End of Days

by Max Turner

  Then something bizarre happened. A shadow fell to the floor on the far side of the hall. It happened quickly. With the lights doing a kooky flash dance above, I wasn’t sure if I’d actually seen anything, but then the people on that side of the floor began to part. They were staring at a man who was moving toward us. With the light behind him, all I could see was a tall silhouette, but it was enough. His movements were fluid. Effortless. Perfectly balanced. Driven by tremendous strength. There was none of the stiffness you see with normal people. It was another vampire. He’d obviously spotted us. If he was one of those elders who didn’t like kids, we were going to go straight from rave to grave.

  I wasn’t about to take any chances. “Charlie, we’ve gotta go.” I grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and started pulling him to the door.

  “That’s right, pretty boy, take a walk,” the guy with the fan-shaped hair said.

  I’d hoped Charlie would just fall in step, but I should have known better. He resisted. Fortunately, I was a lot stronger and jerked his shoulder back. He shot me an angry look, but when he noticed I was staring past the guy with the fan-shaped hair, he turned and saw what I did. Right in front of him, the girl with the red lampshade hair was smiling and waving. Her boyfriend was smirking. Then the tall vampire, little more than a shadow, shouldered past a guy just behind them, spinning him like a turnstile.

  Charlie looked back at me, panic all over his face. “Zack, that’s a vampire.”

  “I know!”

  We raced for the door.

  “How did he know we were here?”

  I had no idea. But it didn’t matter. We’d been spotted. So we ran.

  — CHAPTER 3

  RUNNING SCARED

  We were just outside when I heard a sound like a flag rippling loudly in the wind. I looked up to see a second shadow drop from the far corner of the building, about a hundred feet away. He was wearing something that might have been a cape, or a loose cowl. It snapped in the night air as he fell.

  “There’s two of them,” I said.

  Charlie put it into high gear and I followed. Neither of us spoke. We were both terrified. Our lives were at stake, no pun intended. Our fear was so strong I could smell the sharp tang of it in the warm night air.

  To avoid being seen, we didn’t follow the road, but stuck to the banks of the river. When we reached the Riverview Park and Zoo, we stopped.

  “Are they following us?” Charlie whispered. “Do you hear anything?” He pushed so little air past his lips that it made less noise than a pair of moth wings, but to my ears, it was crystal clear.

  I tested the air. Smelled sweat. Charlie’s cologne. Zoo animals and rotting straw. Our strained nerves. The wind in the trees was loud. So was the babble of the river. I heard nothing else and didn’t expect to. Vampires are predators. Fast, silent, and lethal. We wouldn’t hear them until it was too late. Not if they were elders. Over time, the pathogen responsible for making us vampires changed us in ways that stretched the imagination. Talents, they were called, but they were more like the special powers you’d expect to read about in comic books and fantasy novels. Turning into mist. Blending into shadows. Reading people’s thoughts. Shape-shifting. Even flying.

  I scanned the treetops overhead, then started running again. In minutes we were downtown. We headed for the rooftops. Up and down, block to block. Trees, fire escapes, phone poles, and fences, we scampered over all of them, sticking to the shadows, jumping store to store, row to row, house to house. We were two foxes who knew the hounds were right behind.

  We never made it home. About a block from our house, I stopped. Charlie was looking over his shoulder and nearly plowed into me. I tested the air with my nose.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  I could smell blood. Normally, it has a distinctive odor—much like everything does. But because it’s our only food, we’d never confuse it with anything else. It always set off a chain reaction, in me at least, that usually started in my mouth and spread like a jolt of electricity to every muscle in my body. But I wasn’t reacting this way because the odor was a bit off. My mind took a few moments to sort out the reason why.

  Charlie poked me in the shoulder. “Wake up, Sleepy Dwarf. Why have we stopped?”

  “Can’t you smell that?”

  He tested the air. Then his eyes widened.

  “I think it’s from a vampire,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Smells wrong.”

  The wind changed and the odor grew even stronger. I raced to the tallest house nearby, scampered up the wall, pulled myself up onto the roof, then perched on the chimney. Our place was just down the street. Ophelia’s car wasn’t there. Did that mean she hadn’t returned? I was hoping so, because the odor of blood was coming from our driveway. A telltale crimson smear covered the asphalt.

