Immortal Coil: A Novel (Immortal Trilogy Book 1) (12 page)

Randal came across a bum sprawled out on the dirty sidewalk, with empty soda cans and discarded fast food wrappers lying all around him like strange trophies. In one grimy hand he held a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Randal turned the hand over and, ignoring the grit, attempted to bite into the soft flesh of the man’s dirty wrist. Fluid poured out of the bottle, which woke the man.

“Hey,” the bum cried and pushed Randal away. “This is my Hazlitt. Go find your own!”

Randal crawled away from the bum. The hunger throbbed in his head like poison. He continued his search for relief from the powerful thirst, but no one seemed to be offering up their blood to him. After moving down several streets that held nothing but empty cars, Randal was finally rewarded with the bright lights of a shopping center, and he headed in the direction of the store full of hope, full of promise, full of people who were full of blood.

Maggie screamed as she came out of the vision. After recovering from her fugue state, she blurted orders. “David, drive. I’ll explain as we go, but we have to go now. Drive!”

David didn’t hesitate. He jumped into the driver’s seat and started the Zephyr, pulled out onto the road and headed in the direction Maggie directed him. Maggie led him through the streets, using her intuition to guide them. When he was directed to a highway, David opened up the throttle and drove with reckless abandon. She pointed at the twenty-four-hour superstore on the left and he pulled into the parking lot. The three of them jumped out and ran toward the entrance with Maggie in the lead. They passed through the sliding automatic glass doors, past the row of checkout lines, and stopped at the back of the store where the meat section was located. A group of people had gathered there, gaping at the boy Maggie had seen in her vision.

Antony was the first to react. He raced past the onlookers to the boy standing on top of the packages of raw steak in the meat cooler. The red-eyed boy was ripping into the packages of raw meat and drinking the blood pooling in the plastic. The beef blood was not satisfying the hunger however, which added to the wild boy’s frustration.

Antony reached out and the boy growled. He gripped the boy firmly by the arm. The boy bit down into the hand holding his arm, but his flat teeth were no match for Antony’s vampiric flesh.

“You’re gonna need a rabies shot, mister,” said a male voice in the crowd.

Antony reached out with his other hand and pulled the hemp rope up and over the boy’s head. He tossed the rope aside and lifted the boy into his arms. As the boy bit at the hand holding him, Antony carried him out of the store and back to the Zephyr. Inside the Zephyr and away from the eyes of onlookers, Antony had a better time controlling the wild boy. He pulled his gnawed palm out of the boy’s mouth and held the squirming boy with his gnashing teeth out at arm’s length until the need to thrash and fight subsided. The boy then lay still and lifeless, a grimy form sleeping soundly on the pristinely white sofa cushions.

Antony reached for the knife in its sheath on his belt.

“No.” Maggie spoke in a whisper. “Please, you can’t do that while he sleeps. We must give him a chance.”

“We have to get him blood then, if we are not going to euthanize.” Antony reluctantly replaced the knife back in the sheath.

They returned home and Antony carried the unconscious vampire boy to the basement. There were three men locked away in the panic room, which had been Antony’s nightly feeding regimen. He could hunt later. Antony opened the panic room and chose the nearest, wide-eyed and terrified form to the door. He pulled the squirming man—a serial rapist and a murderer—into the open area of the basement. The man’s hands and feet were securely bound and there was no danger of the man escaping.

Antony stimulated the unconscious vampire by opening a wound in the prey’s throat. Blood pumped out and at the scent, the vampire boy’s red-tinged eyes popped open. He saw Maggie first and flew at her with supersonic speed. Maggie cried out, and her hands flew up, but even before the sound left her lips, Antony had caught the boy and pulled him back to the bound man.

“No.” Antony forced the boy to look at him as he spoke. “You must not harm anyone in this house unless they are dedicated to feeding us. You may feed on this man here.” Antony forced the boy to look down at the prey. The boy salivated like a wild dog and moved closer to the wild-eyed man.

“Look into his eyes; can you see his deeds? This is how we choose our prey. They are the vile humans, the killers and rapists.”

The wild boy looked at Antony and then at the fearful man. The boy peered eye to eye with the prey. The boy could not see what he was looking for, not at first. But eventually it grew inside his head, and he saw the horrendous crimes the man had committed.

