Rotter World (5 page)

Chapter Five

The knock on the container door echoed through the room’s confines, jarring Elena awake. She stirred and sat up on her cot, wondering if she had only imagined it. A moment later a second knock confirmed that someone was outside.

“Miss Elena, are you in there?” The question was accompanied by a third knock, slightly louder.

“I can’t open the door. It’s daylight.”

“I understand, Miss Elena. Paul sent me to tell you that Dr. Compton and the others have arrived.”

“Thank you. Please tell Paul I’ll join them after sunset.”

“Of course, Miss Elena.”

Elena settled back onto the cot and stared up at the ceiling. She wished she could have been there to greet Compton, but the raiding party’s late return had prevented that. Now Compton would have an entire day with Paul to tell his version of how the vampires had stolen the R Virus and used it to destroy civilization, a version that in all probability would undermine, if not completely shatter, the fragile accommodation between her and Paul. She feared how the coven would be treated once night arrived. A part of her expected the humans to burst into the containers sometime during the day and drag every member of the coven into the sunlight.

Elena sighed. She would not blame the humans if they did.

Elena found it ironic how events had played out. She had never supported stealing the R Virus and releasing it against mankind, even when the idea was being bantered about by some of the more extreme covens. Her objections had not been based on any emotional bond to the species she once belonged to, nor were they derived from any sentimentality to what a zombie outbreak might do to the humans. Her objections had been entirely cynical and selfish. She had considered humans as a source of nourishment, and worried that the living dead might wipe out the covens’ food supply, much like Mad Cow Disease culled out entire herds of cattle. Back then, Elena had viewed humans with the same emotional detachment as a rancher has for his livestock.

If she had the courage and the strength of her convictions, maybe she could have prevented this apocalypse when the Vampire Council, the supreme decision-making body of the vampires, had met sixteen months ago in Prague to debate stealing and releasing the R Virus. As master of the New York City coven, the largest in the United States and the fifth largest in the world, her opinion usually carried considerable weight on the Council. On that day, however, the dissenters had been outnumbered eight to two. The only other voice protesting such insanity had come from Hu Yi, the master of the Beijing coven, who fully understood what such an outbreak could do to a country with a billion and a half people. Unfortunately, the older covens from Rumania, Moscow, and London had carried the day, their centuries-long struggle to stave off human hunters swaying the masters from Tokyo, Manila, Mexico City, Cairo, and Abidjan. Had they known what the results would be, maybe they would have listened to her and Hu Yi.

What no one on the Council had foreseen was that the zombies needed to sustain their reanimation through the nutrients found in living tissue, and to the living dead the flesh and organs of vampires was just as nourishing as humans. Because the covens had to find refuge from the sunlight, they had found themselves in imminent danger as zombie outbreaks erupted in the world’s major cities. A few covens had been smart enough to move by night, staying ahead of the outbreak, but that merely delayed the inevitable. Most of the covens had been trapped indoors when the zombies swarmed over them. Within weeks of the initial outbreak, vampires had nearly become extinct.

Because of New York City’s massive population, the infection had spread rapidly. Only one of the three scouts she had sent out that first night to survey the carnage returned, the single terrified vampire describing how he watched the city be overrun by zombies. Elena had prepared the coven to evacuate at nightfall and seek refuge in the country. She had planned various escape routes and safe havens to hole up in during daylight, ran through her mind all the contingencies they might encounter, and felt confident she had counted for every possibility. Except for the possibility that the zombies would find them first. On the morning before their departure, a dozen rotters had stumbled across the coven and attacked, excited by the prospects of food. Half the coven had been wiped out within minutes. The survivors had escaped to the sewers, only to find their underground world also infested with the living dead. Even worse, they now faced their recently-butchered comrades reanimated as super zombies, with all the speed and agility of a swarmer and the strength and voracious appetite of a vampire. The sewers had turned into a charnel house.

Only sixteen vampires had escaped New York City. Once outside the city limits, five of her coven had disappeared into the night, no longer trusting her judgment or respecting her authority. Elena hoped they had found safe refuge somewhere, but doubted that they still existed. The remaining members were slowly whittled away during the next few months. Once the largest in the States, her coven now numbered only four vampires besides herself. As far as she knew, all the other covens had been wiped out and every vampire destroyed, including the members of the Council who had initiated the holocaust.

Elena would have laughed at the irony, except she no longer found humor in anything.

Of all the coven members, she trusted Dravko most. After herself, he was the second oldest, having been turned in the 14th century when vampires took advantage of the Black Death to ravage their way across Europe, hiding their feeding under the guise of the pandemic. Whereas most vampires do not go more than a few hundred years before hunters tracked them down, Dravko possessed a natural instinct for survival, and lived long enough to hone his skills for hunting, fighting, and evasion until he grew to be a powerful and fearful vampire in his own right. Elena had discovered him in 1689 as a rogue prowling the countryside on the outskirts of Budapest, living off the local gypsy tribes, and had welcomed him into the fold. Dravko rewarded her generosity with unfettered loyalty, and soon became the coven keeper and her right hand man.

