by Elisa Hansen
No! She took a deep breath and dropped to her stomach. If they didn’t face the hill, they wouldn’t notice her. She began to elbow through the low brush, wincing as sharp rocks rolled under her.
They were interested in the factory. They wouldn’t have reason to look up. Not right away. They wouldn’t see her, they wouldn’t see what a goddamned moron she was. As she scrabbled down the slope, she cycled through the onslaught of passive aggressive insults on permanent mental record in her mother’s memorized voice.
“They can’t see you,” she hissed to herself. “They won’t look up.”
But if they did. Oh god. And it would be all her fault.
“Idiot, idiot, idiot.” She chanted under her breath with each pull of her elbows. Slow, smooth, like a shadow.
Only one time in her life had she been more furious with herself. She trembled with each inch of progress through the scratchy bushes as the nauseating memories came crashing back.
“Stop! Stop the car!” her mom had yelped.
Emily squashed the brakes. “What? What’s wrong?”
“That’s it. We found one! There they are, look.”
No. Dread coiled into Emily’s stomach at the sight of the commune tents in the hilly field off the roadside. She moved her foot back to the gas, ready to peel out, but her mom tumbled through the door.
“Mom!”
“Susan was right.”
Was this why she told Emily to take this road? How did she know where to find them? It shocked Emily her mom even possessed the capacity to trick her.
Emily dove after her, catching her elbow. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m going where it’s safe.” She swatted at Emily’s fingers. “I can’t live like this anymore!”
Anymore? They’d escaped Long Beach less than two weeks ago.
“Mom!” Emily shook her as if trying to wake a sleepwalker. “You still don’t get it. What they do to people in those places? They’re not human. How many times have I—” She took a sharp breath. “You can’t be serious!”
“Jesus Christ, Emily. What else are we supposed to do?”
“We run! We fight. We keep going. Anything but them.”
“You think you can be a little princess forever? Life’s not that easy.”
What? Emily sputtered. It felt like she was battling some strange dream argument in a reality where logic didn’t exist. “Easy? You’re the one who’s… Going to them is giving up!” She might as well just commit suicide right now! Though Emily didn’t dare say that aloud. Her mother would probably threaten to do it until Emily begged her not to and repeated forty times how much she loved and needed her.
She clamped her fingers around her mom’s soft wrists, dragged her to the car.
“Stop that.” She dug her heels into the ground. “Emily Raye Campbell, let me go. You’re hurting me. Stop!”
“No!” Emily’s voice came out high and thin. “No, you stop! You’ve lost it.”
“Stop!” Her chipped acrylics clawed at Emily’s hands. “Let me go, let me go! I can’t! I can’t! Not like Alan, no! Let me go!” Her writhing turned the skin of her wrists raw pink under Emily’s grasp.
Emily went still as she absorbed the wild look in her mother’s eyes, like a terrified animal, all signs of intelligence gone. The sight knocked the wind out of her, and her fingers slipped away.
Her mom fell to the dirt with the sudden release. Emily was too frozen to react, but her mom shrank back, throwing her arms over her head as if afraid her own daughter would attack. “You…” She shuddered and craned away like she lay before a monster. She wobbled to her feet.
Emily took a shaky step back, trembling in disbelief. “Mom…come on.”
“Get away from me! You want to end up like Alan? Go follow your idiot father! Leave me alone!”
“If you go in there, Mom, that’s it.”
“Jesus Christ, I sure as hell hope so.” She twisted around and ran off to the camp.
Emily turned her back and got in the car. She wrenched the steering wheel, she put the car in gear, she drove. She got less than a mile before she U-turned.
Her mom would be sitting at the side of the road with her arms crossed. She would spend the next hundred miles berating Emily for all the ways she was a disappointing daughter, and Emily would keep her teeth clenched and tune her out.
