One of Them (Vigil #2) (2 page)

From Above

The second time I awoke, it was to the smell of decay.

My stomach was grumbling as my eyes scanned desperately for the odor’s source. But sprawled out on the floor the way I was, I had no real angle on the room. I jerked up into a crouch and began to crawl around the floor on my hands and knees. In the midst of a rather furious turn around the bed, I skidded to a halt. In front of me was a white container, a plain old plastic bucket. I stared down at the liquid redness inside, breathing in the aroma, pungent and dank. The smell was overwhelming.

I dipped my finger in, gathered up a thickened dollop on the tip and raised it toward my mouth, drawing it inward and licking it clean. The blood wriggled its way down my throat, warm and tasteless, and ultimately unsatisfying. I wanted more of it, a whole lot more. I used my cupped hand to scoop out an even larger helping. As I gulped it down, the leavings dripped everywhere—on my thighs, my chest, and all over my face. But it still was not enough. I wanted the damn stuff to taste like something. I wanted more. Three additional handfuls went inside of me before the urge to consume slowly started to subside.

I sat there, feeling sickened by the stickiness in my mouth. I kicked the bucket away. I was what I thought I was. Why else would I consume blood like that without even thinking? For what other reason would someone leave blood out for me like that if I did not need it? I was in a fog, unable to maintain control. And that was the scariest part of it to me, the lack of restraint. I’ve never been someone who indulges in impulses, any kind of impulses. But I dove into that blood because something inside of me wanted it, or needed it, and I had no say in the matter. I desired the stuff, so I drank the stuff.

Shockingly, after everything I’d slurped down, I was still hungry. And not for blood—but for real food. My bladder was full as well. I had to go, but there was nowhere
to
go. I kept nudging the bucket farther and farther away from me. If I stayed too close to it, I just knew I would need to suck down more.

In the midst of my struggle, out of nowhere, the walls began to shine, looking as if they were heating up internally. Where I couldn’t before, I could now see my reflection in the structure, and it was not a pretty sight. My blonde hair was mangled, a mess of knots and blood. I couldn’t tell if I had messed myself up while I was eating, or if no one had cleaned me up after the attack. Either way, I looked like a horror show.

I scooted closer to the glowing wall to study myself in detail. I checked my teeth first. Of all the things, those would be an indisputable sign I had been turned. But to my instant relief, my mouth was unchanged. My incisors were a normal length and everything else was where it was before—even the fillings in my back molars were intact. There were traces of blood glazed across the enamel, but after all the slurping I’d done, I knew where that had come from.

“Do you like what you see?”

I turned, thinking there was someone behind me. But there wasn’t. I was still alone. All of a sudden, the walls glowed much, much brighter. My eyes did not appreciate the intensity.

“What the fuck is going on?” I said, blinking like a crazy person.

“Language, language.” The voice, wherever it was coming from, was being electronically altered. I couldn’t tell if the person speaking was male or female.

“If you don’t like my language,” I said, standing upright and balling up my fists in a weak-ass attempt to be threatening. “Come on in here and do something about it.”

“Oh, no. You are being kept in there for a reason. A reason I bet you have already surmised.”

“I haven’t surmised shit, because I don’t know shit.”

“You knew to drink that blood we left out for you.”

I didn’t respond. And it wasn’t just because I was embarrassed by the fact that I’d guzzled the stuff down. Intransigence was vital here. I could not engage on any issues my jailers wanted to discuss. The situation had to work in my favor and my favor alone. They would tell me what I wanted to know, and I would tell them nothing. A mind war was in the offing, and I’d win that just as easily as I would a fistfight.

I held the silence a long time. It was the voice who broke first.

“There’s no reason to feel shame about drinking it. You are what you are now.”

When presented, I took the opening. “And what exactly am I?”

“Don’t you know? You were aware of what Danny Ray Jessup is.”

Is not was. So Jessup remained in the picture.

