The Vigilantes (The Superiors) (15 page)

“How you feeling?” she asked.

“I’ve been better. Are you well tonight?” he asked.

“Well, yeah. I’m fine. But I ain’t supposed to be out here yet, so I can’t turn on the light. I’ll just be a minute.”

“And what is my sentence? In what manner will I face execution?”

“Your…well, they ain’t gonna be one.”

The bloodsucker didn’t answer for a minute. “I imagine hope would be unwise on my part.”

“What’s that mean?” Sissy whispered.

“It means that your news only sounds promising,” the man said. “It means…what you’re planning is likely worse.”

“They wanna experiment and find what’ll kill you fastest.”

“I can tell you, if you’d like to know. Simply put a stake in my heart, or my mouth, and push it until it comes out the other side.” He looked at her, his eyelid raising all the way this time so she could see a little glimmer of light shining in the dark pools of his eyes. “Please, Sally.”

“I can’t. And if you keep asking, I ain’t gonna talk to you no more. I’ll tell you what they’re gonna do first, and that is put you out in the sun first thing tomorrow and see if you burn like a torch.”

The man made a strange sound, and it took Sally a second to realize he’d made an attempt at laughter. Or a chuckle, anyway. It sounded warm, like his voice. It almost made Sally smile, but she bit it off even though it was dark and weren’t no one going to see her.

“Why’s that funny?” she asked.

“I’m afraid your party will be in for a disappointment.”

“You don’t burn in the sun?” Sissy asked. “What’ll happen?”

“What happens when you stay out in the sun too long? I’ll sunburn, that is all.”

This time Sally laughed, and then Sissy, too, and the man laughed softly from inside his cage.

“Thank you for telling me, Sally. Sissy. You should get back. I wouldn’t want you getting caught talking to me.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Sally stood for a moment, wanting to say something but not sure what. “Reckon I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, humans.”

Sally and Sissy left the shed and walked back to the house as quietly as they could. “That man talks funny,” Sissy said. “But he’s real polite.”

“Yeah, he is that,” Sally said. “Now you best not tell anyone you talked to him or we’ll both get our butts whupped. And then I’ll whup yours again. Got that?”

Just then Larry and Tom came in, both of them laughing. “We’re gonna watch that bastard fry in the sun like jerky,” Larry said, shrugging off his coat. “I can’t wait.”

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens,” Sally said. She looked at Sissy and winked, and the little girl smiled at her. “Ain’t no way to know what sun does to them until we try it.”

Chapter 24

Draven’s body began to heal a bit each night, a painfully slow process. Wounds from wood took some time to heal. His body hurt in ways he never imagined possible, and he remained weak and hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Internal injuries healed more slowly than his skin, although to the humans his body looked as if it had repaired itself when his skin closed. This only gave them a greater desire to continue inflicting pain upon him.

Attempting to inform the one who talked to him, and some of those who didn’t, had proved useless. They didn’t want to hear that what they did would not kill him. They thought Superiors deceitful, and claimed he lied about being alone on his journey. But he knew by the glittering determination in their eyes that they got some sick enjoyment from coming up with new tortures. The sunburn hadn’t been so bad. The rest were much worse.

They’d taken him out as Sally had told him they would, but after five or ten minutes of watching him squeeze his eyes closed, they had brought him back to the steel cage. He did not tell them that if they had kept him in the sun longer, he would have sustained a more severe injury from the exposure. They expected something instant and spectacular. They didn’t want to stand about for an hour to watch the intensity of his sunburn grow. After that failure, they had taken him back and left him, and he’d slept intermittently, as he had since the first night.

Lack of food left him weak and caused his body to heal more slowly, and for recovery, he needed sleep almost as badly as food. Since he had many opportunities for sleep, he took them when he could. He imagined the humans would eventually deny him sleep as a new means of torture, so he tried to sleep often while he retained that privilege.

Sometimes Sally sat in the chair and read, other times she talked and knitted. Draven didn’t know if she was speaking to him, as sometimes he slept and woke again to find her still talking like she had never ceased. One night when he stirred, she stopped rocking and looked at him.

“My finger hurts real bad where you bit it,” she said. “I wish you wouldn’t’ve done that.”

“As do I,” Draven said. “I was out of my mind.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said, and started knitting again. “It hurts real bad to knit. The needle hits it just so, where it hurts. Did you put something in there?”

“No.”

“I got these two little lump thingies where you bit me.”

“Yes. I told you to let me heal them.”

“You really meant that?”

“Yes.”

“Well dang me or hang me. I sure as shoot thought you was gonna bite me again.”

“No. If a
Superior
bites you, and doesn’t seal off the wound, your body protects you by making a small bead around the trace of anticoagulant. Otherwise, it would put poison in your bloodstream.”

“For real?”

“Yes. Closing the bites prevents that from happening. If you had allowed me to heal the marks, I could have sucked the trace out and sealed your skin. Your kind would not even notice a scar.”

“Geez Louise. Why didn’t you explain all that to me when you bit me?”

“I had a stake in my throat. It was difficult to speak.”

Sally stopped rocking and looked at him. “I think you made a joke.”

“Quite an amusing one.” Although Draven never moved his body when he spoke to Sally, his eyes settled on her face or what she held in her lap that night.

“So you can’t do nothing for me now? I ain’t complaining, but just asking.”

“I could…but it would hurt you.”

“I ain’t scared of pain. I thought being bit would hurt, and it wasn’t nothing. Course you didn’t get me good, did you?”