But her mom wasn’t at the side of the road. The smoke from the campfires at the tents looked warm and inviting. Emily turned off the car and waited, but the sun shrank into the horizon. If she remained near the commune after dark, she might not have a choice about following in her mother’s footsteps.
“Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.”
A figure emerged from the tents, and Emily jolted, her thumb on the power button. But it wasn’t her mom. A tall, lanky man with long snarled black hair and a leather jacket waved a rifle in the air, flagging her. He began to cross the field.
Emily turned the engine and floored it. She never saw her mother again. She never got to hear about her daughterly disappointments. Not out loud.
Each time her LPI unit took down a commune, Emily sorted through the bodies. She examined each overweight tan woman with tangled bleached orange hair, searching the torn and withered faces for something her genes would recognize, tuning out the grief-stricken belligerence of the shivering survivors. Her mom was never there. Each time Emily went through it, she thought, Next time. And each time she prayed to the universe crumbling around their pathetic broken world that it wouldn’t be this time.
Brap! Brap! Brap! from the radio. Muffled somewhere behind her. Emily winced and wiggled herself around. Where the hell was it?
“Come on, come on,” she muttered.
Three more ear-grating beeps.
“Yes!” There, next to a small boulder. She refrained from leaping. When she reached it, she flopped onto her back and heaved a breath that shook her whole body.
“Sorry,” she rasped into the radio. “I was, um, counting them.”
“Em.” Ramon’s voice mixed frustration and relief.
“Don’t come out here! Don’t. Tell everyone to stay inside.”
“Details.”
She took a long breath. She couldn’t let him hear her panting. “They’ve stopped at the factory. Three pickup trucks and two, like, cattle truck things.” She rolled onto her side and peered through the binoculars. One of the long semis had a bunch of sparkly Christmas garlands threaded through its grill, and the other’s sported an oversized stuffed pink bunny like a figurehead.
“I see eight, no, ten men.” No women. And no one looking Emily’s way. Not at the moment. “Hang on.”
“What?”
She had to get back to the protection of the overhang.
“Nothing.” She grunted as she crawled up the hill, doing her best to sound as still as possible. “I mean, not nothing. Ray, they’ve got boxes.”
“Vampire boxes? Coffins?”
She winced at the word. “Yeah, I think so. Two that I saw—can see.”
Returning to the overhang seemed to take a tenth the time it did to get down. She threw herself into the shadows and took in the scene at the factory fully. The three pickups sat as close to the entrance gate as they could get, two of their tarps withdrawn. “Make that four boxes. And eleven men.”
The cattle trucks were parked farther away, and none of the men showed interest in them. They unloaded the boxes from the pickups one by one, carrying them pallbearer style through the factory doors where she couldn’t see beyond the swallowing darkness. The men remaining outside talked amongst themselves with casual gestures. Lip-reading wasn’t in Emily’s skill set, but if any of them noticed her on the hill, they sure didn’t give a damn. She gripped the binoculars tighter to keep her hand still as the adrenaline dissipated.
“Looks like they’re setting up camp in the factory,” she said into the radio.
“And you’re sure there are only four coffins?”
&nbs
p; “No. And who knows what’s in those cattle trucks.”
Probably supplies or, hell, “cattle.” Not cows. A commune with four vampires would need more than eleven human men to sustain it. The semis weren’t big enough to hold the Amargosa hostages, not unless they crammed in shoulder to shoulder. But they wouldn’t. That’s why Rosa’s NYC bus comparison made her laugh. Communes needed to keep their humans comfortable enough to thrive. Emily estimated there wouldn’t be more than forty in the two trucks. But she couldn’t see anything through the small windows lining the top of the side facing her.
She cringed as the men whipped back the last tarp. “Six boxes.”
After they unloaded the sixth, the last of them disappeared inside and pulled the factory door shut. The echo of its clang reached Emily a moment later.
