What Happens in the Darkness (27 page)

Patrick had been here all right.

What a messy eater.

“Where the hell is he?” Jeff sputtered.

Martin pointed at half a dozen vampires. “Go keep an eye out upstairs. I don’t want this to turn into an ambush.”

Jeff massaged his temples with his fingertips. Not that he had a headache, he just had an old habit not abandoned in his death.

Rebecca did a 360 and shook her head. “How many were there? With Patrick.”

“I’m not sure. I saw about twenty in here. But that doesn’t mean anything.” Jeff turned away from the human discards. “I remember something disturbing though. They were all wearing Global Dominion uniforms. Full uniforms, or parts of one, but there was no mistaking it. Those vampires used to be enemy soldiers.”

***

They were hungry.

Ravenous.

They sped across fields and highways, barely leaving tracks in the new snow, determined to arrive quickly and strike while the bloodlust ran thick in their veins.

They passed people along the way but moved in a pack, moved as a force of one, a single entity, unwilling to stop or rest for fear of disturbing the momentum.

Not that they needed to rest.

New York City was minutes away.

They’d traveled down through New Jersey this time, through the Palisades, passing rest areas and nearly deserted parking complexes. Across the George Washington Bridge, they entered the Bronx.

It was here they planned to start their feeding frenzy.

But at one in the morning, where would they find pockets of people?

The celebration at the Cross County Mall.

Banners had been hung, proclaiming a new Independence Day. November 27. Red, white, and blue balloons floated from strings, adorned lampposts and streetlights and trash cans.

How original
, Patrick thought.
Red, white, and blue.

Red worked, anyway. Probably not for the same reason.
Then again
, he thought,
those damned Americans and their bloody revolutions.
The red probably represented the same thing.

Shortly after, they stood at the entrance to the mall. Even at one a.m. the festivities were still going strong. Music blasted from speakers the size of small cars. The bass was turned up so high it tickled the soles of their feet.

Patrick smiled.

This was going to be fun.

People drinking. People eating. People fucking. Everyone wandering around like it was midday, getting drunk, falling over one another, laughing and screaming and twirling and whirling—

“Do not
change
anyone,” Patrick told his small mob. “Remember. Feed only. Do what you want with these …
humans
,” he spat, “but do not sire any of them.”

Word quickly spread from one vampire to another until the entire group, about two hundred in all, had heard Patrick’s instructions.

Patrick inhaled deeply, smelling the perfume of fresh blood in the air, the rich scent of the fluid just under the skin’s surface, the aroma of musk and sweat and body odor, thick and meaty. The taste of residual fear, of compassion, of passion.

Lightheaded now. Too exciting. Like horses at the starting gate they waited, and he held them … held them … held them …

Then … released!

Two hundred vampires. Several hundred partiers. It was like releasing a pride of lions into a heard of wounded gazelle.

Patrick had grabbed the first victim because they were
his
, all of them, his property, his cattle, his chattel, his victims, his prey, his slaves, his food. None would dare oppose him—not vampires, not humans. He might as well be God as far as they were concerned.

He attacked the man with such savagery he even scared his vampires. He plucked the human out of the crowd and slammed him on the ground, splitting his skull. He growled, clutching the man’s face with both hands and pulled back, flaying the skin in a single piece. The man screamed so loudly, so intently he hurt Patrick’s eardrums. Patrick punched him in his raw, stripped face and tore at the exposed muscle and tissue, licked the blood and fluids off the husked skin. He immersed his own face into the skin he had shucked off and inhaled deeply, sticking his tongue through the mouth-shaped hole. Patrick straddled the man, who writhed beneath him, his palms slapping the concrete, his left leg kicking in a spasm. Patrick jumped off the man’s crotch, looking down at the darkening stain spreading across his jeans. He scowled and snorted and grabbed the man’s head with such ferocity he tore it from his shoulders. It separated from the shoulders with a tremendous
riiiiipping
sound, and he casually tossed the head away, his furious bloodlust temporarily sated. The head bounced awkwardly away, like a SuperBall from hell, refusing to jump in a straight line. It bounced half a dozen times before doing a final spin and coming to rest on its raw, now-filthy exposed facial tissue.

