by Eden, Seth
The Vampyren had their own uses for the space. Using human labor they built fences around the nearly 6000-seat theater, hemming it in. The stage was open and generally bathed in blood.
The combatants provided entertainment and refreshments all at once.
The music had largely changed to the sound of screaming.
Though before the games there were performances from popular cultural icons, usually terrified, often in another competition. That stopped early on. Kill off too many pop icons and the groundswell of rebellion started. It was too tiring to have to subdue an already conquered race.
And that, Danton thought, was part of the problem with his restlessness. The humans were easy to conquer, with their short attention spans and desire to pretend everything was getting back to normal if they could just ignore the warriors stalking among them.
They couldn't. They weren't being allowed to forget.
Those that did either entered the games or came as special guests.
He thought again of the girl on the motorcycle, slim figure. Rigid middle finger. It was hard not to like the way they continued to fight back when all hope was gone.
Lan leaned in close, handing off a box of popcorn and a beer. There were benefits to the planet.
"Tonight's a treat."
"Females?"
"No, the usual males, but these were actually trained to fight but not real fights. They're wrestlers, but it was all like their dramas: all fake."
Of late the games had sickened Danton slightly. It wasn't just the extreme waste of food. Some Vampyren liked that, it was sexually deviant and socially unacceptable to watch blood spilled on the floorboards and in the streets, but there was an illicit thrill. Like knowing they had enough they could waste it.
But the games, bloody and horrifying, he didn't understand. When they'd come to the planet and overthrown it, that should have been enough. The games should be more fair. The humans should be better matched against Vampyren they stood some sort of chance against.
Watching them torn limb from limb was repugnant. Vampyren should be better than that. Torturing food lent a spicy flavor to it, but otherwise?
Stop it. If anyone finds out what you're thinking, you'll be up there.
And besides, watching fake warriors finding themselves competing against real warriors sounded like fun.
The lights went down around the seats and up on the stage and the first of the humans were released to discover the orchestra pit changed to nothing but pikes and the doors back behind stage only opened outward anymore. They'd run out on stage, look desperately to all sides, and panic before discovering there really was nothing else to do but fight.
He put the popcorn down on the floor behind his booted feet. He had no appetite.
On the stage, the first of the fake warriors stepped out to the insane level of noise the crowd was making the screaming and stamping of free and the hysterical screams of women torn from their mates and forced to watch.
The stench of popcorn suddenly turned his stomach.
The music screamed to a crescendo. Whatever group had been forced to perform had just thrown down their instruments and bolted. They'd be rounded back up. Good musicians were becoming scarce.
Lan noticed it first, tensing beside Danton. "What's happening?"
Seconds later the rest of the crowd seemed to ripple with recognition. On the stage, the faux warriors strutted and postured, waiting for the Vampyren to come up to them.
They weren't cowering or screaming or trying to run. They held their weapons as if they could actually do something with them.
He looked at Lan, who shook his head, but where Danton expected him to shrug, he stood instead, looking worriedly at the stage.
Danton looked behind them, up the steps leading out of the bowl. The theater was crowded the same as it always was, a section of prisoners in chains who could at any minute be dragged onto the stage or drained of all blood, and their handlers, the invited VIPs and those Vampyren who paid for better seats.
Crowded. Always popular, the games. They led to satiating sex and violence in the intermissions, the tents in the back full of willing camp followers who thought they cemented their place in the new world by offering up their bodies. They didn't understand it wasn't choice.
He didn't understand what was happening.
Until the first of the women stepped onto the stage.
A howl went up from the crowd, the male Vamps already hot, their bodies swelling with the blood they'd consumed, their erections straining, their blood lust and fight lust high.
Now onto the stage stepped half-dressed human females, stiletto heels, jean shorts cut so high their asses were exposed, like jean gee-strings, Danton thought, and there was something wrong with that. In the lights on the stage, their naked breasts shined with oil, with colorings to highlight nipples, with elegant swirls and colorings of offerings the way Vampyren women painted themselves when offering sex but not mating.
"Wait, look," Lan started, but the prickling at the back of his neck made Danton turn the other way to look, back at the steps again that led to the seats.
There were more women there. Massive numbers and already the Vampyren and their human guests and prisoners were starting to react, coming to their feet, voices shouting in the night. The noise made talking impossible. He slugged Lan on the shoulder, gestured at the women even as he drew his weapon.
The women coming down the stairs carried human weapons, altered semi-automatic rifles held at the ready and on the stage, the warriors who hadn't been properly afraid had been joined by the topless women and from nowhere there were weapons, coming down from the tops of the stage, from the curtains and the lights, dropping into outstretched hands.
The shooting was already starting. There was limited damage human weapons could do. What they could inflict, they were doing.
He shouted and brought his weapons around to bear.
