Vamp-Hire (23 page)

He had the feeling he was going to be doing a
lot of that for a while. He realized there were only two ways this
would go: either he’d find a way to turn his mess of a life around,
get a real job and residence or he’d be on the street until someone
killed him or he was rounded up and put back in the Pens, this time
for good. He told himself he didn’t care, wallowing in self-pity
for a brief moment.

Nick did care about his life, it just hurt
because he felt like he was the only one who did. Maybe he would
find some sort of companion and maybe he would let him or her in.
He could probably start by finding Lucky and giving him a real
apology. He didn’t want to dwell on their last conversation because
he didn’t want to feel any worse than he did at the moment.

His cell rang.

Nick snatched it off the holster on his hip
and answered the call, not paying attention to the number on the
display.

“Hello?” he said, expecting it to be Phoebe,
hoping she would tell him to turn around and come back home.

“Hello,” a gravelly male voice said. It
sounded put on, like a teenager trying to sound tougher and
older.

“Who is this?” Nick said.

“Over here,” the voice said.

“Wha—” he said, standing up to look around.
He realized his mistake half a heartbeat before the high beams of a
car behind him switched on, crawling over the sidewalk and onto the
lawn of a house two doors back.

Nick was semi-blinded, turning away from the
car to run. He hesitated, remembering the person who had spoken to
him on his phone, also not far away from him. Nick zagged, hoping
to pull away from these people long enough to recover his vision
and make a break for it. He tripped over something, somehow managed
to keep his feet, waving his arms like a madman to keep from
running into a tree or signpost.

Something thudded off the side of his head,
white flashing beneath his hazy view of a medical building lit by
the orangey glow of a streetlight.

Nick’s legs came out from underneath him and
the asphalt came up and crashed against the side of him, taking a
bite out of his cheek. He tried to do a push-up to get onto his
knees and pain exploded in his ribs. He tumbled onto his side and
groaned. He kept rolling, trying to get out of reach of his
attacker.

He managed to get to his feet, his arm
wrapped across him. His vision cleared just as he saw a skinny man,
several inches shorter than him, charge in his direction. Nick
willed down the volume of the pain. The man raced at him as if in
slow motion. He stepped to the side, letting a leg drag behind him.
The little man turned, but not in time to avoid tripping over
Nick’s foot.

He saw the look of shock dawn on the man’s
face as he tumbled to the street. Something inside Nick said to
chase after this man, to catch him as soon as he fell. He wanted to
stomp on some vital part of his body, maybe his pelvis or his
throat. He wanted to tear some part of him off, not because he
thirsted for the man’s blood, just out of some advanced sense of
self-defense. Even if he were hurt from the fall, the man would get
up and come after him again. Nick needed to put him down for good
before his partner—

Nick’s skin felt like it was on fire and he
couldn’t control his body anymore. He shook violently, his legs
spilling out from underneath him as the ground came up for another
kiss. He went on convulsing for several more seconds until a man
stepped into his peripheral vision, holding something in his
hand.

“He almost got the best o’ you, Wendell,” the
man said. “Now what would you ‘a done if I wuddn’t there?”

Wendell scraped himself off the street. “I
think I chipped a tooth,” he said. Electricity stopped coursing
through Nick, however, he still couldn’t move. He smelled something
like burning hair, hearing himself make some sort of gulping,
groaning sound like he was starving for air. He was a rear
passenger in his own body, unable to reach for the wheel.

The first man rolled him on his stomach and
wrenched his arms behind him. Nick felt the all-too familiar
zip-ties strapped on his wrists and then the two men yanked him to
his feet. Nick’s legs were still jelly and they had to drag him
toward the blaring high beams.

He became aware he still had his cell phone
in his hand when it began to ring. They stopped and Wendell plucked
it out of his grasp. Nick was trying to make a fist around his
phone, hoping to keep his lifeline to someone he could tell he was
being kidnapped.

“Hello?” Wendell said in a pleasant tone.
“Nick? No, this is his phone. Oh, I’m sorry, he isn’t available
right now. Could I take a message? Sure.” He ended the call and
pocketed Nick’s cell. They started walking again.