Tibor’s loyalty was also secure, albeit to Dravko, who sired him back in 1812. When Napoleon had marched on Moscow, Elena’s coven followed close behind, assured that the most violent war to date would allow the best opportunities for feeding. Dravko had stumbled across Tibor hidden in a grove of trees, bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the stomach and left for dead by the retreating Russian army. Dravko had offered him a chance of salvation and immortality, and the opportunity for revenge, which Tibor readily accepted. Tibor came into his own right as a vampire during Napoleon’s winter retreat from Moscow when scores of French soldiers succumbed to his bloodlust. By the time they reached Poland, he had become the fiercest fighter in Elena’s coven.

Less reliable was Sultanic. Elena had found him in London in 1888 after he had butchered five prostitutes in the East End, giving rise to the Jack the Ripper legend. She spent weeks tracking him down before his slaughtering brought the weight of the city’s police down on the coven. Her and Dravko had captured Sultanic shortly after the mutilation of Mary Kelly and moved him to the country. Common sense had dictated that Elena should have disposed of Sultanic to prevent any future killing sprees, but something stayed her hand. Maybe she connected with Sultanic’s Polish heritage. Maybe she understood that he directed his rage at prostitutes because he had been sired by a vampire posing as a street whore. Or maybe she empathized with the confusion of the newly-turned trying to find his way in a strange world. In any case, she had taken Sultanic under her guidance and tutored him in the ways of the vampire. In return for giving him a second chance, Sultanic devoted himself to Elena, loyally sticking with her through good times and bad. It did not get much worse than this.

Elena had a similar situation with Tatyana, the youngest member of the coven, both in physical and vampiric age. A nineteen-year-old student from St. Petersburg, Russia, Tatyana had emigrated to America to start a better life for herself. Instead, like so many other naïve and vulnerable girls before her, she got sucked into a culture of physical and psychological abuse, first being forcibly addicted to meth, and then sent out to turn tricks to pay for her habit. One of those tricks happened to be Sultanic. Taken with her beauty, he had sired Tatyana rather than feed off her, bringing her into the coven.

Tatyana had encountered extraordinary difficulties adjusting to her siring. Most vampires underwent incredible hardship transitioning to their new lives, often taking decades to become comfortable with their vampiric form, enhanced strength, sense of immortality, and loss of inhibitions. For Tatyana, this displacement had been intensified by the abuse she had endured. Her adjustment from human to vampire, strained enough to begin with, had been crippled by her hatred and distrust of others as well as her own sense of self loathing. Tatyana drew inward. She rarely explored her vampiric side. She preferred the company of humans over her own kind, and one human in particular. Normally such regression could be compensated for over time; however, these were far from normal times.

Elena knew that fact better than anyone. She wondered what the Vampire Council would say, if any of them were still alive, about her alliance with the humans. Even the surviving members of her coven had opposed the idea when she first proposed it. They had acquiesced only when Dravko spoke out in support of the alliance. She knew Dravko considered the idea insane, and had agreed to it only out of loyalty to her. Truth be known, Elena had not liked the idea of trusting their lives to the humans, but she had been left with few choices. She had been amazed that the coven had endured as long as it had, living off of stray animals and wildlife, and holing up by day in any building where they could find refuge. Too many times they had to clear a building of zombies in order to occupy it for the night, and in the process lost Christophe, her lover, as well as Svetlana and Toshii. Elena knew their luck would soon run out, which left an approach to the humans as the only viable option to ensure their survival.

Elena never knew why Paul accepted the offer. She had spent those first few days lying awake all day, waiting for the humans to break into their containers and drag the coven out into the sunlight, exacting revenge for what vampires had brought onto mankind. Thankfully that never happened. The threat of death, however, always hung just beneath the surface. She chalked up their continued existence to the humans having the same loyalty to Paul as the coven did to her. Just as she knew her coven’s loyalty was growing tenuous, and could be shattered by the slightest incident, she assumed the humans’ loyalty to the alliance to be just as shaky. Elena feared Compton’s arrival could be the catalyst that broke the bond.

Elena stared intently at the ceiling, guessing where the sun would be in the morning sky. It would be another seven hours before the sun set again, and she dared not imagine how much discord Compton could sow in that time.

Not since the first weeks of the outbreak had Elena felt so uncertain about the coven’s future.

Chapter Six

Dravko spread out on the bottom bunk, desperately trying to fall asleep. He could not doze off, partly because of the adrenalin rush of the raid, and partly because he always felt uncomfortable in the steel container the vampires used as their emergency quarters when they returned to camp after sunrise. It had nothing to do with their safety, for the container was the ideal haven. The outer layers were covered with steel plates welded onto the outer frame to ensure sunlight could not filter in, and the only door was secured from the inside with four heavy-duty slide bolts. He felt uneasy having to rely on their hosts to ensure their survival.