The boy was cautious but the hunger was too strong to be denied any longer. Antony opened the man’s throat with his own teeth and the boy latched onto the wound instantly. The boy sucked much too quickly at first, choking on the blood, and started over. This time he drank without difficulty. The boy finished the man off and looked around for more. Antony led the wild boy to the panic room and set him loose on the others stored there. The boy growled and, using his bare, flat teeth, tore open the throat of the first man in line. Antony perceived that more blood was lost on the floor than was taken in by the vampire boy. When the boy finished with the third victim, he curled up in a corner. When Antony approached, the wild boy kicked and squirmed, struggling to get away from him. Antony backed off. He pulled the corpses out of the room. As he closed the door, locking the boy inside, he heard the slurping sound of the boy licking blood off the floor.

The boy had gone out the window—right out the window—and into the big bad world. His roped boy was out there somewhere. In his hands he had another boy. During his flight back to the lair, he had crushed the boy’s chest, effectively stopping the boy’s heart. As he stared down at the still, limp form, he realized his error.

He dropped the dead boy on the floor and went out in search of his lost roped boy. He scoured the streets, and abandoned buildings, but he did not find his little boy lost. He returned to his lair, dejected and irate. How had he been so stupid? And to make matters worse, he had killed the boy who could have been his pet’s replacement. He growled.

Then another thought occurred to him: could he make a new pet from this dead boy? Would drinking from a corpse, giving it the gift, revive it? He had never drunk from a corpse, but what could it hurt to try? And what would the blood of a corpse do to him? He decided to try. Anticipation raced through him as he leaned over the dead boy and bit into his neck. The blood was thick, clotted and cold. He spat the first two attempts onto the floor. Dead blood was not to his liking, but this wasn’t about feeding. He was making history here.

So he tried again. He had to suck hard, really hard, to make anything come out. He ripped the neck open wider to get the remaining blood to come out. The blood was foul, and he had to stop several times to keep from gagging. He smacked his lips and grimaced at the fullness. He pumped the chest in order to get the coagulating blood to flow out of the wound. He squeezed on the boy to get all the blood from the body.

He bit into the boy at each wrist and squeezed the blood down from the shoulder. Then he bit into the inner thighs and drained legs. When he was sure he had gotten all the blood he possibly could, he tossed the corpse over his shoulder and carried it into the basement.

His lair was a large, four story mansion in the Pocono Mountains at the end of a dirt road high atop a hillside looking down on the small valley town of Bear Creek Village to the east, and to the west was a scenic view of the Lackawanna State forest. He only saw it at night, however, and he wasn’t that impressed. He didn’t care about the view. He merely wanted it for its seclusion. He treasured his privacy. And the occasional trespassing hooligan would soon learn the error of their ways when he caught them.

He married the old bitch who owned the land, drank from her and brought her back. When he had sufficiently staked his claim to her money and her land, he destroyed her. He never wanted her companionship, only her property.

The sun was coming up soon. He carried his corpse boy gently in his arms into the cool darkness of the coffin. He closed the lid and slept.

The following night when he rose, the boy did not. Feeling anger and disappointment, he left the corpse where it lay and went out to hunt.

He found a nice little family of three and attacked, releasing all his fury and hate on the woman and her two sons. The boys were too old and not to his liking, so he didn’t consider making either of them a new pet.

He returned to his lair and slept, waking the second evening to discover the boy still had not.

On the fourth night sleeping in the coffin with the corpse, and having no faith that his new pet would rise with him, he decided he would have to destroy the corpse.

But this night the boy opened his eyes. His flesh was pale, gray and moldering. The skin puckered around the mouth and eyes. The eyes were milky orbs that held no color or irises. The fingernails were yellowed and chipped.

The boy would need food, he surmised; and when he went out and took his family that night, he brought back a street walker for his newest pet.

But the boy would not drink, could not. Even when he had slit the screaming, mad-eyed woman’s throat and held the wound to his pet, the boy would not drink.

He decided his latest pet was no good. A rotting corpse boy was not a good pet, after all; so on the morning of the boy’s third day as a living corpse, he decided to put the boy out in the sunlight. He chained the boy to a tree in the back yard and retired to the coffin.

The following night he awoke and strode out to the tree where he expected to find a putrefying mess. Instead, he found that the boy was still there. The boy was intact and, although his rotting flesh had been visited by flies and maggots crawled through the skin in several places, he seemed unharmed.

He unchained the boy from the tree and pulled him back into the house. He released the chain around the boy’s neck, and he just stood there. He seemed simple, stupid. The boy rubbed absently at the flesh on his cheek when a fly landed there. As he rubbed, a glob of flesh and maggots peeled away, but moments later new, albeit rotten, flesh regrew.