“I only know what I have been told,” I said in an attempt to play dumb. “People told me stuff about Jessup. No one’s told me anything about me.”

“Well, you could be informed about a great many things. But first, you need to tell me what you experienced when you ingested that blood. How did your body respond? Is your stomach sore? Did you feel any discomfort whatsoever?”

I was talking to a scientist or a doctor of some kind, the questions made that clear. Someone like that would be far easier to manipulate than a hardcore interrogator. On that front, I’d lucked out big time.

I kept nudging. “Since I don’t know what I am, how am I supposed to articulate to you what my experience was?”

“Like I said when we first started speaking, I think you do know what you are. If you need me to say it for you, I don’t mind doing it.” The voice paused. “Is that what you’d like from me?”

“I guess so.” I walked over to the bed and propped my arms on the mattress, to make sure I had steadied myself for whatever it was I was about to be told.

“Alrighty then,” the voice said. “You have died and been restored to life, your nervous system reanimated. Although I do not approve of such terminology, in the common tongue, you are now a vampire. You require blood to live and you will not do well in direct sunlight. Your aging process has been slowed to the point of imperceptibility, and you are now strong—very strong. It’s that last bit which frightens me the most. I’m aware of what you were before—violent. And I know what you are now—super-human and violent. That’s a volatile mix. And I, for one, do not want to test how angry you actually are. I suspect you are absolutely livid and are only toying with me, feigning this pleasantness. I hope I am wrong about that, because I mean you no harm—but that doesn’t mean I do not understand that you might want to murder me or anyone else with impunity. Terrible things have happened to you, and someone must shoulder the blame.”

The light from the walls was pulsating.

“May I ask you a question, doctor?” I said, twitching.

“I am not a doctor.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Okay. But I am not a medical doctor.”

“It’s no big thing, but—” I felt a freight train of pain tear up and down my spine. I did my best to hold it inside, to keep it from showing. I continued to speak, my voice cracking. “You say I am what I am, yet my teeth are normal. Can you explain to me why my teeth are normal?”

It was a small question, to see if I could get an answer. The first thing off the top of my head. Anything to distract me from the dwindling spasms.

“This is not a story, Ms. Kimble. Teeth do not retract willy-nilly. And you don’t need them to ingest blood. It’s nonsense. It is not a real thing.”

“Drinking blood is not a real thing, either.”

“Sure it is. In nature, it’s more common than people realize.”

“Common in what way?”

“I have answered you, answered you too much,” the voice said. “I would now like you respond to me in kind. You are a well-bred young woman. You understand the concept of quid pro quo.”

I couldn’t help it. Laughter just exploded out of me. And boy did it feel good. I needed the release more than I had realized. “You say you know everything about me, but I’m not sure you do,” I said, still chuckling. “A lot of dark crap was kept out of my many, many psychological reports. You can chalk that up to the benefits of having an extremely important father.”

“Grace, I know more about you than you can possibly imagine.”

“I don’t think that you do, Doc. You said I’m violent, but I am more than that. I’m a major league cunt with psychopathic tendencies. I do what I want, and I get what I want. You—you are going to get jack shit. You can keep speaking to me all nicely, and all you will get out of it is jack shit. You can let me out of here, and it won’t matter—jack shit. I’m an immovable object. And as I wait for my eventual opening, I will sit here and veg the fuck out. Because apparently, I have a pretty long life ahead of me.”

“This does not have to be confrontational.”

“Of course, it does. Someone did this to me. For all I know, that someone is you.”

“Confrontation and immovability can work both ways.”

“Yeah, I’m shaking. What the hell else are you pricks going to do to me? You’ve taken everything from me and locked me up.”

“We know how to persuade. We are well versed in those arts.”

“Then send in your goons and torture me. I am not afraid.”

“You also don’t know exactly what you are just yet, or even where you are. Who says we need to go in there to apply pressure?”

