Chapter Twelve
“Nemesis”
Priests and
Cannibals
Han Solo, all bundled up in his cold-weather gear, blaster in hand, raced across the snowy hillside into the teeth of the blizzard. He knew that Chewie was circling round the other side, knew the kid was waiting as backup, still—he had a bad feeling about this. Sneaking up on a well-armed traitor in the middle of a twilit snowstorm was not his idea of fun. He reached the end of the ridge and flopped onto his belly, blaster arm outstretched. He peeked over the frozen lip of the hill. There was Alastair, the traitor, kneeling beside some equipment, working on—what? A transmitter? A weapon? Han saw Chewie's noggin poke up over the hill on the other side, and he risked a quick hand gesture, keep your furry ass down! He steeled himself. Ready. Set.
The intercom bleeped.
With a sudden violent lurch, the icy hills of Hoth were transformed into Norbert's legs tented under a white comforter by an involuntary muscle spasm that sent the plastic action figures tumbling hither and yon. Norbert wished fleetingly that there was something he could do about the dread that was creeping into his system. He leaned over and hit the speak button before the second bleep. "Yes?"
"Ajax. I suddenly have an uncontrollable desire to speak with you."
Norbert lifted his hand from the speak button and sighed in a rather dramatic manner. He slid out from beneath his comforter, into his robe, and out the door. He padded down the narrow companionway, stateroom doors to port, portholes to starboard, to the large foyer at the end, dimly lit, with two large wooden doors with etched glass windows.
He pushed them open.
FTS Nosferatu was the largest ship in the Albanian fleet, but it had put into the Adriatic Sea only once in its lengthy life. It had been an Exxon oil tanker in its previous life, before a rather wealthy group of shadowy investors had paid cash for it and had it rebuilt to their specifications. Norbert was stepping into one of those now, a large, dark room which had been SA Mainline Tank #1 and was now Alastair's main office.
Water dripped somewhere. The only light was a green-shaded banker's lamp on the desk yards and yards away. The floor—
Norbert actually spared a glance for the floor. By the light trickling in through the etched glass he could see that the floor of the tank was covered with money, acres and acres of it, rainbows of pounds and yen and dollars and francs and marks and lire and florins and rupees, scattered like leaves upon the forest floor. He shook his head and set out across the expanse of currency, which rustled and crunched beneath his bare feet. Water dripped somewhere still. Some chains clattered ominously in the depths of the dark. Alastair waited in a pool of green light with a smile Norbert could see from all the way across the tank.
Two minutes later and Norbert reached the desk and the armchair before it. He sat.
Alastair kept smiling.
After another minute or so, Alastair bent down and came up with a recorder. Norbert had had plenty of time to reflect on the fact that the thing most…unsettling about Alastair was how very normal he managed to look. Alastair clicked the recorder on. "Sunday, sixteenth of November, it's about ten seventeen in the evening. An interview with Ajax."
Silence for another minute or so. Really, Norbert was thinking, it was the brush of silver just over the man's left temple. A touch that odd made his normality unique, and thus not worthy of a second glance.
"How old are you, Ajax?"
Norbert cocked an eyebrow.
"How many years?"
"You should know," said Norbert, "by now that the question never comes up."
"Not even in your own mind?"
"I prefer not to think about it."
"Surely sometimes—"
"I don't think, Alastair. I do. You wanted to talk, I'm here."
Alastair's smile uncoiled slightly, but it was impossible to tell whether it was at the interruption, the straight line, or the implication. "You bungled, dear boy."
Norbert's insides alternated so rapidly between icy dread and white hot rage that it threatened to hurricane in his belly. You damn fool, I'm older than you are, you aren't even one of us, all you've got is photophobic syndrome and delusions of grandeur! He steeled himself. One did not say such things to Alastair. Not these days.
"Point the first," continued Alastair in that ridiculously cheerful manner. "This Jill Mankevich character?"
One of the things about Alastair was that at some point in his life he had picked up an uncanny facility in reading people. One had to be very careful when one lied to him. Norbert prided himself on his caution.
"I don't know anything about her."
"You're lying," said Alastair, ever cheerful.
Whoa, heart. "You're paranoid."
"You've left a paper trail a mile wide and given the hounds every reason in the world to come sniffing after you. You panicked. Why?"
Being a vampire unfortunately does not grant one control over one's glands. Shame. "Didn't you hear? Flight 451 of Northwestern Airlines went down in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. It will take weeks for the rescue teams to find it, much less get anywhere near it. We're all presumed dead."
Alastair's voice lost its cheerful edge. "Not good enough."
"Why," slithered a new voice from the shadows behind Alastair, "do you continue to suffer its existence?"
