The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations

by David M. Bachman

  Once inside the boat, he gave a firm shrug of his shoulders that threw her onto the seat at the rear of the boat. She bounced off the seat and crumpled onto the floor in a limp heap, clenching her jaw tightly as she felt broken ribs grating against one another. For the most part, she was simply doing her best to pretend that she was still unconscious. She feared that giving him any indication that she was awake and even somewhat alert might incite him to hurt her more. She didn’t have a plan to do anything, really, except to await her own death.

  Jasmine had a pretty good idea of what he had in mind for her. The cinder blocks, rope, and tarp were almost self-explanatory. She only wondered if he intended to dump her in the same spot as the others he had surely delivered to the depths in the same way. Would she be left floating alone in the dark abyss like a human burrito on a string at the bottom of Canyon Lake, bloating and swelling with rot while the aquatic wildlife picked away her flesh until she was eventually reduced to a gathering of bones held in a plastic sack? Or would she have company amidst the darkness, just one part of what might be a small forest of wrapped and sunken corpses?

  What she mainly wondered was, did he intend to kill her before pushing her overboard? Or would he simply allow the lake to claim her, filling her lungs with water as the blackness of death filled her vision and her very soul? She wasn’t sure which of the two fates would be preferable. It was largely dependent upon what he may or may not have had in mind for her. If he intended to kill her, himself, would it be quick and painless, perhaps via a bullet through the head or heart? Or would it be slow and painful, maybe biting her neck and tearing open her jugular, letting her bleed out as he sucked her life away one gushing gulp at a time? Perhaps he intended to rape her one last time?

  Male vampires were both famous and infamous for their virility, their ability to stay rigid and ready for indulgence over and over again – good for those in adult films and the sex trade who demanded repeat performances, but bad for anyone such as herself that was left to the mercy of such an insatiable (and enraged) monster. If the latter of those options proved to be the case, then she wasn’t so sure that she could hold fast to her sanity. Even if the blessing of death was but a short time away thereafter, she wanted to at least have her mind and what little remained of her dignity intact when she passed from this world.

  Mister Giovanni’s keys jingled about for a few moments before he apparently inserted the proper one into the ignition of the boat, starting its motor. He allowed it to idle while she felt and heard the thumps of his heavy footfalls drawing near once more. Though the pain it caused her was so intense that it took everything she had to resist the urge to cry out, she managed to remain convincingly limp and still as he grabbed her about the throat and lifted her upright. Now pinned back against the rear seat of the boat, she felt the barrel of a pistol being pressed against the top of her left breast, aimed right at her heart. With her shirt already torn open and hanging from her thin shoulders more like a cape than a blouse, the metal of the barrel pressed coolly against her bare skin. Cold beads of sweat covered every inch of her body as she both felt and heard the hammer being pulled back.

  This is it. This is where it ends, she thought to herself.

  And so she waited, anticipating the loud pop that would punch through her torso and spill what remained of her so-called life out upon the floor of his boat. She would die, and she would be tossed away like trash, thrown into obscurity and forgotten like all the others.

  All the others, she thought. That idea chilled her more than any other as she waited for him to finish her off. How many others had shared her fate? How many more would die the same way at the hands of the same killer? If she knew for a fact that she was the only one to have experienced this at the hands of Mister Giovanni, then it would have been far easier a fate to accept. But knowing that she was not unique, that others before her had died similarly (if not identically), she knew that it would only go on and on until somebody stopped him. And she could not even count upon the Grand Duchess Raina Fallamhain, her former training partner and sort-of friend, to avenge her death and to stop him from continuing this madness. Mister Giovanni had ordered another hit on Raina, this time with his own men. Raina’s demise, as well as Samantha’s, was just as assured as Jasmine’s. For them, the end was very near, but for Mister Giovanni, it was just another night.

  “No,” he finally said, taking the gun away from her chest. There was a soft click as he eased the hammer back down. “Not here.”

  Not here, as in not inside the boat? That was just like him. He was more concerned with getting blood all over the inside of his boat and making a mess than he cared about taking someone’s life. His priorities were as selfish, superficial, and predictable as always. He pushed her aside so that she collapsed roughly upon the floor once again, and he went about the task of untying the ropes that secured the boat to the pier.

  As he returned to the helm and slowly increased the throttle input to the motor, leading them away from the pier, she dared to open her eyes – well, the one that still could open, anyway. The short-barreled, shiny, silver-colored revolver with a wooden grip that he had been threatening to kill her with a few moments before was now stuck into the waistband of his pants at the small of his back. Its neatly polished finish glinted coldly in the urine-yellow light of the sodium-vapor bulbs hanging around the pier, seeming to shine at her with an almost deliberate beckoning.

  He piloted the watercraft calmly and deliberately, apparently taking care not to create too much noise or draw the attention of anyone that might by chance be awake and in the vicinity of the lake at those early hours of the morning. Lying upon her back, turning her head to one side slightly, she could see the tops of the Superstition Mountains scrolling by slowly as they cruised lazily along Canyon Lake. The moon was quite bright, almost full, and it provided enough light by which Mister Giovanni could easily navigate the watercraft without the aid of artificial lights. The sky above was full of countless stars, far away from the glare of the city where its many lights would have otherwise spoiled their clarity. Dawn was easily three or four hours away. Mister Giovanni was in no rush. He was taking his time.

