Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (20 page)

“Cuz I’ve gone all rotten, Fishy,” he said,
pointing to his legs. “Just because I’m a vampire don’t mean I
can’t be full of infection. That’s what happens when its minions
chop off my legs and let the festering stumps lie in shit all
day.”

Peg instinctively pulled her ruined foot
closer to her body and away from his cage.

“But why would they do that?” Peg asked.

For the first time Pig turned his unsettling
gaze away from her. “Because I almost escaped. And I saw.”

Peg moved as close to him as the bars would
allow. “Tell me what you mean.”

“I think I was the second one that got close
to escaping. The first one I saw got as far as the top of the
stairs, I think. So when I saw my chance to punch in the face of
one of the minions while it was trying to feed me, I didn’t go that
way. Instead I went…”

The door at the end of the aisle slammed open
and the two creatures that had kidnapped her walked swiftly down
the aisle into view. As they reached the other two that had been
milling around they fell in behind them without any word. They
stopped about thirty feet down from Peg and stared at the
cages.

“What’s going on?” Peg asked Pig.

“Three of the minions went out after your
sister.” He stopped as though that explained everything.

“So?” Peg asked, trying her best to be
patient although she had a horrible feeling that time wasn’t on her
side.

“Only two came back. The mish-mash usually
likes to have at least five.”

Peg did her best to get a better angle of
view on whatever was happening down the aisle, but in such a small
place there was only so much she could do. She tried putting her
face against the bars but she could only do that for so long before
she felt like the pain might fry the eyeballs from her sockets.

She didn’t have to strain for much longer
anyway. The minions slowly walked closer, occasionally stopping to
stoop and look in at various people in their cages. Every single
one scrambled away from them as far as the cage would allow.
Finally all four stopped at the cage with the guy reciting
Shakespeare. Unlike the others he seemed to be too out of it to
react to their presence. Although Peg couldn’t even begin to guess
why, this seemed to be exactly what they were looking for.

One of the minions pulled out a ring of keys
from the pocket of its hoodie while another came forward with
something cradled in its hands. Once the cage was open the
remaining two minions reached in and grabbed the kid by the arm and
leg. Only then did he appear to realize that something was wrong,
and with his free arm and leg he began flailing about wildly. The
action knocked one of the minions against the side of the cage,
forcing it to let go, but the remaining minion kept its hold and
dragged the boy out of the cage on his stomach. The boy screamed,
although his voice was hoarse and pathetic. Everyone else in the
cages stopped their own noises at the sound. The hush had an eerie
quality to Peg, like the moment of silence before a tornado
descends on a trailer park.

The boy tried to call out again, but before
the sound could completely come out of his mouth the minion with
the keys slammed his head down hard into the stone floor. Peg
thought she heard the sickening crack of his nose breaking. The
other two minions went down on top of him, one pinning his legs
while the other held down his arms. The boy stopped trying to
scream and instead started sobbing. Peg went numb at the sound. He
might have been older, probably much, much older than he looked,
but in this moment he sounded disturbingly like Brendan crying out
for his mommy after a bad dream.

The last minion knelt by the boy’s head, its
hands still cupped in front of it, and Peg finally had a view of
the thing in its hands. She had absolutely no clue what it was
supposed to be, but she had seen something just like it only hours
before. It was a putrid, shining gob of flesh that pulsed softly as
though it might actually be a living creature, although what
remained of Peg’s rational brain tried to reject that anything so
alien could possibly be alive. As the boy was held down the minion
carefully placed the thing on his neck.

Immediately the boy’s sobs changed to choking
coughs. He sounded like someone was crushing his windpipe, but the
formless mass on his neck wasn’t actually doing anything. Despite
this the minions waited for some seconds for a sign that apparently
only they could understand. Then the minion who had put the thing
on his neck gently put both its hands on the back of his head. Its
movements were gentle, and for one crazy moment Peg almost expected
it to give him a massage.

Then the minion crushed his head.

