The Vigilantes (The Superiors) (31 page)

“Why aren’t you doing it?” Cali asked, rubbing the smelly yellow lump on her feet.

“I already got it on, princess,” he said. “You think I’d go up in your place and leave my smell all over for them to figure out who’s been there?”

“Oh.”

“That’s alright, you’ll learn,” he said, peeling the shiny pink shell away from a section. “Besides, you can’t be too careful, right?” He started rubbing the thing on his foot. “Put your fingernails in it and get the juice on you as best you can,” he said as he worked. When they’d all finished, he took out a knife. “I’m gonna cut these cloves in half, and you gotta rub the wet part on your feet and then put them in your clothes somewhere they won’t fall out.”

Cali put her piece in her underwear, the only secure place she had. She remembered putting the picture she’d stolen from Man with Soft Hair in her underwear once. She’d left the picture in the drawer at her apartment. A part of her wished she’d taken it, just so she’d have something from home. But Shelly would probably like to have it more than she would, anyway. And she didn’t want to risk getting punished for it, by either humans or Superiors, if she got caught.

When the rest break ended, they all got up and stretched.
Cali
didn’t get much exercise in her apartment or the garden, and she was awfully tired after the morning of hard walking. She wanted to sit there in the road the rest of the day, but too soon they started off again. She could tell the rest were tired too, except their leader. He didn’t seem to notice.
Cali
had cooled a little when she opened her jumpsuit, but sitting on the open road in the sun had her as hot as before, and she was sticky and smelly and itchy and tired and sore. She wished the man would offer to carry
her
.

Terry had handed off the baby again. The blonde man carried it on his chest in a sling. Terry had fashioned her shirt into the carrier for the man, and now she was bare above the waist.
Cali
wished her master had gotten her a set with two pieces so she could take off the bottom. She had underwear on, so what did it matter? She didn’t want to dwell on envy so she walked ahead of Terry, closer to the girl with long hair, wanting to talk to someone but too tired and irritable to start a conversation.

Chapter 44

Draven was sleeping when they came for him. He awakened when sunlight streamed through the door. Their hurried footsteps and the commotion of movements and muttered words registered in his mind before he awakened fully. Then the chain around his ankle tightened, and they dragged him across the dirt floor by the foot.

“Stop,” Sally yelled. “You’re gonna get kicked out of the community. You gotta do what they says.”

“I can’t get kicked out, I made the community,” Tom said. Draven recognized Tom’s smell as easily as Sally’s now that he’d drawn from Tom.

“You got to at least start out with burying,” Sally said. “It’s in the rules. You don’t do what they said, they’ll get you. You know it. Besides, they’ve all been waiting to see the death. We can’t hog it for ourselves.”

When Draven tried to twist away, he saw that the two men outside the bars had stakes. He’d smelled the other before as well—one of the community men. A boy, really.

“Besides,” Sally said, “You can’t do it without Larry. We found the bloodsucker together, and you know how much he’ll be wanting to see it. And he got that right, just like I do.”

Tom and the boy looked at Draven, and he squinted back at them, his head throbbing. “Alright,” Tom said. “But I ain’t waiting for them to get back for the burying. I wanna see this sucker’s face when I shove a big shovel of dirt in his dirty cannibal mouth.”

“Ah, come on Tom, it’d be so cool,” the boy said. “Let’s do it.”

“Sally’s right, we gotta wait. But I’ll let you stake him afore we chain him up. Last time we thought he was sleeping, he done bit me and nearly kilt me.”

The boy lifted his hand and brought the stake down on the section of exposed calf above the ankle cuff. It tore through the skin and into the flesh above the ankle. When Draven jerked his leg at the impact, Tom yanked the chain tight. The boy laughed and got another stake. Draven ground his teeth together and tried not to scream when it sank into his leg.

“Now, is that really necessary?” Sally said, her heart beating quickly as she fluttered around trying to dissuade the men.

