“Yeah, I know. I get it.” I drove a dark red, 1986 Plymouth Duster that I’d bought with some of the money my mom left me in her will. Sure, it was a jalopy but it was my jalopy.
After another few moments, I felt her fingers caress behind my ear, playing with the hair back there and raising pleasant goose-bumps on the tender skin. “I like the way your hair feels, so nice and soft,” she said. “I love being able to run my fingers through it.”
I smiled. “Weren’t you the one who always complained that it made me look scruffy and unkempt?”
She laid her head against my shoulder. “Yes and it does. Can I help it if my eyes like one thing and my hands like another?”
I love how she sounds when she lets her voice get playful. She sounds like Eva Marie Saint trading silky banter with Cary Grant in North By Northwest.
I was about to make some Grantishly witty reply when she leaned forward, trying to see as far above us as the windshield would allow. “Avery, I think that helicopter is following us.”
I craned my neck to try to see what she was talking about, conscious that the cars ahead of me kept slowing down. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s there. I caught a glimpse of it back when we were still on one-ninety-five.”
“But how could they find us? And don’t say hidden tracking devices.”
She sighed. “Their helicopters are equipped with night vision, thermal imaging and telescopic lenses. They can read your license plate and body temperature from half a mile by match light.” Her mention of body temperature was a reference to the fact that, far from being the undead corpses of fiction and folklore, Vampyrs have a faster metabolism and higher body temperature than humans.
Vampyrs are a particular species of vampire which Caroline and other scientific types call Homo Sapiens Sanguivarus. There are others, which I’ll get into later, but the main thing is that we’re still living, breathing people who have been transformed at the genetic level to be able to live on human blood alone. Caroline’s been researching ways to improve that condition.
We were approaching Exit 8-A and, up ahead, the Turnpike split into separate bus/truck and car only lanes. Usually, this helped cut down on congestion but the overpass signs said that the truck lanes were closed for construction.
“They’re funneling us,” Caroline said. “Farther along, they’ll announce some accident that’s closed all the car lanes, too. Then we’ll be detoured off and while we’re hemmed in by cars on all sides, they’ll arrive as FBI agents and discreetly take us into custody.”
“Fuck that,” I said. “They can’t close the New Jersey Turnpike just to get us. What about all the news choppers that’ll come out to cover the supposed accident? They gonna fake that, too? Jackknife a semi full of oil and kill thirty people just to make it look convincing?”
“Avery,” Caroline said, invoking her ability to sound like my tenth grade math teacher. “This isn’t some local Reeve, this is Sebastian. He could shut down every airport in North America and keep the mainstream media from acknowledging it!”
I didn’t bother trying to argue. Caroline’s written a book on The Order (which I read as part of Vampyr 101) but the idea of a single group being able to control everything still seemed absurd.
Meanwhile, I’d seen the cars and trucks merging left. Traffic cones appeared in the farthest right lane and angled out to cut off the entrance to the truck lanes. Thick steel poles also hung across the lanes with “closed” signs on them, suspended with cables from an overhead rigging. Then, to make absolutely sure you got the point, a NJ State Trooper stood ready beside his patrol car, lights flashing.
I had an idea that, as they say in the movies, might just be crazy enough to work.
Fighting the left-bound flow of traffic, I moved into the right lane and considered the optimum place to break through the traffic cones. I’d only have a few seconds before the cop pulled his pistol and shot us. Being Vampyrs, we could survive gunshots but it would still hurt like hell. I decided that the smartest maneuver was to veer where we paralleled the trooper, running fast and straight at him for the shortest possible distance. This point also coincided with a gap between two of the poles and the edge of the trooper’s front bumper.
The moment arrived. I swerved and gunned the gas.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking the road less traveled.”
The trooper dodged around behind his vehicle as I clipped his bumper, ripped up my hood and spider-webbed both sides of my windshield crashing through the poles.
