Undesirable: Chapter 23
TITLE: Undesirable (A vampire novel)
RATING: NC-17 (This chapter PG-13)
SUMMARY: Help finally arrives.
Word Count: 6673
Chapter 23
I wasn't unconscious, I wasn't even asleep, but I seemed to collapse into myself as Wally rowed our stolen boat down the river. I listened to my pounding heart and felt the parts of my body as they gradually woke up from the numbness of cold. My head ached where it had hit the dock and my stomach felt queasy, but after about fifteen minutes huddled in a fetal position, I began feeling a bit better. I gingerly pulled myself to sitting and began sifting through the litter of clothes for something to wear.
"Hold on," said Wally, as my clumsy movements caused the boat to rock. He then paddled us over to a shallow beach of pale round stones, leapt out and then proceeded to drag the boat up onto the shore with me in it. I found my clothes and began putting them back on, feeling instantly more human.
It was at that point that I began paying attention to something besides myself. Wally had taken his shirt off to cover me and his skin was milk white with chill. I could see the goosebumps on his chest and belly and his nipples stood out pale and hard. There were a quite a number of dark purple bruises on his arms, shoulders and chest, most of them small and round like fingerprints. Leftovers from the fight with Abram. He looked disheveled, exhausted and abused. I snorted out a breath. Man, we were quite a pair right now, weren't we. The drowned rat and the punching bag.
Wally picked his shirt off the top of the discarded pile and stuffed the rest of the damp clothes back into the pillowcase while I put on my shoes. The noise of the river and the occasional warbles of birds were the only thing competing with the grunts of our breath. Throwing the sack over his shoulder, Wally let out a deep breath and looked out over the waist high reeds at the line of dirt road heading up what amounted to a "hill" in these parts. He rubbed his unshaven face, then turned back to me. "You okay?"
"Yeah." The rest remained unsaid, because it didn't need to be.
I'd nearly drowned. For this whole crazy venture, from Chicago, to Kansas City, Wyoming and back, I'd been scared silly. And yet, the vampires hadn't so much as slapped my face for my insolence. Even Darlene hadn't threatened me, and lord knows she had every reason to. No, my life had never been in any actual danger until I entered the river, and I'd done that to myself. It was sobering: my biggest threat was not from Abram, or Nadette, or Jeffrey, it was me and my crazy quest to buck the system. And I didn't want to die, I realized in a sickening revelation. I could put all kinds of premiums on my freedom, but in the end it came down to that: I wanted to live, and I didn't want anyone else dying over me. Maybe that made me a coward. Maybe it meant that I didn't take my own cause that seriously. Maybe I was giving up. But given the choice of giving up and facing another situation like the river, I was going to give up. I'd found my limit.
I covered my hot face with an icy cold hand and sat down on the sun-bleached trunk of a fallen tree. My gut clenched with adrenaline as the implications of my near-death experience sank in. Maybe, just maybe, I needed to be controlled, like the vampires kept telling me. My judgment clearly was for shit - even Wally, who loved me, had been calling me out on it. This wasn't even the first truly stupid thing I'd done. I'd let myself get pulled into a number of fistfights back in high school - any one of which could have gotten me expelled. I'd once argued with a cop and ended up spending a couple of hours in jail. Worst of all, I'd been mugged at knifepoint once and it was pure luck that the guy left with only the contents of my wallet. I'd known the neighborhood was bad, but I'd walked into anyway, supremely confident that I could go where I pleased and be respected by the people I encountered. Maybe I should just turn myself in. At least with the vampires, I'd never have to worry about my physical safety.
But then, we'd made it this far, I might as well give it one more try before throwing in the towel.
"Feel up to walking?" Wally asked after a few silent minutes.
"Sure." I stood up and shoved my hands in my coat, pulling it tighter around my body. I had on both my shirts and my windbreaker, but I was still shivering in spurts.
"Cold?"
"I'm fine. Though, I'd kill for a coffee." I grinned at him.
The corner of Wally's lip twitched, but he didn't smile. He was probably mad at me for almost dying. I know I'd have been plenty mad at him if he'd done something similarly harebrained. But he didn't yell at me, or accuse me, or any of the things I half hoped he would, just to get it all out in the open. Instead he quietly turned back to the reedy shore and pointed. "Let's try get to the top of that hill and see if I can get some reception on my cell."
We walked in silence through the underbrush until we hit a deeply rutted dirt road little wider than a car's undercarriage. We followed that up the hill, avoiding the nuggets of horse manure left ripening all over the place. The place smelled strongly of farm. Half way up the hill, fences made of low, weather-greyed posts strung with rusted barbed wire sprang up to either side of us. We passed a group of horses, still with a bit of winter shagginess left to their coats, grazing quietly in a pasture to our left.
At the top of the hill, Wally held his Iphone up to the sky and somehow found a single bar. He sat on the root of a twisted looking old apple tree and began thumbing out a message to the email address provided by the resistance. I put a careful hand on the top of a splintery post and watched one of the horses jump into a frisky sort of prance, snort and shake it's coat. It then caught sight of me and wandered hopefully over, but I had nothing to feed it, so it drifted away again.
Wally put his hand on my shoulder. "Done. We might as well walk up the road while we wait for an answer."
And so we did. I'd thought that driving through the countryside was a bit like being on a treadmill. Walking felt even more like that. Half an hour later, when Wally's phone burst into the opening bars of Thus Spake Zarathrustra, we still had pasture to either side of us and the apple tree was clearly visible. Wally pulled the phone from his belt and answered it. I listened in as he described our surroundings in detail, then grunted an "Alright, see you soon," and hung up.
I waited expectantly.
"He said to wait here, it will take him about an hour to drive out to where we are."
"Who said that?" I asked.
"Resistance Guy called himself Tea-for-two. He said he'd be driving a dirty white Ford extended cab."
I nodded, relieved that contact had been made, but even as I relaxed on one point, I began worrying about another. What if this Tea-for-Two fellow was another Stan? Or worse, what if he was just some creep looking for a couple of guys who wouldn't be missed? There were so many ways this could go wrong and very few for how it could go right. I had to bang my head against the palm of my hand in an effort to stop thinking. I was just too damn worn out to keep chewing my gut like this. I desperately needed it all to just stop.
I noticed Wally had put down the bag of clothes and was trying to perch himself on a lumpy boulder. He looked as pensive as I felt, so I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. He put his hand on mine and then with his other hand he rubbed his mouth. To my surprise his eyes were slightly red and glassy, like he might be on the verge of crying.
"Hey," I said, not trying to embarrass him, just letting him know I was there.
Wally blinked hard and tightened up. He looked up at me and nodded. "She was kind of a bitch wasn't she?" A shivering shock went through me as I realized that he had been thinking about Darlene. "What did you call her that one time? Lady Dingaling?"
"Yeah, that was rude of me. I'm sorry. I didn't know what she meant to you."
"She was a dingaling. And she wasn't very nice, either. But tell me," said Wally, his voice suddenly growing sharper as he leveled a look that was half challenge, half plea for understanding. "I know you are shaking your head at me because you hate vampires, but tell me, don't you ever wish to be part of something bigger and cooler than yourself? I mean, the vampires are our Lords, doesn't that resonate at all with you? Shit, I can't put words to this, but -- I mean -- don't you want to have someone to look up to, to follow, not because they are faultless, but just because you want to give that part of yourself to someone?"
"Fealty? Like a knight to his Queen?" I hazarded. Oh, Wally, so romantic.
Wally's eyes lit up with relief, "Exactly. That's exactly what I mean."
I shook my head, guiltily. "Not really, no? I admire people who do admirable things, but I don't love someone just because they have some title. I guess I can understand the impulse, maybe?"
