Hunter of the Dead (6 page)

“Are the gas pumps on?”

Nico’s mouth worked, but he found he couldn’t bring any words forth.

“Nico!”

“What?”

“Turn on the fucking gas pumps!”

Price leapt from the deli case and crouched as he landed in front of the register. He grabbed a roll of duct tape from a shelf of overpriced office supplies and began ripping the packaging off. Nico stumbled to his feet and flicked the buttons for the fuel. Price held out his hand.

“Come on, come on!”

The thing began to rise from its position, and Nico watched in horror as its mangled face began to reassemble itself mere seconds after being torn to shreds. When all the pumps were on he took Price’s hand and felt the older man pull him over the counter. Together they hurried out into the parking lot.

The Saab stood at its fueling spot, the only car in the customer lot. Price grabbed the hose out of one of the pumps, depressed the handle, secured it with a few layers of duct tape, then dropped it to the ground so it began spraying a puddle of gasoline. He repeated the process at the next hose, and gestured to Nico to do the same.

“Is your car here?”

“Um, no,” Nico said, shaking his head, “I take the bus.”

“Shit.”

Price dug into his pocket and tossed Nico a set of keys which he nearly fumbled, but caught before they splashed into the ever-widening pool of gasoline.

“Go and pull my car around. You know how to drive stick?”

“What about Jackie and that guy?”

“They’re dead, kid! Go and get my car!”

Nico nodded and stumbled, knocking his knee badly against one of the pumps before getting a handle on his feet and pounding off towards the back lot where the employees parked. Even if it hadn’t been the only car in the lot, Price’s mint green 1963 Cadillac convertible would’ve been impossible to miss.

He stumbled, his messed-up knee hurting a lot worse than he had expected, and fumbled through Price’s keychain before finding the right one. The car door was heavy and hard to open, and Nico had only ever driven standard once before, but somehow he managed to get the prehistoric behemoth moving and pulled it back around to the front.

The creature had emerged from the Fill-Up, and to Nico’s horror it looked exactly as it had the moment it had walked in – not healthy, exactly, but utterly unharmed despite getting a faceful of deli slicer. It hissed at Price, who was backing away from the entrance to the store, and subtly motioning for Nico to keep his distance. Price’s green Fill-Up polo was off, his rock-hard abs on display.

Not bad for an old guy.

Price had wrapped his shirt around one of the window squeegees that was stationed at every fuel pump.

“Yeah, I recognize you, motherfucker,” Price said loudly. “You’re supposed to be one of The Damned, right?”

The creature – the “Damned,” Price had named it – its ears rose, pointing nearly straight up. So it was intelligent, if horrifying. Its tongue fluttered, as though it were trying to speak with its chapless mouth. It stepped towards him, more cautiously than it had been acting up until now.

Is that monstrosity really afraid of Carter Price?

“What does it mean that you’re loose? All bets are off now? Cicatrice is gunning for us?”

Then, in a night full of awful noises, Nico heard the most heart-rapingly awful sound of his entire life. A noise came from The Damned’s throat that it took him a moment to identify as a gruesome chuckle. It shook its head from side to side.

Price began to back up, surreptitiously moving closer to the car. The Damned slowly followed after him, and Nico watched with mounting anxiety as it stepped into the slowly broadening puddle of gasoline.

“So you don’t know me, huh? This is just a co-inky-dink?”

The Damned nodded; its soulless eyes almost mirthful. Price nodded right back.

“Yeah, well, you might be king shit of the vampires – or that’s what they say anyway – but I know one thing that kills every vampire dead. Even king shits.”

The Damned paused and glanced skyward, furrowing its brow and squinching its eyes tight as though looking for something. Then its gaze returned to Price and it made a circular motion with its arm.

The sun’s not rising anytime soon
, it seemed to be saying.

“No, not that,” Price said, opening his Zippo and sparking it alight with a single flip of his wrist, “this.”

