Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (2 page)

She stumbled up to the bar and shoved her way
past several people who slurred at her in protest to ask the
bartender if she had seen Zoey, but the bartender couldn’t help.
Zoey hadn’t even been the one going up to get the drinks. That had
been Peg, and somehow she’d been so absorbed in herself that she
hadn’t even realized Zoey was no longer around asking for more.

Peg turned back to Angie, who had lazily
followed her up to the bar. Benny was close behind her, but Peg was
pretty sure that had less to do with concern for the situation and
more because he thought it was about time to try getting into Peg’s
pants.

“Help me find her,” Peg said. Every time she
thought back to the memory she could clearly hear the note of panic
in her own voice.

“Just relax,” Angie said. “I’m sure she’s
around here.” Her own tone of voice told Peg that she believed what
she said, but she seemed disturbed by the way Peg was acting. Peg
tried to tell herself that Angie was right, that there was
absolutely nothing to worry about. This was a busy night in a
popular bar. It wasn’t like misplacing your friends was an uncommon
thing.

But Angie’s tone changed in the next few
minutes. Even Benny began to understand that something was wrong.
Peg tried calling Zoey’s cell phone only to have it go directly to
voicemail. They searched everywhere in the bar. They checked on the
outside deck. They even looked out back by the garbage dumpsters to
see if maybe she was out there puking. She wasn’t there. No one had
seen her. No one could remember her going anywhere. At first all
those they asked got annoyed at the three increasingly frantic
people running around the bar with the seeming intent on harming
their pleasant evening. After half an hour people began to truly
understand that something bad was happening and this wasn’t just an
overreaction.

After an hour the police were called, but it
wasn’t until the next day that any cop started to take this
seriously. Even then, accusations were made that she had run off by
herself, since Peg had already developed the reputation as being a
bit on the wild side and was already known by the police. They
simply assumed Zoey was taking a page out of her big sister’s book
and taking a few days away. And she was nineteen, after all, so she
was allowed to do that if she wanted.

Her phone was discovered dumped at the bank
of the Sheboygan River a week later, busted up from its journey
through the water. Further up the river they found one of her
boots. If there was anything else that had gone into the river it
was never found, assumed by the authorities to have washed out into
Lake Michigan. At that point the police finally decided this was
not just a girl out defying her family and was in fact a true
missing person, a kidnapping or possibly a murder.

But all that came later, and many of those
memories got washed out in the haze of grief, anger, depression,
hatred, and recriminations that fell upon her family. The exact
history of everything that happened in the years after would be a
story in itself, and it was often one that Peg Sellnow chose not to
tell. But the night itself, that one night, was the third
moment.

The fourth moment that Peg would always
remember with absolute clarity happened eleven years later on April
24
^th
, 2013 at right around one o’clock in the afternoon.
That was the moment that Zoey Sellnow finally came back.

The name Peggy Sell
now was gone, had been for going on four years. She was Peg Uttech,
and she was just as happy to be rid of the name as she was to be
rid of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She’d also left behind her black and
red dyed hair, her old clothing style, and half a dozen other
things that she associated with that time of her life. She couldn’t
even listen to the same music anymore without becoming nauseous,
instead using country as her music of choice not because she
actually liked it but because it was safe and predictable. That was
what her life had become now. Safe, predictable, completely lacking
in surprises. If it was occasionally boring she considered that to
be a fair trade off for the thought that she would never have to go
through the kind of things again that had defined her twenties.

She even had a good-paying, secure job,
something she would never have been able to predict for herself at
twenty-three. She lived in Oconomowoc now, about an hour and a half
south of Sheboygan, where she was a hostess at the Apollo Resort.
She had to dress up every day, smile politely, lecture the new
employees on the proper way to greet the guests, all of which went
against every belief she used to have about non-conformity and
sticking it to the man, whoever the hell that was supposed to
be.

The biggest surprise, though, the one thing
she would never be able to get her younger self to believe, was
that she was a devoted wife and mother. She’d always said she never
wanted children. Even at her drunkest she would only admit to
saying she would have a kid only if it was by accident and for some
reason she couldn’t afford an abortion. But she’d had a child, and
even did it in the “right order,” getting married first and having
her son with her husband on purpose. She didn’t regret the decision
at all, but there was always a part of her that felt like she had
betrayed herself by becoming what others had always deemed
responsible. Her husband Tony, a chef and also an employee at
Apollo, had never even met her until she moved to Oconomowoc six
years ago, and even then he couldn’t believe many of the stories
(usually told without some of the more unfortunate details) she
told about the way she used to be. To most of the people around her
now she had always existed as this responsible, trustworthy adult
and no one could believe any differently.

They had a home on Lac La Belle, the sort of
thing her parents had owned but she had always believed she wanted
no part of. She’d always believed since she was a teenager that she
would become part of some sort of artist’s commune, sleeping in
hammocks or something and smoking weed all day long. Instead she
lived in a three bedroom—one more bedroom than they needed right
now but they wanted that extra room for when they decided it was
time for their family to grow. It wasn’t a question of whether or
not they would every have another baby but a question of when.
Everything about her exuded domesticity.

Tony was one of only two people in her circle
that knew she still went to see a therapist on a bi-weekly basis,
or that she attended weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and she
never talked to him about that. Peg had gotten him to agree early
on in the relationship that such things were holdovers from her
previous life, necessary but not an acceptable topic for
discussion. All of that was over, and must never come back.

