BLOOD TELLS TRUE
by
Alan Ryker
Copyright 2011 Jeffrey Rice
Published by Sucker Punch Press at Smashwords
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law. Contact: jalanrice@gmail.com
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
"Silhouette" by Melissa Samworth, melissasamworth@verizon.net, www.melissasamworth.com
"Skulls in the Catacombes, Paris" by Joshua Veitch-Michaelis, www.flickr.com/photos/31266481@N02
Cover design by Jeffrey Rice
Copy edit by Theresa D. Lininger, athenaedits@gmail.com, http://athenaedits.com
Chapter 1
Jessica stood perfectly still except for a twitch in her left leg. She'd tweaked her knee running a few days earlier, and the hours of standing made it ache. But she was accustomed to standing for long, silent hours. Accustomed to the discomfort and the boredom so that both had nearly disappeared. Nothing mattered except the hunt.
The night air was thick and muggy. The sky was clear, and the stars and moon turned the long, pale grasses of the Kansas prairie silver.
On her face, she wore a visor-less paintball mask with filter paper taped over the inside of the front vent. The goggles prevented blood from splashing into her eyes; the mask, her mouth. She didn't know how much blood or venom it took to cause an infection. She didn't know if the infectious agent required an open wound or if it could pass through a mucus membrane. She took precautions so as to not find out.
She wore chainmail gloves. She'd inherited them from her uncle, Keith Harris, when she inherited his ranch. He'd used them for his own meat that he'd occasionally butchered on the farm, a steer or a deer. They were butchering gloves, light enough to perform long hours of hard manual work in, but strong and tightly-woven enough to turn a razor sharp blade or a mouthful of fangs.
Because Jessica Harris hunted vampires. The same creatures that killed her uncle.
The first time she punched a vampire, its lips had split across its fangs and her hand came back covered in blood. Working a heavy bag every day had turned the skin of her knuckles into thick leather, but she realized that if they'd split, or if she'd hit the vampire in its fangs, or if it had been fast enough to bite her hand, it would have infected her. So she began wearing gel-padded hand wraps beneath elbow-length chainmail gloves. The first time she simultaneously wrestled a vampire and tried with gloved hands to distinguish between the blades she kept on her belt, she was surprised by how much information her fingertips had provided. How blind the gloves made her hands. But she got used to it.
Jessica shifted from foot-to-foot to relieve her knee, and in the silent night, the plastic tarp around her shoulders rustled. She'd coated the tarp with cow's blood. She kept gallon jugs of the stuff in her deep freeze, gathered from slaughtered cattle, for just such occasions.
She clenched the blood-covered tarp shut at her neck. It stank with a stink the vamps couldn't resist, while keeping her smell in. Vampires were afraid of humans, but they were also stupid. They didn't know what to make of her, but were inevitably drawn in by the blood.
She bounced her left foot back and forth. She'd been sprinting, not on her worn path, but through her pastures. There were benefits to training how you fought, and she fought with waist-high grass pulling at her legs, draining her quadriceps of energy and filling them with lactic acid. It didn't seem that grass should make that much of a difference, but it felt like sprinting with ten pound weights on your ankles. The grass also prevented her from seeing the gopher hole she had stuck her left foot into. She was lucky the stumble had resulted in only a tweaked knee.
A screech snapped her wandering mind back to the moment, and she planted her left foot and braced for impact. The vampire hit her in the back at top speed and all the bracing in the world wouldn't have prevented its weight from driving her face-first to the ground. She landed on her elbows. Her right hand still pinched the tarp shut at her neck, but her left had dropped the shotgun.
The vampire knelt on her back and gripped each bicep in a hand. Almost before Jessica hit the ground, the vampire began tearing savagely at her neck. As she felt it ramming its teeth futilely into the high collar of the knife-proof vest she wore, she understood that she'd fucked up so big that if it weren't for the vest, she'd be dead. That thought overcame her panic and filled her instead with rage.
The vampire perched on Jessica's back as if she were some stupid, passive bovine it could feed on at will. Jessica twisted and rolled to her back, and the vampire tumbled to the side as it lost its base. Jessica planted her elbow in its temple as she rolled, and it hit the ground dazed. But when she reached for it, she found her arms still bound up in the tarp.
The vampire flipped and landed on all fours, then scurried backwards a few steps, watching Jessica closely. Jessica saw the fear in its eyes, and knew that it would turn and run as soon as it had put enough distance between them to feel safe to.
Jessica took a breath, forced herself calm and stopped struggling with the tarp. She let it fall to either side and sat up out of it. Her shotgun was somewhere beneath it, but she had a .40 caliber Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol in a shoulder holster and drew it with conscious care. The vampire rose and turned to disappear into the dark of night. It moved with the frantic speed of its kind, so every fraction of a second counted. Jessica was glad she'd cut the first two knuckles worth of chainmail from the index finger of her right glove with bolt cutters. She calmly squeezed the trigger and put a hole in the vampire's back just right of its spine. It hit the ground and scrabbled.
Jessica kept the pistol trained on the vampire, but reached over to her black duffle bag and grabbed the handle of the baseball bat jutting from the zipper. She looked back to the vampire trying to regain its feet, and she shot it again, this time in the back of the thigh. The bullet hit square, and she thought that it had probably shattered the femur from the way the vampire now dragged itself forward. Good. She wanted to take the vampire, not kill it. And she wanted to put as few holes in it as possible. Its blood was likely as poisonous as its bite.
Still, she would have to soften it up. She couldn't take it with her as it was.
That's where the baseball bat came in.
It wasn't the best blunt-trauma weapon for a fight. It was too tip-heavy and slow for that. But when she had time to work, there was nothing like a nice aluminum bat. She used a seventeen ounce, twenty-eight inch kid's bat. In a pinch, it was light enough to use as a weapon, but it was still hefty enough for dirty work.
