Grayland: Chapter Three of the Dark Chicago Series

by David Ghilardi

  The rif daunted him as he realized he was not all that powerful. His eyes roiled in his skull. Flesh twitched. So, so many hostile demons wanted a piece of him. Who could ignore so much avaricious greed? How could he? He could feel the salivating of their barbed tongues on his psyche.

  Gray bit through his lips then, providing the impetus to shake free of the relentless pull. Pain was not his parameter of worry. His resilient body’s mechanism to repair itself shook free what delusional hold the rift had on him, if just for a moment.

  The hulking man reared back his shoulders and screamed. His rage shattered any connection to the hellish place before him. Gray’s eyes cleared. Retinas of coal focused. There was a fiigure floating in front of him just inside the tear. To the human eye, it appeared as a bloody torn sheet tattered by eons of wind. A dripping crimson tentacled kelp beckoned to Gray.

  “Join us.” It said. “Rule fiierce. Leave nothing behind. Burn it all.” Gray stared. Then a broad smile overtook him. The demonic things in there needed him. Their desperation was their weakness. The dark man would take advantage of that edge. Gray would manipulate them. And of course, this world would burn. Without speaking both he and the kelp began to communicate merely by thought. Dee looked on as the basement air sparked.

  The oating entity crackled at the exchange. Gray roared.

  Chapter 3

  Joan climaxed again in the sweetest way. Doug was on his knees in the shower, jaw deep into her pelvis, as the water cleaned, sluicing juices away. Using her elderly mother’s hand rails, installed after a scary hip incident, Joan braced her body against the tiles.

  Her lithe body shuddered in Doug’s mouth. He kept his tongue probing in there, satisfiied to bring her so much pleasure. She arced her back, fiingers leaving her perch, using them to rub her palms over his face. It was almost comical how much she massaged his cheeks, shuddering fiingers nearly poking him in the eye.

  A nail sliced his cheek. Joan gasped, muscles tightened. Doug detached from her. He rubbed his jaw. “Careful. Don’t want to die in a terrible oral sex accident.”

  Joan collapsed over Doug, gently caressing his back. The faucet was turned down to a trickle.

  “Sorry. Look at your face.”

  Joan licked the wound with her tongue. Their lips connected again.

  “Death in the shower. Not how I want to go out.” Doug whispered.

  “Well, I ‘died’ in your mouth almost three times. Not a bad way to go.”

  Joan hugged Doug, until she burped in his ear. They both laughed as hot water cleaned away all the detris. Tight embraces, long kisses melted into tender pecks. Doug lost himself in Joan’s green eyes. He felt clean. Fresh. New.

  “Up for some breakfast?” Joan purred.

  “Just had mine.” He whispered. She giggled. “You need nourishment after so much exertion. Let me feed my beast.”

  Doug kissed her again, turning offf the water, then helping her out of the tub.

  He snapped down a towel from the rack, starting to dry her offf.

  “I’d better get back. Check on Cray. For all I know, he could be covered in mustard running around the streets.”

  Joan took a towel down for him. “Okay. Sad face on that. Will you come back later?”

  Doug clacked his teeth appearing like a hungry robot.

  “Wild horses and dead men couldn’t keep me away.” Joan looked at him funny.

  “ ‘Dead men’? What is that about?” Instead of answering, he grabbed her hips lif ting her up in his arms. Discarding her towel he kissed her stomach, breasts, found her dimpled chin, fiinally settling on her lips. Doug lingered in his progress. His body felt scrubbed, his pores open, his mind alert. He slowly lowered her back to the tiles. Joan looked pouty. Doug smiled.

  “I’ll come back. You’re too fiine to stay away from.” Joan said nothing, picked up her towel and wrapped it around her. Doug continued.

  “Anyway, you know where I live, so If I don’t show up. Come whup my ass.” There was a moment as the wall heater hummed. It sounded exhausted trying to keep up with the cold climate. Doug took a dry towel, covering her shoulder and head with it.

  “You promise?” Joan whispered. “I don’t want to be alone.” He drew her lithe body into his tight frame. Even though the mirror was foggy, there were spots where they could see their reflection. Doug’s short dark hair, strong body enveloped Joan’s auburn tresses. Brown eyes looked and green eyes found him. Damn, his dream came true. They looked great together. He smiled in the glass.