Wally's face fell in.
"You want someone to be your Lord," I said. "You don't want to be part of a resistance." Christ, I couldn't understand that. The idea of some vampire running his hands over Wally's body, drawing him close, biting him. I shuddered with disgust. The pleasure might be addictive, but there was just something degrading about it. How could anyone ask for that?
Wally sighed. "I want to be with you, George. And the Resistance is the only way that's going to happen." He stood up and shrugged my hand off. "Never mind. Abram's right: Loyalty is one of my failings."
"Oh, don't say that!" I countered, angrily. "Abram is full of shit. He wasn't against you being loyal, he just wanted that loyalty directed at him." Then I noticed Wally was looking at me and realized -- Yeah. Shit. Loyalty to me. He shouldn't even be here right now, neck deep in my problems. I swallowed and turned away.
"It's been a bad couple of days for me, Geo," Wally apologized, but it didn't take the sourness away from guts. "Fuck," he said suddenly, "Give me a break." And we both settled silently in a tired funk while we waited the rest of the interminable hour for our ride to appear.
Eventually, we heard the sound of a motor and saw a truck appear from around a copse of trees at the end of the long rural lane. It drove slowly over the potholes, the hood bouncing up and down, it took a full minute after it appeared it finally came to a stop next to us. The truck was theoretically white, but the layers of dust and dirt on it made it closer to brown. I worried briefly if this was actually our ride or if it was the guy who owned the ranch wondering who the fuck we were and why we were hanging out on his property.
The guy behind the wheel did nothing to alleviate that worry. He looked at least sixty with a wild head of salt-and-pepper hair and a full Santa Claus beard. He rolled down his window and looked us over with deep suspicion. "Wally and George?" he asked after a long uncomfortable moment.
"And you are?" Wally asked, no nonsense.
"Tea for Two."
We both let out a breath. This was it. Wally and I gave each other a reassuring nod and headed around the front of the truck to the passenger's side. Tea-for-Two growled at us as Wally opened the door, "Whoever takes the front seat better be able to read a map. Back seat is in charge of the cooler."
I took the back seat, not because I couldn't read a map, but because my legs were a lot shorter than Wally's and the bench back there looked like it was meant more for kids and pets than full-grown adults. At it was, even at 5'4" my knees ended up being squashed. Resting on the seat next to me was a 50 quart cooler.
"Okay, boys," said Tea-for-Two, gruffly. "I got a couple of rules we need to go over before I take you to your destination. First thing, I know at least one of you has a cell phone on you."
Wally drew his Iphone off his hip.
"Did you take any pictures of me or my truck as I was pulling up?" Tea-for-Two asked.
"No sir," said Wally.
"Good. Now I want you to erase the history of that last call I made to you, then I want you to turn your phone off. And you back there, if you got a phone, it goes off, too. Same for any electronic devices, lap tops, PDAs, anything. Those all go off and stay off."
"Why?" I asked.
Tea-for-Two swiveled in his seat to look back at me. Santa beard or not, he looked damn scary. "Cause that's what I just told you to do, boy. See, let's get this understood straight off the bat: I'm putting my life on the line for you two, so you don't go questioning my rules. You just know that there's a damn good reason for them and you obey them, or get the hell out of my truck. Got it?"
"Yessir, " I said, thoroughly intimidated.
"Okay, everything off?" When we nodded, he went on gruffly. "Next rule - you will find a paper bag next to each of you. All trash goes in there. You don't get crumbs in my truck." There were mud stains on the back of the front seats, and foot prints on the floor of the cab. Tea-for-Two seemed to sense my thoughts because he said, "Mud don't attract ants or raccoons."
"Understood," said Wally.
"Good," Tea-for-Two nodded. "Last rule. We can talk about anything you boys want, except politics or religion, because I got strong opinions about both and I'm not in the mood for an argument. Oh and you don't ask me any personal questions, either. You don't need to know what I do for a living or if I got any family or what town I live in."
We nodded our agreement. Then, like a sudden ray of sunshine, Tea-for-Two brightened up. He gave us both a huge toothy grin. "Well then, good to meet you two. Off we go." The truck lurched forward and began to move at a steady 5 miles an hour down the lane past the ranch, retracing our steps down to the river then a further mile or two until it met up with a paved section of road.
It was clear from the way Tea-for-Two had been talking that the contents of the cooler were available to us. I peeked inside and saw to the delight of my stomach a number of sandwiches in zip lock bags and bunch of sodas tucked down into the ice. My stomach gave an embarrassingly loud squeal. Last nights dinner had been a long time ago and the morning exercise seemed to have sucked all the sugar out of my blood. Wally watched me, looking hopeful as well.
Tea-for-Two noticed our attention and said, "Go ahead, you grab something to eat. That's what it's there for. Figured you two might get hungry and we aren't stopping for anything except gas and bathrooms."
I picked the first sandwich and handed it to Wally. I offered the next one to our driver but he shook his head. "I've eaten," so I took the sandwich for myself. It was white bread and baloney slathered with mayonnaise with a thin slice of tomato and a single leaf of lettuce - the same kind of thing my mom used to make for me when I was in grade school. Two weeks ago I'd have turned my nose up at it, but not today. I tore my way into the plastic and took a huge bite. It tasted fantastic. My whole body welcomed it. Even though I normally don't like mayo that much I found myself licking the excess from my fingers. I followed it with a can of Mountain Dew and for a few minutes I couldn't think of a single thing wrong with my life.
While we ate Tea-for-Two drove us down a series of rural roads until he reached the onramp to I29 going South. I pressed my lips nervously together as he eased the car up to speed and merged with the Tuesday morning traffic. This was the road we'd taken when we'd first run away from Nadette, only then we'd been headed in the opposite direction.
"We aren't going through Kansas City, are we?" I asked, nervously. That seemed a bit too much like testing fate.
To my relief Tea-for-Two shook his head. "I heard the two of you are in trouble down there. No, we're splitting off the freeway at St. Joseph and taking 59 to Topeka. That's where I hand you over to my contact. She'll take you from there."
"Where is she going to take us?" asked Wally.
"No idea. That's how this business works," said Tea-for-Two. "I'm a runner. I pick up a package here in my area and I run it down to the next area over. Sometimes it's people like you two. Sometimes its objects, money or even guns. I don't know the plan, where they are going or why, that way if I'm caught and a vampire reads my mind, I won't give away the whole operation. Usually, once everything is done and clear, my contact will let me know what happened and give me the full story, or at least as much as won't jeopardize on going plans."
"Guns," I said, "You mean the resistance is killing vampires?"
"Oh yeah. We've taken out sixteen that I know of, probably a lot more I don't. You wouldn't know if for listening to the news, though."
"You were there?" I asked, feeling a bit of my earlier excitement about the Resistance coming back. It was the first I'd heard of any humans getting the upper hand with vampires. "Were you part of that? Did you take one down?"
"Me? No," said Tea-for-Two, laughing. "Oh god no. I'm brave in my own way, kid, but I'm not that foolhardy. I'm just paid to run things, not to shoot them. But I know it's true because one of those vampires was in my area, and I saw the aftermath. The new vampire who took over the territory is a vast improvement. Vast improvement."
My heart was pounding and I felt a surge of hope. This was a real resistance, not just a two-bit operation. This is exactly what I'd been hoping to find. At the same time I felt a bit of trepidation in light of my earlier revelation. Would the Resistance expect me to take a gun and shoot a vampire? What if I didn't have the guts to do it? What kind of life was I signing Wally up for? Tea-for-Two couldn't tell us that much about the Resistance. Outside of the ins and outs of smuggling, he didn't know what they were up to and he didn't want to know, either. I gave up asking questions rather quickly as he lost his sunny disposition and returned to the gruff paranoid man who'd picked us up. I fell into silence for the rest of our trip with him.