“I’m gonna need that back,” Nick said, his
words sounding slurred. His throat felt sore as if he’d been
screaming, though he hadn’t heard himself doing that.

“Don’tchoo worry none,” the other man said as
they began walking to the car again. “We’ll make sure to log all
yer personal effects. You won’t be needin’ ‘em, though.” He smiled
and Nick got an eyeful of gold teeth and a noseful of sour milk
breath. “You know where you people go after gettin’ arrested,
right?”

Nick knew.

“The Pens! We get a sixty-five dollar bounty
for each of you we catch out after sundown.”

Their car was actually a rusty white Ford
F-250 with a canopied flatbed. Wendell opened it with one hand,
wiggling a tooth with the thumb of his other one.

“I think I’m gonna lose this tooth. Man!” he
said. Nick was only able to offer a modest amount of resistance
before they propped him up on the tailgate and slid him in. They
shut him inside and Nick could smell the three other vamps he was
locked in with. Save for the relative few he’d gotten to know and
like at the Center, he didn’t really like vamps. Almost all the
ones he’d encountered were awful. He didn’t like ‘regular’ people
for much the same reason.

Three pairs of tapetum lucidum stared back at
him. They were all Nick could see for a second before his own eyes
adjusted and he spotted the two males and one female. Two of them
looked homeless.

Nobody said anything. After a few seconds two
doors slammed, the truck jerked slightly, and then pulled away.
Nick found an empty spot as close to the rear as possible, noting
the strip of white tape between him and the others on the floor of
the flatbed.

“I suggest you scooch back behind the line,”
one of them said. Nick looked at an older vamp who looked around
twenty-five or so. He smelled of sour alcohol and cigarettes and
had an overall grizzled appearance. “They taser you if you sit too
close to the door.”

He looked at the man then at the line. He
waited several seconds and then shuffled over on his butt, sitting
on the other side of the wheel hub. He looked down at the floor,
not wanting any more eye contact. There was no need to assess the
situation, Nick was totally screwed.

The best he could hope for was one of those
re-education halfway houses where they went over all the rules
regarding release. Nick didn’t want to go back to the Pens. He
wasn’t suicidal, but death would be preferable to being shipped
back there. He looked up and stared at the vamps he was in company
with. The woman and the one who had spoken to him were looking
back. He wondered if they had ever been there.

Nick’s wheels began turning. He had to figure
a way out of here. Only his hands were tied and he could move
around. They all could. Maybe he could get them to work together
and they could overwhelm their captors. The others couldn’t want to
be in here.

“Hey,” Nick said to all three, “why don’t we
try to break out of here?” The other one who hadn’t spoken raised
his head in Nick’s direction and smirked.

“That’s it, boys!” Wendell shouted from the
front. “I thought I said no talkee!” Nick heard a whispering sound
all around him and then he could taste copper at the back of his
throat.

“That’s why,” the woman slumped at the front
of the flatbed said. She had a soft smoker’s voice and a head that
seemed like a giant mass of black hair.

Nick licked the corner of his mouth. It was
blood. He didn’t get it. Blood made vamps stronger, didn’t it? Nick
didn’t remember where he had actually heard that or if he had
figured it on his own. It didn’t taste like there was anything in
it. Then again, he had never consumed blood before. And it wasn’t
like he had a sophisticated drug-taking palate. So far as he knew
there could have been any number of tranquilizers laced in the
mist.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“He probly thinks that blood is going to turn
him into Superman,” the man who had spoken earlier said.

“There could be any number of odorless and
tasteless poisons in that.” The other man was looking at Nick with
a smile on his face. He didn’t look happy, though, he looked deeply
exhausted. Something in his eyes said he was old despite his
unseamed face. He had on a suit, complete with expensive-looking
shoes.

Nick had been trying to collect as much of
the mist into his open mouth as he could, and froze at the man’s
words. The man’s smile dropped into a smirk and he stuck his tongue
out, licking the part of his face where a mustache would go if he’d
grown one.

