The Vigilantes (The Superiors) (7 page)

Draven sat still, but his mind raced. He could have run if his legs weren’t bound by the sleeping sack. He could kick out and tear it quickly enough. But if they had stakes… He didn’t doubt it. They began rolling him, and he lost whatever chance he had at escape. Now steel chains as well as blankets wound about him. Steel—the only material strong enough to hold him as these chains did.

“Please, uncover my face,” he said, not sure what to say but wanting to extend his time. If they meant to kill him, why did they not simply kill him? And if they didn’t want that, perhaps he could talk his way out of it. He’d talked his way through a trial once. If he could convince a panel of Enforcers, certainly he could convince two…humans.

“Don’t think so, buddy,” one of them said. “Then you’ll see our faces, and just in case you try and escape, we don’t want you knowing us.”

“I will know you.”

“You don’t know squat. You surely made it easy for us, wrapping up like a feedsack all ready to go. A feedsack. Get it? ‘Cause that’s all we are to you anyway, ain’t it?”

A bloodbag. That’s what some Superiors called them.

“I know you are a male of mature age, physically fit. Your companion is female, your sister, of similar age and condition. And you have two dogs with you.”

“Dang, girl. I knowed they could smell real good, but how’s he know what age we are?”

“I told you he’d been staking out the house.”

“No,” Draven said quickly. “I have not. I stumbled upon it last night, and I left in peace. I mean you no harm. I only wish to go on my way. Please let me go.”

“Nice try there. Don’t think so. We know you’ll just go running on back to
Princeton
and lead them bloodsuckers out here to kill us all.”

“No, I swear, I have never heard of this place you mention, and I will never mention you or your home and family if you let me go.”

“Maybe we oughta uncover his face. I mean, what if it can’t breathe?” the female asked.

“You’re a blasted fool sometimes. Course he can’t breathe—they don’t never breathe.”

Draven wondered what they meant to do with him, why they took him. Did they want something from him? He’d come so far, gone through so much, and now he’d never get his girl. He’d get staked by a human instead of getting to buy his human. If he had to die in such an undignified way, at least no one would know. But if he’d chosen a way to end, well, he wouldn’t have chosen this. And if he had no choice in the manner of death, at least he’d want to know the sapien who staked him. He’d never harmed these saps. He’d never even seen them. If a sap were to stake him to death, it ought to be Cali. She had reason enough to despise him.

The saps pulled the plastic tarp across the snow with Draven lying bound upon it. At times he bounced and rolled off the tarp, and the humans rolled him back on and continued. He tried to think of a way to free himself, something to say that would convince them. But he could think of nothing except that they must have drawn near the house by now, and that would likely bring an end to his thinking. Though he tried to talk himself out his mounting fear, when they stopped, it rose to cover every thought like the snow blanketing the world around them.

The tarp bounced over an edge of some sort, and the chains pressed through the layers of wrapping as his body moved from the cushion of snow onto a harder surface. The blindness inside the sleep sack, the way it dulled all his senses, and his inability to free himself from the chains drove a shard of panic through his core. When the two sapiens rolled him from the tarp, he thrashed against the restraints, all rational thought having momentarily vanished. He writhed on the floor, straining at the chains, until he heard the clank of metal and several clicks. Then a door closed, and he lay in the cold darkness of a room, alone once more.

He struggled for some time, and then lay still and waited for what came next.

Thoughts crowded into his mind as he lay waiting for what would likely prove the end of his life. He had lived for…he didn’t know how long. He’d survived twenty-three years before he evolved. Then he’d lived in Belarus for…fifty years, perhaps. And then in southern North America for perhaps that many, or more. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped counting. He hadn’t realized he had lived so long, grown so old. He still felt…young. Inexperienced, unseasoned. And now his short life would come to an end. And what had he ever done? Trained for a war that never happened, worked at jobs he did not enjoy, listened to bad music, read worse books, and had a few attachments and a dozen or so partners, none of whom had left a stamp on him or his life once they’d gone.

He could hardly call it living, what he’d done. Until he had met Byron, he’d done nothing but work for many years. The years when he’d done most living had come before the Second Evolution, when he’d been only a human. When he’d been granted potentially eternal life, he’d spent it working and stifling some hidden urge, perhaps his true nature. But what true nature? He couldn’t even answer the question himself. Once, his brother had told him he had a curse on his nature, the inability to be satisfied. Perhaps that was all that had kept him from leading a fulfilling life, a life like Byron’s.

Or perhaps he could never lead a life like Byron’s because he was not a man like Byron. He had no high position, no money. He didn’t belong to the Second Order, or have opportunities for the kinds of work they did, the kinds of work that paid a man well enough that he could travel, see and experience something new, do as he pleased. Instead, he had the sort of job that just let him keep his apartment and his car. True, he had taken an assignment with Byron and killed a man this year. But before that…nothing.

Yes, he’d cared for many animals in his different jobs, and he’d put some disreputable men out of business, and he’d returned some saps to their distraught owners. But nothing that counted. Nothing memorable. The idea of buying Cali was the first thing he’d been passionate about in decades. He wondered if she would remember his name. Although against Superior law, he had told her once. In case he died, he had wanted someone to know. But her remembering seemed highly unlikely, if not impossible. She had likely forgotten already. He didn’t think himself the sort who stood out in the memory of people, or even saps. And he’d done Cali as much harm as good.

