The Blood Bargain (2 page)

Moments later Mrs. Simmons was back, in her collected manner she explained to us our parents would be picking us up shortly. A Red Alert for a possible terrorist attack had been announced on the News.

At
that point we filed out and life resumed. Texting my friends on Friday night planning, whether or not Steve
Tisland
cheated on Jessica with Karen at the last football game. My three best friends wanted to come over later that night and watch
a bunch of amateurs try to sing into the big leagues on cable
, I couldn't wait.

Little did I know I wouldn't see them that night.
Or ever again for that matter. Dad picked me up in his red SUV at the circle drive out front. He looked stressed with all those extra wrinkle lines in his forehead, but Dad had always looked stressed so I didn
’
t think much of it. He
’
d been that way since Mom died. Dad had a busy job, being a Fed and all. I wasn
’
t really sure what that meant or what he really did. I just knew that he worked for the government and it was always weird hours. When he wasn
’
t out doing whatever, he was tending to my every whim. New clothes, dinners out, and so on. I can admit it now; I was very spoiled back then.

I remember t
hinking when I got in the car I’
d ask him if we could hit the mall, summer was coming up and I wanted a tenth pair of sandals. However, when I got in my dog Spike was in the
back seat. I asked him if we were going home when he turned the wrong way. He just shook his head, turned up the radio on the oldies station and kept driving.

I've always meant to ask him if he knew more than the others because of his job, wondering if there was some way we could have saved
Steph
, Sarah, Crystal or even grumpy old Mr.
Waterson
from across the street. I never have though,
shoulda
woulda
coulda's
do not resurrect the dead.

We ended up in Milo, Iowa. Population 817 according to the sign, the ridiculously small town was about an hour and a half south of where we had lived. Dad worked with a guy, Richard Mineral, who had a farm there, 56 acres of no man
’
s land. No cell service, no Internet. Aside from the cows, chickens and other smelly nonsense he raised Shetland ponies. I volunteered to help with them during those first days; they were beyond adorable and gave me something to keep my sanity.

Well more
voluntold
than volunteered.

At first I acted like a typical teenager stomping around screaming my life was over. That ended when we turned on the news. The first two days the reports called it rioting. Then a possible biological attack.

Landlines quit working on the fourth day. Television was on EMS only by the sixth.

My eye caught movement from the right, pulling me out of my memories. The steady fluid motions of someone who still breathed. As he came into view, I smiled.

T
he arrival of Cole Marshal indicated the end of my shift. He was a few years older than me, 28 I think. He was in good shape, lean and muscular with an all American features. A 1950
’
s dream boat, if you could look past his armaments. I had my crossbow, Cole preferred katana. Plural. Crisscross straps across his broad chest gave him the look of some sort of anime character.
I’m
not sure why he always carried two;
I’d
only ever seen him use one. I guessed one was a
b
ackup of some sort, or perhaps it was just for that bad ass image. He told me once before the outbreak he was heavy into martial arts.

Knowing those guys tended to fall into the picked on category in the old suburbia world; my guess on the weapons was for the image. Like a lot of the men in town they wore their hair as short as possible, worried a rogue deadhead would get a hand full and pull them to their demise.

There was a lot of that in the beginning.

He smiled back and gave me a little wave. In another life I probably would have swooned at the gesture,
hoping he’
d take me out to a movie. These days, there was no time for those thoughts, so I regarded him like all the others. Another survivor, a teammate against operation

wipe out humanity.

"Three today." I handed Cole the
walkie
for his shift. He clipped it onto his leather belt.

"Three? Damn, those bloodsuckers
ain't
pullin
their weight lately." I shrugged. No point in stirring Cole up more than he was currently. He, like many of the people in our community, detested the arrangement.

"Yeah I know, but who's
gonna
tell them that? You?"

"Hell to the no. Those creeps freak me out more than the living dead."

"They are living dead." Cole punched me in the arm.

"You know what I meant smart ass." I flipped him some playful insults and started back to town. He lucked out this time, with daylight waning in the autumn his shift was short. Cole would run his hours till nightfall, then they would take over. Vampires. As if the deadheads

W
eren
’
t enough to throw at us.

T
hings got really bad a month into the outbreak. The military units had started going rogue. Ham radio told us they were executing everyone, dead or not. Bombing infested cities. Lo
oting and Pillaging. They weren’
t too far off from our position, neither was a hotbed of infestation.

Dad and the other adults had a tough call to make.

Stay and fortify or get the group moving. Of the 817 residents of Milo, roughly 500 stayed after the initial outbreak. We picked up 350 more refugees. Mostly children from neighboring towns. Couple of teachers

from the elementary and preschools loaded up their entire student body into buses and hit the road, those brave souls will be forever heroes in my mind. However, after they arrived our folks realized planning an exodus had become next to impossible.

They debated anyway, weighing both scenarios; food rations, transportation. There were a lot of arguments, a lot of throwing things. Adults gathered around noon to come to a decision. The sun set and they

were still heatedly at an
impasse
. It seemed half wanted to cut and run and half wanted to stay. I could hear my Dad
’
s voice through the floorboards booming that division was suicide. I finally got the courage to duck in the planning room at about 9pm that night, driven by fear that Dad had been gone too long.

