by Platt, Sean
We have a problem. Hope is remembering.
Fifteen
John
“You okay?” John asked.
Tiny stared up at him, confused, blood gushing from a six-inch gash, slashed in a lazy river across the big man’s stomach.
“Yeah, I think so.” Tiny sat up, pulled his black tee up the length of his torso, and lightly pressed his fingers into the depths of his wound through the pouring blood. His flesh was already stitching itself healed. “Shit, I had worse than this before I was near invincible.”
“What happened?”
“Little fucker snuck up on me, stabbed me before I even saw him. Confused the sense out of me before I knew what was happening. I couldn’t think straight, or defend myself. He picked me up and threw me in here, even though he was a buck thirty tops.”
“That’s Shadow; he’s a Halfworlder,” John said. “With all sorts of magick weapons, powders, and spells. No telling what he did for sure, but I’d guess he only stunned you. Think you can get up?”
Tiny stood, wobbly at first, then looked back to his wound, completely healed and nearly invisible except for the fresh pink scar painted across his dark skin, where it would stay for at least a day until it turned invisible.
“So what the hell we gonna do now?” Tiny asked.
John looked up at the well’s opening and the moonlight which would soon be sunlight painting the well’s stone walls and bringing their death. Then he looked at the door. “If you can help me open this, maybe we can get out of here. Shadow did something to me. I’m a lot weaker than I was. I can’t get the thing to budge. And I can’t climb or jump for shit.”
Tiny pushed at the door, shoving his shoulder hard enough against the metal to nudge a groan from his mouth. The door didn’t move, or flinch in its frame, so Tiny took a few steps back and ran into it like a bat to a ball with the bulk of his body. Still, the door didn’t budge.
“Shit!” Tiny said. “I’m weaker, too. What the hell?”
“I don’t know,” John said, scrounging the well’s bottom with his eyes, searching for something, anything among the dirt and debris in the darkness that might help them escape the well.
John focused again and tried to reach Larry.
Still nothing.
John wondered why he could reach Tiny but not Larry or Abigail. Tiny shared the Darkness with him, same as Abigail — with the same parasite bred into them both. They were, in essence, his parasite’s children, and if he’d been able to connect with Tiny, he should’ve been able to connect with Abigail. If he could contact her, she could tell Larry to save them.
John tried reaching out to her again.
Abigail?
Nothing.
A round of automatic gunfire cracked the pre-dawn silence.
“Shadow!” a man screamed out. “Just give us the crystal.”
John looked at Tiny. “You bring friends?”
“No, didn’t have time to round up the crew, though I wish I had.”
John closed his eyes, absorbing the outside world in his mind — he felt several people closing in on Shadow.
What the hell? What crystal?
Another round of gunshots punctuated the darkness as Shadow’s fear continued to balloon, so swollen it pulsed inside of John as though it were his own. Shadow’s fear was a rising tide of confusion. Shadow knew at least some, if not all of the people in his ambush.
John turned to Tiny. “I think his people turned on him.”
“How you know that?”
“I can sense some of Shadow’s thoughts. You can’t?”
“Hell, no. It’s not like you gave me an instruction manual with these powers, bro.”
John laughed. “I don’t know how I do it. I just do. Afraid I can’t help you there.”
Sudden movement skittered on the other side of the door, like an injured animal thrashing.
John turned to Tiny. “Get ready, he’s coming!”
Tiny balled his fist. John stood back from the door, ready to pounce.
The door burst open and Shadow threw up his hands. “Wait, wait! I’m not going to hurt you!”
Tiny moved in to take a swing, but John waved him back. “Hold on,” he said, studying Shadow as he closed and locked the door, sealing them off from his enemy despite the large opening above. John imagined the men aiming their weapons down and firing.
“My people turned on me. They brought Harbinger here.”
“Why?” John asked.
Shadow looked Tiny up and down. “Who’s he?”
“A friend,” John said, figuring Shadow could get four from two and two, see that Tiny was a vampire, and maybe even sense he was John’s. “Why did your people turn on you?”
“Because my father, until he died two weeks ago, was a vessel. Now someone wants what he had.”
“What the fuck is a vessel?” Tiny asked.
“We don’t have time for a long story. You just need to know that I, and four others, are all that stands in the way of the world’s utter destruction. Help me escape, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
Tiny said, “And you ain’t gonna try an’ kill us again?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill you,” Shadow said. “I was trying to get away from you. I don’t know who I can trust, and when John here rolled up on my hotel with the men in black, what the hell was I supposed to do?”
“So, how do we escape?” John asked. “Can you make another portal?”
Shadow laughed, “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Those things take time to prepare, and ingredients I don’t exactly carry with me. There’s a network of underground tunnels leading into the sewers. We make our way through them, find a way topside, and get to where I stashed the list.”
“What list?”
“The list with the names of the other vessels. If Harbinger’s after it, that means they’re looking to kill everyone on that list.”
“We’re in,” Tiny said before John. “But first, you need to give us our powers back.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine once we get out of here. I put damper spellstones at the bottom of the well to prevent feeders from escaping.”
