Applewood (Book 2): Fledge

by Myers, Brendan P.

  As Dugan followed Julian into the park, his boots crunched footprints into the snow. Further in, Dugan began to see an alien landscape marked by huge red structures protruding from the ground. Julian answered his unasked question.

  “Sandstone,” he said, almost reverently. “Withered by erosion over the course of three hundred million years.” Dugan was stunned by their beauty.

  Julian tapped him on the shoulder and gestured he follow. The two got off the hiking trail and onto a less trodden path. A few hundred feet in, Julian stopped suddenly and sniffed the air.

  “Do you smell it?” he asked. Dugan raised his nose and perked his ears and then he too began to smell it. He nodded his head.

  Staying downwind, Julian turned and crept forward through the woods, advancing in the direction of a bubbling stream. Stopping just short of it, the two peered out at the stream from behind the shelter of some trees. Dugan saw a herd of deer foraging along its banks. He watched them perk their own snouts as if sensing an alien presence before going back to their lazy sniffing and quiet grunting. Dugan recalled the nervousness of the pigs back in Arizona, and knew that staying downwind of the deer was not the only obstacle he and his kind had to overcome. But they had stealth and quiet and quick movement on their side.

  Julian turned and smiled, motioning him to take the smaller one on the right nearest the stream. He would take for himself the larger of the two on the left. Noiselessly creeping out from behind the trees, Julian approached his prey. Dugan followed close behind. At about fifteen feet, Dugan saw his own deer raise his head, alert now to their presence. From the corner of his eye, Dugan saw Julian become a blur as he attacked. In the blink of an eye, Dugan did the same, his fangs extending without conscious provocation.

  As the animal was about to spring across the stream, Dugan leaped, grabbing it by its long neck and twisting it violently to the ground. Grunts of surprise and terror came from her throat. Reaching out with his fangs, he tore into her neck and ripped through fur and sinew. Blood streamed copiously from the open wound. Dugan began to drink. The animal kicked and fought, and her exertions only made the blood pump faster. Dugan drank greedily in an orgy of bloodlust, and while drinking realized just what it was he had been eating and drinking these past few months. The rich liquid and strips of dark meat that greeted him outside his doorway each evening were the flesh and the blood of these Rocky Mountain deer.

  He had always felt a bittersweet pang with the last weak heartbeat of any creature he killed, be it rat or cat or even, Buck. But when the last of the dark liquid oozed from this beast, he rolled onto his back in ecstasy and fulfillment. It took a moment for him to realize where he was. At some point during his battle with the deer, the two had rolled into the stream, and it was in the frigid waters of the stream where he now lay. Sitting up, he saw Julian smirking down at him and couldn’t help but laugh. He lay down again in the frigid water as if he didn’t even care.

  A moment later, Julian reached out his hand to lift him out of the water and onto the banks of the stream. Dugan was surprised at how exhausted he was. Perhaps the beast had put up more of a fight than he realized. When the two were ready, they walked in companionable silence back in the direction they had come. As they once again approached the natural sandstone formations, Dugan spoke.

  “So, you said I deserved it, but really. What’s the occasion?”

  Julian turned and smiled. “Well, first of all, you do deserve it,” he answered. “I recognize how hard you’ve worked. Second of all, it’s Thanksgiving Day my boy! You remember. Plymouth Rock? The Mayflower? All of that? Happy Thanksgiving.”

  Dugan hadn’t even realized it. Then again, holidays — any sort of holiday — seemed like nothing meant for him anymore. He had a sense of time passing, but knew as well that time with Julian was well spent. Julian had opened his eyes to art and literature and helped him understand what kind of a future he might have for himself.

  However, he had also recently begun having a nagging suspicion there was something he had left undone. Something important, as if he had breached a covenant with someone, or left a promise unkept. He remained quiet on the drive back to the house.

  “What are you thinking about, boy?” Julian asked.

  Dugan struggled to put his thoughts into words.

