Old Flames, Burned Hands

by McGregor, Tim

  He creaked and fumbled to his knees, pain shooting hot at every move. He stared at the object in her hand with its candlewick guttering until he made sense of what she was holding. The name of the object had simply dropped out of his memory and he groped around to find it again when a burst of flame roared out of the business end in a great arc.

  The wraiths inching forward caught a facefull of fire as Tilda hazed them back. She drew a bead on the rector, who again refused to withdraw. “I’m taking Gil out of here,” she spat at him. “And you will leave us alone. I’ll keep your secret but if I smell any of you within a mile of my family, I’ll expose you and bring every cop in the city down on your little fucking clubhouse. Do you understand me?”

  The despot didn’t respond. Whether he failed to understand or refused to capitulate was anyone’s guess.

  “Tilda…” Gil wheezed.

  “Gil, make him understand.”

  “…behind you.”

  She spun just as one wraith sprang from its brothers and she torched it but its momentum propelled it on all the same and she kicked it down, blasting it again until it blazed up into an inferno.

  The others hesitated, articulating their jaws with that awful clicking sound.

  “Lean on me.” She draped his arm around her, felt his weight drag her shoulders down. “Watch our backs.” Another blast of the fire and the coven parted. They hobbled back toward the entrance, Gil craning his neck behind him.

  When they came to the edge of the pit, Gil all but fell into the bones. The dessicated femurs and ribslats rattled like kindling as he regained his footing. Tilda fired a warning blast and dropped in beside him and they waded through the bonefield of nameless remains.

  When Gil stumbled and fell to one knee, she saw the wraiths dropping into the pit after them. She snatched his arm and dragged him, Gil caterwauling drunkenly and then one creature sprang, vaulting off the edge towards them.

  Tilda brought the weapon up fast and fired but no flame issued forth, the can hissing dry. She throttled the trigger piece again and again.

  Empty

  empty

  and still empty.

  A guttural howl of victory went up from the filth as they surged forward like sharks on chum.

  THE FIRST MONSTER TACKLED HER, buckling Tilda at the waist and sprawling her into the pit of bones. Her hands pushed in a frenzy to keep the snapping teeth from her locking onto her face. A sudden tug at her back and then she felt a geyser of cold blood douse over her. The machete blade appeared an inch from her nose, sunk into the decrepit neck of the creature. It jerked taut as if electrocuted then fell limp. Looking up she saw Gil pull the blade free and boot the carcass off of her. Then he turned to face the oncomers.

  Tilda racked back the lever arm on the flamethrower and spun the dead can out. With the backup canister taped to the empty one, she snapped the seal and flipped it over, seating the fresh supply into the body. Jamming the arm back in, she fired blind into the horde of undead things rushing at Gil.

  One went up with a whoosh and another ignited into a ball of flames and flailed against its fraters for help but the others knocked it away like some malignant thing. The acrid reek of charred flesh stung Tilda’s nose but she kept the pressure on, a steady stream of dragonbreath until the hateful things backed away.

  Gil swung the machete clumsily, the strength of his attack blunted by blood loss and massive trauma. She pulled him away and clawed up the slope towards the breach in the wall. The way out of this hellhole.

  “Go,” she said. The breach in the wall was narrow. One at a time.

  He shook his head. “No. You first. I’ll hold them off.”

  “You can barely stand. Go!” Tilda shoved him forward and then put her back to the wall. The coven rattled through the bone pit, fanning out below her at the base of the slope. She swept the air with another blast of flame but there were too many to keep at bay at once.

  Chief amongst the rabble was the rector of this daemonic cloister, wading through the bones, its eyes fixed on her and her alone.

  Gil disappeared into the gap. The wraiths clawed up the slope towards her. She fired the air one more time and then clambered into the fissure. The space was tight, barely enough room to work her elbows as she clawed and wriggled through. She pushed the flamethrower ahead of her and shimmied her weight in a peculiar slither, her legs kicking uselessly on the other side of the wall.

  “Gil!”

