The Blood Talisman (26 page)

“
Do you know how to end
this?” he asked Selene.

“
Haven’t a clue. I don’t
understand why it started, much less how it ends. We have a lot of
research that we need to do. We need to get to a safe place
first.”

They fell silent and the miles rushed
past. Selene noticed Alex rubbing his bare arms. There was a chill
in the air and the fright that they were feeling made everything
seem even colder. She searched in one of the bags that remained in
the back seat with her and fished out a plain white t-shirt. She
handed it to Alex and he took it happily.

The clean white shirt was a stark
contrast to his bloodstained, dirty body.

“
You got any wet wipes in
there?” he asked.

“
I can look.”

Ram chuckled slightly and said, “Do
you honestly think a vampire is going to carry wet wipes? We don’t
waste a drop of the blood we spill.” He glanced over at Alex’s
blood stained arms. “Just lick it off. That’s what we
do.”

“
That’s disgusting,” Selene
pointed out.

“
I’m not doing that,” Alex
said.

“
Just trying to help.” Ram
shrugged his shoulders and eyebrows, ignoring their
disgust.

“
I don’t see any wet wipes
in here. Sorry. But there are more white shirts in here and here’s
a bottle of water.” Selene handed him a clean white t-shirt and a
half drank bottle of water.

Alex poured water on the t-shirt and
wiped his arms, neck, and face with it until the remnants of his
kill were gone. He dropped the dirty shirt to the floor.

The SUV started to slow as they pulled
over to the side of the road.

“
Why are we stopping?”
Selene asked.

“
I’m hungry,” Ram
answered.

“
You only ate half an hour
ago. What’s your problem? We need to get back to the
hospital.”

“
There’s a hitchhiker just
up the road. Can’t you hear her?” Ram asked, looking at
Alex.

Alex nodded yes slowly with a confused
look on his face. He wandered if he had become the new temporary
John. He hated Ram with every fiber of his being. There wasn’t
anything within him that could remotely care about Ram and his
hunger.

“
C’mon, I’ll let you have
my leftovers,” Ram joked.

He turned and opened the driver’s side
door and began to exit the SUV when Alex grabbed his arm, stopping
him from leaving. Ram shrugged his arm away and got out
anyway.

“
Don’t do this. We need to
go,” Alex yelled at him

“
Try and stop me,” Ram said
in a deeper, more menacing voice. He slammed the driver’s side door
to, leaving them both behind.

Alex and Selene looked at each other,
Alex questioning what he should do.

“
Don’t go after him. Let
him be, Alex.”

“
I can’t let him keep
killing people. I have to stop him.”

He turned to open the passenger door
and saw Ram walking back with the hitchhiker. She was tall and
skinny with long brown, almost black, hair. She was laughing and
smiling at him like they were long lost friends. She wore blue
jeans so tight that they looked painted on her skinny body and a
deep red and grey striped, nearly see-through sweater shirt that
left no room for imagination as to what her perfectly perky breasts
looked like underneath. They jiggled happily as she laughed at his
obnoxious jokes.

Ram opened the back passenger door
where Selene sat looking at him with a most distasteful look of
concern and resentment.

“
Will you drive?” he asked
her. “I have some more stories that I want to continue telling my
new friend.”

“
What the hell are you
doing?” Selene whispered to Ram.

He looked at her as if she had three
heads on her shoulders. She rolled her eyes at him and complied
with his request. She slammed the door shut behind her and he
reopened it to let their new guest inside. He climbed in behind her
and she scooted over behind Alex.

It made Alex uncomfortable to have
someone sitting behind him that he didn’t know.

Selene put the SUV back into drive and
continued their drive towards Texas.

“
I’m Jolene bah the wahy,”
the hitchhiker said.

Her Southern accent immediately
irritated Selene. It sounded fake, like she was intentionally using
it to get attention.

“
This is Selene and Alex,”
Ram said.

“
Oh, I knew ah Selene once.
She was mah babysittah when I was ah lil baby,” Jolene
said.

“
Where did you say you were
headed to?” Ram asked her coyly.

“
Oh, I’m headed to
Calie-forn-i-a. I heard you can get some good jobs out that
wahy.”

She stomped her brown cowboy boots
down on the floorboard beneath her feet. The white shirts that Alex
used to clean himself up with were smashed up under her
boots.

“
What in tha worl?” she
said, picking up the bloody shirts from the floorboard. She turned
them over with a horrified look on her face. She started screaming
and Ram reached over and put his hand over her mouth.

“
Shhhhhhh.” he whispered to
her. “Now this won’t hurt much.”

He bit into her neck softly and she
screamed again. Selene winced at her screams and wished she could
cover her ears with her hands. Ram pulled back and looked at
Jolene’s face of horror. He smiled at her, revealing his menacing
fangs and she screamed more.

Alex, unable to remain silent any
longer said, “Don’t play with her. Kill her if you’re going to or
we can stop and let her out.”

Ram shrugged and said, “Pull
over.”

Selene pulled over the SUV, a mile up
from where they had stopped before. Jolene’s screams and cries
hushed with the hope of getting out alive. She fumbled, trying to
open the door. She practically fell out of the door and Ram pursued
her. She crawled backwards on her hands and feet, watching every
move that Ram made.

He reached down and snapped her
neck.

Alex got out of the SUV and slammed
the door behind him.

“
What the fuck is wrong
with you? You act like if you’re not killing someone every five
seconds, then you’re not living.”

Ram smiled at him and said, “Just get
back in the car, wolf.”

