Jess coughed and Nico banged Jess’s head against the booth.
“Don’t let me find you up there,” Nico warned as vampires ran down the stairs. “I’ll cut your head off. I’ll punch your heart organ out. What are you looking at? You want your eyes poked out?” she snarled when one guy looked at her. He ran out the front door with the others. “If I see anyone left in the dorms I will stick my knife in your brain and wiggle the blade all around. Here I come.” She turned off the mike. No one else ran down the stairs.
“Now tell Charity Housing I’m coming,” Nico said. She let go, and Dann pulled his arm away. He looked at her in bewilderment.
“This switch,” he said. “I’m s-supposed to throw this switch every time you’re here.”
“Do it,” Nico said. “Then use your backdoor and get out of here.”
Dann flipped the switch. He grabbed his jacket and stepped back. The air seemed to envelope him, obscuring him from view. Dann disappeared.
Nico heard the shuffle of sneakers outside the entrance. Dann struggled into his jacket, watching Nico. He then turned and hurried down the walk, his harried gait like one eager to achieve normality and a distance from crazy girl vampires.
“Another veil,” Nico said to Bear, and knotted Jess’s noose to the cage.
“You freaky little—” Jess hoarsely sputtered as she clutched at the noose. “What do you want?!”
Nico didn’t answer and approached the front door with her rubber mat. She kicked the door open while Jess struggled.
Nico ripped the adhesive protection from the mat and stuck the rubber’s sticky side over the doorframe’s locking mechanism. She slashed the rubber with her knife to bend it, then secured the end pieces firmly over the frame. When she stepped back inside, the heavy door slid to shut and bumped against the thick rubber.
That should give lockdown trouble.
“Argh,” Jess uttered in frustration.
“C’mon, OI.” Nico looked out into the night; no one came into view. “Fine. I’ll get the proof you need.” She walked back to the booth. She held Jess by the hair and ran her blade behind Jess’s neck to cut the cord. Jess lunged away, staring at Nico. Blood dripped from her nose to her yellow tee.
“Hi, bait girl,” Nico said.
Jess did not run for the front door; she ran back for the ground floor hallway.
Nico ran faster and shoved Jess into the stairs. The vampires locked in the rec room yelled and banged on the door.
“We’re not leaving here through the classroom,” Nico said. She took hold of Jess and flung her up the staircase, sending the vampire flying. Jess smacked the landing and groaned.
“Are they holding your baby hostage, or do you just like the money?” Nico asked as she ascended.
“Oi!” Jess cried as she painfully regained her feet. “You crazy—” She grabbed Nico by the shoulders.
“Why keep pretending you’re not bait?” Nico resisted Jess’s attempt to throw her. She wrestled the other vampire up the next flight of stairs for the second floor.
“Uff,” Jess uttered when she tripped back and fell. “I’m not a—” She jumped up and swung. Nico slipped under the swing and punched her. While the other vampire staggered, Nico turned her around and took hold of Jess’s nape and the waistband of her jeans. She marched Jess across the floor and tossed her up to hit the next landing. Jess landed with a bang.
“All right, listen!” Jess gasped from where she lay. “I’m not—I—I work for the OI! I work with them!”
“Really?” Nico walked up. “Why do you never sign in on the sheet, then, mate?” She pulled Jess up and dragged her up the remaining steps. “Why are you always playing the hostel’s game, ay?
“I don’t care if you’re a deep cover,” Nico added, sending Jess stumbling. “You’re too good at being their lure. You’re too good at doing nothing a cop would do.”
“Rack off,” Jess yelled, swinging around. “You cold bitch! You don’t know!” She threw a wild punch for Nico’s face. Nico thrust her foot out and kicked Jess low, striking her knee. Off-balanced, Jess stumbled, her fist hitting nothing. Nico shoved her.
“I’m a cold bitch? I’m not the one letting others become—what?” She moved swiftly and grabbed Jess up by the front of her tee shirt.
She hurled Jess into the room, the vampire landing and skidding for bed number 16. Jess slapped the floor, enraged. At Nico’s approach, Jess leapt for her. Nico met her in midair and punched her into the floor.