  I heard Charlie below me. He was climbing up the side of the house. I waved him off, then dropped as quickly as I could to the ground. Once I was hidden in the shadow of a tree, I pulled out my cell phone and called Ophelia. Her number was at the top of my call list, right under Charlie’s. I hit send and waited. The ring sounded louder than a church bell. I figured every vampire from here to the moon could hear it.

  “Can’t you set the volume lower?” Charlie asked.

  I shook my head. Then Ophelia’s voice mail came on. “Call me immediately,” I whispered. I nearly snapped the phone in half folding it up.

  “Let’s get home,” Charlie said. He started off toward the house.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled him the other way. “We can’t,” I said. “That’s where the blood is coming from. I think they might have arrived ahead of us.”

  “What? Those vampires? How would they know to come here?”

  I had no idea.

  “Perfect. I knew this night was too good to be true. We were finally having a bit of fun.” Charlie was starting to raise his voice. I waved for him to be quiet. The wind picked up and the smell of vampire blood intensified. “You don’t think it might be . . . ?”

  He didn’t finish, but I knew where he was going. That the blood might be Ophelia’s.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Her car’s not back. And I don’t think she was planning to come home this early.”

  “Let’s hope that’s not wishful thinking.” He stared up the block, then checked over each shoulder. What now?”

  I had no idea, but standing still wasn’t an option. I turned toward my old neighborhood, where I’d once lived with my father.

  “Wait . . . not that way.” Charlie pulled me around so we were backtracking downtown. “If we want to hide, the best place is somewhere they’ve already looked.”

  Did he mean back at the rave? We’d done this sort of thing once before, last year on Stony Lake when the police were looking for us. We went to a cottage they’d already searched. It seemed a good idea. I fell in step beside Charlie and we headed back to the rave, back to the rooftops.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” he said.

  Him . . . He could only mean one person. Vlad Tsepesh—the Impaler. His real name was Wladislaus Dragwlya, but to the modern world he was Dracula. Not a creature of fantasy but a scourge. When I’d first heard of him, he’d used an assumed name, the Baron Vrolok. My uncle Maximilian told me about him. That he’d killed my parents and infected me. Later, Vrolok tried to kill Charlie and me. And Luna. But, thanks to Ophelia, we’d survived. So had he, but only because I didn’t have the heart to kill him. Now he was missing, or his body was. It meant he might still be out there. Although he’d almost burnt up in the sun, nearly dead for a vampire isn’t really dead at all. Unless the head is cut off, or the body is incinerated, all it takes to bring us back is a bit of time and blood. Lots of it.

  “We should never have stayed in Peterborough,” Charlie whispered.

  It was hard to disagree at the moment.

  We ran over the downtown and sprinted along the river until we reached a picnic area between one of the city’s hydro st
ations and a row of houses. Then the smell of vampire blood returned, stronger here than at the house. I slowed, then stopped. Charlie pulled up beside me. The way his nose flared, I could tell he’d noticed, too. His teeth were down and his pupils were two black disks again. Wide. Alert. Nervous. I felt the same.

  I scanned the shore and the grass around the trees. A few picnic tables sat near a trash can. Drops of vampire blood ran past them in a straight line toward the river.

  “Over here.” Charlie pointed to a large bootprint in the grass a few steps away. “Do you think it’s from one of those vampires at the rave?”

  I had no idea.

  “Look, it leads straight into the water.”

  In the mud on the lip of the bank was another print. I set my foot in it, then backed up and looked for another. Whoever it was, he’d lost a lot of blood here. Then jumped into the river. It made no sense. Blood doesn’t clot underwater.

  “What can do this to a vampire?” Charlie asked.

  I shrugged. “A stronger vampire maybe.”

  He kneeled down and smeared his fingertips with blood, then raised it to his nose. He was about to stick it in his mouth when I grabbed his arm.

  “Oh, right,” he said.

  I let go of his arm. He wiped his fingers on his pant leg and stood. A vampire’s blood could be fatal to another vampire. I wasn’t exactly sure why.

