Blood of Gold (18 page)

Combs had surprised him tonight, and for the first time, Hoss began to question his new mentor’s motives. Hoss didn’t know exactly what was going on, but it was clear that he was caught up in some Machiavellian dealings. It was stimulating, just the kind of thing that Hoss liked and that the small town of Crescent City never provided.

Almost without thinking about where he was going, he found himself outside the IT room. There were three or four vampires in there, as there almost always were, even this late at night, including Jared, who practically lived there.

They greeted Hoss as one of their own. He presented them with the problem he’d been mulling over.

“A simulation?” Jared asked. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

They immediately set about creating the program, and they drew in the other IT vampires, who called their friends, and soon they had a dozen techies working on the problem. By the next morning, they had come up with a rough simulation.

“It could use some fine-tuning,” Jared said, “but it should give us an approximate answer.”

First, they ran what had actually happened. The Wildering plague took off, growing at an alarming rate, a red stain that began to cover the Northern California coastline. Then the Golden Vampires appeared as a small yellow patch, one that had an immediate effect on the growth of the red stain. Then Hoss’s vampires, the followers of the Rules of Vampire, appeared, and the red stain was beaten back and eventually extinguished.

But not completely, Hoss noticed. There were still red splotches scattered throughout the area.
Do you suppose the humans know that?
he thought.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s see what happens if only Terrill and his band arrive.”

They ran the simulation again. This time, the red stain was beaten back only temporarily, but before it could regrow significantly, the projected outside human forces came to the rescue. Again, the red was reduced to a few scattered spots.

“All right. What happens if Terrill never shows up?”

The simulation looked exactly the same, right up to the point where Terrill and the Golden Vampires had originally entered the picture. This time, the red stain grew and grew. Not only did it overwhelm the defenses at the Armory in Crescent City, it also completely drowned the entire area.

Jared reached over and pressed a key, and the area shown by the map expanded. Soon the entire area north of San Francisco and south of Bend, Oregon, was submerged in red.

The room fell silent. Jared expanded the map to all the states west of the Mississippi. “That’s as big as we programmed it,” he murmured.

It seemed to take only seconds before the crimson stain exploded. Not only was it growing bigger, it was doing so at a faster and faster pace. In the end, the entire map was blood red.

“Well,” Jared said. “That was unexpected.”

Hoss sat before the screen, stunned.

This changed everything. Combs had known this would be the result. That’s why he’d argued so vehemently. So what were the old vampire’s true intentions? Whose side was he really on? Was he trying to manipulate Hoss?

He turned to Jared. “Where do the communiqués from Fitzsimmons come from?”

The entire room went still. Jared shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Hoss asked bluntly. “Where the hell is Fitzsimmons?”

“In America,” Jared answered. “Where else?” Hoss couldn’t read his expression. The IT chief had deliberately turned away from the rest of the room, and he was raising and lowering his eyebrows as if trying to semaphore a message to Hoss.

“OK,” Hoss said. Jared obviously didn’t want to talk about it. “Just wondering.”

The room slowly relaxed. The IT vampires started excitedly talking about the simulation and seemed to forget Hoss’s question. Eventually, Jared surreptitiously signaled for Hoss to follow him out of the room.

“What’s going on?” Hoss demanded. “What do you know?”

“Not yet,” Jared answered, leading him farther away from the others. He didn’t stop until they turned a corner and moved into the stairwell.

“The messages from Fitzsimmons aren’t coming from America,” Jared said quietly. “They’re coming from London. The first one to notice that, and the only one to ever mention it aloud, was a guy named Harold.”

“So let me talk to Harold.”

“That’s just it. You can’t. He’s gone. A day after he brought it up, he disappeared. No one has dared mention it since.”

“So you think there’s a spy.” Hoss didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Maybe more than one. Peterson is pretty free with his money, and most of the techies are young vampires who haven’t accumulated much wealth. So yeah, I’m pretty sure that Fitzsimmons is either dead or a captive.”

“So what happened?”

