Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (27 page)

Wallace smiled, wet and big. “Ain’t evolution a bitch, Coach? Try something a zillion times and all you get are dead, dead, babies. And then, one day, someone else tries it and … bang!” The word snapped out, wet and sharp. “Mutation! And a new happy family. Too bad the Lords don’t like change.”

Ned licked the sharp edge of his teeth. “No. She’s just a kid. Just a kid from the Scrum.”

Wallace shrugged. “You’re a worse liar now than when I was your protégé, Coach. But fine, suck on the tit of denial if you want. Whatever she is, she’s coming with me when the fight is done. I got a feeling that her blood work and heart look a little bit different than last week. Going to need a whole new set of tests.”

“Only if she lives.”

“Oh, she will. Gregor’s playing ball. Going to knock her out cold. He’s got enough chemical in his system to take on a hundred magic mutant girls. She’s got a better chance of shooting eleven the hard way than winning, let alone dying. And you’re coming too, Ned. We’ll just be one happy family.”

The crowd roared. She was losing.

Ned bowed his head in surrender, but the hands in his pockets were fists. “Then what harm is there in letting me see her fight?”

“You always said I got a soft heart, Coach. Might break it to watch you lose some replacement for a half-cast, still-born daughter.”

Wallace’s last word choked as Ned drove his fist into his solar plexus and his teeth through Wallace’s neck. The Turncoat’s death-gurgle was absorbed by the wail of the crowd. Sugar tainted the wet red rush into Ned’s mouth, but he ate until Wallace defecated in his pants and expired in Ned’s arms. He shoved the soiled husk aside as the Turncoat’s heart link beeped.

Kill a Turncoat, Ned knew, they send in the Blackcoats. And even deadbloods never saw them coming.

He had seconds.

In the stands among the howling throng, louder than any alarm bells or whistles, legions of fans stood with arms in V formation as their hero stalked Sakura. She was broken, on her knees, swooning like a willow stalk. Her bandages were torn, ugly knuckles exposed.

“Come on, Child!”

Gregor wiped his sparkling ruby fist across his mouth, long and slow, licking every finger while the crowd ate it up.

“Sakura!” A black hand of steel clamped Ned’s mouth while others gripped his arms.

The crowd’s attention steered toward him. Their voices hushed to a hiss for the interruption. From the bottom of the pit, Gregor looked and laughed. He gripped Sakura’s neck, turned her head to see Ned before waltzing around her for a choke. Her swollen, bloody eyes barely opened.

Ned ate through the hand on his mouth and it snapped away for a beat, long enough for him to suck in air and shout. “I bet everything on you!”

Everything tightened. Cold sizzles burned through his back and danced like barbed static across his eyes … but he kept them open, thanks to the fresh blood in his guts … the world slowed and silenced until all that Ned heard was the thud of a courageous heart, strong, fierce, and defiant.

Sakura still stared at him. She smiled, and snapped out her thumbs. Bullet quick, she drove them behind her and into Gregor’s eyes.

Yes!

Gregor, hands on face, stumbled blind as Sakura rose from the bloody ground. Quickly, she wrapped her fist into a mangled morning star, knuckles big and rotten, and went to work.

Stars popped against the growing black in Ned’s eyes, as Sakura’s heartbeat slowed, racing toward its final thrum: elbows to the neck, kicks to the back of his skull, softening him up like an ax on an old tree until Gregor’s neck was ripe … then a gasp, a stumble.

Breathe, child, he thought, head swimming with memories of a back-alley delivery room, and the breathless faces of a mother and daughter, still as the night, heartbeats lost … she never even got to, the tiny thing never got a chance to—

“Breathe!”

Sakura inhaled hard, the beats slowed, but her form was perfect—

The morning-star-fist launched, and a dying girl screamed with her last heartbeat. Gregor’s head landed six feet from his body, but all Ned could feel was Sakura’s heart burst, her body crumble, her pulse whisper to silence.

