Underground Vampire (13 page)

For now, the task was simple, he
thought, as he rose from the corpse at his feet and flashed down the
corridor.  Encourage his Vampires to hunt and feed as they did before the
Clan became civilized, then mold them into a fighting group. 

A scream reverberated up the
corridor and he rushed, encouraged to witness the denouement of today’s
festivities. Around a corner, he came upon Tomas greedily drinking from one of
the men while two other Vampires lurked nearby, clearly hypnotized by the
intoxicating rush of murder.  He watched as the two lurkers edged closer,
hoping to share in the feed. 

Oliver recognized the powerful
attraction of the struggling Human’s blood smell upon the two, but he wanted
them hunting, not scavenging, so, stepping in front of them, he said, “No,
today you eat only what you kill.”   The two looked at him, the
desire writ large in their eyes, and continued to move closer, their hunger
overwhelming their obedience. “Go,” he commanded, pointing down the corridor,
“or you go hungry tonight.”  Snapping out of their mesmerized state, they
ran by their greedy brother noisily slurping at the throat of the Human and,
with a last envious glance, shot down the corridor.

Stopping for a moment, Oliver
stroked the long hair of the eating Vampire. “You have done well,” he
said.  The Vampire softly growled deep in his throat and Oliver
smiled.  This would be easier than he’d thought; the veneer of
civilization was thin and Vampire nature was strong.  Gunshots
reverberated down the darkened passage and he hurried off, leaving the first to
his kill while he went to see how the others were doing. 

He’d chosen the hunt site carefully,
exploring until he found a bit of the original Underground left over from fire
that had been forgotten by City Hall and abandoned by the People of the
Night.  The passages in this part were unsafe for both Humans and
Vampires.  Treacherous pits had opened in the ground from subsurface water
and the old wooden structures had long ago rotted, leaving skeletal corpses of
rotten buildings.  Waste pipes and utility lines jutted from odd angles in
a complex mess. What light there was came from the century-old glass embedded
in the sidewalks above and a string of pale bulbs he’d haphazardly strung down
the old walkways.   The weak light and collapsed structures made this
area more like battleground Stalingrad than tourist Seattle, which suited
Oliver’s purposes perfectly. His future looked more like Russians and Germans
slaughtering each other in rubble than Seattleites sipping coffee on the patio.

When he caught up with the hunt, he
saw that his five Vampires had the remaining two Humans surrounded.  The
Humans were making a stand behind the debris from an old cave-in with the wall
at their back. The Vampires were in a semi-circle slowly moving closer. 
He stopped to observe.  “Let the youngsters work the problem out
themselves,” he thought, resisting the impulse to organize the attack. 

One of the Humans, the female, was
threatening, “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot,” waving her pistol from
Vampire to Vampire.  The other, a stocky male who looked to be brimming
with blood, stood still, aiming at the center Vampire.  This one held his
weapon rock steady, using his left hand to support his shooting hand. 

From the midst of the Vampires
stepped forward Usher, a tall slim Vampire that he’d had his doubts
about.  Usher walked toward the male Human who fired into his chest
several times.  Usher stumbled without going to his knee, then reached out
and calmly twisted the pistol from the Human’s hand saying, “You need a bigger
gun.”  He nonchalantly flipped the gun off into the darkness, then deliberately
and slowly pulled the Human to him and, stretching the man backward over his
leg till he was curved like a bow, began to drink at his neck. 

The other Vampires, realizing they
were down to the one remaining Human, fell upon her and she disappeared beneath
a frenzy of the black clad Vamps, each fighting for a vein or, hopefully, a
cascading artery.  Her cries were silenced and her gun fell useless to the
ground as Oliver watched the violent scrum. 

“Next time,” he commented to no one
in particular, “if you want your own meal you must learn to be quicker.”