Several very long hours passed with nothing happening other than Emily radioing Ramon every five minutes that nothing was happening. He told her they were working on a plan up at the compound. The longer the afternoon heat beat into the dirty metal roofs of the cattle trucks, the more Emily doubted any hostages could be in them at all. Vampires were assholes, but like Rosa said, they weren’t stupid. They protected their assets and wouldn’t leave their human herd to roast and dehydrate. The trucks must only contain supplies or stuff for trade. Both good and bad news. A six-strong commune with a herd of eleven was worse than if they had forty or hundreds.
They would be hungry.
By the time Sherice reappeared to resume the watch an hour before sunset, every muscle in Emily’s body felt ready to snap with tension. She passed over the binoculars and radio without a word.
“Don’t need these.” Sherice offered the binoculars back, but Emily turned away and staggered up to the road.
“Nice to see you too, bitch,” Sherice called after her.
Emily didn’t have the energy to reply.
5
Scott
Two days? Three? Super. Scott had already lost count. The security of the abandoned Curisa complex felt weeks behind him either way, and his destination eons to go. This wonky sleep schedule messed with his brain. Two hours here, four hours there was no way to stay coherent.
He was supposed to be napping—recharging. Har har, android humor. But half an hour into the rest stop, he still couldn’t sleep.
His legs felt somewhat noodley after climbing eight stories to the apartment building’s top floor. He’d followed the rules though, taken it slow. Sore quads tomorrow could get him killed, obviously.
They were in there, beyond the unit doors, puttering around, bonking into things, moaning like they’d eaten bad burritos. But the stairwell was clear and that was what counted. They couldn’t get out of the apartments on their own, and Scott was the only living person in the building. Maybe in the whole town. And the top floor was obviously safest from any threats on the street.
The empty apartment boasted one lonely bedroom. The futon sucked, but by the time Scott realized he wouldn’t be getting any rest on it, he was on his own and didn’t dare try breaking into another unit without help. Not sleeping meant waiting around, though, bored and lonely. He wasn’t the only one who needed to recharge.
Time to scrounge.
The narrow kitchen wedged at the front of the unit had no windows. So many roaches scattered when Scott stepped in that he thought it had started to rain.
No point in checking the fridge. He made that mistake at a house yesterday hunting for mustard and almost puked from the stench. Or was that the day before?
“Cupboards are where it’s at.” Propping his shotgun against the sink and dropping his backpack to the grimy linoleum, he crouched to check the under-counter cabinets in the light angling from the living room. People always stashed the least-perishable stuff down low. Doubtful he’d discover anything more nutritious than his Curisa-issued ration bars, he hoped for packs of ramen or another tasty treat. He was disappointed to find only a few cans of green beans and mushroom soup and other equally gross stuff. They were expired, but not so long ago they wouldn’t be edible. He didn’t need them, though. His bags bulged, almost too full. He sat back to close the cupboard, leaving the cans for the next guy.
As the door’s shadow moved, a hint of red and white in the deep corner caught his eye.
“Yes!” He dove for the cans.
Sweet, sweet, sweetened condensed milk. He fished his multitool out of his backpack’s front flap while he shook one as vigorously as his muscles allowed.
“Expiration?” he reminded himself. Squinting at the numbers stamped on the bottom, he made out a rim of rust on the can’s edge. The stuff expired even before the Ecuador Explosion. The second can proved no better. Figures.
“Welp, here goes.” He wiped the can top with his t-shirt and cracked it open. It smelled all right, so he took a cautious test sip, spat, then another.
Thank the gods of preservatives, it was perfect. Like it was canned yesterday. Glorious!
As he drained it, he could hear Jade’s voice from years ago in his brain. You still drink milk? Like a baby? You’re a baby man. A man baby.
Scott told her at the time she didn’t know what she was missing. People in their twenties drank milk all the time. What did she think lattes and ice cream were made of? Shakes? She claimed those were different. Milk was weird by itself. Scott never minded being called weird, though. He knew what was up. No helping those who let the mainstream hold them back. The bros and the chads. Where were they now?
