Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (22 page)

And there was another noise. Movement.
Something slipping over the surface of the rock. Squelching.
Squeezing. Sick wet, smacking sounds. Grunts. Whispers. Thousands
of whispers. Sighs and moans and sobs. So many voices, all of them
quiet, all of them babbling to themselves.

Peg finally stopped. Her eyes had adjusted as
much as they possibly could to the near total blackness of the
cave, just enough that she could see Zoey ahead of her. The three
remaining minions stood around her, one behind her and one on each
side holding her arms straight out at her side like a sacrifice
tied to two posts. The minion at the rear turned to look at Peg,
but all the others continued staring straight ahead.

Something beyond them was moving. Something
massive.

Don’t look
, the inner voice said.
Dear God, whatever you do, don’t look at it
. For the first
time ever that inner voice actually sounded petrified. For the
first time, too, Peg knew she had no other choice but to ignore it.
She ran straight ahead, going right for Zoey. She didn’t care if
she had to run right over the minion in her way to do it. Because
this couldn’t happen. After all this time, after all she and Zoey
had been through, there was no way she could let this end any other
way than…

Something flashed out of the darkness. Peg
only had the impression of something like a tentacle, yet not
nearly uniform enough to rightly be called that, something flesh
colored. It wrapped around Zoey and yanked her deeper into the
darkness. Zoey screamed, a high, shrill lance of sound that became
muffled almost immediately.

“No!” Peg screamed as she hit the minion, her
arm ramming forward into its chest with a speed and force she
hadn’t realized she was yet capable of accomplishing. Her fingers
clenched an organ she could only assume was the heart and she
squeezed. The minion, who she could now see was formerly the
Shakespeare, sighed and crumpled as she pulled her arm back out,
her forearm now slick with black fluid. She expected the other two
to come after her but they just stood there. They looked
hypnotized, or maybe empty. Yes, that felt more like it. There was
nothing inside them at the moment. Their bodies were on just enough
of an autopilot that they didn’t just collapse where they stood,
but their minds, or whatever mind-like thing controlled them, was
elsewhere.

Before either of them could come to she
rammed her hands through both their chests, repeating her feat from
moments earlier. As they dropped to the ground, the remains of
their bodies crumbling to nothing, Peg stooped down for a search of
their clothes. They had to have some form of light on them.
Anything at all. Even they must have needed to find something in
the dark that had been beyond their eyesight from time to time. She
found it in the pocket of one of their jeans, a small Maglite that
didn’t look like it would do much at all in darkness this thick.
But she grabbed it, pointed it ahead of her, and prayed to her
higher power that she would see Zoey perfectly okay only feet away
from her.

She didn’t.

The beam of light created a small circle
ahead of her, and faint, but it was enough. At first her mind
couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. In fact, later, she would
still never be able to fully comprehend it. The mere memory,
blurred in her head to nearly nothing in a futile attempt by her
mind to assert that world could still possibly be sane, would be
enough to send her crying and puking to the toilet, where she would
hug it and try to deny that it had ever really happened.

Zoey and Pig’s descriptions were correct,
after a fashion. It was, indeed, a mish-mash, a combination of
things. But those words meant nothing. They were approximations of
a concept that humanity had never dared to come up with.

The circle of light illuminated a part that
she could only refer to as its midriff, although it was too
asymmetrical to be said to have a “mid.” It was flesh, human flesh,
mostly white but with many spots of black and brown and tan and
every variation in between. Another second of staring and Peg
realized it had protrusions sticking out all over, all human body
parts of all shapes and sizes. Arms, legs, fingers, toes, body
hair, pubic hair, breasts, nipples, ears, noses, penises, vulvas.
The first three fingers of a hand, its nails grown impossibly long,
wriggled and stretched at her from around a belly button. Beneath a
single brown eye, darting here and there at random intervals, there
was a shriveled piece of skin that could only be a scrotum. Mouths
showed up on it sporadically, each and every one snarling and
hissing and crying. Most of it was incomprehensible, but from
several she thought she heard the mumbled word “help.” From others,
louder, came the words “kill me.”

