Blood Day (10 page)

“No one knows his plans, dear girl. He is unpredictable.”

“Why don't you just let him kill me?”

“Why would I do that?” said Mathilde. She laughed. “Sia, you are going to be the first. You are so special to us.”

“You've locked me up,” said Sia. “Chained me down, drugged me, shocked me, sprayed me with a hose.”

“To keep you safe,” said Mathilde. “The electroconvulsive therapy was for you. It helps get over the depression that the Slack brings on. The chains and drugs kept you from hurting yourself. And we locked you up so this terrible man cannot get to you.”

“Is he a Rev? This man you're talking about.”

“I don't like that word, but no. Not as such.”

“Are you?” said Sia.

“Am I a Revenant?” said Mathilde. “Would you like to see?”

Sia didn't move, didn't answer. She just watched Mathilde.

“Very well,” she said. “But don't say I didn't warn you.” She held out her gloved hand and gripped the glove with the other hand. The glove slid off and floated to the floor. Sia thought of the petals on the tree where they had caught her. They had looked so much like blood.
 

Mathilde had taken both gloves off now. The sun shone in on her skin, puckered and mottled by burn scars. She reached up and took her veil in her hands, pausing for a moment as if reconsidering, then pushed the exquisite black lace over her head like a dark bride. Sia gasped. Mathilde had once been beautiful, but her face was burned so deeply in places, that Sia wondered if what she was seeing was bone. Her cheeks, her jaw, her neck, her nose. All that was left of Mathilde was a set of ruby lips and a pair of dark, dark eyes.
 

“I did warn you,” she said.

“What happened to you?”

“This man who follows you? He followed me too. This is the result.”

Sia swallowed, feeling a lump in her throat. She stared at Mathilde's face.

“Why?”

“Why?” Mathilde echoed with a bitter laugh. “Because he could. Because he is who he is. Because he's...”

“Joshua Flynn,” said Sia, finishing the sentence.
 

Mathilde's lips twisted up in a smile of sorts. “You do remember.”

“I don't know,” said Sia. “The name just came to me. Why can't I remember?”

“Because he is very powerful. But you are the key to catching him, Sia. You are how we are going to end the suffering he is causing.”

“What about me?” said Sia. “I could die.”

Mathilde nodded and moved closer to Sia. She let herself fall back against the wall. So close to Sia that she could smell the lavender again. And another odor underneath. Sandalwood?
 

“Sia, if you help us, you will be free. Would you like that?”

“No one's free.”

“You will be. You can go where you like, play music, sing, dance, love, laugh. You will be your own woman, Sia. The first of your kind.” Mathilde reached up and stroked Sia's hair.
 

“I would do anything to play music again,” Sia heard herself say. “I would kill to feel something again.” The instant she said it she knew it was true. Mathilde had a way of making her believe, of getting her to admit things.
 

Mathilde smiled again and cradled Sia's face between her scarred hands.

“Good,” she said. “This is very good, Sia.”

“Will it be dangerous?” Sia said.

“Yes, very dangerous.”

“I could die?”

“Yes.”

“I don't care,” said Sia. “When do I start?”

“Your training has already started,” said Mathilde. “I suggest we find you some clothes. Are you ready to start your new life?”

“Yes,” said Sia. “When can I play? I want a violin.”

“In good time,” said Mathilde. “We must first teach you. You will have quite a transition to go through. If we succeed, then we will play together, just you and me, until the sun comes up. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” said Sia. Mathilde embraced her and Sia felt how cold she was. It was then that she realized what the smell was. Mathilde smelled of deepest earth, of dirt and roots and crawling things. It was subtle, but it was there.

Mathilde smelled of the grave.

Eight

“What the hell am I doing?” Mike looked around him and ran a shaking hand through his hair.

His second day in the farmhouse, the people started to arrive. Most were in their twenties and early thirties, but more than a few were Mike's age and older. One old man looked to be in his seventies, his grizzled beard showing his years in shades of white and gray. They were revolutionaries, part of a group who called themselves The Fallen. They looked their title, too. Dark circles and gaunt faces, Mike was quite certain that more than a few had a steady supply of some sort of drug, but he couldn't imagine where they were still getting it. No one dared sell any more, though with this group, he had no idea what the limits were. He'd seen the bulges of concealed weapons in quite a few jackets and pants pockets.