“Damper spellstones? That some kinda kryptonite or something?” Tiny asked.
“They won’t kill you, so not exactly, but yes, you can say that.”
The tunnel walls were slimed with moss and something black, smelling like death at its dankest. They moved across the slippery ground, squinting through the dark amber glow of Shadow’s lightstone, not that John needed it, as his senses had quickly grown used to the lack of light once he’d left the well’s dampening effects behind.
They wound their way through the old man-made structures, mostly going straight, but taking a right once, and a left twice, walking in mostly silence for nearly 10 minutes.
“I didn’t even know these tunnels were here,” Tiny said.
“They were built back when the city was made,” Shadow explained. “They were used by Otherworld Smugglers who would traffic artifacts, and people, into and out of town. Some were used during prohibition, with a lot of the tunnels leading to the basements of speakeasies. Most of the exits have long since been sealed off, but a few are still active. We’re not too far from where the tunnels split into three different paths. The one in the middle leads to old sewage systems.”
“That’s probably where they’ll be waiting,” John said.
“For sure,” Tiny agreed. “They have these freaky magick knives like you?”
“I don’t know,” Shadow said. “I doubt they figured they’d need anything other than guns against me. Bullets will do the job fine. I’m half-human, and all human weakness.”
“So you might wanna stay back and let the vampires take care of business,” Tiny winked.
Footsteps splashed through the shallow water, just ahead. Lights bounced off the wall — Harbinger soldiers, no doubt.
“Stand back,” John thrust his hand in front of Shadow, then stepped
forward to block his movement. Splashing grew louder. Shadow extinguished his stone’s red glow.
Eight guns with lights rushed at John, Tiny, and Shadow. “Get down, hands in the air!” one of the Harbinger soldiers shouted as if they had any authority.
“Stay back,” John repeated to Shadow, then turned to the soldiers.
John sensed the first soldier’s itch for his trigger before he pulled it, so he pivoted out of the way. Shadow dipped into a swath of the tunnel’s darkness, drawing it like a cloak around his body.
Shots fired from a soldier’s gun, bullets whizzing off concrete as Tiny went into motion, a blur of darkness descending upon the gunman. Within seconds, the gunman was reduced to a screaming, burning heap as Tiny yelled, “Yeehaw!”
Gunfire erupted around them as the other soldiers fired on Tiny.
With seven left for John, he started two at a time, leaping toward the closest two soldiers and landing hard with a hand on each one. The soldiers struggled, but never stood a chance. Their screams died inside their helmets, as everything they once were and ever would be flooded into John, teasing his hunger for more.
As the soldiers’ lifeforces, and memories, swirled inside John, he swatted the guns from the three soldiers Tiny wasn’t taking care of.
As John circled in on the now unarmed soldiers, two of the three drew pistols from their holsters. One of the men Tiny was tussling with, managed to break free of his grasp, as Tiny must not have found a way to breach the man’s suit yet to burn him. John looked up just in time to see the man’s pistol aimed at his head. While John could take numerous shots to his body, a headshot could be mean death.
Tiny shoved the soldier he was fighting with aside and leaped on the other man just as he squeezed a shot off at John. Tiny smacked the man’s hand just before the shot got off, knocking the gun to the ground and sending the bullet into John’s right calf.
“Sorry, John!” Tiny yelled, then grabbed both soldiers, wrapping them both in a giant bear hug, his hands finding their way under the men’s helmets, sending them both into screaming spasms.
One of the three remaining soldiers got a hold of his fallen rifle and began spraying the tunnel in a desperate panic. John threw out his hands and sent a blast of energy into the man, sending him flying backward into the two men who had gotten behind him for safety.
As the men fell back, John raced forward, and was on them in seconds, feasting on their energy, feeling it surge through his body like a thousand fires, but without the pain.
John heard Tiny yelling in victory as he finished off the last of the soldiers, but John was in too much bliss to open his eyes. He basked in the power, feeling it heal him entirely, replenishing his strength, and making him feel unstoppable, like the perfect killing machine.
He opened his eyes to the sound of Tiny calling out for Shadow, “OK, it’s safe to come out now.”
But Shadow wasn’t coming.
“Shadow?” John asked, an uneasy feeling ruining his good buzz.
But there was no Shadow — he had used the distraction to escape.
“So what the fuck do we do now?” Tiny asked.
John said, “We keep walking. Follow Shadow’s scent.”
“Think we’ll find him?” Tiny asked.
“We don’t have a choice,” John said.
Sixteen
Abigail
In the dream, Abigail was in school, and not a vampire.
She was a normal 11-year-old girl, sitting at a desk watching the boy beside her, trying not to stare. He was cute, with brown hair and blue eyes. He looked like a baseball player. Abigail wasn’t even sure what a baseball player was supposed to look like, but the boy definitely looked like one in her dream.
He turned to her, then smiled and said, “Hi, my name’s Bobby.”
It was weird, him introducing himself in the middle of class. The teacher, who was only vaguely there, stood three feet from the front row, wrapped in a thick fog like the rest of the room. In Abigail’s dream, the only things that mattered were her and the cute boy — Bobby.