He thought:
I have a rotten corpse boy pet that does not eat but can still regenerate somehow
.
And he supposed he would have to get used to the smell.

“You will call me Dark Father,” the man said to his new pet. He doubted the simpleton even understood him, and the boy didn’t talk, so he supposed his pet wouldn’t be calling him anything.

The boy was obedient and rarely moved unless directed to do so. The boy looked around but didn’t seem to have much interest in what he saw. Only once did the boy react to his surroundings with any kind of sentience. The boy walked past a mirror, turned and looked at his own reflection. The boy reached out and touched the face in the mirror. As he pulled his hand away from the glass, he brought the withered hand back to touch his face, and studied it as if looking at ants in an exhibit. Next, the corpse boy examined his ripped and rotting clothes. He brushed a clump of dirt off his pants, straightened a tie that wasn’t there, and then dropped his hands and continued on his way as if nothing he saw held any interest for him. The Dark Father watched all this transpire and wondered what it meant. His curiosity was short lived, however.

He slept with the boy even though his corpse boy did not need sleep. He just wanted his boy near him.

No rope was required for this boy.

The corpse boy earned a lot of freedom from the man. He was allowed the run of the property, which covered a ten-acre patch of land. As long as the corpse boy was in the house when the Dark Father slept, he no longer needed to be kept in the coffin during the night.

The corpse boy occupied his time catching flies, tearing off their wings and eating them. He also picked maggots and beetles off his skin and ate those. The corpse boy craved these bugs as a vampire craved blood, and it was these bugs that gave his rotten skin the ability to regenerate. He did not tell Dark Father of this discovery, and when the man saw what the boy was doing to the insects, he told him to stop. When the boy refused to stop eating the insects, the Dark Father used a machete to cut off the boy’s hands. The hands dropped to the floor and burst into dust like the ashes flicked off the end of a cigarette.

The following night, the Dark Father woke to learn that the corpse boy’s hands had regenerated. Not only had the rotting flesh returned, but also the bone and muscle. The vampire was intrigued; he couldn’t do this. If his hands were cut off they were gone. He could not regenerate severed limbs. Why was this simple creature able to completely regenerate?

“I wonder what else you will grow back,” he said and cut off the boy’s legs.

The corpse boy sat in the corner looking at the two piles of ashes that had been his legs and learned he didn’t have to actually eat the insects. He still caught and ate flies, spiders and other bugs that passed by him, but he noticed the maggots and beetles boring through his body were being absorbed by his rotting skin. He could forgo eating bugs, and maybe then his evil master would stop cutting off his body parts.

The Dark Father woke to learn the boy’s legs had grown back.

Now the Dark Father was angry. He didn’t have this ability, so why could this festering pile of puss do this regeneration thing? In a fit of anger, The Dark Father decapitated his corpse boy. He looked down at what he had done in horror. The head turned to ash, but the body was still intact. He placed it on the work bench. He would decide what to do with the rotting flesh another night. He hunted and slaughtered a new family with an anger and fervor that did not abate when he was finished. He didn’t have time to kill any more that night, although he wanted to. He decapitated the three members of his latest family and returned to the mansion grumpy and unfulfilled. As he returned to the coffin, he stared at the headless corpse on the workbench. He missed his pet and hated his own impulsiveness.

But to his surprise, he woke the next night to learn the head had grown back.

“I can’t seem to destroy you, my precious little thing,” The Dark Father said. He resolved to do one last experiment. On the workbench where the corpse boy sat, the Dark Father decapitated the boy with his machete. He then severed the arms and legs, and cut the torso in half. With the boy’s body parts in hand the Dark Father dropped the corpse into the bonfire he had built in the back yard. He burned everything. He hunted bums and street walkers, and retired to his coffin confident that the corpse boy was no more.
A pity
, he thought.
He is gone too soon from me.

What the Dark Father didn’t know was as long as a single cell survived, the corpse boy could regenerate. On the table where the Dark Father had performed his evisceration, a single scrap of rotten flesh twitched. The bit of flesh expanded and pulsed. Soon the lump of flesh grew from the size of a dime to the size of a quarter, then to the size of an orange. Within hours the corpse boy was back in full. He climbed off the table, picked up the machete and hid it in the garage. This new corpse boy was aware at a molecular level, and could retrieve all the memories of what the Dark Father had done to him. When the Father woke, he was stunned and excited to see that the corpse boy was sitting in the corner of the basement staring at him.

The corpse boy tossed a spider into his mouth like a kernel of popcorn.