The afternoon that it did come back, whether
she wanted it to or not, was sunny but slightly cool. They’d had an
overly long winter and spring was having a hard time coming, but it
was slowly arriving just the same. It was the kind of day where,
years from now when her son Brendon was old enough, she would
probably have to take him after school to some kind of sports
practice. The mere thought of that made her shake her head with a
crooked grin as she pulled into the driveway after coming home from
work. Peg Uttech, soccer mom. It was another completely improbable
transformation that she had never predicted for herself. Even her
mother, on the rare occasions where they forced themselves to talk
to each other, couldn’t believe that her only remaining child had
actually turned so unbelievably domestic. Peg knew that there was
an unspoken insult in there, the implication that Peg should have
been in jail somewhere or in some run-down apartment somewhere
doing any number of drugs. But Peg did her best to ignore it simply
because she knew there was some level of truth there. She could
have easily gone down that road. She’d even started. She turned
around and came back though, likely just in time. And now here she
was, the very picture of a modern 21st century wife. Somewhere deep
inside a suppressed version of her tried to gag at the idea, but
that part had no control over her.

Even though she finished her shift at one
today she would still have the house to herself until after three.
She paid the sitter extra to keep Brendon every day, just long
enough for her to take some time to herself before the mad family
life intruded back in. She loved who she was and what she had
become, but that brooding introverted nature that had plagued her
so much when she was younger still stuck with her, and if she
didn’t give it some time to breath every day it would come out when
she didn’t want it to. It used to be that she would take this time
to read or watch something from Netflix all by herself, but more
and more she found herself falling asleep on the couch and waking
up just in time to go get Brendan. That was another thing she had
never envisioned—she liked naps. The moody young girl inside wanted
to call her a geezer and sneer at such a waste of valuable time,
but that moody girl hadn’t understood what it meant to work an
eight hour day and then come home to work even more.

Of course, there were other ways to relax,
too. As Peg unlocked the door she remembered that she still had
some pot somewhere around here. She’d gotten rid of many of her
vices— she’d even finally managed to stop smoking after a long
struggle—but weed had been something she couldn’t get rid of
completely. Tony knew about her habit and tolerated it, as long as
she didn’t do it too often and absolutely never ever around
Brendan. Those were terms she could live with, and it had probably
been more than a month since the last time. She’d been a good girl.
She figured she’d earned it.

All thoughts of a relaxing bowl, however,
vanished as soon as she opened the door. She stopped before
entering, knowing something was wrong, but at first she couldn’t
say what. Then she caught it and sniffed. There was a smell in the
air, faint but unpleasant. She had a friend who’d once had a less
than pleasant adventure with a possum in her attic, and when she’d
gone to shoot the thing with a BB gun it had fallen down a crack
into the walls and died. It had taken her days to get the thing out
and it had infected the house with the most horrid rotting odor
that had managed to hang around for weeks before they’d finally had
to simply rip the wall open and clean it from the inside out. The
idea that something might have died in the walls immediately put
Peg on edge, but she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. There
could be any number of things that might be causing that smell, and
hopefully most of them would be easy to clean up.

Before she could do that, though, she had to
figure out what the odor was and where it was coming from. Inside
the back door she stood and sniffed the kitchen, but it didn’t seem
to be coming from in here. The smell was vaguely like shit,
however. That much she could figure out. Immediately she went to
the bathroom, but it actually seemed weaker there. She came out
again, slowly moving through the short hall into the dining and
living room area. Now it was getting stronger. She curled her nose.
Maybe it was some kind of sewer leak in the basement. She went to
the door in the living room and sniffed at the crack. Yeah, that
seemed right. She cursed. That was just great. She and Tony had
done well for themselves since they’d been married, but not so well
that fixing some kind of major sewage problem wouldn’t hurt.

Taking a deep breath, she opened the door to
the basement and immediately had to turn away. The smell was
absolutely foul, far worse than she had realized just by walking in
the back door. Now that it could fully assault her nose she
realized that it wasn’t just shit, either. There were other
stenches mixed in with it. She thought she detected the nasty reek
of body odor, although at a level far worse than anything she had
whiffed before in her life. But even stronger than that was the
unmistakable stench of decay, like someone had left several pounds
of hamburger to sit for days in the summer sun. Again she thought
back to her friend’s unfortunate story of the possum, but although
Peg hadn’t had the misfortune to smell that one firsthand she had a
feeling that this was worse. It was as though someone had rolled
around in the water from an overflowed toilet and then crawled into
their basement to die.

Peg stopped at that thought. The tinge of
body odor was unmistakable. Maybe this wasn’t from
some
thing
. This smell could very easily have come from
some
one
. The house was old enough that it didn’t just have
this one entrance to the basement. There was a door in the ground
out in the backyard, an old rusty metal one that Tony kept saying
he wanted to replace. They kept it padlocked shut, but it wasn’t
outside the realm of possibility that someone could have gotten it
off and come on in. It was possible that Peg was not alone in the
house right now.

Quietly so as not to tip off anyone that
might be down there, Peg went back to the kitchen and selected the
largest knife they had from the block on the counter. She’d taken a
few self-defense classes over the years but hadn’t retained much,
despite the nagging knowledge that whoever had taken her sister
would have had a harder time if Zoey had known something about
defending herself. But Peg hadn’t truly wanted to learn. The
self-destructive part of her would have been almost happy if
someone had popped out of the shadows of an alley some night and
killed her. It had taken years of therapy to convince herself even
partly that she didn’t deserve that. So all she had to protect
herself now were common household items, but even that was better
than going down there unarmed. That death wish she’d once had was
gone now. Mostly.