Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (19 page)

Even though she knew the thought wasn’t doing
her any favors, Peg had to wonder if anyone had ever gone through
this door and come back out again.

The inside of the house was in even worse
shape than the outside. Maybe it was Peg’s imagination, but she
thought she could hear the walls creaking under the sagging roof,
the sound of one side of the house desperately trying to match the
other. The front room would have been a living room at some point,
although the only thing living in it now were a couple of seagulls
that took wing through the gaping holes in the roof when they came
in. The carpet, which once might have been shag, was now nothing
more than a forest of mildew, fungus, and a few stunted plants that
had somehow managed to eek out something resembling life among the
ruins. Although she hadn’t been able to see it from the outside,
Peg now understood why the roof must have collapsed: it was because
part of the floor itself had collapsed along with it. Much of the
wreckage of the roof hung precariously over the hole in the floor.
Peg couldn’t see too far down the hole from her angle, but judging
from the echo of the birds’ flapping wings she thought it might go
down quite a ways. A sinkhole, she realized. Her theories about
limestone caves would appear to be at least partially right.

Rather than heading to the sinkhole the two
creatures steered her cage in the opposite direction toward the
kitchen. The kitchen looked like it had fared somewhat better than
the living room, if only because it was farther from the open
elements. There was another door here, and this one at least
closed. The creature in the front opened the door, assaulting Peg’s
nostrils with an awfully familiar smell. Mildew, blood, body odor,
human shit. Almost a mirror match of the odor from her own basement
only a day earlier.

The wooden stairs groaned beneath them as
they went down. The two creatures had to hold the cage at an angle,
causing Peg to slide up against the bars to light up her naked skin
with searing pain. She repressed the urge to cry out and instead
tried to concentrate on the physical agony, letting it overtake her
fear and anger and humiliation. It was no different than the razor.
All the negative emotions racing through her mind burning away,
leaving only the will and determination to escape, to save herself
and her sister, to be able to see her son again.

At the bottom of the stairs the basement was
faintly illuminated by the light coming from the floor above. The
far side of the basement was missing most of its wall where the
concrete had fallen into the earth, but otherwise there was nothing
of particular interest. Peg was confused at first, trying to figure
out where they’d put Zoey, before she realized they weren’t
finished descending yet. An incredibly makeshift and rickety
stairway had been built at the edge of the sinkhole and led even
farther down into the earth. As they brought her to the edge the
stench became even worse. She also thought she could hear noises,
inhuman screeches or occasional howls and whimpers.

Don’t take me down there
, she thought.
Please. I don’t want to understand what’s going on anymore.
Nothing down there could possibly be sane
.

Your sister’s down there
, her inner
voice said.
You know as well as I do that you’re not leaving
here unless she’s with you
.

Once again, she really hated how right that
voice always had to be. She grabbed a hold of one of the bars and
let the pain overwhelm the panic.

At several points during the descent Peg was
certain they were going to drop her. Although she couldn’t see
beneath them she could see the stairs that were higher up as they
went, and she realized that in several places the steps had given
away beneath someone in the past. The two creatures had to be very
careful with their footing, and once or twice they had stopped and
gone back up several steps while the one on the lower side looked
down behind it to make sure the wood would hold it. Peg tried to
see down into the sinkhole, but for a while she couldn’t see a
bottom. When they finally reached it she saw at least one broken
body among the debris from the roof high overhead. It looked like
the long-decomposed body was missing the back of its skull.

The floor at the bottom of the sinkhole was
rough-hewn rock, the product of hundreds or thousands of years of
water eroding away the limestone. A couple of passages led off from
the center, all of them the work of nature rather than human hands.
Water dripped down the walls in several places, leading Peg to
wonder just how much more natural erosion it would take before the
nearby Lake Winnebago would break through the stone and drown
everything down here. A few small stalactites could be seen down
one of the passages, but the creatures took her to a different one.
Whereas the other cave might have allowed them to go through
standing up this one was low enough that they had to get on their
knees and push the cage through on the ground.

All the while the stink became worse. Peg
would have thrown up, but it suddenly occurred to her that she
hadn’t actually had anything to eat all day. Nor had she gone to
the bathroom. She didn’t expect either of these two to let her out
long enough to use a toilet.

After a minute the cave widened into a
cavern, this one with clear marks on the soft stone walls that let
her know there was nothing natural about this place. The general
cacophony she’d first heard at the top of the sinkhole was
deafening at first, but as the two creatures picked up her cage
again the noise vanished into a disturbing hush. There was no light
to speak of down here, not even torches or fire or lanterns, but
Peg’s eyes adjusted to the light surprisingly quickly. She almost
wished they hadn’t.

The room was long, maybe half the length of a
football field from what she could see, with a width of maybe
twenty to thirty feet in places and about ten feet high. There was
a central aisle that ran down the middle leading to a door at the
far end that looked like it had the same drunk-ass carpenter as the
stairs, but the sight that really stopped her heart were the cages.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected. She hadn’t really thought
she and Zoey would be alone, but this was beyond belief. Cages
filled the entire room on both sides of the aisle. Just at a rough
guess she figured there had to be well over a hundred.

And each and every one held a person. Men and
woman, or in many cases people young enough to more accurately be
called boys and girls. Many were white, but at a glance Peg could
see that pretty much all ethnicities were represented at some
point. All of them locked away, most of them covered in years of
filth. And as far as Peg could see, each and every one had that
same mouth full of ragged fangs as Zoey.

Zoey’s words came back to her. Animals eat
plants, humans eat animals, vampires eat humans. The only question
was what came after.