The sound was unlike anything Peg had ever
heard before. Saying it was like an egg cracking didn’t do it
justice. The noise was thicker, meatier. Peg looked away, again
feeling the urge to dry heave. At the same time, though, that need
to know stayed with her. As diminished as her hopes of escaping
were, she still had the suspicion that any little detail about all
of this might be the difference between living and dying. She
forced herself to look back.

Despite the sound, Peg realized that the
minion had only damaged the back of the boy’s head, leaving the
front intact. The minion picked away hairy pieces of skull,
carelessly tossing them to the side and revealing the smushed
remnants of his brain underneath. Now the rest of the minions
joined in, ignoring his limbs which still twitched with every jab
to his ruined brain. Each of them ripped and scooped pieces of the
meat away, leaving it in steaming piles at their sides. They made
short work of the brain, although guessing from what Peg had seen
earlier she was sure they weren’t very neat or thorough about
cleaning out every scrap of gristle or bone. Despite the complete
lack of anything remaining in his head, however, the boy continued
to twitch. Peg noticed the throbbing blob move on his neck, moving
to the exposed top of the spine. It disappeared in the cavity, and
all four minions stood up. After just over a minute the boy got up
as well.

There was no more twitching, no more
Shakespeare. Just one more inhuman creature.

The four original minions went back down the
aisle to the door. The new one hesitated and stumbled at first, as
though it were a baby taking its first steps, and then it followed
them. Once all of them were out of Peg’s sight the vampires in the
cages around where the boy had been started reaching out for the
pieces of his skull and brain. Peg finally turned away, but she
couldn’t avoid the sounds of slurping and chewing.

“Enjoy the show?” Pig asked. “Don’t worry.
It’s not one we have to watch very often. The mish-mash doesn’t
create any more minions than it absolutely needs. After all, every
walking set of eyes it creates for itself is one more it doesn’t
get to keep closer to home.”

Peg couldn’t make herself speak. Her mind
didn’t want to accept anything she had just seen. This had to be
the worst thing this place had to offer, because she couldn’t
imagine a vision more soul-crushing and insanity-inducing than
that. All she wanted to do was curl up in her cage and put her
hands over her ears. She wanted to go to sleep. She wanted to wake
up and find that she was back in her bed with Tony at her side. She
wanted… she wanted…

Fuck what you want
, the inner voice
said.
No shutting down. If you shut down then both of us are
screwed, and I’m not fucking ready to go down yet. Do you
understand me? Pull yourself together, woman up, and figure out
some way to fuck all these sick bastards right in their empty
fucking earholes
.

Breathe
, she thought to herself.
Just breathe. Okay. Good
. She could keep going. She knew it.
She’d managed to get through everything else in her life, and even
if all the other horrible moments in her life paled to all this,
she knew from experience that she could keep on. She could. All she
had to do was keep repeating that to herself and maybe she would
eventually even believe it.

“Oh, welcome back,” Pig said. “I thought you
were going away there for a second. Wouldn’t blame you. Most people
down here go away when they first see something like that. Quite a
few of them don’t ever come back, either. Not everyone can be as
sane as me.” He punctuated the sentence with a flash of his
fangs.

“You saw,” Peg said.

“Of course I saw. Couldn’t miss it with them
putting on the show right there in front of us.”

“No. I meant what you were saying before. You
said you tried to escape and you saw. What did you see?”

“Me? Didn’t see nothing. Can’t see nothing.
I’m probably just a figment of your imagination. You’re talking to
yourself.”

Peg could see that he was uncomfortable
though. “Tell me.”

Pig grabbed the bars of the cage and pulled
himself closer, not even flinching at the pain. “I went the other
way, you see.”

Peg nodded, motioning for him to
continue.

“I thought there had to be more than one exit
from here. See, before me, no one ever knew what was beyond that
door. All anyone ever knew was that the people who went through
never came out. So a way out. It had to be. So when I had the
chance, that was the direction I went. But it wasn’t a way
out.”

