The Nightlife: Las Vegas (The Nightlife Series) (26 page)

“Stay there, puta, if you know what’s good for you.”

He ran his hands over Aaron briskly then turned to Michelle
with a salacious smile.

“Now you, conchita. Spread your legs.”

Pedro’s hands lingered at Michelle’s breasts and crotch. 
Pedro finally nodded to JC indicating they were clean.

“Where’s the money?”  JC yelled as Pedro returned to his
side, sniffing his fingers with a smirk.

“Ana first, then the money.” 
Aaron yelled
back.

“No te pases la verga cabron!  
The
money or she dies!”  JC cocked the pistol against Ana’s temple.

Aaron grabbed a black leather briefcase from the front seat,
and walked towards them.

“Ala verga!  No!  Throw it to me!  You stay right there
puto!”  He turned to Pedro with smirk.  
“Somos Colombianos guey. 
No te juegas con nosotros!” 
We are Columbians, don’t play with us
.

Aaron caught Ana’s eyes.  She felt an impression. 
Drop
now
.  She dropped.

Aaron flung the suitcase hard and fast, nailing JC solidly
in the face.  Pedro and Isidro raised their assault rifles and opened fire on
nothing but air.  Aaron and Michelle were already gone, closing the distance
inhumanly fast.

As JC tried to draw down on him with his pistol, Aaron tore
out Isidro’s throat, knocked the rifle from his hands, and lashed out at JC. 
He smashed JC hard in the left side of the head.  He went straight down onto
the truck, head bouncing off the wheel well.

Michelle hit Pedro with an open-handed slash, tearing into
his belly and tossing him back three feet to land in the dirt.  He lost the
rifle struggling to keep his guts from spilling out.

As soon as the shooting began, Kramer screamed like a girl
and took off running the opposite direction, deeper into the desert.  Aaron hesitated
for a couple seconds, debating whether or not to give chase.  Michelle decided
it by taking off in pursuit of Kramer.  Ana rose up from the ground, rushing to
be reunited with her husband.  As he intercepted her, JC regained his senses
enough to take aim and fire off four shots at Aaron.

He dodged the first three shots, twisting out the way.  The
fourth shot hit him in the back shoulder through and through.  The bullet continuing
on through Anastasia’s left breast and heart, and exited, leaving a gaping
wound out her back.

Aaron dropped to the ground sheltering Ana.  He rolled and
leaped up to slice through JC’s torso from pubic bone to sternum, claws fully
extended, cutting his belly open wide.  JC’s intestines snaked out, coiling
about his feet.  Juan took two steps forward and tripped over his own
intestinal tract, falling to his hands and knees.  The remainder of his
internal organs poured out onto the dirt.  His hands worked frantically,
cramming his guts back inside, dirt, sand, mud, and all.

Aaron picked up his beautiful bride from the dirt and held
her cradled gently in his arms.  He bit her without feeding, solely for the
purpose of sharing his venom.  Ana gurgled, blood coming out her mouth as she
fought to breath.

“Aaron … I love you … hold me … so cold.”  Her body
temperature leaked out as she bled through his arms onto the desert floor.

He knew she wouldn’t last long.  He could smell death
encroaching.  He saw the acceptance of her fate in her mind and spirit.  She
was happy, awash in the wonderful euphoria of his bite and the joy of being together
with him one last time.  As he released his bite, his beautiful wife’s heart
beat stuttered.

“Michelle help me!  Can’t we save her?”
  He
cried out, speaking both aloud and straight into her mind with his plea.

Michelle, occupied in the hunt, sent him a psychic blast
directive,
“
Feed her your blood now!”

He brought Ana’s lips to his chest, where he bled profusely
from his own injuries.

“Drink my blood, Ana.  Please, baby, drink it!”

She gasped and choked for air, struggling to breath as he
rubbed her lips around on his chest.  He pulled her away so she could breath. 
She spoke in a whisper.

“I … love … you … my husband.”  With this exhale her heart
stopped completely.  He followed her mind as she experienced the sublime
serenity of letting go of this existence and all the struggle and pain that came
with it.  Her parting thoughts were of him, gratitude.  She was grateful for
the wonderful bliss, floating off in a tranquil sea of venom induced heaven.

