Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (44 page)

So as they leave we go down to the alley. The
gardener’s tool does not see us skulking in the shadows at first,
but it knows we are there. It speaks, it asks questions, it pleads
with us. While we gave the girl we met earlier respect enough to
listen to its mewling, we see no reason to even acknowledge this
one. It has no true mind of its own. It follows the leader blindly.
It is, in fact, everything the gardener tried to make the trio that
just left and all the other plants that have grown rampant in this
city.

It is fruit, existing for no other reason
than to be plucked from the vine and ingested by superior
creatures. Creatures like us.

We take care to remove the poison from this
fruit, ignoring all its screams and anguished protests. It is not
ripe and will not give us much, but we accept that. We don’t need
to become the corpulent, insanity-driven thing that is the
gardener. We just need a little flesh to work with.

The fruit’s screams become screeches, then
moans, then nothing.

“Are you sure this
is the place Vlad pointed out?” Fancy asked. She was breathing
heavily, partly from the pain and partly from the strain of trying
to move fast while her body clearly didn’t want to anymore. Dancer
was just as bad despite her not actually being injured. Cory
noticed the way that their every pant and limp was synchronized in
a way that even they did not appear to be aware of. For the first
time tonight Cory was the one among them in the best physical and
mental shape, and he wasn’t prepared be the one in charge going
into this. He wanted to go back to the tunnel and hide in the trash
corral.

But you’re not going to ever do that
again, are you
? Gramma asked.

He wasn’t sure about
ever
, but if all
three of them came out of this okay he thought he was prepared to
start down that long hard road to something better than what he had
been allowing himself.

“It has to be,” Cory said, avoiding any
snarky comment he wanted to make that no, Vlad must have meant one
of the
other
completely abandoned church steeples. The fact
that he even wanted to make such a comment said something about
where his mind was. A week ago he would have never dared even think
about talking back to anyone at all.

Once they’d finally reached the church Cory
realized that he actually recognized it, albeit only in half-formed
memories of a time long before the cave and cages. This place had
once been St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, and although it looked
like it had been shut down for awhile now he suspected this was
where he or his family had attended services when he’d been a
child. The church was surrounded by houses so they had to be
especially careful as they approached not to alert the neighborhood
to their presence. It was still in the earliest hours of the
morning but not so early anymore that some people working the very
earliest shifts might not be awake and getting ready for the day.
In a few more hours the people of Fond du Lac would all be up and
the sun would be rising. Anything that they were going to do here
had to happen quickly and with minimal commotion. Unfortunately
none of them knew yet what exactly they should be expecting.

“And you’re sure it didn’t give you any
warning about what would be inside?” Dancer asked.

Cory stared at her for a moment to make sure
she wasn’t pulling his leg. But no, she really had no memory of
meeting Vlad other than the quick suggestion in her memory that at
least someone had been there with them. She’d said on the way over
all she had felt was an intense feeling of serenity mixed, oddly
enough, with repulsion. She had desperately wanted to join Vlad on
the other side of the ramp yet had the equal need to get away. The
two things had paralyzed her, apparently, in both body and mind.
Fancy had felt it as well just before she’d seen a glimpse of Pig,
and that had been what kept her from properly defending
herself.

“The Dusters are there,” Cory said. “And
something else. Something Vlad was cryptic about.”

“Sounds to me like Vlad is cryptic about
everything,” Fancy said.

Dancer smirked, even though any facial
expression at all gave her pain. “‘Hello, my name is Vlad and I
would say what I had for breakfast this morning, but I couldn’t
tell because it was cloaked in my shadows.’”

“I’m pretty sure you should be careful to
never say that to Vlad’s face,” Fancy said.

“This place looks pretty big,” Dancer said,
pointing at the church’s adjoined school. There was a sign out
front that said it would be the future site of a day care, but for
now it was as empty as the church. “They could be anywhere in
either of those buildings.”