Pain engulfed Ned, a sliver of what was to come. But it couldn’t shake the fresh memory of Sakura at her best, doing what she was born to do, and the spark she’d lit in the dark places of this world. A memory worth dying for.

* * * * *

Jason S. Ridler has published over thirty short stories in such magazines and anthologies as
Brain Harvest, Not One of Us, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts Thirteen,
and others. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. About his story, he says, “‘Blood that Burns so Bright’ was inspired by the Joe Louis/Max Schmeling boxing matches of the 1930s, and how a single fight can encapsulate a moment and time of great importance. Plus, I’m a sucker for an underdog story. And who would be more of an underdog than a human fighter in a vampire fight circuit?”

Survival of the Fittest

By Leanne Tremblay

It took Kara Morales more than two hours to slow her breathing. Only then did she try to wipe the blood off. Killing Angeline had been surprisingly easy.

At first, she had sat on the floor beside the body, mesmerized. A cavity the size of a fist yawned in the chest. The pooled blood beneath the body had begun as red but had since turned black. Kara touched the tip of her tongue to the droplets adorning her wrist like a bracelet. Salty
.
Hesitating, she licked the rest of the blood off her arms and fingers and sucked at the matter congealed under her nails.

At some point during the afternoon, she left her office and activated the cleansing system. Thirty minutes later, she re-entered in fresh clothes. Her office, sterilized and lightly scented, showed no trace of blood. Looking at the body annoyed Kara, even though it had been scrubbed white as a china doll. She lifted it under the shoulders and dragged it out of sight behind her desk. The monitor blinked the time, just past four o’clock in the afternoon. Two hours until sunset. For now, she had to remain where she was, sealed inside the Institute. She’d just have to wait.

Kara’s first surprise had been seeing Angeline in the examination chamber when she arrived at the lab. The woman had been laughing, sharing a joke with a figure already seated at a small metal table in the centre of the room.

“Angeline, what are you doing here?” asked Kara sharply. The woman’s interference in her research was becoming endemic; always sniffing around. Kara put it down to a morbid curiosity in the research subjects. Homo sapiens were short, cowering creatures, dirty, malnourished and infested with parasites. She assumed Angeline wanted the thrill of proximity so she could pass along scintillating tales to her friends.

Secretly, Kara despised the woman’s classic Vamparian looks: tall, pale, sharp features, red lips, perfect skin. She was the pretty, public face of the Institute, the PR voice that soothed and cajoled. Kara may not have inherited beauty but she did inherit the mind, the historic bloodline. That’s what mattered.

“Kara, there you are! Charlie and I were wondering where you’d gotten to.” Her canines flashed, the ridiculous diamond chips embedded in them winking under the fluorescents.

Charlie? Who? Confused, Kara blinked several times and halted mid-step.

“Ah, hello. That would be me,” said the subject, getting up from his chair. He rounded the table in a few long strides and offered his hand. “Charlie Koop.” He smiled.

Charlie — the second surprise.

Dazed, she took his hand automatically. Lord, he was warm! Even through gloves, her hand sucked up the heat from his fingers and an unfamiliar wave of perspiration pricked her skin.

Civilized social behavior, coherent speech — what form of Homo sapien was this?

Kara cleared her throat, hiding her unease. “Hello … I’m
Doctor
Morales. I run the Sapiens Outreach program.”

“I was just telling Charlie about the Institute’s mandate for hominid species preservation,” said Angeline.

“What a relief,” he quipped, smiling at Angeline, who’d hitched herself onto the edge of the table, letting one long leg dangle.

He turned back to Kara and frowned slightly. “You okay, Dr. Morales?” Standing at full height, he was as tall as any Vamparian male, but his face, brown and smooth as glass, betrayed a different ancestry. He was dressed oddly, in a high necked tunic made from some kind of dull brown fiber. His hair, so blonde it was nearly white, fell softly to his shoulders. With his height and healthy build, he could almost pass as Vamparian, if it wasn’t for his skin. Burnished gold. Like sunshine, she imagined.

