Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (27 page)

The intimate closeness in our silence. Sitting with our fingers so tight around each other’s you couldn’t tell where your hand stopped and mine started. No longer my Moon Girl -
my
girl - like I was yours. I tried not to think about the look in your peepers - cold but defeated - as you’d turned away from me on your doorstep that last time.

I tried so hard not to think about that last time, until my brain near burst. And you know what?

Lying there, where the dead and dying fish waited their turn to be sold and gutted, gave me enough time for the adrenaline to build, pulse and bubble through what was left of my weak blood. To rejuvenate every bleeding inch of me. I sparked with it; I could’ve lit whole continents.

All right, so I was going to die. Probably. But I was alive again right now. And if I was about to go out a second time, then this was how I wanted to cop it: not like some wounded baby bird starving slowly. But bloody alive and kicking.

I pushed the edge of the fishy tarpaulin up and squinted out. First at a square of sharp stars and the bright moon in the deep black. Then further, at the back of Kira’s nut and the pull of her pilot’s jacket, as she steered. I felt the boat jerk, when we slowed. I couldn’t see the seabag with Susan rugged in it: Kira must’ve stashed it somewhere near her feet.

Then the metal side of a ship’s hull loomed out of the dark –
Radio Komodo
.

This was bloody well it then.

When Kira cut the engine, we bobbed closer, clanging against
Radio Komodo
.

I heard the slither of a rope thrown over the side. Then I ducked down, as Kira stepped back through the boat and –
splash
– that must be the anchor. I risked another gander.

Kira’s wiry form was half-way up the rope-ladder, with your cousin in the seabag gripped over her shoulder; if they pulled up the ladder after them, I’d be stuck impotently kicking my heels in the trawler, like a right berk.

Bugger
.

I forced myself to hold back and not go charging up there for a good two minutes at least. It felt like I’d lived another bloody century in that short span. But the ladder was still just hanging there.

I struggled out from under the tarpaulin, clambering along the lurching trawler in the cutting wind.

I assessed the ladder suspiciously, as if it was a rattlesnake.

I took a deep breath and started to climb. The rough rope dug into my shredded palms, as it swung and twisted, like a bleeding fairground ride.

When I reached the deck, I hung low enough to suss out if I was likely to have my head blown off; jammie bugger that I was, no one was on guard. I guess they didn’t imagine anyone would try and board a radio pirate station manned by Blood Lifers, secret labs or not.

Blood Lifers are arrogant wankers like that.

I crouched, scuttling crab-like along the deck, even though there were no windows to avoid. We don’t like suntans, remember? I noticed there was only one small lifeboat, which was good news: it hinted there weren’t hordes of Blood Lifers aboard. If there had been, I’d have been snookered. There were probably only a couple of them working shifts. And Silverman, of course: I mustn’t forget that scumbag.

There were two routes down - one aft and one stern - whichever the hell was which. Russian roulette. My type of odds. I chose one, edging down the steel steps, and there she was: Susan was slumped to the side of an empty cabin.

Was that relief surging through me? Making me giddy as a bloody teenager? I had to get a grip on these new emotions. They were damaging my Blood Lifer image.

Susan was untied and out of the seabag at least. She was still, however, lost somewhere in fairyland. After a quick examination, I couldn’t hold back a sigh, when I realised there were no fang marks on her throat, like the world’s most lethal love bite. They hadn’t had time to heal. I hoped.

I’d wager you reckon all I cared about was my bloody plan?

Clap-trap
.

That suckling conscience…or Soul…or whatever the hell it is, which boots me in the goolies when I screw up,
that’s
what was relieved that for once in either life I hadn’t gambled and lost. What made it burn deeper, was this time it’d been
your
cousin, who’d been the stake.

So I stopped everything and took Susan out of there. I was done playing with her, like she was no more than an object, just as Kira had used her.

What made Advance any different to Ruby’s wanker of a father and husband?

I took Susan gently in my arms, carrying her up the steps. There was still no one on the deck, so I ducked to the lifeboat and hid Susan in the bottom of it. I struggled to release the boat down onto the heaving waves, listening for the soft
splash
as it landed. If I ever got out of here, I’d row Susan safely to the coast - as long as I wasn’t burned like a candle by the sun before I got there.

If I didn’t escape from here..?

I watched the lifeboat, as it started to float away, carried on the currents. Susan would simply have to take her chances, like the rest of us.

Now it was time to see what Aralt and Silverman had been researching in their fascist experiments. Why they’d been fighting to change our natural place in the world - a lesson Ruby had beaten into me well enough over the years - by splitting our venom. Wasn’t that the venom’s very genius? Its predator’s perfection: paralyse the victim so they couldn’t escape and then explode the heart to hide the kill?

I ducked down the steps again, this time noticing the shadowed stairs, which led deeper into the hold.

See this is how I figure it, folks bury their nasties: underground, basements or holds… It’s the same with your subconscious. You stuff down everything dark, as deep as it’ll go. Those nightmares, which you can’t face when you’re awake? You dream them, rather than admit their reality. Of course that doesn’t make them any less real, but everyone likes to pretend. For First Lifers, that’s what the night’s for.

So I reckoned whatever nasties Silverman had set up would be hidden in the hold.

As I stole towards the stairs, I heard Kira and Silverman, deep in conversation, coming down the passageway. I threw myself down the stairs. It was shadowy, reeking of stringent chemicals and something else: First Lifers and
blood
…

When my senses adjusted into night vision, I stumbled back, knocking over a bubbling flask on a long worktop, which instantly burnt through the wood in furious spits.

Christ in heaven
,
what was this
..?

Vats of virulent chemicals lined the walls. And between them?

