by David Khalaf
“She’s irrelevant now.”
“You foolish boy.”
A sliver of morning light shone through a crack in the bottom of the doors. Atlas could just barely make out Deda’s face. It was an expression he had never seen on Grandfather before: derision.
“You dare call me a fool, old man? One breath and I could knock you over. One flick of my fingers and you’d be short a head.”
Atlas heard the pop of a cork. One of the man’s wretched tonics.
“I’ve been called an old fool many times,” Deda said. “And I’ve been labeled a helpless geezer longer than I can remember. But no one thinks to call me what I really am—a survivor.”
Atlas could smell the man’s tonic. It had a bitter almond odor.
“Drink your wretched medicine before I throw you out the back door.”
Kill him now.
We’ve learned all we can from him.
There was a sound of breaking glass as the old man dropped his tube. Atlas growled.
“You may have shown me my destiny, Deda, but now you’re a liability. You’ve outlived your usefulness.”
“Funny,” the old man said, “I was about to say the same thing about you.”
The stench of the tonic became too much to bear. Atlas coughed hard.
I don’t need his tongue. We could rip that out.
No arguments here.
“The nice thing about being weak,” Deda said, “is that everyone underestimates you.”
“The nice thing about being strong,” Atlas said, “is being strong.”
Atlas punched one of the back doors and it flew off its hinge, clattering on the street behind. He looked at Deda, whose eyes were red and swollen. He was doubled over in pain. Atlas took a few deep breaths and fell into a coughing fit.
“It’s too late for you,” the old man said.
“Your tonic…”
“Is prussic acid. It’s not a tonic at all. It’s a poison.”
Atlas felt the muscles around his neck constricting, blocking his windpipe. Even so, he laughed.
“But I’m invincible,” Atlas said.
“No,” Deda said. “You’re impenetrable. There’s a world of difference, you imbecile. Even an indestructible man needs to breathe.”
The old man coughed hard.
“You’ll kill yourself too,” Atlas wheezed.
“You forget who I am. I’ve survived the bubonic plague, yellow fever, smallpox, and typhoid. This chemical, which is lethal after just a few breaths, will leave me with little more than a sore throat. What do you think I’ve been putting in my tonics all this time?”
Atlas lunged at the old man and threw a wild punch. It missed and went clear through the front of the cargo hold, into the cabin. He felt blood and bone on his hand. The driver.
The truck swerved hard to the left. Atlas and Deda slammed against the wall. Then everything went topsy-turvy as the truck rolled and they were knocked around like stones in a rock tumbler. Atlas sought to steady himself in the cargo hold. They finally landed upside-down as the truck screeched to a slow stop.
The old man had landed on top of Atlas, the hair of Deda’s cloak scratching his face. Atlas tried to move his hand, to wrap it around the old man’s neck. But he couldn’t seem to make it move the way he wanted.
“You’re losing control of your body,” Deda said. “It will take another five minutes or so before the poison completely stops your heart, but you’ll feel every excruciating beat.”
“Why?” Atlas croaked.
Deda lifted his bloodied head. A cut on his cheek closed on its own and the bleeding stopped.
“Do you think I care about your people, your cause, your wretched homeland? I’m five hundred years old. I’ve seen the extermination of entire races of people. Occasionally I was the one doing it.”
The old man crawled right up to Atlas’s ear.
“The only reason I joined your brother and his pathetic band of revolutionaries was to help you succeed. To help you start a war. Because war, it turns out, is the secret.”
Atlas began to convulse. It allowed him a breath, but it felt like knives scraping down the inside of his lungs.
It can’t end like this.
We won’t let it.
Deda rolled off him.
“I discovered that war is the single most effective tool for discovering heroes. It forces Burdens out into the open, compelling them to reveal themselves. So that’s what I do. I start wars.”
Atlas managed another piercing breath.
“You took me in. You protected me.”
“I kept you,” Deda said. “Like a useful pet.”