“That’s true, but somebody has to come in here to feed me.” I pointed back at the container on the floor. “One of you brought that in here. And one of you will have to bring something fresh in. Or don’t I need fresh blood?”

“I don’t feel like I should be sharing anymore,” the voice said.

“Just for the record, if starvation is what you meant by methods of persuasion, then I will believe it when I see it.” I hopped up onto bed. The paper gown I had over me ripped from behind as I plopped down hard. “I need to piss,” I bellowed. “Where am I supposed to do that?”

“The bucket. Once you’ve emptied it.”

I looked at it sitting there, half-filled. “Classy.”

“It’s either that or pick a favorite corner.”

I reclined back on the bed and ceased communicating.

“You’re the one who is making this difficult,” the voice said. “This will be a trying time for you, it always is. Cooperation will only make the transition easier. I’m giving you a second opportunity to coexist nicely. We can all begin again, and you will learn that we are not the villains here.”

The person talking was a woman. After that last spiel, I was certain of it. All needy and giving away second chances like they were candy. The tone was so cloyingly familiar it could have been my stepmother, if she weren’t such an illiterate idiot.

The voice yammered on, not stopping until I went over and squatted in the corner. I wasn’t too proud to go where I needed to go, and I loved that I could shock my questioner into silence.

Locked up the way I was, I’d take the upper hand any way I could get it.

Where It Hurts

The battle of wills stretched on for a couple of days. I withheld; they withheld. They poked; I poked back. All that resulted from our petty skirmishes was a stinky room—that thanks to the multiple deposits I’d had no choice but to keep on making in the corner. My patience was holding steady, though. I couldn’t say anything for certain about theirs.

Day in and day out, one event became a constant, and that was the continual delivery of blood, refilled in an alternatively colored bucket. The switch was made whenever I was out of it. I would fall to the inevitable oblivion of exhaustion, and once I came around, it would just be there. I had no clue how they were getting the buckets in or out—and I never once finished one off, not entirely. On the second night, I did everything I could to not succumb to sleep. But after a certain amount of time, I would fall into this woozy, weakened condition, and I would lose consciousness.

I hesitate to even use the word ‘sleep’ when I’m talking about that particular state because it was nothing like how sleeping used to be for me. It was more like a light-turning-off kind of thing, as if I had run out of power. I never drifted off into dreamland; I snapped off. And when I woke back up, I could never remember dreaming of any kind—and I had always remembered my dreams—to a ridiculous degree.

These blackouts, as I started to call them, were the only method I had for measuring time while I was being held within the box. By my count, I was able to remain conscious for about twelve hours between collapses. But I had no clue how long I was actually out of it. That could have been twelve hours as well, which was likely, or maybe even longer. Without a clock or a watch there was no way to be sure. And there was always a chance the blackouts weren’t a natural occurrence. Perhaps I was being drugged. That had to remain a possibility.

The games being played against me began to escalate on day four. During the first three cycles, they would do simple shit like turn up the glowing walls too bright in an attempt to make me uncomfortable. To counteract that move, I had these newfangled things called eyelids, which I occasionally closed. Following that brilliant maneuver, they began piping in loud music—the middle-of-the-road, heavy metal crap that I hated. That could be ignored as well, all you had to do is think about something else. My thoughts centered around what I was going to do once I got out of there, and who was going to die first.

In between attempts to prod me into cooperation, the voice would return and slip in various new questions. All of these inquiries had something to do with my overall health. They asked me about my sleeping patterns. I said nothing. They asked me about my bowel movements. I pointed at the corner. They asked questions about my strength. Were my muscles hurting? They didn’t get as much as a shrug.

When they finally decided to get personal, I was lying on my side on the bed, having just reawakened, my paper gown barely held together in strips and tatters.

The voice said to me, “It’s not as if you don’t have any loved ones, you know.”