Just as Tea-for-Two promised, at St. Joseph's we turned off the freeway, wound our way through the town and bailed out on a rural highway on the far side. I gazed out the endless crops while Wally and Tea-for-Two talked avidly about baseball. Half an hour later we crossed the Missouri river again. I looked down at the clear dark waters that had almost taken my life and flipped it the bird. Before I had a chance to feel any closure, it had fallen into the distance behind us, no longer an insurmountable obstacle, just a feature and a rather forgettable one. That, I profoundly hoped, was the last time I'd ever see that particular body of water.
Just outside of Topeka, Tea-for-Two pulled into a filling station. It was the first stop we'd made and Wally and I eagerly made for the attached minimart to get the keys for the toilets. When we got back we saw our acerbic driver pumping gas for a strange blue sedan. Puzzled we wandered over to see what was going on.
"Boys," said Tea-for-Two as we approached. "This here's my good friend Mindy, she's going to be taking you on from here."
Mindy craned her head out the drivers side window and waved at us. She looked to be about our age, rather on the chubby side, with dark eyes and tan skin and her curly black hair pulled back in a red handkerchief. Her round face was pleasant. "Climb inside," she said.
This time Wally insisted on taking the backseat and letting me have the front, which made no sense, but whatever, if Wally needed to fair about things, it was best to indulge him. As I sat down I happened to see Mindy's right arm for the first time and a felt a profound shock ripple down me. The arm looked perfectly normal from shoulder to elbow, but there it ended. Her forearm was shortened to a ball with five fingers, each no larger than a baby's toes, poking out of the rounded end. It reminded me of Darlene's healing arm so jarringly that I had to fight to suppress the surge of nausea I felt.
"Yeah," said Mindy, dryly. "I get that a lot. You'll get used to it."
I realized that she'd seen my reaction and had drawn the obvious conclusion. "No!" I said. "I'm sorry, it's just we were just with a vampire who was … in bad shape…"
She raised an eyebrow at me, and Wally and I explained about Nadette and what had happened to her. I remembered the incredible smell and the wounds healed still gaping. The regrowing arm had honestly been one of the least horrific parts of her.
"Well relax, I'm not a vampire, just a cripple," She laughed a bit bitterly, "This is as much as it's ever going to grow." She then bent the elbow around the shift stick, and put the car deftly into gear. Tea-for-Two gave us one last wave and then headed back to his own truck as we pulled out of the station and onto the road. "Actually," she said, as soon as she was settled into traffic. "You guys should be thankful for my wonky arm, because I would not be driving you today if it weren't for it." When we looked confused, she clarified. "I would be Red instead of Brown. Brown makes me undesirable, and that means I can drive anywhere I want to, whoo hoo!" she smiled gloriously.
I smiled ruefully. "Yeah, I remember how that was."
We ended up talking about my past job and how I'd lost my undesirable status. Mindy didn't seem to have Tea-for-Two's paranoia about revealing her home life. In fact she shrugged the whole idea of anonymity off as if it were preposterous. "If some vampire wants to find me, they are going to find me. I'm pretty distinctive." She then started talking about how she'd gotten involved in the Resistance.
"So what happened is my cousin Barney was in line at the movies and this guy came and cut in front of him. My cousin was all, 'hey, you just cut.' This dude just looked at him funny and started to buy his tickets. Barney said 'get in line, asshole,' and the guy turned around and hit him." Mindy held onto the wheel with her elbow and mimed a punch. "Then Barney hit back and put him on the ground. So anyway, turns out the dude was Harem, and his Patron came after my cousin for revenge."
I felt a sick feeling of sympathy in my stomach. "What was his Patron going to do with him?"
Mindy shook her head. "Don't know, probably kill him. They can, you know, kill you. There's no law against it."
"Law, what law," I agreed.
"So anyway, I put Barney in the trunk of my car and drove him out to Texas where my cousins live. While I was down there I was approached by the Resistance. Turned out they'd been following my cousin, thinking of trying to get him out of the situation, and then they got interested in me and asked if I wanted a job driving other people out of similar situations. I said sure. That was five years ago, haven't looked back since. Man I love my job."
Well, damn, I loved Mindy's job, as well. Christ, it was perfect for my temperament. Lots of travel, a bit daring, saving people. I yearned to be part of that so badly it physically hurt. I ended up grilling Mindy about her other assignments. Turned out a lot of people had the bad luck to run afoul of harem, who in turn sicced their patrons on them. In some communities it had been particularly bad, with the harem behaving like vampires themselves and demanding everything from sexual favors to free goods and services.
All this talk of badly behaving Harem made Wally uncomfortable. "I'd never do something like that," he said more than once.
"Of course you wouldn't," said Mindy. "Anyway, you can't really blame the harem. It's the vampire's fault. They could stop it if they wanted to, easily, but they don't. And sometimes the harem get the bad end of things, too. I had to rescue this one guy whose vampire liked drinking him sour." She shuddered, the edges of her mouth turning down. "That vampire absolutely terrorized him, finding any excuse she could to punish him. Poor guy was in terrible shape when I got him. I dropped him off at the first hospital outside that protectorate I could find, he was that bad off. I wouldn't want that guy's therapy bills."
I craned my head around so that I could meet Wally's eyes. He looked as horrified as I felt. Yeesh! As bad as the last weeks had been, it could have been much worse. Nice to be reminded of that.
"That was the first time I worked directly with Chuck," said Mindy. "Chuck's the guy I'm going to be handing you off to. You guys must be in it pretty bad because he only deals with the really tough cases."
"Please tell me that's one of the sixteen vampires that you guys killed," said Wally, unable to let the last story pass.
"Oh yeah. Chuck's crew got her that night." Mindy switched arms at the wheel long enough to mime a slit throat. "When they are that bad we take them out. Well, not 'we' as in 'me', 'we' as in the Resistance. Though I was ready to strangle that bitch after what I saw. Thankfully, that's Chuck's job and he's good at it. Don't worry though, he's a sweet-heart, despite being a vampire killer," she added hastily, in case Wally and I were disturbed by the idea of being handed off to an assassin. "You'll like him. He's always so completely calm and good humored no matter how hairy things get. He's a total rock."
Despite seeming to have her mind more on the conversation than the road, Mindy turned out to be an excellent if a bit aggressive driver. We made great time down I 70, at times moving at a breathlessly quick clip, but still managing to be below the limit at all the speed traps. "I know this stretch really well," she said by way of explanation.
Like Tea-for-Two, she had a cooler in the car, filled with sandwiches, fruit and chocolate bars for "desert." Mindy indulged in two of those herself. What with the baloney sandwiches earlier, I began to feel rather like a kid on a long cross-country drive. The only thing missing was the sightseeing. Except for rest stops, and once for gas, we never left the car. In just under five hours we'd crossed out of Kansas and into Colorado.
The shadows were getting long when Mindy spun the wheel around deftly and took us off the freeway. Wally was snoring softly in the back and, with the sun in my eyes, I was starting to feel a little sleepy myself. My body was tired from sitting for so long. I squirmed as the strap of the seatbelt kept creeping up over my neck. Mindy turned again hard and I shrugged myself upright and looked around to see what was up.
She'd pulled into a dusty and drab but well populated rest stop. Two non-descript brick buildings sat in the middle of a sea of asphalt. All around was a field of grey-green grass dotted with yellow wildflowers and the occasional scrubby looking pine. A couple of elementary school aged kids were chasing each other in the empty dog run, their shrieks and laughter sounding thin and swallowed up by wide open countryside.