  “Merry Christmas, Joan.” The street was clear, cold and still. Cars were crusted over with ice, Winter’s fiirm grip bolstered by sub-zero temps. Doug took notice of the damage around him as his foot steps crunched, disappearing into the white carpet of ice beneath him. It was an alien landscape. Strange forms were buried, evidence of destruction. He was like being an arctic archaeologist stepping foot on an uncharted planet. Doug’s head felt light. His wore a silly smile. Been a long time since he had felt anything remotely like happy.

  Joan had eased that heavy weight he had been carrying for what seemed like years. Everything below his waist was numb. They had both screwed each other into oblivion. Insensate was the word that came to mind. Hence, the ridiculous grin plastered on his mug. Doug looked up at the gray almost flint blue sky. The orange star, Sol, continued to be a resentful stranger to Chicago. The snowstorm had passed. It felt like the frigid snow world of Hoth.

  Doug walked around a fallen elm tree laying across Kildare and Grace that had pancaked two cars. He seemed unfazed, remembering only the taste of Joan’s body. Lucid thoughts of her lips, her fiirm breasts, the pink and red folds of her love muscles between her legs. She was intoxicating. She made him feel that Life was amazing again.

  He felt like he had never been to war. Had never met Abernathy or Charles or gotten involved in all of the past 96 hours of violent nonsense. Doug’s body bristled with energy. Cray would have quipped something about needing his pipes cleaned. He laughed and climbed over two more vehicles smashed together. His gloved hand sank deep into snow on one hood as he propelled his body over it.

  Doug had the secure feeling that more could happen between them. He’d wanted Joan for so long. They had shared bits of each other’s lives for so long, maybe this was the chance they had to put all the parts together. To give it a shot. Make it whole. The idea of it gave Doug something he had not felt in a very long time.

  Hope.

  Doug had forgotten what that felt like. Jumping over more collapsed branches and around apparently dead power lines, he gave a loud yawp of joy. Whoops! Almost slipped on a frozen patch of ice. He recovered. Looking up, Doug saw his parents house completely dark.

  The front porch door, the one Chicagoans called a stormer, stood blocked open by a three foot snow drift. The heavy main door of the home stood open, listing by inches back and forth in the stifff cold wind. The glass in the stormer rattled. Frozen-legged shivers crawled like centipedes up Doug’s back. What in hell was this? Why would Cray forget to lock and shut the door?

  This was an immediate reminder that none of this was over. Doug frowned. His body was fully aware now. Training kicked in. Alert and hating having to be so.

  Doug carefully took it three stairs at a time. Slowly. Quietly, trying to minimize the creaks in the frozen wood. The long silver blade he used to fiinish offf the bizarre creature at the brick house was extended in his right hand. It was shorter than a bayonet, but not by much.

  He could hear nothing. Just the constant rasp of the sharp wind lacing his clothing on the porch landing. Cray was gone. Doug knew it before he stepped over the threshold. He trusted his intuition. For some reason, his friend had gone out into the blizzard. Or, thought Doug, maybe he was dead inside. Doug hesitated. He hoped his intuition was offf base. The signs foretold no good though.

  There were light foot prints exiting the porch. A few more showed a trail leading away, trekking across the buried lawns leading out onto Kildare Street. Doug
looked up and down the block. All the homes were dark. It was early Christmas Day morning. No lights or even the glow of candles were visible. Most of the front windows had their curtains drawn. Shades were lowered. Strands of white, red and green Christmas lights danced to the chaotic beat of the wind, Everyone appeared to be hunkered down, safe in their homes due to frigid temps. Doug gandered at how much snow had accumulated in front of Mavis’s front door as well. Perhaps Cray went to share a drink with the old woman, but he doubted it. His friend did not like to share his alcohol. Naked trees swayed as if frightened from the gusts. There was no other human movement anywhere.