  The wick of the thrower guttered before her but beyond it there was only darkness. She called his name again. Why wasn’t he there? Had he collapsed or was something waiting for them on the other side?

  That’s when she felt something clamp over her ankle. Tighter than a tourniquet, it tugged hard, dragging her back out.

  Her scream burst her own eardrum as it boomed around that cramped space. She wedged her elbows against the dirt walls, dug her fingers into the earth to anchor herself but she kept sliding back in some infernal breech birth. The flickering wick went out, plunging her into darkness. She felt teeth clamp onto her calf and bite down.

  Then pressure on her wrists. A grip. Gil’s voice in the dark, telling her to stop screaming. He pulled her forward but the teeth in her calf sunk deeper. An obscene tug of war, Tilda pulled apart over an infernal line of demarcation. Forward into Gil or backwards into Hell. She could hear Gil snarling against the strain and she muled out with her good foot, kicking like she was on fire. The lamprey mouth barnacled on her leg tore free, the teeth scraping down her ankle before she shot forward, ejected from the burrow hole.

  She tumbled onto Gil and they sprawled over the floor of the small anteroom. Gil snatched up the flamethrower and aimed it at the crawlspace. A pale face appeared, slithering after them and he toggled the nozzle and spewed fire into its horrid visage.

  “Hurry,” Tilda hollered, already pulling at his arm.

  “Wait.” He tossed her the device and turned to one of the oil drums standing guard near the wall. He spun the cap off and pushed the drum over and a viscous fluid gurgled from the spout, pooling across the gritty floor.

  He snatched up a smaller canister and knocked the cap off of it too. Pushing her ahead of him. “Go.”

  They ran up the incline of the tunnel. Gil falling once and then twice as he staggered to keep up, emptying the canister as they ran and twice Tilda doubled back to haul him up and pull him along.

  The canister emptied before they reached the intersecting tunnel and they could already hear the coven pouring out into the anteroom below, knocking the debris out of their way.

  Gil limped to a stop, wheezing. “Torch it.”

  Tilda judged the distance from their position to the lateral tunnel up ahead where they could dive for cover from the blowback of the inferno she was about to set off. Gil reeled, losing blood from almost every pore. “Can you run?”

  “Throw it, Tilda. Before it’s too late.”

  “You’ll never make it in time. Run up ahead and take cover.”

  “Torch it!”

  She could already see movement at the far end of the tunnel, figures slithering in the dark. The wick of the flamethrower guttered and she tossed the weapon in a soft underhand. It arced through the air and clanked to the floor. Flames crackled up the trail of fuel and snaked furiously down the passageway.

  They ran headlong and heedless and didn’t look back. The next tunnel closing fast when they heard the explosion and Tilda felt the heat at her back as the fireball chased them up the incline, eating everything in its path.

  Gil was staggering and she seized his hand to pull him along and light filled the archway as the fire found them out. She dove for the bisecting tunnel, scrambling for cover behind the damp brick wall and yanked Gil after her. She wasn’t fast enough. The fireball swept over him, searing the flesh on his back as it ate all the oxygen into it and Tilda gasped for air, gulping heat into her lungs.

  The fireball thundered over them and then petered out quickly, leaving wisps of greasy bla
ck smoke in the air. Smaller fires kindled up around them as the air rushed back in to fill the vacuum and Tilda chomped it down. The taste of ash burnt her tongue and seared down her throat.

  Gil lay face down in the grit. His back was charred and carbonized like a piece of over-grilled meat. He didn’t move.

  “Gil,” she whispered. “Gil, look at me.”

  His hand crawled into hers and held tight. His jaw racked up and down, trying to speak but the only sound it made was a wet rattle. His pupils dilated and his mouth corkscrewed in pain and then he closed his eyes to it all.

  A sound hooked Tilda’s ear, rising above the crackle of the various fires around them. Hellish screams of anguish echoed up from the way they had come. Banshee wails of pain sounding over them in that echo chamber of sooty brick. The sound of the coven, in what she prayed were death throes.

  “Can you walk?”

  A grunt with no recognizable syllable.

  “Try.”