"Hey there," she said as she approached the crawling vampire. Her voice sounded strange in her ears. It felt strange in her throat. She'd been silent not just for those hours, but possibly for days. Except for the occasional word to her dogs, Jessica didn't speak.
The vampire turned and looked at her with wide, terrified eyes. It pushed itself up to one hand and started to limp away, but collapsed with a shriek as its femur came out of its thigh.
"That's a bad one," she said. Then she felt silly. She wanted revenge on these creatures, but they were nothing more than dumb animals. So she shut up and went to work with the bat.
She stayed away from the spine, because while a vampire spine would heal, it took a long time. She stayed away from the head, since thoroughly pulping the brain was one of the few ways to stop a vampire for good. She worked the ribs some, though she knew to quit just short of them popping through the skin. The creature shrieked for a time as she swung the bat into its guts over and over
Jessica gulped down air. Inside the heavy vest, sweat flowed down her body. On the ranch, she beat a tractor tire with a sledgehammer to build explosiveness, but training wasn't the real thing. She desperately wanted to remove her gear, but wouldn't until she sat safely inside her truck. The vampire lay twitching, white and long-limbed as some creepy, cave-dwelling spider. It had been a woman at some point. Probably middle-aged. Probably around the same age as her mom when she'd died a year ago. She'd probably been someone's mom, someone like Jessica.
It didn't matter. It wasn't a mom anymore. It was a monster. But it no longer seemed to be in any sort of shape to put up any sort of fight. So she tied its hands behind its back and hogtied its ankles to its hands, then connected that to her deer drag harness, also courtesy of dead Uncle Keith. She took off her shoulder holster and put it in her duffle bag, slipped on the deer drag harness, and began slowly plodding across the pasture. Her truck tilted into a ditch on the side of a dirt road some two-hundred yards away, and her knee already ached.
Jessica drove the county highways back. She'd been hunting about halfway between Wichita and her place near the Oklahoma border. Well, it wasn't exactly hers yet, but it would be in a month when she turned eighteen. The summer before, not long after she'd turned seventeen, her entire family had been killed by a vampire. Not one like the animal in the back of her pickup. Dennis had been intelligent, the result of a freak coincidence. He'd been a meth dealer, and when he held her captive he explained that somehow, meth had kept the vampire disease from destroying his mind while it turned him undead.
Dennis had wanted her, so he infected her parents and burned her house down. Uncle Keith had managed to save her and kill Dennis, but got bitten.
So Jessica chopped his head off with a hatchet.
Keith left his house and property to Jessica. It was being held in trust until she was eighteen, but after everything that had happened, Sheriff Wheeler made sure that no one tried to stop her from living there. Though there were no reliable witnesses to exactly how the slaughter happened—Sheriff Wheeler wasn't about to ruin his reputation and bring down chaos upon his community by admitting to the existence of vampires—rumors spread, and people gave Jessica wide berth as long as she kept to herself.
She was happy to keep to herself.
Instead of attending her senior year, she tested for her GED and took up ranching her father's and uncle's cattle on their pastures. The land had been divided in two by her grandfather and split between his sons. Now it was reunified in Jessica's ownership. She let the fields lay fallow, but the cattle were already there and she'd grown up ranching, and the hard work helped her to not think. When she thought, she tended to think of how her whole family might still be alive if she hadn't attracted Dennis's attention. Yeah, Dennis hated her uncle Keith, but that was her fault, too.
Driving was one of the times when she couldn't seem to avoid thinking. Especially at night.
She turned off the rocky gravel road into her long, gravel driveway.
A motley pack of hounds bounced around in front of the truck. They always greeted her, but with extra excitement when they could smell that she'd brought home a vampire. Her uncle had trained his dogs to track vampires instead of fear them, and she'd later trained her father's dogs beside them. No one else even knew that vampires existed because they had no way of finding them. Most dogs wouldn't track a vampire. People still thought their cattle had been attacked by some normal predator, cougars maybe, that had moved north up from Mexico and then moved on.
They thought they'd moved on because Jessica had cleansed almost all of south central Kansas of the fanged freaks.
She drove past the front of the slatted, white two-story with a big wraparound porch and continued through the turnaround right up beside a concrete storm shelter. It was a little bunker that sat halfway down in a pit, and halfway in a mound built up around it.
Jessica hopped out of the truck. Some of the hounds pressed their heads against her hands to be scratched. Some sniffed at the bed of the pickup and bayed as if she didn't already know she had a vampire back there.
"Come on," she said.
She didn't need them jostling around while she worked, so she walked up to the side door, the one that led straight into the utility room, and shooed them in. Buster and Fatty ignored her completely. She shouted at them as she held in the wriggling wall of dogs with her legs. Eventually the mutinous pair obeyed and she swatted their hind ends as she pushed them in.
With the dogs contained, Jessica could work in peace. She walked back to the storm shelter and opened the heavy metal door. It opened both up and out, being set at a forty-five degree angle to the ground. The smell hit her. There were no vampires in the shelter at that moment, but she had kept many down there over the past year. He'd never said so, but she figured her uncle had used it in the same way before. When she first checked over the property after inheriting it, she found the shelter stinking and blood splattered. Vampire fangs had littered the concrete floor.
Vampires reeked like the rotten blood they were filled with and always covered in, and though the weather hadn't gotten nearly as hot as it would, being only June, it was more than hot enough to make that closed-up bunker stink like an unearthed grave.
Jessica dropped the pickup's tailgate. The vampire hissed at her. Its mouth became so distended and full of fangs that it looked more like a deep-sea fish than a human.