Part of the old man’s cloak was caught under Atlas. Deda waited for the strong man to convulse again, and then pulled it out.
“You know nothing about power,” Deda said. “You want to replicate our talents to give to normal human beings. To the undeserving masses. True power isn’t shared. It’s consolidated.”
Convulsing on the floor, Atlas watched the old, decrepit man hop out the back of the cargo hold, position himself on the ground, and then cry out for help.
He had been playing Atlas this whole time.
I’d rather be strong and dead
Than weak and alive.
CHAPTER
F IFTY
GRAY HELPED PICKFORD walk to the staging warehouse while Chaplin circled back through the beginning of the parade route to find the others. Lulu scouted ahead, looking for Atlas or other danger.
Pickford had an arm around Gray’s shoulder for support, and he was disturbed by how light she was. It was as if she had sloughed off most of her body in the past few weeks, and all that was left was a wraith draped in black rags.
They entered the warehouse and Gray threw all of his weight into closing the giant sliding door. He threw the metal latch to lock it. It was dark inside, the only shaft of light coming from a tiny window at the top of the structure. The warehouse floor was littered with petals, leaves, and other plant scraps, like some kind of flower Rapture.
“You came to rescue me,” Pickford said. “Why?”
Gray shrugged.
“You rescued me first.”
Suddenly he felt very shy. It was the first time he’d been completely alone with his mother since the car ride to the train station.
“You should have left,” she said. “In the big picture, I’m not important.”
“You’re important to me.”
Pickford didn’t have a chance to respond. There was a screeching sound outside, tires burning against asphalt. Then a crash and the awful squeal of metal tearing and crumpling. They ran to the sliding door and Gray peaked through a crack.
“Is it Atlas?” Pickford asked.
Gray shook his head.
“I’m not sure. It’s an accident.”
A big truck had tipped over, maybe because it had turned too fast into the parking lot. From the back, Gray saw someone very small and shriveled crawl out. He wore a black cloak that was fuzzy. Not fuzzy—hairy.
“There’s an old geezer out there. He looks hurt.”
Gray let Pickford peek through the crack.
“Deda, the old man with health! He’s escaped Atlas too. We have to go help him.”
She pulled at the heavy door latch and struggled with it.
“You’re weak,” Gray said. “Let me go bring him back here.”
Gray threw the latch and slid the door open just enough to walk through. It was about fifty yards to the truck. The old man crouched in place, coughing hard. There were cuts to his head but they appeared to have stopped bleeding.
“You OK, mister?”
“Help me up, son,” the man said in a voice that he exhaled more than he spoke.
Gray crouched and wrapped the old man’s arm around his shoulder, then supported him as they stood. He saw a blood red energy glowing deep inside the man, pulsing through his veins with every beat of his heart.
“What happened?”
“The driver,” De
da wheezed. “He swerved back there to avoid Atlas.”
Gray walked quickly to the front of the truck and opened the door. A man fell out, his head mangled from the back.
“He’s dead.”
“There,” Deda said, pointing at the driver’s belt. There was a gun stuck in it.
“Take it, just in case.”
Gray reached down and took the pistol. He then returned to the old man to help him up.
“Here, I’ll hold it for you,” the old man said.
Gray gave him the gun and the old man slipped it in a pocket of his cloak. They shuffled their way toward the warehouse.
“No offense,” Gray said, “but you don’t look all that healthy.”
The man grunted an affirmation.
“You’ll have to forgive my appearance. I am, after all, five hundred and nine years old. Or is it five hundred and ten?”
Gray kept an eye out for Atlas. At the pace they were moving, the fifty yards may as well have been fifty miles.
“Where are you from?”
The man’s eyes drooped, as if trying to remember.
“It was called Wallachia. It doesn’t exist anymore. I was a prince. The prince of Wallachia.”
Gray wanted to keep the man talking. He looked as if he might pass out.
“What happened to it?”