“Of course, we would have already been
poisoned, wouldn’t we?” Nick noticed his suit was already stained
red, feeling slightly embarrassed at the man’s minor manipulation.
“I’m Grant O’Neill, by the way.”

A last name. Grant the vamp had a last name.
Not many of the ones Nick knew did. Perhaps he had more recall of
his former life or a family who still claimed him. The doctors had
said partial memory recovery was possible.

“I’m Nick.” He felt like they should shake or
something. Nobody had a free hand.

“Nick.” Grant said it with a degree of
authority, like a command was going to follow his name. “I always
repeat a person’s name upon first meeting. Helps me commit it to
memory.”

“Okay.” The mist cut off. “So what’s the
purpose of giving us blood?”

“Look, kid, it’ll be obvious in a moment or
two.” The first man had jumped back in the conversation. He blinked
slowly several times and for a moment, Nick thought he was trying
to tell him something.

Then everything began to feel like it was
slowing down. He didn’t remember closing his eyes, but suddenly he
was lying on his side.

“It tastes like cow’s blood,” Grant was
saying, “but the effect is largely the same. Blood doesn’t give you
super strength, it gets you high. Large quantities can make you
violent. They spritz us with enough to make us nice and
docile.”

His voice sounded like it had dropped a few
octaves. Nick found himself having trouble listening.

“Yeah. He’s going to sleep,” the woman said.
“Definitely a first-timer.”

“Why… why are you all fine?” Nick yawned.

“We’re not,” somebody said. “We just have
more experience with it than you, newbie.”

Nick struggled to keep his eyes open. He
wanted to ask something else. He opened his mouth twice; no words
would come. It came to him with perfect clarity that Lucky had
given him blood before and he couldn’t remember feeling like this.
Then he recalled he’d slept for three days while his body
miraculously knitted flesh back into a hole shot in him with an
arrow.

Or was it four?

He struggled to remember, swimming in a
directionless sea, his limbs and mind going number by the
second.

“I… need,” he managed to say before fogging
out.

* * *

Nick came to inside a pen. It was like a
light being switched on in his head. He blinked several times. His
eyes insisted on being dry and scratchy. He rubbed at them, which
only made them feel hotter and scratchier.

Finally, tears came and he sat on the floor
with his lids closed, rolling his eyeballs left and right, up and
down until he felt something akin to relief.

He had to figure out where he was. This
didn’t look like the Pens. It wasn’t packed enough, the air didn’t
carry the stank of despair, there was no constant moaning or
mindless screaming. The concrete walls were bland, dull blue
fluorescent lights making the room look washed out. There was a bed
of newspaper in each pen, like they were animals who would
eventually need to go potty, though nowhere the level of awful that
was the Pens. He didn’t think he’d been out long enough to be taken
to Middle-of-nowhere, Iowa. For all Nick knew the Pens were just
across the state line or maybe they were franchising into this
area.

At least he knew this wasn’t the Pens. And if
that were the case maybe there still was a way out of here.

Nick looked around. He was in a five by five
chicken-wire enclosure. There were iron rods at all corners to keep
the structure upright and secure that went through all the other
Pens to the walls on either side. There was a little hatch in the
front of each one, held closed with shorter iron rods and
padlocked. Most of the pens were empty and his neighbors were the
three vamps who had been in the truck with him and about five or
six more. All of them were in separate enclosures that backed up to
a bare cinder block wall.

To his right was a baldheaded man in a track
suit. He looked lost and confused, like he had gone to sleep in his
bed and woke up here.

Nick nodded at the vamp twice before he
noticed him. The man’s eyes swiveled back and forth in his head,
taking in their surroundings.

“What is this place? Get me out of here.” The
man was speaking a language Nick understood despite never hearing
it before. He didn’t know how to respond or even if he should. He
wanted answers from Nick he couldn’t provide.

“I’m sorry, I don’t—” Nick pointed to his ear
and shook his head. The man wrapped his hands around the wire mesh
separating them and cleared his throat.