In retrospect, it’s probably the most ballsy, cinematic thing I’ve ever done but when I was doing it, I just felt blind terror. Caroline screamed. Now I was driving a smashed up Duster on a deserted two-lane highway with visibility only at the center of the windshield. Maybe I thought I’d jump off at the first exit, ditch the car once we were out of sight and steal another. Maybe I just thought we’d end up on World’s Wildest Police Chases.
My first hint that my brainstorm had been a mistake came when the trooper showed no sign of pursuing us.
The second was when I heard Caroline’s helicopter overhead.
The third and final one was the solid line of construction vehicles that blocked the road about a half-mile up. Silly me, with my head full of Caroline’s conspiracy warnings, it never even occurred to me they could be telling the truth about the road construction.
Yup. Crazy like a fox.
As I screeched to a halt, I could see the helicopter landing behind us in my rearview mirror: a big black sucker with no markings.
“Get out and run!” I shouted over the noise, popping my seat belt. “Head for those trees, I’ll try to keep them busy!”
I heard her scream my name but I was already gone.
* * * * *
I’d love nothing more than to tell you how my newly-acquired Vampyr strength allowed me to mop the asphalt with the guys in the chopper, or even how I took a few down in a valiant struggle before falling under the weight of their numbers, allowing my beloved to make her getaway.
Didn’t happen.
I came roaring out of the car expecting Hugo Weaving or maybe even old Cancer Man from The X-Files, instead, six commandos in black jumpsuits and body armor poured out and jogged toward me in formation. I charged, feeling confident in my enhanced Vampyr body and roared a challenge to draw their attention as I closed the distance.
They dropped me with a stun gun before I made it halfway.
Not one of those silly looking pistols with the wires, this was a gun akin to a shotgun and had I been able to look down, I would have seen a battery resembling a soda can attached to my chest with contacts sticking out from all sides.
What’s it feel like? Nothing.
I remember having no sense of touch, sight, sound, or taste. I think I remember smelling that ozone scent of rain but that might have been my imagination.
It didn’t knock me out. They did that with the tranquilizer darts as I lay there twitching on the concrete. They rolled me onto my stomach and cuffed me, while I watched Caroline, also in handcuffs, being led to the chopper by a middle aged, leathery soldier who I would later learn was Ash. I remember thinking that Ash looked more like Humphrey Bogart with a crew cut than Hugo Weaving.
Then I blacked out.
* * * * *
I woke up on a cold flagstone floor, less groggy than I would have expected given how I’d been put down. Caroline says that the few toxins and tranquilizers that work on Vampyrs tend to move through our systems faster. The first thing I remember is the stench. The air was thick with the smell of piss, shit, mildew and that old socks odor of unwashed bodies.
“Avery?” It was Caroline, just behind me. I opened my eyes and sat up, regretting my haste as a wave of dizziness crashed over me.
As my sight cleared, I saw that the muffled hums and creaks I’d been hearing came from people lying in stacks and stacks of cages. They were naked, bound, mouths taped shut and sustained by I.V. drips h
anging on the doors of their cages. I’m not talking full-size cages, either, there was just enough room for the person inside to lie on their stomach and maybe raise their head a little. There were men, women and children of all ethnicities and ages with colored, laminated tags on the front of each cage. Some of them cried while most just lay there while the bodily waste from the cages above them dropped down onto their backs and legs. There had to be close to a hundred cages, stacked four high and running nearly the length of one wall. The lowest cages were at knee height, raised up above drainage grates in the stone floor.
“Jesus Christ.”
“This is the reality of The Order,” Caroline said. Her voice echoed in the dungeon-like chamber. She was sitting against the wall opposite the cages, arms resting on her knees, eyes on the floor. “All the bureaucracy, all the politics, all the power and wealth and grand history: this is the foundation it rests on. You couldn’t understand before why I didn’t see the humor in those movies and television programs you showed me…”
“What … what is this?”
