Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (24 page)

Peg had supposed that the thing at the bottom
could have been killed in the cave-in, but she doubted it. The
cave-in couldn’t have been a coincidence. Even in its weakened
state (if Peg had even succeeded in that much) it could have been
able to cover its tracks. It no longer had any minions that she
knew of and no other way out, so the best she had been able to hope
for was that it would be trapped for the rest of Peg’s
lifetime.

She’d taught Zoey what to look for, though,
just in case.

“Where?” Peg asked quietly. Zoey pointed
toward a copse of trees on the far side of the park. It was right
near a creek that ran through the park, and it had plenty of shade.
Peg noticed that, even though the park was full of playing
children, not a one of them went anywhere near that spot.

“You just stay right here,” Peg said. “But
look away. Understand? No matter what you hear, no matter what you
feel from me, you do not move and you do not look. Can you listen
to your mommy for once?”

Zoey nodded. As strong willed as she was, Peg
believed she would obey.

Peg turned and started to walk back to the
baseball diamond. Although she’d always had some trouble with the
trick, she concentrated hard on creating a glamour around herself.
Normal humans would see her and not realize she was there. She
could stand right in front of them, whisper in their ear, and they
would only think it was the wind. She’d never quite gotten to the
point of doing mind control, although she had seen it work, but she
didn’t need that right now. The only important thing was that no
one else could see her. No one except her half-vampire daughter and
the minion hiding among the trees.

Her speed had improved over the years. She
reached the trees before the minion knew she had turned back
around. Her hands went to its wrists and pinned them above its head
against the tree trunk. It looked exactly like Peg remembered,
dressed in the same kind of clothes Peg had warned Zoey to watch
for. It struggled against her, but this one didn’t have anything
near the strengths of its predecessors. Peg had some guesses as to
why that might be, but she didn’t want to assume.

“Now you listen here,” Peg said, her words
strong and confident and annoyed-sounding despite the deep
penetrating fear coursing through her. “I know you can hear me,
wherever the fuck you are now. And I know that I’m probably getting
close to ripe by now. You probably think I’m all ready for
picking.”

With no effort whatsoever she ripped off the
minion’s left arm, casually throwing it behind her into the
creek.

“But this is the last time you are going to
come after me. Or my family. Because I’m not afraid.” It was a lie,
but hopefully one she was hiding well. And if she was lucky it was
capable of feeling just as much fear.

She ripped off its right arm. It didn’t
scream. It didn’t show any emotion. It didn’t even move. She
grabbed it by what passed for its throat and held it high against
the tree.

“And if I ever do see any of your walking
eyes ever again, I will come after you. I’m stronger now. And I
know how to hurt you. You may be my daughter’s boogeyman, but never
forget: I’m yours.”

Sticking her hand through its chest and
crushing its heart took no more effort than pressing her thumb
through a warm stick of butter. It lost integrity immediately,
faster than any of the others had all those years ago. All that
remained were its clothes, an odd-colored smear against the tree,
and a mess of unidentifiable matter at the base. Peg calmly washed
the gore off her arm in the creek, although her sleeve was stained
and she would have to change. That was okay. She always kept an
extra jacket in her car just in case she was out and the sun caught
her off guard anyway.

She gathered up the clothes and threw them in
the nearest trashcan, then went back to Zoey. For once she had
obeyed her mother and hadn’t turned around.

“Is it gone?” Zoey asked.

“Yes sweetie,” Peg said.

“So it can’t hurt me?”

“No. I would never let that happen,
understand. You remember why?”

Zoey recited the answer from memory after
years of hearing it over and over. “Because when something happens
you made a promise that you would save me.”

“That’s right. I did.” She smoothed Zoey’s
tousled hair and kissed her head. “Now what do you say we go back
and watch the rest of your brother’s game, huh?”

She agreed, and Peg and Zoey walked hand in
hand back to the rest of their family.

He had no name,
not a real one at least. Pig reminded him of that often, although
he had at least managed to convince Pig that he wasn’t Goose or
Chicken or Veal. He still had at least that much dignity.

Dignity, of course, was a completely foreign
concept here. He knew he would have no choice but to utterly let go
of it at some point in the future. How far in the future he
couldn’t say, since he had no way of keeping track of time. The
sounds of distant water dripping off stalactites were the closest
thing he had to the tick of a clock. Sometimes he got it in his
head that he would count the drips and get some idea of how much
time passed, but there was no point. Nothing ever happened, so
there was no need to know how long it would be until nothing
happened again.

The other reason there was no point to
counting the drips was that most of the time he couldn’t hear them
anyway over the moans and wails and screams of his fellow captives.
All up and down the long row of three-foot by three-foot cages they
babbled and whispered to themselves. In his current position
relatively close to the exit the captives were quieter. Farther
down, though, were the ones who had been here for longer. And the
longer they all huddled fearfully in the dark, waiting for the
moment when they would finally be taken through the roughly-made
door at the end of the darkened cave, the more insane they
became.

He wasn’t sure how long ago he had given up
on ever escaping, but even locked here in his cage, covered in his
own filth and fed sporadically on the blood of mangy stray animals,
he still had not reached the point where he wanted to go through
that far door. No one that had ever gone through it had come back
out. No one except the nightmarish guards and Pig, that was, and
the stories he told only enforced his desire to stay slumped in
this cage like an animal for longer, so long as it didn’t mean
becoming “ripe” and going on to the next step.

