“Marty?” I said. “Is that you?”
“Yeah, Katie, it’s me.” His deep, rumbling voice came through from the hallway.
There were four deep sighs of relief, and Sparks started playing her infernal game again.
“You coming through?” I wondered aloud.
“I will, just . . . you guys, don’t yell at me, okay?”
“Why would we yell at you, Marty?” Penny hollered, alarm raising the pitch of her voice even higher than usual.
“See, now you’re doing it already,” Marty said quietly.
“Come on through, Marty. I promise we won’t yell at you.” I gave Penny a look as I spoke. She rolled her eyes but nodded her agreement. Penny liked to yell at people, which was sort of amusing given her almost childishly high-pitched voice. She looked kind of disappointed, but I was getting tired of talking to Marty through a partition wall.
“Okay, but remember you promised.”
I could hear the first shuffling of feet, and then, seemingly while I blinked for a millisecond, Marty’s bulk took up almost the entire doorframe.
“Shit,” Nova said, his head turned to the door.
“Che cavolo.” That was Frankie’s effort from the other side of me. Don’t ask me what it meant, but I guessed it wasn’t polite.
Penny recoiled, making gasping noises as she edged farther away along the sofa she was sharing with Sparks, who was playing her game.
“What the hell happened to you?” I asked, as I seemed to be the only one capable of constructing a sentence.
In news reports where somebody was described as being covered in blood, generally there was maybe only a splash or two.
Well, Marty was covered in blood, but I mean . . . covered. Head to toe. Shoulder to shoulder.
Dripping, it was.
I jumped up. The floor in the hall was new too. Well, new-ish. Five years. But I still didn’t want it blood-soaked. Blood was such a bitch to get out of tile grout, and I should know.
“I had an, errm . . . accident.”
“You look like you’ve been wrestling a polar bear, man. If that polar bear were turned inside out.” Nova stood up and took a step toward Marty who was looking very sorry for himself. “What happened?”
Marty looked around the room at everyone, and then he dropped his chin to his chest.
“I bit someone.”
Silence reigned for a second or two, and then everybody started to yell.
Chapter Two
I WAS IN my room getting changed into my clothes and gear, my hands fumbling a little as I moved with haste.
Marty was in the shower scrubbing himself. His clothes were in my washer. Quick wash cycle.
Everybody else was arguing in the living room. I’d left the door cracked open so I could hear the conversation.
“I knew he was rationing the dragon blood too tight,” Nova said. “He’s only been getting the same as everyone else, but he’s twice the size of any of us. We should have known.”
“How could we know?” Penny made a fair point.
She was right. How could we have possibly known?
“It was probably a biological certainty,” Sparks said.
“So why didn’t you say anything?” Nova asked.
“Because, Nova,” Sparks said sharply, “I’m a tech wizard. I’m not a biologist. I prefer to deal in certainties rather than probabilities.”
“Well, that’s just great.” Nova’s anger exploded. “Our science expert doesn’t like biology. You might have told us that.”
“Hey,” Frankie cut in. “Keep your voices down. You don’t want the neighbors reporting a noise violation right now. We gotta stay calm and deal with this. Ever since we found that dragon blood, this day has been waiting to come. We have none left, and we only drank enough tonight to last us a couple of weeks. After that, we’re all going to be fighting the same urges Marty succumbed to today, so cut the guy a break, and let’s work out what we’re going to do.”
“Whatever happens, I’m not going for no implant,” Sparks said.
There were sounds of agreement from the rest, and if I’d been in the living room, I’d have agreed too. The idea of having the implant to control bloodlust filled me with fear and anger. The implanted VAMP2 people we knew were in control of their urges, that was a fact, but the other side of it was that someone, somewhere, was controlling them.
We had all seen it often enough.
That was partly why our little group was so tight. We were united in the effort to try and find a way to avoid the implants. We hadn’t gotten very far, admittedly. But we were surviving as natural vampires without hurting anyone. Well, we were until Marty lost control.
We were all VAMP2s, infected by a strain of the vampire virus. We’d been away in the mountains camping together when we realized the infection had spread among us. We didn’t have time to try to get help. Not that there was any help to be had. The virus wasn’t reversible. But thank the heavens we’d all turned at once, because otherwise, the vamps among us probably would have killed the humans.
When the VAMP2 virus first broke out decades ago and infected millions of people, turning them into bloodthirsty nightmares, the government, with the aid of Gregori Industries, came up with an implant that stopped the bloodlust. But it meant that they could control your actions to a degree. Only, no one knew about that part until much, much later, many years after the vast majority of new generation vamps had succumbed to the implant. Every VAMP2 had been required to have the implant fitted or be carted off to the middle of nowhere and disposed of, according to the stories we had all heard.
Neither option appealed to me, so I never registered. No way. I was my own person, not some mind-controlled puppet. My friends and I formed a pact, promising each other that we’d find a way to survive without the implant.
But nearly all VAMP2s were eventually implanted.
The ones who weren’t got hunted down, and that was how we earned a living. The money for a captured VAMP2 paid for the apartment and bills, and as long as we kept our . . . nature . . . to ourselves, we were relatively confident we would get away with this way of life for as long as we needed to.