What little good that would do them. Mike recalled with a snort seeing a junkie shoot at a Rev in an alley not long after Kyra had died. The Rev wasn't even fazed. Just kept coming. The junkie was in shreds by the time the Rev was done with him. That was just after the Annex, during the Blackout, when the world was an endless horror. When the children disappeared. When blood could literally be seen flowing in street gutters. Before the obsession with medicine and germs and blood donation and IV's became part of Rev culture.
 

Mike was alone in the cold, chilly cellar, but he could hear the creaking of floorboards above him. Back and forth, back and forth with these people. Always moving, always antsy. Always nervous. They wouldn't tell him how they knew to come or who told them he was here, but Mike assumed it was something to do with Joshua Flynn. It had to be. Flynn was the only one who knew he was here.

After killing Deacon at the puppet theater, Flynn emerged to stare at Mike, cocking his head like some sort of reptile regarding a strange new thing it had never seen or wasn't sure how to eat.

“I have a task for you, Mr. Novak,” he said finally, wiping the corners of his mouth with a pinkie finger. “In your wheelhouse, I think. I'm going to take you there and then you will wait for my instructions.”

And that was all Mike could remember. The next moment he was waking up in a strange bed with crisp, clean sheets, and a look out the window told him he was surrounded by nothing but trees and snow and nothing.
 

Mike stood up from the rickety chair he sat on and pulled the cord for the bare light bulb and sat back down. He looked at the old-school printing press in the middle of the room. He thought he knew what Flynn had in mind. But he had no idea what to do with it.

It was a linotype machine. Mike wondered how Flynn had even gotten it down the stairs. It was far too big to fit through the tiny hatch upstairs that opened to a set of stained, creaky wooden steps. It encompassed most of the cellar, at its highest point nearly reaching the bare slats of the ceiling. There were boxes of tiny metal letter plates placed all around the machine.
 

“Goddammit, Flynn. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this?”

But he already knew. Mike thought he had probably known from the beginning, from the moment he had first seen Joshua Flynn's perfectly ordinary face at the office. Flynn wanted him to write news stories, just as he'd always done. But Mike couldn't figure out how he was supposed to do that sitting in the middle of nowhere with no phone, no computer, no anything but scores and scores of kids who watched Fight Club one too many times.

“Did you know they call you Mr. Novak?” bellowed a familiar voice down the stairs. Mike watched a pair of ratty shoes descend the stairs, creaking and sending up puffs of dust and dirt and melted snow. “Shit, Mike. You look like hell.”

“Jesus Christ, Dez. Where the hell have you been?”

Dez Paine looked around the cellar, his eyes landing on the printing press.

“What the hell is that?” he said. He stepped around it poking at the knobs. “That looks like some steampunk shit right there.”

“What's steampunk?” said Mike.

Dez smiled at him, the white of his teeth bright even in the dim basement.
 

“It could be said,” said Mike, “that this is all your fault.”

“The hell it was,” said Dez lightly. “I never even met that vampire bastard until after you wrote that story about the hospital. You tried to get the paper to print it, Mike?” Dez clucked his tongue. “Not very bright, mate. You know how this works.”

“Yeah,” said Mike weakly. “I know. I just thought...” he trailed off.

“You thought they'd all get behind you, yeah? That all the humans would rally. That we were still strong, we would fight.”

“Yeah,” said Mike.

“Bullshit,” said Dez, coming around the machine to look at him. “You had a death wish. The Revs are too deep, and we're too bloody weak.”

“I disagree,” said Mike. “If people know they're not alone, they’ll come together and fight.”

“And what?” said Dez, uncharacteristically intense. There was no hint of a twinkle in his eye, and his trademark grin was nowhere to be seen. “Get killed? Or worse? ”
 

“What else can we do, Dez?” said Mike, his voice rising. “Are we just supposed to give up?”

“We're supposed to survive,” said Dez. He nodded at the press. “You know I'm a fugitive now? I found myself at that goddamn experimental hospital hellbent on saving that Japanese girl. ”

“Sia? You tried to save Sia Aoki?”