Alex pushed him on the shoulder and
said, “I’m not John. I refuse to serve you in any shape or
form.”

“
Get in the car, wolf,” Ram
said again, pushing him back.

Alex punched him across the face and
Ram did the same. Before long they were rolling in the dirt on the
side of the road next to Jolene’s dead body.

“
Stop it!” Selene yelled at
them. They refused to listen. “Stop it!” she yelled out again. They
ignored her and continued to roll around on the ground, punching
each other. She got out of the car and slammed the door.

She looked around at the woods behind
them, frustrated. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The
trees grew to gargantuan lengths and widths. Their branches spread
towards the road. One of the limbs reached out and grabbed Ram by
his ankle. Another limb reached out and grabbed Alex by his. The
trees hoisted them up in the air and Selene opened her
eyes.

They dangled there looking at her,
confused.

“
What did you do to us?”
Ram yelled out at her.

“
I am separating you two
before you kill each other! The world could potentially be going to
hell and you get into a fist fight? You’re both being very
childish!”

“
I’m sorry. Can you let us
go?” Alex asked.

“
Promise not to fight
anymore?”

“
I swear,” Alex
said.

Selene looked over at Ram, expecting
the same promise from him.

“
I promise to try,” was the
best Ram could do.

“
I guess I couldn’t expect
more from a vampire.” She lowered them both the ground. She sat
Alex down gently but dropped Ram on his ass.

The trees receded back into the forest
and stood at their normal height and width as if they had never
been touched.

They all loaded themselves back into
the SUV peacefully and Ram put it into drive. He spun a little dust
at take-off. The dust billowed up into a small cloud above Jolene’s
body. Her undead body sat up in the cloud and climbed to its feet.
Jolene’s neck started bobbing around on its broken pedestal as she
slowly began walking down the road towards the disappearing
SUV.

Chapter
3
1

Several hours had past and the sun had
covered the southern skies. They had traveled all day. The sun
threatened to set again as they pulled into Blearney Hospital’s
parking lot. Chaos had been set about amongst the empty cars and
trucks that remained. Some were burning embers and others remained
untouched except with broken windshields and bent-in
doors.

“
Surely this curse hasn’t
spread this quickly.” Selene said to Ram and Alex.

Ram parked the SUV right outside the
front doors and they cautiously got out. Selene grabbed the book
bag with the canister that contained her father’s ashes and his
Book of Shadows. They were both too important to leave
unprotected.

A wheelchair prevented the doors from
completely closing to. They slammed back and forth in unison,
making the wheelchair pop and squelch each time. Ram pulled the
wheelchair out of the way and pushed it over to the side. He caught
the doors before they closed back to, and an eerie silence greeted
them as they walked in. The front lobby of the hospital wasn’t much
different from the parking lot. The deserted nurses’ desk was
covered in pools of blood. A dead patient lay on the floor by the
station. He was a completely hollowed-out shell of a human. Even
the cheeks on his face were missing.

They all walked slowly through the
hall, carefully viewing the disarray of it all. Alex clicked the
elevator down to take them to the basement. If it looked this bad
on the first floor, he wondered how Amalia had gotten through it
all.

The elevator doors opened to two
female nurses enjoying a hospital visitor as a snack. They were
ripping through his bones and tearing at his flesh. One was working
on chewing up his forehead and the other was eating what was left
of his right arm. They stopped chewing to look up at Ram, Alex, and
Selene.

Ram pulled one of his many guns and
shot them both in the head. They crumpled onto their
meal.

“
I think I’ll take the
stairs,” Ram said.

Alex opened the door leading to the
stairwell and followed Selene and Ram into the dimly lit area. It
seemed mostly quiet as they descended down into the basement. They
matched each other step for step with Ram leading the way. Selene
was sandwiched safely in between them both.

They reached the basement door and Ram
pushed it carefully open. The lights in the basement flickered
furiously. Papers lay disheveled along the ominous grey floor.
Every door in the basement had been left open. It looked like
criminals had ransacked the place looking for loot.

They all ran towards the room that
Amalia had been in. They found an empty bed with many dead doctors
and nurses lying near the bed. They all lay there in black pools of
blood. They were all burned to the point of being
unrecognizable.

Alex knelt down by one of their bodies
and took in their scent of burnt blood. It gave him flashes of
Amalia alive and feeding on them all. When the bodies dropped to
the floor, Sol burned their corpses with the light of the
sun.

Alex stood up from the dead, burned
bodies and backed away from the room.

“
What did you see?” Selene
asked him.

“
She’s with Sol. They did
this together,” Alex answered.

“
Is she still
here?”

“
I don’t know. I can’t see
past their deaths,” Alex said, pointing towards the
corpses.

A noise from behind startled them all.
Selene let out a small scream at the loud rustling. It was coming
from the monitor room a few doors down. Ram ran quickly towards it.
He jerked the door completely open and the small man with glasses
that cowered inside yelled out, “Please don’t hurt me. Don’t let
them kill me too.” He struggled to get farther into the room, away
from Ram.

Ram picked him up off the floor and
the man struggled to run.

“
Stop it. I’m not going to
hurt you. I need to know what happened here.” The man continued to
struggle, ignoring Ram’s calm request. “I won’t hurt you,” he
replied as he gently released him from his grip.

“
She… she woke up and… and
started feeding. He was here with her. A powerful witch or
something. He just showed up and… and they… please let me go. I
don’t want to be here anymore.”

“
What’s your name? Selene
asked.

The man calmed slightly at the mundane
question.