  She saw his jaw clench over the pain as she helped him up. They hobbled forward in a brittle sidestep and Tilda felt his body trembling under her like an injured dog. Her own muscles quivered and she didn’t know how long she could keep him upright before she would give out.

  She made for the first tunnel, backtracking the way she had entered, but Gil tugged her sideways, nodding to the intersecting passageway. They limped along in the dark, Tilda blind in the gloom and she cursed herself for not tearing the Maglite from the torch before tossing it away. Groping in the dark, Gil guided her along, steering her through the corridor. His weight sank onto her with each step and she strained to stay upright, unsure of how long she could keep either of them vertical.

  His wrist was slick and her grip slipped and Gil slid away, dropping to his knees with an unearthly groan. Tilda winced and grimaced to haul him back to his feet. They shambled on in this manner for some time, Tilda straining her ears for the sound of anything coming up behind them but there was no sound, nothing above her own panting and his grunting.

  He pulled her to a stop and let go of her, leaving her stranded in the dark. Then a rattling click, metallic and sharp. Light split the pitch as a door creaked opened and Tilda’s retinas burned against white light. She groped her way through the door like a blind woman, pulling Gil after her.

  THE blinding light was no more than a low watt incandescent bulb frosted with dust. The room they filed into was storage space, an archive of sorts with dusty boxes reposing on metal rack shelving. A faint whiff of must and damp newspaper. Tilda scanned the room for an exit. Gil slid down the wall to the floor, legs splayed out before him. Under the steady glow of the incandescent, she could see the extent of his injuries. There was nary a patch of skin that wasn’t painted in blood. His flesh had been flayed and bit and cut and ripped open. His entire body was scored with the dark hatchings of trauma. A sucking chest wound and snapped ribs gelled in dark blood, as if the coven had tried to dig Gil’s heart out with their bare hands.

  Tilda felt her brains short-circuit for some way to help him. He needed surgery. He needed a hundred surgeries. “Oh God. We need to stop the bleeding.”

  A deep rupture on his stomach split open and ropy intestines bubbled out in a slow ooze. His hand shot over it, like some unseemly blemish to hide from a girl on a first date. Gil wheezed and then his eyes rolled over white, chin dipping to his collarbone.

  She smacked his cheek. “Wake up. Don’t you pass out on me. Gil!”

  His eyes wheeled about crazily but could not lock onto hers. “Tilda,” he slurred. “I think I’m fucked.”

  “No, you’re not. But I don’t know how to stop the bleeding.” She scanned down the wounds. Too many to count, she didn’t know where to start or what to do.

  He followed her eyes, tracking the panic that was growing fast in them. “That bad, huh?”

  “You’ve looked better.” Shaking herself free, she turned and ransacked the shelves for towels or cloth or a first-aid kit. Anything to cover the worst of the leaking wounds but all she unearthed were soiled rags. She cursed and flung them away.

  “Don’t waste your time.”

  “No,” she said sharply. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Okay. Then don’t waste mine. Cuz they’re ain’t much left.”

  She just had to look harder, that was all. Sweeping whole shelves to the floor, she tore the room apart but there was nothing here. She stopped her ransacking but was afraid to look back at him. This wasn’t happening, she thought. Not now, not after all this. When she finally turned around, she saw his chest glisten red as it heaved up and shrank down.

  Think, damn it. Gil was a vampire, like the others. He fed on blood. He’d lost a massive amount of it at the hands of those monsters. He needed more. Simple as that.

  “You need blood.” She scurried back and crouched over him. She thrust her forearm out and set the soft flesh of her inner wrist to his lips. “Take mine.”

  Gil tilted his head away. “No.”

  “Do it! Take just enough to heal up. Or enough to walk out of here.” She took his chin in her hand and turned his face to her. “You can’t die on me. Not a second time. Do it.”

  She pressed her wrist to his bloodied lips again. Just below the epidermis throbbed the arteries, both radial and the ulnar that pulsed her hot blood. The red and white cells, the platelets and the haemoglobin. Both banquet and sustenance, a feast and an aphrodisiac. All he had to do was bite down and pierce the skin and it would gush out over his tongue and geyser into his throat. So simple and primal. Even a mindless leech could understand the task required.

