Welcome to the Darkness (Darkness Trilogy) (24 page)

“Hi, I’m Trudy,” the woman said, thrusting out her hand to shake ours. She
was around the same age as my parents, and she had medium length brown hair, glasses, and an athletic figure.

Pickle also shook our hands before introducing us. “This is Sarah, and . .
.”

“Reed,” I said, realizing I hadn’t told Pickle my name earlier.

“And I’m Pickle, but you already knew that,” he said.

Trudy held her hand to the side of her mouth as if to tell us a secret. “But I bet you don’t know how he got the name ‘Pickle,’” she whispered, her eyebrows lifting. “Think certain parts of the male anatomy and the color green,” she added with a wink.

“Shut up,” Pickle laughed, hitting her on the shoulder. “That is totally not true.”

Sarah and I
smiled at each other. Their playfulness made me relax almost immediately.

“C’mon in guys,” Pickle said, walking toward a bunch of folding chairs at the far side of the room. “Have a seat,” he said and called out to gather the rest of his gang.

Two more men and another woman appeared out of various doorways and came to join us. The men were both in their mid-twenties or so, one with dark hair, and one blond. The woman had short cropped hair, and looked about forty-something. Everyone in the group seemed to be in great physical shape, which made me think they all used the workout equipment I could see off to the side.

“Joe, Sahib, Liz, I’d like you to meet the two Specials I told you about,” Pickle said. “This is Sarah, and Reed.”

‘Specials?’ I mouthed to Sarah. She shook her head to let me know I shouldn’t say anything.

Joe and Sahib sat down, but Liz crossed her arms and remained standing. She frowned and stared at us with cold eyes.
Apparently, we wouldn’t be getting a warm welcome from everyone.

“How could you bring these two here?”
Liz demanded. “We don’t know anything about them. How do we know they won’t turn around and tell the vamps everything they hear?”

“It’s all right, Liz,” Pickle spoke calmly. “That’s why we’re here now. We can ask questions and get to know each other.”

He turned to Sarah and me. “Liz is the one who brought us all together,” he explained. “Each one of us has lost people we cared about because of the vamps. Not everyone in our situation is willing or able to join our cause. Some curl up and withdraw from the world after they find out that monsters really live among us. But everyone here is determined to do whatever it takes to stop them from infecting us with the virus they’re developing, and ultimately, to rid the world of vampires forever.”

The atmosphere felt a lot more serious after his intr
oduction. Liz stared directly at Sarah and asked, “So what’s your special ability?”

Sarah looked taken aback at her abruptness, but a
nswered anyway. “It’s not something I normally talk about, but because we’re sharing information to show we can be trusted, the truth is that I can read minds.”

“Human minds or vampires?”
Liz asked.

“Both, although I can’t read the vampires when they’re dead after feeding,” she clarified.

“What number am I thinking of?” Liz said, continuing her rapid-fire question period. Maybe she’d been a cop in her previous life.

“Is this necessary?” Sarah asked, looking at the rest of the group members.

“What’s your story?” Liz pointed her finger at me.

I swallowed before answering. “Uh, my story . . . is that I was attacked by a vampire a week and a half ago, and he killed my family. My house burnt down, and I freaked out and ran. Now everyone thinks I murdered my parents and my sister. Sarah’s a
cop, and she decided to help me out. It’s a long story,” I finished. Would they notice my explanation was full of holes?

“But why are the vamps keeping you around?” Liz stared right into my eyes, daring me to mess up.

“Because Reed has a special ability too,” Sarah interrupted. “He has super strength.”

Holy shit, what?
Sarah kicked me in the ankle.

“How much can you bench press?” Liz asked.

“I . . . don’t know.” What the hell? This was not what I’d had in mind when we came to these people looking for help.

“So, show us what you’ve got,” Liz demanded, pointing to the exercise equipment at the other side of the room. “Stick as much weight as you can on the bar and give her a go.”

Sarah didn’t look at me, but everyone else stared, waiting. I rose out of my seat and trudged over to the weight bench. “This is stupid,” I muttered.