“Why does it matter? Why should I endanger my life over an asshole like Fitzsimmons? I mean, give me a choice between Robespierre, who wants to guillotine everyone in sight, or Danton, who only wants to guillotine, well,
almost
everyone, and I’ll pick the latter.”

Hoss didn’t say anything, but it offended his sense of order. Fitzsimmons was the elected president of the Council. If he was removed by any method other than a vote, it was a coup, pure and simple. Once the rules broke down, they became meaningless. Either all the rules must be followed, or none of them.

The following morning, before he went to sleep, Hoss vowed to find out what had happened to Fitzsimmons. He called Jared and asked him to track down the source of the messages.

“I’ll do that,” Jared said. “But don’t ever call here again. If you have something to say, say it to my face.”

“Right,” Hoss said.

Jared hung up. A second later, Hoss heard a second click. A chill washed over him. He got up, barricaded the door and unlatched the window. He was hundreds of feet above the street, but he decided he’d rather take his chances with a plunge than be captured.

Chapter 17

Hoss wandered the broken Twilight lands outside the giant walls of an eternal city. Mankind was extinct, all of them either Turned or consumed. The Wilderings preyed on each other. Some banded together under strong leaders; others wandered as ronin vampires, alone and in hiding. Very rarely, a Wildering became so powerful that the immortal gods behind the walls noticed. The gods would then either reward or destroy the Wildering, or even more rarely, raise him or her up to join them.

Hoss was ronin for a long time and he was left alone, for the price of challenging him was too high, until one day, almost by accident, he became the leader of the largest clan of Wilderings. Their old leader tracked him down and confronted him, leaving Hoss no choice but to kill him, and Hoss became his successor. From that base of strength, he slowly conquered the rest of the Wilderings; not on purpose, but they kept attacking him and he kept defeating them. And now his army was camped outside the eternal city, ready to besiege the mile-high walls.

The god came to him in broad daylight, materializing inside his tent. He appeared as a huge shadow against the hanging tapestries.

“You have done well,” the god said. “The immortal gods have decided to let you join us.”

“Not interested,” Hoss said.

“You will never have to fight again. We offer you eternal life, safe from danger. We still have humans living behind our walls to serve us, and we breed them for the most succulent flesh. Come, join us, and let this Wildering riffraff go back to their wandering ways.”

“There is no such thing as eternal life, nor safety from danger,” Hoss said. “As you will soon find out.”

“Do you not realize what will happen?” the god said, sounding puzzled. “Can you not see our power?”

“You’ve made a mistake. I see before me not a god, but a vampire. No vampire has ever defeated me.”

“Ah, I see,” said the god. “Then you must be taught a lesson. For I am no simple vampire. I am indeed a god.”

The creature began to grow, filling the tent like a dark cloud, but the dark was deeper than ordinary blackness; it was nothingness, a hole in existence that sucked up all light, a Shadow from which nothing could escape.

Hoss lifted his spear and threw it with all his might into the center of the black void, but the emptiness came roiling toward him and washed over him, and he felt its unending cold, heard its everlasting echo and saw its infinite nothingness, and he was consumed.

#

Hoss awoke at dusk, his vampire senses alive to the coming night. His heart was pounding. The blue blood that usually flowed sluggishly felt liquid and hot.

It is a vision of the future,
that’s clear
, he thought.
But what does it mean?

Who were the gods? They were vampires, but also something more. There was something that his subconscious was noticing that only his dreams revealed, but like all such visions, it was murky and unclear.

He made his way to the IT room, where he found Jared waiting. Before he could speak, the IT chief grabbed Hoss by the arm. Though he wasn’t a big man, Jared was still stronger than Hoss, with his thirteen-year-old frame. He pulled Hoss into the stairwell.

“Don’t
ever
call me like that again,” he hissed. “The Council owns both the landlines and the Wi-Fi. They can hear everything we say.”

“Sorry,” Hoss said. “That was stupid of me.”

Jared glared at him for a few more seconds. “Well… I think I found where they’re hiding Fitzsimmons. I didn’t figure it out from the messages, but from a strange little rental bill we’ve been getting every month for a small apartment building in a rundown part of town. I figure that’s got to be it.”

