?UPON THE CRUCIFIX
Jake jumped up, psyched with rage, the weakness in his legs forgotten. Whatever power had restrained him before released him. Joey flinched at the suddenness of his rise, not by the force of it.
Betrayal!
Joey had been helping the hunters kill the vampires, his brothers and he was becoming one of them.
"Bastard!" He jacked Joey by the neck, off the ground, rough and hard unto the mirror-less glass of the chapel and looked into his eyes. Joey simply smiled. He didn't make an attempt at a struggle.
"How long have you been bitten?" Jake asked, his eyes flaring.
"Four days," Joey answered calmly. That calm fashion in which Joey spoke was getting to Jake. "I die by mid-day."
Four days! In four days, the hunters had killed more than two dozen. And Joey had been an integral member of that group, slicing them, staking them, burning their bodies in heaps of piles, relentlessly. His brothers.
"Five of us against seven of them, New Kerklees, they attacked us. We didn't expect it. We killed them but were all of us bitten. I killed my boys. It made dad proud. He had no idea I?" Joey paused. Something stirred in his voice. "For the first time, he didn't put me down."
Jake looked at Big Stan's boy. He was certainly going to die in a few hours. His heart had stopped. Told a lot. The essence of vampirism left in him was the only thing keeping him alive. And then he would be born into the world of chaos that was his. And yet Joey looked indifferent about it. His eyes actually sparkled, reflecting glows of euphoria. The guy was in the least worried about his impending death. Soulless, power-hungry eyes glared at Jake's. Dark eyes batted his. Jake tightened his hand around Joey's throat, squeezing the tiny amount of air left there out.
There was a connection now. A blood connection. This was someone's mind he could read. Jake stared into those power-hungry eyes, stared hard at it, into it, past the whites, past the irises, past the lens, into the darkness inside. He slithered successfully into Joey's thoughts. Vivid images vibrated inside, slowly stabilizing into focus.
Blood! There was blood everywhere. It formed large, revolting, thick patches on a roughly spherical sial plate that actually spread to corners he couldn't see but corners that felt like they had boundaries. The moon cast a dull glow on the surrounds of the plate, and on Joey. He sat on a largish igneous rock also made from the sial in a thrashing black coat, his feet suspended from the ground. He looked straight at Jake. His face was bright, lively, in extreme contrast to the Joey that owned this thought. Blood poured down his chin. Bloody fangs protruded from his mouth, needle-like, razor-sharp fangs. Two from both sides of his wet lips. A body laid beneath him in a crumpled mass of blood: big, massive body, a ten-gallon hat beside him, blood spoiled his lightly-bearded, half-burnt? Big Stan! Jake gasped. Joey's papa. And then he saw bodies. Bloody bodies. Bodies of hunters sprawled on the floor in several sickening and distasteful positions, some impossible. Body parts were mangled, broken and dismembered, flesh torn. It was a gross sight.
"It's begun to happen," Joey whispered, his voice felt like echoes that stung him over and over.
The Mad Prophet stayed on the floor. The lower part of his body had been heavily ravaged and a large hole appeared at the part of the chest where his heart was meant to be.
"This? this is what you want?" Jake asked in a sick voice.
"Old branches need to be pruned," Joey replied, his dark eyes searching Jake's.
"Why do you want this?"
"I'm fed up," Joey replied curtly. "Tired of the misery. I've never been good enough for that man. I've always been degraded, demeaned. It's going to have to stop."
Jake shook his head. Vengeance. It was bitter.
"That's it?"
Joey shook his head and looked back. "There's always a faint idea of what power is until you own it. It's all about power, is it not? All this time I've prayed for this kind of power, almost all my life. To have this incredible strength. The things I could achieve?" he paused and snapped his fingers. Almost simultaneously, figures appeared out of the thick air, behind Joey. They all wore long, misty overcoats, with grim, studying, yellow eyes and a vain expression, so alike so much that Jake believed they could've been copies of themselves. They formed an arc around Joey. Their faces were darkened by the thick ambiance they stood in. He could scarcely count their number.
"We can rebuild that world once again, you and I," Joey continued. "Rule that world and rule the living. We have all the time in the world. Live forever."
Jake misplaced himself in thought. The transition from the weak, feeble, smart Joey to this hungry, superior Joey was unimaginable. This was wrong. The hunters had hunted him and the others and killed them. And they scarcely knew that the enemies, the real enemies were those on the inside, putting on coats of hypocrisy and smiling with the rest of the band. A merry hunt to kill him, so much that none of them had discovered that their boss' boy had 'become'.
