Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (21 page)

“They’re made of silver. And the minions go
around once a day and rub them down with garlic oil. Both hurt
vampires.”

“Right, but why do they hurt
me
?”

She turned to look at him and saw him give
her a wicked smile, like everything he’d been telling her so far
had been a joke and he was just now finally reaching the punch
line.

“Tell me something, Fishy. Just how do you
think a vampire is made?”

She almost answered out loud, but she cut
herself off as it slowly dawned on her. Of course she knew how a
vampire was made, didn’t she? In practically all the vampire
fiction she had ever seen or read it was the same. A vampire
drained a person to the point of almost dying, then the person
drinks the vampire’s own blood. Once she’d learned that vampires
were real she’d simply assumed the real world matched the fiction.
But she’d already seen the ways that a real vampire was different,
so…

The pain at touching silver and garlic.

The itchy skin under the UV lamps.

The way she’d been immune to the hypnosis of
the minions.

Her ability to move almost but not quite as
fast as the minion in the abandoned store.

All these memories came back to her, each one
helping to form a clearer picture. But one memory trumped them
all.

A self-inflicted wound. A slice on Zoey’s
finger. A simple, loving touch as Zoey tried to heal the unbearable
pain of all the years in whatever way she could.

And then a final memory, that one detail she
had so desperately needed: a misshapen lump of metal lying on the
stairs in her basement.

There was no time to contemplate the
consequences. At some point later she could sit and wonder if Zoey
had realized what she was doing to Peg or if it had been an
innocent accident. Zoey’s time was almost up for real this time.
There would be no coming back after this. Peg had one final chance
to fix the mistakes of eleven years before.

With no further hesitation Peg reached
through the bars and grabbed the lock.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Pig asked. There
seemed to be honest shock in his voice, but Peg didn’t take the
time to look at him or even answer. The pain in her hand was
immediate. It was no wonder why none of the other vampires had ever
tried this before. But Peg’s relationship with pain was different
than all of them. Years of self-inflicted harm had taught her how
to use it as a tool for her own advantage. All she needed to do was
let the pain release the pressure, the mental anguish, the belief
that she was unworthy. Release it all, and let only the strength
remain.

With all that firmly in her mind, Peg
squeezed.

Nothing happened.

“What the hell do you think you’re going to
accomplish?” Pig asked. It was a good question, although the better
question might be what she was doing wrong. Zoey had done it with
ease back at her house, so Peg shouldn’t be any different now.
Except Zoey was “ripe,” Peg realized. She’d been a vampire for over
a decade. Her strength came to her easily. Peg might not be at that
level herself for years. She almost let go and broke down sobbing,
but the voice in her head would tell her she wasn’t trying hard
enough. Even if she wasn’t a full vampire yet she’d still been able
to move fast without realizing. She could summon the strength.

Only half-aware that she was doing it, Peg
started singing under her breath. “I tried so hard and got so
far…”

She squeezed again. The pain was
excruciating.

“In the end it doesn’t really matter…”

“Fishy, the minions,” Pig said. “They see
that you’re up to something.”

Peg didn’t look down the aisle. She closed
her eyes and squeezed harder. The metal felt strong, but maybe not
as strong as just a few seconds earlier.

“I put my trust in you, pushed as far as I
could go…”

She heard footsteps coming down the aisle,
moving fast. Whatever. She could be fast as well.

“Put my trust…”

She twisted. With a sharp metallic clang the
lock came off the door.

Her body felt stiff and cramped from the
hours in the cage, but she ignored ever protest in her muscles and
moved at a speed that should have been beyond the abilities of a
mere thirty-four year old mother. The minions were moving at speeds
only slightly faster, but Peg had the head start. Not a single one
of the others had been able to get away from the minions after
escaping, but they had been trying to escape. Peg had no intention
of leaving.

Instead she pitched the broken lock at the
nearest minion and then, without bothering to see if it hit or did
any damage, reached for the only other thing she had at her
disposal at this point. Putting both hands on the bars of her cage
she twisted, intending to pick it up and throw it at them. The
movement was nowhere near as smooth as she had expected. Later she
would realize that not only had she been forgetting her strength
wasn’t at full “ripe” levels yet but it had taken two of the
minions to carry something so bulky. She tried to swing it around
the way an Olympian would spin with a shot put but it clipped the
cage across the aisle, throwing Peg off her balance. The vampire in
the cage scurried back until it realized that the front of the cage
had been damaged. Perhaps inspired by Peg’s actions it too tried to
grab the lock.

Peg didn’t have the chance to pay the vampire
any more attention as the minions reached her. She had at least
enough momentum on the cage to smack one of the minions in the side
of its chest, but the other leaped at her and knocked her against
Pig’s cage. The pain of her naked spine hitting the hard metal was
enough to make her vision black out for a second even without the
added burning sensation. The minion grabbed her by the throat and
started choking her. Peg had no idea if that could be enough to
kill her now, but the last thing she wanted to do was test the
possibility. Peg reached up to the minions face with both hands and
pushed her thumbs into its eyes. She’d never tried to actually
blind someone before, but her expectation from the movies was that
the eyes would offer some resistance and then pop like she’d stuck
her fingers through the skin of a rotten tomato. To her surprise,
however, they offered barely any resistance. They just popped out
of the sockets, falling back on their thin remaining strings of
muscle and dangling off the back of its neck, the pulsing mass of
mystery flesh the only thing keeping them from falling straight to
the floor.

The effect was immediate. The minion, no
longer able to see anything other than the ground at its heels, let
go of her and flailed around wildly. It looked like it was trying
to reach behind itself to grab its dangling eyeballs, but they kept
swinging just out of its reach.