This thing, this enormous thing of which she
could only see the smallest portion, was made purely of people.
Immortal people, vampires, fused together by… Peg couldn’t even try
to understand the mechanism by which it did this. She couldn’t tell
how old this thing might be, but its form came from an uncountable
number of people. And each one, she realized, was still conscious,
still alive in the most rudimentary sense, still very much aware of
the unending Hell.

“Zoey?” Peg whispered. She didn’t hear a
response, but she felt it in her head. Despair. And agony. Pure
agony.

Peg looked up. About fifteen feet in the air
Zoey hung from a… again, calling it a tentacle was inaccurate. It
was certainly an appendage of some sort, but its structure matched
nothing that should exist in nature. It grew so slim in some
places- the width of a single leg- that it shouldn’t have been able
to support its own weight and yet it waved in the air effortlessly.
It had a muscle and bone structure that appeared to have been
designed by a drunk on an all-week bender. Peg thought she could
see the impression of a spine poking out from the skin underneath
what might have once been a scalp. An arm ended in a chest, where a
woman’s face was stretched over a rib cage. And a flat end of this
appendage was wrapped around Zoey, covering her face and preventing
her from screaming even as her legs dangled out from underneath,
waving in a horrible spasming rhythm.

Again Peg’s inner voice told her to stop
watching. She should look away before any of this was permanently
burned in her mind for the rest of her now unnaturally long life.
It told her that Zoey was gone, that there was nothing Peg could
do, that the only thing to do that even slightly resembled logic
was running.

And again, Peg didn’t listen. Instead she
jumped. Up until today a fifteen foot leap for her would have been
impossible but she’d already seen that the minions could do it back
at the empty store. She accidently dropped the flashlight, making
her lose sight of her moving target so she almost missed. As the
flashlight broke and went out beneath her she barely got her hands
around Zoey’s foot. Zoey’s legs continued to shake like a rag doll,
nearly throwing Peg off until she got a better grip with her second
hand. She tried to use her weight to tug Zoey out of the thing’s
grip, but all she got for the effort was a muffled scream from Zoey
somewhere in the pulsing wall of meat.

Peg reached up and the closest thing she
could find to a handhold, something she didn’t register at first as
being Zoey’s wrist. The proportions seemed wrong, like she
shouldn’t have been able to reach her hand that far down on Zoey’s
body, but Peg didn’t take the time to wonder about this. Zoey had
to be fighting to make this thing let go, but her strength alone
wasn’t enough. If Peg could combine it with her own, though, it was
still possible that they could escape.

Peg reached up again, and this time she
didn’t touch Zoey. Her hand clasped a twisted knot of skin that
might at one point have been either a knee or a shoulder. She
resisted the deep seated repulsion and urge to get her hand away
from it as quickly as possible and instead used it to pull herself
up almost level with Zoey. The knot twisted under her fingers like
it was trying to readjust and reform around her hand. Peg could
feel an irregular pulse beneath the surface. It must have had some
kind of circulatory system, although it was impossible to predict
exactly how it worked. Maybe, though, it still worked enough like
the vampires it had been built from to share the same
weaknesses.

If she had stopped for any blink of time and
considered what she was doing Peg would have probably screamed and
allowed herself to drop rather than do this, but she instead worked
entirely on blind instinct. Bracing herself by wrapping her legs
around Zoey’s, Peg grabbed the nearest spot on the creature—it felt
like an eyebrow over the heel of a foot—with both hands. Her
fingers sank into the twisting mass without any effort on her part,
and she realized with sudden horror that it was trying to swallow
her hands and assimilate her with the rest of it. After several
seconds of feeling it trying to take over her mind just like the
piece of the minion had earlier, though, it stopped and instead
tried to retreat from her touch.

She was too young, Peg realized. It couldn’t
take her because she wasn’t ripe.

