Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (23 page)

“Let’s see your hands,” Harper shouted, his voice high and whiny with fear. “Right fucking now!”

A pair of pale hands rose above the door. There was no sign of a weapon. Bill Davis covered me as I walked up to the pick-up, knees like jelly and a stone brick in the pit of my stomach.

As I approached, the door opened further and a tall man stepped out. He showed me his palms, which looked almost white in the gathering gloom. When he looked into my eyes my stomach turned to ice, and I was sore tempted to just drill him there and then.

It was something in those eyes that did it. They reminded me of a time before the darkness, and a bar fight in Boston with a man who didn’t care how hard you hit him, a man who just liked to fight. This newcomer gave off the same aura, and that was trouble I didn’t want to know.

He smiled, and that put paid to any idea I might have of shooting him.

“Hello,” he said softly. “As you can see, I’m not armed. I’m here with a proposition.”

Harper was having none of it. “You can take your proposition and shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

He’d come up to my side and aimed his shotgun straight at the newcomer’s nose. If the stranger was intimidated, he didn’t show it. Ignoring Harper’s gun completely, he stepped back and patted the tailgate of the pickup.

“You’ll want to see what’s in here,” he said.

And he was right. He drew back a tarp and showed us what he had under there. When I stepped forward I did indeed start to salivate.

The stranger … he said his name is Josh Prentice … brought us enough tinned food, liquor and smokes to see us through a month at least.

We’ve just had a town meeting. He’s promised to share it all, if we let him stay.

Mine was the only dissenting vote.

From the journal of John Sharpe — June 12th 2062

I still haven’t taken to Prentice, but I can’t deny he’s made a difference. Three times now he’s gone out in that big pickup of his, and three times he’s come back with supplies — less each time, but still enough to keep this town on a borderline subsistence.

It’s better than dying, that’s for sure.

And he’s certainly been putting in the work up at the Avery place. Nobody’s lived in that big house for three years and more — it’s too far out of town and too high up the slope in winter for any of us townsfolk to care for it. But Prentice says he’s doing just fine. Most days we hear the sound of chainsaws and hammers echoing down the valley. Bill Davis is the only one who’s been up to see. He took the deeds of the house to be signed.

“Just ‘cause the world’s gone to fuck don’t mean we shouldn’t keep the law here in town,” he said. When he came back down he was quiet, and it took a few beers to loosen his tongue. Even then, he refused to be drawn, beyond a single phrase that he would repeat when asked what he’d seen: “He’s building a fort up there.”

Prentice has sure made himself useful. Apart from bringing in food, he’s also done his shift on the barricades, volunteering for night duty where nobody but the stupid would stand. Most nights there’s just me and him there. He doesn’t speak much, but his eyes scan the horizon continuously, like an eagle watching for a rabbit.

Haven’t learned much about him. Says he came out of Vancouver, and it was bad. I can tell that much from his eyes and the way his hands tremble when he speaks. But he won’t give away specifics, and when pushed his eyes get that hard look that reminds me never to get him riled.

He said something that’s got me thinking, though: “We need to go back to the old ways.”

When I pointed out to him that maybe it was the old ways that got us into this mess in the first place, he said something under his voice that I almost didn’t catch. “‘Old’ depends on how far back you want to go.”

From the journal of John Sharpe — August 17th 2062

Fall’s going to be here soon. The sense of trepidation in the town is palpable. If it weren’t for Prentice I’m sure we’d have a few suicides on our hands by now. He’s stopped taking the pickup to Edmonton. He says there’s nothing left there to scavenge but rats, and even they’re having trouble hanging on.

That news, brought two weeks ago, hit us hard. We’d grown accustomed to the supplies he was bringing — especially the liquor and the smokes.

But meat is what we mostly crave. I can’t count the nights I lay awake listening to my stomach do impressions of thunderstorms and thinking about burgers, and sausages, and rib-eye steaks with all the fixings. While we still had some smokes I managed to keep the cravings at bay, but I figure it’s going to be another long protein-free winter.

Until Prentice made one last trip out.

Our summer hunting has yielded nothing but a pair of coneys and a maggot-ridden coyote. But the stranger — I still call him that — thought he could do better.

He called a town meeting yesterday to set out his plans. We yielded the floor to him and he stood up on the stage in the school hall and looked down at us as if he was the headmaster and we were recalcitrant pupils.

“Look at you,” he said. His voice sounded soft, but it carried across the whole hall even though it was several years since we’ve had power for a microphone. “There you sit, preparing for death, when you should be preparing for life. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

A few snorts of derision rang through the hall, but nobody spoke up. It seems I wasn’t the only one who’d recognized the look in Prentice’s eye.

“You’re all worried about the coming winter? And well you should be, if it is anything like the one I spent last year. But I can ameliorate the situation. I can bring you what you need.”

Bill Davis joined me in
snorting
at that one, but everyone else seemed rapt.

“What can
you
do that we can’t do for ourselves?” Bill shouted.

I was sitting close to the front so I caught the angry glance Prentice shot Bill’s way. All everybody else noticed was the harsh laugh.

“The world has changed. I am adapting,” Prentice said. “How many of you can say that?”

He let us chew on that for a while before continuing. He repeated what he’d said earlier.

“I can bring you what you need. I can guarantee survival. In return I will ask you for something. Maybe not this week, this month or even this year. But the time will come when I will ask. And I will expect it to be given … with no questions.”

