The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations

by David M. Bachman

  The block hit the surface of the water with a smacking sound and the resultant splash hit her right in the face. She turned away to wipe her face clear, hearing Mister Giovanni’s cries become screams of sheer panic as the weight of the blocks began to drag him fully over the edge of the boat. She cleared her eyes just in time to see his legs go over the edge in front of her just before she felt something pierce her right side.

  In a desperate move, he had taken out the pocket knife he had earlier used to cut the rope and thrust it into her as he was being dragged off to his watery grave. The knife served as an anchor and she was slammed against the side of the boat as he used the knife inside of her as a means to turn himself over and grab hold of the bench seat that ran alongside the edge of the boat using his other hand. The knife was small, but he’d plunged it into her deeply and with enough force that no amount of adrenaline in her body could make her ignore the pain of that steel instrument being hooked upon and cutting slightly into her lower-most rib. He released the knife as soon as he had a firm hold on the lower cushion of the bench seat, and he began to frantically attempt to pull himself back into the boat with just the use of his upper body.

  He was so far gone with panic now that his screams had evolved into a strange sort of keening that was not unlike a wild animal in extreme torment. Jasmine staggered back, immediately plucking the pocket knife from her side and pressing a hand over the wound. She clumsily fell backward onto the rear seat of the boat as its lower cushion hit the back of her knees. Mister Giovanni’s hands scrabbled about for traction, but his hands had been made slippery with his own blood. His palms and fingers squeaked with rubbery sounds upon the surfaces of the vinyl seats and the fiberglass side of the boat. The closer he slid back toward the edge, the higher and louder and more desperate his voice became, his pleas for mercy having become wordless wails of despair. The boat rocked sharply as he tried again and again to hoist himself back into the boat. Jasmine felt something twist inside of herself – joy or horror, she wasn’t sure – as she saw Mister Giovanni’s hands slip and he vanished over the side with a bit of splashing. The feeling was short-lived, though, as the fingers of both his hands found the chromed steel rail on the side of the boat and grabbed hold at the last possible moment, clinging desperately to that last bit of his salvation.

  The screaming went on. He would not stop. He would not die. This would never end on its own. Jasmine sat, watched, waited, and finally summoned the last of her strength to push herself forward once more. She fell forward onto both her knees and crawled upon all fours, dragging her hands and her knees through the puddles and smears of blood Mister Giovanni had left behind upon the blue tarp. Using the side bench to help herself upright onto just her knees, Jasmine picked up the pocket knife, grasping it firmly in her right hand, and began to stab it into Mister Giovanni’s right hand.

  She was surprised to hear his screams somehow grow even louder, higher, and more desperate, becoming something not even humanoid in nature. He clung with surprising tenacity, even as she impaled his right hand twice with the knife and then began to stab at the very knuckles of his fingers. His right hand finally let go of the rail, not so much because he surrendered but because she had caused enough damage that his fingers simply would no longer function. She turned her attention to the other hand and began to thrust the knife down repeatedly. After the third or fourth time she stabbed his hand, he finally let go, and he slipped into the dark waters of Canyon Lake with an ear-splitting, hair-raising shriek that became a bubbling gurgle. The bubbles that arose to the surface in his wake were first large, then small for a long while, and then large again as he accepted the very fate that he had bestowed upon the others. After a minute or so, the bubbles stopped almost entirely.

  The silence that followed was almost as deafening as the cacophony preceding it. Jasmine collapsed upon the floor of the boat and curled into a fetal position upon her side as she clutched the wound that was Dante Giovanni’s parting gift. She listened. She waited. And when she was sure that it was all over … she wept.

  * * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It was only when Raina became aware of a beeping sound from somewhere else in the house that she finally returned to her senses. She abruptly pushed Sam up and away to break their kiss, practically suspending her entire upper body by her shoulders with ease – her own strength was sometimes surprising.

