Dark Season: The Complete Box Set (59 page)

Bowie

We walk all night through the pouring rain, eventually reaching the outskirts of the human town just before dawn. Moving quickly, we hurry across the flooded railroad tracks and head for the dumpsters behind one of the small restaurants. The lids are padlocked shut, but we've brought bolt-cutters and soon we're going through the trash. This is the kind of stuff that usually feeds us: out-of-date food that the humans have decided is no longer fit for consumption. Unfortunately, it looks tonight as if the owners of the restaurant have realized that we're feeding from their garbage, and they've poured bleach on all the left-over food. Now that we have human bodies and human guts, we can't risk eating this stuff. It's poison.

"Damn them," Cassandra says, rain streaming down her face as she slams the lid shut. "Now what?" It's hard to hear her above the sound of rain on every surface: rain on the plastic lid of the dumpster; rain on the asphalt of the parking lot; rain on the trees; rain on the outside of the cloth hood that covers most of my head.

"We try somewhere else," I say, trying to keep our momentum going. With cold rain seeping through our clothes, it would be too easy to give up and return empty-handed, but then what would we eat? "We can't go back without food, the others will kill us. They'll starve."

"I think there's another restaurant on the other side of the parking lot," she says. "We've got time, if we hurry."

We head across the wide, open space toward the other restaurant. If anything, the rain is getting worse, belting down so hard that the whole city seems to be hissing. Trying to keep to the shadows as much as possible, we nevertheless find ourselves passing perilously close to large artificial lights. In the distance, in one corner of the parking lot, there's a solitary parked car, with two humans having sex in the back seat.

"Animals," I say, pausing to watch from afar.

"Bowie," Cassandra says with urgency in her voice, "come on! We don't have time!"

Hurrying on, we quickly reach the next set of dumpsters. Fortunately, these ones aren't padlocked and we find plenty of sandwiches that have been thrown out. It's crazy: this is good food, yet it's abandoned so freely. Sometimes I wonder how much longer the human race can last.

"Hurry," Cassandra says as she scoops as many sandwiches as possible into her bag. I'm struck by the look relief on her face. There was a time when she and I commanded the greatest banquets in the halls of Gothos, yet now we're reduced to finding pleasure in simple hauls of scrap food left behind by lowly humans. Times have changed...

Glancing up, I notice a figure walking along the street. It's her, the girl I've seen before. She seems to walk the streets of Dedston at night. She never notices me, but I notice her. She's always wearing a white dress, and she has such a pretty face. One day perhaps I'll speak to her.

"Are you helping?" Cassandra asks.

"Sorry," I mutter. Soon we've loaded up with enough to keep us going for a couple of days. Say what you like about humans, but their wastefulness means that plenty of other species are able to survive. If they were more efficient, and more careful, people like us wouldn't stand a chance.

"We should get going," I say eventually, noticing that the sky is starting to lighten. Dawn is coming

"Careful!" Cassandra shouts. We both crouch behind the dumpster as a police car drives slowly across the parking lot. For a moment, I worry that they've seen us. I'd hate to have to kill again. Fortunately, the police car drives away, its occupants apparently having not even spotted the two people having sex in the car nearby.

Loaded down with as much food as we can carry, Cassandra and I turn and hurry back across the parking lot, over the railroad tracks and into the forest. It takes us hours to make our way toward the encampment, but although some of our group feel it would be safe to move closer to the town, the rest of us insist that we must stay far away from the humans. If the people of Dedston discovered that we existed, they'd surely drive us from the area. There would be violence, and we would never be allowed any peace. It's better like this.

As we're getting close to home, Cassandra stops as something seems to catch her attention nearby. "Look," she says.

I follow her gaze down to the river that runs through the forest, but at first I don't see anything except rain, rain and more rain. The water is flowing fast, probably rushed along by heavy rain on higher ground.

"There," she says, putting her bags on the floor and hurrying over to the swollen riverbank, which is threatening to burst after several days of heavy rain. "Don't you see him?"

I look again. Down in the water, almost completely submerged, with just his head and shoulders visible, there's a man. He looks to be badly hurt and unconscious, and he's covered in thick mud from the river. The mud is so dark, it's almost impossible to see the man at all in the moonlight.

"He's dead," I say, turning away.

"No," Cassandra replies. "He's breathing."

"Barely," I say, looking back. "We don't have time to help stray humans. If he's not dead now, he'll die of pneumonia in a couple of hours. Come on." I turn to walk away, but I quickly realize that Cassandra isn't following. I stop and look back at her. "There's nothing we can do!" I shout over the rain. "We have to go!"