Rage flared up in Jessica, and had she been holding her bat she might have bashed those fangs down its throat, but she calmed herself. It wasn't challenging her; its display was out of fear.
Jessica grabbed a handle of rope she'd knotted into the monster's bonds and dragged it out of the back of the truck. It shrieked when it thudded to the ground, and she knew its ribs were still broken. As she pulled it over the grass, her grimace of effort held a bit of a smile.
She took the vampire right to the threshold of the storm shelter, then climbed down inside. Four metal stairs led to the concrete floor. Jessica reached back up with both hands, braced a foot against the second stair, and pulled as hard as she could. The vampire rolled over the lip. Jessica gave the rope a sudden jerk as she stepped to the side and the body bounced down the stairs.
The vampire's eyes rolled and its jaws snapped open and shut. One of its loose dugs had torn as some point during the dragging, probably either over the strands of barbed wire left when she'd cut the fence or over the metal lip of the bunker. And its femur still jutted from its leg. The other wounds would heal, but Jessica didn't think that one would. The bone couldn't mend if it weren't connected at least a little.
She wanted the vampire in good shape.
Jessica would need to put her gloves back on to touch the thing's open wound. But she doubted she was strong enough to manipulate the bone back in by herself, anyway. Not with the vampire fighting her.
Then she got an idea. She doubted it would work, but it might be fun. She flipped on the lantern, then took a knife from her belt. The vampire's eyes opened even wider. They didn't understand much, but they remembered what a blade was. It writhed as she got closer.
The problem was that the flesh had retracted around the bone. Having its legs tied behind it stretched its quadriceps, which helped, but not quite enough. Jessica jammed the knife into the vampire's leg just beneath where the femur protruded from the muscle. The vampire bucked, but the knife was in four inches deep and wasn't going anywhere unless Jessica wanted it to. She gripped the handle with both hands and pulled the blade down, adding a long incision to the jagged puncture wound.
Jessica stood again. She kicked the vampire's upper thigh, and the femur pressed against the cut, then went in. The vampire's shrieks bounced around the concrete walls. She kicked it again and felt bone hit bone.
That was enough.
Walking up the stairs, she breathed deeply. Her hands vibrated. Her heart raced. She knew that if she looked in the truck's side mirror, her pupils would be dilated, just like when she'd done speed.
She liked hurting them too much. It was a weakness, to get that emotional.
She reached over the side of the pickup and grabbed the jug of cow blood. It held what she hadn't splashed over the tarp. She took it back downstairs and poured it into a shallow pan which she pushed near the vampire. It would need nutrition to heal.
She wanted it healthy.
Jessica stood in the upstairs bathroom, drying her hair with a towel. Her gear soaked in the tin tub of bleach and water beside her, which she'd soaked herself in before getting into the shower. She made sure to pour extra bleach on the throat protector of her knife-proof vest. The vampire venom that coated it was thick and a bit cloudy, like spit after drinking milk.
That had been such a stupid mistake, getting distracted by her knee like that. On the hunt, nothing mattered except your prey. Not your aches and pains. Not your boredom. Not your dead family. If she couldn't keep her mind on the task at hand, then she wasn't fit to hunt. And if she wasn't fit to hunt, she was fit for the loony bin, because without it, she'd lose the bit of hold she had left on the world.
She looked at her elbow, twisted it around and rubbed at it. Not a scratch. She'd been so lucky, blindly elbowing the vampire in the head like that. She'd seen elbow pads in her Galls police equipment catalogue. They even had some armored ones. She'd have to order a pair.
Jessica bet that Keith wouldn't have gotten distracted like that. He had focus, and when he turned it on people, they crumbled. He'd always just been her big, loveable uncle, but she'd seen the effect his presence had on others.
She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She knew that she'd gotten some of that intensity. She was built like him, too, which meant she took after her grandfather. Her own dad had taken after his mother, so that she felt closer to her uncle Keith than to her own father.
Keith had been tall, well over six foot, with broad shoulders. He wasn't bulky, but had that deceptive, steel-strong country muscle. You could see it in his hands and forearms, but even Jessica had been surprised when she'd seen him grapple a steer or casually hoist a sack of feed or armful of lumber up onto a truck bed.
This would be so much easier for him than it was for her.
But she had some of it. She stood five foot ten, and had the same broad shoulders. Sort of a swimmer's build. She had long legs. Keith had, too. Enough so that her dad had occasionally called Keith "Stretch." Jessica used to have the kind of legs that drove the boys crazy. The dirty old farmers didn't mind getting an eyeful, either. She'd sometimes worn little blue jean cutoffs. But her legs were different now. They were still long, but her quads stood out and her hamstrings bulged. They might still be able to drive the boys crazy. She didn't know because she didn't go into town in little shorts anymore.
Her abs were cut deep, and muscles stood out on her arms and shoulders. She didn't look like a bodybuilder, but she didn't have the same softness she once had. That softness had been from her father. She'd lost it when she lost him, even in her face. The hard jaw line had taken over and been joined by a hardness of the eyes. She looked like a lean, hungry wolf—and she liked it, whether it was attractive or not.
The next morning, Jessica hurt. The adrenaline had masked the pain and exertion. She got out of bed and hobbled a few steps. Her knee had grown stiff overnight. She'd have to be careful on it.
She made the bed, smoothing the quilt her aunt Irene had made and replacing the decorative pillows. Irene had taught Jessica to cross stitch, but then had died when Jessica was young, and Jessica hadn't kept it up. Jessica could remember her aunt sitting on the porch, stitching a country scene and humming tunelessly. Those were better times for everyone. Before the vampires, yes, but also Uncle Keith withdrew, and everyone had to worry about what he'd do next. Looking back, it wasn't the vampires that first brought the dark times, but the hungry cancer that ate Irene.