And found himself falling.
5
Cassi
Taekwon-Do was more about kicking and punching than getting out of holds or learning how to fall, though Cassi had done all of that.
But being pressed by a forearm face first into a wall by an attacker who had wrapped his free hand in her hair was a move she'd never contemplated trying to free herself from.
"Please don't hurt me."
Desperate times, desperate measures. Just survive somehow, long enough for someone to notice her missing in the bar and come looking.
The man behind her – big, from the fact that his arm was pressing down on her neck, his had grabbed her ponytail at the top and from the top, not anywhere else – sucked in a breath.
He was going to call someone.
They should all be on the same side, all about canning tomatoes and using the light of the full moon.
There were no easily identified sides since the Vampyren came.
She wasn't willing to stake her life or her ability to walk on the assumption the man behind her was part of any kind of rebel.
She wasn't even willing to assume there was a rebellion. All the reports that there were could be nothing more than misdirection. Set up a fake rebellion and see who was willing to attend, then arrest the hell out of them.
Paranoia.
But she wasn't about to let him finish with that breath or call for help. Cassi rammed her elbow back, using the wall to push herself off and get some traction. Her elbow found a slightly spongy midsection and the man behind her said something breathless and stepped backward.
He didn't lose hold of her hair. He barely stepped back. She made the most of it.
Another thing TaeKwon-Do didn't do a lot of was kicking to the crotch. There were so many other moves that were so much more effective and, more important, more likely to connect.
Men protected their genitals. Go figure. Kicking there was too obvious and too likely to miss.
But she'd winded him already and she knew how bad that hurt. When she turned back he was unprepare
d, trying to keep his hands on her and at the same time, trying to breathe.
She kicked him hard enough to feel sorry for it.
He sank like a stone to the floor of the back room behind the bar and somebody would be coming soon enough even if she'd stopped him calling out.
Time to do something.
She knelt next to him. He looked like a truck driver or a construction worker, somebody capable and big who got his muscles doing heavy lifting in a job rather than in a gym. He had graying hair cut short and a plaid flannel shirt that reeked. Of course it did – finding water for washing clothes wasn't easy, and it was June in Los Angeles. Who wore flannel other than misguided street gangs that still showed up sometimes and made a nuisance of themselves before fading away again into obscurity.
The Vampyren had made street gangs passé.
She knelt down beside her attacker-come-victim and bent her head to put her mouth close to his ear while still maintaining enough space between them to move away from him if she had to.
"I know who you are." A lie. She could guess. "I know what you were talking about." A hopeful guess but a guess nonetheless. "If I wanted to turn you in, I would have done so without giving you any way of knowing what I was doing."
That was an out and out lie since she hadn't intended to let him know she was listening as it was. His eyes, still watering, found hers and told her he knew it too.
She shrugged, and felt like herself again. He was recovering faster than she expected and her knees objected to the weird half ready to jump away kneeling. She sat on the floor next to him.
"Fine. I guessed what you were talking about. I know what canning means I can guess what gardening by moon phase means. And this room isn't bugged, so relax. Even cell phones don't work in here. It's one of the last dead zones."
He nodded and sat up slowly.
She didn't trust him any more than she had. But she was willing to take a chance now. She thought he was more recovered than he was letting on and that was either in her favor or the fact that she knew it was.
Sometimes she got tired of being paranoid and trusting no one. When he gestured that he was going to sit up, she just scooted back a foot and nodded.
He leaned his back against a post. They were surrounded by cases of alcohol that were stacked into towers, creating a maze. The wall he'd driven her into was one of the few with any space at all. She'd been headed toward one of the back walls where her backpack rested in her locker, not into the main storeroom packed nearly to the ceiling with boxes of bottles of booze.
Otherwise, he'd have driven her into one of the cardboard boxes of whiskey, which might have resulted in them being buried under them.
The storeroom no longer had codes to conform to. Even if city government wanted to ticket Cassi and her unregistered bike they weren't going to mess with alcohol. It was too important in the Vampyren world. Which meant that, anymore, the boxes of bottles could be stacked to the ceiling. They could create an intricate maze. Anything to keep the bar stocked.
Cassi stood, moved to one of the open boxes, took out a bottle, cracked the seal and handed it to him.
He took it, looked shocked for a second, then clearly tried to decide whether putting it in his lap or getting the contents inside himself was the better idea.
He settled for drinking from it and resting it between his legs between swallows. "What is it you want?"
Not to be attacked in the storeroom at my job?
"I want in." And then even though she knew the back of the bar had never been bugged and never would be bugged – the owner had some kind of in with somebody high up somewhere – more than that Cassi had never asked and never would; it was enough to keep them from being attacked, not enough for any special privileges and asking would be dangerous. Despite it all, she said, "I have always been interested in canning. Especially tomatoes."