  “What’s wrong?” Samantha asked. A second later, she turned her head toward the hallway door as she became aware of the sound. Her eyes flared wide with a sudden panic. “Oh God…”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The security alarm!” Sam replied in an urgent whisper. “I think I forgot to lock the front door after Dom left!”

  Footsteps could be heard upon the hardwood floor of the front foyer and dining room. Listening closely, it sounded like two people, maybe three. The door to the other bedroom had been closed, last she had seen, and she hadn’t heard it open, so it wasn’t likely to be Sophie or Thomas. Perhaps Dominic had gone out, gotten drunk, and returned with his girlfriend, and neither of them was willing or able to disarm the house alarm?

  “Maybe it’s just him?” Raina whispered.

  “No,” she insisted fearfully, “he would have silenced the alarm by now.”

  “Please tell me you have a gun in this house.”

  “I do,” Sam replied as she met her gaze at point-blank range. “I have one in here, and Dom has a few in his room.”

  Across the bedroom, there was a soft clicking sound as someone attempted to open the locked French doors facing the back yard. Through the relatively thin curtains over the doors, Raina could clearly see the silhouette of a man standing outside, half-crouching near the middle of the two doors. He was apparently attempting to pick the lock with something.

  “Now would be a good time to use it,” she said as she pushed Sam up and aside and rolled off the bed.

  As Sam slipped off the bed and reached for something underneath, Raina rolled over, grabbed her sword from where it stood propped against the nightstand, and unsheathed it quietly. It was a good thing that they hadn’t gotten any more involved in their passion than they had, and Raina found herself with another reason to appreciate fully-clothed lovemaking. She would have felt utterly silly about wielding a sword in the buff … although, on second thought, it might have made for a helpful visual distraction.

  Looking toward the hallway door, Raina saw the glow of a flashlight coming and going and then returning again as the intruder(s) began going from room to room in a quiet visual search. Her own skin glowing with an intensity that now had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with fear, Raina set aside the scabbard of her sword and took the weapon firmly into both hands as she approached the French doors. After fumbling about with a plastic foam-lined gun case under the bed, Samantha came back up with a black, short-barreled revolver.

  Raina made a quick waving gesture to get Samantha’s attention, put a finger to her own lips to tell her to be silent, and then gestured for her to keep an eye on the hallway door. Sam nodded and crouched beside the bed, placing it between herself and the hallway door as a means of cover, while Raina held her sword up and ready, standing slightly aside and back from the French doors. She wasn’t sure why, but Raina was surprised by the fact that Samantha didn’t panic or simply try to run into a closet or bathroom and hide. Just like her sister, she wasn’t the type to come apart at the seams and lose her wits in a situation like this. She was calm, logical, and apparently a capable fighter … at least in a home-defending sort of way. If they lived through this, Raina would someday have to see how she handled a sword.

  Just as someone began to test the locked hallway door, the intruder at the French doors finally succeeded in picking open the simple lock of the lever-style doorknob. However, as they attempted to push open the door, they encountered the secondary lock of the door, a small brass security bolt that connected the top of the door to the upper do
or frame. Raina leaned as close as she dared to the left edge of the curtains covering the door, peeking through the slim gap between the curtains and the door frame. Just barely, she could see a man with a ninja-like black hood backing away from the door as he stashed away a tool of some kind – the lock pick, presumably. He was dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt and black cargo pants, looking either like a professional bank robber or a SWAT team member. He drew a semi-automatic pistol from the front waistband of his pants and held it in both hands as she barely heard him saying something.

  “Back door’s stuck. Ready for breech,” he said.

  As quiet as the man was trying to be, his words were plainly clear to Raina’s keen sense of hearing. For once, those goofy, pointy, elf-like ears had finally proved useful.

  “The front’s open. We’re in,” she heard another man say from the hallway in a hushed voice. There was a pause. “Two rooms locked, everything else clear.”

  “What rooms?”

  “South and east,” was the reply. “They’ve gotta be in here.”

