Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (30 page)

But that house? It was damned near perfect. Out in the middle of nowhere, hidden by trees, so clean it seemed the family had left voluntarily and no one had found it since. The pantry was stuffed with canned and dry goods, as if they’d stocked up when things started going bad.

I lived there for three weeks. Read half the books in the house. Even taught myself to use the loom in the sitting room. Damned near paradise. But one day I must have been sloppy, let someone see me return from hunting. I woke with a knife at my throat and a man
on top of me. There was a moment, looking up at that filthy, bearded face, when I thought,
Just don’t fight
. Let him have what he wanted and let him leave. Just lie still and take it and he’d go and I’d have my house back.

That’s when I saw the others. Three of them, surrounding the bed, waiting their turn. And it was as if a pair of scales in my head tipped. I fought then. It didn’t do any good, and deep inside, I knew it wouldn’t. I don’t even think I was fighting to escape. I was just fighting to say,
I object
, and in the end, lying there, bloodied and beaten, I took comfort in that, when every part of me screamed in pain.
I fought back.
No matter what had ultimately happened, I’d fought back.

It was a week before the leader—Ray—decided he’d broken me and I could be allowed out of that room. It took another week to build their confidence to the point where they left me alone long enough for me to escape that place, because of course they hadn’t broken me. As a child, I’d been inoculated against far more than mumps and measles. They did what they would do, and I acted my part: the cowed victim who comes to love the hand raised against her. An old role that I reprised easily.

Which is not to say that those two weeks didn’t leave their mark, and not simply physical ones. But I survived, and not for one moment did I consider
not
surviving, consider taking Katie’s way out. I respected her choice, but it was not mine. It never would be.

A
s I walked along a deserted country road a day after my escape, I remembered an old TV show about a zombie apocalypse. I’d been too young to watch it, but since those hours in front of the TV were the best times I had with my family, I took them, even if it meant watching something that gave me nightmares.

That show had endless scenes just like this one, a lost soul trudging along an empty road. While I didn’t need to worry about the
undead lurching from the ditches, at least in that world you knew who the monsters were. In ours, the existence of vampires was almost inconsequential. In the last year, I’d had a gun to my head twice, a knife to my throat three times, and been beaten and raped repeatedly. And I had yet to meet an actual vampire.

When I heard the little girl singing, I thought I was imagining it. Any parent worth the title had taken their children and fled long ago. There were fortified communities of families run by the last vestiges of the military, sanctuaries you couldn’t enter unless you had a kid. That’s another reason parents kept them hidden—so no one stole their children to gain entry.

But this really was a girl. No more than eight or nine, she sang as she picked wild strawberries along the road. The woman with her took off her wide-brimmed straw hat and waved it, calling “Hello!” and I cautiously approached.

“You’re alone,” the woman said. She was about thirty. Not much older than me, I reflected.

I shook my head. “I have friends. They’re—”

“If you’re not alone, you should be,” she said, waving at my black eye and split lip.

I said nothing.

“Do you need a place to stay?” she asked. “Somewhere safe?”

“No, I—”

“I can offer you a room and a properly cooked meal.” The woman managed a tired smile. “I was an apprentice chef once upon a time, and I haven’t quite lost the touch.”

“Why?” I asked.

She frowned. “Why do I still cook?”

“Why give me a bed and a meal?”

She shrugged. “Because I can. I have beds and I have food, and as much as I’d love to share them with whoever comes along this road, most times I grab my daughter and hide in the ditch until they pass.”

“And I’m different?”

“Aren’t you?”

The little girl ran over and held out a handful of strawberries. I took one and she grinned up at me. “We have Scrabble.”

“Do you?” I said.

“And Monopoly. But I like Scrabble better.”

“So do I,” I said, and followed her to the strawberry patch to continue picking.

I
f I thought the last house was heaven, that only proves how low my standards had fallen. With this one, even before the vampires, I’d have been both charmed and impressed. And maybe a little envious of the girl who got to grow up in this cozy sanctuary, like something from an old-timey English novel, the ones where children lived charmed lives in the countryside, spending their days with bosom friends and loyal dogs and kindly grown-ups, getting into trouble that really wasn’t trouble at all.