Mindy climbed out of the car and stretched, her back audibly cracking. Wally and I followed and I could actually feel my joints creak as I stepped off the tarmac onto a grass. The air smelled dusty and the grass looked dry. I was walking around, grateful that Mindy hadn't insisted we immediately get back on the road after finishing with our bodily duties, when I noticed a car pulling next to ours.
Mindy suddenly perked up. "Oh, yea, Chuck's here," she said. Wally and I watched a man with brown hair climb out of the Prius. He was carrying a Subway Sandwich bag and heading over to one of the pebble and cement trash containers when the three of us got to him.
He looked our way and smiled warmly and I was absolutely struck by just how much he didn't look like a vampire killer. He was short, for one thing, not more than an inch or two taller than myself. Late twenties, early thirties with a round and wholesome looking face. He wasn't fat or thin, and though he looked reasonably fit, he didn't have the bulging muscles I'd expect from someone who was ostensibly muscle for the Resistance.
To be completely honest, my first impression of him was that he reminded me strongly of Jimmy Weaver, of all people. This, I realized, is just what Jimmy would have looked like if he'd had a chance to grow up. With that thought I felt a kind of magic serendipity about our meeting. I'd been thinking of Jimmy Weaver when I first started running - maybe seeing Chuck meant that this was where my running would end. And with that I became hugely prejudiced in favor of Chuck, even though the dude hadn't even said a word yet.
Mindy introduced us. "Hi, there," Chuck said and then ended up juggling his soft drink and Subway bag to have a free hand to shake. "Sorry about that. Did the two of you eat yet?"
"We had sandwiches in the car," Wally said.
Chuck looked into his bag and pulled out an unopened bag of potato chips, "Either of you want this?" he asked. "I'm full." When we shook our heads he dumped the bag and the chips with the soda into the trash and clapped his hands. "I was up all last night so I grabbed some breakfast before coming. Say, you guys tired of car rides yet?"
"Oh howdy," I said. Even the thought of sitting in a car made my back start to ache again.
"Good, because we are almost at Denver. I've got a place were you can recoup and get some dinner. Then we have some decisions to make." Chuck then clucked at Mindy. He reached into one of the wide pockets of his slacks and handed her a fat envelope. I caught a glimpse of the edge of a wad cash. "Don't skimp on the hotel," he told her. "Get a nice five star one. The kind where they give you chocolates on the pillow."
Mindy grinned and took the cash.
We climbed into the Prius, me in the back this time, and waved goodbye to Mindy. Chuck's car was eerily silent as it pulled out of the rest stop and then seemed to purr to life once we got onto the freeway again. The car was spotless and smelled new. I suspected it was a rental. Chuck had NPR softly playing on radio at a level where I could barely make it out.
"Kinda spooky jumping into so many strangers cars, eh?" he asked good-naturedly.
"Not as spooky as some of the rides I've taken in the last couple of weeks," I replied dryly.
He caught my eye in the mirror and nodded. "Yeah, that's actually something I was kind of hoping you'd help me with. One of the things I do is collect information about what the vampires are up to, and you two have met a few of them in the last couple of weeks. I'd love to hear anything about them you know. No detail is too trivial."
And so it ended up that I spent the entire drive into Denver relaying my experiences. Chuck took great interest in Jeffrey. "Sounds like he's decided to get himself more involved. He might become a player in Vampire politics soon. He seems to have a talent for it."
"Well," I said, skeptically, "He seems to have a talent in pissing other vampires off." I wondered if he'd survived Abram and if he had, what he thought when he returned to find me gone. Then I pushed aside the surge of guilt. I hadn't asked Jeffrey to fight for me. I hadn't asked Jeffrey to do anything at all.
"That's a large part of politics, George," Chuck said, tossing me a grin. "The unreasonable man is the one who gets things done. Hmm, interesting."
As we passed through the boundry wall and into Denver's densely built up suburbs, the conversation moved on to my time with Nadette, where we skipped rather uncomfortably to an account of the tasting, since that's where I had most of my one-on-one experiences with the guests. At first I felt embarrassed about the sex. But when Chuck didn't seem to either shocked or judgmental about it, I felt a little bolder. One detail seemed to stand out as more important than the others in Chucks mind, and he latched in on it.
"You absolutely sure he gave you his blood," Chuck asked.
"Yes. I mean, he did something that the others didn't, and it tasted like … something."
"Pricking the condom," Chuck murmured. "I'm not sure if he's being monstrously presumptive or if he's just that needy to sire a childe."
"He said he did that for all his harem."
Chucks eyes widened. "Oh, really. Well in that case it might be both. I'll have to keep an eye on him. That's the kind of shenanigans that can end up really screwing up his harem."
My guts squirmed with self-conscious trepidation. "Pricking the condom? Does that mean I might be infected, I might turn?" I was half horrified, half intrigued by the notion.
Chuck laughed. "Relax, you're safe. Takes a lot more than a single drop, but that's how the process gets started. And the fact that Gregory went that far with someone who wasn't even his harem yet really suggests that he's getting pretty desperate. Now that the vampires are being all civilized and responsible, they can't just go about creating young ones willy-nilly. If they do, their population would explode and vampires would be back at each others throats, clawing for territory again."
That was an idea I could visualize rather too well. I stared rather hard at Denver's high-rises, all bathed in golden late afternoon light. Weird to think that in the midst of such civility was such utter animal violence.
"But reproduction is a biological imperative," Chuck went on. "And a hard one to ignore, especially if you are as powerful and important as Gregory. Give him another year and I'll bet he'll be working on a childe, with or without approval. Oy, won't that be an interesting mess."
"Wow, you know a lot about vampires," said Wally with some amazement. "I've been harem for years and I didn't know that."
Chuck flashed him a huge grin. "That's my job. I'm way too vain to say how many years I've been studying them, but it's a lot." I peered a bit closer at him and realized that he had faint lines around his eyes, then quietly revised my estimate of his age upwards by a decade. "When you occasionally have to take one down, you have to know their individual weaknesses, or else you are toast."
"No stakes then," I said. "Holy water?" I was half joking, but Chuck didn't seem to see the humor at all. For once the smile went off his face.
"Christ, no," Chuck said in utter seriousness. "You know who came up with those crazy ridiculous weapons? Vampires. And you bet they laugh their asses off every time someone tries to use them. Right before they break the poor sucker's neck." Chuck shook his head with disgust. "I've been trying for years to get people to cut that shit out, and you have no idea how frustrating a battle it's been. More than half of the little resistance cells I've hunted down in the last decade were stockpiling silver and holy water and crosses. The unlucky ones actually went through with their attack before I could stop them. I've merged the rest into my network or sent packing home depending on how hopeless they were. Sad to say, most of them were utterly hopeless."
He pulled into a parking structure under a fat low multistoried building. At the security kiosk he rolled down his window long enough to swipe a card into a reader. The striped arm barring our path lifted and he took us down and around a claustrophobic ramp to the lowest level of the underground structure and parked in a space labeled "reserved." He then turned off the car.
"The real irony," Chuck said as we climbed out into the chilly, gas-perfumed air, "Is that every single one of them had a copy of my bible, where I explicitly warn them not to do precisely what they were doing."
My eyes widened. "Your bible… wait, you mean you are Vestalar? The Vestalar."
"In the flesh," He held a hand out to me to shake again. "Nice to meet you."
I automatically took it. He gave it a single firm pump.
"Well, we're here, George, Wally. Welcome to my resistance."
