Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (29 page)

“Maybe we should get you to a hospital?” the
woman asked.

Cory almost said yes. There must have been
enough of the pre-cage version of him left to automatically
associate the concept of hospitals with healing, care, maybe even
warmth. Then his post-cage paranoia reasserted itself and all he
could think of was what they would say when they saw his teeth, or
how he reacted to sunlight, or any of a dozen other tell-tales that
would out him as something they would rather not accept was part of
their world.

“No,” he managed to croak. The burning
sensation from his insides was getting worse. He knew he couldn’t
just stay where they were, but he didn’t think he could get up and
walk anymore. The poison inside sapped his will to move, and even
his breathing felt like fire now.

This is dying after all
, he thought.
The idea filled him with a complicated mix of existential fear and
creeping serenity.

“You were shot,” the woman said. “You can’t
just not go to a hospital. I’ve got a prepaid cell back at my place
if we can just get you…”

“I said no!” he said, this time forgetting to
hide his fangs and flashing them where she would obviously see. She
flinched back, but not nearly as much as he would have expected.
Most people, at least in his imagination, would have run screaming
or would have immediately attacked him just like the two with the
gun. But she only moved back on what looked like reflex rather than
any genuine fear. Maybe the light here was still too dim for her to
see the unnatural points of his teeth clearly. That seemed like the
only logical explanation, because after only one or two seconds
pause she was bending over him again as though she hadn’t seen
anything.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, fine. I think I’m
ready for this. I still need to get you back to my place, though. I
don’t see an exit wound, so the bullet’s got to still be in you. If
you really don’t want to see a doctor then I’m going to have to be
the one to do it. Can you walk a little more? It’s only another
block or two.”

He wanted to say no, that he really didn’t
think he could, that all he could possibly do was sit here and wait
for the bullet to do its miraculous poison magic. But she didn’t
give him time to answer even if he would have had the energy to say
anything more. She grabbed him under his armpits and lifted.
Although his weight was mostly dead—any attempt to help her only
rewarded him with new spikes of agony through his entire body—she
still managed to get him to his feet. For such a smallish woman she
was surprisingly strong, and Cory could feel her sold muscular form
as it pressed against him through her thin layers of clothing. He
might have found the touch exhilarating under any other
circumstances than these.

Once he was back on his feet he found that he
still had a little more energy left in him than he’d thought, at
least enough to not fall over flat on his face as long as he moved
slowly and had the woman at his side to keep him propped up. His
instincts still tried to press him into some faster pace, but he
let the woman lead him and set their speed.

“They…” Cory said. The word came out as a
barely audible wheeze.

“What’s that?” she asked. She kept his left
arm around her shoulder and held him tight with the right. Although
she was strong she didn’t feel like she had the energy enough to
keep him upright without his help, and he did his best to oblige
her. It was weird, but he felt like he desperately owed her that.
He hadn’t felt like he’d owed anyone anything in so long, not even
FancyDancer, that he suddenly and illogically felt it would be
horribly rude if he dropped back to his knees again.

“They… coming?” he asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. She said it
quickly, as though she weren’t completely convinced of the truth of
her own words and didn’t want to dwell on them. “Whatever reason
they were after you, it wasn’t enough to keep them coming I
guess.”

“You don’t…” He was going to ask her whether
or not she understood just why they were after him, or if she
understood the significance of his freakishly sharp teeth, but she
cut him off.

“Stop talking,” she said. She spoke the words
with a force she hadn’t shown yet, and Cory wasn’t sure what to
make of it. “You need to save your strength.” This she said with
more softness, and Cory felt compelled to obey her. He only hoped
that what little strength he did have left would last, because he
felt his consciousness waning. If they didn’t get the bullet out of
him soon, he didn’t think he would be around to explain anything
else to her.

Cory was no
stranger to the feeling that time had a mind of its own and could
slow down or speed up however it suited itself. Deep in the ground
with no sunlight to even indicate when another day or night had
passed, he’d lost all sense how long an hour was supposed to be as
opposed to a minute, a week, a day, a month. To him they had all
been interchangeable words representing the same amorphous blocks
of time.

He had that same blurred feel for time now as
the bullet rubbed up against his guts and sent fresh lances of
searing agony with his every step and movement. The woman had said
they only needed to go a few blocks, and he was sure that he didn’t
see anything in their journey that indicated to him otherwise, yet
he nonetheless was sure they walked for hours. Or perhaps it was
seconds. He didn’t know and no longer really cared. He only wanted
the pain to stop by whatever means necessary. He would have tried
again to reach into his own wound and dig out the bullet himself if
he could trust his hands to work well enough, but he was afraid all
he would manage was to scramble his own insides with the numb and
stiff fingers.

The woman didn’t speak as they walked, but
Cory felt strangely comforted by the matter-of-fact way that she
had handled the whole situation so far. She obviously didn’t
understand yet what he was, but simply having a person treat him
like something other than filth gave him some peace, or at least
whatever small amount he could expect while shot and bleeding.

They moved silently through a few more yards
before reaching another street. Here she led him back toward Main
Street. He tried to fight and pull away, but his normal superior
strength had drained away right along with his blood. She shushed
him, quietly reassuring that they wouldn’t run into the two that
had shot him again. He wasn’t so sure that was true, given how
close he thought they still were to the pizza place, but as they
emerged on Main Street the expected hail of bullets never came. The
two attackers apparently hadn’t been able to follow or find him,
and there was no one else on the street except the rare car driving
along about its business. Cory supposed that to anyone inside he
would just look like another drunk that needed to be helped home by
a well-meaning friend.

