Angeles Underground

by Michael Pierce

  “I wouldn’t exactly complain about that,” Candace said. She moved like she was going to hop up on the counter, but then stopped herself. “Maybe she choked on her chai and died.”

  “No; seriously, isn’t it weird she’s been gone too? And do you remember how she reacted when she saw Matthew in here that one day?”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay, that was a little weird,” Candace said.

  “What was weird?” I asked. “What happened?”

  Another customer came in and Alexis left to meet the family at the register, though Candace made no motion to run off and help.

  “She saw him sitting at the bar talking with Fiona and acted like I’d never seen her before—nice and cordial. No snide comments. No rude remarks. She paid for her drink and the drinks of her friends then left without saying a word.”

  “And you saw her notice him?” I asked.

  “Yeah; she definitely noticed Matthew. It was almost like she knew him too, but they certainly weren’t on speaking terms.”

  I took in this new information, more suspicious of this guy than ever. Had Mallory supposedly “run off” too? Her father did own the coffee shop, but from what Alexis had said, he rarely ever came in. He wasn’t exactly the hands-on kind of owner, so the opportunity to ask him personally didn’t seem likely. If it turned out Fiona and Mallory had disappeared on or about the same time, then I’d believe all fingers would be pointing back to Matthew.

  31

  Fiona

  After asking multiple times over the course of several days, Matthew finally agreed to let me see my father again. He hadn’t been the man I’d expected to meet, which I’d been warned about by Matthew. He’d told me I needed to manage my expectations. Well, now they were successfully managed, but I wanted to know more. More of who he was, how he had gotten involved with the True North Society, more about his other family.

  Matthew accompanied me through the non-time portal to the current day ParallEarth station—Sector 7—hidden in the Nevada desert. I didn’t know where the other sectors were being built but suspected they were scattered around the county, or maybe even the world.

  We went during the day this time; I wanted to stop in on him while he was awake. There were many more tradesmen working on the station during the day with the urgency of a looming due date.

  The desert air was stifling, so much so I could see heatwaves rising from the dirt. Matthew didn’t look comfortable during our trek through the sun, but he didn’t complain. When I took his hand, it was on fire. It seemed the sun serum could only do so much, so we rushed to get out of the direct rays.

  When we reached my father’s room, I found my heart racing just as much as the first time I’d been there. I didn’t know what to expect, and as much as I wanted to see him again, I was apprehensive to open the door.

  “Are you okay?” Matthew asked, keycard in hand.

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing hard, preparing myself for another crazy encounter.

  Matthew proceeded to swipe the keycard and hold the door open for me to enter. The lights in the room were on and my father was talking to someone. At first, I was afraid he was simply talking to himself but soon realized there was another person in the room. It took me a moment to place him, then remembered it was the infirmary tech who’d bandaged my hand after the branding ceremony. They were seated at a desk against the wall.

  “Hello,” I said as I entered.

  The infirmary tech smiled and waved, having heard the door open. “Kelly; in case you didn’t remember,” he said.

  “Fiona,” I said, but then felt stupid because he obviously knew my name.

  My father spun around at the sound of my voice, noticeably startled. Then he glanced over at Kelly, gauging his reaction. “You can see her?” he asked inquisitively.

  “Of course, I can see her,” Kelly said. “Why wouldn’t I be able to?”

  “Because she’s dead. Abigail’s been dead for several years. That was why her mother left me.”

  Kelly glanced at me, then at Matthew, his jaw tense, silently asking for help.

  “You’re right,” Matthew said. “Abigail is dead, and she visited you not too long ago.”

  “I remember,” he said. “It was late in the evening. I was awakened from a peaceful dream.”

  “But this is not Abigail, though she looks very much like her. This is Fiona, one of our new candidates.” Matthew paused to judge my expression before continuing. “She wants to know more about how you designed ParallEarth. Don’t worry, she’s been cleared for such information.”

  “Good; because it’s very sensitive information indeed,” my father exclaimed. “Welcome, Fiona. You do have an uncanny resemblance to my late daughter, God rest her soul.”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said.

  “Kelly was just helping me with my notes,” he continued. “It’s important to write everything down—every last detail you can recall from spending time in the future. We need to recreate it perfectly. Even some minuscule, mundane detail you think might not be important—it could end up being everything, the thing making greater things possible.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said.

  “You should write that down.” My father offered me a pen, but no paper. “You can’t trust your memory for long. Soon what you thought was clear becomes jumbled together with other thoughts, memories, ideas until the important information slips away like a cat in the fog.”

  “Your fath—Assemblyman Damascus interprets his notes for me to record onto a Word document. Then I copy it onto the main server for easy access.”

  “Only for those with clearance,” my father clarified.

  “The information is encrypted and password protected. We… umm… wouldn’t want this information falling into the wrong hands.”

  “That could be catastrophic!” my father exclaimed, gesturing with the uncapped pen in his hand.

  “You visit my—the assemblyman often?” I asked.

