Vampire Blood (32 page)

“Now you understand,” he spoke in a fierce undertone. “I’d never hurt you or anyone you love, Jenny. Not on purpose. Great writers are so rare. I know. And I like you. Truly like you. Feelings are rare for our kind.” He heaved another sigh.
“Now go!”
His face altered into something hideous, inhuman, before he moved away to check something on one of the machines. He turned his back to her once again, as if he’d forgotten her.

Jenny inched her way back towards the stairs cautiously, her hand sweaty on the banister. Her world was revolving in excruciatingly slow motion.

“Run!”
He glared over his shoulder at her and suddenly hissed.

Jenny bolted, nearly tumbling down the steps she was in such a hurry to escape.

Michelson’s voice dogged her. “
Run and hide, Jenny! They’re looking for you.”

In a blind panic, not knowing what she was doing, she ran. The next thing she knew she was cowering in a dark corner of the theater’s auditorium, not really sure how she’d gotten there.

Panting, she hunkered down against a wall, trying to keep her wits about her long enough to decide what to do. She lost herself in the gloom and the faraway voices coming from the screen, but not for long. As her eyes grew accustomed to the lightlessness, she caught
them
flitting about on the edges of her vision in the room—fleeting shapes sifting in and out of the shadows as the screen’s images danced around them.

She heard a muffled groan. A cut off cry.

In the murky twilight under the movie screen, two adult shapes were dragging a third, smaller struggling figure that looked like a child between them up the aisle, disappearing about halfway, almost into thin air. The noise from the movie covered the child’s cries.

Oh, my God. Had no one seen it but her? They were abducting people.

She compressed herself into an invisible shape in the corner until she was sure they were gone. Now she knew how a mouse felt, chased to its hole.

She had to get out of there.

In a crouching position, she stealthily crept up the aisle. The lobby was empty. She slithered up against the wall, her heart pounding so wildly against her chest she couldn’t hear a thing, ready to make a dash for the doors when she realized someone was blocking her way.

Irene.

“Running away, Jenny?” Irene tsk-tsked her. “No, I don’t think so.”

Terrified, Jenny hesitated a split second too long and then made a suicidal dash for it.

She never made it through the lobby.

Something huge, covered with fur, heavy with wicked teeth and claws, brought her down. As she tumbled helplessly onto the hard floor, something knife-sharp slashed across her face tearing open the skin. Sticky warm blood gushed out. The screaming pain exploded and plunged her into oblivion as the something began to drag her away.

* * * *

Jeff awoke sometime near the end of the night. The trailer was silent. Too silent. Something wasn’t right. He could feel it.

He surged up from the couch and searched the trailer. No Jenny.

“Oh, Jenny, you
didn’t
go there alone?” he asked the emptiness. He feared she had. His hands went up to knead his face. What to do now? He looked at the kitchen clock: 3:43 A.M. If Jenny wasn’t home yet, there had to be something wrong.

He ran to the window. There was no car in the driveway and the theater was five miles away. Jenny’s dad’s car. It was across the field in the garage; it had been there since his disappearance.

Jeff threw himself out the door and crashed through the field in the dark towards the farmhouse. He’d played in this field so many times when he was young he knew every tree and bush of it.

Minutes later, every muscle yelping in protest and holding his side in agony, he pounded on the farmhouse’s rear door, then the front. Estelle didn’t answer. She must still be in bed, asleep, and he couldn’t wait.

He would have liked having some kind of weapon, but there wasn’t time.

He sprinted to the garage, hacking the rusty lock away with a large rock. He broke in, found the old flashlight Ernest had always kept hanging in the corner and hot-wired the station wagon. It seemed to take forever to start the old wreck.

Then, praying all the way that the car wouldn’t die on him, he raced like a madman into town.

Let this be a false alarm. Jenny, please be okay.

* * * *

Jenny came to shuddering, a dull thudding ache in her cheek. The first thing she was truly aware of was that she was sore, sore all over, and cramped.

It was dark. Not end-of-the-world dark, just dark. Her glazed eyes clung to the miniscule bit of light that they found and her consciousness migrated to its warmth. A single candle sputtering in a dish.

In a cave. Not a cave, a basement, her befuddled mind told her. The damp earthy smell and the echoes of the place reminded her of an old cave full of rats, spiders and slimy water she’d once discovered as a child. Except here, the rats and spiders were malevolent, bloodthirsty and immortal.

She must be below the theater somewhere. There were no noises up above, so the movie must be over she thought, and the theater was closed for the night.

No help there.

Her numb fingers discovered the limits of her prison as she lay on her back. A large wooden cage. She felt it more than saw it. It couldn’t have been more than five feet by eight. She could lay in it, or sit, but not completely stand. She moved, and a splinter pricked her.

The place stank of death.

She heard the soft weeping.
There were other cages. There were other people down there.

“Someone help me ... please ... don’t let them kill me,” came a pitiful moan behind her somewhere.

To her right, there was sobbing.

Jenny’s eyes grew more accustomed to the dimness, and she could almost make out the cage to her right. There was something huddled in the corner, but no sounds emerged.

“Someone. Anyone.
Help me!”
A woman’s pain-stricken howl cut through Jenny, making her blood curdle.

She lifted her head to see better, but the pain and nausea sent her back to the floor, and she passed out again. It must have been minutes later— it could have been hours—when she came to, and this time the horror and futility of her situation hit her full force.

She was locked up like an animal in a cage. No one knew where she was, and she would die as horribly as those other poor wretches, the earlier inhabitants of the wooden prisons, had died. Tears mingled with the blood on her face, and she had to fight to keep from shrieking out her anguish. Screaming hysterically wouldn’t help. She needed to save her strength. She needed to
think
.