He ordered me to sit in the corner, which sounded a lot better
than going back upstairs. That’
s when they came.

There was a quick knock on the front door; I had about jumped out of my seat. With guns drawn, one of the men answered it. When the door had opened, he sort of stood to the side at attention, like he was a door stop.

In the doorway were three figures straight out of a Vogue magazine. Two men and a woman. As one they entered the hall and the air temperature had seemed to drop.

The woman was blond, almost six feet tall and built lean like she owned the catwalk. Her blue eyes were haunting, her makeup heavy across her lids to increase the effect. She wore a little black dress and six inch red pumps. Not exactly the outfit I would pick for the end of the world. Her pale hair slicked back and pulled into a high pony tail which flipped as she walked.

The men were equally spellbinding. One who was a cliché; long black hair, and a face that belonged on a romance book cover. His body was the only thing that broke the mold. He wasn
’
t lean and frail like most

vampires are portrayed. He was a brick house that had been wrapped in an Armani suit. A suit that I could only assume was completely custom; his arms were easily wider than my waist. He towered over the female so I could only guess at his height.

The third one was smaller than the other two, probably only five ten or so. I didn.t get a good look at him as he was hanging back from the others.

I may have, had my Dad not shielded me immediately and started barking orders. He then rushed me back up those oak suburban stairs faster than you could say marmalade.

Even so, I knew what had happened by morning. Everyone did. They were not human. What had entered the hall that night were creatures commonly known as Vampires.

And they had offered an arrangement, one that most would examine from a thousand different angles and perspectives, one that many would outright refuse. It was an arrangement that despite these facts the adults in our group readily accepted. Hell, I heard it took the adults less than an hour to unanimously agree to the terms.

When the sun set the Vampires would protect our band of survivors, in exchange we would offer ourselves up to them for sustenance. Their leader, Caius, vowed no humans would die from the feedings, they did not require exorbitant amounts.

That first night those undead creeps cleared
an
eight mile perimeter, undoubtedly saving us from being completely overrun.

That was ten years ago.

Now, we have the colony. No longer called Milo, Iowa. Or even Iowa after the Indians who once roamed
this land, it’
s now just Junction
;
g
iven our strategic location at the center of the land mass.

What's so strategic about it? After the wall went up we discovered a very important fact.

We were not the only ones. The vampires had made their deal everywhere they found the living.

Their new feudal era had begun.

Chapter 2

“Anybody home?” I called out, kicking my boots off by the door. I had set my bow on the porch outside moments earlier; I
’
d learned my lesson with bringing it in the house when it was dirty.

My home sweet home was a four bed two bath Victorian near the center of town. It had endured the chaos in style. The original stain glass windows were intact and the walls unmarred by blood splashes and bullets.

Zoe popped her head around the corner of the kitchen and put a finger to her lips, her nice way of telling me to shut it.

My Dad and I shared this house with the Russell family; Zoe, her husband Mark, their three year old twins Max and Tyler, and her sister Candice. Seven people in a home was not uncommon; helped with protection in the beginning and heating in the winter. Honestly, now it was more a side effect of the lack of real estate in the area. Funny thing was nobody minded.

“So
rry!” I whispered. “Hope I didn’
t wake the boys.”

“Well I
don’t
hear any wailing, think we.re okay. How was your day
Liv
?”

“I had to put down three.” Zoe stopped peeling potatoes for a moment and took a deep breath.

“You
don’t
say.” Her voice was flat, that controlled motherly worry tone. Even her long blonde waves seemed to lose their shine when she was upset.

“I think the council needs to have a chat with Caius, they haven.t gotten that close in over a year.”

“I agree, you should talk to your Dad tonight.”

“Plan to. Hey, do you need help?” I hated burdening Zoe and Candice with all of the house work when I was out on patrol. Meal prep, like so many other things had taken a giant step backward by about two hundred years. It could now take hours to prepare dinner depending on what we had. Microwaves and drive thru windows were a forgotten memory. Well, not completely forgotten. Every once in a
while I still get a craving for a handful of McDonald's fries.

I walked over to Zoe, my hand out for a peeler. Rather than give me one she turned up her nose.

“How about you take a wash first? You smell horrible.” She chided. Okay yeah there was a bit of really dead blood on me.

“
Fiiine
. Be back in ten.” Around the back from the kitchen was the door to the backyard. I smiled and looked right as I exited our place. Under the large oak tree I had buried my dog when he blissfully died of old age two years ago. Maybe someday I would also be so lucky. Not a day

went buy that I di
d
n
’
t miss that little guy. We had some pets that survived the turmoil; a few gals were desperately trying to breed the ones we had so they didn.t die out. I hoped someday we could get one for the twins.

Directly down the wooden steps was our interpretation of a shower. Basically it was open rain water well with a grate to filter out the leaves and other debris.
Worked like a charm three seasons out of the year.

The basin dumped out into a pipe with an on off switch and a shower head. Not exactly rocket science, but better than a dip in the river.