Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels
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Authors: D.J. Goodman
Tags: #Vampires, #supernatural horror, #Kidnapping, #dark horror, #supernatural thriller, #psychological horror, #Cults, #Alcoholics, #Horror, #occult horror
Derek J. Goodman
A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK
Published at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-68261-095-4
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-096-1
BLOOD HARVEST
Two Vampire Novels
© 2015 by D.J. Goodman
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Christian Bentulan
This book is a work of fiction. People,
places, events, and situations are the product of the author's
imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or
historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without
the written permission of the author and publisher.
Permuted Press
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Franklin, TN 37067
Part One: Planted All In A Row
FRUIT
Book I
Part
One:
Ripe on the Vine
Chapter One
Until the day she
died, there would be four moments in Peggy Sellnow’s life that she
would remember with absolute clarity. The first two were the
obvious ones, the ones she would mention if anyone ever asked her
the question and she didn‘t want them to have any deeper insight
into her character. She would say the day of her wedding and the
moment her son had been born. Those moments had been important,
special, but for different reasons than everyone assumed. For all
her friends times like that were what their entire lives had been
leading up to, the defining points of their existence. Peg didn‘t
see anything wrong with that, and she certainly didn’t judge that
their lives were defined by everyday domesticity. Indeed, she often
wished it could be the same for her. But it was not.
The third moment had actually happened first,
eleven years earlier when she had been twenty-three and, like most
twenty-somethings, absolutely convinced on some instinctual level
that she was better than her elders, that there was something
unique about the times that had created her to make her generation
superior in every way and she had some secret knowledge that could
finally fix the entire world for the better as soon as she finally
figured out how to unlock it. On the night of June 23, 2002,
however, she was given the first hint that such a way of thinking
was deeply flawed and she did not in fact have all the answers. She
had none, in fact. No one had them. Everyone was clueless, floating
through life with zero direction while they mistakenly believed
they were in control. That was the night her sister had
vanished.
Peg had loved her sister Zoey, but she had
never really understood how much until the days following the
disappearance. Before that Zoey had just been this strangely
beautiful and fluttery creature. She had a tattoo of butterfly
wings on her back, and that was how Peg had come to consider her in
the intervening years, as a thing of beauty but ultimately almost
insubstantial, something that blew away too easily on the wind. Peg
could barely even remember anything about her sister other than
that. There were so many times in the following years that Peg
would go through Zoey’s things hoping for some further clue about
what her sister had been like. Insights were hard to come by,
usually. At times, usually when she was drunk or stoned, Peg
thought that maybe some sort of cosmic force didn’t even want her
to remember. Zoey had become nothing more than a vague ghost in the
shadows as though that was all fate had ever intended her to
be.
On that night everything up until the moment
was hazy, mostly because she had already been well on her way to
drunk. Clarity came later, starting at the exact point where she
began to understand that something was wrong. Before then all she
had cared about was that she had someone to do shots with,
preferably someone she knew. That wasn’t so hard considering how
well she was known in the Sheboygan bar scene. She was even mostly
liked, which was quite the feat considering how catty some women
could get once they were drowning in vodka and whisky. Zoey, on the
other hand, was rather new to the way of life. She wasn’t even
supposed to be there with Peg, considering she was two years too
young to legally drink. Peg had been the one to hook her little
sister up with a fake ID, a detail that caused no end of trouble in
the years of official investigation that followed that night.
The last time Peg saw Zoey was just before
midnight. She remembered that detail because several of the
televisions playing in the bar, all but ignored by the patrons and
drowned out by the blaring sounds of Marilyn Manson from the
jukebox, were showing
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. Channel 9.
Peg knew because she checked the TV listings later and it became
another detail permanently burned into her head. It was one of the
episodes from season 4, and near the end of the episode Buffy and
Riley had been fighting. After slamming a drink with Peg and
several other women at the bar, Zoey had looked up at the screen,
shook her head in a vaguely woozy way, and then said, “God, I’m so
glad she finally dumped him. Spike’s much hotter.”