  “It’s just that . . . well. It seems like you remember everything about your former life and what happened to you and how you got here. Why can’t I remember what happened to me? I guess more important to me than that is, am I ever going to remember?”

  He turned to Julian and awaited his response. Julian turned away from him to look out his window. Dugan knew then there was something Julian wasn’t telling him.

  “Tell me the truth, Julian,” he asked. “Please tell me. Why can’t I remember?”

  As in the past, Dugan wondered then whether the answer to that question lay somewhere within the rest of Julian’s untold tale. Maybe that was the reason he hadn’t told it all yet. But when Julian turned to him and gave him his answer, it was the most shocking news of all.

  “It’s because you haven’t yet completed the change, son,” he said. “I was wondering whether you were going to realize it yourself.”

  Dugan’s face took on a look of astonishment.

  “It was your uncle,” Julian continued. “I’m sure he did it with the best of intentions — pumped blood into your veins and took away your pain — but by doing so, he interrupted the process. Right now, you’re in between worlds, boy.” He paused before going on. “Well, you’re not really a boy now, are you? But you’re not quite a man yet either. It’s kind of the same thing. You’re no longer human, yet not quite a vampire.”

  Julian let that hang in the air while waiting for the obvious question. It came a moment later.

  “What . . . what do I need to do then?” Dugan asked.

  His voice was tremulous with excitement, yet fearful all the same. The prospect of remembering who and what he was conflicted mightily with the remembered pain of his apparently aborted transition. When Julian didn’t answer, he asked again.

  “Julian, please. Tell me. What do I have to do?”

  Julian turned to look at him. His face was kind but tinged with sadness.

  “I’m afraid the answer is simple,” he answered. “The part that your uncle interrupted was the most important part of all. You haven’t died yet, my boy, and that’s what you need to do to complete the transition. You need to die.”

  3

  It had been a long day. Arthur was tired. After spending Thanksgiving morning with his parents in their Georgetown home, he spent the afternoon having a surprisingly pleasant Thanksgiving dinner with C.J. and his ex-wife in the house they had all once shared. Linda had politely not mentioned the man whom C.J. had told him about. Arthur knew her well enough to know that if it was anything serious, she would have told him. Arthur smiled when thinking about C.J.’s ongoing and not so subtle attempts to put his parents’ marriage back together.

  C.J. would no doubt learn someday that secrets were the death knell of any marriage. Arthur chewed on his glasses thinking maybe he should warn C.J. about that. Then, he smiled to remember there were some lessons only life could teach. There was a good reason that for the last fifty years or so, his company recruited solely unmarried men. Marriages were allowed after a man had achieved a certain rank and status, but even then they were well vetted beforehand.

  Around eleven-thirty or so that evening, Arthur was laying comfortably on his bed in the Alexandria Ramada reviewing some paperwork when he glanced up at the television across the room. Tonight’s topic on Nightline apparently featured a discussion of the ongoing Stetson hearings in the Senate. Getting up from his bed, he walked over to turn up the volume.

  “. . . I’m just a little uncomfortable with the word “Czar” being used in an American context,” said the noted left-wing Harvard professor who was one of tonight’s guests. “And given the overheated rhetoric that has been coming out of this
White House—”

  “If ah might get a woid in,” interrupted the president’s point man in the Senate on the Stetson nomination in his distinctive southern drawl. “Ah can thinka no higher callin’ than to serve this country and the world by spreadin’ the good news about freedom and democracy, and ah can thinka no man who is bettah prepared for it than Robert Stets—”

  “Excuse me, Senator,” interjected the professor. “Excuse me. If you would allow me to finish my point. As I am sure you know, the genesis of the word “Czar” itself — even setting aside the reprehensible connotation it may have for our Russian friends—”

  “Friends, you say?” interrupted the senator. “Did ah hear you right?”