Back to chapter 22
Forward to Chapter 24
RATING: NC-17 (This chapter PG-13)
SUMMARY: Help finally arrives.
Word Count: 6673
Chapter 23
I wasn't unconscious, I wasn't even asleep, but I seemed to collapse into myself as Wally rowed our stolen boat down the river. I listened to my pounding heart and felt the parts of my body as they gradually woke up from the numbness of cold. My head ached where it had hit the dock and my stomach felt queasy, but after about fifteen minutes huddled in a fetal position, I began feeling a bit better. I gingerly pulled myself to sitting and began sifting through the litter of clothes for something to wear.
"Hold on," said Wally, as my clumsy movements caused the boat to rock. He then paddled us over to a shallow beach of pale round stones, leapt out and then proceeded to drag the boat up onto the shore with me in it. I found my clothes and began putting them back on, feeling instantly more human.
It was at that point that I began paying attention to something besides myself. Wally had taken his shirt off to cover me and his skin was milk white with chill. I could see the goosebumps on his chest and belly and his nipples stood out pale and hard. There were a quite a number of dark purple bruises on his arms, shoulders and chest, most of them small and round like fingerprints. Leftovers from the fight with Abram. He looked disheveled, exhausted and abused. I snorted out a breath. Man, we were quite a pair right now, weren't we. The drowned rat and the punching bag.
Wally picked his shirt off the top of the discarded pile and stuffed the rest of the damp clothes back into the pillowcase while I put on my shoes. The noise of the river and the occasional warbles of birds were the only thing competing with the grunts of our breath. Throwing the sack over his shoulder, Wally let out a deep breath and looked out over the waist high reeds at the line of dirt road heading up what amounted to a "hill" in these parts. He rubbed his unshaven face, then turned back to me. "You okay?"
"Yeah." The rest remained unsaid, because it didn't need to be.
I'd nearly drowned. For this whole crazy venture, from Chicago, to Kansas City, Wyoming and back, I'd been scared silly. And yet, the vampires hadn't so much as slapped my face for my insolence. Even Darlene hadn't threatened me, and lord knows she had every reason to. No, my life had never been in any actual danger until I entered the river, and I'd done that to myself. It was sobering: my biggest threat was not from Abram, or Nadette, or Jeffrey, it was me and my crazy quest to buck the system. And I didn't want to die, I realized in a sickening revelation. I could put all kinds of premiums on my freedom, but in the end it came down to that: I wanted to live, and I didn't want anyone else dying over me. Maybe that made me a coward. Maybe it meant that I didn't take my own cause that seriously. Maybe I was giving up. But given the choice of giving up and facing another situation like the river, I was going to give up. I'd found my limit.
I covered my hot face with an icy cold hand and sat down on the sun-bleached trunk of a fallen tree. My gut clenched with adrenaline as the implications of my near-death experience sank in. Maybe, just maybe, I needed to be controlled, like the vampires kept telling me. My judgment clearly was for shit - even Wally, who loved me, had been calling me out on it. This wasn't even the first truly stupid thing I'd done. I'd let myself get pulled into a number of fistfights back in high school - any one of which could have gotten me expelled. I'd once argued with a cop and ended up spending a couple of hours in jail. Worst of all, I'd been mugged at knifepoint once and it was pure luck that the guy left with only the contents of my wallet. I'd known the neighborhood was bad, but I'd walked into anyway, supremely confident that I could go where I pleased and be respected by the people I encountered. Maybe I should just turn myself in. At least with the vampires, I'd never have to worry about my physical safety.
But then, we'd made it this far, I might as well give it one more try before throwing in the towel.
"Feel up to walking?" Wally asked after a few silent minutes.
"Sure." I stood up and shoved my hands in my coat, pulling it tighter around my body. I had on both my shirts and my windbreaker, but I was still shivering in spurts.
"Cold?"
"I'm fine. Though, I'd kill for a coffee." I grinned at him.
The corner of Wally's lip twitched, but he didn't smile. He was probably mad at me for almost dying. I know I'd have been plenty mad at him if he'd done something similarly harebrained. But he didn't yell at me, or accuse me, or any of the things I half hoped he would, just to get it all out in the open. Instead he quietly turned back to the reedy shore and pointed. "Let's try get to the top of that hill and see if I can get some reception on my cell."
We walked in silence through the underbrush until we hit a deeply rutted dirt road little wider than a car's undercarriage. We followed that up the hill, avoiding the nuggets of horse manure left ripening all over the place. The place smelled strongly of farm. Half way up the hill, fences made of low, weather-greyed posts strung with rusted barbed wire sprang up to either side of us. We passed a group of horses, still with a bit of winter shagginess left to their coats, grazing quietly in a pasture to our left.
At the top of the hill, Wally held his Iphone up to the sky and somehow found a single bar. He sat on the root of a twisted looking old apple tree and began thumbing out a message to the email address provided by the resistance. I put a careful hand on the top of a splintery post and watched one of the horses jump into a frisky sort of prance, snort and shake it's coat. It then caught sight of me and wandered hopefully over, but I had nothing to feed it, so it drifted away again.
Wally put his hand on my shoulder. "Done. We might as well walk up the road while we wait for an answer."
And so we did. I'd thought that driving through the countryside was a bit like being on a treadmill. Walking felt even more like that. Half an hour later, when Wally's phone burst into the opening bars of Thus Spake Zarathrustra, we still had pasture to either side of us and the apple tree was clearly visible. Wally pulled the phone from his belt and answered it. I listened in as he described our surroundings in detail, then grunted an "Alright, see you soon," and hung up.
I waited expectantly.
"He said to wait here, it will take him about an hour to drive out to where we are."
"Who said that?" I asked.
"Resistance Guy called himself Tea-for-two. He said he'd be driving a dirty white Ford extended cab."
I nodded, relieved that contact had been made, but even as I relaxed on one point, I began worrying about another. What if this Tea-for-Two fellow was another Stan? Or worse, what if he was just some creep looking for a couple of guys who wouldn't be missed? There were so many ways this could go wrong and very few for how it could go right. I had to bang my head against the palm of my hand in an effort to stop thinking. I was just too damn worn out to keep chewing my gut like this. I desperately needed it all to just stop.
I noticed Wally had put down the bag of clothes and was trying to perch himself on a lumpy boulder. He looked as pensive as I felt, so I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. He put his hand on mine and then with his other hand he rubbed his mouth. To my surprise his eyes were slightly red and glassy, like he might be on the verge of crying.
"Hey," I said, not trying to embarrass him, just letting him know I was there.
Wally blinked hard and tightened up. He looked up at me and nodded. "She was kind of a bitch wasn't she?" A shivering shock went through me as I realized that he had been thinking about Darlene. "What did you call her that one time? Lady Dingaling?"
"Yeah, that was rude of me. I'm sorry. I didn't know what she meant to you."
"She was a dingaling. And she wasn't very nice, either. But tell me," said Wally, his voice suddenly growing sharper as he leveled a look that was half challenge, half plea for understanding. "I know you are shaking your head at me because you hate vampires, but tell me, don't you ever wish to be part of something bigger and cooler than yourself? I mean, the vampires are our Lords, doesn't that resonate at all with you? Shit, I can't put words to this, but -- I mean -- don't you want to have someone to look up to, to follow, not because they are faultless, but just because you want to give that part of yourself to someone?"
"Fealty? Like a knight to his Queen?" I hazarded. Oh, Wally, so romantic.
Wally's eyes lit up with relief, "Exactly. That's exactly what I mean."
I shook my head, guiltily. "Not really, no? I admire people who do admirable things, but I don't love someone just because they have some title. I guess I can understand the impulse, maybe?"