Jessica put on a clean t-shirt, jeans and boots, then her shoulder holster with the .40 caliber and went downstairs. She'd learned that the world was a dangerous place, and that it didn't usually give warning or time to prepare. In the kitchen she chugged milk from the container. She didn't like to eat breakfast, but she knew she needed calories for the work ahead.
Years ago her father had switched to late calving. It was more natural, resulted in more healthy calves and mothers, and it cut down on feed costs before the grass turned green. Jessica carried on the same practice, and still had several pregnant heifers in the enclosed pasture behind the barn.
June mornings are beautiful in Kansas. Jessica stepped out onto the porch and breathed in the cool, sweet morning air. Before long the sun and humidity would have her sweating, but not yet. She walked around the side of the house and let the dogs out of the utility room. Seven hounds clumsily rushing to meet the day couldn't help but put a smile even on Jessica's stern face. They milled around her as she heaved a bag of dog food from under the cupboard and stepped outside to pour a quarter of it into a trough.
Next, she walked across the yard to the chicken coop and opened their door. She dumped some grain into their feeder, but at that time of year they'd barely touch it, preferring the bugs they rummaged for as they strutted around the yard. Jessica went through their nests and collected almost a dozen eggs. She ate a lot of eggs. She probably didn't need the chickens, but they weren't much cost or trouble, and she'd taken care of chickens her entire life.
Once she'd gone back to the house and put the eggs in the fridge, she went to the barn to check on the calving heifers. There were four left. Though separated from the rest of the herd, and though bulging to ridiculous proportions with the calves inside of them, they grazed as they always had. There were no expressions of beatific motherhood on their vacant faces.
Three grazed as usual, that was. One didn't. From the way she moved, Jessica knew that it was time.
Mr. Nelson, the local vet, had already helped her deliver the malpositioned calves. The danger with the posterior presentation birth—or ass-first birth, as she called it—was that the umbilical cord would be severed or pinched off before the calves head had emerged, leading to suffocation.
The remaining calves were positioned to come out headfirst, and Jessica didn't think she'd need any help with them. She led the cow into a grassy pen near the barn and tied it up. The calf's snout and front hooves already protruded, and when Jessica put a finger in its mouth it sucked at it. That was good.
The heifer didn't want to lie down. The calf seemed to be in the proper position, so the best place for the cow would be on the ground where she could push the easiest. Jessica took the rope, tied two half hitches around her and pulled it until she went to the ground. It seemed for a moment that she would stand up again, but she didn't.
As the cow pushed, Jessica pulled, gently but relentlessly. When the cow rested, Jessica stopped.
But after some time, even Jessica's young back began to get sore. The heifer was becoming upset, and the calf wasn't yet breathing. Jessica finally realized that the calf wasn't as well-positioned as she'd thought. She'd never dealt with hip lock before. Her father always had. The calf's hip bones were caught in the heifer's pelvis. It was halfway out, but the chest was still inside the birth canal, which constricted it so that it couldn't breathe. The umbilical cord was probably still attached, but Jessica needed to readjust the calf to prevent injury to it and the mother.
Jessica had watched her father do this before. He'd explained to her that while the heifer's pelvis was largest up and down, the calf was largest side to side. Jessica pushed the calf back in as far as she could and twisted it. Without letting go, she began to pull hard. The cow lowed, but Jessica kept pulling, and felt the calf's hips slip free and slide forward. That was good, but the difficulty made it necessary to accelerate the process a bit, and though she didn't like to do it, Jessica strapped a come-along to the calf and cranked it out until it could breathe.
The heifer was tired, so Jessica helped until the calf had completely emerged. Jessica thought that she might have to drag the cow up after the difficult birth, but she stood on her own and began licking the calf. Jessica left to get iodine from the barn to spray on the calf's navel, and when she returned she found it already trying to stand. The mother kept nudging and licking the calf as it scooted and tottered around. As Jessica watched, the calf eventually managed to keep its hooves beneath it. The mother nudged it with her teats and the calf immediately began to suckle greedily. That was important, because the first milk contained the antibodies and nutrients the calf needed to survive its hostile new world.
Jessica watched the pair for awhile longer, though at that point she knew they would be fine. Her initial happiness faded as the scene brought back memories. She missed her mother. She didn't know if her mother would appreciate that watching two cows reminded Jessica of her, but there it was.
Jessica finished the rest of her work and showered, and thanks to the long days still had a few hours of daylight left. She'd taken to grilling her meals when the weather allowed, and put a big tinfoil packet of vegetables and a steak on the gas grill on the porch. It really was the only way to prepare a good steak, and she liked the no-fuss cleanup, too. Hell, she thought a crusty grill made better tasting meat anyway.
Once she had her supper going, she went to check on the vampire in the storm shelter. She opened the door, and the contrast between the beautiful early-summer night and the incomprehensible hell of that concrete bunker gave her pause. The stench, for one thing. And the creature violently flopping and twisting with its hands and ankles tied behind its back. It flashed its fangs at her and twisted its face into an expression never meant to have been seen in this world.
But it was still tied securely, and Jessica walked down the metal stairs with the jug of blood in one hand and her pistol in the other.
Pouring the thick cow blood into the pan, she watched the vampire's eyes flick back and forth between herself and the meal. She looked the vampire over. Its breast had healed, and the exterior wound caused by the compound fracture of its femur had closed. She didn't know if the bone had mended. There was no way to tell. The wait frustrated her, but she'd let it heal for another day.
She reached out with a boot to tap it on the thigh and the vampire strained such that it looked like it might yank its own arms off at the sockets to get to its feet. Thin muscles churned and jumped beneath the pale skin. Jessica chuckled and backed away, not wanting it to hurt itself. It would either be ready or it would die. It would probably die, regardless.
