Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (39 page)

“We need to get you out of here,” Dancer
said.

Cory shook his head. “I can’t even remember
what I did and didn’t tell her, but the tunnel might have been in
there somewhere. We can’t go back.”

“You and that stupid tunnel,” Dancer
said.

“We’ve got someplace much better,” Fancy
said.

“We’ve been trying to tell you and you just
wouldn’t come with us,” Dancer said. “Stubborn ass.”

Cory had to take a deep breath before he
could respond. He’d never been able to get over his paranoia
before, and it was trying to reassert itself now. This time though
he didn’t even need to turn to Gramma and her persistent voice. All
he had to do was remember that if he didn’t go with them he might
as well just turn around and walk back to Lynn’s apartment, right
through the living room, and into the bedroom where Lynn and her
grunts and flat declarations of love were waiting for him.

“I’ll go,” he said. The words felt heavy on
his tongue, but as soon as they were gone his entire body felt
lighter.

We feel the city
and we feel the night, and in both we sense a great tension about
to burst. For just short of a year we have hovered at the edge and
watched the subtle forces at work go about their duties, but now we
feel everything has come together. We do not see the full shape of
everything yet, but we intend to know all before the sun rises.
What we will do about it, though, we still cannot be certain. And
that uncertainty makes us feel electric.

Our encounter with the girl earlier in the
night has given us a place to start from, at least. She is young,
naïve, has no idea what she is actually a part of, but she said
something important, something we recognize as true despite all
other obfuscations on the situation. She said he wanted to speak to
us, has in fact been trying to do so for some time. Very well then.
It is time we let him. Us, that which the people of Fond du Lac
have come to call sometimes Vlad the Mystery and sometimes Vlad the
Impaler, and him, that which we have thus far only been able to
call the gardener.

The gardener is aware of us and we are aware
of him, or rather it since we are well aware how little gender
means at its stage in life. All we need to do is find a place where
it cannot ignore us, a spot where we can broadcast the signal that
we are here and we are not hiding from it. We choose the roof of
the tallest building in the city, the Rosalind Apartments, and
wait. We resist the latent urge of one of us to show off and wait
on top of the cell tower on top. That one has always had impulse
control issues, but his urges have faded over the years as the
others asserted control. Instead we just stand on the edge of the
building, looking west to the Retlaw and downtown and everything
beyond. This is likely our last night in the city and we will move
on to whatever strikes our fancy next, so we indulge in a little
nostalgia for our time here. It has been an interesting city, not
as interesting as it could be but far better than its citizens seem
to understand. We will miss it, in as much as we are capable
anymore of missing anything.

“
You’ve been hiding from me.”

We turn around to the “sound” of the voice. A
naked man covered in his own filth sits in the middle of the roof.
His legs are just stumps ending in seeping sores and blisters and
diseased scar tissue, although the festering stops well before his
crotch and the impressive erection standing at attention between
them. We did not know how he would appear but we were not expecting
this. It is surprising, and we are delighted that we have found
something still capable of giving up that feeling.

“
We have not been hiding. You have simply
not figured out the best way to communicate with us.”

“
This is how I always communicate,” the
man says. We wonder if he thinks he’s fooling us with this form.
Perhaps he wants to alarm us. Anyone else would be alarmed to see
that a man who cannot stand and has no visible means of mobility
has miraculously found his way to the top of a building without
anyone seeing his arrival. But he should know better that
appearances are not something that will shake us, especially since
we know what “he” really looks like, and even without any true eyes
here he can see our own appearance quite easily.

“
This is how you communicate to those you
wish to intimidate and control. We are not here for you to
control.”

“
Then why are you here?” he asks. “I made
a pact with the others. This is my territory. No others were
supposed to be here.”

This is interesting. “We do not know of any
others.”

“
Don’t be silly. The others of our kind.
The Legion.”

“
Ah. We have heard rumors of this Legion.
Long ago. Vanished before our time.”

“
You lie. The Legion is forever. They
can’t be gone.”

We can see that he will not believe us. It is
not simply a matter of him not accepting the truth. It is that he
cannot comprehend a world without the Legion. The Legion was
ancient, according to the stories. Far older than even we are, and
we are of an age that can remember glaciers upon all the northern
continents.

This information is the most important piece
we needed to understand. The gardener is of a time before sanity.
It cannot comprehend that its way of doing things no longer fits
into any accepted scheme. That is why it has tended its garden the
way it has. That is why it grew and picked its fruit in its
inefficient way. We could teach it new ways, but we do not think it
would listen.

All that remains is what, if anything, we
choose to do about it.

“
We see that you are close to a new
harvest.”

“
You stay away. They’re mine.”

“
We do not wish to take them from you.”
But do we? We have not yet reached a consensus on this, even as the
debate rages internally between us. We certainly have no wish to
harvest them, at least not in the way that the gardener seems to
understand the process. But we are curious. We would like to see
what they grow into when left to their current wild state.

However, we also question the wisdom of
making the gardener our enemy. It is older than us, and we do not
know what it is capable of. We don’t know it’s true form, although
given the nature of its gardening tactics we can hazard a guess,
and from that guess we believe that it might not be as
sophisticated as those of us from a later time. Its form is
certainly not this apparition in front of us, though.

“
You tell the rest of the Legion that the
old territory lines still hold true,” he says. This shit-covered
little man sounds agitated even though he looks perfectly calm on
the outside. “I have never crossed them and they better not either.
This is my land. I
am
this land. All the fruit is mine. All
of it. I won’t share!”

We decide it would be both prudent and
amusing to play along. “Very well. We will let the Legion know that
you are not open to a redrawing of the territorial lines.”

“
Mine!” he says again. It is practically a
scream in our minds, although our ears hear nothing. “You’ll leave
now. Tonight. Right now! You’re not welcome.”