  “Almost every day for a few hours,” Kelly said. “He still has a lot of information floating around in that brilliant head of his.”

  “We need to document everything,” my father reiterated. “Every detail, no matter how minuscule or mundane.”

  “You mentioned that already,” Matthew chimed in. He was still standing by the door, one shoulder against the wall.

  I took a seat at the foot of the bed. “It seems like the space station is almost done—or at least, well on its way. What’s left to discover?”

  “I don’t know, which is exactly the point,” he said. “We don’t even know what we’re missing. We could get one thing wrong and the whole thing could go straight to hell. It might never make it into space. It might not connect with the others. They might fail before the portal opens—which was exactly what was happening if I remember correctly. The station was shutting down. Critical systems were failing. Many lives were lost. It’s up to me to ensure that catastrophe isn’t repeated.”

  “Enough of us survived to make the journey worth it,” Matthew said. “But if we learn a little something extra this time around to save even a few of those people, then I’d call that a success.”

  “I thought things couldn’t be changed?” I asked.

  “The problem is, there are too many holes in our information—which I’m sure is part of some divine or universal design—so we don’t really know what kind of effect we have, what can change, and if we actually did change something or only thought we did.”

  “Then it seems you’re doing important work,” I said to my father.

  “The most important!” he bellowed, pointing to his notebook full of scribbles and designs.

  “If only we could decode it,” Kelly said, sarcastically.

  “We’re decoding it together. The answers are in here.”

  I had wanted to get into more family questions, but it seemed he was engrossed in his work, and with Kelly there, I didn’t feel comfortable prying. So, I continued to play along, told him it was a
pleasure meeting him, and one day I hoped to be able to help him like Kelly did.

  He thought about that a moment, then agreed the extra help would be appreciated once I was initiated. Before then, he insisted I didn’t have the clearance.

  After leaving, as Matthew and I walked down the hall, I took his hand and sighed.

  “He’s not someone you can anticipate,” Matthew said. “I know you want to get some real information out of him. But it’s like his notes—a whole mess of nonsense with nuggets of wisdom and useful information hidden inside. You just have to decode it.”

  “And here I thought you were going to tell me to manage my expectations again,” I said with a sly smile.

  “There is that,” Matthew laughed.

  We made our way back to the Southern California compound by way of the Sector 7 portal. It was still in the middle of the afternoon and I had another training session scheduled with Mallory, so we stopped at a café where I could get a bite to eat first.

  “Mind if I watch this time?” Matthew asked as we neared the locker room.

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “The sessions are going better, and you just make me more nervous.”

  “And things are going well with Mallory?”

  “They are; she’s helping me a lot. And today, Zelda should be joining us. We’re becoming a real team.”

  Matthew smiled, flashing the boyish grin that had a way of melting my heart every time. “I’m so glad things are finally working out.”

  “I hope so.” The Assembly of Seven had yet to determine our fates. All I could do in the meantime was to continue working as hard as I could. I stopped at the door to the locker room, leaned in, and kissed Matthew. “There; that should hold you over until I return,” I said.

  “I guess it’ll have to,” he replied, his sweet smile turning into a wry one.

  “I’m sure you have plenty of important business to attend to.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. So, feel free to return to the apartment whenever you’re ready and order yourself some dinner.”

  “I’ll manage,” I said and proceeded into the locker room, trying to mentally psych myself up for another beating in the gymnasium.

  32

  Matthew

  There was a Vampire Order consulate in most major cities around the globe and Los Angeles was no exception. After leaving Fiona to her latest training session with Mallory, I retrieved my Land Rover and headed toward the city. There was never a good time to drive into LA during the day, so I prepared myself for the agonizing slow-moving traffic.

  When I had made the appointment, I’d learned that the regional consul I’d met years ago, Bertram Lovell, was no longer there. His successor was Gideon Brent, a name I had never heard before. He didn’t seem to be very familiar with me either, which was probably a good thing.

  I parked in an underground lot in the heart of downtown, then walked a few blocks to the small shop where the consulate was located. The skyscrapers were blocking out most of the sun as twilight approached. Most of the business people were hurrying to get home or to happy hour. Many of those left loitering on the sidewalks were vagrants preparing for the night.

  I entered a street-level entrance of one of the downtown high-rises, then continued through a small door with a sign overhead that said, “Books Aren’t Dead!” The B.A.D. Bookstore was an eclectic, eccentric shop of used books and collectibles. There were monuments and furniture all constructed from old hardbacks, and mazes of bookshelves. Several specialty vault doors could be found around the perimeter of the shop, which led to themed rooms.

  Suitably, the horror vault was where I needed to go. Once it was free of patrons, I stepped inside and pulled the vault door closed. A lock on the inside kept more patrons from venturing in. An antique chandelier hung overhead, the key to reaching the consul. I tugged on the chandelier and the chain extended a few inches, which caused one of the bookcases to slide to the side and reveal a secret staircase.