“No,” Fancy said. “There’s only one place
they’ll be.”

Dancer didn’t argue, and Cory didn’t have to
ask for an explanation. If he was a part of a group of vampire
wannabes that used religious imagery to hide their true nature,
there was only one place he would be using: the church itself.

“They’ve probably got the front doors
watched,” Dancer said.

“We can go around back,” Cory said. “There’s
some entrances to the school from the parking lot. We can go
through the school, down to the basement, and then from there up
into the church.”

FancyDancer didn’t question him, instead
following silently as they made their way around the building and
scaled the chain link fence to the parking lot. From there he would
have led them to one of the doors, but Fancy suggested instead that
they try the windows in case anyone was watching the entrances.
Cory expected the broken glass of the window to bring the Dusters
down on their heads immediately, but even though they waited a
minute there was nothing. Apparently the Dusters weren’t keeping
that much track of the school portion at all.

Although the memories were faint Cory still
had enough recollection about the layout that he only sent them
down the wrong hall once, eventually leading them to a ramp that
led down into the basement under the church. They all stopped well
before the doors, however, as they could hear voices beyond.

“I guess we were wrong,” Fancy whispered.
“Looks like they prefer the church basement to the church
itself.”

“Kind of like a support group,” Dancer said.
“Assholes Anonymous.”

The doors into the basement were open
slightly, allowing them to see a flickering light coming from
somewhere inside. It smelled like they were burning candles, a
whole lot of them, although there was another odor that Cory
smelled quite clearly. FancyDancer stiffened, indicating that they
smelled it too. Blood. From the rich hints in the scent, Cory was
pretty sure it was human.

“You smell that?” Dancer asked.

“Kind of hard to miss,” Cory said.

“Not the blood,” Fancy said. “The other scent
underneath it.”

Cory took a deep breath through his nose. He
had expected it to be garlic or silver, more proof that they were
prepared for a possible attack. But that wasn’t it. Any hint of the
poisons was farther away, as though it were stored somewhere that
the Dusters themselves would be safe from it. No, the odor
FancyDancer had picked up on was sweat. Human, mostly, and in
copious amounts. It was fairly cold here so Cory didn’t think it
had come from heat. This was the sweat of people who were afraid,
or at least were afraid on some level. There were living humans
here against their will, probably enraptured by the Dusters’ power,
but on some level they knew enough about their situation to be
terrified.

“Can’t we even kill just one?” someone, a
woman, asked.

“That’s not the orders Pig gave us.” This
voice Cory recognized easily. It was the voice that had told him it
would help and protect him in the dark. It was the voice that had
claimed she loved him.

“But this is bullshit,” the first woman
said.

“Yeah,” another voice said, this one male.
“We’ve been vampires for, like, a week now. And we haven’t killed
anyone yet.”

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Lynn said. “We’ve
killed plenty.”

“Yeah, but half of them were those fake
vamps, and those don’t count,” the woman said.

“And I say the others don’t count either,”
the man said. “We didn’t get to drink their blood.”

“Dumbass, you’re drinking it right now.” This
was a second man, his voice much deeper than the first.

“I mean really drink it. As in ‘from the
throat’ drink it. This shit has been in a fridge.” He made a noise
that sounded like spitting. “I want to try it when it’s fresh.”

“Quit being impatient,” Lynn said. “We’ve
only got an hour or two before Pig gives us the rest of our powers,
and then we can do everything we want.”

Cory turned to FancyDancer. “Powers?” he
whispered. They both shrugged.

“Do you think something’s wrong?” the woman
asked. “They should have been back by now.”

“Maybe the location Pig gave wasn’t as
precise as it should have been,” Lynn said. “You remember how it
happened with that one vamp.” But she didn’t sound very confident.
Cory would have liked to think that he had been around her enough
to know when she was faking an emotion, but he knew that simply
wasn’t true.

“We do have everything ready to go once they
get back though, right?” the first man asked.