Now this is the part, which I’ve always skirted over (even to myself), because I’m a soft git sometimes and I hide from the nasties of this world, the same as anyone.

And you?

You only got the candy floss version. I never wanted you to know what Blood Lifers are capable of imagining…planning…doing…

You love me. Yet if I’d put the same image in your mind as I had, then maybe you wouldn’t have been able to see past it. Or see me. Just like now you can’t, lost in your long-ago nightmares. I’m still haunted and I’m a Blood Lifer. Maybe I should’ve trusted you. But I couldn’t risk it.

So I’m telling you now, when I know it’s too late to make a difference either way. At least, however, the truth of it will be out, rather than eating me from the inside.

Naked First Lifers lined the walls of the hold. They were both male and female but they were so shrunken, paled to ghosts, that it didn’t seem to matter which they were anymore. Feeding tubes looped them into place, in and out of their bodies, like bloody lacing; one to keep them alive and one to drain their blood from them in dark umbilical cords, out into a central vat. That was the smell: overpowering fresh blood. It made my body tremble with its call. The worst of it? They weren’t dead or even dying, like they should’ve been if they’d been bitten. Yet they weren’t alive either. Not fully.

I stumbled closer, waving my hands in front of each of them in turn, in increasing agitation. I punched this one bloke hard in the gut, but there was no response. It was like they were all in a sodding coma.

Repulsed, I collapsed back away from them.

When my hand touched the worktop, I felt the sharp prick of a needle. Twisting round, I studied a rank of syringes, which were filled with this thick, transparent stuff: like saliva.
Evidence
. I nicked one, pocketing it.

That’s when I finally got it: why Aralt was so hooked on dividing our venom.

Our pure venom - here in these neat little syringes - could be used for its various properties. The part that paralysed had been injected into these poor sods. I’d wager there was also one somewhere for pure death. And who knew how Aralt was planning to use that? I shuddered at the thought.

To Aralt, Blood Lifers weren’t perfectly evolved. Instead, our double whammy of paralysis and death was a flaw to be fixed.

Aralt’s Blood Life hadn’t unleashed a connection to the earth and nature, red in tooth and nail, rather the scientist of death, which he’d been in First Life. He was set on improving what his election had granted him. The same as the First Lifers racing to lunar victory.

Aralt planned to subjugate the world.

I forced myself not to shiver, as I ran my fingers down a feeding tube, which was gushing warm nutrients and water into one First Lifer’s gut. Another tube glugged the waste away, as blood was sucked in a dark red line from jugular and wrists. Dead cold efficiency. No need for hunting or the kill. When this method was perfected and rolled out, we could feed by simply strolling to the larder. Advance would hold the patent to the distilled venom, making Aralt…anything he bleeding wanted.

I trailed my fingers lightly over the First Lifer’s lips. I could feel the weak flutter of breath.

It’d been a woman once, although hard to tell when she’d been shaved bald, and her dugs were shrivelled and painful to look at. She was the same age as you, I reckoned. I wondered if she had a bloke desperately searching for her: his bird, the one who held him in the quiet and laughed at the same moments in the dark of the flicks.

This was what they’d been planning to reduce Susan to, purely because I’d dared to love you.

All on me
.

Christ this conscience business was enough to make a man bloody cry.

And the worst of it? The image of a silent, deserted world, with no life but us Blood Lifers - us select few - who were deemed worthy to wander the streets. Streets that were now ours alone, whilst the lonely sun baked a world without humanity because First Lifers only existed in our harvested factories.

Disgust isn’t the word, love.

How I figure it, First Lifers and Blood Lifers are two sides of the same coin, even though you don’t know it. One can’t exist without the other. Dark to the light.

I love you, how many times have I said that? Yet how I felt about this wasn’t about that. Or even about you.

I loved (and realised I’d always loved, even in those crazy, wild days with Ruby), your First Lifer world: Billy Fury, my leather jacket, the Triton on a hard, fast road, Florence’s piazzas, as evening sets over Duomo’s terracotta dome, the aroma of spices, “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet” and the exploding joy of Carnaby Street.

All that dead and silent, so we could feast in comfort? That creativity, spirit and life vanished, and in its place zombies with tubes and blood on tap, like sodding beer? A Blood Lifer World imagined and dictated by Aralt?

This new vision wasn’t progress. Eden. The next step. It wasn’t buggering evolution.

It was the end of the world for both our species.

‘Sorry,’ I murmured, not knowing as I said it, if these shells could even hear me (but uncontrollably feeling the need to say it anyway), as I smashed the flasks and booted at the vats until they shattered and the chemicals bubbled out.

I dodged back into the doorway. The First Lifers didn’t even flinch, as their feet melted to the bone. But I reckoned they could still feel the pain under the paralysis. They just couldn’t get out the screams.

There’s always something worse than dying, and there’s always someone in First or Blood Life, who’ll find a way to inflict it.

When I flicked my lighter, the flame jumped. For a moment, I was mesmerised. Then I bent down and lit the boiling flood.

A sheet of fire roared across the hold. It climbed the walls, up the tubes and flamed the First Lifers’ motionless bodies, like burning lollipops.

Still the humans didn’t utter a bloody sound, as I smelt their crackling skin and that - right there - is the worst of it. When I’d whimper in the night and you’d nudge me awake, hugging me closer into your warm shoulder,
that’s
the recurring dream, which I’d never repeat to you. Because it wasn’t a dream. It was too real, and I deserved every sweating, restless night and will do, until the day of my second death.

We all have our ghosts.

When I gagged and backed up the stairs, there he was - Silverman himself. He was leonine in his lab coat, which gave him an austere air of false authority.