Blood of Gold (24 page)

“You can’t believe any old shit you hear,” Feller said, flashing his badge. This guy had never liked him, he recalled. Salvatore was his name, or something Italian, or maybe Spanish. Salvador? His dark good looks could have come from either ethnic heritage. He’d been shunted off to the prison system because Feller had graded him low on his tests. Didn’t matter. They just needed to get inside long enough to bite someone; maybe this asshole, if he accompanied them.

Salvatore examined the FBI badge, casting a suspicious look at Kelton’s huge bulk. Feller had insisted the big vampire shave his beard, cut his hair and at least try to fit into a suit. Which is what he was doing: approximating wearing a suit. It looked more like a sack draped over his shoulders. Laura had wanted to come with them, but Feller couldn’t think of a plausible excuse to bring her along. They had left her pouting on the steps of Halliday’s trailer.

“I’ll send Perkins with you,” Salvatore said. “He’s worthless enough to be your nursemaid.”

“Fine.”

“Perkins!” the supervisor shouted.

“I’m right here, sir,” said a low voice from behind them.

“Shit, Perkins! I swear, you’re always sneaking up on me. That’s why I said you’re worthless. Didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said, but there was loathing in his face. He was an average-sized man with lots of baby fat. He looked soft.

“Yeah, well. Take Agents Feller and…”

“Kelton.”

“Take Agents Feller and Kelton to SHU.”

Perkins looked surprised and a little troubled. The Secure Housing Unit was where they held the worst and most violent offenders. Those inmates didn’t care how many guards or fellow inmates they injured or killed; they knew it didn’t matter, because they weren’t getting out anyway, not ever. It drove most of them crazy, to one degree or another.

“Sir, they aren’t allowed visitors,” Perkins said.

“These aren’t visitors. These here are the high and mighty FBI.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and Perkins. Be careful. The prisoners on the Island haven’t killed a guard in days and days, so they’re probably feeling deprived.” The SHU was called the Island because it was in the middle of the facility, surrounded by barren ground and its own fences.

Perkins led them away without a word.

“Healthy work environment,” Kelton said.

“Real esprit de corps,” Feller agreed.

Perkins finally spoke up. “Yeah, well, try working here. It fucks with everyone’s head, but Salvatore is a special kind of asshole.”

There was only one corridor to the entrance of the Island, and it had secure guardhouses on either end. The SHU control room itself was encased in concrete, with such thick windows that a missile couldn’t have gotten in. From there, the guards would open one cell at a time, every few days. The hallway led to the showers and then to a small courtyard open to the sky. Open, that is, if you considered twenty-foot-high walls covered in razor wire “open.”

There were only two guards inside the blockhouse. There wasn’t any need for more. Since it was night, everything was in lockdown.

Perkins knocked on the door.

“What do you want, Perkins?” a voice said, crackling over the speaker beside the door.

“We have a couple of FBI agents here,” Perkins said into the speaker. “They’re here to question a prisoner.”

“That isn’t allowed.”

“That’s what I said. Go tell it to Salvatore.”

“Salvatore. Shit.”

There was a brief buzzing sound and the door opened. The room was small, lined with tiny screens keeping an eye, day and night, on the prisoners’ cells, which were bare concrete with no windows. Most of the prisoners appeared to be asleep, except one guy who was literally bouncing off the walls.

“Isn’t he going to hurt himself, doing that?” Feller asked, nodding at the screen.

“God, I really hope so,” the guard sitting before the screens said. He was chubby and probably not too tall, though it was hard to tell with him slumped in his chair like he was. The name tag on his uniform said “Carl Winters.” “Somehow, he always seems to bruise himself just enough to get a little hospital bed rest. Kind of smart, really,” Winters concluded in a tone of begrudging admiration.

The other guard, who was apparently in charge, got up and shook hands with Feller and Kelton. He had a rifle in one hand. From this room, he could fire into any of the cells. There were little slots in every wall. This guard was older-looking, with almost completely gray hair. His name tag said “Bill Thomanson.” He was probably only a year or two away from retirement.
Sorry about this, old fella,
Feller thought.
You almost made it.