Nico brushed sprayed blood off of Bear as Jess lay, dazed. She hauled Jess up.
“Who’s doing this?” Nico asked. “Are they really so scary?”
“You don’t understand,” Jesse gasped. “This is an intragalactic society.” She laughed harshly. “These people can cross dimensions. We can’t escape.”
“You mean they can’t escape.” She spun Jess around and pressed her knife into Jess’s back. “You’ll have to take my place.” She stabbed Jess in the base of her neck, severing the nerves of her C-5 vertebrae.
“No!” Jess shouted as her body collapsed. Nico hauled her into bed number 16, chest down and her head sideways. “I—I can’t move!”
“But you can still talk,” Nico said. “Scream when you get there, okay?”
“Rest time,” the voice-over announced, and the echo of lights shutting off sounded below. “Rest time.”
Nico moved quickly for the door.
“You don’t want to know what they do to us there,” Jess screamed.
“Too late.” Nico crossed the hall and descended down the stairs. “I think I’ve been there. I just need to know whose kingdom it is.” She hit the landing just as a sudden realisation did.
“Rest time.” The lights went out. Nico descended to the boys’ floor and pulled out Dorothy.
“Dorothy, my location; find out what’s been built on it in the past one hundred years,” she said. “Hurry.”
“Working,” Dorothy said. In the pitch-darkness of the boys’ dorm, an abandoned Id’s face still shone brightly, not yet powered down. Nico went to the bed and tossed the Id and the half-eaten blood pack. She knotted her electrical cord to the bed frame, let out line, made certain her spool spun freely, then quickly lay down with Bear.
“I don’t think they’ll wait for 22 hundred.” She looked at Dorothy as the list built.
A dentist office. A club. A bar. A disco. A record store. A Baha’i centre. A hospice. A meatpacking facility.
“The meatpacker. I need pictures,” Nico said.
The photos showed: an abandoned plant, covering half the block. Four storeys high. Dorothy captioned it: Brown’s Meatpacking, closed forty years ago.
Nicky, her maker said, how dae ya like yer new—
Prison.
A man on top of her. A man who was supposed to be watching the customers who came to use her. He was carving his initials into her chest, emulating her maker’s handiwork. Old meat hooks swayed on chains from the ceiling. A teddy bear hung, a kidnapped child’s lost possession, placed there by an abductor for absurdity, for mockery. Nico felt the digging knife sink too deep—deep enough to pierce her heart.
She pulled her chains’ fixture out of the wall.
His neck, wound with steel links; Nico pulling, the chain’s straining tension manifesting a truth in glinting metal.
You are the first soul—
You are the first soul I am sending to hell.
The man’s head popped off. Blood rose, champagne-like, and Nico drank down ugliness, mercilessness, and fury. She rose, shaky as a foal, and brought Bear down.
No one will ever touch you, ever again, she told him.
Nico stared at the hostel’s ceiling, her Id shining in her face.
“So that’s how I got you, Bear.” The darkness thickened. She activated Dorothy’s location beacon and sent it to the Makepeace Emergency Assistance Hotline.
Help, her message said.
The cold closed in. Nico triggered her switchblade.
/> The dark snatched her away, her spool rattling.
Nico lay in a bed inside a brightly lit room lined with empty beds, a man standing over her.
“Strashnaya mest' i medved’!” he yelled, and his pulse rod flared.
Pain ripped through Nico. Her blade came up.
You are the first soul—
You are the first soul I send to hell, Nico had thought, popping off the man’s head.
She sliced through his throat as pulse fire from three different directions exploded against the bed. Her left arm seized, and the man’s body jerked from being hit. She cut the neck cord of her spool and flung her knife at the nearest shooter, hitting him in the throat. He dropped his pulse gun.
She grabbed the man’s pulse rod and hurled it at another shooter, bursting his nose like red fruit. The last shooter shouted into his Id ring. Nico flung the spool at the remaining gunman, hitting him in the face. He staggered and turned to run.