“War,” the man said. “There’s always a war. The Ottomans, the Hungarians. It’s hard to remember. They captured me. They thought they killed me, but it was my younger brother they caught. I escaped.”
Gray saw Pickford at the door, thirty yards ahead, beckoning to them to hurry.
“I spent centuries traveling through villages and cities. In time I learned about the Burdens. I began looking for others. Searching for you.”
Searching for me?
The old man had a coughing fit. They stopped walking until he recovered.
“I’ve had more time than any Burden to research who we are. What we are. I read the ancient writings of wise men, and I learned that you would come along at some point, but I didn’t know when. It has taken me hundreds of years and hundreds of attempts. I earned quite a bad reputation throughout the ages.”
“Whaddya you mean, a bad reputation?”
“Your blood, I’ve known of the power it holds,” Deda said. “But I didn’t know who you were. So I looked for signs. I took guesses. I was always wrong. Many people died.”
Gray began to feel uneasy, but the man was so old, so frail. He couldn’t imagine him posing any real threat.
“What did you say your name is?”
The old man leaned in close. There was something ancient in his eyes.
“My name is Vlad. Officially, Vlad the Third, Prince of Wallachia. Informally, Vlad the Impaler. But more recently, the name I’m best known for is a title derived from ignorant folklore. That name is Dracula.”
And then he bit.
The man sank his teeth deep into Gray’s neck. Gray screamed out as he felt the man’s pruney lips and jagged teeth. The old man spit out a chunk of Gray’s flesh and exhaled in a kind of ecstasy. He loosened his grip, enough for Gray to push him away. Gray grabbed at his neck as blood spouted out of it.
Vlad turned and smiled, his teeth and face blackened with Gray’s blood. He looked like a monster—a dark beast.
“Vampires don’t exist, of course. But I do.”
Gray watched as the man’s features began to change. The lines on his skin began to smooth and his hair, once white and thinning, filled out into a luxurious brown mane that cascaded down his shoulders. His posture became upright and his body filled out his suit so that it became too small for him. The milkiness in his eyes faded and his complexion became bright and rosy.
He was the very picture of health. The energy pulsing through his veins surged with new life.
The man, once old and now young, had a long, sharp nose, high eyebrows and a burly mustache that ran horizontally across his face. His cheeks were high and defined, his chin sharp. He appeared to be about thirty-five. His old age had hidden what was now so apparent: Vlad had an antiquated look, like a portrait in a history book. He was not of this time.
His hairy cloak now looked regal on his strong frame.
“Do you like my cloak?” he asked. “I made it myself. One scalp at a time.”
He pointed the gun.
“And now,” Vlad said, “I’ll take Newton’s Eye.”
Pickford was still standing in the doorway, screaming something at Gray. But he couldn’t make it out. His vision was a tunnel. It was as if the entire world had dropped away and only he and Vlad existed.
He finally turned to Pickford, saw her eyes wide with horror. She was shouting something familiar. Something she had shouted at him at the circus.
What was it she said back then?
“Run!”
CHAPTER
F IFTY-ONE
VLAD DASHED AT Gray, who was slow to react. But hundreds of years of decrepitude worked in Gray’s favor; Vlad was unused to running, and he tripped on his first few steps.
Gray sprinted to the door and pushed Pickford inside, then pulled it shut and closed the metal latch.
“Your neck,” she said. “It’s bad.”
Gray felt tired and slow, as if time had sped up and left him behind. Pickford found a rack of costumes and rummaged through it until she found a white scarf. She tied it tightly around his neck like a tourniquet.
“We should be safe in here,” he said. “He only has his health. What can he do to us?”
There was a gunshot against the door and the latch came loose.
Gray jumped one way and Pickford another. The latch jiggled and a bolt in the center fell out. A finger poked through the hole.
“Find the lights!” Pickford said. “We need to make sure he can see me.”
In the dimness of the warehouse, Gray saw Pickford pull off her veil as she felt her way along the wall for the lights. Gray took off in the other direction, looking for some kind of switch. It was dark and he had to run his hands along the wall.