Outside the bunker, Jessica gulped down fresh air. She chained the metal door shut just in case, then went to flip her steak.
From the porch, she looked at her grain silo. There was still time, still daylight. She walked across the yard.
The grain silo stood near the barn. It looked like the Tin Man's head, but twenty feet tall and made of galvanized steel. Anchors bolted it to a concrete foundation that lifted it a full foot off the ground, to prevent moisture from getting in with the grain. It had a door like a porthole, heavy enough to stand up to the pressure of tons of grain. A ladder ran up to the top hatch where grain was dumped in. Keith hadn't had any grain in the silo when he died, and Jessica didn't grow wheat like he had.
She started climbing the ladder up to the top, and immediately something hit the inside wall hard. Very hard.
At the top, Jessica opened the hatch. A screech shrilled up out of the darkness and something hit the wall again. Jessica let her eyes adjust until she could see the vampire pressed against the steel, away from the circle of light shining down onto the dusty concrete.
This was a male vampire. Any fat it had had on its body in life had melted away, but its wiry form belied its strength. Jessica thought that if it got much stronger it might bash its way out of the silo. But she wouldn't let it get much stronger. It would get one more vampire. Then either she or it would die.
Jessica climbed down from her perch atop the grain silo and returned to her steak. The focus she'd been developing, consciously and unconsciously, was beneficial in most respects, but not in some. She'd spent too much time contemplating her enemy, and to call the premium cut of beef well-done would have been generous. She forked it onto her plate, and then gingerly picked up the foil packet of onions, potatoes and broccoli and plopped it down before it could burn her fingers.
She needed some water and started to set the plate down on the sideboard of the grill, then looked at the dogs. They lay in the grass and on the porch, watching the plate of steaming food with focus that made hers look like ADD by comparison. Each individual dog was a good dog, but sometimes together... If one thought that another would steal a bite, it'd steal the bite to get it first. They could lose their heads in their pack jostling.
Jessica decided that it was a good test.
She sat the plate down on the sideboard and watched the dogs' heads swivel between her and the food.
"Don't you touch that plate," she fairly growled. The dogs' heads drooped from the guilt of just thinking such disobedient thoughts.
When Jessica returned, the plate of food sat unmolested. She smiled. Then she noticed a truck coming down the road. Standing at the porch rail, she watched it approach. It slowed and turned into her driveway.
Sheriff Wheeler.
He held his arm out the window and waved as he brought the truck to a stop in the drive before the porch.
"Some beautiful weather we've been having," he said. Dressed casually in a short-sleeved western cut shirt, blue jeans and a ball cap, he pressed through the milling, barking hounds. Tall and lanky, he had a build similar to Uncle Keith's. But where Keith looked like slender bundles of steel rods, Bill Wheeler more closely resembled boiled spaghetti noodles.
Jessica thought for a moment that maybe that was too harsh. Maybe she still held some resentment for how he had treated her uncle, and how he had acted at the end. She wasn't sure if he were a coward or not. He wasn't fearless and overwhelming like Keith had been, but then again, Keith was dead. Like those boiled spaghetti noodles, Sheriff Wheeler gave. He adapted. He kept things in order and made sure he was still around to keep them in order. Keith had been as hard as they come, but that meant he had a breaking point, and when he reached it, he snapped.
"Good porch weather," Jessica said. "I would have thrown another steak on if I'd known you were coming by."
"You would have known I was coming by if you ever answered your damn phone." Wheeler walked up the porch steps and hesitated for a moment. Jessica almost thought he would go for a hug, and felt a moment of panic before she stuck her hand out. Wheeler shook it, gripping it like she was a man. Giving her respect. "Why do you even pay for a line is my question?" he asked.
She laughed a bit. "I probably wouldn't except I need to be able to get in touch with Mr. Nelson."
"You do that late calving thing, don't you? How's that going? Still got any waiting to drop?"
"Just had a case with hip lock this morning."
"They okay?"
Jessica nodded, "I've never dealt with it alone, but I've watched enough times. Mom and baby both doing good. Got three more to go."
Wheeler sat against the porch rail and crossed his arms. "Most everyone else has been done for months. I just don't know. You don't think they're too light when it's time for market?"
"They're lighter, but I save so much on feed. A heifer eats a heck of a lot to make milk for a calf. I can just let her graze. At the price feed is now, you're gonna have more ranchers calving late."
"You're probably right." Wheeler took off his cap and scratched his head. "You're probably right at that."
"All the hippy organic farms have been doing it forever," Jessica said, smiling.
"I think that's half the reason these good old boys won't switch over. They think they'll be growing sprouts and granola next."
"Heck, with all the soy they plant around here, you can tell them they're already growing tofu and veggie burgers."
Sheriff Wheeler slapped a leg and laughed. "Oh no, I won't be telling them that. I'd rather not get busted in the nose."
"Sheriff, can I offer you anything to drink?"
"What have you got?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Milk and water. I'd love to be able to offer you a beer..."
"But you're seventeen years old."
"Yeah, and nobody'll buy me any with you keeping an eagle-eye on me." Jessica smiled, but she knew that wasn't the reason. People were scared of her. She didn't have friends anymore. She went into town to go to the co-op or to fill up on gas, and that was it.
"I'm doing good. But I'd like to talk to you. You mind if we sit down?"
Jessica gestured to a porch chair. She glanced at her already-dry steak getting colder and dryer, but sat down, too. The steak was a lost cause, anyway. "So what's up, Sheriff? This isn't a social visit?"
"Not exactly. How are you doing out here?" He leaned forward and looked concerned. Jessica couldn't help but feel a bit condescended to.