  “He was motoring.” Charlie stared at the bootprint in the grass. The other print, the one in the mud by the water, was at least twenty feet away. “You think he was being followed?”

  My eyes swept over the grass. “I don’t see any other footprints, do you?”

  Charlie went back to the bank where the ground was softer and shook his head. Then he kicked off his shoes and waded out to his knees. A few seconds later, he pointed to the ground at the lip of the river. I saw a hollow depression. A few inches of water had washed inside, obscuring the bottom. We found several more. They were deep, as if someone had pressed a large tin can into the muck.

  “What makes that kind of mark?” he asked.

  I couldn’t say. I stared at the round hole and tried to imagine what might have done it. It looked almost like a bear print, but was wider at the front, with no toe markings, though the river might have washed them away.

  Charlie slapped my shoulder gently with the back of his hand. “Don’t go catatonic on me now.”

  I wasn’t planning to. But I often got quiet when I was thinking and sometimes forgot to answer people when they spoke to me. I’d picked up this bad habit from living in the Nicholls Ward. Half the people there couldn’t carry on a conversation. They just muttered all the time or repeated themselves or completely ignored me. Since it didn’t really make a difference what I said to them, I got used to keeping my mouth shut and thinking about things in my head. The busier my mind got, the less likely I was to say anything out loud.

  Charlie gently punched my shoulder. “Say something, turkey meat. Your tongue’s frozen.”

  “Sorry. I’m just trying to figure this out.”

  I tested the air. I could smell the damp grass, car exhaust, rotting sticks and leaves along the bank, my deodorant, vampire blood . . .

  “What is it?”

  “Wine,” I said. “And a sweaty, leathery kind of dog smell.”

  We stood for a few moments, not speaking.

  “You want to get your feet wet?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t like the water.

  Charlie looked farther up the shore. “Should we keep checking along the bank? Whoever jumped in had to come out somewhere.”

  “If he came out at all. You really want to find him?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Not really. But if he’s injured, this might be the best chance we have. He’s weak. If he feeds and regenerates, we’re going to be in trouble.”

  I had a feeling we were already in trouble. I turned back to the street.

  Charlie stayed for a few moments to tie up his shoes. Then he just stared out over the river. In his first life, he’d been a water baby. Swimming. Canoeing. Windsurfing. He used to be a sailing instructor. Before that, he raced Lasers, single-sailed boats you could skipper by yourself. It was all part of a life that belonged in the sunshine. It was gone and never coming back. I didn’t know what to say to him. These were all things he’d lost because I’d infected him, and there was no easy way to set it right.

  I heard him take a deep breath, then he turned so we were standing shoulder to shoulder. “Any more clues, Sherlock?”

  Before I could answer, a howl ripped through the air. Another answered. Wolves. They were close, only a few blocks away.

  “That’s weird,” he said.

  And unsettling.

  “Let’s go.” He started forward.

  I didn’t move.

  “What is it?”

  Did he really have to ask?

  “We have an advantage, Zack. He’s hurt.”

  “That only makes him more dangerous,” I said.

  “Or more likely to kill someone.”

  Charlie had a point. An injured vampire needed human blood to regenerate. If his hunger was strong enough, it might push him over the edge.

  “Who else is going to do anything?” he added. “What if he’s gone crazy?”

  That clinched it. “You’re right. We’d better check things out.”

  Charlie laughed.

  “What is it?”

  “You sound like you’re auditioning for the part of Superman in the school play.”

  “Very funny.”

  Another eruption of howling. It sounded as if the entire cast of White Fang were having a feeding frenzy just up the street.

  “Well, now is our chance, Clark. Up, up and away.”

  Charlie brushed past me, then raced off into the dark along the river. The howling continued.

  — CHAPTER 4

  SURPRISE ATTACK

  The Riverview Park and Zoo was less than a quarter mile down Water Street. And yes, they had wolves. Two of them. Whenever Charlie and I came by on a late-night run, they were always up, padding their cells, restless to join us on the hunt. They would have been disappointed. We never killed anything larger than mosquitoes. But tonight was different. We were hunting an injured vampire.