He gave her a long look, like a father judging if his child really understood the seriousness of what she was suggesting. "Sometimes we need to put up produce before we think it's quite time," he said.
"And sometimes you choose to move because the moon is full and it's time." Because he had to mean that it was time to go. Now. Excitement was gathering in her. The bike was parked out back. Brecca was here. Neither one of them had much to lose. The only things of value were each other, their phones, and whatever cash they had.
There was nothing at her parents' roofless house that she would miss. Memories, but those she'd take with her.
She had one short, sharp jab of memory at Jayce, dead now for most of the year. She pushed it away hard. There was no way to hang on to sentiment. At the time he was executed she mourned him, but survival in the Vampyren world meant moving on. Hard choices. Salvaging what you could and discarding the rest before it got you killed.
If she could get her mother back, she'd make new memories.
If she couldn't get her mother back, alive, then she'd make some hell.
Either way, the moon was going to full, and there were plans to be made. She needed to know where to go and who to look for and there was only so much that could be transmitted by way of information on putting up vegetables. Eventually if there was someone listening they'd have questions about the inane conversation.
Studying his face, she wondered if he'd answer if she just asked questions.
"Who were you calling in here? Will they try and stop me when I go back out?"
He gave her a long look, as if trying to judge all the same things she was just wondering about. Coming to some kind of conclusion, he took one more hit off the whiskey, started to lower the bottle, considered, took another swallow, mopped off the top and offered her the bottle.
Right, what she needed to do was drink and drive, or drink and collude -- actually, it wasn't a bad idea. She took it, tipped it in his direction in a kind of hat tip, and swallowed. Coughed. Offered it back to him. He didn't take it so she set it down between them.
"There was more than one of us here tonight. Do you remember who you saw me with?"
That might have been a trap, she supposed, but she hadn't even seen who he had been talking to in the crush of the bar, she'd just heard words she recognized as being part of the growing rebellion in the rural states. She told him the part of the crowd and the audio rather than visual, and he relaxed enough she understood he'd been worried about her seeing someone else who'd run, not about whoever he came with.
Whoever he came with wouldn't need to discuss rebellion. They'd already be part of it.
The surge of anxiety and pleasure swept through her harder than the alcohol had. It was real. It was real and she'd found it. Or it found her.
Something she'd done reassured him. He pushed himself up straighter, back to one of the towering boxes of vodka bottles, and began asking what sounded like a checklist. "What is it you want to do?"
What would he do if she said she was looking for help? Or looking for somewhere to hide? There had to be places for people like that, too. People disappeared daily, still, and not all of them there in high risk positions or well known. Sometimes next door neighbors disappeared and there was no scuttlebutt that something had happened to them. They were just gone.
Cassi had a lot of answers. Get revenge. Get information. Help change things back or to something even better than what they'd had before. Save a life. Save multiple lives.
But she stuck with the one-word answer that summed it up: "Fight."
He nodded, looking for a long time into her face, maybe at the set of her jaw and the anger in her expression. Then he nodded.
"Do you have a plan for that?"
"How could I?" she asked before she thought about it. "I need to find the people to do it with, first."
If his checklist was the five W's – who, what, when, where and why, and how tacked on for good measure – she'd just cleared how and who, she thought.
When was now. The gardening and canning had mentioned gardening by the light of the moon, which was full tonight.
<
br /> Where, then. Her breath caught in her throat.
"Anything you can't live without?"
Anyone. "No."
He was still giving her the parental look. "You go straight from here out the back door. You follow my instructions." The color was returning to his face, though she thought it was artificially induced out of the bottle.
"No," Cassi said, and caught him by surprise.
"You don't say no. You leave without looking back or the deal's off."
"I leave from here, and I don't look back from here. But I need one thing from the bar."
"It's too dangerous."
'Deal's off, otherwise," she said. As if she had any bargaining power at all.
" This is what you said you wanted. What's so important you can't go without it?"
"Me," said Brecca's voice from above them.
The moon was already high but even at ten p.m. the streets were empty. It wasn't safe to be outside even if martial law curfew didn't clamp down until midnight.
The bike purred under them. Brecca's arms around her waist anchored Cassi to a moment that felt surreal.
She'd expected more questions. They were headed to a rendezvous at one of the city's museums and from there they'd be taken to into the canyons surrounding Los Angeles and from there into the desert outside the city where they could train. The Vampyren had conquered the metro areas, but where the invasion could have been expected to spread outward, it had stayed contained. As if the only humans in need of conquering were those in the cities.
Which left the rural areas both untouched and totally fucked. Because city residents were streaming into the rural areas across the country, one of which were equipped for the sudden population explosion.
That might be why the vamps didn't follow. Rural spaces had too much trouble trying to fit all the pieces together to be worrisome.