After the Fall (13 page)

“Don’t bring her into this! She’s not my mother, and she will never be. She was my sister’s friend and you married her, for what? To help ‘repopulate’ this place? It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it, right?” He got right up to his father’s face. “This marriage is an insult to their memories. I never thought I would say it, but I’m glad they’re gone, because if they were here to see this, it would kill them.”

He stormed off to his room and locked the door. For the first time, Alaric looked truly defeated. Here was an enemy who knew his weakness and was not afraid to exploit it. He stood in the middle of the room with his head down and his shoulders hunched. I felt a need to put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Mordecai…my friend. I felt bad about leaving you, but I had an urgent issue to address.”

“Nothing serious, I hope? Is everyone safe?”

“For now, yes. Everyone is safe. That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m not sure if I should share it yet. It may be too soon.”

“Alaric, you can’t just mention something and not tell me.”

“It’s just that I might be premature to think this.”

“Well, just spit it out. If it’s not true, I can live with it.”

“But I don’t know if I can. Under all these layers of armor, there is a heart.”

“I don’t doubt that. You’re a good man, Alaric. I hope this town has enough sense to realize that you’re more of a leader than they deserve.”

“Thank you, Mordecai.”

“No need to thank me. I’m just telling the truth.”

“You are just too much.”

“I hope that’s a compliment.”

“It is.”

“Then thank you.” He nodded. “So, are you going to tell me, or are we still going to play this back-and-forth game all day?”

“It’s…just that I’m not sure.”

“I understand. I’m not going to press you anymore. It’s getting entirely too late for me and I must sleep. I will see you tonight.” I turned around and started for the basement.

“Rhiannon is with child.”

I spun around and made my way back to him. Part of me was happy for him, but the other half was jealous and spiteful. I wasn’t about to indulge the latter. I summoned up the biggest smile I could manage, fangs be damned, and said, “Well, congratulations. I know you’ll make a great father.”

“I hope I’m right about this…and I hope I am up to the task once again. I’m getting old, Mordecai. Things aren’t as easy as they used to be.”

I can’t give him anything more than a sympathetic nod. I really can’t know what he feels, not when I’m a creature doomed to be forever young. Well, maybe
doomed
is not the right word, more like
privileged
. I can’t say that it’s been a burden until recently, when all it has allowed me to do is live to starve another day. I couldn’t even think of making another one of my kind, not when it would mean a lifetime of starvation and the worst kind of death.

“You’ll do fine, my friend. I know you’re not the kind of man who takes defeat lying down. You have what it takes to keep going.”

“I only wish Matthias felt the same way.”

“He’ll come along. It’s just a difficult time in his life.”

“I sure hope so.”

“Does he know?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I haven’t found a way to tell him. It’s hard enough to say two words to him before he disappears.”

We beat the proverbial dead horse for a while longer. He seemed reassured when I left. The door closed behind me and off came that false smile. I went to bed and lay staring at the ceiling, ripping holes into the side of the bed with my nails until I fell asleep.

It had occurred to me that I should follow Matthias. There was something about him that went beyond youthful rebellion. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but it troubled me.

I slept little that day. Rhiannon was still in my thoughts. She was like that uninvited guest that just won’t leave. Sometime in the afternoon, I got out of bed. Who needs sleep anyway?

When I checked his room, Matthias was still asleep. I could hear the snores from outside the room, and decided to go wait for him in the guest room. In the meantime, I could just take a break, maybe recoup some of my lost energy. I yawned. Hopefully I would only be here a minute. I closed my eyes, just for a second, and dreamt of peaceful darkness.

When the “second” passed, I picked up my head and looked out the covered window. It was well past dark now. I leapt out of the chair and listened. The room next door was still; not even the sound of his breathing came through.

Too late.

His room was empty when I checked it this time. He had made a lump with the sheets to make it look like his body was still there, but he could not fool me. At this distance, I would have been able to focus and hear his heartbeat, as well as smell him—even if he were dead, he would give off some kind of smell. I could do neither of these two. There was nothing left but the residual smell impregnated on the sheets and emanating from the clothes he had left strewn about on the ground. Matthias had been out for days, hunting and doing whatever else fit his fancy. I left the room, but not before giving the sheets a kick in the middle. It collapsed over the edge, dragging the rest of the blanket to the ground.

I walked downstairs and found Rhiannon sitting in the living room with a vacant expression on her face. She looked peaked and sullen.

“Good…evening,” I said to her. She didn’t reply. “How are you feeling?”

She replied this time, but only with a grunt, deigning to look at me for a moment before returning to her vacant stare.

“I heard the news…congratulations.”

She closed her eyes and recoiled as if she’d been slapped. “Yes. Thank you.”

“How long have you known?”

“Not long, but the doctor examined me and I have all the symptoms.”

“You must be very happy. I know Alaric is.”

“Yes, he must be overjoyed,” she replied. Her voice was dead, devoid of all feeling. “His blood will live on. Long live the great Alaric.”

“What is bothering you?”

“Nothing. I am just fine.”

I’ve been alive long enough to know that those words mean completely the opposite from what they say.

“I want you to stop pretending everything is okay and tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Or you can go back to those whores of yours and leave me alone.”

Ouch. That shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. It cut all the way to the core. I didn’t reply, though; I just nodded and left the room.