"Doing good."
"I worry about you out here by yourself."
"I've been doing this my whole life."
"It's not that I don't think you're capable, Jessica. Listen, I love farm life. I love this community. When I see a young person who can make a good life for themselves out here, I encourage it. Everybody's rushing off to the city and forgetting how things should be. I honestly believe this is how we were meant to live."
Jessica nodded. Wheeler continued. "But small towns hold grudges. None of what happened was your fault, but they'll never let you live it down."
"I don't care about them." Pleasantries were an effort for Jessica anymore. Atrophied muscles strained to put emotion into her face. She let them go. Her face went blank, and then the blankness went deep.
Only three people walked away from Dennis's slaughter alive: Jessica, Bill Wheeler and Rachel Irving. Neither Jessica nor Sheriff Wheeler said anything about vampires. Wheeler let the vampire corpses burn up in the sun. Only Rachel insisted that Dennis was a vampire. But she had survived with a case of post-traumatic stress so severe that she had to be put in a home. Not the most reliable witness, so people weren't exactly prone to believe her tales of fanged monsters. But they also distrusted Jessica, the only member of her family to emerge alive. Alive and changed. They hadn't liked her uncle, and now they didn't like her.
"It's not healthy for a young person to live in total isolation. You got your GED. I seem to remember hearing that despite your lackluster grades, you did real well on the SATs and ACTs your junior year. Why don't you go to school, decide if this is the sort of life you really want? Go live it up in Manhattan or Lawrence for a few years and get some perspective. You need to spend this time with people your own age, not out here with only dogs and cows to keep you company. I called KU and K-State and it's not too late to apply, given your circumstances."
"My circumstances, huh? I sometimes try to think of how to describe my life now. I'm going to have to remember that. My circumstances." Wheeler started to speak, but Jessica cut him off. "I appreciate your concern. I really do. But this is where I belong. I can feel it. Sitting right here in this chair, where Keith sat. I can't run away from this."
"You know what this did to your uncle," Bill said with obvious delicacy.
"And you were part of that, so have some respect."
Bill hung his head like one of Jessica's hounds, and she felt twinges of both righteous anger and of regret for punishing Wheeler. She knew he'd already punished himself, and was trying to make his penance.
"Besides, they don't know it, but they need me here," she said, letting Wheeler off the hook. That was the closest she'd come to admitting that she was the reason their county was vampire-free. Wheeler obviously knew it.
"No offense, but we need your dogs. It's a catch-22. We can't train any dogs to track those creatures because they're too scared of them, but we can't break them of that fear without one of the creatures they refuse to track down."
"Regardless of the technicalities, without me this whole section of Kansas would be overrun."
Wheeler nodded and stood up. "I'm not trying to tell you what to do. I just wanted to remind you that you've got options. Despite everything that's happened, there's no reason you can't live a happy, normal life. But you're such a goddamn Harris. You know, I knew your Grandpa Harris when I was a boy. He scared the holy hell out of me. His eyes would pass over me and I always felt like I was doing something wrong and was about to be struck down by lightning for it."
Jessica didn't say anything, just watched Wheeler get up.
"There's one other thing," Wheeler said. "It goes hand-in-hand with I've been trying to tell you. Did you know that Dennis's cousin Randall moved down from Wichita and into Dennis's old trailer?"
"Yeah." She'd seen him once at the gas station.
"I don't like this guy. Dennis was just a drug dealer. At least before... You know. Randall, though, is dangerous. He's done time for some bad stuff, and gotten off on some worse stuff. And I've heard that he's been asking about you. I'm keeping an eye on him, but is there someplace you can go for awhile?"
"I'm not going anywhere, Sheriff."
Wheeler slapped the porch rail and headed for his truck. "I figured not. Please just be careful. And think about what I said."
The next evening, Jessica put on her mesh gloves just in case the vampire got feisty. Their joints were loose, and their range of motion had surprised her more than once.
Bugs of all sorts chirped. A cloud of them circled the big post lamp. Jessica had already closed the dogs into the utility room. It was past their bedtime, but she heard them whine and bark as she rode her 4-wheeler by the side door on her way to the storm shelter. They knew that she was getting up to mischief, and they wanted to be part of it.
But it wasn't mischief to Jessica. It was two other things: research and revenge. Vampires were dumb creatures, so it wasn't entirely satisfying taking out her anger and guilt on them, but it helped. Besides that, she was learning about them. She figured that she knew more about vampires than practically anyone else still alive.
She undid the chains wrapped around the storm shelter's steel door, then aimed her pistol with one hand while she opened the door with the other. When nothing came leaping out at her, she aimed her flashlight down the stairs and spotted the creature.
The vampire still lay with its hands and feet tied behind its back. She'd roped enough calves in her life. She'd even competed in junior rodeos back before she got too cool.
The vampire hissed at her. It looked a mess. It had drained the pan of blood she'd set out for it and licked it clean, all without the use of its hands. It had been filthy before, but now blood coated its entire face in a black crust from its hairline all the way down its neck. But it looked to be in much better shape than when she'd dragged it down there.
Jessica walked down the metal stairs and flipped on the battery-powered lantern. The vamp's leg looked good, though she wouldn't know for sure until she saw it in action. Its bullet wounds had disappeared entirely, and its chest had regained the shape it had before she'd pulverized it with her baseball bat. It seemed lively enough, the way it rocked around and snapped. It reminded her of the meaner fish she and her dad used to pull out of the lake, flopping around in the bottom of the boat.
Jessica had a strong urge to stomp its snapping jaws shut. Instead she stepped in the middle of its back and pinned it down long enough to get a good grip on the loop of rope she'd left in her knots. Then she leaned back and began dragging the creature up the metal stairs. Between the exertion and the thick, humid air she was drenched with sweat by the time she'd gotten it onto the grass.