The gloom stretched away from him
down the sidewalk until the shadows merged into black and form became
indistinguishable from imagination. The yellow light spilling from the basement
of the Blue Anchor decreased as the inverse square and the amethyst colored
glass embedded as skylights in the sidewalks above painted the walls, doors and
windows of the old shop fronts violet, until he felt that he was as far from
Seattle as he’d ever been in his life.  Overhead the streets rumbled with
the passing of trucks and buses and, while city noise comforted him at first,
the deeper into the maze he went the more the noise became ominous and distant
thunder.

He tried to read the hand drawn map
he’d prepared, but it was too dark and his lines became squiggles.  Here
and there, tunnels jutted off at odd angles and vaults like random cloches
imported from the Maginot Line stood guard at intersections.  He’d
researched the Underground and the reports made little sense. No one seemed to
know exactly how many blocks of Seattle had burned in the fire. The more he
tried to reconstruct pre-fire Seattle and compare it to building records, the
more it became apparent that someone had confused the records so that there was
no certainty concerning the streets or, more importantly, the
Underground.  

Estimates of the fire ranged from
twenty to sixty square blocks, a number larger than all of downtown at the time
of the conflagration.  The only fact everyone agreed on was that one
million rats perished in the blaze.  A curious fact repeated in all the
accounts and histories as if it was very important to someone.

The Underground had a geography
separate from City Hall reality.  Reporting his findings to Arabella she’d
laughed, cautioning that while Humans owned the City Vampires controlled the
Underground.  He was beginning to believe that their influence extended
from the dark into the civil corridors of power.

Snagging his sweater on a rusty
nail jutting from a board hanging in his way, he paused to disentangle himself
and take stock of his situation.  Finkelstein had said, “don’t go down;
you aren’t ready.”  Swinging by her apartment to bring her up to date on
the investigation and hopefully to hang, he’d gone to their unofficial
headquarters the Blue Anchor when she hadn’t answered.  Mr. Finkelstein
mentioned that she’d been there but went into the tunnels, alone.  That
was all he needed to know and, pushing by Mr. Finkelstein, he started down the
passage looking for his partner.  Actually, technically, they weren’t
partners, as whenever he mentioned it to her she replied, “No, we are not
partners.”

The last sound he’d heard was
Finkelstein yelling, “Don’t go past the light,” as he plunged down the
corridor, that and the rumbling overhead. He wished he had his
flashlight.  He was craving light and he knew from history it made a
terrific club.

He tried to memorize the turns so
he could retreat, but quickly lost track; the Underground was a maze with no
discernible pattern.   If everything went bad, Plan B was to break
into the first available basement, make his way upstairs and out into the
light. But, and it was a big but, unlike the Blue Anchor most of the basements
he came upon were boarded up, sealed long ago from the Underground.  Here
and there someone or something had punched openings through walls, but most of
the time the windows and doors were rudely boarded up, leaving him no way out
if something bad was coming down the passage toward him. 

He thought about turning around but
there was no way he was going to face Arabella and admit he’d started in but
quit and abandoned her.  Even if she didn’t think they were partnered, he
did and that was enough.  He’d had enough of being treated like a rookie,
he was a SPD veteran and done his time on the street.  “Aint nothing here
that I haven’t seen and can’t handle,” he said to himself, “all I have to do is
find her.”

He thought he was heading east
since the walkway slanted up.  In places it got steep, steeper than he thought
the streets were now, but then it would dip down or level out and any
correlation with the surface slipped from his mind.  From his research he
knew that they’d regraded the streets when they’d raised them by sluicing the
hillsides down to fill in the walls they put up next to the sidewalks. 

Apparently, when the streets were
raised to the second story, people would crawl up and down ladders to get from
the new streets to the shops below.  It wasn’t until they built the new
sidewalks on the second floor that the shops all moved upstairs, and the second
floor became the first floor and the old first floor became the basement.