The people around him had been staring in horror, stunned into paralysis, and had barely thought to react.

Now they reacted.

Screams first … screams of fear mixed with shrieks of fresh pain, the scent of blood hitting the air, people running blindly because they couldn’t see the massacre around them, it moved too fast, could only sense trouble, could taste the danger but still couldn’t
see
anything, nothing at all but the person standing beside them seconds before now flopping on the ground like some dying fish, writhing as something sucked the very life from the gaping, spurting wound on their necks and throats and heads.

The crowd went insane, running and screaming, banging into each other, trampling each other to death in a futile attempt to escape. The smells of blood and terror rang thick through the night air, escalating the mayhem, the carnage, further inciting the vampires.

And before they could escape, before they came to their senses and fled the carnage it was their turn to flop and writhe as something sank its teeth into their jugular or their carotid, and they had the briefest of moments to wonder what in the hell had just happened right before death took them.

Two hundred vampires gathered a short while later, beaming radiantly with the new lifeblood in their bellies.

Several hundred people lay scattered across the pavement, or sprawled across the hoods of cars, or laid in dismembered sections inside stores they had tried in vain to flee to; they lay half in and half out of the gutters, dead or nearly dead or wishing they
were
dead.

The few survivors screamed and cried and ran and stood perfectly still and fainted and vomited and picked up what weapons they could find.

But the vampires had already moved on.

Fifteen miles away, they had discovered earlier, was a deserted Ground Round restaurant. They broke in the back door and piled into the storeroom to sleep off their wonderful meal.

Chapter 23 

The way they came screaming into town, you would have thought they were on fire.

Janelle heard them, even though they were half a mile away. By the time she and Thomas rushed the ten blocks uptown, a massive crowd had formed and was listening to the hysterical ramblings of the small group that had spilled out of the SUV.

Vampires.
Vampires!

Well duuuuh
, she thought.

And suddenly, those same people who had so desperately wanted to ignore the existence of vampires were now intent on doing something about it. Suddenly they were believers. It might have had something to do with the blood and gristle and chunks of gray matter that adorned the storytellers’ bodies. Or maybe that most of these people had seen the vampires for themselves—or had even been rescued by one.

So that was another matter altogether. 

*** 

“Why would they do that?” a woman screamed, clawing at her cheeks. “Why would they save us if they plan to kill us?”

“Don’t you see?” The man who’d answered was planted on the hood of the truck, his tattooed arms exposed beneath his leather vest despite the cold. “They rescued us so they could eat us!”

The crowd yelled at this, mostly disagreements, others nodding.

“We’re their pets,” the guy in the vest yelled, his fingers stroking the ZZ Top beard that was riddled with popcorn kernels. “Or worse—their cattle. Maybe they saved us so’s they’d have something to eat. Or drink.”

“Bullshit.” A man wearing a fluorescent orange ski jacket stepped forward. His glasses slipped down his nose, despite the thick bridge that had been built up with duct tape. “They just woulda kept the soldiers if they wanted cattle.”

“No, man, don’t you see? Free-range humans! They would’ve had to keep those soldiers locked up.” He scratched his exposed arm, leaving red streaks across the navy emblem tattoo.

The crowd broke into small, heated debates. They argued the merits of vampires, or argued why they all needed to be destroyed.

A new face emerged from the crowd. He reached the SUV and climbed first onto the hood, passed the bearded man in the biker vest, and stood on the roof of the vehicle. Black leather pants, black T-shirt beneath an open ankle-length black leather coat. Black motorcycle boots glistening from his short hike through the half-inch of newly fallen snow. His long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung halfway down his back.

“Name’s Rudy,” he bellowed. “Y’all need to listen up.” He planted his boots on the slippery surface. His voice commanded attention, and most of the crowd looked his way and waited to hear what he had to say.