The house itself was as hidden by trees as the one I’d left. The woman had seeded the lane with weeds and rubble, so it looked as if nothing lay at the other end. There was a greenhouse filled with vegetables, fruit trees in the yard, a chicken coop, even goats for milk. The pantry was overflowing with home-canned goods.

“Keeps me busy,” the woman said as she took out a jar of peaches for afternoon tea.

For dinner, we had a meal beyond any I’d dared dream of in years. Then we played board games until the little girl was too tired to continue. After that, her mother and I read for an hour or so. Finally, we headed off to bed, and I was shown how to lock myself in. There were two dead bolts, one fastened on either side of the door. As to be expected these days.

I said good night. Then I went inside, turned my lock, and climbed into bed.

I lay there, in that unbelievably comfortable bed, with sheets that smelled of lemons and fresh air. I lay, and I waited. Hours later, when I heard footsteps in the hall, I closed my eyes.

The woman rapped softly on my door and whispered, “Are you awake?”

I didn’t answer. She carefully unbolted the lock on her side. Then came a rattle as she used something to pop mine. The door opened. Eyes shut, I waited until I heard breathing beside my bed. When I pinpointed the sound, I leaped.

I caught the woman by the throat, both of us flying to the floor. I saw a blur of motion and heard a muffled snarl and turned to see the little girl with a canvas sack over her head. Her mother swung at me. I ducked the blow and slammed her against the wall. The girl was snarling and fighting against the sack. As I pinned her mother, the girl got free of the bag.

The child’s eyes didn’t glow red. Her fingers weren’t twisted into talons. Her canines weren’t an inch long and sharpened. She looked exactly like the girl I’d just played Scrabble with for two hours. But the look in her eyes told me I’d guessed right. Yes, I’d hoped it was still possible for a stranger to be kind to me, to take me in and feed me and give me shelter because we were all in this hell together. I’d taken the chance, because I still dared to hope. But I’d known better.

If I was surprised at all, it was because I’d presumed the mother was the vampire, and she’d been locking her daughter in each night to keep her safe. But this made sense.

“She’s my daughter,” the woman said. “All I have left.”

I nodded. I understood. I really did. In her place, maybe I’d have done the same, as much as I’d like to think I wouldn’t.

I looked at the little girl. Then I threw her mother at her. The woman screamed and tried to scramble away. The girl pounced.

It was not over quickly. I’d heard stories of how the vampires killed. The rumor was they paralyzed their victims with a bite. But
the girl kept biting and her mother kept struggling, at first only saying the girl’s name and fighting to control her. Then came the panic, the kicking and screaming and punching, any thought of harming her child consumed by her own survival instinct. The girl bit her mother, over and over, blood spurting and spraying, until finally the woman’s struggles faded, and the girl began to gorge on the blood while her mother lay there, still alive, still jerking, eyes wide, life slowly draining from them.

I walked out of the guest room and locked the door behind me.

T
he next morning, I hit the road, back the way I’d come. I walked all morning with the little girl skipping beside me, then racing off to pick wildflowers and strawberries. She’d woken in her own room, her nightgown and face clean.

I’d woken her at dawn, seemingly panicked because I couldn’t find her mother. Something must have happened, and we had to go find her.

The girl followed without question. Now she walked without question. I’d told her that her mother had vanished, and she still skipped and sang and gathered flowers. Proving maybe a little part of her
was
still that monster after all.

At nightfall we reached my old sanctuary, the horror I’d escaped two days ago. I led her right up to the porch and rang the bell.

One of the guys answered. Seeing me, he stumbled back, as if a vengeful spirit stood on the porch.

“I want to see Ray,” I said.

He looked at the little girl. “Wha . . . ?”

“I want to see—”

“Hey, girlie.” Ray appeared from the depths of the dark hall.

“I want to come back,” I said.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Realized it’s not so bad, compared to what’s out there, huh?”

“I brought a gift,” I said. “My apology for leaving.”