Price lit the makeshift torch he had fabricated out of his shirt and the squeegee. From the speed that the whole mess burst into flames, Nico realized he must have dipped it into the pool of gasoline.

“Oh, fuck,” he whispered under his breath.

Price flung the torch in a spinning arc through the air and turned to run toward the car faster than any man his age should have been able. Nico’s knuckles turned white gripping the wheel, and he was certain his heart stopped for the entire duration of the torch’s arc through the air.

The Damned took just a second too long to realize what was happening. If it was a vampire as Price had claimed – and at this point, Nico found the assertion difficulty to dispute – perhaps it came from a time when gas stations didn’t exist. All the same, it seemed to realize its danger and turned to flee, but not before the torch struck the ground and a conflagration erupted through the night.

Nico felt himself being shoved aside as Carter hopped into the car and slammed on the gas. The Caddie practically burned rubber as it peeled out, and Nico looked over his shoulder to see a literal mushroom cloud engulf the Fill-Up as the underground gas reservoirs caught fire.

“Oh, shit!” Nico cried out.

“What is it?” Price panted, throwing his head over his shoulder to see what Nico was oh-shitting about.

A flaming silhouette was soaring into the night sky over the devastated convenience store.

“V…vampires can fly, can’t they?” Nico whispered.

Price slammed on the brakes and as he nearly smashed his head into the dash Nico wished he had buckled up. The fiery figure traced a parabola through the night sky, in the opposite direction of where they were driving. It disappeared noiselessly, and Nico realized it had splashed into the nearby Cheyenne Peaking Basin. The lake was black and invisible in the night.

“No,” Price said, “But they can sure jump.”

Three

A few days before…

Rivulets of blood dripped from every corner of the violet-tinged world. Great cigarette burns appeared and disappeared all across her field of vision, blossoming and fading with the regularity of the tides, but in no discernible pattern.

And the soundtrack of the stereoscopic kaleidoscope from Hell was the beating of the awful drums. Louder and deeper and faster than even a jackhammer on the streets of Guangzhou, the sound seemed to emanate from between her ears.

Layered over it all was the incapacitating, overwhelming, gnawing hunger. She felt as though her stomach was trying to claw its way out of her torso. She was scarcely aware of her own body.

She was only vaguely aware of the voice and occasional face of Topan entering and leaving her vision, and pressing hard on her hand, and sometimes slapping her cheeks but doing little to rouse her from the deep reverie of agony.

Then one word, repeated over and over, gradually worming its way into her consciousness.

“Eat…eat…”

Topan’s visage filled the full field of her vision.

“Eat!”

Some thick lump of flesh was under her nose. Unthinking, she bit into it, crunching through gristle, bone, and sinew with ease. She greedily gobbled down the first mouthful of meat, barely stopping to chew, then took another bite, and another.

The throbbing subsided. The drums receded. The purplish tinge to the world around her began to fade. And she found herself sitting in a chair in her sitting room, holding a severed human forearm in her hand.

Startled, she dropped it. The mangled mess of an arm clattered to the table and rolled once before settling against the centerpiece. Before she had gnawed through it in her blood-drunk rage, it had belonged to the person whose sprawled out body was arranged on the table like a feast. Bound and subdued, he was now scarcely even breathing, as the life leaked out of him from the arteries of his severed arm.

Her father.

She only became aware of the pained moaning as the horrible drumming faded from her ears. Her father’s mouth was stuffed with cloth, tears flowing freely from his eyes.

Topan sat across the table from her, studying her with something in between fascination and disdain. She dabbed her bloodied lips with a napkin.

“Not shocked to find yourself a cannibal?”

She shook her head demurely. His right eyebrow crawled up his face.

“No? How can that be?”

“Because you wish me to be shocked.”

Laughing, Topan pounded the table.

“Cussedness! I admire it. I admire it more than almost anything else about you. And trust me, there’s a lot to admire.”

