What Happens in the Darkness (23 page)

“Them,”
he said, clearly annoyed. “You mean
us
, not
them,
you little idiot. You make it sound like it’s a disease.”

Janelle opened her mouth but had no idea what to say.

Sandra said, “I’m sorry you’re scared. But there’s no reason to be. We won’t hurt you.”

Janelle saw the sharp edges of Sandra’s fangs and felt little comfort. She shook her head and backed up, connecting with the car. Nowhere to go. She held up the crosses. “Yeah, right.”

“Baby,” Sandra crooned. “With all these vampires running around the streets, don’t you think you would have been caught by now, if that was our intention?”

Janelle shrugged. “No. I’m a good hider. And I have weapons. You’re a
vampire
!”

“So?” she said. “This wasn’t something I chose, but I’ve learned to live with it. Why can’t you? I’m the same as I was before!”

Janelle absorbed her words, considering them. Then she realized the truth of the situation. “Yeah, right!” she snapped. “No you aren’t the same! Don’t try to trick me. You kill people and drink their blood!”

“The people we kill are the enemy,” Matt said, fury the color of fire burning in his hazel eyes.

“The vampires killed you,” Janelle said, cocking her head. “Were you the enemy?”

“Smart-ass mouth on you, kid,” he snapped, raking his fingers through his curly red hair.

“Easy, Matt,” Sandra said. She turned back to Janelle. “We’re all on the same side. Right now we just want to win this thing.”

Janelle nodded but frowned, so sad at the way things turned out, and knowing she still needed to protect herself. “First we win this thing—and then you come after the rest of us. Right?
Right
?”

Matt scowled and took a step toward her.

Janelle raised the crosses, stopping him in his tracks. “You should go,” Janelle snapped.

“Come with us,” Sandra said.

“Are you
kidding
? Get away from me!” She stared at the jagged fingernails on the woman’s sinewy fingers. Who was she trying to fool?

“If you change your mind, look for us at the Hudson Army Base near Saratoga,” Sandra said.

“Why did you tell her that?” Matt yelled.

Sandra laughed. “Why? What’s she gonna do, one little kid? Anyway, we can smell humans a mile away. We’re in no danger.”

They hadn’t smelled Janelle, hiding behind that Mustang, until Janelle had made her presence known, Janelle thought. Maybe the vampires didn’t know as much as they thought they did.

She watched them disappear down a street as black as their hearts. 

*** 

Sammi woke to the sounds of agony, to screams piercing the new night, and to the snarling of dogs or some sort of lupine creatures barking and fighting a few feet away.

It still wasn’t evening; the sun hadn’t yet completely set, and it wasn’t safe to come out.

The other surviving vampire had been discovered by this pack of animals, and he was being unearthed.

His screams mixed with the furious snapping of jaws and the high-pitched yelps of the marauding dogs. But then came the sizzle, like a book of matches catching fire, and the horrible, heart-rending screams as one of her own died a flaming death.

Sammi cringed, feeling his pain somewhere in the hollow shell that had once housed her soul. If she still prayed she would have prayed that the animals would leave without finding her. It seemed that the combustion of the vampire had scared away the animals, because everything was silent once again.

She could smell his charred flesh. 

*** 

Dagan was usually the impatient one, the worrier, but that night it was Rebecca who paced endlessly from one end of the room to the other. Dagan, arms crossed behind his head, sat on a pile of crushed boxes. The vampires milled about like obedient sheep, waiting for instructions.

On one of her passes, Dagan grabbed Rebecca’s arm. “What’s with them?” His brogue was light.

“What? With who?”

“Them.”
He waved his arms toward the others. “Were we ever so obedient? We tell them when to eat,
who
to eat, where and when to sleep. We say kill, they kill.”

“So?”

He frowned. “It doesn’t seem natural.”

She stopped and stared at him. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Time for what? A dialog?”

She shook her head. “I have too much on my mind.” Off again, pacing the floor, long red hair whipping her shoulders every time she turned.

“You’re making me tired,” he said, whining slightly.