That’s when he saw the girl. He blinked.

“You can use her to get into a refugee camp,” I said. “We’ll say we’re her parents, and the guys are your brothers.”

“Huh.” He thought for a moment, but it didn’t take long before he smiled. “Not bad, girlie. Not bad at all.”

“I just want one thing,” I said.

He chuckled. “Of course you do. Gotta be a catch.”

“I’m with you,” I said. “Just you. None of the others.”

The smile broadened to a grin. “You like me the best, huh? Sure, okay. I accept your condition and your apology . . . and your gift. Come on in.”

A
fter midnight, I slipped from under Ray’s arm and crept out. I tiptoed down the hall, unlocking doors as I went. It was an old house, the interior locks easily picked. The last one I opened was the little girl’s. Then I continued along the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door to begin the long walk back to the other house, my new home.

I got as far as the road before I heard the first scream. I smiled and kept walking.

Things went ever from bad to worse.

When God wills, may the end be good.

—UNKNOWN MONK, WORCESTER, ENGLAND, 1067

A
s dawn broke, it started snowing again, and Winfrid saw a body hanging from a tree.

He paused downhill from the grisly display, catching his breath and shrugging his habit and sheepskin in tighter. Nothing could hold back the shivers. They were mostly from the cold, but over the last ten days he had seen things that set a terror deep in his bones. Fear of God he had, as did any monk; a complex, rich emotion that seemed to both nurture and starve. But this fear was something new. He had yet to define it fully.

Perhaps the body in the tree would feed him another clue.

As he crunched through the freshly fallen snow, softly layered over the previous week’s falls, several birds took flight from the corpse. A rook he expected, but some of the smaller creatures—finches, a robin, several sparrows—were a surprise. With fields of crops burned, villages put to the torch, and the dead more numerous than ever before, perhaps these previously cautious birds were taking whatever they could get.

“Even the animals are against us,” he muttered as he moved cautiously uphill. He didn’t truly believe that, because the animals served only themselves. But if they
had
turned, it would have been the fault of the French. This brutality, this scourging of the land, was all their doing. William the Bastard and his mounted armies had not stopped when they defeated the English uprising in the north. They had carried on, shifting their attention from soldiers to farmers, peasants scraping a living from the land. The cattle fell beneath the sword first, then homes were put to the flame. Anyone who objected received the same—sword, flame, or sometimes both.

Winfrid had seen a child speared onto the side of a burning home. A man split from throat to crotch and seeded with the torched remnants of his stored harvest. Women tortured and raped, left as barren as the land. Whole villages destroyed, populations massacred or left to fend for themselves from a blasted landscape where nothing would grow, no livestock remained alive, and no building was left standing.

The north had paid a hundred times over for rebelling against he who called himself king, and that debt was still being gathered.

The body was relatively fresh. A man, stripped of clothing and hanged from his neck, which was stretched thin and torn, head blackened and tilted to one side. His swollen tongue protruded from his mouth like a final scream.

Winfrid muttered some prayers and tried to unsee the signs of scavenging. He had witnessed them on several bodies over the past few days, and rumors of cannibalism were muttered in the darker parts of his mind. Prayers would not hide them away.

The man’s legs were mostly stripped of flesh, bones plainly visible in several places, knife marks obvious. His cock and balls were gone, his stomach slack and drooping, and his sticklike fingers seemed unnaturally long.

Winfrid’s prayers froze when he heard a sound. It might have been a song being sung in the distance or a whisper from much closer. He stared up at the dead man’s face and saw no movement there, but still he hurried on, pleased when the trees and snow finally hid the grotesque sight from view.

“Just the wind,” he said. His voice was muffled in the landscape, the white silence of snow and woodland showing only scattered signs of life. Birds pecked ineffectually here and there. Rabbits scampered from shadow to shadow. He saw prints that might have belonged to a fox but then found larger marks that were undoubtedly those of a wolf. Winfrid had heard that wolves had ventured north and east from the borderlands between England and Wales, but he was surprised that they had come this far. The slaughters in the north would have left little for them to eat.