Flustered, she fumbled with her recording tablet. “Yes, um, I’m fine. I’m sorry, but where do you—”

“I live in a community about a hundred miles outside New Chicago.”

Kara nearly choked. A hundred miles outside the Net? No one had lived that far from a Net city in centuries. “But the atmosphere … the heat during the day would… So, there are more like you?”

Charlie laughed easily. “Sure. We don’t all live under rocks.”

“But that’s impossible!” she spluttered. This had to be a joke. Sapiens in the New World lived individually, not in groups. In fact, as a species they were becoming hard to find, hence her Outreach program. Her brain scrambled to assemble the possibilities. An entire community within a hundred miles of the Institute? If Koop was telling the truth, then she’d made the discovery of a lifetime.

“Isn’t it just so lucky that we
found Charlie,” Angeline said, interrupting her thoughts, “before some nasty race mongers got their hands on him.”

Starting, Kara looked at her and blanched, the threat underlying her statement all too clear. Angeline had no intention of letting her keep this discovery to herself. Kara sucked in her breath and gripped the recording tablet, her knuckles whiter than usual. She still hadn’t turned it on. Charlie was unlike other Homo Sapien she’d ever encountered. She couldn’t,
wouldn’t
lose this opportunity.

Ignoring the smug look on Angeline’s face, she tapped the tablet to activate it and gestured towards the chair. “I’d be interested in hearing more about your community,” she said.

He smiled and sat, folding his hands loosely on his lap.

Kara drummed her fingers on the desk, keeping time with the flashing clock on the monitor. She thought it surprising how little she remembered of their conversation, although she and Charlie talked for at least an hour. She had a vague recollection of Angeline leaving during the interview, probably bored. The thought pleased her. One thing she did recall was telling Charlie about her father. Had he asked her about him? He must have — everybody did. Her father had been over four hundred years old when he finally died. She’d only met him a handful of times. The last time, he grabbed her chin, his yellow nails digging into her jaw, and forced her mouth open. Squinting, his rancid breath blowing up her nostrils, he ran a dirty thumb over her canines. They were like child fangs, no more than blunted points compared to the elegantly-tapered dentition of the devotees clustered around the sickbed. “Throwback!” he’d barked, and shoved her away. She never saw him again.

Kara glanced at the hole in the body where Angeline’s heart had been. She studied the secondary and less obvious wounds, including deep slashes at the throat. She wondered suddenly if her father would have been proud of her. “Genetic throwback, my ass!” she snapped, swiveling back to the monitor.

Twenty more minutes. She inhaled, letting scented air fill her lungs, and ran her tongue over the enamel on her teeth. For the first time, her head felt scoured clean. All this from the taste of blood.

She considered the small bronze bust on her desk. Lord Darwin, the Father of evolutionary science, bald except for a bushy beard and hint of teeth barely visible below his moustache. In all his works, beginning with
Transmutation of Species,
he said the consumption of human blood was nothing more than a cannibal fantasy — a myth about bloodsucking monsters created by Homo sapiens because their species was failing.

Kara imagined Darwin fuming about it, striding across the lecture hall, spittle caught in his beard, eyes blazing. It’s not a need for blood, he’d shout, that elevates Homo vamparians above their less evolved cousins, but plasma proteins. A superior food source, easy to manufacture in even the simplest lab. Blood was, well, crude.

But, she didn’t feel barbaric. If anything, she felt stronger, healthier. She flexed her arm, feeling individual muscles lengthen and contract, and cocked her eyebrow at the bronze head. Could Darwin have been wrong?

She shook her head to clear it. No. She knew all his precepts by heart, drummed into her head before she could read. Darwin predicted that man in the near future, as measured in centuries, not millennia, would be a more perfect species. The failure of Homo sapiens and the ascension of Homo vamparians proved him right.

A low tone followed by rhythmic clicking snapped Kara’s attention to the sealed windows. The shades began rising and moonlight flooded the office. Finally! She grabbed her recording tablet and pushed her chair back, bumping the body.