Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (22 page)

“What would you have me do?” Remmy asked.

Live.

“I don’t know how.”

He blinked and in that microsecond between reality and darkness, he became lost.

A halo of lights shines in my eyes but I can’t close them. A saw motor hums followed by the sound of metal teeth biting into bone. My skull — they’re cutting into my skull. The doctors wear white environmental suits with positive-flow masks and breathing tubes hooked to oxygen tanks.

I hate them. I want to break my bonds but my body is inert. Useless. Frustration so powerful a tear rolls down my cheek. The saw screams as it cuts my skull and though I rage, I cannot yell. I want to twist their limbs and pull them from their sockets. Their hearts beat so loudly: Thum, thum, thum.

The sound of the saw fades and the doctor holds a set of surgical snips. They consult amongst themselves while I imagine ripping out their throats and tasting a splash of blood on my tongue like the first snowflakes.

They begin the procedure while I lie helpless.

Snip. The anger disappears, disconnected.

Snip. The frustration, suddenly disengages.

Snip. Desire, gone.

More snips and they cut away my emotional self like trimming back an overgrown bush. They leave one emotional connection: fear.

I shiver because I am afraid…

The door unlatched and a sound drifted though his fever-hunger. He savored the last vestiges of the memory — the hatred, the frustration. But the more he tried to focus on those alien feelings, the more they became vapor drifting through his fingers.

“Molly?”

He heard a grunt, and then a body tumbled down the stairs. Remmy pulled himself from his knees and shuffled to the landing. The door closed and was re-latched.

The body lay crumpled at the bottom, smelling of sweat, rubber, chlorine, and blood. The man wore a gasmask with the eye holes shattered. Remmy heard the rats in the walls, but his presence kept them away.

The man groaned, shifted.

Remmy moved closer, observing, his skin tingling like he had touched a live copper wire. He breathed deeply of the scent and his vision brightened, a white halo forming around the bleeding man as he focused on the soft spots — the wrists, the thighs, the throat.

Just a taste.

Remmy took a step back, no longer trusting himself or his instincts. The Handlers had taught him that he would be punished for taking a life; his insides would boil and fester.

Lies.

The man startled awake and gasped for breath. He glanced around wildly, scrambled backwards like a crab until he hit a wall. He tore off his gasmask.

“Who’s there?” he stuttered.

Remmy sat on his haunches, watching as the man fumbled about in the dark, cried at the door just as Remmy had earlier. Occasionally, the man turned, gazing into the black before renewing his efforts at the door.

Remmy’s hunger pains had settled into the hum of anticipation.

What you were meant to do.

When the man returned to the bottom of the stairs, Remmy padded soundlessly behind him, arms encircling his torso, teeth sinking into his neck. The man cried out, then relaxed. Remmy suckled, pulling at the wound, worrying it wider with his tongue and lips. His tongue searched, wiggled deeper and the taste sent a beautiful orgasmic wave through him.

Soaring through the night. Feeling as large as the heavens. The wind whistling in the ears.

The sky turns orange. The world freezes. The air shatters as if made of glass.

Darkness and suffocation. Hunger so limitless, it is a line that stretches past the horizon.

The wall that separated the voice inside of Remmy burst apart in a torrent of blood. Electrical impulses jumped across the incisions in his brain. Old, dead tissue sparked with electrons, reborn with the infusion of blood. Bridges were reconnected, pathways rebuilt. Like the building pressure of a train through a tunnel, the emotions amplified: Hatred for the doctors and what they did to him. The hatred made him clench the man tightly, his embrace snapping bones like kindling. The man’s only defense was a pitiful gasp.

Remmy sucked and drank until the body was a dry husk, the heart sputtering then dying.

The corpse slid from his arms and Remmy shivered with the aftershocks. Through this haze of swirling emotion, he heard the door unlatch and smelled cigarette smoke drifting through the crack. He made his way up the stairs letting his fingers trail along the rail as if experiencing touch for the first time. The whorls and imperfections in the wood sent shivers along his spine.

He opened the door.

Molly sat at the table, good hand holding a smoldering cigarette. His vision focused on her heat. He smelled her fear and it tingled in his groin. And yet, he felt something new: gratitude. Molly had done this. For him.

“Molly. Dear Molly,” he said.

“Are you leaving now?”

“Do you want me to?”

“You know I don’t.” She stubbed out her half-finished cigarette.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

He saw her pulse quicken and his senses sharpened. Crystal, another layer of magnification. If he focused, he could hear the earthworms tunneling, the piercing sonar of the bats outside — but none of it mattered except for the thrumming of her heart.

“You’re playing games with me now?” she asked.

“Isn’t that what all of this has been? A game?”

“Not a game.”

He moved so swiftly that she startled when his hands touched her neck, flowing down her shirt. His breath was cold and goose bumps flowered on her skin. Remmy wondered if it would excite him more if she resisted.
Not with Molly.

She exposed her neck for him. Her breath fluttered when his mouth touched her throat, her good hand clenched in a fist. “Molly,” he whispered, then punctured her with a swift stroke. Blood squirted to the back of his mouth, flowed over his tongue and he swallowed. His veins filled and his heart pumped as he gorged on her life.

The perfect softness of holding hands.