I slid one twenty-five pound weight after another onto the bar until I ran out of weights. There were a bunch of smaller ones, but the bar was
full and must have had over three hundred pounds on it already. The bar rested in the supports over the bench, in position for bench pressing, but I knew I didn’t need to do an actual bench press to demonstrate my strength. I glanced at the group and everyone was watching me. I grasped the bar with my right hand and lifted it out of the supports and over my head with ease. Then I replaced the barbell with a clang.

“Impressive,” Liz called out. Pickle and Trudy clapped which made me feel even sillier. I walked back over to the group and reclaimed my chair.

“By the way, one thousand five hundred and eighteen,” Sarah said, looking at Liz.

Cracking a smile, Liz nodded her head.
“Very good. It’s my lucky number.”

“So now that we’ve confided in you and shown you our hidden talents, maybe you can reciprocate and give us a li
ttle demo or two,” Sarah suggested. She reached over and gave my hand a squeeze, maybe to apologize for catching me off guard. I’d been peeved at first, but I knew she could read their minds and I figured she must have had a good reason for putting me on the spot like that.

“You’ve seen the UV ball already,” Pickle said, plucking one out of his pocket and holding it in the air. “Sahib’s handy with electronics and he managed to come up with these nifty little gadgets.”

“Yeah, and Pickle has been flashing people ever since,” Trudy added with a chuckle, elbowing him in the ribs.

Sahib stood and jogged to the door he’d entered by ea
rlier. “I’ll show you our latest device,” he called over his shoulder. “Just give me a moment.”

“There’s more basic stuff too,” Joe added. “Like the bead curtain over the doorway is coated with silver.
Simple, yet effective. No vamp can come in that way without shredding themselves.”

I cringed and wondered if vampires would be able to sense it was silver-coated before turning themselves into ground meat.

Sahib returned carrying a handheld device that looked like a hairdryer with its front chopped off. He came and knelt next to Sarah and me, and flicked a side switch to turn it on.

“This is something I ordered online,” he said. “It’s an infrared thermal imaging camera. It shows the temperature variations of anything you point it at.”

He held the camera up, pointing it at Pickle. A multi-colored image of Pickle’s body came into view. “The blue and green areas at the extremities are the coolest parts of the body,” Sahib explained. “When you move into the center of the torso, you can see the color changes from yellow to orange to red. The warmest points near the heart are white.”

He lowered the camera and
continued with his lesson. “The reason this is significant is that a vampire’s internal temperature is lower than a human’s. They are quite literally cold-hearted. Because vampires look human, and their external temperature is almost identical to ours, they can walk among us undetected. But one look through this camera is all it takes to identify a vamp.”

Sahib raised the camera again and pointed it at Trudy. The color pattern matched Pickle’s, with the hotter white area at the center of her body. Then he swung the camera around, pointing it at Sarah. “You see the pattern now?”

I felt sick. What would happen if he pointed that thing at me?

Sahib studied my face with concern. Then he lowered the camera and switched it off. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Hey, are you guys hungry or thirsty?” Trudy piped in. “We should have asked when you first got here. Sorry about that. Can I get you something to eat?”

“I’m fine,” I replied. “I fed . . . ate, right before we left.”

“Me too,” Sarah said a little too loudly. “Why don’t we discuss your theory about the vampires developing a virus?”

“And cut to the chase,” Liz said, nodding. “I like that.”

“Let’s get to it then,” Pickle agreed.

I settled back into my chair. This was going to be inte
resting.

Sarah sat on the edge of her seat, anxious to hear what these “vampire hunters” had to say. She worried that Reed might be annoyed with her for putting him on the spot about his “special” ability, but she didn’t “hear” him thinking any nasty thoughts. He looked ready to pay rapt attention to Pickle’s every word.

Meeting up with
Pickle in the vampire’s manor–just in time to get in on their plans to thwart the vampires’ plot to end the world–seemed suspicious, and Sarah couldn’t wait to hear their story.