“Whether or not you agree with the reasons for what they’ve done, the fact remains the same. We got ourselves a vampire problem. Trouble is, what do we
do
about them? It’s true, they saved our lives by takin’ down the enemy—but what for? To help us win a war they don’t give a good goddamn about? Or to protect their livestock? I believe this is a
really
dangerous problem. They just butchered
hunnerts
of people up in a Yonkers mall. Hunnerts of good
Amurcins
, not enemy soldiers! Do we wanna just stand by and let ’em do this shit ta us? Do we wanna stand here with our thumbs up’r asses while they wipe us out?”

The crowd was with him and roared no.

“Do you wanna be next?”

“No!”

“You wanna be
vam’pahr food
?” he screamed.

“No!”

“I don’t wanna wait ’round just to end up someone’s dinner, man. We gotta stop ’em!”

The crowd was alive, animated, excited over the prospect of another bloodbath. Only this one not of human blood.

“Where the hell are they hiding?” a woman yelled.

All eyes fell on the biker, one of only a few who had survived the carnage.

He threw his hands up and turned to his friends, who still cowered inside the vehicle. “How the hell should I know? I didn’t see where they went. I didn’t give a
shit
where they went!”

“Let’s go find them!” came another voice from the crowd.

“Find them?” Rudy said. “How do you suggest we do that?”

“You tell us!” a woman yelled from the crowd.

All eyes were on Rudy. He kinda liked it.

A man yelled, “We go back to Yonkers and hunt for ’em.”

“Okay,” Rudy said, raising his arms in triumph. “Fuck yeah! We hunt them sonsabitches and rip their fuckin’ heads off!”

The crowd roared again.

Rudy was enjoying the shit out of this. “We’re gonna need weapons.”

“Crosses.”

“Holy water!”

“Wooden stakes.”

Rudy nodded, holding out his splayed hands as if addressing a congregation. “They’re too strong at night. We can only kill them in the daytime, while they sleep. We have to find them during the day—before they wake up! First, we need to split into teams to gather supplies.”

They followed his instructions, and groups formed and disappeared, headed toward churches to collect holy water, or to fashion wooden stakes out of whatever wood they could scrounge. Not many fence slats in New York City, so they raided furniture stores and chopped up dining room sets and sharpened the pieces of wood into stakes.

An hour later the teams reassembled by the SUV at Times Square, outside what was once the Disney Store and was now a gutted pile of bricks and mortar, broken toys and shredded clothing spilling out of the wreckage.

A mass of cars and trucks converged, meeting again at Times Square, led by Rudy, who was driving the SUV. He followed the biker on a Harley.

“Roads cleared?” Rudy yelled to the biker.

The biker nodded. “They been clearing ’em. And where the roads ain’t clear, you can drive on the shoulder. And with what you’re driving, man—you can plow right over anything in your way.”

The convoy headed north. 

*** 

Janelle and Thomas stayed behind and watched the proceedings in awe, trying to understand the stupidity of the crowd.

“You think the vampires will just surrender?” she asked, grinning.

“Of course. That’s what vampires do.” Thomas smiled back and shrugged. “You think they’ll even
find
any vampires?”

They smirked, stuck their tongues out at each other, and giggled. They had an impromptu contest to see who could make the silliest face.

“Stupid grown-ups,” Thomas said, and they giggled even harder.

***

Rudy led the convoy the fifteen or so miles north to Yonkers, directed by the biker, who had told everyone to call him Hank.

They reached the Cross County Mall.

Massacred bodies lay everywhere. Throats ripped out, heads torn nearly off shoulders.

Considering the size of the crowd piling out of the vehicles, they were surprisingly quiet. A few gasps, moans of shock. Mostly stunned looks.

“Holy shit,” Rudy muttered.

Hank clutched Rudy’s arm like a nervous prom date.

Rudy scanned the area, looking for signs of movement, hoping for a survivor, a hidden witness. Other than the urban tumbleweeds—sheets of newspaper and discarded candy wrappers—pinwheeling and flipping across the parking lot, there was no movement.