  Visibility was diminishing again. Canadian wind relentlessly raked Doug’s exposed flesh. Eyes began to burn. He’d forgotten that being out in Arctic polar conditions would freeze your ass right quick. He squinted to survey his old neighborhood one last time. Many trunks and branches lay buried across lawns, on top of cars, their weight dragging down other trees as if drunkenly leaning on them. A few porch roofs had given up, sagging under the white onslaught. Weather had waged a war in Chicago. And like after every battle, the people of Chicago, citizens of Olde Irving Park would have to clean up and salvage what they could.

  Doug peeped inside his family’s house. His little brother would kill him. He was a born again Christian, but forgiveness came hard to him. Snow had blown up the front hall, settled on stairs and even crept down into the kitchen. A foot of snow formed like a Saharan sand dune stretching into the dining room where bloody towels curled around empty beer cans and liquor bottles. Most of Cray Lamb’s clothing lay in the dining room.

  The house was cold and silent. Doug could see his own breath. Where did Cray go? Did he venture outside naked? Cray was a perverse guy, but still. Did the infection overtake him? Food was still out on counters, unwrapped and waiting as if in mid-sandwich. Doug turned as he heard the refrigerator cycle on. Its low hum was a comfort.

  We may be in a lot of trouble here, he thought. Doug remembered a lot of the people in the restaurant had been bitten as well. He had no idea how it all worked. How much of the lore of being a vampire was accurate? Even the Brits did not have all the answers. You’d think the Limeys would know how it all worked by now.

  Doug smiled at such absurd thoughts. At least, he felt revived a bit. He was smart enough to let joy into his life no matter how brief. One of the lessons he learned while fiighting overseas. You had to sleep when you could, eat when you got it, and fiind a way to refiill your spirit. His superiors had taught their men well. The unit Douglas had fought in was close knit and good at what they did. They had six true lethal bad asses. Doug was below them, in terms of a killer’s appetite, but not without useful skills. He just didn’t have the blood-lust some of the other guys did. He gut checked himself there. Part of the reason deciding to come back to Chicago was a saving grace for him. He needed a break from mayhem. His badass friends just re-enlisted again. He knew they felt complete over there in ‘the Suck’. Doug said a prayer for his missing and dead friends.

  It occurred to him then, he had his own bloody battle right here. “Coming for you, bud.” Doug mumbled. He cleared the snowy blockage of the door with his boots. And began to clean up Cray’s mess.

  Chapter 4

  The driver lay in a puddle of her own juices. She was rancid. Black blood puddles, inches deep surrounded her face like thick soup. She blinked awake, a feral creature now, whose brain had not yet caught up. Snarling, her hands shot out to grab the fiigure next to her. Her palm grasped at a shadow. Her thoughts were broken, her mind damaged. The fiigure throwing the shade turned towards the sudden outburst.

  Cray sat on the black SUV’s hood gazing down at his newly risen acolyte. Somewhere in his consciousness, it struck home that he was not to have made his own servant, being merely hours turned into a bloodsucker himself. Cray Lamb had never been a proponent of giving in to form over substance. He had always been the passionate one seeking the form. He was not one to feel guilty over bad choices. No matter how bad the consequences were.

  The driver leapt through the windscreen still not fully of sound mind. Her body was slow to propel itself through the glass. Cray easily caught her skull in his grip. He marveled how powerful his slender body was. He had once been a Human Honda Fit, compact, lithe and trim. Now his body felt like a Mack truck, an eighteen wheeler loaded to the brim with plastic explosives. His learning curve from Life to Tortured existence was supernaturally quick. It was as if he had been naturally called to being a bloodsucker, so easily it had come to him.

  Not so the young lady he turned. The driver kept struggling in his grasp. There was something wrong with her brain, he decided. It was like being a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, either you acclimated to the violence, or you broke apart. Cray saw many young men crying at night. One Missouri boy in base camp actually tried to hang himself. Battle didn't just give you PTSD. Most warriors had those anxious moments. Cray thought War was about how much you liked the killing. He and Dougie had always been among the cream that rose to the top almost every time.

  The driver fell over offf the SUV. Yep, something was wrong with her. When he was a boy, following his father from service assignments hither and yon, Cray had found a cur just after a car had glanced it with its bumper. The poor dog tried to walk across the street to safety but found itself walking in slow circles. Cray had saved it then, tears in his eyes. The scrawny thing died in Lamb’s arms. His father ordered his son to bury the mongrel. Saving something’s life made you responsible for it.