"He's not human," Cassandra says.

I sigh. "Come on," I say, "we have to get out of here."

Instead of listening to me, however, she starts scrambling down to the water, making her way carefully over to the injured man. With the riverbank reduced to a pile of mud, she's taking a hell of a risk going down there. Sometimes, I think she forgets that we're not what we used to be. She acts like she's still invincible, but one wrong step and she could fall straight into the current, and I'm not certain I'd be able to save her. How ironic it would be, if the great Cassandra were drowned while trying to help some pathetic fool in the middle of a storm.

"I'm not helping you!" I shout down to her. "We can barely look after ourselves. We certainly can't nurse some idiot back to health just because we happened to find him in the forest. We don't need another mouth to feed."

"He must have been washed away by the river," she shouts back at me as she examines him. "He's lucky to be alive. He's bleeding, and..." She pauses.

I wait as the rain pounds down on us.

"What?" I ask eventually.

She turns to me, a look of shock on her face.

"What?" I ask again, becoming increasingly impatient. It's time for us to get out of here.

"It's him," she says, her voice filled with fear.

"Who?" I ask.

"Him," she says simply.

It takes me a moment to realize what she means, but finally I feel a knot tightening in my stomach, as if some long-buried anger is starting to work its way back to the surface. "It can't be him," I say, my voice weak, betraying fear. After all these years, it's simply impossible, although my heart reminds me that Cassandra is not often wrong about important things. "You're wrong," I continue. "It's just some human. Leave him."

"It's him," she says, wiping some of the bloodied mud from his face. "Oh God, it's really him." With the mud gone, I can see that she's right. It's that same face that I see whenever I close my eyes; that same face that pursues me in my nightmares and eludes me in my dreams. "Are you sure?" I ask, even though I know the answer.

She nods.

"Then we definitely have to get out of here," I say. "We don't owe him anything. He deserves to die like this, like a common rat. He left us to die, we should return the favor."

"No," she says, trying to pull him out of the water, but failing. She hauls him up again, but she falls back into the mud. She's not strong enough to pull him out. "Help me!" she shouts.

I don't reply. I just stand there, watching as she struggles. Slowly, she manages to get him up the river bank until finally she drops his body next to my feet. Staring down at him, I find it hard to believe that I'm seeing his face against after all these years. The last time I saw him, he was tearing the Silk Prince to shreds while the armies of Sangreth marched closer and closer. Perhaps Cassandra can forgive him for everything he did to us, and for how he left us all those years ago, but I refuse to lift a finger to help him. Stepping closer, I lean down and spit on Patrick's face.

Sophie

"Dumpster divers," Shelley says, peering into the trash. "Fucking scavenging assholes." I watch as she unscrews a bottle of bleach and pours it onto the food waste she's just thrown away. All that good food being ruined for no reason.

"Do you really have to do that?" I ask, grabbing a sandwich that escaped the bleach. "That's food. There are hungry people around. Maybe -"

"I know!" she interrupts, seeming irritated. "It's not my idea. The boss says it's for insurance. If some hobo grabs a baguette from our dumpster and gets a bad stomach, he could take the restaurant to the cleaners. Don't blame me." She puts the lid back on the bleach. "Blame our fucked-up, blame-centric legal system. Fucking lawyers. Fucking everyone and everything."

"You're in a good mood today," I mutter.

She shakes the dumpster to make sure that the bleach gets down to the bottom, and then we walk back around to the restaurant's side door. Shelley's on a ten-minute break, which she's using primarily to swear, smoke and generally vent her frustrations about life. She's been working these dead-end jobs for years, but I think she's getting to the age where she's starting to worry that she'll never break free.

"So I'm going out to the forest again this afternoon," I say as we stand against the wall, looking out over the parking lot. There was a storm last night, and large puddles of rainwater have collected all across the increasingly cracked asphalt. This town is falling apart.

"Waste of time," Shelley says.

"Says you" I reply.

Shelley shakes her head. "It was a waste of time yesterday, when there was still a chance of finding a trail. It's a complete and utter waste of total fucking time today now that the rain's washed everything away. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, except the needle is a vampire and the haystack is five thousand acres of boring forest."

"So you don't want to come and help?"

"What if he's dead?" Shelley asks, taking a puff on her cigarette. "He didn't look good last time we saw him, Soph. Maybe you should go talk to that Nimrod guy again, find out what he knows."