  “You take east, I’ve got the south.”

  “Roger. Hit it on my mark.”

  “Shit,” Raina whispered, glancing to Sam. “Stay down!”

  Samantha nodded as Raina backed away from the doors just enough to avoid their potential path of travel. A few seconds later, there was a hard thud as someone apparently tried to kick in the door to the spare bedroom. The door didn’t give on the first kick and it was followed by a second as the glass of the French door farthest from Raina loudly exploded inward. The curtain served well to keep the broken shards from spraying her as something heavy and round fell upon the floor with a solid thud – the top half of the ceramic bird bath from the back yard. An instant later, the man followed through the opening he’d made and flung the curtain aside with one hand. He simultaneously clicked on a flashlight in that hand while aiming the gun in his other hand readily into the room.

  Just as he began to sweep the pistol over in Raina’s direction, before he could even bring the aim of the flashlight down to where she was crouching upon the floor, she lunged forth and thrust her katana upward. The tip entered the underside of his chin, just under the left side of his jaw. The metal of the sword made a sick scraping kind of sound as it pierced the bone of his skull and became lodged in place as it struck the top-inside of his cranium. He barely even let out a grunt. The man’s arms immediately dropped and he fell away slightly as Raina leaned into him with the sword until he bumped against the edge of the doorway, loudly knocking a few more broken pieces of glass to the floor.

  She held her first enemy there in place for a few moments, his whole body twitching strangely while his flashlight and pistol slipped from his grasp and clattered to the floor. She could immediately sense a terrible, terrible feeling of horror and terror, but not from herself or from Samantha, who was still crouching beside the bed to her right. The man was somehow still alive, although terribly wounded as she kept him upright with a length of steel impaling his brain. She moved slightly to her right, manipulating her would-be killer by the head with her sword as though he were an olive on the end of a toothpick. Raina positioned him in front of the ruined window of the door. She then placed a foot against his chest and kicked hard while jerking back upon her sword. The blade came free with another scraping sound, and the man tumbled backward through the opening.

  Unfortunately, the mortally wounded assassin snagged the curtain on the way out. The weight of his body, along with the momentum of Raina’s outward kick, jerked the curtain rod above free from the thin brackets that held it up, and the thick metal rod suddenly came down with a clatter, striking Raina painfully with a bonk sound, right upon the bony outer part of her left elbow. She winced at the impact, but was not deterred as she immediately crouched down in preparation for any other attackers that might be with him. Finding no one in immediate sight upon the patio or in the back yard just outside the door, she dared to stand and peek around the corner, again somewhat relieved to find no one else to be there.

  There was another thud and the sound of wood crackling behind her as the other assassins continued to try to kick in the other bedroom door. As she remembered it, all of the doors in the house seemed to have been made of a very solid, old-style wood construction rather than the cheap, flimsy plywood kind that Raina recalled having had before in her old manufactured home. For as professional as these killers may have generally seemed, it was a little surprising that they would be slowed by an inability to kick in an interior door. If Thomas and Sophie had been sleeping before, then they most certainly were awake now, vampire or not. At least Sophie was awake, as she could be heard shrieking in a general, useless panic.

  The house alarm suddenly blared to life, a repetitive whoop-whoop siren that seemed to be coming from somewhere in the living room. As she reached down to pick up the pistol that the first attacker had dropped, she heard one of the men in the hallway shout, “Fuck it! Get back!”

  Raina flinched as there was a tremendous boom from the hallway. The shotgun blast was immediately followed by the sound of another shell being jacked into the chamber, and then another terrible boom. Feeling her odds were better with the pistol she now had, Raina laid down her sword and moved to crouch at the foot of the bed, aiming the pistol at the hallway door just as a third round was chambered. This time, the gunfire was directed at the master bedroom door, splintering the wood slightly above the doorknob. She considered blindly firing through the door at her attackers, but she didn’t want to risk wasting any shots. Before she could give that much consideration, a second shotgun blast punched a large hole in the door to the left of the doorknob.