“That’s right,” he answered himself as he wiped his mouth and tossed the can into the kitchen trash. They were behind the doors, in the streets, moaning and groaning while Scott got the good stuff. If part of white privilege included being naturally lactose tolerant, then he would drink it up. What else left in the world was worth enjoying other than the rare find of something ridiculously delicious?
When he reached for the second can, a roach darted over his hand, making him gasp. It came out almost a shriek, and he jerked, falling on his tailbone. His face went hot. No witnesses obviously, but he was embarrassed on his own behalf.
“Real smooth,” he muttered.
If he couldn’t even handle a roach like a man, what would happen if he ever met a vampire?
Not for the first time, he grudgingly thanked whatever cosmic forces might exist that he wasn’t on his journey alone.
6
The Abyss
Arguing voices leaked through the visitor’s center supply room door. Emily pressed her ear against the thickly painted wood.
“He thinks he’s got it all figured out just ‘cause he’s been in charge while we sat on our asses out here?” Daisy. No surprise there. She had to be talking about Ramon. “He’s never led anyone into battle.”
“That’s not true,” Rosa replied, her voice calm and even.
“He’s never led us into battle.”
“This is the best way,” Rosa said. “We have to be organized. We have to support him on this.”
“He’s not Michele.”
“And you are?”
“Fuck this.”
“Do you have a better plan?” Rosa asked.
“This isn’t just knocking out a few humans and torching a few coffins,” Daisy said. “This time it’s night. They’ll be awake in there. And knockout gas sure as fuck doesn’t work on vampires.”
“And like Ramon said, we won’t use gas. Just bombs.”
“And then what? If any get away, they’ll spread the word about us. And our cover here is blown. Literally.”
“We move up the highway, reestablish position,” said Rosa. “We got at least two days, yeah? Target can’t take any other road. It’s a solid plan.” Plastic rustling. Probably the map print. “Look, this ranger station he found. It’s as good a stakeout as this place.”
Emily pushed away from the door. Ramon obviously wasn’t in there. And if the team intended to relocate, that meant packing.
In the theater, the lantern on the floor under the screen blared on fu
ll. The LEDs sliced at Emily’s eyes as she moved past. If Rosa and Daisy came back up from town early, Emily assumed everyone else would be there too, but Carlos was the only one in the room, and less than half of it was cleared out. He sat hunched on the bottom carpeted step, cleaning his rifle.
“Hey.” She jogged up the tiers. “Where is everyone?”
“Early meal, I dunno,” he muttered at his gun.
Emily knelt at her bunk area and watched his jerky movements before turning to sort the few things she called her own into her backpack.
She pulled her hair out of its knot and stripped off her shirt, more brown than black now from her stupid adventure through the dust on the hill. She plucked a few burrs from the moisture-wicking material and folded it inside out before stuffing it in the pack. As she pulled on an identical fresh one, she noticed a fist-shaped bruise marring the tan of her left boob. A memento from training two days ago. Thanks, Daisy. Even though the autumn heat baked through the walls, she slipped into her reinforced jacket. It saved room in the backpack, and it sounded like she might be needing it.
Halfway through rolling up her sleeping pad, Emily heard something metal slam into the wall behind her. She turned in time to see Carlos’s rifle scope bounce down the steps and land under the screen.
“Piece of shit!” He shoved the rest of the gun off his lap and covered his face, digging his fingers into his poofy hair.
Emily froze, but when a minute passed and he didn’t move, she pushed to her feet and climbed down to pick up the scope.
“Here,” she said as she sat next to Carlos. He ignored her while she fitted the scope into place. “See? Like that.”
She handed it to him, but he pushed it back at her. “I don’t even need it.”
“Then why were you—?”
He lifted his face, and Emily’s words died. His eyes were so bloodshot, hardly any white remained.
“It was an omen,” he murmured.
Not this again. Emily sighed.
“My dream, Emily. I told you.”