A Shade of Vampire 28: A Touch of Truth (8 page)

“
A
re
we still honestly going to keep heading down to the ground?” Maura queried disbelievingly. “We’re only, like, halfway down the building and look what we’ve just met with.”

Orlando heaved a sigh. And I felt guilty. It was only because of me that we were forced to head downstairs. The IBSI weren’t a big threat to the siblings, or so they believed.

“Well,” I said, wetting my lower lip. “Maybe we could just wait here a while until the chopper’s gone out of sight.”

Orlando exhaled in impatience. He shifted on his feet, looking left and right along the corridor we had emerged in after leaving the Bloodless-soaked stairwell.

“All right. We’ll hang around for a bit.”

We moved back up the building cautiously, hoping we wouldn’t come across more Bloodless. We needed to climb fairly high up so that we could get a good view of the sky without actually being on the roof. We found a small janitor’s room on the top floor that had a skylight. Orlando pushed a desk that lined one of the walls until it was directly beneath the glass. Being the tallest, he climbed on top of it and gazed out.

Maura and I waited tensely as he looked around.

“Nope,” he said. “There’s still one hovering near this area… Oh, wait, and there’s another one, too.”

Crap
. I balled my sweating hands. Were they really going to go away anytime soon?
I have to get out of this city.
How long would it be before they started sweeping the buildings looking for me? Would they really go that far? Suddenly, staying put didn’t seem like a good idea at all.

“Okay, maybe we should just keep moving,” Orlando said. He returned to the floor and looked from me to his sister, who was scowling. “We got an unlucky start,” he said. “But I don’t think waiting is going to make any difference. For all we know, things could just get worse.”

Maura pursed her lips, making no attempt to hide her disdain, but said nothing.

So we left the janitor’s room. Thankfully, we didn’t come across any more Bloodless on our way down to the ground floor. I hoped we’d had our share of them for at least the next hour. My nerves were still quivering from the monsters.

We moved to the entrance of the building and stepped out into the wet street. Thankfully it appeared to be empty.

“So now which way?” I asked in a whisper.

“The river,” Orlando replied beneath his breath. “Traveling along the river is the best way to remain safe from Bloodless because they can’t stand whatever it’s been contaminated with.”

The river.
“That runs so close to IBSI’s headquarters though,” I murmured.

“Part of it does,” Orlando said, “but that part isn’t where we keep our raft. So we won’t need to pass their base.”

Orlando took a right turn. Maura and I quickly followed behind him as he began heading down the street. All three of us gazed around, alert like animals for the presence of our numerous predators.

The slicing of helicopter blades in the sky was disconcertingly loud. The hunters were still close. We tried to keep out of view as much as we could, sticking close to the buildings and moving beneath ledges.

“How much longer until the river?” I couldn’t help but ask. It felt like we had been traveling for about an hour, though I doubted it had been more than ten minutes.

“We’re not far. Another five minutes or so,” Orlando replied.

“Oh, no,” Maura hissed, pointing up the street. “Bloodless.”

Indeed there were. I spotted a whole crowd of them, huddled in a circle and apparently piling on top of something. A meal, I assumed.

“We’ll have to take a detour now,” Orlando said, frustrated.

We tried to back away unnoticed, but that was a futile attempt. Some of the creatures had already noticed us. They tore away from whatever they were ravaging up the road and began loping toward us. I didn’t need to use my flames this time, though. Orlando was prepared enough. He sent the blade-wheel hurtling toward them, and it spliced them before they could reach within twelve feet of us.

We hurried onward before more Bloodless could decide to have a go at us. We slipped down a narrow, winding alleyway and reappeared on the other side, onto another wide street. This one clearly had once been posh. It was lined with expensive designer shops and restaurants with prestigious names. There was also an old hotel whose windows were smashed in, its rotating doorway mangled.

We raced to the end of this road and onto the road parallel to it. Here, to my relief, I spotted water. A dark, murky river. A barrier had been erected, lining the river’s edge. The three of us climbed over it and touched down in squelching mud.

Orlando pointed toward a wide, steel bridge, a little further up. “We left our raft just beneath that,” he explained.

We fought our way through the muddy, narrow bank until we reached the shelter of the bridge. As I eyed the contraption that was leaning against the bridge’s wall, I could very well see why Orlando had said that it would be generous to call it a boat. It was simply a raft, constructed from logs of wood and tied together with rope. It looked shaky and precarious. I felt nervous at the idea of riding on that, especially since the river was rough in this torrential weather. But at least this time, even if I fell in, my hands would not be tied and I would be able to swim.

The siblings tugged on the raft, placing it over the water, before the three of us climbed onto it. Orlando reached for a tall stick that had lain beside the raft on the bank. Dipping half of it into the water, he pushed us away from the edge and toward the center of the river. The current soon picked us up and began washing us away.

“So,” I said tensely, my voice echoing as we passed beneath the bridge, “is the IBSI’s base behind us?”

“Yes,” Maura replied. “Close behind us.”

“This river would lead us to Lake Michigan,” Orlando informed me, “if a barrier had not been erected. As I said, it’s impossible to pass through it by waterway, so once we get nearer, we’re going to have to head back to the bank and travel the rest of the way on foot… somehow. But this is the safest place to be for now. We’re away from the Bloodless, and it will be harder for gangs to give us trouble. Assuming we don’t bump into them on the river itself.”

After reaching the other end of the bridge and gliding out into the open, I really wished that bridge had been wider. This river, although less so than the roofs of the buildings, was still uncomfortably exposed to the sky. We were moving along swiftly but still, it would not be very difficult for hunters to spot us.