The vampire shrieked and hissed, and even her normally-obedient dogs began to bark and bay from inside the house. But Jessica barely heard any of it. What she heard was a reverberating, arrhythmic pounding, the sound of battering rams bashing away at a steel gate. It was the vampire in the grain silo a hundred yards away. Then it roared, and the vampire in the grass went wide-eyed, silent and still before its entire body began to strain against its restraints. Its thin muscles pulled against its long bones and stood out from the flesh in grotesque striations. In its solid black eyes, Jessica saw fear. It looked almost as if the thing really would tear itself apart to escape its fate.
Jessica hurriedly hooked the loop of rope to a hitch on the back platform of the ATV.
Uncle Keith had left her a beast of a four wheeler. He'd worn out lesser ATVs and finally bought one that could withstand the rigors of ranch work. It was big and powerful and fast. Jessica handled the throttle carefully as she drove to the grain silo, dragging the vampire behind her.
The steel silo wasn't very reflective, but it stood out in the moonlight against the black night. The vampire inside pounded harder on its prison as it picked up their combined scents. The entire building reverberated, but the walls remained undented. They were thick—much thicker than the seemingly similar corrugated walls of the garage and tractor shed—having been designed to not crack under the internal pressure of tons of corn or wheat.
Jessica hopped off the ATV and dragged the frantic vampire to a grain conveyor that she left positioned beside the elevator. It ran at an angle up to the top. She climbed up onto the conveyor and lifted the vampire after her. It was only a few feet, and she lifted weights, but a barbell never tried to bite her as she picked it up.
She hopped down and watched the vamp for a moment. It tried to roll off the conveyor, but the short walls were too high for it to make it over without the use of its limbs. At least not without a considerable amount of time, which she wouldn't give it.
Jessica started the gas motor and then flipped the conveyor into motion. Just as the belt was about to dump the vampire over the edge like so much wheat, she switched it off, though the small engine still chugged noisily. She climbed the ladder on the outside of the silo and opened the top.
Without the sun shining down through the hole, the vampire below leapt for the opening. The silo stood twenty-five feet high, and from a flat-footed start, it could jump nearly twenty of those feet. So out of necessity, this would definitely be its final bout.
Jessica took the excess rope and tied it around the heavy hinge. Then she dragged the vampire off the conveyor and over the edge.
The vampire below hesitated for a moment. It pressed its back against the wall and roared up at the intruder. Vampires were not social creatures. They were extremely territorial.
Still, Jessica worked quickly, knowing that this vampire's experience and hunger would soon get the better of it, and might motivate it to leap even higher. The dangling vampire might be within its reach, and she wanted to give it a sporting chance. Not for its sake, but because she had worked so hard to see a fight, not to feed one vampire to another.
Jessica took her serrated pocketknife and cut the rope that secured the dangling vampire's ankles, so that it hung by only its hands. Then she sawed through the rope binding its hands, and it dropped to the blood-blackened concrete below.
It hit the ground in a crouch, and then rocketed backwards to the wall opposite the resident vampire, the current champion, as she sometimes thought of it. Jessica noted that the new vampire's leg held, even after the drop onto concrete. That was one of the most serious injuries she'd inflicted upon a vampire she'd left alive, and it had healed from it in two days with only a gallon of cow's blood for fuel. While she had hoped that it would be healthy enough to fight, she couldn't say that she was happy about it. These things were incredibly tough. Being already mostly dead, they were very difficult to kill.
Jessica had a good vantage point. The ladder ran up the coned top of the silo, so that she stood on a rung but basically lay with her head peeping over the hatch. From there, she could see the entire steel and concrete arena. She took the flashlight from her belt and shone it down, creating a spotlight.
The defending champion looked up into the light, squinted and roared. Over the previous battles, it had lost most of its fear. This would be fight number seven. If it won, it would have consumed seven other vampires. Jessica imagined that this put it somewhere near the same level of strength as Dennis when her uncle had fought and killed him. She marveled at the thought, because Keith had known almost nothing about these creatures and had killed a monster as powerful as or more powerful than the one glaring up at her.
Unlike Dennis, though, this thing was dumb. And naked. She hadn't seen how strange Dennis's body had gotten. He'd still worn clothes, and maybe he hadn't had the time to evolve. The things below her were animals, and like most of the vampires she'd caught or killed, they were completely naked. Well, the ones that had once been females often still wore their bras, probably because bras were made of tough material and fit so close to the skin that they remained despite vampires' savage lifestyle.
The new vampire still had its back pressed against the wall. The more powerful vampire looked away from Jessica to the invader. Jessica saw its shoulder joints begin to loosen up, the first sign that it would attack. This made its upper back actually widen, and its arms lengthen a bit.
Then it sprang.
The new vampire jumped to the side and skidded on all fours to face its attacker. It growled. Its lips distended, pulling back far beyond what a human's could, displaying a mouthful of horrific fangs.
But the resident vampire was unintimidated. Jessica remembered its first fight, when it had beaten and then drained a vampire that had won twice before. They had stood on opposite sides of the silo for hours, until Jessica wondered if they would fight before the sun came up and she had to shut the upper port. The vampire that had been living in the silo, the one that had fought before, finally built up the nerve to attack. It had been larger, but its opponent had landed a lucky rake of the claws across its forehead, blinding it.
After living through five more fights, the vampire had lost most of its fear of its own kind. Jessica imagined that it had been around sixty when it had been turned. It was hard to tell, because their faces became so distorted and their skin so strange and waxen. It had been a male. It wasn't much bigger than the new vampire, the thing that had been a female, but it looked more powerful, now. The six previous vampires it had fed on had changed it. It moved even more strangely. It moved so fast that it resembled an insect; it was in one position one moment and another the next, almost like watching a movie with missing frames.