It might have seemed strange, as if we were hunting our own kind, but we had no qualms about doing it. Rogue VAMP2s weren’t like us. They didn’t have control. They were little more than accidental monsters. And they were vicious, if left unimplanted. They would keep feeder dens of human victims, and they killed without conscience.
We did have a problem, though: to avoid out-and-out bloodlust, we needed to drink blood regularly. Human blood was good, and it would keep us going for a while. It was tricky, though, because it was illegal for humans to give blood to vamps. But we didn’t rely on human blood. We had something much better.
And anyway, the government was cracking down on humans who voluntarily gave blood to vamps. The punishment was getting steeper, and the anti-vampire sentiment more pervasive. No one wanted to take the risk of being a donor, and humans were more poised than ever to turn in anyone who fed vamps.
No, we’d been sustaining ourselves with something much more, well, unbelievable. During that camping trip in the woods, when we’d all turned and then begun going crazy with bloodlust, there’d been a flash of bright orange light blasting through the sky, and something huge had landed from the heavens. As if sensing that it had blood to offer, we’d all set out in that direction. We’d found that a dragon had landed in a meadow just over the ridge from where our tents were pitched.
Yeah, a dragon.
Who believed in dragons? But that was what it was: an elegant, scaled, winged, reptilian-looking creature.
To be strictly accurate, it didn’t so much land as fall in a dead heap of mangled dragon wings and tail onto the field. Dead as a dodo.
We stood around, looking at it for one moment. And then, I saw a cut on its head. Blood had run down onto its eyelid.
I swiped my finger through it, and when I licked it off, oh my, what a
surprise that was. It tasted like the sweetest nectar ever, and almost as soon as I tasted it and swallowed, the bloodlust that was already building in me was gone. Just one little smear of the dragon’s blood, and I almost felt human again.
The others did the same, bending down to take a taste of the creature’s blood. Within seconds, we were staring at each other, clear-headed but stunned.
Marty had finally turned to Sparks. “Hey, Sparky. Give me your flask.”
Sparks glared at Marty but did as he asked.
Marty twisted the lid off the oversized flask. “We need to get as much of this as we can.”
For the next half hour, we examined every inch of the dragon for wounds, and using the flask, the two cups that came with it, and the water bottle that was hooked to my belt, we caught as much of the dragon’s blood as we could. The whole time, we kept making little remarks about how insane it was. How we couldn’t really be there in the woods crawling over an actual dragon corpse.
By the time we got back to our campsite, the initial euphoria had worn off, and I felt safe to drive.
We headed back to the apartment.
The next morning at first light, we drove out with ten fancy double-walled water bottles that cost us the equivalent of our food budget for the week.
The dragon was gone. All there was to see was a malformed dragon-shaped crop circle in the field, a beat-up old truck, and one puzzled rancher, scratching his head while he held his well-worn, red baseball cap in his hand.
We drove on by and went back home.
When we got back, we checked what we had.
I figured we had enough to last us a couple of months, but it was complete guesswork. It proved to be about right, because that was three months ago. We’d been rationing while we’d searched desperately for more, and from what Marty had said, that rationing of the dragon blood had been his downfall.
Here we were, very nearly out of dragon blood and having to leave the apartment. Quickly. Sparks had already picked up some news reports describing how a VAMP2 had attacked an innocent woman who happened to be doing her grocery shopping and was loading her bags into her car when she was attacked. More fuel for the anti-vamp sentiments, and thankfully no one got a picture of the attacker.
The description given only sounded a little like Marty, which was good, but the report said that the authorities had a good lead on the vicious VAMP2 who was responsible. That was probably a lie, but there was no way we were going to hang around long enough to find out if it wasn’t.
As I walked out of my room, the argument was still going on. I left them to it. Marty’s clothes were on the dry cycle, so we had about a half hour to get together whatever we needed and hit the road.
I went back into the living room and adopted my hand-on-hips-I’m-going-to-say-something-profound-now pose.
The five of them—including a naked, dripping Marty, apart from a towel around his waist—stopped arguing and looked at me. For some reason, going back years I’d been the de facto leader of the group. I never wanted to be or asked for it, but it just seemed to have worked out that way.
“Okay, we have thirty minutes to grab our stuff, take whatever blood we have left.” I looked at Marty. “Especially you.” He nodded. “And get out of here before the authorities get a squad together. We can’t let them catch us here, where we stand no chance of escaping.”
Everyone’s nervous energy began to translate into purposeful motion.
“Sparks, you monitor comms. If it sounds like they’re coming, we need to know quick,” I said. I could tell by her annoyed look that she was already on it. “Nova, go downstairs and keep watch outside. Stay in the van so you don’t look conspicuous. Penny, you help me get some stuff together, and Frankie, you make sure our weapons are all good to go. Everybody clear?”
I glanced around at everyone nodding their heads and finally at Marty. I quickly looked away again, shielding my eyes with one hand. “Marty, for god’s sake, shut the barn door.”
“Oh, sorry, guys,” Marty said as he hurriedly pulled the towel together while Frankie made quiet retching sounds.