She stopped abruptly near his feet. “Didn’t we tell them three nights? They should have been here by now.”

“Agreed.”

“Something probably happened.”

“Probably.”

“Would you stop agreeing with me?” she snapped.

Everyone’s attention was suddenly diverted by the bodies barreling down the stairs.

The two vampires posted at the head of the stairs as guards stumbled into the room, dragging a barely conscious Sammi between them.

Rebecca reached them, clutching Sammi’s face in her palms, and they lowered her to the floor. “Sammi? Sammi, what happened?”

The other vampires began to approach, but Dagan told them to stay where they were. He knelt beside Rebecca and Sammi, gently lifting the girl’s wounded arm. “Look at this,” he said, but the smell warned them before their eyes did.

The arm was badly charred; large chunks of flesh had burned away, and pus dripped from the red-flecked, scabrous wound.

“Why isn’t she healing?” Rebecca asked, panicked. She had never seen a vampire so badly injured who wasn’t
ended
.

“Nasty burn,” Dagan said, examining the wound. “They must’ve been attacked.”

“Yeah, but by what?” Rebecca looked toward the top of the stairs. “Get the first-aid kit!” she instructed one of the gawking vampires. “Where are the others in her group?” she asked the guards who had brought Sammi downstairs. “Did anyone else come in? And where are Nelson and his group?”

Dagan went upstairs to see if there were any waiting upstairs, perhaps too injured or too afraid to come down.

Sammi’s eyes fluttered, and she cried out, but she didn’t wake up.

Rebecca tended to the wounds as best as she could—she had no experience in these matters—and she lay Sammi in a sleeping bag, covering her with blankets.

When Dagan returned, he shook his head. “The guards say she was alone. That she could barely stand, never mind talk.” He looked at the girl. “Is she going to be okay?”

“I have no idea.” 

*** 

The streets, if they hadn’t before, now truly resembled a war zone. Buildings had been stripped of their façades, exposing apartments and businesses, their contents coated in a thick layer of soot; fires burned endlessly in cars and trashcans; corpses had been gathered, stripped of anything useful, and made into piles of human amalgam; glass seemed to coat every inch of the streets; lampposts and street signs lay smashed through windows or crisscrossed over cars. Craters in the sidewalks or in the streets stretched endlessly and reached into the depths of hell.

Janelle stared at the skeletal remains of a child, buried in a layer of dirt and ash, his body still partially attached to his bicycle. He still wore his Nikes, but his legs were stripped of flesh, shreds of clothing hanging off the bones. His helmet was half-blown away and lying beside him, part of his hairless skull still attached to it.

People stared out glass-less windows, the stench of the dead weighing down the air like a funeral shroud. They stared at the destruction, their glassy eyes filled with tears, somehow absorbing it all, trying to understand the hellishness and senselessness of it all.

And then there were the vampires.

As if the bombs and invading troops weren’t enough, there was that element to throw into the fray.

Janelle passed faces, shell-shocked and numb, people emotionally wounded beyond repair. Not believing what they had seen. Not understanding how something like this, something unnatural, something supernatural, something they had been told their whole lives was a Hollywood creation was now responsible for their security and salvation.

She tried stopping them, tried asking questions, tugged on shirts and blouses but was ignored by many. She would stop by an occasional campfire and share whatever meal was being heated, usually something out of a can. She was getting really sick of Spaghetti-O’s but knew the food supply was dwindling.

People desperately wanted their lives back, and Janelle understood—she wanted the same thing.

A small group of people sat huddled around a campfire, a burning tire its base. It emitted a thick, foul smoke and filled the air with toxic rubber fumes. A couple of sticks sporting marshmallow tips dangled over the flames, but no one seemed to be eating them. She wondered where they had found marshmallows. The rats didn’t like giving them up.

Not much conversation happening.

“How come we still have no lights?” Janelle asked them.

No one even looked in her direction. The small group—Janelle counted six people—were comprised of men and women with patches of blood on their dirty faces and torn clothes, gashes on cheeks and foreheads, arms in slings.