Wally's face fell in.
"You want someone to be your Lord," I said. "You don't want to be part of a resistance." Christ, I couldn't understand that. The idea of some vampire running his hands over Wally's body, drawing him close, biting him. I shuddered with disgust. The pleasure might be addictive, but there was just something degrading about it. How could anyone ask for that?
Wally sighed. "I want to be with you, George. And the Resistance is the only way that's going to happen." He stood up and shrugged my hand off. "Never mind. Abram's right: Loyalty is one of my failings."
"Oh, don't say that!" I countered, angrily. "Abram is full of shit. He wasn't against you being loyal, he just wanted that loyalty directed at him." Then I noticed Wally was looking at me and realized -- Yeah. Shit. Loyalty to me. He shouldn't even be here right now, neck deep in my problems. I swallowed and turned away.
"It's been a bad couple of days for me, Geo," Wally apologized, but it didn't take the sourness away from guts. "Fuck," he said suddenly, "Give me a break." And we both settled silently in a tired funk while we waited the rest of the interminable hour for our ride to appear.
Eventually, we heard the sound of a motor and saw a truck appear from around a copse of trees at the end of the long rural lane. It drove slowly over the potholes, the hood bouncing up and down, it took a full minute after it appeared it finally came to a stop next to us. The truck was theoretically white, but the layers of dust and dirt on it made it closer to brown. I worried briefly if this was actually our ride or if it was the guy who owned the ranch wondering who the fuck we were and why we were hanging out on his property.
The guy behind the wheel did nothing to alleviate that worry. He looked at least sixty with a wild head of salt-and-pepper hair and a full Santa Claus beard. He rolled down his window and looked us over with deep suspicion. "Wally and George?" he asked after a long uncomfortable moment.
"And you are?" Wally asked, no nonsense.
"Tea for Two."
We both let out a breath. This was it. Wally and I gave each other a reassuring nod and headed around the front of the truck to the passenger's side. Tea-for-Two growled at us as Wally opened the door, "Whoever takes the front seat better be able to read a map. Back seat is in charge of the cooler."
I took the back seat, not because I couldn't read a map, but because my legs were a lot shorter than Wally's and the bench back there looked like it was meant more for kids and pets than full-grown adults. At it was, even at 5'4" my knees ended up being squashed. Resting on the seat next to me was a 50 quart cooler.
"Okay, boys," said Tea-for-Two, gruffly. "I got a couple of rules we need to go over before I take you to your destination. First thing, I know at least one of you has a cell phone on you."
Wally drew his Iphone off his hip.
"Did you take any pictures of me or my truck as I was pulling up?" Tea-for-Two asked.
"No sir," said Wally.
"Good. Now I want you to erase the history of that last call I made to you, then I want you to turn your phone off. And you back there, if you got a phone, it goes off, too. Same for any electronic devices, lap tops, PDAs, anything. Those all go off and stay off."
"Why?" I asked.
Tea-for-Two swiveled in his seat to look back at me. Santa beard or not, he looked damn scary. "Cause that's what I just told you to do, boy. See, let's get this understood straight off the bat: I'm putting my life on the line for you two, so you don't go questioning my rules. You just know that there's a damn good reason for them and you obey them, or get the hell out of my truck. Got it?"
"Yessir, " I said, thoroughly intimidated.
"Okay, everything off?" When we nodded, he went on gruffly. "Next rule - you will find a paper bag next to each of you. All trash goes in there. You don't get crumbs in my truck." There were mud stains on the back of the front seats, and foot prints on the floor of the cab. Tea-for-Two seemed to sense my thoughts because he said, "Mud don't attract ants or raccoons."
"Understood," said Wally.
"Good," Tea-for-Two nodded. "Last rule. We can talk about anything you boys want, except politics or religion, because I got strong opinions about both and I'm not in the mood for an argument. Oh and you don't ask me any personal questions, either. You don't need to know what I do for a living or if I got any family or what town I live in."
We nodded our agreement. Then, like a sudden ray of sunshine, Tea-for-Two brightened up. He gave us both a huge toothy grin. "Well then, good to meet you two. Off we go." The truck lurched forward and began to move at a steady 5 miles an hour down the lane past the ranch, retracing our steps down to the river then a further mile or two until it met up with a paved section of road.
It was clear from the way Tea-for-Two had been talking that the contents of the cooler were available to us. I peeked inside and saw to the delight of my stomach a number of sandwiches in zip lock bags and bunch of sodas tucked down into the ice. My stomach gave an embarrassingly loud squeal. Last nights dinner had been a long time ago and the morning exercise seemed to have sucked all the sugar out of my blood. Wally watched me, looking hopeful as well.
Tea-for-Two noticed our attention and said, "Go ahead, you grab something to eat. That's what it's there for. Figured you two might get hungry and we aren't stopping for anything except gas and bathrooms."
I picked the first sandwich and handed it to Wally. I offered the next one to our driver but he shook his head. "I've eaten," so I took the sandwich for myself. It was white bread and baloney slathered with mayonnaise with a thin slice of tomato and a single leaf of lettuce - the same kind of thing my mom used to make for me when I was in grade school. Two weeks ago I'd have turned my nose up at it, but not today. I tore my way into the plastic and took a huge bite. It tasted fantastic. My whole body welcomed it. Even though I normally don't like mayo that much I found myself licking the excess from my fingers. I followed it with a can of Mountain Dew and for a few minutes I couldn't think of a single thing wrong with my life.
While we ate Tea-for-Two drove us down a series of rural roads until he reached the onramp to I29 going South. I pressed my lips nervously together as he eased the car up to speed and merged with the Tuesday morning traffic. This was the road we'd taken when we'd first run away from Nadette, only then we'd been headed in the opposite direction.
"We aren't going through Kansas City, are we?" I asked, nervously. That seemed a bit too much like testing fate.
To my relief Tea-for-Two shook his head. "I heard the two of you are in trouble down there. No, we're splitting off the freeway at St. Joseph and taking 59 to Topeka. That's where I hand you over to my contact. She'll take you from there."
"Where is she going to take us?" asked Wally.
"No idea. That's how this business works," said Tea-for-Two. "I'm a runner. I pick up a package here in my area and I run it down to the next area over. Sometimes it's people like you two. Sometimes its objects, money or even guns. I don't know the plan, where they are going or why, that way if I'm caught and a vampire reads my mind, I won't give away the whole operation. Usually, once everything is done and clear, my contact will let me know what happened and give me the full story, or at least as much as won't jeopardize on going plans."
"Guns," I said, "You mean the resistance is killing vampires?"
"Oh yeah. We've taken out sixteen that I know of, probably a lot more I don't. You wouldn't know if for listening to the news, though."
"You were there?" I asked, feeling a bit of my earlier excitement about the Resistance coming back. It was the first I'd heard of any humans getting the upper hand with vampires. "Were you part of that? Did you take one down?"
"Me? No," said Tea-for-Two, laughing. "Oh god no. I'm brave in my own way, kid, but I'm not that foolhardy. I'm just paid to run things, not to shoot them. But I know it's true because one of those vampires was in my area, and I saw the aftermath. The new vampire who took over the territory is a vast improvement. Vast improvement."
My heart was pounding and I felt a surge of hope. This was a real resistance, not just a two-bit operation. This is exactly what I'd been hoping to find. At the same time I felt a bit of trepidation in light of my earlier revelation. Would the Resistance expect me to take a gun and shoot a vampire? What if I didn't have the guts to do it? What kind of life was I signing Wally up for? Tea-for-Two couldn't tell us that much about the Resistance. Outside of the ins and outs of smuggling, he didn't know what they were up to and he didn't want to know, either. I gave up asking questions rather quickly as he lost his sunny disposition and returned to the gruff paranoid man who'd picked us up. I fell into silence for the rest of our trip with him.