“Oh god Anastasia, my wife, I love you.  Don’t leave me.  Please
don’t leave me.”  He held her, rocking her lifeless body, crying tears of blood
onto the desiccated Nevada soil.

* * * *

Michelle caught Kramer, slashing at his back with her razor
claws.  He went down hard, tumbling through the dirt screaming in pain.  The
skin on his left shoulder flapped, exposing muscle and bone.  He tried to get
up, but his ankle twisted in the melee.  He crawled on hands and knees for a
couple feet till she kicked him hard in the gut, flipping him up into the air
to land on his back.

She straddled his chest, shoving him flat.  Her jaw
unhinged, a gaping maw wide open in his face, as though she’d swallow his head
whole.  Her fully elongated fangs snapped shut with an audible ‘clap’ a scant
millimeter from his nose.

He knew true terror for the first time in his life.  She
read it in his aura as his bowels evacuated.  She smelled it, the scent
heightening her bloodlust, driving her instincts wild.  She bit down hard into
his neck, sucking massive gulps of his lifeblood.  Screaming and beating at her
head and shoulders, she brought him to orgasm after terrified orgasm.  In the
middle of his sexual ecstasy, she reached down between his legs, sliced through
his designer slacks and seized his convulsing ballsack.  His climax wetting her
hand, she squeezed and yanked hard and fast, pulling his scrotum and testicles
out by their bloody roots.  She tossed the useless flesh aside.  He didn’t need
it anymore.

Kramer screamed till he lost consciousness.

Aaron’s overwhelming grief slammed into her psyche,
distracting her from finishing the job.  She cried out in the night in anguish,
feeling all his pain and sorrow along with her own.  Tears of blood running
down her face in rivulets, she rejoined him to mourn Anastasia’s passing.  They
held their dead lover together, each expressing the grief of the two combined
via their wide open psychic link.

They stayed there for a time, wrapped in a cocoon of sorrow
and shared pain.  Seeing Aaron’s growing weakness, she focused on priorities.

“You must feed.  You’re too weak.  Your wound is serious.” 
She examined his shoulder.

He cried out in anguish.  “I won’t defile her body!”

She pointed to the Colombians.  Aaron noticed Juan Carlos
was still alive.  “He’ll do.”

Juan saw them coming for him and started crawling away
frantically.  Without his hands to hold them in, his guts fell out into the
dirt again, tangling at his knees as he crawled.

“Son demonios.  Vete detrás de mí Satanás.” 
They
are demons.  Get thee behind me Satan.

Aaron snatched him up off the ground by his hair to pull him
up face-to-face with one hand.  “You owe me your life for hers.  You can never
bleed enough.  There is not blood enough in this world to make up for her life.”

He tore out JC’s throat with his teeth and drained his body
of every last ounce of blood.  Isidro had died earlier from his injuries.  Pedro
survived just long enough to die in both Aaron and Michelle’s arms as they fed
from either side of his neck––
exsanguination
––cardiac arrest from high
volume blood loss.

She led Aaron back out into the desert to find Kramer.  Surprisingly,
the man had survived, lying in the blood-soaked dirt in obvious agony.  “Please
kill me, I can’t take it anymore.  I don’t want to live like this.  Please.”  His
voice broke with the plea.

She shook her head.  “No.  He dies slowly.”

She grabbed Aaron’s hand and led him away.

* * * *

Chapter 26

Mike Jamison watched Aaron and Michelle drive way from
Demarco’s shortly after Kramer and the other three Hispanic men left with the
black-haired beauty.  He recognized her from the video security footage Kramer
had shown him earlier in the day.

He waited for a few minutes and then followed in the
direction they traveled.  He didn’t need to follow directly.  He had placed a
GPS tracker under the Tahoe earlier.  He drove down highway 15 till he reached
the dirt road turnoff.  He parked a mile to the north.  With his smartphone
tracking app, he pinpointed their location off in the desert and took off
hiking with his night-vision goggles.  Reaching a nearby rise, he heard the
telltale rat-a-tat-tat of assault rifle fire. 
Sounds like AK-47’s.
  He
knew the sound well.  A common weapon all across the Middle East, any militant
group on a tight budget went for the AK-47.  The Mexican mafias relied on it so
heavily they had a nickname for it,
cuernos de chivo
, horns of the
devil.