Instead she thought of her father. Had he died in one of these pens? Would she die here, too? She’d never see Jeff, her mother, or Samantha again. Ever. Why hadn’t she believed Joey? Listened to him? Why hadn’t she left well enough alone?

“Awake, finally?” It was Irene, outside Jenny’s cage, gloating in the candlelight.

The same candle, now mostly gone.

Jenny cowered away from the specter, pushing herself into a corner, trying to hide. Her face felt like it was swollen to twice its size, and she was weak from loss of blood. Her fingers crept up her neck. Had Irene ...

“Don’t worry. I’m saving you for another time. I’ve already fed.” Irene answered Jenny’s fear.

“You can’t get away with this,” Jenny whispered spitefully from her cage. “Someone will be looking for me. Someone will find me.”

“That’s what they all say. You humans are so predictable.” Irene cocked her head at the other cages. Her lips drew back, and her sharp fangs gleamed against her blood red lips.

Jenny felt like she was in the Twilight Zone or an episode of Supernatural. This couldn’t be real ... couldn’t really be happening to her, could it?

“No, your precious ex-husband won’t help you, either. I’m leaving to find him now.”

Jenny stared up at her, refusing to rise to the bait. Irene just wanted to torture her. She’d been thinking about Jeff, praying that he’d come after her.

“Later tonight, I’ll take care of that brother of yours, too. I don’t care how many guards he has. This time he won’t get away.”

“Leave them alone,”
Jenny spat, clenching the wooden slats of her jail and squeezing until her hands ached. “I’m warning you!”

Irene swatted Jenny’s hands viciously with something hard, a stick, perhaps, and Jenny cried out in startled pain, yanking her wounded fingers back in.

“What
are you?” Jenny cried.

Irene’s face in the yellow candlelight turned malignant with an eternal, unearthly evil. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Irene floated out of the feeble light.

Jenny heard someone crying.

From the shadows came the soft taunting farewell. “You think you’re different, Jenny, but you’re not. You’re like all the rest, and you’ll die like all the rest.”

Jenny fought to keep her sanity. She wanted to kick, wail and beat at the cage, but she knew that wouldn’t solve a thing. It wouldn’t get her out. “Where are the others?” Jenny called out in a tightly controlled voice.

“Out until dawn.” A spiteful laugh.

Jenny ran her tongue over her chapped lips. God, she wanted a drink of water. She touched a hand gently to the side of her injured face.
There go my looks.

She wasn’t going to get out of there. Michelson wasn’t going to help her this time. On the verge of breaking down completely, she felt like laughing, but she knew it’d hurt too much.

“No, he won’t.” It was Irene’s voice. She hadn’t left, as Jenny had believed. “But you won’t be alone.” There was a cruel joke somewhere in the inflection. “I’ve brought you a ... visitor.”

* * * *

Irene unlocked the cage, scraped open the door enough to shove another person through and locked it again. A soft bulky warmth fell up against Jenny. A familiar scent.

“Where am I?” a stunned voice asked near to her.

“Mom?”

“Jenny!”

Instantly they were together, clinging to each other.

Irene laughed as an ephemeral mist enfolded her, and when it dissipated, she was gone.

Jenny squinted down at her mother in the candlelight. “Are you all right, Mom?”

“I’m not sure. I’m hurting.” Her breathing was rapid and shallow. She collapsed in her daughter’s arms as if now that she wasn’t alone, she could let go. “Being tossed around like a football didn’t do me no good ... and she
bit
me, Jenny,” her voice incredulous; indignant at the same time. “And it hurt like hell. Ernest’ll be so angry when he sees what she did to me. Wait ‘til he sees.” She started to ramble then, disoriented, her speech slurred. Her skin was fever wracked. She was going into shock.

Jenny examined her mother’s neck in the weak light as best she could and there were deep blood-oozing lacerations at the base of it. Bruises and cuts along her arms. Her face had been beaten. Jenny wanted to cry. Instead, she cradled her mother’s frail body, rocking her back and forth, talking softly to her, as if she were a child.

“There, there, Mom, it’s going to be okay.”

Lucid for a moment, her mother groaned breathlessly, obviously in intense pain, “What are we gonna do, Jenny? You were always so smart. You’ll get us out of this, won’t you?”

How?
Jenny felt worse than she’d ever felt.

“No matter what you’ve ever thought, I was always proud of you ... my Jenny ... always loved you best ... still do ... Jenny Penny.” Moaning pitifully, she fainted in Jenny’s arms, a broken rag doll.

The blood along her mother’s neck and face was soaking through Jenny’s fingers. It was warm and there was so much of it. Weeping silently, Jenny tried to staunch the flow with torn strips of her own clothing, tying a bandana loosely around her mother’s neck as if she were going to a square dance.

“Wake up, Mom, please wake up,” Jenny pleaded, but her mother was beyond her in another safer place. A place with no blood-hungry ghouls, wooden cages and the threat of further torture and death. Her mother wasn’t dead, yet, but without immediate medical attention, she wasn’t far from it. “Don’t die,” Jenny cried, her heart constricting in fear.

Her mother’s body began to go into convulsions, and there was nothing she could do.

“You bitch!”
Jenny railed at the absent Irene at the top of her lungs. “I’ll get you for this, Irene! Believe me, I will. Somehow.
I’ll get you for this!”

As her threats ricocheted off the cold brick walls around her, the other unwilling occupants of the prison remained mute, as if they’d long ago given up hope of escaping or revenge, or as if they were beyond it. With one last sputter, the candle went out, leaving them in the deepest blackness Jenny had ever experienced.

“Ah, damn,” Jenny swore, pulling her mother’s slack body closer, as if she could protect her from the horrors around them.

The hours stretched into an eternity.