  Raina’s pulse thudded in her ears as she and Samantha aimed their pistols with both hands at the hallway door. They heard the spare bedroom door being kicked in, causing Sophie to scream in terror, and a moment later the master bedroom door swung open with a wood-crunching blow. Another man burst into the room, tall and dressed similarly to the first. He immediately swung his weapon in their direction, blinding them with the flashlight mounted on the end of his shotgun. Raina simply aimed for the terribly bright light, squinted against the glare, and started jerking the trigger of the pistol as fast as she could.

  The shots were terribly loud, but they nevertheless seemed small compared to the deafening explosion of the shotgun that offered its own reply to their gunfire. She felt the boom of the shotgun blast in her chest, momentarily believing the very sound of the weapon to be as deadly as the lead that it shot forth, but she felt no actual impact, nor any pain, while the pistol in her hands jerked slightly upward with every pull of the trigger. The flashlight’s beam swung upwards suddenly and she saw the man jerking with reaction to each of the bullets that struck his body, sending him reeling backward against the wall. Raina stopped after what was about the fifth or sixth shot, having fired twice as many rounds as Samantha, and she watched the man drop to his knees and fall aside.

  Raina remained in place for several long moments, keeping the aim of her weapon trained upon the doorway in anticipation of the third attacker. Her ears were ringing painfully from the literally deafening sounds of gunfire within the confines of that bedroom, and everything that she could still hear seemed terribly muffled and dull. Dimly, she could hear a voice to her left over the keening sound of white noise. She turned with a gasp as someone grabbed her shoulder, and she very nearly stuck the muzzle of the pistol in Samantha’s face as she turned to face her.

  Sam backed away with her hands raised to show that she meant no harm. Her eyes were impossibly wide with fear as she asked her something that Raina could not make out. It was only when she pointed toward her face and left shoulder that Raina became aware of the strange tingling sensation that had been lingering around there following the exchange of gunfire. She touched the fingers of her left hand to her own cheek. They came away wet with blood, the red of it looking so much brighter and impossibly vivid amidst the gloom when painted over her glowing fle
sh. There wasn’t really any pain, at least not yet, but she had apparently been struck by a few stray pellets from the buckshot. One had grazed her left cheek, a small blessing that it hadn’t been a bit lower where it may have struck something vital, while another two or three had penetrated her upper left arm and shoulder. She was bleeding profusely, but nothing was spurting, no geysers of blood to indicate a severed artery of any sort.

  Before she could say anything to Samantha to set her at ease, as she was clearly distraught over Raina’s wounds, there was the roar of another shotgun blast and Raina saw a sudden blur of movement in the doorway. She jerked her right arm slightly upward to aim for the person (or rather, the persons) that came rushing into the room and fired a wild, sloppy shot without hesitation. The pair of individuals that entered the room had already begun to fall down together before she had squeezed the trigger, however, so the shot went high, damaging the frame of a photograph upon the wall behind them.

  Raina stood abruptly and aimed downward toward the pair, but wisely chose not to pull the trigger once more as she saw Thomas struggling with the third gunman. The attacker clung to his sawed-off shotgun for dear life. He was holding it across Thomas’s throat to keep his face away from his own as Thomas apparently was trying to bite him. Exhibiting a trait unique to the Sabertooth race, Thomas’s mouth was opened amazingly wide, baring those severely elongated upper canines as well as his pointy lowers. Combined with his long, dark hair, his hairy chest, and the wild look in his eyes, Thomas looked more like a werewolf in mid-transformation than a vampire.

  Raina hurried over, but soon realized that she was essentially powerless to do anything to help, at least with a gun. She watched as Thomas finally jerked away, abandoning his effort to tear the man’s throat out with his fangs, and the attacker immediately swung the aim of his weapon toward Thomas’s face.