Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (45 page)

“They’re here,” Dancer said, her voice a lot
less far away than Fancy’s. After a few more heartbeats Fancy
seemed to come out of it a little as well.

“They’re going to help us,” Fancy said.

Before Cory could ask who exactly they meant
by “they” he heard another voice beyond the doors, although this
one was not so close. From the echoing quality he guessed that it
was coming from upstairs in the church proper. He recognized the
voice, too. He should, after all. He had just heard it ten minutes
earlier when they had been tying the thin Duster up in the
alley.

“Someone give me a hand up here!” There was
something distinctly wrong with the voice. It was as though the
speaker had not actually spoken words in some time and had
forgotten how to give them the right inflection. The result was a
strange sing-song that managed to be both pleasant and grating at
the same time.

“Tony, that you?” the first man asked,
calling up through another door.

“One of the bastards shot me,” the voice
said. “I could use some help.”

“Shit,” Lynn said. “Sugar, come upstairs with
me and give me a hand. Erin and Roy, you two stay down here and
make sure these six stay under.”

FancyDancer blinked their eyes repeatedly as
though waking up. “That’s a disturbing feeling,” Dancer said.

“We can still feel them,” Fancy said.
“They’re pulling away to give us a chance, but they’re still
there.”

“Up,” Dancer said. “They’re above us
somewhere.”

This was going to be their only chance then.
Cory didn’t know if Vlad would dirty its own hands by taking Lynn
and the other one, Sugar, out, but if it chose to act as nothing
more than a decoy then they would be back down as soon as they
couldn’t find the other Duster. Three against two was better odds,
even if all three of them were still hurting from the poison.

“I’ve got an idea,” Cory said. “Both of you
on either side of those doors at the bottom of the ramp.”

“Okay,” Dancer said. “But we should be
lethal.”

“There’s no other way,” Fancy said.

Cory wanted to object. Ever since becoming a
vampire the one thing he had not wanted to be was a monster. He
didn’t want to think that he might be just as bad as all those in
his life that had hurt him. But he couldn’t just think about
himself and what he wanted right now. If the tables were turned
these people would have no problem killing him or FancyDancer, and
they certainly didn’t care about all the victims they had and would
destroy in the future. As much as he didn’t want to be a vampire he
had to embrace it at least this once. He had to accept every aspect
of himself if he was going to be a whole person.

Don’t know if I completely agree with the
logic
, Gramma said,
but I understand the sentiment. And it’s
about time you did it all by yourself
.

Cory tried to get the voice to speak again
and ask it what it meant, but Gramma’s voice in his head was
silent. For all he knew it could be gone for good. That was okay,
though. He didn’t think he would need it anymore.

He waited for FancyDancer to get on either
side and then sat down at the top of the ramp. This would work
better, he decided, if he looked like he were in pain or injured,
which at this point still wasn’t all that far from the truth. He
debated for a few seconds what he was going to say, then realized
it didn’t exactly need to be the Gettysburg Address. His general
thoughts on this whole matter would do fine.

He cleared his throat and, loud enough that
they could hear beyond the door but soft enough that it might still
sound like he was trying to be stealthy, said, “Shit this
sucks.”

All chatter from the two remaining Dusters
stopped. They were silent for a moment before the woman, presumably
Erin, said, “Did you just hear that?”

“No. You’re probably just hearing things,”
the other said, but as he said it his voice got closer.

Cory turned around and acted like he was
trying to crawl away from the door but his legs wouldn’t cooperate.
“Oh God. Oh God, I’ve got to get out of here.”

The light from the basement brightened as one
of them opened the door. “Shit! Erin, come take a look at…”

Cory turned to look just as FancyDancer
sprung from their hiding spots. The feeble candlelight did little
to illuminate the scene, which Cory recognized immediately as a
blessing. Despite their slower speed and the obvious pain that the
movements caused them FancyDancer were brutal. Dancer attacked low
and Fancy went high, both of them aiming for vital soft spots. Even
if he was a vampire the Duster still didn’t understand what was
happening quick enough to try protecting himself, and their hands
jabbed into his gut and throat like nails through butter. Dancer
ripped out his intestines and let them drop steaming to the floor
while Fancy’s hand went straight through his neck and out the other
side, sending his trachea and bits of spine to shower Dancer’s
face. Dancer didn’t seem to mind.

