After the Fall: A Vampire Chronicle (Book One) (2 page)

“You said you will to your mother,” Ron elaborated, his eyes still glued to the television set. Somehow, over the past four years, he had become an avid Yankees fan.

“Oh that. I will be sure to meet up with lots of rough and wild guys. You know Mom. Only wants the best for me,” Caroline joked.

Ron finally peeled his eyes from the set, looking at Caroline with puzzlement on his face.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Of course, Dad.
Who’s winning?”

“We are.”

“Of course.”

“You
wanna watch?” He patted the couch cushion next to him.

“I’d love to, but I’m going out. I have a date with Channing Tatum.”

“Oh yeah? Did he go to your high school?”

Caroline couldn’t help but smile and shake her head.

“Yeah, Dad, he did. I’ll be back by midnight, okay?”

“Okay, Carrie. Have fun,” Ron answered, his atte
ntion already back on the game.

Caroline could only roll her eyes as she walked past him. Most of the time, Ron Gallagher was a pretty observant person, very grounded in the world, but put the Yankees on, and bam! He was transported to another realm.
A realm of pennants, World Series, glory, and Derek Jeter. As someone who had become a pretty big Yankees fan herself over the course of watching just to appease her Jeter crush, Caroline could understand, but she knew her father took it to the extreme – if forced to choose between his family and his beloved Bronx Bombers, she knew he’d have a very tough time making a decision.

On her way to the coat closet, Caroline stuck her head into the bedroom her sisters shared. The two younger girls were on the floor, playing a video game and bickering as usual.

“Ha! I won again,” Katie crowed, gloating over her victory.

“
Of course you won,” Caroline pointed out. “You’re three years older than Lauren.”

“Aren’t you gone yet?” Katie asked as she restarted the game. Caroline didn’t remember ever being as sullen and moody as Katie at fifteen, but she figured it was probably magnified by the middle child syndrome. That could explain it.

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving. Be nice to her, Kate. And Lauren?”

“Yeah?” her youngest sister asked, turning around to face Caroline. Caroline leaned in close to whisper in Lauren’s ear.

“Kick Katie’s ass.”

Caroline could see Lauren smiling as she left the room. Checking her watch, she realized she was running extremely late. The movie was going to start, and she was going to miss the previews.

Grabbing her coat from the front closet, she opened the apartment door, called a quick good-bye to her parents, and headed to the elevator doors, which were just opening. Two people stepped out, a man and a woman, and Caroline rushed past them and into the elevator car, which was now empty. She noticed just before the doors closed that the couple, both the man and woman, were dressed in all black, which Caroline figured she had noticed because it was emphasized by the paleness of their skin. Freaky.
But what do you expect
, she thought.
This is New York after all, where freakiness abounds
.

The doorbell rang, just as A-Rod hit a homerun. Lost in the moment, Ron didn’t even hear the bell.

“Ron? Ron, someone’s at the door,” Alice called from the kitchen. Sighing with frustration, she stood up and walked into the living room.
Teenage bickering and computer-generated sounds of warfare were coming from one of the bedrooms; the doorbell rang again.

“Was that the door, honey?” Ron asked.

“Now you hear it,” Alice sighed in frustration. She walked to the front of the apartment, knowing whoever was outside must be getting impatient. 

“We’re not expecting anybody, are we?” Ron asked, puzzled.

“You know what? I bet it’s Caroline. She forgot her key twice last week, but at least now she remembered before midnight,” Alice answered, as she unlocked the door and opened it, startled to find two strangers in the hallway. They were young and almost sickly pale, dressed all in black. Young people today.

“Can I help you?” Alice asked.

The guy gave a smile that wasn’t a smile. It definitely should have been a smile, but Alice had never seen anything like it before – the coldness of it sent a shiver down her spine.

Alice gasped as the female roughly pushed her out of the way and stepped into the apartment.

              “Yes, you can help us,” she crooned, grabbing Alice by the arms and slamming her against the wall; Alice’s cry of pain only made the man smile more. The woman leaned in close to Alice’s face, and the emptiness Alice saw in her eyes, like twin black holes, made her afraid like she had never been afraid before. The woman’s breath was hot on her face, and Alice felt sick to her stomach.

             
“We’re starving,” she hissed.

              Caroline stepped off the elevator, back on her floor again. She checked her watch for the fourth time in ten minutes and cringed. She was going to be nowhere near arriving on time for the previews. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten her keys again, but at least this time she had remembered before it was the middle of the night. Maybe she could catch the next show and still make her curfew…

             
She was so lost in her thoughts that her first indication that something was wrong was when she went to knock on the apartment door and all she got was a handful of air. Finally focusing on her surroundings, she saw the door was already open. Frowning, she stepped into the apartment, and then stopped, a cold wave of anxiety and something else – fear, maybe – sweeping over her. Something wasn’t right. Even if somebody had stepped out for a moment and forgotten to shut the door, there still should have been video game sounds coming from the bedroom. The television still should have been on. Her father never shut the set off in the middle of a Yankees game. Never.

             
“Mom? Dad?”

             
Caroline took another step into the apartment, and was greeted by, despite the busy sounds of the street drifting up and in through the window, the most deafening silence she had ever known.