  But that had been long ago. The Driver seemed to have fiits as if her brain could not adjust to its new existence. Cray thought he may have to hobble her, if her struggles became too annoying. Jumping down offf the hood, he grasped the female by her neck. He threw her lithe body straight up at the brick ceiling of the tunnel. She slammed into it head fiirst, plummeting back down, then crumpling into the snow covered apron of the tunnel entrance. The Driver snarled, face down in the shallow snow bank.

  “Calm down. You need to listen to me. Hello?” Cray whispered, as if he were still talking to the long dead mutt. The driver sat, legs akimbo, her black jeans torn and slick with blood. Her skull was cracked and blood seeped from the wound. One eye looked bigger than the other. Did she have a concussion? Cray frowned.

  “Damn. I broke the new girl.” The driver tried to look up at him, held his gaze for a moment, then collapsed backwards into a heap, her head laying in the snow. She shuddered, convulsing violently. Legs and arms twitched, spasming through the change. Cray busied himself clearing all the bits of safety glass from the windshield frame. When he turned back to look at the driver, she was sitting up again. One eye was fiilled black with blood while the other tried to focus on him. The naked Cray kneeling on the SUV looked upon the frail fiigure in the snow.

  “Listen to me, new chick. This is what we’re going to do.”

  Wind gusted then. Only the snow could hear what was being said.

  Chapter 5

  Charles looked nearly white as the sheet he lay beneath. His skin trembled as sweat seeped from his pores. The huge man lay prostrate on the medical bed, his eyelids fluttering.

  Abernathy grimaced, his stomach rumbling in protest. He hadn’t eaten for a full day, only drinking to sustain himself from the brandy snifter in the foyer. His body had been as out of whack as his partner’s. A headache had been pounding his skull for hours. Sleep remained elusive and any alcohol induced naps were broken up by horrible nightmares.

  That was the cost he paid for what he had done. What else could he hope for? Abernathy had had to make a deal with the enemy so to speak. He drank, considering the thought. Was the dark man truly an enemy? Gray was part of the Smythe family tree. True, the man had been on the wrong side of history. However, there was now a chance, however narrow, of those dark forces lining up and helping Abernathy save Charles waning life. Desperate ideas flew around his cranium.

  Without Charles’ love, what would life be worth? Charles squeaked ou
t a word. It appeared his love was battling demons in the night. The dire wounds the vile thing graced from earlier refused to heal. Abernathy would be satisfiied for them to merely congeal over. Charles large frame shook as he fought the stubborn ague. Pale skin revealed red gashes, casting an awful pallor. Abernathy looked away. He pulled the top sheet tighter over Charles chest. Grief caught in his throat.

  The brick house was quiet, all but for the shaking of the body in the bed. Abernathy’s back was towards the door. He quafffed the fiinal dregs of brandy in his short glass, turned to put it on a side table and pivoted soundlessly holding a minibow pointed at the doorway behind him.

  He shot the bow. The arrow flew true hitting the huge fiigure in the doorway.

  “How?” Gasped the man.

  “You smell like dead earth.” Muttered Abernathy. “Your reek precedes you.” Gray stood for a moment, before grasping the bolt, pulling it from his chest. At 6'3'', the towering creature grimaced at the force it took to remove the bolt. He ground the graphite arrow into dark green shards rolling it with thick fiingers.

  “Yes, A strong cologne would be nice.”

  The two relatives stared at each other. Wind whistled around the eaves outside. “Another 30 more such arrows might do minor damage to me. Had enough? I thought we had an agreement. Your help in purveying the cube for me in lieu of my aid with your …” His words festered like gangrene.

  “… Predicament,” Gray fiinished. Abernathy’s hand shook as he wiped away the sweat from his upper lip. He slowly loaded another arrow. The Gray fiilled the doorway.

  “Look at you. When my world held sway, families had the good sense to eliminate the retarded and infiirm. Dwarves. Midgets. Circus freaks. Fewer insignifiicant mistakes meant the world would be a shade lighter of grotesques.”

  Abernathy gritted his teeth. His diminutive stature had been the target for bullies his entire existence. He would be damned if this relative would get any further than the others ever had. The Gray stared at him.