  He pushed it away.

  Anticipating the pain, Tilda’s eyes shot open when the pain didn’t come. Confusion flashed hard in her eyes, then frustration. “Do it. As much as you need. Just heal up.”

  “No.”

  “You have to.” Was he insane from the blood loss? She dug into his gaze for some sign of delusion or death wish, found neither. “I don’t know what else to do. Please.”

  “Help me,” he said.

  “I’m trying to!”

  He took her hand and squeezed tight. “Upstairs. Help me up the stairs.”

  She clasped his arm and pivoted back on one heel, hauling him to his feet. “Where.”

  “The roof,” he said. A sliver of a smile on his lips. “Help me get to the roof.”

  THE sky overhead was grey and rainclouds hunkered so low that Tilda could almost reach up and touch them. To the east, the sky was clearing and the clouds broke apart as their undersides burned orange from a sun almost risen.

  The building was deserted and they were undisturbed as they limped and reeled up the stairwell to the access door at the very top. They came out onto a flat square of rooftop covered in clear stone gravel. Tilda drew in great gobs of clean sweet air but the bitter ashen taste in her throat would not go away and she was terribly thirsty.

  She looked over the edge to the street below. Trying to orient herself from this angle was difficult and it took a moment before she determined that they had resurfaced into the old building in the crescent on the edge of the university campus. Two blocks from their dream apartment.

  Gil hobbled to the western lip of the roof and all but collapsed onto the gravel. The bleeding hadn’t abated and a trail of dark blood drizzled across the stones from the door to the roof edge where he crumpled. Leaning back against the flashing, he drew up his legs and cantilevered his elbows atop his knees. “Do you see smoke?” he asked.

  Tilda swept the eyeline of the old buildings and treetops. There, to the north, a twisting funnel of black smoke coiled up from some unseen origin to meet the rainclouds above. She pointed. “There.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “I can’t tell. Somewhere on Saint George.” She looked down over the edge. A sheer drop to the potholed laneway below that made her dizzy and she took a step back. “Do you think they’re all dead?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s hope so.” Gil leaned his back aga
inst the dull metal and considered her question. The fire in the lair had been massive. Total. Had it incinerated them all? Even if one or two had escaped, the coven itself was destroyed and, like herd animals, the creatures could only thrive in numbers. Alone and adrift, a solitary wraith would crumble under its own outcast loneliness and the depravity of its existence. Tribe mentality, without the tribe, would not be enough to survive. It would starve to death or become desperate and be caught, snapping the sacred law like straw and exposing itself to the rational daylight world.

  They had held him captive for almost two decades. A lifetime, or rather, he considered, a deathtime. How old the coven itself was, he didn’t know. The rector had held his secrets close but Gil suspected the monsters went back to the time of the first European settlers. Had the coven come with the earliest French and English pioneers or were the wraiths already on this continent, waiting for them? He didn’t know. He no longer cared.

  Regardless of whether they were all destroyed, he was now shed of the hateful things. All that mattered now was his escape and Tilda. Always Tilda.

  He opened his eyes and saw the wreckage of his body and the blood pooling underneath him and he looked away. Filled his view with her. “Come here,” he said. “Sit beside me.”

  Tilda eased down slowly onto the gravel. Everything seemed to hurt. Her bad wrist most of all, flushing hot and tender as if the bones were grinding against one another. She’d gotten away relatively unscathed, she thought, compared to the man from her past.

  “Let’s go back down,” she said. “Where it’s dark.”

  “No.”

  The dark blood pooling around him soaked through her jeans and she gaped at the volume of it and wondered how it still seeped out of him and where it was all coming from. His breathing was laboured, like a coal-miner on his deathbed, and his hand was back on his split belly holding his guts in.

  She had expected tears but her eyes were dry. Too dehydrated to cry, she thought. She swiveled her head to him. “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can go back down. Find some other way.”