Just as Tea-for-Two promised, at St. Joseph's we turned off the freeway, wound our way through the town and bailed out on a rural highway on the far side. I gazed out the endless crops while Wally and Tea-for-Two talked avidly about baseball. Half an hour later we crossed the Missouri river again. I looked down at the clear dark waters that had almost taken my life and flipped it the bird. Before I had a chance to feel any closure, it had fallen into the distance behind us, no longer an insurmountable obstacle, just a feature and a rather forgettable one. That, I profoundly hoped, was the last time I'd ever see that particular body of water.
Just outside of Topeka, Tea-for-Two pulled into a filling station. It was the first stop we'd made and Wally and I eagerly made for the attached minimart to get the keys for the toilets. When we got back we saw our acerbic driver pumping gas for a strange blue sedan. Puzzled we wandered over to see what was going on.
"Boys," said Tea-for-Two as we approached. "This here's my good friend Mindy, she's going to be taking you on from here."
Mindy craned her head out the drivers side window and waved at us. She looked to be about our age, rather on the chubby side, with dark eyes and tan skin and her curly black hair pulled back in a red handkerchief. Her round face was pleasant. "Climb inside," she said.
This time Wally insisted on taking the backseat and letting me have the front, which made no sense, but whatever, if Wally needed to fair about things, it was best to indulge him. As I sat down I happened to see Mindy's right arm for the first time and a felt a profound shock ripple down me. The arm looked perfectly normal from shoulder to elbow, but there it ended. Her forearm was shortened to a ball with five fingers, each no larger than a baby's toes, poking out of the rounded end. It reminded me of Darlene's healing arm so jarringly that I had to fight to suppress the surge of nausea I felt.
"Yeah," said Mindy, dryly. "I get that a lot. You'll get used to it."
I realized that she'd seen my reaction and had drawn the obvious conclusion. "No!" I said. "I'm sorry, it's just we were just with a vampire who was … in bad shape…"
She raised an eyebrow at me, and Wally and I explained about Nadette and what had happened to her. I remembered the incredible smell and the wounds healed still gaping. The regrowing arm had honestly been one of the least horrific parts of her.
"Well relax, I'm not a vampire, just a cripple," She laughed a bit bitterly, "This is as much as it's ever going to grow." She then bent the elbow around the shift stick, and put the car deftly into gear. Tea-for-Two gave us one last wave and then headed back to his own truck as we pulled out of the station and onto the road. "Actually," she said, as soon as she was settled into traffic. "You guys should be thankful for my wonky arm, because I would not be driving you today if it weren't for it." When we looked confused, she clarified. "I would be Red instead of Brown. Brown makes me undesirable, and that means I can drive anywhere I want to, whoo hoo!" she smiled gloriously.
I smiled ruefully. "Yeah, I remember how that was."
We ended up talking about my past job and how I'd lost my undesirable status. Mindy didn't seem to have Tea-for-Two's paranoia about revealing her home life. In fact she shrugged the whole idea of anonymity off as if it were preposterous. "If some vampire wants to find me, they are going to find me. I'm pretty distinctive." She then started talking about how she'd gotten involved in the Resistance.
"So what happened is my cousin Barney was in line at the movies and this guy came and cut in front of him. My cousin was all, 'hey, you just cut.' This dude just looked at him funny and started to buy his tickets. Barney said 'get in line, asshole,' and the guy turned around and hit him." Mindy held onto the wheel with her elbow and mimed a punch. "Then Barney hit back and put him on the ground. So anyway, turns out the dude was Harem, and his Patron came after my cousin for revenge."
I felt a sick feeling of sympathy in my stomach. "What was his Patron going to do with him?"
Mindy shook her head. "Don't know, probably kill him. They can, you know, kill you. There's no law against it."
"Law, what law," I agreed.
"So anyway, I put Barney in the trunk of my car and drove him out to Texas where my cousins live. While I was down there I was approached by the Resistance. Turned out they'd been following my cousin, thinking of trying to get him out of the situation, and then they got interested in me and asked if I wanted a job driving other people out of similar situations. I said sure. That was five years ago, haven't looked back since. Man I love my job."
Well, damn, I loved Mindy's job, as well. Christ, it was perfect for my temperament. Lots of travel, a bit daring, saving people. I yearned to be part of that so badly it physically hurt. I ended up grilling Mindy about her other assignments. Turned out a lot of people had the bad luck to run afoul of harem, who in turn sicced their patrons on them. In some communities it had been particularly bad, with the harem behaving like vampires themselves and demanding everything from sexual favors to free goods and services.
All this talk of badly behaving Harem made Wally uncomfortable. "I'd never do something like that," he said more than once.
"Of course you wouldn't," said Mindy. "Anyway, you can't really blame the harem. It's the vampire's fault. They could stop it if they wanted to, easily, but they don't. And sometimes the harem get the bad end of things, too. I had to rescue this one guy whose vampire liked drinking him sour." She shuddered, the edges of her mouth turning down. "That vampire absolutely terrorized him, finding any excuse she could to punish him. Poor guy was in terrible shape when I got him. I dropped him off at the first hospital outside that protectorate I could find, he was that bad off. I wouldn't want that guy's therapy bills."
I craned my head around so that I could meet Wally's eyes. He looked as horrified as I felt. Yeesh! As bad as the last weeks had been, it could have been much worse. Nice to be reminded of that.
"That was the first time I worked directly with Chuck," said Mindy. "Chuck's the guy I'm going to be handing you off to. You guys must be in it pretty bad because he only deals with the really tough cases."
"Please tell me that's one of the sixteen vampires that you guys killed," said Wally, unable to let the last story pass.
"Oh yeah. Chuck's crew got her that night." Mindy switched arms at the wheel long enough to mime a slit throat. "When they are that bad we take them out. Well, not 'we' as in 'me', 'we' as in the Resistance. Though I was ready to strangle that bitch after what I saw. Thankfully, that's Chuck's job and he's good at it. Don't worry though, he's a sweet-heart, despite being a vampire killer," she added hastily, in case Wally and I were disturbed by the idea of being handed off to an assassin. "You'll like him. He's always so completely calm and good humored no matter how hairy things get. He's a total rock."
Despite seeming to have her mind more on the conversation than the road, Mindy turned out to be an excellent if a bit aggressive driver. We made great time down I 70, at times moving at a breathlessly quick clip, but still managing to be below the limit at all the speed traps. "I know this stretch really well," she said by way of explanation.
Like Tea-for-Two, she had a cooler in the car, filled with sandwiches, fruit and chocolate bars for "desert." Mindy indulged in two of those herself. What with the baloney sandwiches earlier, I began to feel rather like a kid on a long cross-country drive. The only thing missing was the sightseeing. Except for rest stops, and once for gas, we never left the car. In just under five hours we'd crossed out of Kansas and into Colorado.
The shadows were getting long when Mindy spun the wheel around deftly and took us off the freeway. Wally was snoring softly in the back and, with the sun in my eyes, I was starting to feel a little sleepy myself. My body was tired from sitting for so long. I squirmed as the strap of the seatbelt kept creeping up over my neck. Mindy turned again hard and I shrugged myself upright and looked around to see what was up.
She'd pulled into a dusty and drab but well populated rest stop. Two non-descript brick buildings sat in the middle of a sea of asphalt. All around was a field of grey-green grass dotted with yellow wildflowers and the occasional scrubby looking pine. A couple of elementary school aged kids were chasing each other in the empty dog run, their shrieks and laughter sounding thin and swallowed up by wide open countryside.