Finally, one looked at her, a woman with greasy brown hair pulled into a ponytail, her long thin face sallow, like melted candles.

“What?” she asked wearily. “You say something?”

Janelle planted her hands on her hips. “Well, aren’t we winning this thing now?” she demanded. “I don’t see no soldiers around here. So how come this place is still such a mess? How come things aren’t getting back to the way they used to be?”

The woman waved her hand in the air, as if Janelle was a bug. “It’s not that simple, little girl. You think this is easy? Take a look around you. We got nothing left.”

“Pretty stupid if you ask me,” Janelle muttered, and as she turned to leave, a young man grabbed her arm.

“There’s nothing left,” he said, letting go. “Don’t take it so hard, okay?” His white sweater was gray with age and soot.

“Are we gonna stay this way?” Janelle asked. “No one’s even going to turn the electric back on?”

The man wearing a red T-shirt with sunglasses dangling from the pocket chimed in. “Hey,” he said, pure Bronx. “I work for Con Ed. Useta, anyhow. It ain’t that simple, kid. It ain’t as easy as throwin’ a switch or nuthin’.”

“Yeah, but why not? Can’t we—” another chimed in.

Janelle smiled, feeling hope for the first time in months. The conversation around the fire took a spirited turn, and Janelle moved on to look for shelter.

Chapter 19 

They’d lied. All of them. For some reason—possibly revenge, who knew?—they had told Jeff lie after lie. Vampires are never cold, one had said, and now he lay shivering on the damp, frostbitten ground. What had been the biggest lie of all? That Jeff was safe. Martin had sworn he would never be changed.

And Jeff had foolishly, stupidly trusted him.

Now he was torn, achingly torn between loyalty to Patrick, which unfortunately was as ingrained in him as knowing right from left, and an unbearably seething hatred, ready to explode because of his raw nerves.

How
profoundly
he hated; how deeply it ran through him.

Now propped up against a tree, arms wrapped around his knees, trying to conserve some nonexistent body heat, some phantom remainder of a life that once had been. So tired. So weak … when had he last eaten? He had yet to taste blood, despite the passage of many days, most spent huddled in that blasted cave. What had the other vampires been told, during the many training sessions he had spied upon, eavesdropped on? That blood was their energy, their life force. That without it—

He would die.

So be it.

He had yet to taste blood. While the craving was maddening, he chose not to drink it, chose instead to end this life, or this lack of one.

But death was so painful. His second death. The first at the hands of Patrick, who allowed Jeff’s blood to seep from his dying body through gashes and punctures, making contact with each wound, the vampire’s saliva completing the transformation. Excruciating pain as the mouth sealed over the wound, the blood sucked away, drained from the body until all that remained was a caricature of the former man, waiting for his own sustenance to rejuvenate him.

But that had never come, for Patrick left him, lying in the dark, not a vampire and yet not truly dead, hovering between one plane and the other, waiting for Jeff to decide for himself. True death would be a lingering, painful process … and true transformation went against everything Jeff stood for.

Jeff knew how it was done. He’d been reborn, even in his purgatorial state, with the knowledge, along with that blasted internal clock telling him the precise time the sun would rise and set daily. He knew how to sire another vampire, and he knew how to simply hunt humans for food. Killing someone outright prevented siring … but draining the blood while they were still alive, and then making contact using the vampire’s saliva created another.

So simple. Why, he could sire and increase his numbers and—

But he didn’t care. Death would come soon. The elements might not kill him, but the sun would.

He waited, resting against the tree, the wind slapping his cheeks. Bits of snow began to fall.

Screams pierced the night, followed by cries for help, and then laughter.

How keen his eyesight now was. Not yet perfect—he assumed perfect eyesight would come if he allowed himself to fully change—but so much better than they were when he was fully living and breathing.

Across the field, which had to be half a mile away, a group of soldiers chased after two young girls.

Jeff struggled to his feet and doubled over in pain, and in spite of his weakness the trip across the field took seconds. His desire to die was not as strong as his desire to help others.

Seconds later he reached the soldiers, but now what? This was uncharted territory.