Forty minutes later, we were out.
Just as Marty climbed into the back of the van and slammed the doors shut, four black SUVs with darkened windows pulled into the parking lot and braked to a halt outside the front door of my building. My heart thumped. How could they have found us so quickly?
Nova whispered sharply, “Everybody get down and stay down.”
Then he started the engine, and we pulled out of the lot as each SUV disgorged five heavily-armed men who somehow bypassed the entry system and jogged inside in single file, leaving one man outside to guard the fleet of vehicles.
He eyed us carefully as we drove by, but he didn’t challenge us. Once we were past, I sat back up and watched in the side mirror. He had his hand to his ear and was talking as we pulled out onto the road.
“We need to dump the van,” I said as we joined the late evening traffic.
“Why?” Penny’s squeaky voice came from the back seats.
I turned to look at her. “Because it’s registered to me, and they must have somehow connected me to Marty, or why would they raid my apartment?” My heart was racing at the idea that those men were stomping all over my home.
“It won’t take them long to ID that blood in the hall as being from whoever Marty attacked.” Nova was concentrating on the road but nervously flicking his eyes at the rearview mirror from time to time.
“I’ve seen that guy waiting outside before,” said Marty, having finally managed to disengage himself from the narrow space between the seats in the back.
“You saw him?” I said. “I thought I said to stay down.”
“I’m six feet four, Katie. Even down as far as I could go, I could still see out.”
“Fair point,” I said. “So, who was he?”
“I don’t know a name or anything, but I’ve seen him out and about when we’ve been tracking VAMP2s down. He’s on a SCAR capture squad.”
Supernatural Crime Action and Rehabilitation. An organization created in recent years with the rise of public and governmental hysteria about vampires. Rumor was the organization preferred termination to rehabilitation, but the Chief Officer of SCAR didn’t want the organization to be known as SCAT for obvious reasons.
Those guys were bad news all round.
“Where are we heading? We never decided,” Nova said.
I looked around the van at everyone. One or two looked scared. Sparks looked terrified. Action wasn’t her thing, and she would be little help if we got into a fight. Marty looked frightened too, and he liked a battle. But against SCAR, and with the prospect of what might happen to him if he got caught, well, that would be enough to alarm anyone.
“Bogus Basin, and then on to the cave.” I named one of our hideouts that was just past a mountain recreation area not far out of town and then looked back around. Everyone nodded their agreement. Nova didn’t seem to be totally on board.
“That’s an hour drive. In an hour, every SCAR agent in the area will be looking for us,” Nova said, doing more eye flicks at the mirrors.
“I know,” I said. “We need to find some different transportation and get off the main roads. Anyone got any ideas?”
Frankie piped up. “I could ask my brothers.”
Frankie was a great guy. His brothers? Yeah, they were okay, but not vampires and not overly inclined to help vamps either. I’d only met them once, and neither of them hit on me, which according to Frankie would have been a miracle had it not been for him telling them I was a vamp. For some reason, that put them off. It made me nervous that Frankie had revealed my true nature.
“Do they have a vehicle we could use?” I asked, hopeful.
“Johnny has an SUV. It’s only a five-seater, but we could squeeze in. Maybe. Other than that, it’s just motorbikes.”
Perfect. I’d forgotten his brothers were heavily into off-road motorbiking. At least with bikes we could pair u
p and split up if needed.
“Let’s do it. Give Nova directions to your brothers’ place.”
“We got trouble.” Nova’s voice was calm, but his eyes were alternating between the road ahead and the rearview.
I flashed a look out back and saw what he meant. Two of the SCAR SUVs were pursuing us. Fast.
“Can you lose them, Nova?”
“Take a left here,” Frankie yelled as the sound of the van engine increased.
“Hold tight, everyone.” Nova hauled left on the wheel. I didn’t know if two wheels left the ground or not, but there was a whole lot of squealing, and the van fishtailed a couple of times before Nova had it heading straight again. He put the pedal to the metal, and we moved slightly quicker along the street, but we were in a van with a lot of bodyweight in it. It was little more than a decent bus at the best of times, but in a chase, well, we really had no advantage at all.
Our best chance of losing the soldiers in the SUVs was on foot. I didn’t recognize the part of town we were in, although I knew Frankie’s family lived in a neighborhood just north of the I-44, which we had crossed over earlier. So, we couldn’t be far away.
“Take a left again,” Frankie yelled. I looked out the back. We had made a hundred yards, but the bad guys were catching up again.
Nova heaved left. The van felt like it was tipping, and everybody apart from Frankie yelled out curses or demanded to know what the hell Nova was doing. A hundred yards ahead, the road came to a dead end. A turning area at the end of a residential street.
“Stop panicking, guys. I know what I’m doing. Go right to the end and pull up, Nova. Everyone else get ready to run. We need to head off to the right, so follow me.”
Nova drove to the end of the turning area, jammed on the brakes, and we all bailed. Nova forgot the handbrake, and the van began to roll backwards. He saw it and turned to go back, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him after Frankie and the others who had veered off to the right.
“Don’t worry, Nova. Someone’s damaged fence is the least of our worries.”
Chasing Legends Page 2