“Which inmate are you wanting to––inappropriately, and as far as I know, against the rules––talk to?” Thomanson asked.

“How many prisoners you got in this block?” Feller countered.

“Two hundred,” Thomanson said, looking puzzled by the question. “We’re full up. So which one do you want to talk to?”

“All of them,” Kelton growled.

“Come again?” Thomanson requested, looking even more confused.

“I want to see all of them in the exercise yard.”

“What kind of joke is this?” Thomanson asked. He was raising his rifle ever so slowly. Kelton grabbed him by the throat and squeezed, and the shout Thomanson was trying to give was choked off. The rifle clattered to the floor, and there was a loud snap in the small room as Thomanson’s spine was broken.

Perkins was trying ineffectively to pull his sidearm, but Feller merely had to turn slightly to sink his fangs into the younger guard’s neck. He fell to the ground, twitching but still alive.

Then Carl Winters got up. He was taller than Feller had expected. He was also unarmed, and he held his hands out toward the vampires as if to ward them off. “What are you doing?” he asked incredulously. “Don’t you know you can’t get out of here? I couldn’t open these doors even if I wanted to.”

“We don’t want to get out,” Feller said. “We want you to release the prisoners.”

“That’s impossible,” Winters said, his voice quivering. “We can only open one cell at a time.”

“What if there’s a fire?” Feller asked.

A flicker of doubt crossed the chubby guard’s face, and Feller knew his hunch was right. “Show me how to open them right now,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, “and I won’t kill you.”

The guard pointed to a red button at the end of the console. It was surrounded by a wire cage, which Feller twisted loose.

“You press that button and every alarm in this place, the most secure supermax in the country, will go off,” Winters warned. “I really don’t understand what you think you’re accomplishing here, buddy. You’re just going to end up in one of those cells, especially if any of these monsters get outside.”

Feller nodded and pressed the button. Sure enough, alarms started sounding throughout the complex. Echoes from the far walls competed with the higher notes of the nearby alarms.

The doors to all the cells flew open, and within seconds, the prisoners were pouring out. Kelton had the older guard’s keys, and he went to the far end of the room and opened the door. Feller dragged the still-twitching body of Perkins over and tossed him into the corridor. He turned and addressed Winters, who was so frightened he couldn’t stand and had sunk back into his chair. “You too.”

“What? You said you wouldn’t kill me!”

“And I’m not killing you. I’m letting you go. If you’re fast enough, you’ll survive. Now get out there!”

Winters didn’t budge.

Kelton walked over, picked the guard up as if he was a child and threw him out into the corridor. Then he closed the door.

Out in the hallway, Perkins was waking up. He stood up, twitching. His arms and legs seemed to have their own controls. His red eyes fixed on Winters, and in seconds, he had his fangs in his coworker’s neck. He sucked the man dry in what seemed mere moments and dropped the body, then whirled around at the sound of more prey coming toward him.

The first of the inmates turned the corner about then, a huge man, his face and bald head covered in prison tats. A wide grin lit up his beefy face when he saw an unarmed guard running toward him. Only at the last second did he sense the danger, and he turned to run. Perkins leapt on top of him, riding his back, looking like a little kid getting a piggyback ride from his father––except he had his teeth sunk into the prisoner’s throat, and blood was painting the walls.

“Now what?” Kelton said.

“Now we wait. We find out who really
is
the worst of the worst.”

In the end, of the two hundred prisoners, only about half actually made it to the exercise yard. The others were shredded and gnawed on, and their remains littered the corridor. About fifty of these casualties hadn’t been able to handle the black blood of the Shadow Vampires. Like Perkins, who had burst apart only minutes after passing on the infection, these fifty prisoners must have still had a few redeeming human characteristics. It had doomed them.

The one hundred or so survivors of this test had apparently agreed not to turn on each other. Now they were milling around the open space, uncertain what to do. After a few squawks, Feller figured out the loudspeaker system.

“Jump out of there!” he said, and his voice echoed back at him. “You are Shadow Vampires. I assure you, you can reach the top of the wall.”

