Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (25 page)

There was no way this could be happening. It
went against everything he had been told was possible. There was
never an escape. He was supposed to stay here always. He wasn’t
sure if he even remembered how to stand up after being scrunched in
the tiny cage for so long. What was he even supposed to do in this
situation?

I was a human once
, he thought.
I
had hopes. I had dreams. I had a name. Didn’t I
?

He moved slowly even as others ran down the
aisle for the narrow passage that would eventually lead back to the
surface. His brain still couldn’t fathom the idea that he might be
free. It was so much easier to believe that this was some cruel
trick on the part of the guards, that they would round up the
escapees any second now and prove that this was all just one more
way to break down their spirits, to remind them all that they were
nothing more than cattle. But the two girls continued opening the
cages unimpeded, and half-mad young men and women went screaming
for the exit.

He set his hand on the rough stone, careful
to keep it from being trodden on by running feet. Then his other
hand, then his knees. With his every muscle screaming at the
unfamiliar strain he stood up, then looked down at his naked body.
This was what it looked like to be something sentient rather than
livestock. This was what it was like to be human again.

Something in his brain tried to remind him
that he was wrong, that he was forgetting one relevant detail, but
he no longer felt the need to dwell on it. He had to leave. There
was still a chance of the guards coming back before everyone could
escape.

He ran the short way down the aisle, or at
least tried to. He stumbled several times both because of the
unevenness of the floor on his bare feet and fierce cramps in his
calf muscles. He tried to scream at the pain but it morphed before
it was out of his mouth into an inarticulate sound of joy. The pain
made this all feel real. He was actually leaving.

He had to duck down and almost crawl through
the exit at the end of the aisle. Farther ahead and behind him he
could hear others making similar noises, sometimes whooping at
their freedom, occasionally even crying. The tunnels of the cave
here twisted in natural, uneven formations, all the while growing
brighter and brighter until…

He heard screams ahead but ignored them. It
wasn’t until he finally made it to the source of the light that he
understood these weren’t noises of happiness at all, but real
agony. He burst out from the cave system and felt the sunlight on
his skin for the first time in far too long.

And then he too screamed at the sudden pain.
It wasn’t intense, but it was unexpected. He thought he could
soldier through it well enough, but as he stepped away from the
cave and looked around at his surroundings—he was at the bottom of
a sinkhole, with a rickety and makeshift set of stairs leading up
and out—he remembered the events of when he had first been brought
here. He’d been forced into the cage by the guards using some kind
of glamour, then they’d brought the cage down here, at which point
they had forced him to drink…

No, he suddenly realized. He was wrong
earlier. He wasn’t human after all. He never would be again, no
matter how badly he wanted to be. Now and until the moment he died,
he would be subhuman. He would be a vampire.

But the time to mourn his lost status would
have to be later. For now he had to get out of the light and find
the shadows. And he had to feed.

We smell the
lake air from miles away, just as we can smell that parts are still
frozen over even at this late date. We smell it and we feel it. We
might even be able to stick out tongues and taste it were we so
inclined, but we are not. We have other things to do. It has been a
long journey to the city at the foot of the lake, and we must rest.
Rest and eat.

We have been in this city before, once long
ago in another life when we were another people. We did not have
the abilities and senses that we do now, but we could still feel
the hint of its soul, its identity, that unique flavor that each
city has and no other city can mimic, whether it be large or small,
full of dreams or broken and defeated. That soul touch is magnified
now that we are We, and we can understand things about its depths
that we couldn’t before. It is that understanding that tells us it
is different. There has been a change. Something has been released
into this city, something once buried, planted in the ground to
grow in a hidden garden. The seeds meant for that garden have been
flung far. We could cultivate this garden, force it back into its
shape, but that is not our place. We are not here for the
garden.

We are here to understand the gardener.

*

He had a name again. His first name was Cory,
he remembered that much well enough. But nearly a year after
finally being free of the dank shit and death-smelling darkness of
the caves he still couldn’t remember a last name. He wondered
sometimes what that said about him. He did remember at least that
it was something foreign sounding, and that the translation to
English was slightly absurd. Perhaps Meat-Eater, or something like
that. So although there were desperately few people who bothered to
acknowledge him long enough to call him anything, that was the name
he went by. Cory Meat-Eater.

It was an appropriate enough title at this
exact moment. Huddled in a corner of a metal enclosure for trash
dumpsters, he had his face buried firmly in the hot yet quickly
cooling body of a rat he’d just found. His long jagged teeth ripped
the creature’s stomach apart to spray its precious life blood into
his mouth. He stopped only when he heard voices going by in the
nearby street. Cory didn’t dare make any noise or movement that
might alert someone to his location. He’d been sleeping in this
spot for the last few days, huddling during the day as the sun beat
down in the narrow space between the dumpster’s bottom and the
concrete. He was sure he’d have to abandon this spot soon—garbage
day couldn’t be too far away by now—but for now he wanted to keep
the hiding place as long as he could. It wasn’t safe—no place ever
was—but it was as close as he would likely ever come.

When the voices had blurred back into the
various noises of the city’s night Cory finished slurping the blood
from the rat and then threw its limp body in the dumpster to join
the rest he’d caught over the last few days. While Fond du Lac
might not have been a large city by most traditional meanings of
the word it was still large enough to have its own share of rats
and back alleys and any number of other details that he could use
to survive on the streets. The winter had been rough, and more than
once he had been tempted to seek out one of the city’s few homeless
shelters where he might get a warm bed, comfortable sheets, and
maybe even a change of clothes for just one night. But he hadn’t
dared risk it. For one thing, he likely wouldn’t have been able to
stay in the shelters during the day, when he actually needed to
sleep somewhere safe. For another, there was no way he would be
able to hide his teeth, and given the headlines that had been on
the front page of the Fond du Lac
Reporter
for the last
year, he didn’t want anyone to have even the slightest hint of what
he truly was. He probably would have been staked in his sleep by
some overly-superstitious do-gooder.