  The staircase wasn’t lit, but I could see just fine as I descended into the underground. When I reached the bottom, I entered a small waiting room with the consul’s executive assistant. The doorway to the consul’s office lay just beyond the assistant’s desk. The only frame to adorn the wall had a picture of a crow flying through an oversized full moon and the maxim: “Corvus oculum corvi non eruit.”

  A crow will not pull out the eye of another crow.

  The maxim was the sole visual identifier that this was a Vampire Order consulate. Everything else about the waiting room was bare. The Order operated under the guise that vampires should work together and look out for one another, but of course, that wasn’t true. The Order was just as corrupt and propelled by self-interest as any governing entity.

  “I’m Matthew Mercer and I have an eight o’clock appointment. I know I’m early and would appreciate it if Gideon could see me before my appointed time,” I said to the young male assistant. He almost looked too young to be a vampire, but I knew a human wouldn’t be allowed to work in a vampire consulate.

  “Come in, Mr. Mercer. Come in,” bellowed a deep voice from the office.

  “I guess, Mr. Brent will see you now,” the assistant said, but I was already on my way into the office.

  The man sitting behind the desk was large, with suitably large features, had shiny black hair, and was wearing a blue pinstriped suit. His dark lavender tie was loosened so the top button of his shirt could be undone. His cheeks reminded me of those from a hound dog and his smile was shark-like and sharp. A smoking cigar sat in an ashtray; he reached for it upon seeing me.

  “Mr. Mercer. Mr. Mercer. How may I be of assistance, my dear boy?” the large man boomed boisterously. “Please, shut the door.”

  I did as he requested and took a seat across from him in one of two leather chairs. “Some human friends of mine have been targeted by Order peacekeepers and I’m here to appeal for their safety.”

  “I’ve reviewed your file. Matthew Mercer. Catherine Mercer was your maker; you were turned in 1950 at 21 years old. I assume you took her name, even though there is no documentation of the two of you being married.”

  “That is correct,” I said. “She was killed before we could wed.”

  “Before becoming a vampire, you were convicted of killing two teenagers and committed to Sisters of Mercy Psychiatric Hospital, which was where you met Catherine Mercer. To reintegrate with human society, I assume it was suggested you change your name.”

  “Yes. It was best to leave my old identity behind.”

  “You were born Matthew Sanders, son of Richard and Lily Sanders, from Tucson, Arizona, both of whom died in an automobile accident in 1947.”

  “Also correct,” I said, even though that whole part of my backstory had been fabricated, so it didn’t look like I’d appeared out of thin air when the Order came digging. When I’d been arrested in 1949, I’d seemed like a raving lunatic with no history. But once I was sentenced to Sisters of Mercy—thanks to Frederick—the human correctional system seemed to completely forget about me. Once I was turned into a vampire and learned about the Order, it seemed important to finalize a plausible past.

  “You now own and operate Sisters of Mercy, the place where you were once held, and you are an alleged member of the infamous True North Society. You have no prior strikes to your vampire record and have been in good standing for the past half a century.” He looked up at me. “Good job. Besides the potential connection to the True North Society, it seems you have an exemplary record. Though I would like to get confirmation regarding your involvement with the True North Society.”

  “Maybe I don’t want that confirmed in my record,” I said.

  “Then what about man to man?” He was going to be insistent, I could tell.

  When I thought about how much time was left, it almost wasn’t worth fighting to keep the secret any longer. What were we hiding from anymore? Just because people learned we officially existed, didn’t mean we’d lose the power and connection
s amassed over the past decades. We were too close to the end. It simply didn’t matter anymore.

  “Yes, I am one of the founding members of the True North Society,” I finally said.

  “Not just a member, but a founding member,” Gideon chuckled. “I suppose you’ve kept your plate pretty full. I have an important man in my midst.”

  “Not that important.”

  “You do realize the True North Society is accused of multiple vampire assassinations over the years, though the members have been elusive. Now you’re confirming you’re one of them?” Gideon’s laughter was gone now, replaced by a cold, hard stare.

  “We have our interests, the same as you,” I said. “We are not murderers.”

  “And now you want to appeal for the safety of some of your human friends… It seems your loyalties are deeply divided. Do you side with your secret society or your kind?”

  “That’s not a simple answer,” I said. “I regularly help my kind, which is a big part of Sisters of Mercy.”

  “And the Order thanks you for your service—along with your regular and timely payments,” Gideon said, his expression softening again.

  “But I am also loyal to the secret society I built, determined to keep my members safe.”

  “A minute ago, you said you were one of the founders, and now you’re saying you are the one who built it. How integral are you to its genesis?”

  “I was its genesis,” I stated, boldly.

  “So, a vampire started the elusive True North Society.” Gideon rocked back in his chair and took a big puff from his cigar. “That is something the Order would be interested in learning.”

  “Can my friends be granted amnesty?”

  “Who are your friends, so I can look into why they were targeted?” Gideon set the cigar back in the ashtray and scooted his laptop closer.