The warehouse door slid open a crack, letting in a thin, long beam of sunlight. Framed inside it, the dark silhouette of a man. Gray saw a small metal box affixed to the wall up ahead. He snuck toward it.
“I must thank you, Gray Studebaker,” Vlad shouted as he stepped inside. “I feel like a new man. Hitting on all sixes. Isn’t that what you Americans say?”
Without the ravages of age on his vocal cords, Vlad’s voice was crisp and clear with an accent that was as strange and ancient as he was.
“I’m most excited about eating solid foods again,” Vlad said. “Steak and potatoes. Grilled chicken. Roast woman.”
Gray quietly placed his hands on the edges of the metal light box. He pulled on the door. But it was locked. He jiggled it frantically. Vlad heard him.
“Ah, good. There you are.”
The warehouse was a cluttered maze of flower crates, prep tables, and half-finished float prototypes. Gray ran through a row of boxes and crouched beside an unfinished float with a Chinese theme. It had a pagoda and what looked like the beginnings of a dragon sculpted out of chicken wire. Across the aisle he saw a work table where someone had been cutting pieces of bamboo. There was a large machete on it. He darted across the aisle and grabbed the heavy knife, then returned to his hiding spot.
“I know what you are,” Vlad said from somewhere nearby. “I’ve known about you for hundreds of years. You know you are the Final Artifact, don’t you?”
Gray forced himself to breath slowly, though his mouth, so that Vlad wouldn’t hear him. The footsteps got closer.
“Maybe you know you are a Burden too? But which one?”
A long shadow reached the aisle next to Gray. First the head, then the shoulders and torso.
“Your friends, they are children,” Vlad said. “I’ve lived longer than all of them combined. I’ve had hundreds of years to learn all about us. About the prophecy. About you. I know all about your awful dest
iny. And I can show you how to avoid it.”
How to avoid it?
Vlad was close enough now that Gray could hear his breathing.
“Come with me and we’ll work together,” Vlad said. “Help me find the other Burdens and I’ll tell you what you are. Your friends can’t help you out because they don’t know the truth.”
He whispered the last word, sacred as the password to a Mayan temple.
“You are not one of the sixteen Burdens,” he said. “You’re the seventeenth.”
A hand appeared from around the corner from the main aisle. Gray didn’t think, he just swung. The machete came down on Vlad’s forearm, cleaving his hand and wrist from the rest of him. Vlad screamed, and Gray fell backward into a crate of eucalyptus leaves.
The hand lay there in front of him, contorted like a dead spider. The gun remained in its grip.
Vlad appeared from around the corner, gushing blood. He pulled up his jacket sleeve, revealing a bloody stump.
“Five hundred years intact, and you do this?”
Vlad picked up his hand, shaking off the scraps of sleeve. Pinching it under his armpit, he took the gun out and pocketed it. Then he scrutinized the amputated limb as if looking for something. The ragged flesh on the sliced edge of his forearm seem to undulate, as if caught in a breeze.
“Perhaps even I underestimate the power in your veins,” Vlad said.
He carefully fitted the hand back on his forearm. The torn bits of flesh seemed to reach out for each other, like a child reaching out for its mother. As the edges of flesh reunited, they melded into each other like the soft wax of a candle. The dismemberment became a fissure; the fissure became a cut; and, finally, the cut became little more than a faint scar.
Vlad flexed his reattached hand. He smiled. His teeth were sharp.
“I suppose I should never take my health for granted.”
He pulled out the gun and put it back in his hand. He pointed it at Gray.
“Wait!” A voice from down the aisle. Pickford.
Vlad turned and shot indiscriminately. She screamed as Vlad chased her down the aisle.
Gray hoisted himself out of the crate, the machete still in his grasp. He rounded the corner and ran over to the main aisle, where he found Vlad a good twenty yards away, standing behind Pickford with her in a headlock. Blood was dripping from her shoulder.