Most vampires fed on cattle. They were fast, but not that strong. And while you wouldn't want to come across one accidentally, they weren't generally aggressive. They were more like hissing little foxes than wolves. Cow blood sustained them, but it didn't make them any more powerful.
Jessica couldn't be certain, because she'd never found a vampire that she knew of that fed on humans regularly, but she didn't think that human blood strengthened them, either. The ones that attacked humans did so out of desperation or because they were cornered. A lot of vampires were small, or like the champion below, elderly. A desperate vampire would attack the weak or the sick in order to feed. She imagined that's why Dennis had gotten attacked: because he'd been small with a bum arm. Like other animals, vampires could sense weakness.
But when a vampire fed upon another vampire, it got stronger. Whatever made them how they were—whatever virus or curse—it lived in the blood. Jessica thought that must be the reason they avoided each other at all costs.
But these two vampires couldn't avoid each other. The vampire she'd dropped in was still crouched, waiting, not knowing what to do. In the wild, it simply ran when it sensed another vampire nearby. Its instincts to fight had left it when it had changed from human to vampire. Humans fought. Vampires hunted or ran.
Except the reigning champ. She'd never created a vampire as aggressive as this old man. It stood tall and stared up at her through black eyes with a look that Jessica thought might be contempt. Then it charged again.
The invader again leapt clear, but this time the old man shoved off the wall and attacked again instantly. It grabbed the new vampire by the back of the neck and shoved it to its stomach. The pinned vampire reached back with one hand and dug its claws into the old man's thigh, and the old man replied by crushing its skull. Then it sunk its fangs into the invader's throat and drained it dry.
When it stood again, it reeled a bit. Jessica had once thought that it was simply exhaustion from the battle, but then after the last battle, it occurred to her that the old man had looked a little drunk. She remembered how her uncle had acted after he'd been bitten, when the venom made its way to his brain. His eyes had lost focus and his movements became heavy and clumsy. It had reminded her of a very drunk person, and now she knew for certain that she saw some of this in the vampire below. The fight—if it could even be called that—hadn't exhausted it. The potent vampire blood it had filled its stomach with was going to its head.
If she had wanted an advantage, that moment would have been the time to attack.
But she didn't want an advantage. She wanted a test. So, with the creature staring up at her with black eyes set in a blood-smeared face, Jessica closed the top of the silo and secured it. She would let the blood set in, let the vampire grow stronger, and then she would fight it.
Chapter 2
Kroger sat on the dirty floor directly in front of the television. His mind didn't register the bits of dirt sticking to his exposed calves. With the shades down to minimize glare, he didn't notice the sun streaming in from outside. He was barely even aware of the video game controller in his hand. It had become an extension of himself as he used it to wage a brutal, one-man war on an alien race. And he was hiiiiigh.
Wake and bake, man. Wake and bake.
Between the weed and the realistic new 16-bit graphics, he could practically feel the assault rifle thudding away in his hands as he shot down-range at the boss of the level, this weird, armored, half-insect alien, until Randall broke his trance with a slap to the back of the head.
Randall didn't say anything, just flopped onto the couch. He hadn't wanted Kroger's attention. He was just being a dick. Like usual.
Kroger heard the flick of a lighter, but the smoke that wafted over him didn't have the earthy bouquet of pot but the rank stink of tobacco. Kroger hated it when people smoked indoors, but what could he say about it? It was Randall's place, and he let Kroger stay there.
Kroger missed Dennis. He'd been an okay guy. It had seemed so, at least, until he went missing and then was supposedly to blame for the slaughter at the Irving's farm. But Dennis had disappeared again, if he'd ever been back in the first place, and wasn't around to tell his side.
Kroger couldn't believe it. Dennis wasn't a violent guy. First of all, he had the bum arm. Secondly, even before that he'd avoided confrontation. Yeah, he had his enforcer, Brandon, but Brandon wouldn't have decapitated or drained all the damn blood out of anybody. He was a big, doofy, generally likeable dude. He would beat on whomever Dennis pointed at, but he wouldn't do what the sheriff said he'd done.
It was a cover up. Yeah, weed made Kroger paranoid, but it was a conspiracy, for real.
"You suck. Give me the controller," Randall said. Kroger handed the video game controller up to Randall, who sat up from his sprawl across the couch.
"Let's see you do better," Kroger said. He didn't really care. He'd been on autopilot, had barely even noticed he was still playing.
Kroger wondered what had really happened that night in that big barn. The only survivors had been Sheriff Wheeler, Jessica, and Mrs. Irving, who'd gone nuts. According to her, Dennis had become some sort of monster. Nobody believed her because she had genuinely lost her shit after watching her husband get murdered, but Kroger didn't buy the official account either, that Dennis and Brandon had abducted people, murdered them—perhaps as part of a satanic ritual brought on by drugs and heavy metal—and had then fled after being confronted by the sheriff and Keith Harris.
Jessica had testified to the same thing, but there were rumors that she'd had something more to do with it, that she hadn't been some passive victim. With the way she acted now, Kroger could believe it. She was scary. Still hot, but scary, too. Like the mom in Terminator 2, Sarah Connor. In Terminator, she'd been all soft and pretty and had a perm. By Terminator 2, she'd spent years in a nuthouse and was shredded and—while still hot—completely terrifying. When she jammed that syringe full of cleaning fluid into that guard's neck, you could see that she'd kill him. She'd push that plunger in sure as shit. You could see it in the way her muscles all popped and twitched, and you could see it in her eyes.