Peg dug her fingers in and pulled. The skin
ripped with far too much ease, and a mess of intestines fell out of
the hole onto her chest. On the inside she was screaming, but she
didn’t stop clawing. She pulled out some other piece of
unidentifiable viscera—a kidney, maybe—and threw it away. The
appendage began to shake, and Peg thought she could hear another
waving somewhere in the darkness behind her. Any moment it might
come swooping down to wipe her off. Peg dug deeper, gritting her
teeth and she tore away all manner of organs, some identifiable,
many more unlike anything she had ever seen. Maybe she was wrong.
This thing might not work like…

With her arm shoulder deep in the things
guts, Peg finally felt something. Pulsing. Pumping. She got a firm
hold on it and pulled. With a faint squelching sound it came out, a
human heart, still trying its best to beat, still spurting
blood.

The thing screamed.

Peg screamed with it. She couldn’t help it.
The sound was so human, and yet not even close. Hundreds, maybe
thousands of mouths all at once opening and giving voice to their
pain.

The thing didn’t stop, though. The second
appendage came out of the darkness and slammed into her. If she
hadn’t had one of her arms still deep within the thing’s wound she
was certain she would have fallen. The skin around the wound
started to crack and peal, flaking off into slimy lumps that fell
to the ground below. But one heart couldn’t possibly be enough to
stop it. This thing likely had as many hearts as it did
victims.

Peg reached in with both arms again, trying
her best to ignore the fact that Zoey’s legs had stopped
moving.

Black blood spurted in her face as she pulled
out something that had once been lungs but now looked like it had
merged with a spinal column. She spit as much as she could from her
mouth and kept digging. Peg didn’t need to destroy enough hearts to
kill it. She wasn’t even sure if such a thing was possible. All she
needed to do was destroy enough to get it to drop Zoey.

The other appendage hit her again, this time
coming up from below. Her legs came away from Zoey, completely
removing her anchor. She started to slip.

No. No. Just
…

Her fingers clenched something else inside.
It felt like it was moving. As her body started to fall she pulled
at it, afraid her grip would give out before the connective tissue
inside.

She dropped the fifteen feet and landed on
her back. The pain was horrible, but the scream that came from her
lips wasn’t from the agony. It was one of desperate, hopeful
triumph. The thing in her hands beat several times before it
started to disintegrate.

She couldn’t see anything that was happening
above her, but she could feel bits of meat splattering on her body.
The thing screamed again, and although it might have been her
imagination she believed the noise might have been slightly weaker
this time. A significantly larger piece fell a few feet away from
her, then another. A jawbone hit her in the head. She tried to roll
out of the way of the collapsing tentacle, but she was so
disoriented by now that she couldn’t tell which direction to
go.

Something huge splattered onto the stone
right next to her. The thing screamed again, but this time the
noise was retreating. Through whatever form of locomotion it used
it was going deeper into the cavern. Peg had no idea how deep it
could go, nor did she have even the slightest desire to learn. It
was time to leave before it decided it wanted to come back for its
revenge on her. But she could only leave under one condition.

“Zoey?” she asked, although she was no longer
sure that she would get an answer.

“Peggy,” Zoey responded, but her words were
weak. Peg crawled in their direction.

“Zoey, keep talking. I can’t find you
if…”

“Peggy,” Zoey said again. The words may have
been closer, but they were fainter as well.

Peg put her hands in a gory mess, and the
gory mess moved beneath her touch. She recoiled until she realized
that underneath it all she had felt something that might have been
Zoey’s stomach.

“It’s okay Zoey. I’ve got you,” Peg said, but
as she slid her arms under Zoey’s body she vaguely registered that
the shape was wrong.

No, that can’t be right
, Peg thought,
not after all that. This isn’t how it’s supposed to end
.

The thing groaned from somewhere deep in the
earth. Now was not the time to deal with this yet. They had to get
out first.

Doing her best to ignore the unnatural way
Zoey sagged in her arms, Peg picked her up. She wasn’t sure exactly
which direction she had come from, but she figured that the safest
assumption was to go the opposite direction of the inhuman noises
still getting weaker in the gloom. Even though her mind tried to
tell her that urgency was still important, her body was telling her
it was time to slow down. Vampire or not, she was not immune to
taking a beating. Maybe she could heal from it all, but not now.
For now, she just wanted to collapse. Especially if Zoey…