As Pig babbled his nonsense in the cage next
to him (he thought it was to his left, but sometimes he thought Pig
was to his right. With almost no light to see by he sometimes got
turned around in his cage and didn’t even know which direction he
was facing) he became aware of another voice nearby, a new one. He
turned in the direction he thought it came from and squinted,
trying to get some vague shape in his vision to associate the voice
with. It was a woman in the spot for the newest arrivals near the
end of the row. She sounded like she was talking to someone, or at
least thought she was talking to someone. The cage she looked to be
facing appeared empty, though. That had to be some kind of record.
Brand new and yet she was already crazy. She was going to fit in
just fine around here.

Whatever the phantom voices were telling her
must have been alarming, because she turned to the front of the
cage and grabbed the bars, oblivious to the way her skin smoked and
sizzled as they touched the garlic that their guards regularly
smeared over the bars to prevent escape. “Zoey?” she screamed.
“Zoey!”

From somewhere near the other end of the
cages someone responded. “Peg, I’m sorry.”

“Zoey? No! Zoey! Zoey!” But the other person
didn’t have time to say anything in response. All he heard instead
was the door slamming. This Zoey, whoever she was, was gone
forever. Gone to meet the mish-mash, as Pig called it, the
combination of things.

He tried to turn around in his cage, the
closest thing he could possibly manage to giving the new woman some
privacy. He was sure there was an interesting story to be told in
the drama unfolding across the aisle, but he still had enough of
his old personality to be ashamed at the idea of taking
entertainment from someone else’s suffering. After a few more days,
or months, or years, maybe his attitude would change and he would
wish he had paid more attention, just so he had something
interesting to think about as his captivity continued. Until then
it felt like the only decent thing to do to retreat back into his
own head and listen for the voice that sometimes tried to speak to
him.

He didn’t get that far into his own thoughts,
though. The woman wouldn’t let him. She continued frantically
talking to herself until, for no apparent reason, she started
singing tunelessly to herself. It was a song he vaguely recognized
from another life, a life where he had had a name and everything,
and it intrigued him enough that he turned back around to watch
once more. Although he could still barely see, he saw enough to
realize she had reached through the bars and, heedless of the pain,
grabbed the lock of her cage. He didn’t understand how she could
manage it. He’d tried that himself when he’d first been brought
here. Everyone did. But the garlic and silver of the cage was too
excruciating to touch for more than a few seconds. She should have
been pulling away, screaming in pain. Instead she kept singing to
herself right up until the moment where she twisted the padlock and
snapped it right off the door.

The two guards were at the cage in the blink
of an eye, but the woman moved with almost their same inhuman
speed. The guards, each missing most of their heads, shouldn’t have
been able to stand let alone run for her, and yet they both fought
as the woman leaped out of her cage and tried to pick it up to use
as a weapon. The movement was awkward and the woman accidently hit
the cage across the aisle—only two down from him. He felt his own
cage rattle with the impact, and he ducked his head under his hands
as he realized just how ugly this was probably about to get. This
woman wasn’t the first person who’d ever tried to escape, and she
probably wouldn’t be the last. As soon as the guards got her under
control she was going to experience a world of agony at their
hands.

The volume throughout the cave reached a
fever pitch as all the other captives screamed and shouted cheers
and boos at the fight taking place right in front of them. The
entire thing was over just as fast as it had started, though, and a
hush suddenly went through the cages. He looked to see just how
badly the woman had been defeated but was surprised to see her now
standing alone in the aisle. She’d actually beaten them. He never
even considered that was possible. The two guards were collapsed at
her feet, their putrid gray flesh slowly dissolving and leaving
behind only their clothes.

The three other guards are going to put a
stop to this
, he thought. There was no way this could be
happening. He might not have any idea how long he had been down in
this filthy, shit-stinking hole, but it was long enough that he
knew one hundred percent that he would never leave. Pig had drilled
that idea into his mind after seeing hundreds of people get brought
down and then subsequently go through that door. Once you were down
here it was forever. No one challenged it. No one escaped, at least
not for long.

He was nothing. Everyone down here was
nothing. And the idea that someone brand new had decided to
challenge that scared him far more than he knew it should.

But the remaining guards didn’t come. They’d
all gone with that Zoey person through the door and they wouldn’t
come back out until they were finished doing… well, whatever
unspeakable thing it was they did to people in there. That left the
woman out here, alone and free.

Doesn’t matter
, he thought.
She’s
just going to run. Back through where she came. The guards will
find her eventually. She’ll be back. She’ll be given to the
combination. That’s just the natural order of things
.

The woman stood there for several seconds,
frozen with indecision. Then she bent down and rifled through the
clothes until she found a key ring in one of the pockets. She
turned to the cage she had accidentally hit during the melee and
tossed them to the girl inside. “Free everyone,” she simply said,
then ran down the aisle and through the door, letting it bang shut
behind her.

He stared with a gaping mouth out into the
aisle as he heard keys fumbling at a lock. Everyone in the cages
continued to be quiet as they all listened, waiting for the click
of a lock opening. The instant they heard it the cave erupted with
shouts and begging and screams. Several people, forgetting the pain
such a thing would cause, grabbed the bars of their cages and
rattled them wildly. Through it all there were only two words that
he could coherently make out, repeated over and over in a crazed
chant of the damned—“Me! Free me! Me me me!”

When the girl in the first cage was out she
moved quickly, going from cage to cage and opening each lock. His
was the third cage she unlocked beside her own. One across the
aisle from him contained a young man about twenty or so, and he ran
right for the exit without stopping. The other, a girl in her late
teens with dark skin, stayed with the first girl and took some of
the keys from her so that they could unlock the cages faster
together. The first girl, a scrawny blond thing that probably would
have been pretty if she wasn’t covered in dirt, dried blood and
feces, came up to his cage and unlocked it before he could say
anything in protest, and then she was on to the next one.

His door swung open, but he couldn’t
move.