“I see you’ve lied to me. About a great deal.”

Her father’s breathing was becoming slower, strained. He was no longer conscious. She felt strangely disconnected from the whole scene, as though she were watching it from somewhere distant.

“Not so much as you might think. Most of what I said was true. I just held back the secret of what makes you so appealing.”

“And what’s that?”

“A potential beyond all reason. There is within you a potential to become the greatest of our kind, perhaps even to eclipse my own sire, Cicatrice. You’ll meet him in time. He’ll be very excited to meet you. And that’s no small thing. Cicatrice doesn’t let a whole lot of emotion cloud his day.”

He sniffed at the air.

“And now that I’ve turned you, I see that I was right all along.”

She felt her hands beginning to shake. The hunger which had abated was washing back in. The purple mist pushing in on the edges of her eyes told her that though her reason was regained, her hunger was far from sated. She saw herself devouring the old man by inches, from the toes up as he still breathed (even if just barely), and consuming every inch of his freshly flayed flesh before feeling full.

Unable to control herself she leaned forward and began to gobble away at the ragged flesh of her father’s ruined shoulder.

“Yes, eat, eat. This first day you’ll experience hunger like you’ve never known before.”

She blinked, regaining her composure.

“But aren’t you eating, Topan?”

“Not on fare such as this. Besides, this is all for you. Aren’t you famished?”

“I am but this food tastes…”

“Ashen?”

Yes. Bitter. Worse than turned. Burnt.

She leaned in and to her surprise her tongue darted out and touched a pool of congealing blood. It tasted…off, though. Topan was on his feet as she closed her eyes. She could almost smell something, something that seemed bright like a light in her nose. Her nostrils flared and she tried to follow the source of the light.

Her eyes opened and her lips were pressed to the severed arteries of her father’s missing arm. She felt Topan’s heavy hand on her shoulder.

“What is it? What do you sense?”

“A power…a source…a…”

She suckled at the blood still dribbling from the dying man’s arm. It tasted like warm
maotai
, and the warmth spread through her almost instantly. Her eyes closed and she entered a state entirely unlike dreaming.

It wasn’t until Topan began shaking her that her eyes fluttered open. She finally felt full, but she looked down and saw that aside from those first few bites through his elbow, the father who had been her first meal was largely unmolested.

“I’m sorry, Topan, I lost track of time and…”

“Never be sorry for who you are, little one. I would say that even if you were no one of particular import. But would you believe me if I told you that in all my years of life I’ve never seen an immortal discover the power in the blood in her first night?”

The young girl rose and stroked the hair of the man who had raised her and who had filled her up so. He seemed so pathetic now, like a crumpled rag.

“At first I wanted to just eat him up. Strip the flesh from his bones and gobble it all down. But then I felt something. Like a light behind my eyes but I could smell it like an odor.”

“It normally takes months, even a few years, for our kind to transition from feasting on flesh directly to drinking blood. You’ve nearly done so in a night.”

“You’ve made me eat my father,” she whispered.

He laughed.

“Would you have preferred your mother?”

He walked over to the broom closet and opened it, pulling her beloved mama, also tied up tightly and gagged. Mama dropped to her knees upon seeing Papa on the table, the tears flowing like the Zhu Jiang.

“I didn’t know who you loved more. Girls tend to love their father. Mother-daughter relationships are…more fraught.”

“Are you going to let her live?” she asked, the words already hollow before they left her mouth.

That shit-eating, snake charmer’s grin which she had fallen for so many times before crossed his mouth.

“Of course not,” he said, “I told you I would see to your parents. You can’t leave loose ends like this behind. The memory of you alone, that’s dangerous enough. But family? Searching for you? That’s something we can’t have. Besides, I haven’t feasted yet tonight either.”

Topan let his hand settle on Mama’s mop of brown hair like a spider. Unbidden, a gasp came to her lips. The world was like moving through molasses, and only in spare moments did clarity abide.