“Fuck!” Erin screamed from the other side of
the doors, and Fancy pulled her hand out, causing Roy the Duster’s
head to loll sideways without anything to support it anymore.
Dancer continued to pull out guts like a magician’s endless hankie
trick even as the body began to disintegrate, but Fancy dashed
around him and into the basement. Erin started a scream that was
cut short with a wet rip and a crack.

The whole thing hadn’t even taken a
second.

Cory stood up and came down the ramp,
gingerly stepping over the Duster’s blackening remains to enter the
basement. Dancer followed with that same look she always had if she
were too far from Fancy’s side for more than an eyeblink.

The scene in the church basement would have
looked more suitable in the church itself if, in fact, the church
had been dedicated less to the Christian God and more to an
archduke of Hell. The candles had been placed all over the room but
the biggest concentration were in a large circle in the center of
the floor. The blood Cory had smelled had been used to draw another
circle within the candles as well as a complex squiggle that might
have been almost funny if Cory hadn’t seen it several times before.
The first had been on the side of the pizza parlor covering up the
cross the Dusters had used as their false tag. The second had been
on the floor of Lynn’s apartment. It was likely the closest the
Dusters could come to representing the thing they believed they
served.

“It’s like a cult,” Cory said.

“Not like. Is,” Fancy said.

“And they honestly thought they were going to
be rewarded by some kind of god,” Dancer said.

Although Cory didn’t know what exactly had
lurked behind that door, he was pretty sure it hadn’t been a
god.

The six humans that had been intended as the
combination’s first new batch of “fruit” were lined up along the
far wall, all of them naked, on their knees, and stock still. None
of them looked like they were older than twenty-two, with the
youngest possibly being fourteen. Cory saw her and looked away.
He’d known that young ones had occasionally been brought down into
the cave but he had never been able to see them well. To see this
one now horrified Cory in a way he had not known he could manage.
While some of the humans looked completely ignorant of what was
happening to them a couple, including the fourteen year old, had
just enough control of their senses to cry.

I failed her
, Cory thought as he
looked at the tears running down the girl’s cheeks. This was
something that would haunt her forever. He had no idea what the
Dusters might or might not have done to these people before they
got here, but anything at all was too much. It would stick with
them, eat away at their insides, make them sweat and scream in
their beds in the middle of the night.

“For the love of God, give them some
clothes,” Cory said.

“Looks like they’re all in a pile over here
in the corner,” Fancy said. She had a haunted look on her face that
Cory guessed had to match the one on his own, but she turned away
before he could see it for long.

“They’re still in a trance,” Dancer said.
“Maybe we can make them forget that any of this ever happened.”

Fancy agreed and they both turned to the
humans, looking them each in the eyes in turn in an effort to do
some kind of damage control. Cory knew he could have helped, but
this was his chance. As they were both preoccupied Cory silently
slunk out the door that Lynn and Sugar must have gone through up
into the church.

Maybe FancyDancer were right. It was entirely
possible that they could erase any memory those people had of this
night and what had almost happened to them. But from his own
experience Cory didn’t think that would work. No matter how much he
had blocked out in his mind his horrible experiences would always
still be a part of him. It would always affect him and his actions
in tiny little ways that he might not be consciously aware of, and
he expected it would be the same with those six people. Their fates
could have been so much worse, and for that Cory was grateful. But
it still should have never happened at all.

And for that Cory wanted revenge for
them.

The stairs just outside the door led up to a
landing with the church’s front entrance, then another set of
stairs and a ramp into the church itself. There was no sign of
Lynn, the other Duster, or Vlad here, but if any of them were
expecting him Cory didn’t think they would just allow him to see
their faces.