  “. . . It comes from the word Caesar, Senator. I mean, aren’t even you a little uncomfortable with that? What’s next? A Czar in the war on drugs? A National Security Czar? How about we start calling America, the Fatherland. Would you be comfortable with that? What I am saying is, that words mean something, Senator, and I tell you that George Orwell himself is right now spinning in his—”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said the blow-dried host sitting in for Ted Koppel. “I’m sorry, but I am going to have to interrupt you both. Susie Langham has a report on the efforts of the former governor’s wife in defending her husband’s nomination.”

  Arthur watched in rapt fascination, first at the ping pong match between those opposed and against, and then as the former governor’s wife came on the screen. There was no doubt that Barbara Stetson was still a beautiful woman. The girl who had once been Miss Virginia was still evident in her looks and shapely body. But he saw now too that deep lines had formed beneath her eyes at some point between departing the governor’s mansion two years ago and the videotaped interview now appearing on the screen.

  He thought there might even be a hint of something else in her eyes, some kind of drug perhaps, but set that aside, figuring it was simply him reading too much into it because of what he now knew. Still, he felt a deep empathy for the woman, who was after all only being a good political wife. The report ended by stating that Mrs. Stetson was scheduled to address the annual breakfast of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Richmond tomorrow morning. He thought about it for only a moment before calling the airline and rescheduling his flight. It was long past time he had a word with Mrs. Stetson.

  4

  Julian invited Dugan to join him in the study after their hunt. The fire was warm and their full bellies made them warmer. The two had remained silent after Julian gave Dugan the news he had not yet completed his transition. Dugan did his best to suppress the intermittent quakes of fear that rushed through his body to even contemplate such a thing. To think that the worst was behind him, only to learn that it might lie ahead, was almost more than he could bear. Julian was the first to break their silence.

  “Do you feel ready to talk about it?” he asked. Dugan suppressed another tremor, knowing it had not gone unnoticed by the man seated across from him, before shaking his head no.

  “But I would like to hear the rest of your story,” Dugan answered flatly, knowing that after what Julian had told him this evening, Julian could not deny him that.

  5

  “The pistol exploded in my mouth, sending shards of metal into my gums, shattering my jaw, and blowing out most of my teeth. But the bullet did not fire. The rest of that evening I spent drifting in and out of consciousness, half mad with pain, so much of what I tell you now is secondhand or surmised. But I can tell you it was not the police whose shadow crossed my door that evening, but a man who I later learned was acting as agent for another man named Porter. A beefy, strong man, he heard the gunshot and entered my office. Coming upon my half dead body, he carried me off into the night.

  The streets of San Francisco were riot-choked and inflamed with passion against the Chinese immigrant, so it was nothing unusual to see one man carry another away for help or medical attention. Neither was it unusual to see a man’s face beaten pulpy, with blood dripping from his jowls. The man carried me down to the harbor and put me in a waiting boat, then rowed to a privately owned schooner at anchor in the bay. He carried my broken body over the transom and down the stairs to the salon where Mr. Porter awaited.

  His anger toward me was for having the temerity to kill Mr. Smith, the man I once knew as Smithson. Smithson had for years been Porter’s cat’s-paw and puppet. Porter had over time looted Smithson’s firm for his own purposes. He planned to sail away that very week with the firm’s converted assets in his hold, freeing Smithson from his control and leaving him to explain away the theft.

  The irony is not lost on me that if Mr. Windham had come see me a week later with his accusations about Mr. Smith, none of what I tell you would have happened. I would not have stalked him and been responsible for his death. I would have gone on to have a happy life with my family and died a fulfilled man. Smithson would have been ruined without any intervention by me. Life would have exacted its own revenge. I know now that the reason Smithson pleaded with me to kill him that day was an effort to avoid his own pending ruination and humiliation. That I did not give Mr. Porter the satisfaction of seeing that was the reason why I lay at the man’s feet, on the floor of his elegantly appointed salon.