He stopped. It was obvious that he didn’t
want to continue. “You can’t stop there,” Peg said. “Tell me. What
did you see?”

He hesitated before saying. “A combination of
things.”

Peg smacked her hand against the bottom of
her cage in frustration. “God dammit! I am sick and tired of
everyone giving me the same meaningless answer. Just tell me what
it is!”

Now it was Pig’s turn to sound angry. “You
want an easy to categorize answer? Well tough shit. You can’t have
one. Because there isn’t one. There is no word for what’s beyond
that door. There might have been a word once, but not anymore.”

Peg didn’t know what to say to that. Even for
everything she had seen, she wasn’t sure if she could accept that
someone or something was beyond that door that couldn’t even be
named. Instead some other detail of his story stuck in her head.
“So you did get out of the cage once?”

“Yep. Not that I could do that anymore.”

“And Zoey did, too. And you said there were
others.”

“No one ever escaped for long. Your sister
was out there the longest that I’ve ever seen.”

“But it’s possible.”

Pig moved closer to her, a rather
unstable-looking smile on his face. “Oh-ho! So here you’re thinking
you’re going to be the one person to get out of here, huh?”

“No, not the one. I’m taking Zoey with
me.”

Pig snorted, although there was something sad
in the way he did it. “I suppose you really haven’t been paying
attention as we’ve been talking, have you?”

“What do you mean?”

The noise came to her then, then one she
hadn’t realized she should be listening for. The sound of a cage at
the end of the aisle being opened.

“I mean they were so desperate to get your
sister back for a reason,” Pig said. “The mish-mash needs to eat.
And there’s only one person here who’s ripe enough to be
picked.”

Peg grabbed the bars at the front of her cage
and again tried to force herself into a position to see down the
aisle. “Zoey?” she called. “Zoey!”

“Peg,” she heard back, Zoey’s voice low and
resigned. “I’m sorry.”

“Zoey? No! Zoey!” But Peg had no way of
knowing if Zoey heard her, because all Peg heard in response was
the sound of the door at the end of the aisle slamming shut.

“Zoey!” Peg kept screaming her name over and
over again. A few of the others echoed her either in mocking or out
of a lack of anything else to do. She gripped the bars tightly and
tried to shake the door, but it only rattled slightly. There was no
chance that the hinges might be loose enough for the door to come
off. Unfortunately for her the minions appeared to keep at least
that much in working order.

She continued holding on to the bars for as
long as she could, but the pain eventually became too much. She
screamed out every cuss word in her extensive repertoire and let go
to look at the dark spots on her hands where they looked like they
had been singed. Although it was slow, she thought the spots were
fading the longer she didn’t touch the bars.

“I’m out of time,” Peg said to Pig. “You’ve
got to tell me how you got out.”

“I did. I attacked the minion when they
opened the cage to feed me. But they don’t do it alone anymore.
They may not technically have a brain but they still learn from
their mistakes.”

“Shit!” Peg grabbed the bars and tried to
rattle them one more time, more out of frustration than any belief
that it would work. This couldn’t possibly be happening. Eleven
years later she was failing her sister again. Peg had no idea how
long before Zoey met whatever fate was behind that door, but she
knew it was probably measured in only seconds or minutes. Every
horrible thing she had ever been told by others, every destructive
belief that she had ever believed about herself would be proved
absolutely true. She was nothing. She was a waste of life. She
was…

Jesus Christ, shut up
! the inner voice
said.
What did you tell yourself earlier, huh? The details. It
would be the details that would matter. Don’t you think maybe your
subconscious was trying to tell you something? Has it maybe
occurred to you that there’s perhaps one very major and important
detail that you haven’t been allowing yourself to see?

Wait, what? What was that supposed to mean?
She let go of the bars and looked at her hands again. The pain
subsided, the marks slowly faded.

“Pig,” she said quietly. “Why does it hurt to
touch the bars?”