Mindy climbed out of the car and stretched, her back audibly cracking. Wally and I followed and I could actually feel my joints creak as I stepped off the tarmac onto a grass. The air smelled dusty and the grass looked dry. I was walking around, grateful that Mindy hadn't insisted we immediately get back on the road after finishing with our bodily duties, when I noticed a car pulling next to ours.
Mindy suddenly perked up. "Oh, yea, Chuck's here," she said. Wally and I watched a man with brown hair climb out of the Prius. He was carrying a Subway Sandwich bag and heading over to one of the pebble and cement trash containers when the three of us got to him.
He looked our way and smiled warmly and I was absolutely struck by just how much he didn't look like a vampire killer. He was short, for one thing, not more than an inch or two taller than myself. Late twenties, early thirties with a round and wholesome looking face. He wasn't fat or thin, and though he looked reasonably fit, he didn't have the bulging muscles I'd expect from someone who was ostensibly muscle for the Resistance.
To be completely honest, my first impression of him was that he reminded me strongly of Jimmy Weaver, of all people. This, I realized, is just what Jimmy would have looked like if he'd had a chance to grow up. With that thought I felt a kind of magic serendipity about our meeting. I'd been thinking of Jimmy Weaver when I first started running - maybe seeing Chuck meant that this was where my running would end. And with that I became hugely prejudiced in favor of Chuck, even though the dude hadn't even said a word yet.
Mindy introduced us. "Hi, there," Chuck said and then ended up juggling his soft drink and Subway bag to have a free hand to shake. "Sorry about that. Did the two of you eat yet?"
"We had sandwiches in the car," Wally said.
Chuck looked into his bag and pulled out an unopened bag of potato chips, "Either of you want this?" he asked. "I'm full." When we shook our heads he dumped the bag and the chips with the soda into the trash and clapped his hands. "I was up all last night so I grabbed some breakfast before coming. Say, you guys tired of car rides yet?"
"Oh howdy," I said. Even the thought of sitting in a car made my back start to ache again.
"Good, because we are almost at Denver. I've got a place were you can recoup and get some dinner. Then we have some decisions to make." Chuck then clucked at Mindy. He reached into one of the wide pockets of his slacks and handed her a fat envelope. I caught a glimpse of the edge of a wad cash. "Don't skimp on the hotel," he told her. "Get a nice five star one. The kind where they give you chocolates on the pillow."
Mindy grinned and took the cash.
We climbed into the Prius, me in the back this time, and waved goodbye to Mindy. Chuck's car was eerily silent as it pulled out of the rest stop and then seemed to purr to life once we got onto the freeway again. The car was spotless and smelled new. I suspected it was a rental. Chuck had NPR softly playing on radio at a level where I could barely make it out.
"Kinda spooky jumping into so many strangers cars, eh?" he asked good-naturedly.
"Not as spooky as some of the rides I've taken in the last couple of weeks," I replied dryly.
He caught my eye in the mirror and nodded. "Yeah, that's actually something I was kind of hoping you'd help me with. One of the things I do is collect information about what the vampires are up to, and you two have met a few of them in the last couple of weeks. I'd love to hear anything about them you know. No detail is too trivial."
And so it ended up that I spent the entire drive into Denver relaying my experiences. Chuck took great interest in Jeffrey. "Sounds like he's decided to get himself more involved. He might become a player in Vampire politics soon. He seems to have a talent for it."
"Well," I said, skeptically, "He seems to have a talent in pissing other vampires off." I wondered if he'd survived Abram and if he had, what he thought when he returned to find me gone. Then I pushed aside the surge of guilt. I hadn't asked Jeffrey to fight for me. I hadn't asked Jeffrey to do anything at all.
"That's a large part of politics, George," Chuck said, tossing me a grin. "The unreasonable man is the one who gets things done. Hmm, interesting."
As we passed through the boundry wall and into Denver's densely built up suburbs, the conversation moved on to my time with Nadette, where we skipped rather uncomfortably to an account of the tasting, since that's where I had most of my one-on-one experiences with the guests. At first I felt embarrassed about the sex. But when Chuck didn't seem to either shocked or judgmental about it, I felt a little bolder. One detail seemed to stand out as more important than the others in Chucks mind, and he latched in on it.
"You absolutely sure he gave you his blood," Chuck asked.
"Yes. I mean, he did something that the others didn't, and it tasted like … something."
"Pricking the condom," Chuck murmured. "I'm not sure if he's being monstrously presumptive or if he's just that needy to sire a childe."
"He said he did that for all his harem."
Chucks eyes widened. "Oh, really. Well in that case it might be both. I'll have to keep an eye on him. That's the kind of shenanigans that can end up really screwing up his harem."
My guts squirmed with self-conscious trepidation. "Pricking the condom? Does that mean I might be infected, I might turn?" I was half horrified, half intrigued by the notion.
Chuck laughed. "Relax, you're safe. Takes a lot more than a single drop, but that's how the process gets started. And the fact that Gregory went that far with someone who wasn't even his harem yet really suggests that he's getting pretty desperate. Now that the vampires are being all civilized and responsible, they can't just go about creating young ones willy-nilly. If they do, their population would explode and vampires would be back at each others throats, clawing for territory again."
That was an idea I could visualize rather too well. I stared rather hard at Denver's high-rises, all bathed in golden late afternoon light. Weird to think that in the midst of such civility was such utter animal violence.
"But reproduction is a biological imperative," Chuck went on. "And a hard one to ignore, especially if you are as powerful and important as Gregory. Give him another year and I'll bet he'll be working on a childe, with or without approval. Oy, won't that be an interesting mess."
"Wow, you know a lot about vampires," said Wally with some amazement. "I've been harem for years and I didn't know that."
Chuck flashed him a huge grin. "That's my job. I'm way too vain to say how many years I've been studying them, but it's a lot." I peered a bit closer at him and realized that he had faint lines around his eyes, then quietly revised my estimate of his age upwards by a decade. "When you occasionally have to take one down, you have to know their individual weaknesses, or else you are toast."
"No stakes then," I said. "Holy water?" I was half joking, but Chuck didn't seem to see the humor at all. For once the smile went off his face.
"Christ, no," Chuck said in utter seriousness. "You know who came up with those crazy ridiculous weapons? Vampires. And you bet they laugh their asses off every time someone tries to use them. Right before they break the poor sucker's neck." Chuck shook his head with disgust. "I've been trying for years to get people to cut that shit out, and you have no idea how frustrating a battle it's been. More than half of the little resistance cells I've hunted down in the last decade were stockpiling silver and holy water and crosses. The unlucky ones actually went through with their attack before I could stop them. I've merged the rest into my network or sent packing home depending on how hopeless they were. Sad to say, most of them were utterly hopeless."
He pulled into a parking structure under a fat low multistoried building. At the security kiosk he rolled down his window long enough to swipe a card into a reader. The striped arm barring our path lifted and he took us down and around a claustrophobic ramp to the lowest level of the underground structure and parked in a space labeled "reserved." He then turned off the car.
"The real irony," Chuck said as we climbed out into the chilly, gas-perfumed air, "Is that every single one of them had a copy of my bible, where I explicitly warn them not to do precisely what they were doing."
My eyes widened. "Your bible… wait, you mean you are Vestalar? The Vestalar."
"In the flesh," He held a hand out to me to shake again. "Nice to meet you."
I automatically took it. He gave it a single firm pump.
"Well, we're here, George, Wally. Welcome to my resistance."
Back to chapter 22
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