Nico leapt from the bed and came behind him, lassoing his neck with the spool’s cord and winding it. She tossed the spool up to the rafters, looping it over a beam, then caught it on the way down. She pulled on the cord hard with her one hand. The lassoed man rose into the air, kicking desperately. She ran around a column with the cord, then knotted it. The hanged man ceased moving, and Nico shook out the arm that had taken the brunt of the pulse rod blast. She picked up two pulse guns lying on the floor.
Jess screamed somewhere outside. Nico walked to the man gurgling from the blade in his throat. She pulled it out and approached the doorway.
The hallway outside was a dead end, with Jess shrieking from the last room. At the open end, a containment field shimmered, cutting off her section from the rest of the corridor.
Keep screaming, bait girl.
Nico put her switchblade’s handle to her mouth and stepped back into the room with the hanged man.
A minute later, she shoved the man with the busted nose into the room Jess screamed from. Hands tied behind his back, he stumbled across the floor, his cries muffled by the pulse rod stuffed into his mouth. It whined, high-pitched.
His head exploded. Nico stepped in and shot the men hiding on each side of the doorway, then brought her pistols together and fired at the remaining four gunmen as she advanced. The man farthest dropped when she aimed at the ones nearest her.
Gods, I’m such a bad shot.
Tossing the guns, she took hold of the blade in her mouth and ran with a vampire’s speed. She slit the throats of two. But when she reached the last man standing, he held Jess up by the hair, his gun at her temple.
“I’ll kill her!” he shouted.
Nico pointed imperiously to a spot over his shoulder.
“No!” he shouted, refusing to look.
She continued to point, and her gaze went to the spot.
The man’s eyes darted to the side.
Nico’s left hand whipped, and her blade struck him between the eyes. He dropped Jess and slumped over her on the bed. Nico walked up, pulled her knife out of his head, and heard his pierced skull crack apart. She moved for the doorway.
“Don’t leave me like this!” Jess shouted. “Don’t!”
The hallway remained empty. Jess continued to shriek and Nico approached the containment barrier. Beyond it lay more rooms on either side, and she heard nothing more as Jess became hoarse. She knelt to touch a button on the disc. The barrier winked from view.
The cries of tormented captives hit, echoing in the hall. She took a breath and the scent of fresh, young vampire bodies overwhelmed—pristine, clean, and bleeding.
Herself, in chains.
“Shhhh,” she hushed to herself and Bear. “Shhhh.”
Two rows of rooms; Nico walked down the hall and saw through the open doors where customers used the drugged and restrained vampires. A male yelled loudest from the room at hall’s end, crying out against a gag while others taunted him. A whip sounded.
Her maker grinned from her VCR, a happy Scots lad in Leningrad.
Aye, happy belated, my wean!
Here’s yer reminder.
One last, gentle lesson.
That all these sick little monkeys ya like to defend—
The male screamed again as the whip came down, the sounds echoing out into the hall.
Well, they’re all like me, Nicky.
All of them.
Nico went back to the rooms at the beginning and entered one. Delores lay, restrained, and Nico took hold of the man atop her by the back of his neck.
I made all a’ this fer ya, her maker said, sweeping his arm before Leningrad. He looked on, contemplative. How dae ya like it.
She cut the gag from Delores’s mouth and Delores’s cat eyes shone.
Kill them, Nicky.
Kill them.
Kill them.
Kill them.
Kill for me, Nicky.
“Weesht,” she whispered, and she forced the man’s throat down to Delores’s fanged mouth.
Nico exited after the man’s screams had stopped. She did not know how to unlock the restraints, and she hadn’t time to find out. The next room held tongue-pierced girl, unconscious, while two men used her body. Nico slit their throats and forced one into the mouth of tongue-pierced girl until her fangs instinctively responded and she sucked, still unconscious. Nico walked into each room, killing or maiming customers. None of the captive vampires was Esche. She moved for the last one, drawn to the blood-scent of a vampire older than she.