He walked into the center aisle between the
pews, careful to walk silently so his footsteps wouldn’t echo. He
had a moment where he had to stop and consciously keep himself from
breaking out in a sweat and hyperventilating. He had thought that
being in that tiny room in Lynn’s apartment brought back the terror
and humiliation of that cave deep below the surface, but in the
darkness with very little light coming in through the stained glass
windows this was so much worse. The pews on either side turned into
cages, the vision so real that he could once again smell the stink
of people forced to live in their own shit. The decorative parts of
the ceiling in the shadows of the far corners became stalactites
dripping with moisture. And the altar at the end became the door,
the rickety wooden thing that no one ever wanted to walk through,
the point from which no one would ever return. Cory thought of the
woman who had freed them all and the way she had confidently, even
defiantly opened that door and gone through. FancyDancer had said
that she had come back out eventually. He wanted to think that
somewhere out there she was living her life and that what she had
seen in the cave never affected her. He wanted all this so badly
because he wanted to be her.

He suddenly realized that he had never
clearly seen her face, but when he remembered that moment where she
escaped she wore the face of his grandmother. And the guards, each
of them looked like…

His father. The drunk belligerent madman Cory
had left home to escape. He had done things to Cory, just like Lynn
had. And just like Lynn had he cradled his sickness in the words of
love and blame, like it had been his fault all along.

Cory remembered. Not all of it, perhaps, but
enough.

“Don’t move, Cory.”

He stopped halfway down the center aisle.
Cory heard Lynn’s footsteps before he saw her. The street lamps
from outside shown through the windows at such an angle that they
shed a feeble multi-colored light on the altar and Lynn walked
right into it, standing behind the altar so that it gave her entire
body a corona like it was glowing. She was a far cry now from the
woman he had met that first night on the street. She’d seemed calm
and put together at the time, but now she looked disheveled, her
blond hair dirtier than ever and dangling in her face, her clothes
rumpled and spattered with dots of blood.

Cory looked at her and hated her. Except
there was a still a part of him that wanted to love her. It told
him that it was all a misunderstanding, that all those things she
had told him in that bed were true, that she really did care for
him and that she was only doing it all for his own good.

The same things his father had said.

Cory took another couple of steps toward her,
a gesture that took every ounce of mental strength he could muster,
and almost slipped and fell in some sludgy pool between the
pews.

“I told you not to move,” Lynn said. “Did you
think I was saying that just to be spiteful? I was looking out for
you.”

There wasn’t enough light here to see exactly
what he had stepped in, but the black mess had clothes mixed in it.
That would have been Sugar, Cory realized, although he had no idea
how the Duster had been killed.

“That’s how you thank me, huh?” Lynn said,
pointing at the mess. “Everything I did for you, and you do that
back.”

“But that wasn’t me,” Cory said.

“Of course it wasn’t you. You’re too stupid
and weak. You didn’t even have any meaning to your pathetic life
until me. But you still had something to do with this, I know it.
You ungrateful sack of shit!”

Cory held on to the pews to keep from
slipping as he stepped out of the remains of the Duster. The muck
stuck to the bottom of his slippers and continued threatening to
send him sprawling for a few more paces.

“I loved you and you betrayed me,” Lynn
said.

“That was never love,” Cory said. “I don’t
think you know what that is.”

Lynn gaped. “I don’t… You think I don’t… You
arrogant motherfucker! Pig told us to kill every single one of you
false vampires after we got your blood, but I kept you alive. Now
tell me, why would I do that if I didn’t love you?”

Cory’s thoughts went unbidden to his father.
“Control. Narcissism. I don’t know.” He got as far as the steps
leading up to the altar. Lynn reached into her belt at her back and
pulled out a gun. It was hard to tell considering the lack of light
and Cory’s ignorance of weapons, but he thought it almost looked
like exactly the same gun he’d been shot with on the night Lynn had
found him.