The prisoners looked at each other, saw the blood on each other’s faces and realized that the voice coming over the loudspeaker was telling the truth. First one of them, then several more, then all of them started trying to leap the twenty-foot walls. They couldn’t achieve that height at first, but with a few tries, some of them started to almost make it… only to get hung up on the razor wire and sliced to pieces, screaming. The others soon figured out that they could crawl over the bodies of the trapped prisoners. The bodies on the wire were sliced deeper and deeper, and parts of them started sliding down the walls and landing with a splat in the courtyard. Soon enough, the courtyard was empty.

“What are you going to do now?” Salvatore’s voice came into the room. “You’re trapped in there. The prisoners will just be shot, even if they manage to get off the Island. You haven’t accomplished a thing.”

“Go ahead, shoot them,” Feller said, assuming Salvatore could hear him. “The prisoners are vampire now: a special kind of vampire. You can’t stop them.”

“
Vampires?
”

“How do you think they got away?”

There was a long silence. Feller could imagine that the guards were having a fierce argument. Some of the gung-ho guards would want to attack, but if he knew Salvatore…

The loudspeaker squawked. “But what about you, Feller? You and your friend want to give up now, or do we have to come in shooting?”

“You can’t stop us either,” Feller said. He nodded to Kelton, who took out his cellphone and punched some numbers. There was the sound of a far-off explosion. The lights flickered off and then came back on again, though with less intensity.

“We have backup generators,” Salvatore said, sounding triumphant.

“Yes, but not for the floodlights,” Feller answered. He motioned to Kelton, and they moved into the cellblock and down to the exercise yard. Where the bodies were piled deepest on the razor wire, some of vampires were still alive, though in pieces. They leaped up, landing on the soft bodies, then dropped into the darkness on the other side of the wall and disappeared.

#

The next morning, Feller and Kelton rounded up the survivors. They could sense where the new vampires were hiding. It turned out that black blood called to black blood, and Shadow sought Shadow. In the end, they found only twenty-one of the Pelican Bay Shadow Vampires alive. The prison guards had had night-vision scopes, and since these new vampires hadn’t been taught how to hide in the darkness, most of them had been picked off with head shots.

“We just saved the great state of California a great deal of money,” Feller said.

Kelton only grunted, worried that the Master, who was due to arrive any day now, wouldn’t be happy with the paltry results.

“Well, we know these vampires are the real bastard ones,” Feller said, shrugging.

Still, they did better than the teacher, Miller, who returned with only four Shadow Vampires, and a whole lot better than the banker, Smith, who was a huge disappointment, having been hunted down by a full squad of FBI vampire hunters and gotten himself killed in the first few days.

They went back to Halliday’s trailer, where Laura nearly jumped into Kelton’s arms. He frowned at her, and she backed away, but the big vampire was barely off his feet before she had plopped herself onto his lap.

Feller and Kelton slept inside and let the new vampires fend for themselves outside. Soon, the neighborhood was all but wiped clean of humans. The Pelican Bay vampires had concocted a game: they delighted in knocking on the door of a house and seeing if they could talk themselves inside. Since most of them had prison pallor, lousy haircuts and neck tattoos, this wasn’t easy. Sometimes they used Laura as bait, but that was considered cheating. Most of the time, they failed, but the humans lost the game even when they won, for the vampires would force their way in in any case.

There were distant shouts and screams, even a gunshot, and then silence.

“If the Master doesn’t arrive soon, we’re going to have to move again,” Feller said.

Kelton was silent, as usual.

#

Feller went to sleep on one of the padded benches around the dining table, while Laura and Kelton took the little bed. In the middle of the day, Feller sat upright and grunted.

“What’s wrong?” Kelton asked.

“You don’t hear it?” Feller groaned.

“I feel a tickling, I think. What is it?”

“He’s
coming.”

Chapter 23

It wasn’t until they were on the road to Crescent City that Terrill realized he and Sylvie were alone, maybe for the first time since they had left Bend. One of his acolytes had offered the couple his small motor home. Terrill had been about to turn him down when Sylvie had gently interrupted and thanked him. From the gratified look on the vampire’s face, Terrill knew that Sylvie had, as usual, discerned the ways of the heart better than he.