She probably wished to forget him altogether. After all, he was only another
Superior
to come and bite her. Unless her arm got infected and she needed someone to suck the vileness out and save her life again, she had no reason to think of him. She’d remember him fine then. But he did not wish to think badly of her or anything else in his last moments. So he thought about the good parts of his life, all the small things he’d done for people over the years—the kindness and pity he’d shown the animals in his care; the saps he’d taken back to the Confinement instead of the blood bank, insisting that they’d gotten lost and hadn’t run; and the ones he’d returned to relieved and thankful owners.

He thought of the time he’d spent with Byron, playing games and talking. Of Myrna, the one memorable attachment he’d had, with her chaotic beauty and fierce principles, her wicked laugher, her marvelous legs and soft cloud of black hair, her reckless disregard for law in favor of moral right. He remembered the warm feeling he had when he spent time with
Cali
, how the life in her seemed too much for her to contain so a bit seeped into him. And he thought of the peace of being alone these last weeks, and working his body harder than it had worked in years. Inside his mummy cast a smile found his lips as he lay on the dank dirt floor of a cold building somewhere in the mountains.

He’d had a chance to live and he’d squandered it. But if his life ended now, if this was his end death, he’d made himself ready for it. He had to. Because it was ready for him.

Chapter 11

When the door to the trailer opened, the night outside had a weird, eerie quality. It wasn’t exactly dark, or light, but somewhere in the middle. The usual light didn’t filter in, but a strange new glow, unlike sunlight and unlike the usual scant lights that shone at night. Light bulbs gave softer light, starlight came from far away, moonlight was…kind of similar, but just different somehow.

Cali
watched, curious and a little apprehensive. She tried to see past her master, but from her position on the floor with Shelly, she couldn’t see much of anything.

“Levante,” her master said to his two homo-sapiens. Shelly and Cali both tried to obey simultaneously, and both ended up falling back to the floor, tangled in the blanket. Cali had a brief second of fear, knowing her master’s short temper with humans. But before she could look at him and get really scared, she heard a noise beside her, so unexpected that it took a moment to register. Shelly was laughing. No, giggling.

“Come on, girl, get up,” he said. “You go first.”

Cali untangled the blanket and stood, barely noticing Master’s irritated expression. She could really like a boy like Shelly. She hoped he would stay. No one around her had laughed in weeks—not that she had a whole lot of people around. But she knew Shelly was scared, and the fact that he could laugh anyway earned him some affection. She’d gotten just about lonely enough that she would have befriended a Superior if one had been willing to talk to her, keep her warm, and laugh with her.

She turned and held out a hand and helped Shelly up, and together they stepped out of the trailer. The eerie light shone everywhere, and even stranger, it seemed to come from the ground itself. And the ground it came from looked like nothing Cali had ever seen. It was the brightest white imaginable, and soft, and freezing cold. Her feet hurt the second they touched the ground, a penetrating kind of ache all the way into her bones. And when she lifted her foot from the weird earth, the cold wetness came up too, clinging to her bare foot and sliding off in dripping white globs.

“What is this?” she asked, staring all around her. She’d never seen anything so foreign. “Why is it so cold?”

“Girl, ain’t you ever seen snow before? Good-ness. You are in for a shocker.”

“Is it…always this cold?”

“Silence,” Master said, shooting them a look. Cali stood in the snow with Shelly, both of them shifting from one foot to the other, while their Superior took a few bags from his car. When he’d gotten all he needed from his car, he led them into the building. Although no stranger to pain, Cali found the ache of snow almost unbearable, the way it radiated from each foot and spread up her legs.

The floor inside the tall building was cold, but not like the ground outside. Cali didn’t know what their master planned, or if they’d make their new home there. Master didn’t tell them anything, but after he talked to another Superior, he motioned for them to follow him and handed them his bags. They carried his bags up two sets of stairs. When they reached the top of the second set, Master walked down a hallway and opened a door using a keypad on the wall next to the door. Cali had seen lots of similar keypads, and something about the familiar device in this strange place comforted her.

Master motioned for them to go inside and came in behind them. He hurried them to a small door inside the room and opened it the same way as the main door. The two humans stepped into the room, and their Superior master closed the door behind them.

Cali and Shelly looked around the small room. It was square, just big enough for Cali to lie down and stretch her arms above her head in each direction. Along the base of one wall, a mat lay rolled up and tied with a fraying cloth string. A sign marked the wall above the bedroll, but of course neither Cali nor Shelly could read it. Other than the mattress and the sign, there wasn’t much to the room—a small flushing floor toilet with a stack of tissues beside it in one corner, some marks on the walls from previous occupants, a small rectangular window roughly the size of a man’s forearm high up in the wall.

“Is this our new house?” Cali asked after looking around and taking in the details of the room.

“I sure hope not. Look at this place. There’s hardly enough room to breathe. You stand over there and don’t look, I have to use the pot.”

“Okay,” Cali said, turning away to give her companion privacy.

“I can’t go with you listening. Sing a little song or something.”

Cali laughed. “Didn’t you go in front of everyone where you came from?”

“Yeah, but that’s different. That’s everyone. You’re just one someone. Come on, sing something. I have to whuzz.”

Cali hummed a tune while Shelly did his business, and when he had finished, he told her to stop. “My goodness, girl, you could deafen a deaf man with that singing. I’ll have to help you out with your voice. Now, what are we gonna do about this room? Isn’t it just the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Well, maybe not the ugliest. But the plainest, for sure.”

“I know. How are we supposed to be of service when all we do is sit around in here all day? There’s nothing to do at all.”

“What did you do where you came from?”

“We had the garden, of course. And we made stuff, you know, clothes and stuff, and we did repairs when anything around Master’s house or buildings needed to be fixed. I was never much good at that,” Shelly said, laughing. “But I can cook and clean like you don’t even know.”

“Really? I’ve never cooked.”