It seemed that Orlando was sharing my thoughts as we both glanced up at a chopper circling a cluster of skyscrapers in the distance. For now, it was apparently preoccupied and there weren’t any other aircrafts around that we could spot. We had to hope that we could slip by inconspicuously, and the hunters in the chopper would remain distracted by whatever it was they were doing—or watching—over there.

* * *

I
was actually surprised
by the steadiness of the raft, how it supported all of our weight. But that was the best thing I could say about it. It was wet—horribly wet. The river water washed over the logs, drenching my feet and making me feel even colder. At least we’d packed waterproof overalls, which saved us from getting completely soaked to the bone by the rain pounding down over our heads.

The journey was also slower than I would’ve liked it to be. We got stuck occasionally, and other times the current was too strong and we had to pause by the edge for a while before continuing.

I could not say how many miles we had traveled, but we’d made a fair bit of headway down the river by the time a second helicopter came into view—flying closer to us than the other we’d spotted. It was hovering over the buildings, several miles away, but it looked like we were in danger of it turning toward us.

“I think it’s time to get back to the bank,” I said, eyeing it.

Neither of the siblings were happy about the idea, but Orlando, using the long stick, navigated us to the river’s edge. I clambered onto the bank with Maura and then the two of us helped Orlando drag the raft out of the water.

Trees lined this part of the river. We found a trunk to lean the raft against before making our way to a bus shelter on the road. We sat down beneath the covering on a plastic bench. Orlando reached into his backpack and pulled out the map which he’d kept in one of the waterproof containers. He spread it out. “Hm.” He studied it for a couple of minutes before folding it up again and replacing it. “Right. I think I know the best route to take, though I hate these parts. The closer we are to the shore, the more likely we are to run into trouble.”

We left the bus stop. Thunder broke out overhead, and I caught a flash of lightning. It had been raining nonstop ever since we’d left Maura and Orlando’s loft, but this was the heaviest rainfall we’d experienced so far. A severe wind lashed us.

“Augh,” Maura moaned. “I hate this weather.”

In spite of all three of us beginning to shiver, we plowed on for several miles. We came across more Bloodless in the streets but thankfully, Orlando’s blade wheel was still holding up well, and he could deal with them on his own. After three hours, Orlando suggested that we stop for a short break.

“I’m starving,” Maura agreed.

I was also feeling exhausted. This damp weather, even though I was covered in plastic and wore a mask over my head, had a way of penetrating to your bones.

Orlando seemed to already have a clear idea where we ought to stop. He wasn’t gazing around at the buildings wondering; his eyes were trained ahead. He led us directly to the end of the road and then stopped outside an old church—a church that was still beautiful even despite its disrepair. Although many of its stained-glass windows had been smashed, its thick stone walls were intact, and to my surprise, so was the heavy wooden door.

“We’ll go in here,” Orlando said.

He gripped the door handle and pushed it open. We stepped in cautiously and found ourselves looking around a derelict, yet hauntingly beautiful chapel. Pale orange light trickled through the tinted panes that remained intact surrounding the engraved, concave ceiling. Swaths of deep green ivy spilled in through the lower, glassless windows, and trailed down the walls to touch the dusty, stone floors. Faded rosewood benches lined the church, some upturned, others almost too perfectly in place. Pigeons fluttered in the church’s heights, soaring from one broad balcony to the other. Their flapping and soft cooing were the only sounds to stir the eerie silence.

The air in here was chill, but at least it was mostly dry. Orlando closed the door behind us as we removed our masks. We moved slowly to one of the benches and sat down. Maura dug a hand into her backpack and withdrew a can of lentils. She cracked it open and began pouring the contents into her mouth directly—as though she were drinking a soda—since none of us had brought spoons.

I pitied Orlando as he pulled out a can from his own bag. Being in charge of the blade wheel, he was constantly carrying around a heavy remote. Plus, he’d been the one with the strenuous task of navigating us down the river. He must have been starved, too.

I supposed that I also ought to eat something. Although my stomach was aching, it was hard to tell whether that was from hunger or just from the sheer angst I had been in for the past… I had lost track of how many hours by now. Probably a mixture of both. I opened one of my cans and began to munch.

Orlando was the first to finish. He placed his empty can in a plastic bag and replaced it in his backpack. Then he stood, his eyes traveling around the church. He began to wander along the aisle, toward the other end of the chapel. I glanced furtively at Maura as he left us. She was watching him.

It felt like Maura and I had gotten off to an unnecessarily bad start and I didn’t like the undertones of tension that existed between us. But I didn’t know what I could do—if there was even anything that I could do—to solve that. Now wasn’t the time to be worrying about that though.

I refocused on my lentils. I had only eaten half, but I was not hungry anymore. Still, wasting food would be a mortal sin in this city, so I forced myself to finish them.

Maura had finished her food by now. She leaned back on her bench, her legs stretched out, her eyes half closed, relaxing.

I looked around for Orlando. He now had reached the end of the church and, to my surprise, was kneeling before the altar. Orlando hadn’t exactly struck me as the religious type.

I stood up and made my way to him, my footsteps echoing off the stone. Orlando had one hand over his heart as he knelt. I didn’t want to disturb him. I took a seat on the bench behind him and admired the painted apse.

After five minutes or so, Orlando stirred. He rose to his feet and turned. His expression was stony, his eyes a tad glazed. He sat down next to me on the bench.

“Are you a Christian?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Can’t consider myself one,” he replied hoarsely. He cast a glance back at Maura, who was still resting. He joined me in gazing at the altar. “I’ve never been a person of faith… At least, not until I murdered a man.” His fingers locked, and he cracked his knuckles. “It’s not something you can easily forget,” he went on, “You know? Not something you can just will to the back of your mind. No matter how much you try to tell yourself that it was self-defense, or that it was justified somehow… the guilt doesn’t go away.”