"I need to find Abigail," I remind her.

"Exactly," Shelley says. "You need to find Abigail. Not Patrick. And if you're really focused on finding her, you need to go through Nimrod. Unless..."

I wait for her to continue. "Unless what?" I ask eventually

"Unless you're just using Abigail as an excuse to keep looking for Patrick."

"Bullshit," I say, looking down at my feet. I hate the way Shelley keeps insinuating that I have feelings for Patrick. I mean, maybe there was a time when he and I were starting to get close, but everything ended when he used my body and stole our child. If I saw him now, I wouldn't kiss him; I'd punch him.

"I'm not telling you not to do it," Shelley says, "I'm just saying you should be a little more honest about your motivation."

"I'm heading out there as soon as I leave here," I say. "I'll have my phone with me."

"You're crazy," she replies. "You're wasting your time going round and round in circles." She pauses, taking another drag on her cigarette. "I'll come and meet you as soon as I'm wrapped up here, okay?" Stubbing the cigarette out on the wall, she leads me back around to the staff entrance. "Shit!" she says, looking down.

I follow her stare, and see a large patch of dried blood on the door. "Nice," I say.

"How did I miss that?" she asks, sighing. "Those fucking animals."

"Animals?" I ask.

"Not actual animals.
People
animals." She grabs a cloth from inside and starts trying to scrub the blood away. "It's not just hobos from town," she says, clearly annoyed. "There's these people who live a few miles away, in the forest. They come into town at night and steal food, but they also fight and stuff. The cops won't do anything 'cause it's too much effort to go out into the wilds and track 'em down. We get stuck with the clean-up 'cause we're so close to the edge of town. There was even a dead guy found a few blocks away last week. These fucking vagrants are such a nightmare. I swear, if I ever see one of 'em, I'll..."

"Pour bleach onto his food?" I ask helpfully.

"You know what I mean," she replies, having got most of the blood away. "I swear, if I ever end up as a hobo - and let's face it, there's a distinct possibility that it could happen - I'll travel. I'll hit the road like Jack Kerouac or Tom Waits. I won't sit around in some soggy camp in the middle of the forest near a no-good little shithole of a town, diving for food in trash cans that most people fill up with bleach. I mean, that's kind of a pathetic lifestyle, don't you think?"

"Some people haven't got a choice," I reply.

"You've always got a choice," she says. "No matter how shitty your life is, you can always find some way to make it better. Even if it's in small increments. Over time, it adds up. People who live like animals are doing it for a reason. Maybe they don't wanna admit what that reason is, but there's a reason. They're hiding from someone, or something like that."

I smile. "What do you want to be, Shelley? I mean, when you're all grown up."

She grins. "A fucking astronaut," she says without hesitation. "Going to Mars and all that shit."

"Good luck," I say, before pausing for a moment. "Maybe you're right about one thing, though. Maybe I should go talk to Nimrod. He seemed to know a lot about Patrick, and I guess I could use all the information I can get right now."

"What if you don't like what he tells you?" she replies. "What if he tells you Abigail's gone forever, and Patrick's dead?"

I shake my head. "It's not as simple as that. Nothing's as simple as that with Patrick. He doesn't just disappear without a trace. He's -"

"Different?" Shelley asks, laughing. "Every guy seems different. They all turn out to be the same." She pauses. "Except Patrick's an actual vampire, so there might be a
few
differences." She checks her watch. "I've got to get back to work," she says. "You want to wait and I'll come with you in a couple of hours?"

"To see Nimrod? No, it's fine."

"You sure?" she asks. "You don't know if he's safe."

"He seems okay. I think he's just like me. He's desperate. I don't what his story is, but it seems like he's been through something like this with Patrick before. Don't worry, I'll be fine. But if you want to come out to the woods with me later, give me a call."

She smiles as she heads back inside. "I really, really don't want to go out to the woods with you. Not ever again," she says. "What time are we setting off?"

"Call me," I say.

After taking a bite from the sandwich I rescued from the dumpster, I turn and walk away across the damp parking lot. Reaching into my pocket, I pull out a few notes and some change. I count it up and find that I have a grand total of three dollars and fifteen cents. That's not gonna get me too far. Hell, by the end of the day, maybe
I'll
be taking a look in the dumpsters for food, just like the hobos. Right now, though, I have bigger things to worry about. Patrick's alive. I don't know how I know, but I'm absolutely certain that he's alive and he's somewhere nearby. I just have to find him, and for that I need some expert help. I need Charles Nimrod.