“All right, let’s give you guys some background info to start with,” Pickle began, stealing a glance at Liz for her
approval, which she gave with a quick nod. “As I mentioned earlier, Liz is the one who brought our group together. Eight years ago, a rogue vampire attacked her family, and killed her husband and daughter. Liz was severely injured and left for dead, but she made a full recovery, at least from the physical damage.” Pickle stared at the floor for a moment.

“Liz knew a vampire was responsible for the attack,” Pickle continued, “and these monsters of myth and legend were not only real, but responsible for destroying her life. Of
course no one believed her. Everyone thought she was insane. Sound familiar?” Every member of the group nodded.

“Fast forward a couple of years, and Liz was pulling herself out of her pit of despair, determined to find other vampires and figure out how to destroy them. Both she and her husband had been real estate agents, so Liz used her contacts to search for properties that
had been held in the name of a single owner for longer than a human lifetime. You might think the vamps would do a better job covering their tracks by changing the ownership name every few decades or so, but they’re a bunch of pompous asses that have no idea humans know about them.” Pickle surveyed the group with a knowing smirk.

“Before you know it, Liz hit pay dirt and found a house in the ‘burbs of Boston that’d been under the same owner for over a century. She spied on the house and discovered a few key things. First, no one ever came in or out of the house during the day, and second, it
was an odd assortment of people, not like the typical families throughout the rest of the neighborhood. Plus, no one ever brought in groceries, and every window in the place was covered by thick curtains 24/7.”

“Now all Liz had to do was figure out how to kill the bloodsuckers. Thanks to the Internet, it wasn’t too hard to rig up some explosives, and on a bright sunny day, she blew
the house right off its foundation. Fried a few vamps by exposing them to daylight. As luck would have it, she found one nestled in the rubble, trapped in his death sleep, so she tested some other stuff on the poor dude. Thanks to Liz’s efforts that day and a bit of dumb luck, we now know some of the things that work against the vamps and some that don’t. Holy water, crosses, garlic: totally harmless. A stake in the chest hurts ‘em, but doesn’t kill ‘em. Silver and UV light: deadly. You guys still following me?”

Reed
turned and gave Sarah a grim smile. “I think we’re good so far,” she said.

“Great,” Pickle said and continued.
“After trolling the Internet some more, Liz managed to connect with Trudy, who had a startlingly similar story about a vampire attack. They banded together and headed for New York City, thinking the largest city in America might be the home of the largest vampire population as well. Another real estate search and
voilà
, our local vampire lair was the first place they looked at. Eventually, the rest of us joined the group, and we continued to monitor the vamps. Their security is lax, probably because they’re not expecting anyone to be bold or stupid enough to go snooping around. We’ve managed to dig up quite a bit about their research, which brings us to the big issue. The virus.”

“Perhaps I should take over from here,” Sahib said.

“Sure thing, man,” Pickle said, grabbing a seat. “Sahib’s a pretty valuable member of the team,” he explained. “Besides being a techno whiz, he was training to become a doctor before all this started, so he’s our medical expert too.”

Sahib went to stand in Pickle’s spot, and Sarah got her first good look at him. He
was around her age, early-twenties or so, and she couldn’t help noticing the scar that ran down his left cheek to his chin, marring the perfect smoothness of his dark skin.

“What we thought at first,” Sahib began, “was that the vampires were trying to find a cure for their weaknesses, or to improve
themselves to be even stronger and faster than they already are. We realized that humans were being brought in, not just as a food source for them, but because these humans possessed special abilities. It made sense that the vampires were trying to harvest these abilities for themselves somehow, but what we discovered was that they were creating vampire-human hybrids who were supposed to have all of the best features from both species. However, the results so far have been disastrous, resembling neither human nor vampire. We discovered a storage area with the preserved remains of the deformed revenants they had created and records describing their behavior before they had died. They were creatures you would typically associate with the idea of a zombie, not a vampire. Mindless monsters driven to feed and incapable of higher brain function. It was a mercy that none survived more than a few hours.”