Lost in the maze, he no longer knew
where he was; abandoning any pretense of navigation, he tried to go straight
hoping he could turn around and walk out the same way.  He tried for
stealth but stumbled often on the rough uneven sidewalks.  Once he
followed the walk around a curve and fell off the sidewalk into a nasty
hole.  Climbing out the other side he scraped the mud from his face the
best he could, ignoring his soiled clothes, as there was nothing to be done
about the mess.  Any thoughts of surprise were gone and he hoped if she
heard him she wouldn’t be mad or, worse, mistake him for a bad guy and take him
out.

Drawing his revolver, he continued
down the corridor, his wet shoes squishing in the dark.  Losing track of
time he focused on scuttling from one pool of violet light to the next. 
He gave up finding Arabella, just hoping that he would be able to escape the
subterranean labyrinth before stumbling upon the Minotaur.  The crazy
thought that Sister Mary Virgil, his senior Literature teacher, would be proud
of him buoyed him for the moment, although he was sure he wasn’t Theseus.

Passing a side tunnel, he thought
he saw a movement. Peering into the savage gloom he wondered if he should say
something in case it was Arabella, so she’d know it was him. Not knowing if his
imagination was inventing or if there was really someone there, he stood
unsure; finally, in a loud whisper, “Hey, its me.”

The only response was a foul odor
wafting to him on a breath of air.  The smell was worse than anything he’d
encountered and could only be described as the combination of raw sewage and
rotted flesh. The noxious fumes grew more acute, adding to his anxiety and
fear.  An irrational impulse to flee gripped him.  He tried to
breathe but the fumes burnt his nose and throat and he began coughing, pulling
his t-shirt up as a filter over his mouth and nose. 

The temperature was rising and
sweat dripped from his head, soaking his t-shirt. Behind him, he thought he
heard a scrape and, turning, squinted to see down the dark corridor but there
was nothing there. Continuing, he shifted right so that his shoulder brushed
the old storefronts.  At least one side was protected if anything was
coming. 

As he rounded another corner the
lane in front of him was pitch black.  In the near distance was purple
light from the glass imbedded in the overhead sidewalk, but between here and there
it was dark and he would have to grope his way. inching his clumsy, scared feet
forward while keeping contact with the wall.  He knew he was losing
control and felt along the wall for an opening or weak spot where he could
crash into a basement and escape.

Pushing off, he stepped into the
darkness and instantly was overcome with the foul odor.  This time it
seemed to be coming from behind him.  He looked back over his shoulder and
thought he saw a movement but couldn’t be sure. He thought he heard a sound but
it was difficult to separate Underground noises from the city rumbling above.
His choices were to retreat toward the smell or push on to the next pool of
light.  Wondering if his paranoia was out of control he went forward,
reluctant to turn tail and run. From behind came a sibilant, “Hello Human,
welcome to the Underground.”

He turned his back to the wall and
pointed his gun back down the walkway.  He brought the Glock today for the
increased firepower and considered spraying a blind burst down the
corridor.   At the end of the dark passage was the last faint pool of
overhead light, and as he watched something flitted from one side to the other,
obscuring the faint glow. “Police, show yourself,” he shouted using his best
voice.  The only response was deep laughter shooting past him like a
staccato drum roll.

“Are you sure, Mr. Policeman, are
you sure you want to see us?” the voice came from the other side and he
realized they had him in the middle.  He began to edge up the walkway, his
back to the wall, his gun in front, closer to the pool of light.  Wiping
the sweat from his forehead he paused; suddenly, a shape materialized in the
darkness; instinctively, he went down to his knee.  Swinging the Glock up,
he fired down the passage at where he thought the shape should be; turning, he
put a couple more rounds behind him. 

Inching forward, he kept moving
toward the light.  It was important to die in the light; even if it was a
violent death, light was better than the dark.  At least the pretense of silence
was gone, he thought, as he moved forward, his gun extended in front. 

Suddenly a firm hand grasped his
gun hand, stopping all movement, and a familiar voice whispered in his ear,
“Stop shooting, you maniac, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here to help,” he said,
desperately grateful to no longer be alone but anxious to show no fear.