“This is the wine cellar.”
That’s what I was afraid she was gonna say.
A few of the caged people stared at me, pleading with their eyes.
“C’mon,” I said, getting to my feet. “Help me get them out of these cages before somebody comes.”
“The guards will just put them back and hurt them for causing trouble.” She hadn’t moved, except to glance up at me.
“Don’t think like that! There’s almost a hundred people here. We could overpower the guards and make a break for it!”
Caroline shook her head. “If they’re all free, the guards will just shoot them. It’s happened before. Even if we got through the guards, the stairways are monitored. The cellar will be sealed off, gassed—”
“But—”
“And if we got out before that happened, we’d still have to get through the house and more guards. Then a private island patrolled by a hundred or so experienced soldiers armed with machine guns, flamethrowers and attack dogs.”
I’d fallen back into my old role-player, problem-solving mode. It helped thinking of this as a fictional scenario designed to test my resourcefulness, rather than the bleak reality it was. “Well, every guard we take out gives us weapons and equipment to help even the odds. We use one of the flamethrowers or something to torch the mansion, create a little distraction.”
Caroline said, “Every wall of the mansion is a firewall, all the exposed beams are steel made to resemble wood and all the flammable decorations are treated with flame retardant chemicals every few years. But for the sake of argument, let’s say we managed to make it to one of the boats. There are attack boats patrolling the waters in every direction and they’ll sink anything that’s not authorized. Supposing further that we managed to land on Long Island or Connecticut- do you really think you, me and a hundred naked humans could just disappear? They’d hunt us down just like they did tonight and they’d catch us.”
I paced, trying not to look at the faces of the caged people. “Well, what the hell do you want from me? We can’t just give up!”
“Avery,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a defeatist but you have to realize that Ash has been in charge of Sebastian’s security for over fifty years now. He led successful high risk missions in both World Wars and personally redesigned every aspect of this island’s security plan. I doubt there’s anything you can think of that he hasn’t already planned against.”
“Well, you managed to get away.”
She nodded. “At the time, I was Sebastian’s Adjutor and advisor—though in name only by then. I used my connections to make preparations for two years. Then I waited until Sebastian was away at a Gathering. I left the island on official business and disappeared.”
Okay, granted, that approach wasn’t gonna work for us in this situation…but then I thought, Kill Sebastian. If we could grab him as a hostage, we could force safe passage for us and the captives back to civilization. A hundred naked people telling anyone who’d listen about a terrible vampire island should prove a nice distraction.
I’d never killed anyone before but I thought I could make an exception for him. With Sebastian dead, Caroline and I would be a low priority for whoever took his place.
Before I could start outlining my brilliant scheme to Caroline, I paced far enough to catch sight of an archway across from one of the stairways. The archway held a prison-bar door, beyond which lay a dark passageway. “Check this out! There’s a tunnel or something here. Maybe you can MacGuyver it open.”
“The passage only leads out into the maze.”
“Maze? You’re not saying he—”
“Had an actual maze constructed,” she confirmed. They say that’s a sign of a great relationship, when you finish each other’s sentences like that. “Back in Nineteen Seventy-Seven or Seventy-Eight. Stone and barbed wire and even some glass sections for people desperate enough to jump through…”
“Yeah and deadly booby traps, too.” I walked back to where she sat. “C’mon, Caroline, a maze? I mean, that’s fucking retarded! What is he, the Man With The Golden Gun?”
“No, he’s a Feral.” She said, hiding behind her clinical tone. “It’s a condition some Vampyrs contract in which their more primitive, predatory instincts overwhelm their human thought processes. It’s often accompanied by structural changes in the eyes, fingers and other aspects of the victim’s physiology. He built the maze to sharpen his tracking skills. He has his people capture the fittest, most dangerous humans they can find—soldiers, athletes, mercenaries, convicts—and put them in the maze. I think he Creates some of them first, even though that’s illegal. There are no traps, just Sebastian, nude and unarmed. All they have to do is get out of the maze and they win their freedom. As far as I know, no one ever has.”