Peg finally truly understood what this place
was. It was a farm. These vampires were the cattle. And even though
she wasn’t a vampire, Peg was now cattle too.

The hush throughout
the room continued as the two creatures set Peg’s cage down at the
end of the line and slid it into place so it was flush against the
next. Then the sounds slowly began again, a few sobs here or there,
a wail from somewhere far down the line. One person across the
aisle, a young man who looked to be perpetually sixteen, started
jabbering to himself and rocking in his cage. It took Peg a moment
of straining her ears to recognize his words as something from
Shakespeare. She couldn’t recall exactly what it was from, but he
kept repeating the same five or six lines over and over like a
prayer against the monsters in the darkness.

The two creatures that had brought her here
immediately took off down the aisle. There were multiple other
cages now blocking her view of the door at the end, but she could
hear it open and shut as they went beyond. Peg had seen a couple
more creatures like them walking around at the far end, but she
hadn’t been able to see what they were doing. Guards, most
likely.

She heard something sniffing just a few feet
away. Peg turned with a start, bumping her head against the top of
her cage in the process, to see someone in the next cage over
staring at her intently. The man had probably been in his
mid-twenties when he’d been turned. Despite the muck smeared in his
long hair Peg thought it might be blond, or possibly red. He was
just as naked as everyone else and made no effort to cover up his
penis, nor the fact that it was erect. He looked like she’d caught
him in the process of masturbating.

The man saw where her gaze pointed and let go
of himself. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s not like we have privacy down
here. And when you’re in a cage twenty-four seven it’s not like
there’s much else to do to keep yourself occupied.”

“Um, sure,” Peg said. Considering there was a
pile of his own feces in the corner of his cage she supposed there
were a lot more disgusting things to catch him doing other than
playing with himself. Even when he stopped touching himself her
eyes stayed at his lower half, although it wasn’t his crotch that
interested her. His legs had been chopped off at the knees.
Although it looked like it had been done long ago the scar tissue
looked twisted and unhealed.

“This is the point where you’re going to want
some kind of explanation about what’s going on, I suppose,” he
said.

“You’re all vampires,” Peg said. “And this is
some place where you’re treated as livestock.”

“Hey, pretty good,” the man said. “You’ve
already figured out much more than the others usually do.”

“Others?” Peg asked.

“The fresh fish,” the man said. He sniffed in
her general direction again. “Although you’re not as fresh as
most.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

The man stared at her for several seconds. It
was impossible for Peg to make sense of his expression. There was a
distinct note of craziness to his wide-eyed stare, although
depending on how long he had been down here Peg supposed that was
understandable.

“Nothing,” the man finally said. “Not my
place to tell you. You’ll figure it out really soon, I’m
betting.”

“Right,” Peg said, doing her best to pretend
that she understood.

“I’m Pig, by the way,” he said.

“Pig? What the fuck kind of parent would name
you that?”

“None. Not the name I was born with. It’s the
one I picked for myself. I figured it was much more appropriate,
given the circumstances. Would you like me to rename you, too?”

Peg didn’t answer, mostly because she didn’t
want to imagine what her new name down here might be. Instead she
focused her attention across the aisle at the other cages, but she
didn’t see Zoey in any of them. “Where is she?”

“Who?”

“My sister. The one they brought down right
before me.”

“Oh, her. Your sister, huh? That explains why
you seem to know a little bit. And how you ended up the way you
are, I’m guessing.”

She almost asked what he was talking about,
but she didn’t really expect a straight answer. “You didn’t answer
my question,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. They put her back where’s she
supposed to be.”

“Which is where?”

Pig pointed down the aisle toward the door.
“Near the end. Back in the right order.”

“And how do they determine the right
order?”

“Based on how long you’ve been here,” Pig
said. “You’re new. So you’re at the end. Once someone is turned
into a vampire they slowly get moved down the line.”

“Why?”

“Because the change into a vampire isn’t
quick. You notice some differences right away. But some things take
time. The fangs. And most importantly, the immortality.”

“So, vampires really are immortal?” She said
this as she looked out at the other cages around her. Peg could
easily imagine a cave-in collapsing the tunnel they’d come through.
They could be trapped in here for years, decades, who knew how
long, and there would be no way out and no way to die. Or at least
that was what would happen to everyone else. Peg hadn’t been turned
yet. If they were trapped she would just starve to death.

“There’s very little that can kill a vampire
who has ripened.”

“Ripened,” Peg said, turning back to Pig.
“Zoey kept saying that over and over. What does it mean?”

“The point of no return. The moment where you
have been a vampire long enough that the only thing that can kill
you is the heart. And once you’re ripe, you get picked.” He mimed
the motion of picking some invisible low hanging fruit outside his
cage, then pretended to eat it. His face screwed up in disgust and
he spit the nonexistent fruit out. “Uck. Got a worm.”

Peg stared at him. His explanation at least
made a little more sense than anything Zoey had said, but that
didn’t mean she really understood yet. “How do you even know all
that?”

“Been down here a long time, fishy. Hey, how
about that? Wanna be called Fishy?”

“You can’t have been down here that long,”
Peg said. “You’re in the cage at the end.”

“Ha!” he barked. “That’s only because they
don’t know what to do with me anymore. I’m no good for picking, and
they can’t use me as one of the minions. They don’t even bother to
feed me anymore. Not even one of those scrawny stray cats they’ve
been using lately! I’m telling ya, I can’t tell you how much I
would kill to have a nice raccoon to drink dry right about
now.”

Peg again tried to look down the aisle for
any sign of Zoey. She would much rather be coming up with some kind
of plan than listen to this loony, but despite himself he was
giving her a few tidbits that might be important. “Why won’t they
pick you?”