He took position atop the hill and sighted in on the action
with the goggles.  He stayed to watch it all, the murder, the cannibalistic
feeding ritual, and even the funeral pyre when they burned the black-haired
girl’s body.  Obviously her death had meant something more to them than the
others.

The things he saw chilled him to the bone.  As they returned
to Vegas in the Black Tahoe, he raced down the hill back to his car.  Badly
shaken, he wanted to keep a healthy distance.  He felt like an interloper
slinking around amidst some kind of ritualistic sacrifice.  He had no desire to
share the fate of the others.

He sat in his car, drinking a warm soda, trying to calm his
nerves as he watched their GPS location settle on the La Quinta Inn off Highway
15.

* * * *

Mike awoke at 11:00 a.m., showered quick, and raced out the
door with coffee and toast in hand.  He drove straight back to Demarco’s house
and parked down the block.  He casually strolled right up to Demarco’s house
and jumped the fence into the back yard.  He was about ninety nine percent
certain no one was home, at least not alive, considering the events he
witnessed last night.  He stood there for a moment looking at the busted glass
of the back door and telltale bloodstains on the patio.  Looking up he noted
the patio security camera neatly disguised within the motion detector spotlight
lamps.  He had installed that very same model in several homes.  Few people
could tell it was a closed circuit wireless security cam by looking at it.

Inside, he found all the grisly evidence he suspected he
might find.  He spent an entire hour looking for what he came for.  His
painstakingly thorough search paid off.  He found it in the master bedroom, a
false wall in the back of the walk-in closet.  A small room about six ft.
square housed the closed circuit wireless cameras recorded onto a hot-swap hard
drive.  A fairly state-of-the-art system several years ago. 
Probably installed
when the house was built
.  He pulled the hard drive out by the handle,
wrapped it in a nearby Rolling Stone magazine and walked out the way he had come. 
I should write Rolling Stone a letter thanking them for all that useless
print
.

He considered calling 911 right then, but the cops would get
in the middle of the flow of information, making it difficult to find the truth
of the matter.  He very much wanted to know the truth on the hard-drive.  Last
night’s show, while shocking, hadn’t been all that enlightening.  The mutilated
bloated corpses in the garage had one hell of a tale to tell, a story he wanted
to watch as it unfolded on video.

He arrived at his home-office at 1:30 p.m. and hooked the
hard drive to his laptop.

“This occasion calls for a little something special.”

He cracked open a bottle of fifteen year Balvenie scotch, a
birthday gift from his brother-in-law in Seattle.  He’d been saving it for the
right moment.  He poured a liberal dash into a glass on the rocks and sipped
the soothing spirit, savoring its rich flavor as he settled in to watch the
video footage that would forever change his life.

* * * *

Three hours later Mike sat in the same chair staring at the
LCD screen of his laptop.  The vivid black and white image frozen in place
could have been something from a gruesome horror film.  There stood Aaron in
all his magnificent fury, Alexander Demarco’s heart in hand.  Aaron’s jaw had
opened inhumanly wide, long evil-looking fangs bared, preparing to chomp down
on the juicy meal.

Mike’s entire world had been turned upside down in the last
twenty four hours.  He kept returning to the events on the hotel security tape
and Demarco’s hidden cameras, culminating with the episode out in the desert
night.  An endless loop in his mind’s eye, playing over and over again.  No
matter how many times he analyzed these events, he couldn’t discount the
supernatural aspects of it.  There was no denying what he’d seen.

He forced himself to face the facts.  Aaron and Michelle were
not human.  The rewriting of fundamental paradigms and beliefs was not an
enjoyable process.  His head ached with the circular logic that folded back in
on itself, the inescapable truth.  The scotch helped keep his throbbing temples
down to a dull roar.

They’re not human.  They look human and sometimes act
human, but they are not.  So what the fuck are they?

He eventually came to the conclusion that was most logical
and yet still sounded insane when he said it aloud, “They’re vampires.  Real
fucking vampires.”

This being said, the question became what should he do?