Within, a bent over and chained Tex raged against his gag as one man whipped him and another stood behind him. Tex’s legs were crooked, broken at the knees, and a bloody bat lay on the floor. A third man taunted him to his face, holding up the keyblade to his restraints. Nico entered and slid the door shut behind her.
***
When she opened the door again, the three men lay dead, Tex ripping out the throat of the last man Nico had given him. He drank down ravenously, shaking the corpse in his mouth as he did so.
Follow, Nico thought to Tex, willing him to bring death in her wake while she moved ahead. She turned the corner and entered the next hallway. Somewhere beyond it, an industrial machine worked, emitting a high-pitched whir.
Blood; the blood of vampires was pristine, perfect, and clean. The hall smelled of too much spilt vampires’ blood. Voices spoke, male and female, taunting and jeering. A pulse rod sounded and a woman cried out in pain. Another cried, too, weeping. Nico entered the double doors of a brightly lit meat storage room, vampires hanging upside down from meat hooks in the ceiling, their throats slit. Blood ran down into waiting jars, and paperback girl lay chained to the floor, sobbing, as two women smelling of expensive perfume stuck sharp straws into her neck and arms and sucked. A gaggle of humans cornered Re’shawn, who crouched, the chains from her wrists snapped apart. She raised her arms as a human, one of the tennis men from Heloise’s building, shot her with a pulse rod. Re’shawn jumped from the pulse and cried out.
Re’shawn was nearly as old as Heloise. Nico was not surprised she’d attempted an escape or to fight back, but in her drained state, the humans had taken control.
Distract them for a little more. Nico walked over and punched one of the women sucking on paperback girl, making the woman’s face bounce on the floor.
The second woman scrambled away and ran out the doors. Nico moved quickly, blocking the other humans from exiting. The group turned instead for another room with a heavy metal door. They ran inside it, slamming it shut right before tennis man. He pawed at the door.
“No! Don’t—” he cried to the people inside, but Nico punched him in the kidney, dropping him. The humans looked out through the door’s porthole. It was a non-functioning meat freezer, one that locked from the inside. Nico tried to pull it open.
“A safe room,” she said, and kicked the door.
“Help,” paperback girl cried. Tennis man was scrambling away, and paperback girl cringed as he passed. Nico caught him and hauled him up by his neck. She broug
ht over a meat hook on a low chain, and ran it on its ceiling rail to hang before the freezer door. The humans behind the porthole stared. She punched tennis man in the face, then hung him from the hook by the back of his shirt.
“You can’t do this,” he yelled. “I’m—”
“A monster,” Nico finished for him. “And—” She punched him in the back, fast and hard, her fists pummelling until he was a fish flopping on a line.
“Monsters,” she said as she punched, “must learn—that there are—monster killers.” She stopped, and tennis man hung, his body broken.
“Ahhg—ahhg,” he moaned, his mouth wide open to draw breath. Nico pushed his body closer to the glass. When she turned around, paperback girl stared with pleading eyes.
“No more,” she begged.
“They won’t come out to hurt you again.” Nico punched tennis man once more in his burst organs, making him attempt another wheezing breath. “Unless what I did only turned them on. In which case.” She shoved tennis man’s face into the porthole, then slit his throat against the glass. His blood ran down it as he gurgled. When she let go, his head remained stuck. “See? They got the message.”
Paperback girl’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh,” Nico said. “I forgot. You’re a pacifist.”
“Go-go girl,” Re’shawn said, hoarse. Nico went to kneel before her.
“Get the...glasses...shortcake. They record.” Nico looked to where she pointed. Danica hung upside down and insensate with her glasses on her face.
Nico nodded. She went to Danica, took her glasses off, but did not put them on. Sushi Hut girl and Iris hung beside Danica, grey-faced and their lips, colourless. Nico could not smell their life’s suspension; their pure scent had fled.
When she looked at the other hung vampires, she did not see Esche among them. Nico returned to Re’shawn and put the glasses on her, then dragged the unconscious human female over by her hair, her obscene, expensive perfume lifting. She offered the woman’s throat, and Re’shawn feebly shook her head.
“Naw...rather starve.” Her eyes rolled back and she slumped.
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