I was getting a little sick of Sebastian’s increasingly mythic status. I stopped myself from replying as my nifty new vamp hearing detected the sound of someone approaching from the passageway. I snuck over to the other side of the archway and squeezed myself into the darkness of the corner as well as I could.
I went completely still as the prison door buzzed and slid open. A second passed … then another … and then a large figure entered.
I leapt—
He had his hands on me even before my feet left the ground. I heard a low animal growl and then I went flying right into the stone wall on the other side of the room!
I managed to brace myself for the impact and landed on my feet.
“No!” Caroline. Behind me.
I turned. She was standing between me and what had to be Sebastian but he pushed her aside as he halved the distance to me. He stopped about ten feet from me and I got my first good look at him. From Caroline’s reluctant descriptions of him, I’d been imagining him as a cross between Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr.’s oafish Alucard.
I wasn’t even close.
Sebastian Blackwood stood six and a half feet tall with black hair shaved close to his skull and worn in a neat beard. He had one of those blocky heads with heavy features that looked a little fleshy even after undergoing the Amazing Vampyr Fat Loss System. His eyes were a striking yellow that reminded me of a panther. They looked like contact lenses but gleamed in the dimness of the room and matched his yellow teeth and sharpened canines. He wore a thin, loose, red robe that showed enough for me to see that he did indeed possess the physique of a Greek god—Hades would have been my guess—covered with black, curly hair. Through the hair, his entire body was splashed with blood. He reeked of animal musk and death.
He grinned at me with a dog-catching-scent-of-prey grin and said, “So thee’d strike first and from cover? A good instinct, if a middling execution.” The voice wasn’t what I expected either. Deep and rich, it had a touch of Middle English pronunciation that sounded vaguely Scottish or Northern English. He crouched a bit, tensing. “Try again, if ye be a man…”
Obviously, he was baiting
me and yes, the smart thing to do would be to tell him where to stick his notions of manhood and go rejoin Caroline. In the heat of the moment however, all I could see were sudden, all-too vivid images of that thick, hairy body crushing Caroline beneath it—of him grunting and stabbing himself into her delicate, beautiful body—of his huge hand striking her face for some badly timed remark—of him shouting at her—of this repulsive creature scraping some person’s blood off his body and smearing it onto her face so he could lick it off—and some ugly, primitive part of my brain recognized that Sebastian was challenging my right to be with my chosen mate. I felt the little flex in my gums as my canines slid down and my heartbeat increased, blood surged through my body, pulsed in my ears, washing out all other sound.
I attacked him.
As we moved to meet each other, I retained the presence of mind to throw a distraction punch at his face while putting my real effort into kicking the fucker in the junk.
Sebastian sidestepped my punch, grabbed my ankle and used it to flip me over and plant my face into the flagstones. The impact smashed my nose, broke a few teeth and swept away whatever last shreds of dignity I’d left lying around. I heard distantly, the sound of people coming down the stairs behind Sebastian and remember being reminded of my years in school. I’d taken my share of beatings there and learned that nothing attracts a crowd like a fight. Good times. Oh yeah.
“Strike for vulnerability, very good!” the beast man barked. He turned and addressed Caroline. “Aye, he’s a spirited whelp. With instruction, he may yet make a worthy companion.”
I saw Caroline come over to us about the same time as the guys in combat boots. “Sebastian, if you harm him any further, you’ll regret it.”
“Thou presume to threaten me?” Sebastian asked without anger. Thinking back on it, he sounded hurt.
Without even waiting for him to drop the other shoe, Caroline knelt down and helped me roll onto my back. I expected Sebastian to explode and maybe throw me again or attack Caroline but he didn’t. His thunder skillfully stolen, he just tossed my ankle aside and turned to the new arrivals.