“It never hurts much. Your people exaggerate their tales greatly.”

“Yeah, I’ll say. That’s really all there is to getting your blood sucked?”

“I did not draw. I only punctured the skin. Your finger is not an ideal location. If I drew from you…it would last a bit longer. It would hurt a bit more.”

“Huh. So you gonna fix these here lumps in my finger?”

“I fear I cannot.”

“Ah, what? Now you’re gonna try to bargain with me? That’s it, ain’t it? You think ‘cause I talk to you that I’m your best bet, and I’m gonna let you out.”

“I don’t imagine you will.”

“Then what you want? I can’t kill you, neither.”

“I asked nothing of you.”

“So what’s the problem? You need some kind of tool for it? ‘Cause I bet I can get it.”

“No. I would have to bite you again, and I cannot…I would not want to stop. I’ve not eaten, and I’ve lost much blood. It is quite difficult to control myself when your people touch me and come close to me.”

“Yeah, they’re gonna see if you can starve to death.”

Draven did not speak. He wondered when they would succeed in killing him. In time, they would find an effective means of killing a Superior. Something more spectacular than slowly starving him to death. They liked theatrics, great assemblies. He’d read about this habit in humans, how in the past they had done this sort of thing—public executions as warnings. But his did not serve as a warning, because his people would not be present to witness. Bloodthirsty mobs had lynched men long ago, dragged them through the streets, stretched them to death, impaled them, pulled them limb from limb. People had gathered and cheered at public hangings, burned herbalists in front of entire towns, and fed each other to hungry animals. The practice of barbaric methods of torture was nothing so new, not to the human race. They had an endless capacity for vengeance and bloodshed.

Superiors had evolved past this, and they kept homo-sapiens confined so this type of mob violence didn’t occur. But it seemed that when they lived on their own, they indulged in their primitive bloodlusts. Draven wondered about the only human he knew somewhat personally. He wondered if anything could induce Cali to revert to this kind of behavior. He had thought her intelligent, civilized. If she’d been part of this society of vigilantes, would she have staked him? Or would she have hung back, like Sally?

“What you thinking ‘bout?” Sally asked, startling him from his thoughts.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“What you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know what you’s thinking about?”

“A girl.”

Sally laughed. “For real? Dang. Just when I think you’re so different from us, you go and say something like that. This the girl you had with you before we done found you?”

“I did not yet have her. I was on my way to retrieve her.”

“What’s she like?”

“Perhaps one night I will tell you.”

“Hey, I got all night. Sometimes I get tired of my own voice. ‘Sides, I’m a lady. I like romance.”

“You would like her. She’s very kind.”

“You trying to get something out of me again?”

“Would you give it to me?”

“What you want?”

“I’m quite cold.”

“What? I thought you was cold blooded.”

“I am also nearly naked, and it is winter, and if my body freezes, it may break if someone moves me.”

“Ugh, that’s disgusting. You best not tell anyone else, or they’ll do it just to see if you can live through it.” Sally came around the front of the cell and slid back the door. The cage was rectangular, a few meters one way and about one and a half the other. Draven could have lain flat if not for the chain that held him to the bars so he could only sit. “I reckon you can use my coat til I leave,” Sally said. “This blanket I’m knitting covers my legs, anyway.”

“Don’t come closer,” Draven said quickly when she drew near enough that he could reach her. She held out the jacket like she would wrap it around him, but when he spoke, she stopped. “Unless…?”

“You think I’m that nice? I don’t think so.” She threw the jacket at him, and he maneuvered his stiff arms into it while Sally returned to her rocking chair and resettled herself. The jacket held the warmth of her body, a blessing, but it smelled of her, a curse. It made him ravenous.

“If I could heal your finger, would you bring me food so I can control myself?”

Sally scoffed and set down her knitting. She looked at him a long time. “You think that’s gonna work?”

“It’s your hand.”

“You’re a…butthead. I’d ruin their plan to starve you to death. Can you even starve to death?”

“No.”

“’Cause y’all live forever, right?”

“Theoretically.”

“What if you was here for like, a hundred years?”

“I’d be quite weak and in pain for some time, and then I’d go into a sort of…dormancy.”

“So how would you know if a person was there if you was sleeping?”

“Our bodies conserve energy by shutting down, but once food comes within reach, we wake.”

“Would you be too weak to eat if some food come along?”

“I’d be quite quick, and strong for long enough to get what I needed.”

“How fast?”

“Fast enough to catch whatever came close to me.”

“Dang.”

“Will you bring me food, then?”

“Don’t you ever think about nothing else? Don’t seem very ‘evolved’ to me.”

“If you had not eaten for a month, would you dwell on the meaning of eternity?”

“I ain’t never thought about that nohow, but I get what you’re saying. What you want me to bring you? I can’t exactly fix you a plate. You got a kind of restricted diet.”

Draven smiled. “I had food, in the backpacks. Packets of dried sap.”

“Dried blood? That’s disgusting.”

“Quite.”

Sally laughed. “Well, at least you admit it. Hey, how long you been a bloodsucker anyway?”

“I don’t recall the exact number of years. Perhaps a hundred, a bit more or less. I could count, but it would take a bit of time to recall every year.”

“Holy Shepherd of Judah. You’re the oldest person I ever met.”

“Very likely.”

“So how much of this stuff you need til you won’t bite me?”

“As much as you can find. I had quite a bit. Save it for me, in case they keep me alive much longer. Please, Sally.”

“Alright, alright. But I don’t feel good about it, okay?”