  I took off. I’d been infected much longer than Charlie. Even though we’d been drinking human blood for about the same length of time, my transmission had a few extra gears. I wanted to arrive first, just in case there really was trouble. By the time he caught up, I was standing outside the wolf pen. It was empty. The chain links of the outer fence and the taller, inner fence had been ripped apart. The smell of vampire blood was in the air. I ran my fingers over the torn metal. I couldn’t make sense of this. If a vampire was injured, why would it mess with two wolves?

  “Why would someone do this?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Like I’m supposed to know?” He nodded toward a hole in the ground. “One of the posts is missing.”

  We heard another howl. And a squeal.

  “That way,” Charlie said, nodding past the animal cages to a play area full of monkey bars and swing sets. He bolted. I got swept up in his turbulence. We passed a goat and donkey pen—they were bleating as if the world were going to end. Then we entered the kids’ park. Every animal in the zoo was awake by this time. It sounded like the inside of Noah’s ark. Then I saw the two wolves. They were dead. Both had deep rows of gashes along their flanks, as if they’d been run over several times by a lawn mower. I scanned the ground looking for footprints, then sniffed at the air to try to find any trace of where the vampire had gone. With so much blood everywhere, I couldn’t tell what was what. My senses were on overload.

  “He’s definitely gone bonkers?” Charlie said. He had to raise his voice over the sound of the buffaloes, which were sounding off like a pair of foghorns.

  I surveyed the mess and nodded. Most vampires hid their tracks. This one was advertising, a sure sign of Endpoint Psychosis. Whoever it
was, Vlad or someone else, we had to catch him quickly or he might easily start the kind of pandemic you only saw in bad Hollywood horror films.

  Charlie slapped my arm gently with the back of his hand, then flicked his fingers toward the edge of the park. “The prints lead that way.”

  The children’s area was a sandlot. I could see a pair of boot markings—the same from the riverbank—leading past a tube slide to a set of steps that ran down the hill. The river was that way. As we were following the tracks, I heard the sound of sirens approaching.

  “Hurry,” Charlie said.

  I took off at warp speed, following the blood trail to the bottom of the stairs. Then I slowed. I’m not sure why. Was it fear? Or perhaps a deeper instinct. Trouble was waiting ahead. The hairs on my arms were standing up, and the eerie chill I’d felt at the rave returned—as if I was being watched. Charlie was right on my heels. As I slowed, so did he. We crept along the path, then I felt his hand on my back. I flattened out on the ground so I was hidden in the long grass. Ahead, by the riverbank, we could see the silhouette of a man.

  “Who is it?” Charlie whispered. “Can you see?”

  I couldn’t. He was about a hundred meters away, and the light of the moon was behind him, so his face was just a shadow. His hair was long. A mix of black and white and gray. He was wearing what might have been a cape, or maybe a long overcoat. As we watched, the man dropped to a crouch and looked back in our direction. By his movements, I could tell it was a vampire.

  “It doesn’t look like Vlad,” Charlie said.

  He was right. Vlad was short and thick with a neck like an ox. This man was taller. Leaner. This should have brought me some relief, but it didn’t. Maybe because the vampire had the missing fence post—the one from the wolf pen—and was holding it like a baseball bat. He began to circle, his eyes scanning the grass where we were hiding. The trees to our right were suddenly looking like a much safer place to hide.

  “I think he can see us,” Charlie said. “What do we do?”

  I didn’t know. But if we didn’t make up our minds soon, we were going to run out of choices. The vampire would decide for us. His eyes were still searching the shadows. Then he started toward us, first at a jog, then a sprint. I felt my stomach twist. Suddenly a shadow shot out of the darkness. It froze the air in my chest. I’d never seen anything move so quickly. I took it from Charlie’s reaction, he hadn’t either. He jumped as if I’d jammed a pin in his ribs. I wasn’t even certain how the thing was running, on two legs or four. There wasn’t time to tell. Whatever it was, it collided with the approaching vampire about a stone’s throw in front of us. The two shapes rolled over the top of one another in a blur. A lethal dance started that was so quick, even my vampire eyes had difficulty following it.