He handed Hoss a torn piece of notebook paper with an address scribbled on it. “There’s a camera in the apartment. I can’t access it, but I can turn it off. And I will, at exactly eight o’clock.

“Thanks, Jared. I won’t forget this,” Hoss promised.

“No?” Jared said as he walked away. “Actually, I’d rather you
did
forget, if you don’t mind.”

#

The apartment was in Camberwell Green, a part of London that Hoss probably would have avoided if he weren’t vampire. Though he was small of stature and he saw some burly lads eyeballing him, none of them approached him. The aura of a vampire wasn’t always obvious, but it was there. Other predators picked up on it and made way for him.

He trudged up the stairwell, which smelled of piss and cigarette smoke, and idly browsed the graffiti as he passed, though he couldn’t make any sense of it. Each successive floor he climbed was less populated, until on the final floor, it appeared that only one apartment was occupied.

A large vampire stood in front of the door. Hoss wandered idly up to him. As he’d hoped, the guard didn’t take a very good look at him, and clearly judged him to be human. It wasn’t until Hoss was almost upon him that the guard began to realize who, or rather, what, was approaching.

Hoss covered the last few feet in a bound and landed on the guard’s shoulders, sliding down his back and grabbing his neck and chin along the way. He twisted the guard’s head as hard as he could as he continued down to the floor, letting his weight do the work, and heard the crack of the other vampire’s spine. The guard dropped backward onto the floor. He twitched and groaned, his eyes bugging out in disbelief. Hoss stomped down on his neck, completing the severing of his spine.

Hoss opened the unlocked door and carefully poked his head around it, but there was no one inside the room. He dragged the guard’s body in behind him. He regretted killing the guard, but couldn’t see any way around it.

There was another door at the other end of the room, and he quickly crossed to it and opened it.

Behind it was a tiny room, little more than a closet, with a single light bulb hanging down over a table. On the table was a child-sized coffin. Dried blood covered the floor, with hanks of fur and bone sticking up from it. The gore smelled awful. Hoss approached the coffin warily.

The armless, legless vampire lay in a puddle of his own waste, the gastric juices burning away the flesh of his lower torso. His hair and beard were long and gray, and his eyes were blurry, but through all the waste and destruction, Hoss recognized Fitzsimmons.

The vampire tried to focus on him. There was a small spark of recognition in his rheumy eyes. “You…” he managed to gasp.

“I’m Hoss. Do you remember me?”

The pitiful creature managed to nod his head. “You… are one of them?”

“No,” Hoss said. “I am no part of this. I’m here to get you out.”

He took a deep breath, leaned down and lifted the vampire from the muck. There was a sucking sound, as if his torso was stuck, then a sudden release of pressure, and Hoss stumbled backward. Fitzsimmons was slimy and hard to hold onto. Hoss managed to maneuver his way out of the chamber and into the main room before the vampire’s torso slipped out of his grasp and dropped to the floor with a thud.

Fitzsimmons glared at him, but at least it seemed to wake the old vampire up.
Anger is better hopelessness
, Hoss thought. He saw a bathroom off to one side, found a soiled towel and grabbed a roll of toilet paper. The water was a little brown-looking, but preferable to the slime that covered Fitzsimmons. It took the entire roll of toilet paper and constant rinsing of the dirty towel, but eventually Hoss managed to get down through the filth to the skin beneath.

Once his body was dried, Fitzsimmons was easier to carry. Hoss lifted him again, wondering how they were going to get out of there without being observed by the human population. Even in this part of London, someone carrying a limbless torso around would be remarkable.

He felt something nip at his throat and pulled Fitzsimmons’s face away from his neck. Sure enough, the other vampire’s fangs were fully extended, and there was a crazed look in his eyes.

“What the hell are you doing?” Hoss exclaimed. “Don’t eat me, damn it.”

“Please,” the thing whined. “I must have blood…”

Hoss went over to the guard, who was lying near the doorway, and dropped Fitzsimmons on top of the body. He didn’t have to do any more than that. The voracious vampire had no trouble tearing his way through the body using his fangs alone, consuming everything but the bones within a few minutes.