“The vans are gassed up and ready,” the
second man said. “The cages are greased up with garlic and silver
just in case we need to turn them for some reason before we get
there.”

“Although remember not to do that unless I
specifically give the order,” Lynn said. “Once they’re turned
they’ll be immune to the glamour and they’ll be harder for us to
wrangle.”

“Where the hell are we even taking them?” the
woman asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Lynn said. “Pig said
something about a temporary place to let them ripen while he finds
a way out.”

“I have no idea what that means,” the first
man said.

“Neither do I,” Lynn said. “But everything
else Pig has told us so far has been…”

She said more, but Cory didn’t hear it. Fancy
and Dancer grabbed him by either shoulder and pulled him back out
of sight of the doors.

“We can’t let this happen,” Fancy said.

“I still don’t understand what they meant,”
Cory said.

“Put it all together,” Dancer said. “They
said cages. And they have hypnotized humans in there. They were
talking about turning them.”

For several seconds Cory still didn’t
understand. Then some of the memories he had lost shone up from
just below the rippling surface of his thoughts. He remembered
someone speaking to him, clouding his mind. He remembered a van,
and a cage, and then the darkness of the cave, and someone else’s
blood being smeared in his own.

“No,” Cory said. “It’s all supposed to be
over.”

“If Pig is really some mental projection of
the thing that was behind the door,” Fancy said, “then this all
makes sense.”

“That woman a year ago destroyed all its
guards,” Dancer said. “They were how it interacted with the world.
If they’re gone then it’s powerless, but if it has them back…”

Cory suddenly understood exactly what Lynn
meant about the rest of their powers even if she herself did not.
Pig probably hadn’t told them exactly what it meant to be one of
the combination behind the door’s minions, but Cory remembered.
Hollowed out skulls with their brains removed, masses of squirming
flesh inside that had come from somewhere behind the door. The
guards hadn’t been individuals at all but extensions of the
combination, and that was what the Dusters were going to become.
They probably didn’t know that. Pig had probably promised them
power beyond their imaginings. Instead they were going to become
hollow shells serving an abomination.

Cory didn’t care much what would happen to
the Dusters, but he knew what it meant if they made physical
contact with the thing from behind the door. Everything it had done
would begin again. More people would go through what he had. The
ones who would be driven insane by the ordeal early would be the
lucky ones, the ones whose minds would break and give them some
sort of half-peace from the trauma and abuse. And the humans who
were trapped by the Dusters powers down in that basement would be
the first.

Cory was not a hero. He was, and probably
always would be somewhere deep in his heart even after he got
better, a broken, scared boy and there would always be those like
Lynn who would continue the abuse. But even if that part was always
there urging him to back down, to run, to hide, he could not let
the abuse happen to anyone else. He didn’t need Gramma’s voice to
tell him that. His own was sufficient.

“We need a plan,” Cory said.

“We storm in there and kill them,” Dancer
said.

“I meant a good plan,” Cory said.

“It sounds like there’s four of them and
three of us,” Fancy said. “They’ve only been vampires for about a
week. They’re not strong enough.”

“And neither are any of us,” Cory said. “And
we don’t know how many humans they have in there. We can’t risk
hurting them.”

“Then maybe we can lure some of them away,”
Fancy said. “Put the odds more in our favor.”

Dancer cracked her knuckles. “So we just need
to figure how exactly we… do… ugh.”

Dancer’s eyes suddenly glazed over, although
she didn’t seem quite so far under as she had on the parking ramp.
Cory turned to look at Fancy and saw the same thing.

“My own voice screaming forever and ever,”
Fancy muttered. “I like it.”

“Oh come on, not now,” Cory whispered.
“Focus, both of you.” He resisted the urge to snap his fingers in
front of their faces. Cory knew exactly what this meant, but he was
at a loss whether Vlad’s presence nearby was a good thing or a bad
thing.