve been working on that.”

  I kicked my shoes off, “Think they will have any left by the time we get out there?”

  “No. But it’s already the quietest it’s been since five thirty. Of course, you’ll be here when the sugar kicks in.”

  The kids ran out of the kitchen back to play. Shannon grabbed a paper towel, wet it with some soap and water, and washed down the table from the surprising array of sugar and donut crumbs. A mechanical habit after four kids.

  “You’ve been losing weight?”

  “Thanks, but only five pounds. A couple of glasses of water and I’ll be back up. It doesn’t come off now like it used to.”

  “You’ve still got a few months of forty-two left.”

  Shannon looked me up and down, “Oh, to return to twenty, such a time, and such a body. Look at you.”

  “Hey, you look great.”

  “Well, after having four kids close together and being old I’ve done ok.”

  “Are you glad you waited on kids?”

  She spun out a couple of glasses and poured diet caffeine-free pop into them from a two-liter bottle. “Why don’t we sit on the couch?” she handed me a glass, “– I don’t know. There are advantages and trade-offs with either. We could ask Mom too, she had me at your age and you at my age.”

  “Think I had been a surprise?” I sat on the long red couch with the subtle Victorian print weave.

  “I often wondered but no. I get it now being her age.”

  The kids played in James’s room poking pillows and stuffed animals into their play tent. Josh ran out, “S’cuse me. Pillow!” he tugged at the pillow behind me. I leaned forward
and he scampered back to the bedroom with his prize.

  “So cute.” I watched him disappear into the bedroom.

  “They’ll be back for the other pillows –” the two girls ran out and squeezed a pile of pillows in their arms and ran back, “– I’ll be bringing the pillows back later of course.”

  “How do you mean you understand now?” I sipped my pop.

  “We could ask Mom sometime but being born so quickly after Mom and Dad got married I saw them struggling with their careers. So I went to college, started working and did the career thing. Then Michael and I learned too much too late about exponentially falling fertility rates in our late thirties.”

  “I remember, really bad over here when you tried for the kids.”

  “You get pangs of regret when you see others with new babies and know your time for it is done or close to done. Really dangerous and difficult after forty even though the celebrity moms are all in the magazines urging everyone on. Not healthy.”

  “I can’t imagine what went on between you two.”

  “The kids are worth it and fortunately they are healthy. But a difficult time.”

  “Including talking to a divorce lawyer.”

  “Yes. It got bad. I guess that’s what finally forced us. Michael is a problem solver but I’m not. I pushed back on his home science suggestions and his charting. We finally saw some specialists and learned about physiology and timing in a completely different way. Which taught me Michael’s charting gave us more accuracy than I gave him credit.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  “Good. I’d never hear the end of it.” Shannon smiled, “But we did finally have four healthy and beautiful kids.” She set her glass on the coffee table.

  “So you’d start earlier if doing it again?”

  “I don’t know. I really love these kids. If I had children earlier than they would be different and not these.”