He listened carefully to the night before
cautiously peering up over the side of the metal enclosure. The
dumpster was on a sidewalk in a short tunnel leading from Main
Street to a parking garage behind the Retlaw Hotel. From what
little lore Cory had managed to pick up in his stay out here on the
streets this particular tunnel had once been part of a trolley or
transit system way back in the twenties or thirties. It made for a
good place to get out of the sun if he was caught out during the
day, although it generally had too much traffic to be a good hiding
place at any time other than the night. Still, he’d come to
appreciate this peculiar throwback part of downtown. He didn’t have
a home, probably never would again, but this place felt closer to
it than any other.

Although he could still hear the sounds of
traffic out on the street there were no more voices. It was too
late and too cold for anyone but the biggest drunks to be out and
about. Although Cory felt the cold deep in his bones he didn’t
shiver, even when the occasional stray wind blew through the holes
in his threadbare stolen coat. Although he could feel the
discomfort he was in no danger of freezing to death. He wasn’t yet
what the guards had once referred to as “ripe”—functionally
immortal as long as his heart wasn’t destroyed or his head ripped
from his body—but he had been a vampire long enough that sickness
and hypothermia were mere nuisances rather than death sentences.
Other people couldn’t say that. So when he heard scuffling and
whispers nearby he knew he probably wasn’t the only vampire in the
vicinity.

He cautiously crawled out of the metal
enclosure and crept hunched over, almost on all fours, back through
the tunnel in the direction of the parking ramp. Here the tunnel
opened up before it went into the ramp, with an alleyway going off
to his left and a walkway heading to the backdoors of various
businesses and the hotel to his right. The Retlaw towered over him,
among the tallest buildings in Fond du Lac, creating an odd little
shut-in alcove surrounded by buildings on three sides. It was down
that direction that he could hear the whispers, and he slinked
through the shadows toward them, mindful in case they belonged to
some of the people he would rather not associate with.

Even when he recognized the voices as
friendly he tried to keep himself hidden out of the lights lining
the walkway. It was habit, and habit and caution had been the only
things that had kept him alive for the past year. With any luck he
would even be able to sneak up on them without them realizing he
was there until he was next to them. That knack for stealth, after
all, was a skill these two had developed quite well, and it would
be nice to impress them for a change.

The two girls hunched in a pool of orange
light from a lamp halfway between the parking garage and the back
entrance of the hotel. They both had their backs to Cory, which he
at first thought was rather stupid. They should have known better
than that. But as he got closer he stopped and considered the
situation. They
did
know better than that, which could only
mean they were completely aware someone was lurking nearby in the
dark. The two of them surrounded the bloody mess of something in
the center of the light that looked like it might have recently
been a couple of crows before they had ripped them apart to suck
the juice from the birds’ insides, but as dedicated as they looked
to their meal Cory realized it was intended as a trap for anyone
that might think they were easy prey. Anyone who made an unwanted
movement toward them would find that they could move far quicker
than two scrawny teen girls should have been able to. At best the
person approaching them would have found them gone in the blink of
an eye. At worst, if the girls actually believed the intruder to be
a threat, the person coming for them would find rows of sharp teeth
in his or her throat.

Before Cory could get any closer the one on
the left, the one with darker skin, spoke. “You’re still not
exactly as stealthy as you think you are, Meateater.”

“I don’t think I’m stealthy at all,” Cory
said quietly. Although she had spoken loud and clear with no fear
that anyone might hear, Cory could still rarely make himself talk
louder than a whisper. There was a constant fear in him that
someone might find him and hurt him. The quiet was just one more
defense mechanism against the innumerable things out there that
were more fearsome than him.

“You’ve improved, though,” the other girl,
her skin pale and her hair golden, said while still not bothering
to look in his direction. “We didn’t realize you were there until
about thirty seconds ago.” She reached down into the bloody mess of
bones and feather, grabbed a mass of entrails, and brought them to
her mouth to slurp.

“I did. I detected him at least two minutes
ago,” the first said.

“Bullshit you did.” She finally turned around
to look at him. “Are you hungry, Meateater? We’ve already got most
of the juicy bits, but there’s still a little worth sucking
on.”

Cory hesitated only for a few seconds before
crawling out of the shadows and joining them. He was never certain
exactly how much to trust either of them, but they had shown him
time and again that they at least weren’t his enemy. And they had
started on that first day by going down the line of cages and
releasing him right along with all the others. He knew they had
plenty of reasons to regret helping some of the others escape from
the cells deep below the surface, but he was determined not to give
them a reason to regret helping him.

Cory didn’t have friends. That very concept
was leftover from a time when he’d been something other than
subhuman. But if he did then FancyDancer here would have been
it.

He took a position in the light across from
them, even though it would have been easier and quicker to go
between them to get at the meal. One of the first things he had
learned in interacting with them was that they didn’t respond well
to being separate for long, even if that separation was caused just
by someone standing between them. They acted like it physically
hurt them and they both got irritable and agitated. He would have
called the behavior bizarre if he didn’t know for a fact that some
of the others who had escaped from those cages had their own
foibles, many of them much more disturbing.