Klaxons. A crush of people, so many they push him down, trample him as he gasps for breath. She cannot reach him. The air distorts from heat, smells of chlorine. His hand is empty as she takes it. Bitterness, like a mouthful of diesel fuel that she cannot spit out.

He heard a truck with an over-loaded suspension bouncing down the laneway. Headlights shone through the window, Remmy staring into their brilliance, Molly holding the back of his head in a lover’s embrace, fingers entwined in his hair.

“You know what you have to do, don’t you, Remmy?” she whispered.

He licked the slowing wound and pulled away. Molly sat with half-lidded eyes and he crouched to her level. He stroked her hair.

“I know what I will do.”

“Thank you.”

He kissed her on the mouth, delicately painting her lips red with blood. He heard the mob outside: car doors closing, muffled laughter, the clink of metal on metal.

“You’ve come this far…” she said, her hand pulling him toward her.

He returned to her throat, worried the bite wider and sucked until her heart gave a final, weak pulse. When he pulled back, her eyes were closed and he marveled how beautiful she looked. He wanted to stay with her but the voices were outside the door now.

You know what you have to do.

“Yes.”

Remmy left through the back door and stood in the shadows away from the brilliance of the headlights. His gaze shifted from person to person, at the way they laughed nervously, at the way they looked over their shoulders waiting for the inevitable attack. Despite their weapons and numbers, they were afraid. Terrified.

And so they should be. Molly had shown him the truth: he didn’t have to fear the dark. They did.

* * * * *

Ryan T. McFadden is an award-winning fantasy/SF author in London, Ontario. He has several short stories published and his novella,
Deus Ex Machina
was part of the Aurora-winning
Women of the Apocalypse,
published by Absolute XPress. He is busy working on his next project in the always popular Neo-Noir Supernatural Crime Thriller category. The story “Homo Sanguinus”
(rough translation:
Bloody Man
) began from two desires. The first, to never say the word ‘vampire’ (an idea given to him by Kevin Nunn), and the second, to place the vampire protagonist as the oppressed rather than the oppressor.

Out with the Old

By William Meikle

From the journal of John Sharpe — April 3rd 2062

Although we had manned the barricade all winter, this was the first day I felt tense and on edge, the first day I really
believed
that danger might be imminent. There was something in the air that spoke of a possibility of spring. Not that anyone would notice much. We’ve been under the same grey cloud for two years and more now, and there hasn’t been a sign of any sun in all that time. All of us
hope
that this year things will be different, that this year will see us turn the corner. None speak of it though, for that might jinx the thing entirely.

There was also something else with us this morning besides hope. Bill Davis actually cracked a smile when the light changed from a murky gray to a slightly less murky gray, and Harper Lodge sang “The Spring’s a Coming”, so off-key that we
all
laughed. The jollity had a forced note to it, though. You don’t come through a winter like this one without it affecting you. All of us have been touched by standing too close to cold death. We’ve had thirty-five bodies to burn out back of Mifflin’s store, and I know I’m not the only one who’s laid awake at night thinking about their dead eyes.

I haven’t been doing much writing. Not doing much of anything besides dying slowly and watching this old town fade away.

We’re down to fifty-five souls, sinking fast. We won’t make it through another winter. We all know it, but nobody will speak of it, a huge elephant in every room. Actually, an elephant wouldn’t be a bad thing. At least we could eat it. The last of the deer meat went this week, and we’ll be lucky to see any more. Grass doesn’t grow real well under this cloud, and the wild animals aren’t any better off than we are.

There’s not been fuel for automobiles or tractors for three months now, and nobody’s volunteering for a trip to Edmonton — the last four we sent never came back. I’m guessing it’s the same all over.

Weren’t any one thing that caused the world to go to shit so fast … just a lot of things at once: war, warming, pollution, and too many folks chasing too little water. That, and the weather deciding to throw everything at us all at once for five years in a row, and we’re left where we are now — no infrastructure, no food, and damned little hope.

A fine start to spring!

The morning’s brief flirtation with a lift in the gloom soon faded as the clouds fell down from the Rockies, slate gray and flat like a giant tombstone just over our heads, getting ever darker as the sun went behind the mountains. I was just starting to look forward to the thin gruel that would pass for supper when Harper cocked his rifle.

“We got company,” he said.

Suddenly the day felt a lot colder.

The three of us stood at the barricade watching a vehicle close in on us along the highway, the headlights too bright in the gathering dark.

I was thinking how unlucky I am. I’d been there on the road the last time too, when the three bikers came along shooting and hollering. I’d stood alongside Frank Brookes when he took a shot in the chest and died gurgling at my feet as I pumped round after round into the bikers, and I’d helped burn the bodies later that day.

I never want to smell flesh burning like that again.

Maybe I’m afraid I might start salivating. Ha! Morbid humor.

Anyway, there’s not much chance of a repeat of that gunfight. We’re down to twelve rounds between the lot of us, and we really should be keeping them for hunting game this coming summer. They might be all that stand between us and starvation.

All those thoughts were going through my mind as the vehicle approached. Whoever was driving, they didn’t seem to be in a hurry. It was a pickup truck, sleek, black and cleaner than anything I’d seen for years now. It could have come straight from a showroom. It came to a stop ten yards from the barricade and when the driver cut the engine I heard warm metal
ping
as it cooled rapidly. The door of the pickup opened.