  Maybe, on some sick, twisted, warped level of his inner psyche, Mister Giovanni saw this as being respectful to her, to give her a little more time to live as he reflected upon things during the trip toward the deeper parts of the lake. In his own mind, surely, he was thinking that this was a way of showing that he loved her, that he would have treated her with far less consideration and would have killed her much more horribly and much earlier, had she been anyone else. She knew that he had already killed Becca, the blonde girl. He’d bragged about it, how he’d held her down and forced a lethal dose of heroin into her vein. He considered that a more horrible and less courteous way to die; Jasmine honestly would have much preferred that, to go away into a dreamy world of nothing forever, than to be forced to endure what she had already, and what she might still have yet to suffer. To him, having her go out with a bang was apparently much more of a tribute to how “special” she was to him, rather than simply putting her to sleep with an injection like a sick animal.

  Keeping her eye upon him, she moved her limbs slowly and carefully to test her mobility, flexing her fingers and stretching her legs out as best she could. He kept his back to her, but she was careful not to make any sudden movements or create any noise that would draw his attention. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, exactly, but she had an idea now. She had an idea because now she had a reason to live. Jasmine had been content to die a few minutes ago only because she had been thinking of herself, allowing the misery of her own despair and tragedy to overwhelm her sense of reasoning. But thinking of two words, “the others,” had been enough to snap her out of that foolish self-pity and resignation. Mister Giovanni’s decision not to kill her at the pier had given her time to form the idea that she now had.

  Mister Giovanni apparently reached a place that suited him, as he throttled dow
n the motor and then shut it off. The boat glided to a slow drift and Jasmine closed her eyes as he began to turn around. She listened closely as his feet thumped about the boat’s floor with his movements. There was a plastic crinkling noise as he pulled the blue cargo tarp out of its store packaging and then began to unfold it. He picked her up and hoisted her up onto the rear seat of the boat once more, this time propping her upright in the far corner of the seat so that she would remain upright and out of the way. He then began to spread out the blue tarp upon the floor of the boat. The tarp was large enough to cover the broad clear area of the boat’s main floor, and he allowed the far end of it to hang over the port (or was it starboard?) side of the boat.

  He had brought several lengths of rope along, which his thugs had delivered to him before he’d sent them on to go kill Raina and the others. He pulled out the first rope from its packaging and knelt upon the tarp as he dragged each of the cement blocks onto it and dropped them aside one another with a heavy thump. He took out a small folding knife from his pocket, opened it, and cut the first rope into a few sections. Watching him carefully through her mostly-closed eyes, his image was a shadowy figure seen through her eyelashes. Jasmine observed him preparing what was meant to be her aquatic death shroud. He then began to tie a length of rope to each of the cement blocks, all of which were presumably meant to weigh her down at different points of her body – one around her ankles, one around her waist, and one about her torso.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said with a sigh as he went about his preparations. “I don’t know why you women always do this to me. I don’t know why you always go against me. I only wanted to make you happy. I gave you everything. I did everything for you. But it is never enough. Nothing makes you happy. You always want more, more, more! You lie and you lie, and then I must do this. You make me do this because I can’t give you more. I have nothing left to give.”

  Ah, but he did have something left to give, she realized as she steeled herself for the task. Summoning all her willpower to move swiftly while ignoring her pains, Jasmine took what it was that Mister Giovanni had unwittingly offered her. As he knelt with his back to her, tying a knot with the rope around the last cinder block, she pushed herself away from the seat and dove forward. The fingers of her right hand closed around the grip of his pistol and she began to jerk upward. He was fast, very fast, and his hand was immediately reaching back and closing around her wrist before she had even pulled the gun fully clear of the waistband of his pants. Reflexively, she pulled the trigger.

  The flash and bang of the gunshot startled her, as did the fact that he was not instantly upon her. The shot took him squarely in the small of his back, right above the waistline of the back of his pants. He cried out and fell to one side. She kept the gun pointed at him. She pulled the trigger again. It made another flash and another bang. She pulled the trigger once more, and then again, and again, over and over, until it finally neither flashed nor banged. She wasn’t even really aiming, just pointing the thing at him and holding it with both hands. She saw the shots blasting through him, making holes appear and causing blood to spurt forth. The darkness of his blood in the gloom of the night and the way in which it drooled out of him somehow reminded her of someone shooting holes in an oil drum, springing slow leaks of dark crude.

  After realizing that the gun in her hands was only clicking uselessly, she stopped pulling the trigger and simply stared at what she’d done. Her ears rang painfully from the potent report of those shots. Although what little she could hear was somewhat muffled, what she did hear was grimly rewarding. Mister Giovanni was crying out, screaming at first and then fading to an agonized groan. Having fallen back upon the tarp, blood had splattered everywhere upon the shiny blue surface, adding a dark and graphic contrast to the colors that would have otherwise been invisible upon the dark brown plastic carpeting of the boat’s floor. Bullets had torn through his thighs, abdomen, groin, and buttocks, as he had fallen back with his upper body away from her. If she’d had just a second longer, if she’d not been in such a rush and not panicked when he’d grabbed her wrist so quickly, perhaps she would have simply shot him in the back of the head – one shot, nothing more. Admittedly, firing a single shot wouldn’t have satisfied her, even if she had killed him with that first bullet. Emptying all six rounds from the revolver hadn’t been enough to completely satisfy her, either … but it had been a damned good start.