  I was told later that Porter’s original plan was to keep me alive a long while, before slowly killing me in ways that still fill me with horror. He had done it many times before. But he became quite petulant upon seeing I had already half done the job myself. The man who carried me to the yacht that evening was another of his cat’s-paws, a man named Lucas. He was in the salon when an enraged Porter attacked my unconscious body, tearing open my throat and drinking his fill. He had almost succeeded in draining me, but Lucas had other plans. Because in the same way that Porter was losing his grip upon Smithson, allowing him enough freedom to move his right hand and pull the trigger, Lucas crept up behind Porter and rammed a stake through his heart.”

  6

  Julian paused a moment. Dugan shivered at the thought of being staked. Perhaps it was newfound instinct or maybe what had happened to William. But that manner of death was now his own deepest fear.

  “Why’d he do it?” Dugan asked, taking advantage of the quiet. “Lucas, I mean.”

  The stone faced man came into the room then to place a tray on the table between them. After pouring mugs of the blood liquid for them both, he began to step away.

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Julian answered.

  It took Dugan a moment. “You mean . . .”

  “Lucas?” Julian shouted at the departing man’s back.

  He turned. “Yeah, boss?”

  “Why’d you kill Porter?” Julian asked.

  He thought about it for only a second before shrugging.

  “He was an asshole,” Lucas said, turning again and leaving the room.

  7

  “Lucas locked my body into the bilge at the bottom of the ship, and in that foul place I underwent my own painful transformation. It was a month before Lucas sent an unfortunate seaman down to open the hatch. I emerged minutes later, a blood and oil-encrusted stick figure. The open wounds from my failed suicide attempt and Porter’s attack had blackened during my time below. They festered and stank and oozed yellowish liquid. Thanks to the seaman, my bloodlust and hunger were sated for the moment, but revenge upon Lucas was strong upon my mind. It was the only thing that had kept me going those long days and weeks.

  Lucas was waiting as I entered the salon. He then uttered perhaps the only words that were certain to save his life.

  “The ship and its crew are yours, master.”

  He stood up from behind the desk and motioned my filthy body be seated behind it. The journals and account books were all open to reveal what I had inherited. The fortune built on my father’s gold was sealed within the hull of the ship. There were shipbuilding and railroad interests and manufacturing facilities within my new portfolio. I realized then I had become the richest man in California. My
father’s American dream had finally come true.

  Lucas had saved the newspaper accounts of the gruesome murder of Smithson, and the ones weeks later with news that his firm had been looted of its assets. Rumors swirled about where the money had gone. Some said he invested in brothels all over the country to sate his own perverse desires. Others hinted he was a degenerate gambler. A man named Windham came forward to claim Smith had even killed his own brother. I took my own cruel satisfaction that the Smithson name was now and forever stained.

  I took less satisfaction in reading the accounts of my own disappearance and suspected demise. My partners all stated there was nothing in my recent bearing to suggest anything was amiss. Kathrin and my children were broken hearted, of course. But then, I was no longer the man they knew. My grievous injuries would make me all but unrecognizable to them. And with the death of the seaman I had become a true murderer, not just the pretended murderer of Smithson I had imagined myself to be.

  Over the course of the next few weeks, I grew stronger. Lucas arranged for doctors to come and rearrange my shattered face and bones. A dentist was brought on board to fit me with new teeth. They did the best they could to make me half-presentable. I took their word for it, for as you already know, mirrors are not our friends. Four weeks after my exit from the bilge, I stood on the bow of my new vessel and bade San Francisco and California goodbye to embark on my new life.”

  Part Four

  “. . . must not all things at last be swallowed up in death?”

  – Plato

  Chapter Seven

  1

  The elegant ballroom of the Richmond Hyatt was packed with the crème of Virginia politics and society. Amidst the coffee service and occasional tinkle of glasses, Arthur watched Barbara Stetson give an impassioned speech about her family’s long bloodline and that of her husband’s. From the founding of the nation, through the Civil War years, all the way to the present day, one Stetson after another had given service to their country.