We bow to the shit-covered man. It is our
suspicion that he is perhaps more coherent during his various
attempts at pruning his plants into the shape he wishes, but he is
so unused to our kind after so long that he does not know any more
how to react in anything other than savage childishness. For even
though it is much older than we ever hope to become, we understand
that this is what it is and always will be: a child.

“
Then we shall leave. We would like to say
that it has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance,
but…”

It does not allow us to finish our sentence.
Instead it aims its erection at us and proceeds to piss in our
general direction. The fluid does not touch us because there is no
fluid. It vanishes before it can reach us, and soon after the man
vanishes right along with it. We reflect on how charming the
gardener is, then consider everything it has said.

We will not be leaving just yet, we decide.
We want to see what this gardener’s end game might be.

And we may even decide to play the game
against it.

Under other
circumstances Cory might have found it undignified for FancyDancer
to physically carry him around the city. But given that he still
had no clothes and the puke on his chest dried to a crisp shell in
the wind of their running and then flaked off behind them, he
figured that
undignified
right now was a relative concept.
Fancy was the one that carried him most of the way tucked in her
arms in front of her the way she might carry an excessively
overgrown baby while Dancer zipped on ahead of her, going back and
forth and then coming back to nod or shake her head to Fancy before
going on ahead again. Normally, at the speed vampires were capable
of moving, they should have been able to go from one end of the
city to the other in under twenty minutes, but FancyDancer used a
zigzag path to their mystery destination that took them nearly half
an hour to reach it. Cory asked Dancer what they were doing when
she stopped to take him from Fancy, allowing her to instead do
Dancer’s job. Dancer said the one ahead was scouting for any signs
of the Dusters and the path they took was supposed to lead them
around the worst of the Duster’s supposed territory. Cory then told
her what he could of his theories on the Dusters, but he didn’t get
a chance to finish before they arrived.

They stopped near the old train station, a
building that in more recent years had been converted into a number
of retail shops, and Fancy set Cory down. He was still wobbly on
his feet, but the pain had subsided enough that he could make basic
movements now with little problem, and he thankfully no longer felt
any need to void his stomach again. They stopped in the middle of
the sidewalk where anyone at all could have seen them, leaving Cory
to feel rather exposed. If they met anyone face to face they could
trance them into not remembering the two oddly connected women and
one very naked young man, but anyone casually looking out their
window would see him with no problem.

You already said yourself that this isn’t
the first time you’ve been wandering around naked in public
,
Gramma’s voice said, but Cory knew that was different. In that
first time he had emerged from that sinkhole in the ground he had
been far outside of Fond du Lac with no one around other than a
host of other naked and confused vampires with their sanity on the
borderline at best. He just hoped FancyDancer would lead him into
whatever alley or abandoned building they were living in before
anyone saw something they shouldn’t.

That’s why he was amazed when they pointed in
the direction of a nearby apartment building. “I don’t understand,”
he said.

“What’s to understand?” Dancer asked.

“That’s where we live,” Fancy said.

“What, do you hide out in the basement or
something?” Cory asked.

Dancer turned to Fancy. “I really don’t get
what’s so hard about the concept.”

Fancy shrugged. “Guess we’re the only
vampires that…”

“Aren’t weird,” Dancer said with a nod.

“Just come up with us,” Fancy said. “We’ll
talk about it once we’ve found you some clothes.”

Cory felt a profound sense of unreality as
they all casually walked up to the front door and Dancer pulled a
set of keys from her pocket. He expected this to be some kind of
joke where they would pull out something to pick the lock instead
at the last minute, but one of the keys fit in with no trouble and
they walked right in. At this time of night they didn’t pass anyone
else in the halls, although FancyDancer were courteous enough to
stand in front of him and block anyone’s view in the event someone
came out one of the doors. Not that it would matter if anyone did
see him, but the gesture was still appreciated. After a short trip
in the elevator they got out on the fifth floor and made their way
to apartment 511, where Dancer again produced a key and let them
in.

At the very least Cory expected the apartment
to have little to no furniture, something akin to Lynn’s scavenged
décor. But while it certainly had never seen the touch of a home
decorator, it at least had a homey, lived-in feel. All the
furniture was in good shape even if it looked like it belonged from
two or three decades back, and a few generic paintings featuring
lighthouses hung on the wall.

“You really live here?” Cory asked.

“No, we just break into a random person’s
apartment everyday and stay there until we’re discovered,” Dancer
said.

Cory nodded. That made a lot more sense to
him than a vampire actually having his or her own place. Then he
realized that Dancer was being sarcastic.

“Of course we live here,” Fancy said. “We
moved in about eight months ago.”

“But this doesn’t make any sense,” Cory
asked.

“We have to live somewhere, Cory,” Dancer
said.

“But you’re vampires,” Cory said. He thought
that alone should explain it, but they both looked exasperated.

“You try to get through to him,” Dancer said.
“I’ll go see if I can find something for him to wear.”

She stalked off to another room. Fancy closed
her eyes for a moment and fought against a pained expression as
though Dancer’s sudden absence caused her actual physical pain.
Then the moment passed and Fancy gently took Cory’s hand.

“Come with me to the bathroom and we’ll clean
you up. I’ll try to explain, too.”

Although Cory’s skin crawled at her touch he
made no effort to pull away. The bathroom was a little cramped with
both of them in it at once, and their physical proximity together
made Cory even more fidgety than her touch had. The only thing that
kept him from stumbling out of the room was the fact that there was
very obviously nothing sexual about this to her. She got a
washcloth wet and asked him if she could clean off his chest. After
some hesitance he said yes, and she set about wiping the puke and
sweat from his body in a clinical manner.