He left us to mull that over for a while too, but there was very little discussion. Everybody had already benefitted from his trips to the city. Everybody knew he was a man of his word.

“Besides,” Marion Larkin said, “we ain’t got much to give him, no matter what he asks for. What have we got to lose?”

The vote was near unanimous again. Bill Davis stood with me in the nay saying, but no one else was listening. We got Prentice back in and agreed to his terms. He left looking like the cat that got the canary.

He came back tonight with three large moose in the back of the pickup. I was the only one who got a good look at them before Taylor Bishop’s truck hauled them away for carving up, but they sure didn’t look like they’d been shot to me.

They looked like something had
torn
their throats open. Damned near took their heads off.

We have enough meat to see us through months to come.

But at what price?

From the journal of John Sharpe — October 10th 2062

Heavy snow today. Winter is almost here.

God help us.

From the journal of John Sharpe — November 18th 2062

The men who came along the road last night were desperate. They had to be to brave the passes on foot in this weather.

Damned near caught us by surprise, too. We’d given up expecting any more marauders, not this late in the year. But hunger drove them out of wherever they’d been holed up, and set them straight at us. We must have looked like a target.

I counted twenty of them in the pack that tried to sneak around our defences. Mangy beasts they looked, and as disease ridden as the coyote I shot in the summer. But their guns were filled with ammo, and that put them one up on us even before we started in to the fighting.

Harper Lodge took one in the chest that’s looking to put paid to him before long, and I felt a bullet graze my temple. We used up the six rounds we had left in the first assault, putting down three of the attackers. Then we were down to hand to hand fighting at the barricade.

The one that threw himself at me was more animal than man, a snarling beast with ropy drool hanging from his chops. He had a knife in his left hand and his right was little more than a mass of pulpy tissue, grey and full of pus. I smashed my rifle butt against his jaw and three teeth flew in a bloody spray. It hardly slowed him.

I was aware of fighting all around me but I couldn’t take my eyes off the attacker. Once again he threw himself at me and his weight took us both to the ground. We rolled, clawing and scratching like kids in a playground.

Suddenly the weight lifted from me. I looked up just in time to see Prentice snap the man’s neck, as easily as if he’d been tearing a sheet of paper. He left me lying there, mouth agape, and moved along the line. Everywhere he went attackers fell before him. He moved smoothly, fluidly. They shot straight at him but he never slowed. He weaved and bobbed, lighter than any fighter I’ve ever seen, leaving a trail of dead behind.

By this time I had got myself to my feet. I moved to Prentice’s side and put a hand on his shoulder. He stood over the last of the attackers. The man lay broken like a wooden doll smashed to splinters. Prentice looked down at the body that was panting like a hot mutt. At my touch he turned and looked me in the eye. By reflex I went for the rifle — I knew that look all too well.

Once again he smiled at me. “Do you still think you’ll make it without me?”

I already knew the answer to that one.

He didn’t hang around to help us with the bodies, but that was fine by me. Like the bikers before them, we burned them at the back of Mifflin’s store, and I made sure I stayed upwind of the smell.

It was only later that I realized I had missed something important, something I had better write down here before I forget. I counted twenty marauders coming up the road. But we only burned eighteen bodies, and I’m damned sure nobody got away.

While writing this, I hear a scream, high and thin, come down from the Avery House, but I’m not daft enough to go and check it out.

From the journal of John Sharpe — January 12th 2063

I was summoned to the Avery House last night, the first time I’ve been up there since he moved in, but I fear not the last.

Bill Davis came to my door after nine o’clock. It was bitterly cold out, and he was wrapped up so that only his eyes showed.

“He wants us.”

He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew who he meant well enough, and I’d been waiting for this night since the attack on the barricades. A favour was about to be called in, and I knew for certain that I wasn’t going to like it.

I kept Bill waiting for a minute as I fetched a long hunting knife and hid it inside my parka. If he saw me do it, Bill said nothing.

It was a long walk up that hill, made longer by the foreboding that had settled in my spine. Bill didn’t speak, and that was fine by me. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, trudging through the peculiar grey snow that had been falling for the last week or so. By the time we reached the turnoff to the Avery place, I felt like a Popsicle. Even then, I wanted to turn back to town as soon as I saw what he’d done.

The perimeter of the property, which once had a facade of a pretty white picket fence, was now a wall of thorn bushes, thick, black and strangely alive. Inside that, where there had once been lawn, was now an expanse of concrete, weathered and broken so as to resemble old stone.

The old house had also been transformed, reinforced with more stone and concrete that made turrets and balconies that towered above. I remembered Bill’s words from the summer.

He’s building a fort up there.

This wasn’t a fort. This was a
castle.

The main door to the property was a thick piece of oak that looked like it had been there for centuries. There was even a bell chain to pull.

A fucking bell chain!

I felt like screaming as Bill Davis pulled it while we waited freezing on the doorstep in the increasingly heavy snow.

Finally the door swung open and we stepped into a sauna. At least that’s what it felt like at first.
I saw the reason soon enough. A huge fire blazed in a solid stone fireplace big enough to walk into. Overhead, three chandeliers hung, each festooned with twenty candles, all burning. At the far end of the room, across a floor constructed of concrete blocks made to look like flagstones, Prentice sat on a large, throne-like chair. He showed no sign of getting down to greet us. Instead we walked forward.

There was no preamble.

“I want a girl,” he said. “A virgin preferably, but I know how hard that can be these days. A young girl will do — no younger than fourteen, no older than twenty. I’ll leave it up to you to choose.”