After another block the woman indicated that
they had arrived, although at first Cory had no idea exactly where
they were supposed to be headed. They were at an intersection with
a stoplight blinking yellow for the almost non-existent traffic.
There was a house on one corner, businesses on two others, and a
run-down looking building on the fourth just across the street from
them. As she led them over the crosswalk Cory realized that
building was their destination.

It was hard to believe that the place hadn’t
been torn down years ago. It was a long brick building that would
have been ugly and completely lacking in any aesthetic value all by
itself, but it was made even more obnoxious by the shockingly
bright blue paint that covered the entire thing in thick coats.
Even then the paint was chipping away in parts to reveal an
unimaginative dull gray beneath. This strange color contradiction
would have made the building enough of an eyesore just by itself,
but it had also been built incredibly close to the street, so much
that Cory imagined it would be impossible for cars coming from a
certain direction to see if anything else was coming for a
collision going down Main Street. As they drew closer Cory saw that
many of windows had been boarded over, and at these windows black
streams of soot trailed upward to indicate a fire on the top floor
at some point in the past.

“Here?” he asked weakly.

“You’re not exactly in a position to
complain,” she said. Her tone was suddenly defensive, although the
tone disappeared and was replaced by something much more pleasant
fairly quickly. “There’s a story behind it. I’ll tell you if you
manage not to die on me anytime soon.”

He was getting more and more eager to oblige
her the longer his stomach and intestines felt like they were
grinding themselves to sand. There was a door near the front of the
building, but she steered him away from it and around a corner.
That was just as well, since what little he saw of it before it was
out of sight showed some kind of tape, possibly police or caution
tape, ripped up and flapping in the rainy breeze. Closer to the
back of the building there was another door, this one propped open
with an old brick. The woman shouldered the door open and awkwardly
walked him through the narrow doorway before pushing the brick away
with her foot and letting the door slam shut behind them. Cory
startled at the loud bang, momentarily mistaking it for another
gunshot then, once his mind registered the sound’s true source,
wondering if the loud noise would give someone a clue that they
were here. Because if it hadn’t been completely clear from the
outside, it was obvious now that no one was supposed to actually be
in this building.

The room they were in was completely dark,
and even though Cory thought he had seen a light switch on the wall
as they had come in the woman didn’t reach for it. From the way the
subtle sounds they made echoed Cory decided they had to be in a
narrow stairwell. He could also here her feet shuffling in some
kind of rubbish on the floor.

“We’ve got to go upstairs. Do you think you
can make it?” she asked.

He shook his head, then remembered she
probably couldn’t see him. He tried to tell her no, but all he
managed was a wordless wheeze.

“Come on,” she said. “No other choice. All my
things are on the second floor. You just have to put one foot in
front of the other. I’ll tell you every time there’s a step.”

If the block and a half it had taken them to
get here had seemed like forever, then the time needed to climb a
single flight of stairs became immeasurable in his mind. Somewhere
he almost thought he could hear Pig laughing at him and the way he
practically needed to crawl up the steps, but Cory knew there was
no way Pig could have followed him this far from the pizza
place.

Multiple times Cory tripped and fell,
especially as a few stairs felt spongy beneath him and practically
ready to break through, as though they had been soaked through with
massive amounts of water in the near past. Every time he fell
though the woman held him tight and kept him from tumbling back
down the stairs until he managed to pull together enough energy to
make the next step. She whispered encouraging things in his ear,
not that he would be able to remember a single one later, but they
did the trick enough that he was able to keep his mind on the task
long enough to reach the second floor.

Here the stairs came out on a long hallway
with doors on either side. A window at the very end finally gave
enough illumination from the street lights that he could see where
he was going. To his left there were several more doors marked off
with caution tape, as well as the same soot marks that he had seen
from the outside. The woman led him past these to a door at the end
of the hall, directing him to watch his step around certain floor
boards that protested against even the slightest weight.

At the end of the hall she propped Cory up
against the wall long enough to open the door. Although there was a
deadbolt on the door she ignored it. He almost wanted to tell her
that leaving the door unlocked wasn’t safe but right now he
couldn’t even be sure that he could stay conscious for much longer.
The burning in his guts had even started to give way to a numbing
cold. He had a suspicion that was a bad sign.

The woman must have realized this, because
she slapped him across the face. “Hey! You’ve got to stay awake. I
didn’t expect you to be this bad before we even got inside. You
have to work with me here, understand?”

Not really, but he nodded anyway.

She shoved the door open and roughly pulled
him in. She took the time to close the door behind them, which Cory
thought was vaguely amusing considering how deserted the rest of
the building looked. Then she moved him into a larger room just
beyond the door and laid him down on a musty, moldy carpet. Her own
strength must have been leaving her, because she wasn’t gentle as
he hit the floor. He groaned—it was the only noise he could still
make, or else he would have most likely screamed at the sudden jolt
that went through his body.

“Sorry,” she said, although he barely heard
her. Now that he no longer had to force himself to move the pain
had taken over his world completely. His muscles locked up and
burning agony took over all but the growing cold spot in his side
and stomach.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit, shit, shit. Not
good. Not good at all.” She again moved aside his coat to take a
look at the wound, this time trying to also lift up his two layers
of shirts to see the actually perforated flesh underneath. “I don’t
know if I’m ready for this. I knew… shit.”

Cory wanted to tell her that it was okay,
that she could just let him go, but two things stopped him. The
first and most obvious was the pain, but there was something more
as well. He knew fear well after some of the things he had lived
through, and not just the everyday fear of small things that most
people felt through the majority of their lives. He knew the true,
my-life-is-very-short-indeed fear that came with the knowledge that
someone or something nearby had every intention of ending his life
in the near future. But this was the first time he thought he was
close enough to death to be able to predict that it could happen in
only a few more minutes. For all his consideration of just letting
himself die earlier, now that he was actually faced with it he
desperately wanted to live.