“Hell yeah, make him scream,” Tom said, and the chains tightened around both Draven’s ankles. Tom struggled to secure it while Draven thrashed against the restraint. But steel could always hold him. They came inside then, while Draven lay breathing hard and trying to stop the pain from snuffing out the light of reason. He’d let them do all this before, and he’d thought it had almost ended. He couldn’t lie passive while they took what little freedom he had.

When the boy came near with a stake raised, Draven knocked him off his feet, dragged the body under him, and put his teeth in the boy’s neck—so full of huge throbbing veins and sap. He drew as hard as he could until a stake went through his own throat and he could no longer pull sap into his mouth. The boy began screaming the moment Draven’s hold failed. Draven heard himself screaming, too, but it was a sound mostly in his head. Outside, his ears only heard the boy and the gurgling wheeze coming from his own throat.

More stakes sank into him.

The pain rose until it blinded him, and they pinned his arms again, bound him. Bright sunlight shone on his face as they carried him from the murky dark of his shed. Sally was near, her hand touching his hand for a moment. Draven thought she spoke, and the other two, but he couldn’t make his mind translate their language. His home-language inside his head made half-thoughts that were ripped away by pain before he could form them into something coherent even to himself.

Then he felt one of the stakes come out.

“Holy Moses, there ain’t even blood squirting out,” the boy said. “You reckon we done drained it all out stabbing him so much? ‘Cause it won’t be near as much fun if he don’t bleed none when we chop him all up.”

“Shut up, Neil. You’re a heathen,” Sally said.

“I’m a heathen? This thing bit me. I can’t wait to tell all the rest of ‘em, I got bit. I defeated a bloodsucker and lived to tell. Too bad Ethan didn’t. I wish he was here to see this. Hey, stop pulling them stakes out, woman.”

“My name is Sally, you moron. And how can you bury him with the stakes still in? They’ll know you been at him while they’s out doing the important things.”

“If they’s so important, how come Uncle Tom ain’t with them? He’s an elder.”

“I nearly died th’other day,” Tom said. “I’m weak. I can’t make it that far, or I would’ve gone.”

“Hey, any newbies coming out this time?”

“I heard we’re getting three of them. Two of them’s a married couple, and then a girl, I think fifteen.”

“Reckon she’s pretty? I bet I could marry her.”

“Ain’t nobody wants to marry you, Neil,” Sally said, yanking a stake out of Draven’s other leg.

“Hey, cut that out,” Tom said. “Let him suffer a little. He done bit me and Neil, here. Besides, nobody cares if we rough him up a little, long as we don’t kill him.”

“Then how come Daddy took the only key and kept it on him?”

“Well, your daddy ain’t here no more, is he?” Tom asked. “Now let’s start to digging, all of us. You too, Sally. If you don’t like blood, quit looking at the thing.”

“I can’t help it. I try not to, but I just keep on looking.”

“Reckon the flies will lay eggs in his wounds and the maggots will eat him in the ground?” Neil said. “I mean, he’s already dead anyway, right? I bet the worms and bugs eat all his flesh away, and his bones’ll rise up to suck our blood in the night.”

“You’re too dumb to even talk to,” Sally said. “You’re so dumb I can’t believe you haven’t shot your own self looking to see if your gun’s loaded. My only question is, does it actually hurt being dumb as you?”

They argued and dug while Draven lay rigid with pain, unable to swallow or breathe, his neck a hole of pain that wouldn’t heal. If they left him in the ground for a year, he’d be crawling with insects all summer, and a frozen block of ice in winter. And all the time with stakes driven into him, lying in agony for so long. He wondered if a Superior could lose his mind. He’d never heard of it happening, but it must be possible. The mind was one of the only aspects capable of change for Superiors.

After a time, the humans came back to him. They had worked in the shade, but Draven could feel among his other pains the burning of his skin that meant he’d sunburned in the time it had taken them to dig his grave. He recognized Sally’s heartbeat coming closer, heard her whisper low enough that the others wouldn’t hear.