  Jasmine was amazed that she was able to bring herself to stand upright at all. Raw fear was pumping through her veins like never before in her life, her heart fluttering in her chest with such ferocity that she felt it might explode from terror, exhilaration, or both. The adrenaline that surged throughout every capillary in her body was all that made her ignore the pain of her injuries. She dropped to one knee beside the seriously wounded Commoner vampire and grabbed one of his ankles. He offered no resistance as she then grabbed his other ankle and pulled upon it to extend his leg fully. His arms were thrashing about wildly as he tried to push or pull his torso upright, but his legs remained limp.

  “You … you shot me!” he finally cried out. “You fucking bitch! You shot me!”

  “Yes, I did,” she replied as she took the nearest length of rope and began to wind it about his ankles, binding them together.

  His legs were like dead weight, utterly limp. Either she had paralyzed him with that first shot to his back, or the wounds to his lower body had severed nerves or otherwise damaged things to a point where he could neither feel nor control his legs at all. This was certainly a great equalizer. If he had been able to kick her away, she would not have been able to tie his feet together so quickly and easily. She was no expert in tying knots, but she knew enough to make one that would secure his ankles together adequately, even if he did regain the use of his legs.

  “What are you doing?” she heard him demand as her muffled sense of hearing gradually improved. The fear was raw and obvious in his voice as he saw her tying one of the cement blocks to the length of rope around his ankles. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Going fishing,” Jasmine replied blankly as she grabbed the rope tied about the next cement block.

  “What? No! No!” Mister Giovanni bellowed. He began to babble something in his native tongue, some rambling curse or prayer or plea for mercy in Italian, before he switched back to English again. “Why? Why are you doing this? I love you! You don’t want to kill me, do you?”

  “Yes,” she said as she tied the third block to him, “I do.”

  Her adrenaline rush was causing her hands to shake terribly, and the initial rush of it had begun to ebb as she struggled to lift the first of the blocks. She tossed it over the same side of the boat where he had allowed the tarp to overhang, and it splashed into the water with a deep, gulping sound, as if the lake was an immense, hungry creature underneath them. Mister Giovanni truly began to panic now, screaming, begging, and cursing at her. She hoisted the second block, again feeling and even hearing splintered bones in her ribcage scraping against one another painfully, and she almost went overboard with the block as she leaned over to toss it into the water. The slack from the rope in the first block had drawn the rope tight against Mister Giovanni’s ankles, and the second one began to reel out as it sank downwards, actually pulling his legs over and dragging him slightly toward the edge of the boat as it ran out of length. Gasping for air now, her heart hammering in her chest madly, Jasmine crouched and began to lift the last block.

  “No! Wait! Please! Wait!” Mister Giovanni begged as the weight of the blocks began to slowly drag him across the floor of the boat. He flailed his arms about and reached for her. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I love you! I’m sorry!”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said through her clenched teeth as she approached the side of the boat one last time.

  “Don’t! Don’t do this to me! Please!”

  The weight of the block was almost too much to bear now. She was running out of steam, both physically and emo
tionally. She set the block upon the edge of the boat with a heavy and metallic clunk as it rested upon the chromed steel railing, and she paused to catch her breath. So close! She was so close! She didn’t even need to lift the block at that point. She could just push it over the edge, give it a little tip, and it would all be over. Just a little nudge, and Dante Giovanni would be out of her life once and for all.

  This was a mistake, of course. The longer she took to actually kill him, the longer she had an opportunity to consider her own actions. Her conscience was a terrible thing. She was about to commit murder. This wasn’t self-defense anymore. This wasn’t something done in the heat of the moment. Shooting him had been one thing; tying blocks to his ankles and sending him to the bottom of the lake was something different altogether. This was premeditated killing, first-degree murder. Vampires had rights now. Humans couldn’t kill vampires freely because the United States government had recognized them as citizens with (more or less) the same rights as human beings. Vampires could still kill other vampires, of course, but justifiable inter-species killings required special circumstances. A vampire could only kill a human in a case of indisputable self-defense; a human could only kill a vampire likewise in self-defense, or if the vampire in question had been legally declared to have gone rogue.

  But legal or not … this was a life. This was a person, a soul that she was committing to death. He was evil. There was no doubting that much about him. Dante Giovanni was a textbook sociopath, someone that only saw other people as a means for self-gratification. But he was still a person, a living being. She had never killed anyone, neither deliberately nor accidentally. Mister Giovanni was mentally ill, but he still had thoughts and dreams and hopes and…

  The others, she reminded herself sternly. Don’t forget about the others! And with that thought screaming loudly in mind, Jasmine shoved the third block over the edge.