He silently pulled himself out of Joey's mind. The figures disappeared, the bodies, the blood, the plate vanished. Joey disappeared but his eyes remained on Jake's. Jake looked at Joey's blank face.
"What do you say?"
He was a firm believer in second chances. He came back. He taught his group of rippers to feed to animal blood. Right there in front of the chapel, he wasn't meant to live. Some higher power had other ideas for him. He was kept safe. He was given another chance. A chance that stared him in the face.
He spotted the crossbow on the floor and shifted his leg to it. He slid his leg under it and flicked it. The bow sailed upwards and he caught it with relative ease. He placed the armed bow's arrow on Joey's Adam's apple.
"You give me a reason why I shouldn't kill you now," Jake snapped.
Joey grinned wickedly. Jake had never seen the guy this full of confidence. He didn't shake at the sight of the crossbow, not as much as flinch.
"You're past revenge," Joey spat Jake's words at him. "It'll be a waste of your time. I'll be dying today anyway. I don't feel pain anymore. The arrow's not trained and you don't want me as an enemy and that's six reasons."
Jake shot a grin back. "Well count them off your list. You're dying come sunshine."
He pulled Joey off the ground, up until Joey's top half connected with the concrete part of the wall. Joey's feet scrambled for a foothold unsuccessfully. He looked at Jake.
"You really want to be the last one, right?" Joey whispered. "If you kill me, what then?"
Those words seemed to put Jake somewhere lost in his thoughts for a few seconds but he returned to himself and pulled the trigger. The arrow pierced a hole through Joey's larynx with a squelching sound, came out the back and implanted itself firmly in the concrete. Joey's eyes contorted in pain. He tried to bring a sound through his shattered voice box but released gasps of air and saliva. Blood poured through the wound in his neck, thick dark blood. But Jake wasn't done there. He pulled two more rounds into Joey's two shoulders. Blood stained his coat. His arms shuddered in shock. Joey was stuck to the wall of the chapel, hanging centimeters from the ground.
"That takes care of the noise and tries to escape," Jake informed.
Joey kept his appalled eyes at Jake, still keeping composed, unnerved. He tried to say something but again failed. Blood streamed down the side of his lips. But Jake had figured what he meant to say. There was an established mind connection already.
"Of course not yet," he seemed to answer, "this certainly won't stop you. However?" Jake remembered Joey was the one entrusted with the stake. Joey had probably entrusted it to himself. A safeguard. He searched the confines of Joey's jacket and found it stuck in the back of his belt. The ultimate vampire killer. He looked at it. Joey looked at it too. And his eyes lost its color instantly.
Jake pushed the stake right through Joey's heart. The pain coursed through Joey. His body convulsed spasmodically. The agony shook him. His face fell. Blood and saliva dribbled in long, slimy strings from his mouth. He raised his face weakly to stare at Ja
ke. Jake returned a satisfied look.
"With the stake in your heart, there's nothing you can do now," he said. "The sun will come and down you go to dust."
Joey accepted. His head dropped again. He felt Joey's mind slipping into blankness.
Jake felt the first twinge of heat on his skin, heat his skin did not like. He looked up. The moon had disappeared. An aquamarine patch streaked across a dark-blue sky. The sun was beginning to rise, distant in the horizon.
You really want to be the last one, right? If you kill me, what then?
Joey's question slapped his thoughts. A very good question! He glared at the Christ statue. The light that sparkled from its eyes was starting to dull. And he knew what he had to do. He'd played his part. His job was done. He understood the light now. A way home. His way home. A natural glow, like an essence of the morning, glinted at the horizon. The sun was coming.
He saw the crucifix once more. It illuminated in Jesus' light. The horizontal bar where Christ's hands were meant to be was lower than where it ought to be on a regular crucifix. It was just perfect. He walked over to it. Another howl floated up from beneath him. The heartbeats coming from beneath had reduced to a mighty few, almost half the number that had gone in. He looked down at the crucifix. It glared at him. Sharp edges and an almost half an inch thicker than a sword.
He bent over it. This was how he meant to die, not at the hands of hunters. Of course, he wasn't committing suicide. You can't kill something that's already dead. He placed his heart over it, smiled and felled himself on it. The top of the crucifix crushed his heart and slowly rose out his back as he sank himself on it. He let a whispered gasp. His head spun. Images rushed through his head, thoughts relived. As his senses began to fail, he was the light. He smiled.
~~***~~