“I’m real sorry about this, Draven.”

The two men joined her before she said more. They dragged him through a pile of fresh earth and rolled him into the grave.

One of the stakes twisted sideways into his flesh before tearing loose when he rolled over, but the two remaining stakes lodged deeper in his body when his weight shifted on them. Cool, hard earth greeted him inside the grave, and the force of his fall drove the partial breath he’d taken from his lungs. He tried to scream again, but he couldn’t draw a breath past the stake that had driven to the hilt into his throat. The chains dug into Draven while he lay waiting for the first scoop of earth to fall on him. After a cheer from the men, they began the process of filling the shallow trench over his body. Their voices seemed to reach Draven’s ears from a far off place. The next scoop of gravel and rocky soil landed next to his ear, and the next one covered his face.

Keeping his eyes closed tightly, he fought the urge to shake the dirt from his face. Even the slightest movement of his head filled him with an excruciating, grinding pain radiating from his throat throughout his entire body. If only they had taken out that one stake. He couldn’t heal with the wood still embedded in his flesh. But when he called out silently for Sally to help him, she didn’t respond. She, like the others, stooped to shovel dirt onto him from outside the grave. The men buried his head, laughing all the while. Draven kept his mouth closed despite the instinct to thrash and scream. Soon rough earth began to press into his nostrils and into the wounds that hadn’t yet healed. Still he didn’t dare open his mouth. No sound would come out, but he would make an entrance for the soil they planted him in. It would push into his throat, into his lungs and stomach, clogging his staked neck with filth and heavy, unforgiving earth.

He could not move now, but only lay trapped as the chains held him fast and the earth pressed down upon him, heavier and heavier, until he could no longer hear even the voices of his gravediggers. And so he waited in the ground, entombed in dirt, silent and cut from the rest of the world, in the last and loneliest place a person ever lay.

Chapter 45

Although Byron was exhausted, the room stayed dark enough during the day that his headache subsided. Caleb had fallen asleep, or at least fallen silent. Byron slept a few hours, but he woke after a while and started trying to come up with a plan of escape. They had to get out. He didn’t want his name at the top of the list of disappearances.

He switched on his pod. Strange that Angel hadn’t taken it away from him. The signal didn’t come in very well underground, but even having it with him would allow
Milton
to trace them after a few days. If they stayed alive that long. While Byron busied himself with checking his pod, he forgot to hold his breath for a second, and the stench in the room gagged him.

He heard a movement in one corner. “Caleb?” he asked the darkness. It had to be Caleb—if the man was honest. Caleb had said he’d checked and found nothing alive in the basement. Byron had been tired and had let Caleb check before he slept. Now he remembered his suspicion of Caleb and wondered if something crept up on him at that very moment. He looked around the dark basement, using his pod to cast enough light to see the area.

“Yeah,” Caleb said sleepily. “Why are you up?”

“Can’t sleep. We have to get out of here.”

“In daylight? I don’t even have shades, and it’s so bright for me after so long. It’s gone beyond where it’s just too bright or hurts my eyes. Nowadays I’m pretty much blind.”

“I am, too. They say the longer you live, the more light-sensitive you become.”

“How long you been awake?”

“A few minutes.”

“Why are we whispering?”

“I don’t know,” Byron said aloud. His voice sounded loud in the small space. “What’s that smell?” At first he’d thought it was the stink of sapien, magnified by the small space. It reminded him of the stench of his own sapiens’ room, which reminded him of his hunger. But he lost his appetite the moment he breathed the rank smell in the underground room. And he had to breathe a little to talk.

“I’m going to find out,” Caleb said.

“I’ll try to call someone.”

“Good luck.”

“You too,” Byron said, and he meant it. He found Caleb a bit suspicious, but right now he was Byron’s only ally. “And be careful,” he added when he heard Caleb moving around.