“Help me, help me, you almost shot
me,” Arabella hissed, barely able to suppress her anger, wrenching the gun out
of his grip.  “You and your stupid gun.”

They were huddled against the wall
so close that he could feel her breast pressed against his arm.  When he
turned his head he could smell a light lilac fragrance and unconsciously he
snuggled a little closer.  “Boy, you sure smell good,” he whispered.

“Get off of me,” she said giving
him a push, “Its L’Heure Bleu.”

“I’ll get you some,” he said, “You
know, for helping me out.”

“You can’t afford it,” she
whispered, “You want to help, right?”

“Of course,” he whispered, glad to
be on the team. “Anything!”

“Good,” she replied, “Stand up and
walk down the sidewalk.”

“What,” he blustered, “What about
those guys?”

“OK, stay here,” she whispered,
“I’ll take care of them myself.”

“OK, OK,” he whispered. “You need a
goat, I’ll be the goat.”

Ortega got to his feet and wobbled
off down the corridor toward the next pool of dim light.  He kept his
right arm out to touch the wall so he wouldn’t wander off in the dark and fall
off the edge.  Silence lay on him like a wet wool blanket; the only
sensation he had was the rough surface of the wall scraping his fingertip and
the indescribably foul odor he was walking into.

He stepped into the warmth of the
violet pool of light, his shoulders sagging with relief when two men
materialized in front of him.  The two were dressed in what he guessed
were raggedy Edwardian tailcoats and formal white shirts with ruffled cuffs
jutting from the sleeves. On their feet were pointy-toed black boots like
skinny rockers used to wear, and one of them even sported a silk top hat. 

Ortega didn’t know what he expected,
but these two cartoon caricatures were not it.  He felt he’d opened the
front door at Halloween on a couple of teenagers scarfing free candy instead of
scary Vampires under Seattle.  He did the only thing he could under the
circumstances.  Opening his mouth he started laughing, his anxiety and
fear exploding at the ridiculous pair in front of him.

Pale as cave lizards, their skin
was finely translucent and Ortega could see the blue veins in their necks
spreading across their faces, branching into their skulls.  The faint
purple highlighted the blood coursing through the network exposed on their
necks and skulls.  Their eyes bulbed insect-like from the sockets, an
effect, he was to learn, from long life in the lightless depths. 

One of the Vampires, the one not
wearing the top hat, flitted to the wall and, with an impossibly quick strike,
snatched a large wriggling rat from a crack in the wall.  Holding it out,
he bit its head off and drank the blood like he was sipping from a drinking
fountain.

“Snack, my brother; next we dine on
Human blood,” said top hat, moving closer.

The two were so out time and place
that he felt he had been transported to another world.  His laughter took
on a hysterical tone as they closed on him.  The one with the rat dropped
it and, refreshed, turned his attention to him.   At his laughter,
the two arched their backs, opened their mouths and hissed like lizards. 
The stench from their breath hit him in the face, his eyes burned and began to
water and his throat involuntarily closed to keep the poison from his lungs.

The creatures split apart and
glided towards him, leisurely surveying prey.  Ortega felt their eyes rake
his and dimly remembered Arabella’s injunction not to lock vision with them;
his brain screamed flight as he realized he was meat to the beasts.  He
tried to fix them in his vision but they haphazardly flitted about until,
breaking, he fled down the corridor, not caring that he couldn’t see his hand
in front of his face, his only thought to escape the hideous smell and the
teeth protruding from the evil grins of the creatures.

Running, he knew he must stand and
fight.  Flight would only result in them ignominiously hauling him down
from behind so, forcing himself, he stopped, turned and, pulling his backup from
its ankle holster, fired three shots down the corridor, hoping he hit
something, hoping he didn’t accidentally hit Arabella.  The only response
was more laughter, the sounds drawing closer. 

He raised his arm to fire again
when the faint smell of Arabella surrounded him and her arms rose up to
restrain his movement.  Softly she whispered, “Wait.”