"Gosh, Alastair," said Norbert. "I could have sworn this was a private conversation."
"Norbert. This is—"
"We've met. No wonder all the lights are out. 'When the Dark comes rising—'"
"Shut it up."
"I've proved my point."
"Norbert. The fact remains. You have endangered our community. Think on this."
The interview being over, Norbert stood, turned his back, and began to walk away.
"About Jack," said Alastair.
"Yes?" asked Norbert, stopping.
"He didn't live up to our specifications. Terribly sorry."
Norbert took a deep breath.
"Yesssss?" said the slithery voice.
"Nothing, Gaunt Man," said Norbert. He began to walk again.
Two minutes. His back itched violently, expectantly.
He reached the doors. Opened them. Shut them. Sagged against them. The last time he'd visited Nosferatu, the Gaunt Man had been reduced to hanging around the Cinema. Now he sat in on the Chairman's private conferences. Alastair, you damn bloody fool, you're selling us down the river to the Dark and I'm the one endangering the community?
Not that Jill had been a smart move.
•
He'd been studying Gullah in the Tiptree Memorial Library when she'd made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
"You're hungry, aren't you?"
Hungry? He'd been catching rats for the past three months.
He made an interrogatory noise in the back of his throat, and she bit her lip, hard, and let a drop of blood splatter onto the pages of his book.
Well? What would you have done?
She led him back to her room, and he followed in a stupefied daze, coppery warmth singing through his head, rich light, ruddy warmth. She sat down on the bed. Something about her roommate sleeping at her boyfriend's place, no matter. He knelt before her. Giddy. She held out a knife. How much? A cup? How much?
"All of it. I want what you've got."
Of course, of course, he'd rationalized. Free will, after all, he was under orders not to take any, not to coerce any. But three godforsaken months, and she waltzes across his path and offers it freely, the least he can do...
She offers him a knife. This will be cold, he tells her.
"I know," she says, and she shivers. She is still as he slits her throat.
And then for the longest time there is the slaking of the thirst.
Inside him a small sun warms something that had been cold for far too long.
He had gone so far as to tilt back her head and begin pouring new blood from his mouth back down her weakly gasping throat when the slaking of his hunger had finally cleared his brain. He couldn't possibly continue, couldn't awaken her.. He would be at the very least confined to the ship while she was tested, a process that could take years. And creating a rogue — that would get both of them hunted down, maybe even killed.
If he left her here, with just a dribble of blood leaking into her system, she would live a few hours before finally dying. She would never regain consciousness. She would spend her few hours left in a pleasant, warm, ruddy haze.
He had wiped his mouth, and hers, and cleaned after himself, fingerprints and such, and had left. Feeling bloated as a tick.
•
The Gaunt Man in Alastair 's clutches. Or vice versa.
Time, Norbert, to get off this ship.
You could have let her live, he thought.
You're going rogue, anyway.
•
Prehistoric
Animals
Janis stepped off the bus at End of the Line. Her memory was waiting there for her.
He was tall, and thin, and dressed as she always imagined Sherlock Holmes would on his Sunday drives.
"Don't touch me," she said.
"My dear child," he said. "How very nice to see you."
She clutched her backpack to her. She felt grimy and unprepared, in the same jeans and jacket and t-shirt she'd been wearing for the past three days, reeking of cigarettes and coffee, standing in the unreal Utah sun on unreal Utah dust with an unreal Greyhound pulling away and the only reality was standing before her in a Victorian summer suit and straw boater.
"You re—you—I—you taught me. You're Number One."
"Yes. And you're Jane Caulfield. And this is a hat. And that is the sky. It is so pleasing to see that you have not forgotten your lessons."
"Dammit!" Janis stomped her foot into the ground. "This isn't fucking funny! I can't remember!"
"I know." He turned around and began to walk away.
Janis felt suddenly light headed. Three days on a Greyhound for this? "Wait!"
He turned around. "You failed your Finals, Jane. Go home."
And off he walked.
Shoulders slumped, Janis walked across the street to a sign which promised dime coffee and air-conditioning that dripped blue ice.
Now what?
Follow him?
This isn't a spy movie.
It was a tough battle.
The coffee won.
Hell, she thought, as she continued across the street, if it really matters all that much, the universe will arrange it so that I find him later.
•
Everybody's Happy
As the Dead Come Home
Albert hated the Arb.
It wasn't the trees so much, although on a visceral level he detested the notion that his respiratory exchange depended on vegetation to proceed in good working order on any kind of a long term basis. The bushes could be dismissed on much the same grounds, although they had the added drawback of always getting caught in his pants and leaving seeds embedded in his socks, as if he wanted the responsibility of choosing their offspring's' new seeding grounds. Not that that happened much at all anymore. But he didn't think about that, as his current state depressed him, and he hated that.