I had an idea about how to track Alaric’s son. It was a long shot, but then again, life was full of those nowadays. I’ll never claim to be a bloodhound, but I can play one if I put my mind (or my nose) to it.

“I hope as hell this works,” I said, letting my keen sense of smell guide me out of the house.

It’s hard to explain how this works. My subconscious mind does most of the thinking. All I can do is trust it and follow where it leads. It could lead to Matthias, or it could lead to some other sweaty guy with bad body odor. And what if he’d taken a shower and rid himself of the smell? Then all this would be a waste of time. Despite all my doubts, I pushed on.

My tracking led me out the walls and to the open fields that lay without. The guards made cursory note of my passing and went back to their duties. If Alaric was looking for me, they would be able to account for my whereabouts. I could see the patches of forest out in the distance. As a hunter, this would be where he was going.
No such thing
, my mind told me. He bypassed the woods and went beyond, using a path that had become fairly worn with regular use. I made a beeline for the path. Thanks to my regular supply of blood, I could run as fast as a car in this terrain. At this rate, I should be able to catch up with him soon, as long as I was going in the right direction.

The path led to a town about the size of Jericho. There were few buildings in any kind of habitable condition. Postmodern construction was simply not the wonder it had been made out to be. It was just about making as many buildings as cheaply as possible, without any regard to durability. 

After the Fall, Mother Nature had resolved to reclaim her territory. Weeds were sprawling out of every crack and crevice, which had become wide chasms in several places. The road itself looked like a map of sorts, with crooked lines of green going in every direction. All that growth attracted grazers, which in turn would attract predators. I saw a doe and two of her fawns take off at the sight of me. They may have never seen a human in their lifetime, but they recognized a predator when they saw one.

I walked around without aim or purpose, searching for Matthias and wondering what he would be doing in this town. The stores were all broken into and looted. Grocery stores and pharmacies were the worst hit, but general shops and hardware stores took their fair share of ransacking. I noticed few shriveled bodies or bones. Predators must have been doing Mother Nature’s bidding by helping dispose of them.

The walk around town proved an interesting tour, but I had become weary of it and Matthias’ trail was lost long before. I had been tracking him all night and the sky to the east was taking on lighter shades. That was my cue to get moving. I took off on a dead sprint when something stopped me in my tracks. It was hard to say what made me stop so suddenly, but I realized I had picked up a trace of his scent again. My vision exploded and I saw every movement of the branches, every blade of grass swaying back and forth with the smallest gust of wind. A bundle of something rested atop a thick branch on the tree. It looked like part of the tree, it blended so well. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it was a sort of ghillie suit. 

Something else caught my eye. I spotted a buck in the distance. He wasn’t as large as the deer of times past, when hunters would feed them to take down a bigger trophy, but he was impressive nonetheless. The figure in the tree moved and I saw the outline of a rifle that was also camouflaged. Apparently, so did the buck, as he sniffed at the air and grunted before taking off on a dead sprint.

I made a split-second decision, which was all the time I had anyway. This thing was fast, which was probably how it had survived all this time. Not fast enough to outrun me, though. I caught up to it some distance away and tackled it to the ground. He put up a fight, but it was not enough to overcome my grip. I searched his jugular vein and rammed my fangs right into the site. The arterial outflow was rich and powerful from the struggle. It wasn’t human blood, but it had a gamey flavor that had a merit of its own. He continued to kick and thrash until his strength flagged and he went still. I did the best I could to wipe the blood off me and picked up the trophy to take to the hunter.

The figure had descended from the tree and was hard at work tracking the creature when we ran into one another. He almost fell over from the shock of seeing me with a buck in my arms, but apparently not enough to run away screaming. My offering was enticing enough to keep him there. He pulled back his head and revealed a face hidden in camouflage paint.

“Matthias,” I said to him.

“Mordecai.”

His hair was filthy, with shocks of hair clumped together by mud. There wasn’t a bit of his face that wasn’t covered with paint. It was a wonder I had picked up his scent with the smell of ammonia about him. He might have thought it was deer urine, but he was only fooling himself. I set the deer before him as an offering. He gave me the most curious smile and began to look around.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

I heard it before I saw it. There must have been hundreds of them coming this way. They were covered in dried mud and dirt, which gave them some camouflage of their own. The figures, walked, limped, or hobbled their way over here, moving any way they could to get to us.

“Matthias, you need to run. Now.”

I wasn’t even done with my sentence when he was gone. For whatever reason, I stood there for a few more seconds and watched their plodding advance. There were more coming up behind them, definitely more than I could dispatch with the daggers I had brought. I made a dismissive gesture at the deer corpse and ran.

Matthias seemed to have disappeared, but I looked to the trees above and saw the lump perched high above. He was invisible to all but my discerning eye, and the smell of whatever he had been writhing in masked his own scent. I knew he meant to stay there.

“Let’s go! You can’t stay here, Matthias,” I shouted up at the treetops. The figure moved slightly.

“I’m staying,” was his muffled reply.

“There’s too many of them. You might be trapped up there.”

“I’ll be fine. I have been every other time.”

“Just like the time when you hurt yourself and I had to save you?”

He gave me a dirty look I could see even through his disguise. The advancing horde had encircled the deer and begun to feed. Others tried to join in, but the meat wouldn’t last much longer. I scaled the tree with the ease of a chimpanzee. About halfway up, I heard the click of his weapon. The spent cartridge tumbled to the ground below. Now he was aiming the weapon at me.