             
“Lauren? Katie?”

             
She took another step and tripped, barely managing to regain her balance and keep from falling. She had warned Katie that the next time she left one of her shoes out in the middle of the room, where someone could easily end up breaking their neck…

             
She bent down to retrieve the shoe that she had tripped on and found that there was a foot in it. Caroline closed her eyes and took a deep breath as a feeling of horror and profound panic began to seize her. This was her mother’s shoe, and this was her mother’s foot, and lying there, on the living room rug, was her mother.

             
“Mom?” she whispered, her voice shaking. Maybe she was sleeping. Or playing some sort of sick joke. But how would that explain the gaping hole in her mother’s throat and the pool of blood she was lying in?

             
Caroline saw it, and yet didn’t see it; she felt as if she was an observer to the scene, watching her body watch her mother. This wasn’t real; it couldn’t be, because that would have to mean that her mother was dead, and her mother couldn’t be, because just ten minutes earlier they had been bantering with each other, and this had been a normal day and now…

             
Standing up, Caroline found she was trembling, shaking actually, and she grabbed hold of a nearby bookshelf to steady herself. For the first time, she noticed that the room had been completely trashed – lamps and mirrors had been broken, books torn and tossed, the cushions on the couch slashed. As if in a dream, Caroline stepped over her mother and walked into the kitchen, where she found her father, face down on the tiles, also lying in a pool of blood. The kitchen, too, was a mess, and here, there were bloody footsteps on the floor, and bloody handprints on the wall, and for the first time, Caroline realized that whoever had killed her parents might still be in the apartment.

             
At the thought, her blood ran cold. Part of her wanted to keep looking, had to, because maybe Lauren and Katie were still in the apartment someplace. Maybe they were hiding, and were scared. They were only little girls; they would need their big sister. But part of Caroline knew that she had to get out and call the police. She had to tell somebody that her parents were dead.

             
Her parents were dead.

             
A small whimper escaped her throat, but Caroline knew she couldn’t fall apart just yet; she had to call the police, find her sisters, and then she could fall apart and not worry that she would never be able to pull herself together. She hurried into the living room, and picked up the receiver to the telephone. She heard a sound coming from the kitchen just as she realized that there was no dial tone coming through. Putting down the receiver very slowly, she listened closely, and heard it again. A footstep. Someone was in the apartment.

             
She wanted to run and get as far away as possible, but she felt a small glimmer of hope that it was one of her sisters, that maybe they were okay. However, it wasn’t Katie or Lauren who stepped out of the kitchen and into the living room, but a man. A very familiar looking man, soon joined by his equally familiar companion. The couple from the elevator. Both had unreadable expressions on their faces, but their eyes were hard and very, very cold, and suddenly Caroline was extremely frightened. That was the first thing she noticed.

             
The second thing she noticed was that both of their mouths were unnaturally red - blood red, in fact; it was smeared messily across their chins and dripping from their lips, as if they had actually put their mouths to her parents’ wounds. Caroline thought she was going to faint. She nearly jumped out of her skin when one of them spoke.

             
“We weren’t expecting you,” said the female, “or we would have waited.” She took a step into the living room, causing Caroline to take a step back, trying to maintain her distance from these obviously insane people.

             
“Your parents, and your sisters,” the female continued, in an almost apologetic voice, “they met with a little accident.”

             
At the thought of her sisters, Caroline had to close her eyes and will herself not to vomit right then and there.

             
“They were such nice people,” she said, her eyes wandering, brushing her fingers across the back of Ron’s overstuffed chair in a nonchalant manner, as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

             
“They were…delicious.”

             
She smiled, a wide, bloody grin, turning Caroline’s blood to ice. Somewhere in the back of her brain, a tiny voice was screaming for her to run, to get the hell out of there, to scream at the top of her lungs, but her feet were rooted to the floor and she couldn’t breathe. A thought washed over her and began to sink in:
You’re going to die.

             
Across the room, the male ran his tongue lazily across his teeth, licking away the crimson liquid that covered them, running across two unusually large and pointy canines. This time, Caroline did faint – her eyes rolled up into the back of her head and she collapsed to the floor.

             
The female approached her and bent down, but the male grabbed her arm, pulling her roughly up.

             
“There’s no time,” he hissed. “Listen.”

             
Her ears perked, and she heard quickly approaching sirens. The screams earlier must have disturbed some of the neighbors.

             
“There will be time, Anya,” he continued. “Once the Master has won, there will be plenty of time.”

             
“But I’m hungry, Gideon,” she whined. He smiled viciously at her.

             
“Don’t be greedy, love. Save this one for later.”

             
Giving him her own arctic grin, she grabbed his face and ran her tongue over his chin and lips, licking away the blood. She stared into his eyes.

             
“Promise?”

             
“Of course, my love.”

             
She looked down at the unconscious girl at her feet and reluctantly backed away, following her companion back into the kitchen. As two squad cars pulled up in front of the building, the two of them climbed out the window onto the fire escape, taking it up to the roof of the building, where they disappeared into the night, long gone by the time the police finally got to the scene of their very bloody handiwork.