HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (76 page)

Mentor had put him
away so that Ross could take over.

Together they'd
found a way to make him disappear so they could cheat him and use his
power.

This time Upton
howled so loud and so long several monk guards came to his door and
shushed him. He roared into their faces, throwing himself this way
and that around the cell his chains rattling like thunder.

Seeing they would
not subdue him, the monks left again, just as if he were no threat.
No one could hear him beyond the monastery enclave. No one would ever
search for him. He had been outwitted and imprisoned.

Well! He would find
a way to extract his revenge on both the old Predator vampires who
had done this to him. If it took a thousand years, he would find
satisfaction.

He stopped fighting
and sat back quietly to think. His considerable intelligence would
save him.

All he had to do
was think his way out of this. He had all the time in the world at
his disposal to put a plan into motion.

~*~

Mentor was alerted
when Upton went crazy. He kept a very minor watch on the vampire, but
even if he hadn't, the monks would have sent word. He knew Upton
planned escape some way, some day. He'd have to watch him closer now.

It did not surprise
him to discover Ross had taken over Upton's enterprises. He cared
little about that, feeling Ross would always be pliable to some
extent. He was no Upton.

Mentor sat in the
backyard of Bette's house. Inside, she slept in the arms of her
husband. Outside, the trees rustled and the moon went in and out of
cloud cover.

Mentor's thoughts
moved to Dell. He gently probed the fetus she carried, touching it
with his consciousness. She would give birth to a dhampir, half
vampire, half human, and the half-breed would grow to loathe his
mother's clan. It would want to eradicate them from the Earth. She
didn't yet know these things, not truly know them, but she would
learn when it was too late.

But no matter, no
matter, the world would go on. God might listen, or He might have
gone on a vacation. Ross would continue being rambunctious and often
deadly, his power growing as Upton's billions burgeoned. Bette would
love Alan, and she would be loved in turn throughout all the days of
her life. Upton would rage and plot, his heart growing ever darker.

Arid the world
would continue to turn. That was all Mentor knew with any certainty.

He looked around
once more at the peaceful Japanese garden before sailing above the
Earth where he paused, looking down upon it. He then looked up, into
the vast reaches of dark, endless, cold space where the universe
twirled. None of them had ever tried to go farther out than where he
was now. What if they tried? What if there was another habitable
planet they could migrate to? But they would just die there, cut off
from mankind.

He sighed and
looked down again at the blue, swirling globe of his home, the prison
where human and vampire were caught in a timeless struggle. If he
must have solace, then this was it.

The world would go
on, whatever happened to him and his kind. It cared little for the
affairs of the creatures living upon it as it spun through space and
time.

It would always go
on, with or without him, through all the risings of all the red
moons.

THE END

Thank You For
Reading! This is the first book of the Vampire Nations Chronicles
trilogy. Please look for RISE OF THE LEGEND, Book 2, and HUNTER OF
THE DEAD, Book 3 in Mosiman's Kindle Store.

THE
SCREAM

by

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright Billie Sue
Mosiman 2012

The wound would not
heal.

Joey leaned the hoe
against the barn wall to adjust the bandage covering his right
forearm. He frowned, worried at how dirty the strips of torn sheet
had become from this day's work in the field. If the wound got
infected any worse, what would happen to him?

Shadows indicating
the approach of evening slouched in the corners and rafters of the
big open hay-strewn building. It was October, a month when the light
failed early. Joey had been attacked in June, during a late hour of
darkness as he came from across the field after finishing a long
day's tilling.

They wouldn't
believe it had been an animal. They thought he had snagged himself
again on the barbed wire fence during crossing from the back field to
the front. They called him clumsy and a fool, and no, they would not
put in a gate they could ill afford for his convenience. They called
him worse names than that, but he tried to forget them because the
words hurt too much if he kept them in his mind.

If Joey had told
them it was not the fence, it was not an animal he had ever seen,
something less wolf than macabre beast, more human than gorilla, they
would have ridiculed him mercilessly. They might even have sent him
away. They threatened him often enough for him to believe them.

Yet no scoring of
the flesh from barbed wire had lingered. Instead a throbbing pain and
a sulfurous stink came slowly creeping into him that lasted six
months now. He tried everything to cure himself. They didn't believe
in doctors and would not take him to one. Here at the end of the
twentieth century they lived as if they were firmly entrenched in the
nineteenth. He had to make do with a poultice of black greasy salve
used as medication for the cows and mules. For pain he sneaked an
occasional aspirin from his mother's purse. Not that the aspirin
helped. The pain kept growing, a tiny incremental bit day by day,
until he realized nothing his parents had in the house was going to
stop it.

Still the wound
festered, turning blue around the bite marks, now threading red
streaks up the inside of his biceps toward his shoulder. It ached all
the time. He expected it would kill him--a thought that skittered
fretfully in and out of his thoughts a dozen times a day as he tried
to get through his work.

"Did you chop
the weeds between your mama's winter greens or have you been
daydreaming in the barn for hours?"

Joey started. In the
open doorway stood the menacing silhouette of his father. In his
father's hand Joey could make out the leather horse whip, his
father's constant companion used for whipping his son, flinging
snakes from beneath the house, frightening cows, swatting flies, and
any other action meant to control his world.