She wasn’t sure what to say. Abigail had never spoken to a boy her own age, not since she was much younger, and back then they were gross, not … cute.
“I’m Abigail,” she said, looking down shyly.
Still smiling, the boy said, “Abigail, that’s a pretty name. What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you here?” he repeated, his smile now faltering, creeping to fear, matching the concern in his eyes.
He disappeared, and Abigail woke to the sound of a man screaming, immediately followed by a woman’s screech.
She opened her eyes, confused to find a man and woman lying in her bed. The man was large, with curly dark hair, in his 40s, Abigail guessed. His wife was big too, blonde, a bit younger, maybe. They looked vaguely familiar, though she couldn’t remember where, or if, she’d seen them before.
What are they doing in my room?
Abigail finished the thought, then realized it wasn’t they who had come into her house — she was in theirs.
Abigail screamed.
“What are you doing in here?” the man shouted, reaching into his nightstand.
The man fished out a pistol and aimed it at Abigail before she recognized the danger.
“Where am I?” she asked, shaking, looking around the unfamiliar room, trying to figure out how she’d gone from her bedroom to this one, and how far she was from home.
“We don’t have any money!” the man shouted, waving his gun. Anger rolled from his body in waves, tinged with fear in bright orange waves of aura.
“I don’t want any money.” Abigail glanced at their nightstand clock: 5:30 a.m. She vaguely remembered going to bed early, not feeling too well, sometime around three.
How did I get here?
“I don’t know how I got here, sir,” she cried out to the man, backing away from the bed.
“Look, Jack, she’s just a kid,” the woman said, leaning closer and looking at Abigail. “Put the gun down for Christ’s sake!”
“No! She might not be alone. You call the police.” Jack reached out for the nightstand, handed the phone to his wife, then stood, cautiously holding the gun on Abigail. “You come with me, missy.”
“Where are you going?” his wife asked.
“To check on Bobby.”
Bobby?
As the man flicked the lamp on, her eyes found a framed photo on the dresser — the boy baseball player from her dream. Bobby.
He’s real?
“No, please don’t call the police,” Abigail begged. “I swear, I’m here by myself. I don’t even know how I got here. I just want to go home, I think I might’ve been sleepwalking or something, I swear, I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Call the police!” the man repeated his order.
“Please,” Abigail said, bursting into tears. “Please don’t call. I’m so scared.” Not sure what else to say, Abigail went with a lie. “I can’t go back home … he’ll hurt me.”
The woman paused, clutching the phone to her chest.
The man said, “What?”
“My Daddy likes to hurts me. Tonight he was going to hurt me again, so I snuck out of the house. Now he’s looking for me. I was trying to find somewhere to hide.”
Jack looked at her, licking his dry lips, likely trying to decide if he believed her or not. Abigail’s tears must have been convincing. He turned to his wife.
“Hold on, Marge. She’ll wait here while I check on Bobby.”
“Thank you, mister,” Abigail said with her best feigned sincerity. She wasn’t sure what to do next, how she’d get out of the house without telling them where she lived, who her daddy was, or something to keep them from calling the cops. She realized with dread that telling them she was abused probably wasn’t buying much time.
Jack looked annoyed, like he thought the girl might be messing with him, but he couldn’t be certain and didn’t want to be a
jerk to a child whose father was abusing her. He left the bedroom, leaving Abigail with Marge. She held the phone without dialing, but her eyes, filled with glassy suspicion, were all over Abigail.
“What’s your name, Honey?”
“Alice,” Abigail said, thinking of Alice in Wonderland, which was exactly how she felt, trying to piece together where she was and how she woke in a strange house. “What street are we on?”
“1215 Elm Street,” the woman said.
Abigail was five doors down from her house. That’s probably why they looked vaguely familiar. She must’ve seen them on one of the few occasions they might have passed after sundown.
Jack screamed from down the hall. “Bobby! Oh, God, Bobby!”
Though Abigail had no memory of feeding on the boy, his father’s grief-stricken scream could mean only one thing.
Oh, God, what did I do?
Marge’s eyes lost their concern and crackled with fear. She fell back from Abigail and started to dial.
“No!” Abigail screamed, launching herself onto the bed and swiping at the phone. Her hand locked onto Marge’s wrist and the feeding started, whether Abigail wanted it to or not.
The woman screamed as her life force flowed from her burning body into Abigail’s, slowly at first, then faster. Abigail’s vision was replaced with a sudden cascade of memories from the woman’s life.
Seven years old, bullied and running to tell the teachers: “They called me Large Marge the Sailing Barge!” Then she was 8, going to see a sneak preview of E.T. with her parents. They didn’t get home until two in the morning because of the flat tire after the movie, but it was an awesome night, anyway.
Nine years old and terrified of riding the bus, Marge was intimidated by the other kids who always made fun of her. Mom gave her a small stone heart, and told her that whenever the heart was inside her pocket, she was never alone. For five years the stone never left her pocket, until one day Marge lost it at the park and couldn't stop crying.