There was a different source behind this voice, a different speaker. There had been several different speakers, but the voice always came out sounding the same, overmodulated and cliché. It was easy to tell the speakers apart, though. None of them were interested in any of the same subjects, and not a single one formed sentences or thoughts in a similar manner. As an example, the most recent dipshit asked no question, he just started off with his threat. This is what made him a he. The males of the world like to bandy about all tough, whipping their dicks out as if they were the most impressive tools in their arsenal.

“Officer Kimble, you have not been a model guest, now have you? What we have been asking from you has not been that much.” He made a tsk-tsking sound with his tongue. “I now regret to inform you that significant actions have been taken. Your former partner, one Angela Chen, has been removed from the force and arrested. There have been questions raised about the relationship between the two of you and Chen’s involvement in your subsequent disappearance. The charges involve the alteration of the crime scene at the Las Rosas complex and her complicity in the cannibalistic murder of Kara Manning. The District Attorney’s theory goes as this: the two of you arrived on the scene and had a confrontation with Manning—who was not being raped, and with whom you personally had a run-in before. You, Kimble, being of the notoriously violent sort, beat her to a pulp in anger. The coroner believes Manning was still alive when, to cover your crime, you and Chen proceeded to create the illusion of a mysterious assailant. The suspicion is that you yourself chopped away at the victim with some undiscovered blade you had no doubt been carrying on your person illegally—that was the kind of cop you were, after all. The bite marks on Manning’s body remain a mystery. Did you do that or did Chen? Good money is on Chen. She’s suspected of coming up with the cannibal story without the aid of her less intelligent partner. Any way you cut it, your pal is in a whole lot of trouble, particularly after naked photographs of you were found in her apartment. Chen’s personal proclivities were never public knowledge until now. To be frank, it has all become a raging scandal on television. The world believes you and Chen were lovers who covered up a crime with an even larger crime, and then you hightailed it out of town and left your girlfriend holding the proverbial bag. A large manhunt is underway at the moment, focusing on you. Most believe you will never be found. After all that fibbing that you did, you never were a normal cop, now were you? You were a liar from the beginning, changing your name the way you did. It makes one suspicious. Not me, of course—I know you did it because of your Daddy and his interfering ways. The bubbleheads on the tube believe you did it because you have something to hide. I personally like their version better than the truth. What do you think? How does all of this make you feel?”

He stopped spitting out his bullshit, and I yawned. He tried to get me going a second time with a few more additions to his story, but I wasn’t going to respond. I remained impenetrable and uninterested.

But on the inside, I was tickled pink. Mostly because I knew who it was who speaking to me. I had known from almost the moment he’d started talking. The cadence he used when he said ‘Officer Kimble’ was all-too familiar. Someone else I’d met recently had said it the same way, his words trilling.

“This can all go away, you know,” the voice told me with that aw-shucks manner he’d used on me before. “You help us, and you can have your old life back. Chen will be released and the true story can be revealed as a plot to capture the dangerous murderer Danny Ray Jessup—a madman who wanted credit for his crimes. We took away that credit to draw him out of hiding. You put your good name on the line to bring him to justice. Imagine the cheers. You’d be a national hero instantaneously.”

I shook my head.

“Or, if you’d prefer, the old you can be gone forever. You can start anew, and work for the Detail. Your abilities would make you an excellent fit there.”

With confidence, I took my swing. “None of that stuff is going to happen, Castellano. Your offer is crap, just like your fairy tales about Chen and I are crap.”

“What did you just say?” The voice seemed startled. I knew I had him.

“I said you’ve been lying to me, Castellano. You have been lying to me since you first came to see me in Mac’s office.”

“I am not this Castellano,” the voice said.

“Yes, you are. You’re the commander of the Detail. You’re not fooling me.”

“I am not him.”

“Come on. Drop the facade. I’m onto you. You cannot and will not sucker me again. I’m in charge now. Get used to it, you stupid son of a bitch.”