"I hoed the
garden," he said. And he milked the cows, fed them their hay,
saw after the mean-spirited hogs that he hated with a passion, and
watered the fall sweet potato crop.

His father went
through the list nevertheless, questioning him closely about the
chores. He was not allowed into the house until everything was done.

Why didn't Evie ever
have to help out, Joey wondered sullenly. She was big as he was now,
and despite all her weight, just as strong. But, no, Evie was their
darling. His sister put on a good show in their presence, while
behind their backs she tortured him every chance she got. Called him
dowder-head and pinched his earlobes and poured sand in his food. Now
there was a monster no one could have imagined.

"All right,
clean up at the pump. Come inside, supper's getting cold."

His father pivoted
and left him alone in the barn with the dark coming on and the fears
of his wound nagging for attention. Joey could hear the sound of the
whip striking at a pants leg fading as his father moved across the
yard.

He shivered with
fear and with self-pity.

The attack had
occurred June sixth. Must have been nine o'clock with the days so
long Joey fell into bed from fatigue as soon as he entered the house
those days. He had not an inkling of premonition something watched,
waiting for a strategic time to ambush him. His tired mind could take
in little more than the lonely call of a whippoorwill he heard from
the woods and the thankful evening breeze that was beginning to dry
his sweat.

He shut off the
engine of the old Massey-Ferguson tractor and climbed wearily down at
the end of the last row, moonlight full shimmering across the flat
symmetrically-tilled land. In the morning he'd have to climb aboard
old Massey again and finish the field, or his father would, of
course, be angry. It was acres and acres of land and he had so much
more work to go.

Then without warning
from out of the thick trees came the sounds of a disastrous whirlwind
that broke limbs and crashed through bushes as it came. Joey halted,
his head snapping up, his heart lurching in his chest. He opened his
mouth to scream, the first ever scream he had made in his adult life,
a scream that began high and was drowned by the rush of wind and the
pouncing of a thing upon his right side that sent him sprawling with
a hard thunderclap of pain against the perfect rows of freshly turned
soil.

The Thing, not a
wolf, larger than a wolf, stronger, more lethal, but with a head
bearing some awful resemblance to that animal, reared above him like
a giant in the moon-splashed sky. It howled from deep in a long
throat, scaring Joey beyond terror, dripping silver streams of saliva
upon his wildly beating chest, and then it swooped down with a last
terrifying growl, its teeth bared and ivory, sinking fangs to the
bone, and tearing away a chunk of meat before bounding away again to
the protection of the forest.

Joey shuddered,
remembering. He struggled for release from the nightmare, shambled
through the door of the barn into the deepening twilight, and went to
the pump to wash the farm dirt off his hands and face. He thought he
felt eyes on his back at once and turned lightening quick, but
nothing was there. Yet it was there, that Thing was out there
somewhere, always waiting.

During the dinner
meal he felt ill. He tried to explain, but his words were garbled.
First a mental confusion came over him and he could not make out the
sense of words--what were they all saying to him? Then he thirsted
like a man dying, yet after grabbing a glass of water he couldn't
bring himself to drink. Finally he fainted and thrashed about on the
floor, suffering convulsions.

He didn't hear what
his family said about him while so sick and he didn't know when they
took him up the stairs to bed, throwing him across the mattress fully
clothed.

He woke after
midnight leaking sweat and blood into the sheets. The train passing
in the distance rattled clackety-clack over the rails and the high,
shrill, screaming whistle from the engine called to Joey to get up,
move now, it's time.

He stumbled from
bed, his head filled by a mass riot of white noise. He took the
stairs from the attic two at a time to the ground floor of the old
farmhouse. He heard an animal growl and turned his head, cocking it
to listen. Where was the animal? Where was it?

"Who's there?"
called his father, floundering through the shadowy dark to where Joey
stood fearlessly in the moon-streaked room.

Joey didn't know
him, only knew he was an enemy, that the object in the man's hand
would cut into him if he didn't take it away and tear it to shreds.

"Joey?"
Querulous and wondering, his father stood with the leather whip
hanging loose from his hand. Then knowing and expectant: "Oh my
God, Joey?"

Joey hunched then
vaulted, using his back legs to propel him across the room, leaping
now into the air like an archaic bird with wide wings, falling
through filtered gloom, landing on top of the enemy full force. The
man screamed once, the scream like a song of blood, a song about the
dying of the world, a song to put the end to all things. The object
fell from the man's hands with a clatter to the floor. And then the
man's throat, pulsing hot as a bonfire in Joey's great, clawed hands,
opened to him, gushing that heat and the wet of red to stain the
floor black.

Joey turned and
looked down the hallway where instinct drove him in leaps. In the
bed, sitting upright with a hand to her mouth, was another being, a
female one, waiting for him to drag her from the covers and devour
her in bloody snatches. She never made a sound beyond the bright
bubble-gurgle of dying.

He turned from her,
knowing another one was in the house and coming. Now down the stairs
came a large one, another female, a block of darkness squalling like
a burning feline, and he left the broken female on the bedroom floor,
hurrying to silence the caterwauling, thrilled to know the power
could carry him in mere seconds bounding across the threshold,
through the littered living room, and to the foot of the stairs. He
reached with a long arm and drew her quick into an embrace,
smothering her echoing screams in his hairy chest, and bending down,
took the top of her head into his great jaws, cracking it with just
small pressure from his pointed teeth.