In the bunk above him, Tibor stared up into the pitch dark at the ceiling. “I don’t trust the humans.”

Dravko mentally sighed. Having to listen to Tibor’s complaints did not help him relax. He pretended to be asleep, hoping Tibor would do the same.

Unfortunately, Sultanic was not as astute. “Shut up and get some rest.”

“I can’t. What if the humans are waiting for us to doze off so they can kill us?” Tibor nearly spat the word “humans”.

“You’re paranoid,” said Sultanic.

“And you’re naïve,” Tibor shot back.

Dravko reasoned it was time to end the conversation. “The humans have done nothing to threaten us. Why distrust them now?”

“I’ve
always
distrusted them.”

“So why complain about them now?”

“Because of last night’s raid.” Tibor leaned over the edge of the top bunk and leered at Dravko. A large scar ran down his face, the result of being sliced centuries ago by a hunter who dipped the blade of his knife in holy water. The scar stretched from the right forehead, across his eye and cheek, and over his lips before ending on his chin. “Didn’t it bother you?”

Dravko hesitated before answering. “I admit it was unusual.”

“Unusual?” Tibor snorted. “Get your head out of your ass. We haven’t gone near Portsmouth since the Navy yard fell to the rotters. We didn’t even send a scouting party to look for survivors. Yet last night Paul and Elena risked the entire raiding party to rescue six humans.”

“Quit exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad.”

“They didn’t know that. Do you remember the last time they sent a raiding party deep into rotter territory?”

Of course Dravko remembered. It had happened five months ago when the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border threatened to go critical and melt down, which would have contaminated most of the coastal region, including their camp. Elena and Paul had dispatched a raiding party of four humans and two vampires to shut down the plant. It turned out to be a suicide mission. The party had succeeded in shutting down the reactor. However, no one ever heard from them again. Both commanders promised they would never send out their people on such a mission again, a promise they had kept until last night.

Dravko wanted to avoid any further discussion. He rolled onto his stomach, breaking eye contact with Tibor. “I’m sure they had their reasons for ordering last night’s raid.”

“Really?” Tibor rolled out of his bunk and dropped to the floor. Crouching by Dravko, he sneered at the back of his commander’s head. “Did you even bother to ask Elena why she approved such a raid?”

Dravko definitely did not want to discuss this any further.

“Well?”

Dravko rolled over to face Tibor. “Yes, I did.”

“And?”

“She told me to stop asking questions and do as I was told.”

“I thought so.” Tibor’s words dripped with self-righteousness. He sprang back up to his bunk and settled down, content that he had won the argument.

As infuriating as he found Tibor’s attitude, Dravko could not fault him. Even he was bothered by the cavalier way they had been ordered into rotter territory and Elena’s curt response to his question. As far as he knew, Paul was just as mysterious with the humans.

It had not always been this way. As mistress of the New York City coven, Elena used to be forthcoming with Dravko and the others, especially after her vampires began to fall victim to the rotters. As the living dead overran the city, Elena had evacuated her coven and headed north, holing up in the basements of abandoned buildings during day and traveling through the countryside by night. Realizing they could not survive on their own, she had sought out a human colony to join forces with. Not just any colony, however. She had wanted one whose members she felt had the intelligence and the ability to survive, yet which was small enough that if the humans turned on the vampires the coven would have a fighting chance. After weeks of searching, they had stumbled upon Paul’s group. Elena had approached the camp one night under a white flag to propose an alliance. Fortunately for her, Paul had seen the advantages of bolstering the camp’s strength by their inclusion, so he accepted the offer and made Elena his co-commander.

At first, neither the humans nor the vampires had accepted the arrangement. The entire situation probably would have fallen apart if Paul and Elena had not struggled to make it succeed. Still, words and insults had been exchanged, followed by threats. The mutual hatred had boiled over one night when one of her vampires, Vladimir, and two humans went after each other. Elena had banished Vladimir from the camp, condemning him to almost certain death out among the rotters. Paul had sentenced his two humans to serve as blood cows for the rest of the coven for a month, giving up a pint a week to feed the vampires. After that, even though the hatred and distrust still existed between each group, everyone had internalized their feelings and refused to act on them.

The downside was that Elena had violated the openness and trust she once shared with the coven. From what Dravko could surmise from Robson and the others, Paul had not kept them informed either. The secretive mission had severely strained the good will Elena and Paul had built up these past few months.

Although Dravko would not publicly admit it, he felt that for once Tibor was justified in his paranoia.

Dravko leaned out from his bunk and looked up at Tibor. “I agree that Elena shouldn’t have kept us in the dark. But she’s done well by us so far, so she must have her reasons.”

Tibor responded with a frustrated huff.

“Don’t lose faith in her.” Dravko rolled over. “As for the humans, we still have to work with them, but that doesn’t mean we have to like them.”

Under his breath Tibor muttered, “Some of us like the humans way too much.”

At last, thought Dravko. Something we can agree on.