There were so many times that Peg wished
their last words to each other were something more profound.
Instead the words Peg left for history were, “Fuck yeah. James
Marsters can do me any time.”
Then Peg turned to talk to Angie Collett next
to her, who was telling her about the latest girl Ronny Schimmel
had tricked into his bed and knocked up. The drinks kept coming.
The music kept playing. The drama kept unfolding. But unknown to
Peg sometime in the next half hour her entire world stopped
spinning.
Sometimes in the later years Peg would try to
convince herself that she wasn’t a horrible person, but it never
worked. A decent person wouldn’t just fail to notice that her
younger sister had vanished for more than half an hour. Such a
person would keep an eye out, notice if there was trouble, make
sure that the baby of the family didn’t just wander off aimlessly
into a crowd of drunken assholes that might want to do who knew
what to such a pretty and ethereal creature. Peg often wracked her
brain for something she had lost among the alcohol-dimmed memories,
just a vision of Zoey’s jet-black hair done up in its two tiny
knots high up on the back of her head as they bobbed through the
crowd, or the sound of her high-pitched squeak of a laugh filtering
through the blaring nu-metal.
But Peg could remember nothing of the sort.
At the time, she hadn’t wanted to, either. She’d been vaguely
annoyed that her kid sister had tagged along in the first place.
For all the beautiful ghost images that came to Peg’s mind later
when she remembered her sister, none of those had actually stuck
with Peg when Zoey was still there. Zoey had been a vague annoyance
at best and a raging nuisance at worst. And Peg wanted to bleach
her mind from ever remembering her sister that way again.
The fabled moment of absolute clarity started
in mid-sentence. It was strange how memories worked, but whenever
Peg thought back it was as though the recollection were the volume
on a television, starting at mute and then slowing being dialed up.
She didn’t remember what was happening five minutes beforehand. At
around four minutes before she could start to remember the general
flow of the conversations she had. At three the sensations she
could remember were more than just sounds but specific sights, like
the way a woman slightly too old for that night’s crowd writhed to
the music by herself in the corner, her arms and legs moving to the
beat in a way very reminiscent of a stiff marionette. At two
minutes exact smells came to her, like the body odor of the guy
trying and failing to drunkenly hit on her or the smell of
peppermint liqueur her friend was drinking and the harsh and
lingering odor of the cigarette smoke cloud that hung over the bar.
One minute, and she knew the song that was playing—Linkin Park’s
“In the End.” The drunk guy, a man named Benny Polaski who she
would finally sleep with two weeks later and would go on to father
her first abortion, was saying something incoherent but deeply
negative about Bush Junior. Angie was on her other side slumped
against the wall next to the dart board, and she was droning on
about the psycho bitches that had been camped out in the bathroom
doing God-knew-what in the stalls. Then it came to her, everything
suddenly in sharp never-fading detail permanently burned into her
mind as the realization suddenly arrived.
Angie. “…what kind of shit they might be
snorting…”
Benny. “…right-wing wingnut. I mean,
seriously, this man is going to drive us into…”
And finally, Peg herself spoke up. “Wait.
Where’s Zoey?”
Benny kept droning. Apparently he didn’t even
hear her over the music, or else he was too drunk to care that she
wasn’t listening. Angie’s rant slurred to a halt, though, and she
said something Peg couldn’t hear. Peg had to lean her ear close to
Angie’s mouth before she could understand. “Don’t know. Thought she
went to the bathroom.”
For a moment Peg’s alcohol-drenched brain
thought that made sense and the sudden urgent dread that had come
over her started to subside. Then she realized how long it had been
since she’d seen Zoey, and that she’d gone to the bathroom with
Angie in the mean time. There’d been no sign of her anywhere in
there.
Peg didn’t believe in intuition or psychic
forces. She was certain now that the dread she felt at that moment
was purely a product of her buzz and had nothing to do with a
deeper understanding that something had truly gone wrong.
Nonetheless, she started to feel a panic as she looked around the
bar and failed to see her little sister anywhere among the
crowd.