Although he didn't have to worry about the insects anymore. This was a bonus. He'd always hated the unplanned nature of the Arb that allowed pocket armies of the ferocious beasties to develop. Last year he'd toyed briefly with the notion of proposing some kind of spraying program, but Albert was smart enough to realize that lynching would be rather painful and given the political climate of the campus, would almost directly follow such a proposal.
No. What Albert hated the most about the Arb was its reputation. Its Presence. Its Mystical Nature. Its Fairy Powers.
The irony of being dead and walking hand in hand through it with another ghost was not lost on him. He hated that, too.
Five minutes later Albert, for the first time in his life, had no idea what to hate. He would have spent some time exploring this notion, but he had just turned as white as if he had just seen a ghost, and his mind was preoccupied with that little fact.
Jill.
She'd suddenly let go his hand and run across the vast expanse of dry grass to a copse of dark green trees. Copse. Albert hated the word copse. "I," she'd said. "Albert, I am in here!"
He had said something about how patently absurd that was, as she was clearly standing there before him. "No," she'd said. "I'm in there. Me." And she'd plunged into the darkly green trees.
And Albert had steeled himself and followed.
And there. Deep in a small clearing. Jill. And Jill. Protoplasm. And Ectoplasm. Ghost, standing, pale. Body, lying, cut, gashed, hacked, torn. Pale.
"Albert," she'd said, in a long, low, mournful wail.
And he'd only been able to watch as she began to sink slowly into the body.
As she disappeared, he was briefly annoyed that he'd never asked her what it was like to have died.
And then the body had twitched, and coughed, and given a low, bubbling wail. It had rolled over and opened its eyes. "Albert?"
He absently knelt beside her and was about to brush some strands of hair from her face when he caught himself just before his hands had passed into her flesh. He snatched his hand back and shivered.
"No matter what," said Jill, each word an effort, "I still love you." Her eyes closed, and she slumped. She was still breathing shallowly.
Albert realized that he was thinking that it would now be much easier to complete his English paper, and he realized that he had found something new to hate, although he wasn't sure what it was, nor why.
•
Big Black Nemesis
It had been one week.
Christian uncurled.
Something was happening, right now, in the Arb.
His heart screamed, it was beating so fast.
He shrugged into his trenchcoat, grabbed his knife and an Ethiopian salt shaker in the shape of a squat, fat mother goddess.
By the time he left Saki, he was trotting.
He was running by the time he left the campus.
He made it to the Arb in time to call an ambulance for Jill Mankevich to whisk her into the hospital and into the history books.
Chris later collapsed that night, although whether it was from hysteria or lack of food or realizing for the first time that Janis had left Herschberg, no one could be certain.
•
Parthenogenesis
The warehouse was one of those enormous sheet metal constructions that had always reminded her of some kind of bizarre musical instrument. Janis had always felt like running up to them and kicking out some tune, heavy on percussion and thick bass.
She'd spent the last three nights in what passed for the End of the Line bus station. Her neck hurt. But she'd found Number One.
Right, Janis. Like now you're going to play Hardy Boys. The sunset behind her was glorious, probably because it had so much empty sky and nothing to compete with. She spared it one last glance over her shoulder as she snuck up the warehouse's parking lot.
The door was unlocked. She paused before opening it. It was, after all, the only door. There were no windows. What would she have done if it had been locked?
Face it, she thought to herself. Sneaking up just isn't your style.
She turned the knob and threw open the door.
There was one enormous room in the warehouse, and it had been furnished like a studio apartment in New York, each corner and section of wall set up as if it were its own room. In the middle of this vast and echoey space was a large white bed in a pool of light from a spotlight above.
With a sick feeling in her stomach, Janis walked over to the bed.
Jill was sleeping peacefully in the bed.
"The freshman class."
Janis spun around to see Number One standing there.
"Jill?"
"Hardly. Her child. I am a patient man."
•
No One Move a Muscle
As the Dead Come Home
Norbert reclined the airplane seat all the way back.
Gods and years of pain but he was tired.
Afterwards, if he had to put a finger on what it was that saved what passed for his life these days, he would mention something about just how quiet it had suddenly gotten.
He looked up.
One by one, the lights were going out.
He might have been closer to the mark had he mentioned his heightened strength. He turned without thinking and punched through the window. Or his agility. As the lights around him winked out of existence, he squirmed through the very small hole.
The plane hadn't even left the gate yet. Still mindlessly, Norbert dropped to the ground and began to run.
Behind him, all the lights on the Nome Airfield went out, one by one.
•
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