By this time the other minion had recovered
and dashed around it comrade, its hand aimed straight at Peg’s
heart. Peg dodged just enough for its nails to scrape the skin
alongside her breast. With anyone else this would have left her in
the perfect position to put the minion in a headlock, but the
minion didn’t have enough of a head to lock. Instead she grabbed
the only thing that was available, the twisted tumor-like mass
holding the inside of its face together. As soon as she put her
fingers in it she regretted the decision. There was no pain, but
the sensation that reached her brain from her fingers was one of
sudden numbness, like she stuck her hand in a bowl of Jell-o that
just so happened to be laced with some kind of crazy anesthetic.
She thought she could feel a form of consciousness in there trying
to communicate with her, or maybe take over, invisible tendrils of
slimy flesh trying to worm their way into her mind and take over
her body. Before this could become anything more than just a
fleeting sensation she pulled her hand back out, pulling as much of
the mass as she could with it. The minion jerked like its entire
body was being tested for reflexes. Peg threw the gore aside,
desperate to get every trace of it off her fingers. Even the
black-red slick of viscera it left behind felt like it was trying
to merge with her and take over. She could feel something’s
presence, something close by, watching her through the simple
touch. She wiped the hand on the minion’s hoodie as she grabbed it
by the shoulder then smashed its impossible face against the bars.
Pig sat in the cage watching with fascination as the shattered
remains of its impossible face showered down around him.

The minion fell limp against the side of the
cage, its body slowly shriveling and cracking just like the one had
in Oconomowoc. Peg turned to face the other minion only to find
that it had fallen to its knees, still trying to make sense of what
was happening to it. Before it could regain itself she shoved it
headfirst into the stone floor. That appeared to be enough to kill
it.

Peg saw something gleaming from the first
minion’s pocket and reached in to find the keys to the cages. For a
moment she fought with herself about what to do. She didn’t know
how much time she had but it couldn’t possibly be much. But if she
went in and never came back out then without letting everyone out
of their cages first then they might forever lose their chance to
escape. She didn’t even know if letting them escape was the right
thing to do. They were vampires, after all. They were all victims
and not a single one of them had probably done anything worthy of
being here, but there was no telling what they would do when
unleashed on the world. Especially since very few of them seemed to
be sane anymore.

It’s not your place to condemn them
,
the inner voice said.

Shit. The voice was right, but she didn’t
have time for this. It suddenly occurred to her that the entire
room had fallen silent again as all eyes watched to see what she
would do. Something rattled nearby, and Peg looked over to see the
vampire in the damaged cage pull her arms back inside, her hands
smoking from touching the lock. She was a blond, probably not even
old enough to be out of high school yet, and unlike some of the
others she still had intelligence and sanity in the way she stared
at Peg. If Pig’s explanation was correct then she would probably
have been here for only a short time. Peg bent down long enough to
toss the keys into her cage and say “Free everyone” then ran down
the aisle to the forbidden door.

She’d partly expected it to be locked, but
instead it didn’t even close all the way. Apparently the minions,
whether they were just walking eyes and hands for the “combination
of things” or not, were truly terrible craftsmen. Beyond the door
the passage shrunk back down to its naturally made original state,
forcing Peg to stoop. From the echo of dripping water she guessed
that it went along for quite a ways, but the absence of light here
was near absolute. Even though she understood the importance of
speed she still stepped carefully, and the floor here hadn’t even
been smoothed, leaving jagged spots on the ground where she
frequently and painfully stubbed her bare toes. She thought her
missing toe might be bleeding again as well, since the going was
particularly slick, although that could have just been from the
perpetual moisture.

Something from farther down the passage
groaned, a low, haunting noise that echoed for many seconds before
fading away. Peg had almost gotten used to the stench in the cage
room, but that couldn’t compare to this. Every time something knew
assaulted her nostrils down here she kept thinking there was no way
anything could possible smell worse and she kept getting proved
wrong. If she ever made it out she wasn’t sure that her sense of
smell would even work anymore. If it was possible for a person’s
nostrils to be permanently damaged, this was the place that would
do it.

Oh shit
, Peg thought,
just what
exactly is it I think I’m going to do
? She looked down at
herself, and even though she couldn’t see much more than her
outline in the darkness she knew what she had to look like. She was
naked, not even having the simple protection afforded by clothes,
and she didn’t have anything that could be used as a weapon. She
had no idea what she was about to face, but she knew full well that
it wasn’t going to feel threatened by her in the slightest. There
were things back in the cage room that might be useful, though. She
might be able to pry a bar off a cage to use as a stake, or she
could look for the garlic oil that Pig had said they used on the
cages. Or at the very least she might find something sharp…

The emotions hit her all at once, almost
crippling enough to send her falling to her knees and clutching her
head. She understood now what this was, or at least she thought she
did. Zoey had said she’d been connected enough to Peg to follow her
emotions to Oconomowoc. And once Zoey had shared her blood with Peg
the ability went both ways. In the empty store Peg had felt Zoey’s
emotions clear enough, but this was so far beyond that. Zoey was
close, and she was just sad or resigned or frightened. This was
absolute, sheer terror on the most primal level. This was abject
horror beyond what a person should be capable of feeling. Peg’s
heart skipped several beats, as though her body itself didn’t think
it could contain such uncontrollable fear.

At no point did Peg even consider turning and
running while she could still salvage her life. She ran flat out
down the tunnel, not caring anymore about ripping apart her bare
feet and somehow managing not to slip or trip, heading straight
ahead to Zoey.

She heard the change in the corridor’s size
before she saw any difference. The sounds of her footsteps echoed
off a higher ceiling, and she was no longer able to reach out and
touch the sides of the tunnel. She got the impression that the
tunnel continued to expand as she went. Somewhere ahead she could
hear Zoey, her soft repeated “no no no no no” amplified by the
expanded cavern.