“Yeah, Sia,” he said. “I go in to save her, and the crazy bird starts screaming her damn head off. Bringing all the guards and nurses running, and I had to make a daring escape.”

“Sounds like an adventure.”

“I don’t like adventure,” Dez complained. “I like to be alive. What the hell was I thinking sneaking in there? For a girl I only met for a second. A junkie.”

“Did you happen to see Joshua Flynn before you found yourself there?” said Mike.
 

“Yeah, I did, actually. And I told him to shove off, and then I…Oh,” Dez said, his eyes practically lighting up with understanding. “That blood sucking son of a bitch. He got into my head.”

“Join the club.”

Dez glared at him. “What the hell did you see while you were in that place, anyway? Must have been pretty bad to cause this much shit.”

“Just an old nurse who called security as soon as I got in,” said Mike. And Sia Aoki strapped to a gurney.”

“Well, you must have stumbled into something over there, Novak,” said Dez. He pulled a pack of smokes out of his inside pocket and lit it with a ragged book of matches. “I had a cushy government job before you came along, old man.”

“You could stay here and help,” said Mike.

“Damn right I'm staying,” said Dez. “Why the hell do you think I'm here?”

“How
did
you know I was here?” said Mike. “You said you talked to Flynn?”

“Well, he talked. I think. The whole thing's a bit muddled, to tell the truth.”

“Yeah,” said Mike, “he has that effect.”

“So he's one of them? Flynn I mean. He's a Rev? Because he doesn't bloody look like one.”

“Think back,” said Mike. “Remember the beginning? When they were killing everyone? Right after the Annex. Before they all started to look like monsters all the time.”

Dez laughed. “I don't remember shit, Mike. I was on Slack just like everyone else. The docs were handing it out like candy.”

“They all looked human at first,” said Mike. He looked away from Dez. “They looked just like us. Until they changed. Then, after they stopped killing us, when they started with the blood days, when they started injecting it, their bloodfaces got stuck or something.”

“Bloodfaces?” said Dez.

“That's what some of us called it,” said Mike, his voice quiet. “They changed when they were about to...feed.”

“So this Joshua Flynn...”

“I think he's a Rev,” said Mike. “But he's old. He said something about being the last of his kind.”

“What, they're a species?” said Dez. “Freaks of nature is what they are.”

“You're wrong, Mr. Paine,” said a whispery voice.
 

“Jesus!” Mike said, spinning and tripping backwards on the chair and falling into the printing press. Dez was on the floor, backing away from Joshua Flynn who had seemingly appeared out of thin air.

“I didn't mean to frighten you.”

“Where the hell did you come from?” Dez said.

Flynn smiled and Mike's guts froze up.

“I'm very fast,” said Flynn.

Dez stood up, brushing himself off. “Maybe go slower next time. There's goddamn spiders down here.”

“Why are we here?” said Mike. Flynn's eyes settled on him and Mike forced his voice to work again. “Why did you bring us here?”

“I brought Mr. Paine here so you would have a companion,” said Flynn. “So you wouldn't feel quite so alone.”

“What about them?” said Mike, motioning above them. “They won't let me be alone.”

“They are for errands,” said Flynn. “Surely you've figured out what I want you to do.”

“You want me to write stories,” said Mike.

“Yes.”

“And print them on this dinosaur.”

“It really is a gorgeous contraption, is it not? Two hundred years old and still works just as well as it did the day it was made.”

“And how am I supposed to get these stories?” said Mike. “Being out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Oh, Mr. Novak,” Flynn laughed. His dark eyes sparkled. “You have a plethora of Baker Street Irregulars upstairs. Use them.”

“You want me to send out the kids upstairs to get real news?” said Mike.
 

“Of course,” said Flynn. “But let me be clear, Mike. It is not just
real news
as you say. I want you to gather rumors, whispers, ramblings. Print it all. Put it all on the page in smudged print and distribute it to everyone. Mail it out, leave it on park benches, shove it through mail slots.” Flynn's voice had grown heated, excited. His eyes seemed to almost glow.

“Whispers,” said Mike.
 

“Whispers,” said Flynn.

“What the hell does that accomplish?” said Dez. “We're risking our lives here. And you want us to print gossip. Piss on this shite, Mikey. No underground bloody newspaper is going to bring these arseholes down.”