Dark Creations: Hell on Earth (Part 5) (18 page)

“What is it, Zogg?” he heard Lord Terzini call from the adjacent bedroom.  Terzini
knew that Zogg could not call to him and inform him of the reason for his visit, yet asked impatiently from out of sight. 

Zogg waited, restlessly, consumed by the scent of exposed flesh, until his maker entered the room.

Lord Terzini swept into the room in plain clothes and plopped down on the massive leather couch in his sitting area.  The whoosh of air that wafted from him dropping to the couch sent a breeze directly into Zogg’s face.  He felt his muscles begin to spasm, the attempt to restrain himself too taxing on his limited self-control.  His maker slid him a sly smile, and Zogg understood what was happening and why there had been increased security. 

“What’s the matter, Zogg.  You look,
off
,” Terzini asked and quirked an eyebrow at him.  “Is everything okay?”

Hunger infused with rage rocketed through his system and the urge to feast on his maker’s flesh jolted him like a bolt of lightning.  He wanted to pounce atop Lord Terzini and tear him limb from limb.  His tongue slipped over his razor-sharp teeth as he weighed his options and assessed his circumstances.  They were not in his favor.  Seven well-trained men aimed their weapons at him.  He would not be able to take them all down.  They would sho
ot him.  He needed to wait.  He would eat soon enough.

But waiting was torturous
, especially when Terzini’s aroma filled the room like fog.

“Well?  I haven’t got all day,
dog.”

His maker would not speak to him with such disdain, with such disrespect, if he were alone with Zogg, or even guarded by only one member.  He would not have survived entering the room, much less running his mouth. 

Zogg swallowed hard, the bitter burn of bile searing his throat, before he sat up on his haunches and pulled a rolled piece of paper from his collar.  He slapped the map down hard on the couch beside his maker.  The map was of Taft and the surrounding townships.  He had crudely circled the area across the lake, the one where he’d seen men watching him. 

“What you’re showing me is a waste of both our time.  I mean especially you.  It must have taken you
hours
to maneuver a crayon and draw this sad-looking circle,” Terzini chuckled and mocked him. 

Zogg allowed a deep rumble to echo through his chest and he heard the reflexive clicks and clatters of metal weapons being readjusted to optimum shooting positions.  Zogg grunted again.  He wished he could tell the pathetic members that without their equally pathetic arms, they were not that much better off than humans.  They would not stand a chance against him and the rest of the Hunters. 

“Oh, no need to get worked up,” Terzini said and waved his hand in the air dismissively.

The act sent the air in motion again and instigated another firestorm of reactions in Zogg. 

Terzini smiled knowingly and leaned back with his arms folded above his head.  He had not applied deodorant and the pungent smell of his armpits, like the scent of a forbidden delicacy, filled Zogg nostrils and became irresistible.  His appetite engulfed him.  Battling it, he motioned to the map again. 

“There’s nothing there. 
I sent Amber to check it out this morning.  Across the river, there are woods and a run-down farm.  That’s it.”

Zogg shook his head adamantly.

“Please!  Who should I believe, a highly trained, highly intelligent member of the new race so elevated she is permitted to spend intimate time with me, or a mindless dog?”

Zogg trembled with ire, with a thirst that surrounded him more fully than the men with guns did. 

“Just do you job,” Lord Terzini shooed his hand at him.  “Get him out of here,” he then ordered his guards.

Zogg remained
for a moment, watching Terzini intensely.

“Come on!  You heard Lord Terzini,” one of the men began ushering him out.

Yes, he had heard Lord Terzini.  Lord Terzini, a small man with a large title, presided over nothing without the Hunters.  And he only lived because guns had been trained on Zogg.  But they would not always be trained on him.  One day, his esteemed creator would find himself alone, and without the protection of his lackeys.  Then, Zogg would see how dismissive and disrespectful his maker was, and how quick to leave his protective clothes behind he would be.  And Zogg knew that ‘one day’ was coming sooner than Terzini thought. 

Chapter 15

Shooting down t
he two-lane highway through low hills, the smell of cool, fresh, afternoon air rushed at Amber.  Clutching the throttle tightly, the wind thrust her body back against Gabriel.  With his hard chest to her back and his arms wrapped around her waist, she felt something entirely foreign to her, an emotion that surpassed hopefulness, and was far more dangerous.  Amber Herald felt safe.

But she knew her feeling of safety would be compromised soon if she did not pull to the shoulder of the road and give Gabriel a protective uniform.  Without it, his help would be irrelevant.  It would never occur.  The Hunters would have him as soon as they reached the town line.  She could not allow for that to happen.  Gabriel had existed in her world as a person she secretly admired, but would never have the privilege of meeting.  To the rest of the membership, he was a failed experiment turned villainous rebel. To her, he was a beacon of hope, hope that was continually on the verge of extinction.  His rebellion, the fact that he had developed emotions despite being created without them, that he had lived to enjoy his newfound emotions with the person who had awakened them, all of it was the stuff of legend.  He was also a thorn in her maker’s side which solidified his rank as a demi
God in her mind.  She would not let him die at the unending hunger of a Hunter.  He was her hero.

As Amber slowed to a stop on the side of the road and climbed off her bike, she felt Gabriel’s body tense.  She hated that he did not trust her, but did not blame him.  She would not trust her either if she were he.

“What’s going on here?  Why are we stopping?” he asked and narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously when she turned suddenly to face him. 

She climbed from her bike and yanked her helmet off.  He jumped off, too and stepped back, away from her, as if he expected her to attack.  She put her hands up in surrender before opening the seat of her motorcycle.  The insides had been hollowed out into a storage compartment.  Inside it, she had packed a spare uniform which consisted of pants and a shirt. She always kept a spare uniform in case hers was compromised.  The material was remarkably hi-tech and stretched to fit all members, though stretching was rarely necessary as most were roughly the same height and weight.  The women and men boasted similar athletic frames and she did not worry the uniform would not fit Gabriel.  After all, he had been the prototype years earlier and was just slightly taller and broader than her. 

She pulled both from beneath the seat and handed them to Gabriel.

“Here,” she said as she shoved both articles at him hurriedly.  “Put these on.” 

He eyed her warily and did not move to take the uniform. 

“Please, you need to wear these.  They’re for your protection,” she urged him.

“How exactly will a uniform identical to yours protect me?  Especially since you told me every member knows who I am.”

“It’s not the membership I’m trying to protect you from.  It’s the Hunters,” she answered honestly and tossed them at him. 

“These aren’t made of steel, Amber,” he said waving the clothes at her.  “So I don’t see how they’re going to help me.”

“The clothes block your scent, and where it concerns the Hunters, they might as well be made of steel.  All of us wear them.  If we were to walk around without them, we would be attacked.  The Hunters,
they’re powerless against their appetite.  They can’t control themselves.  If they smell flesh, they will attack.”

She shivered thinking about the gruesome display the Hunters had demonstrated hours earlier, after she and Kyle had dumped the bodies of her teammates and his parents into the street.  She was not exaggerating the Hunters’ practices.  Still, she understood his distrust of her.

“Why would Terzini create the Hunters if they’re a threat to him and his members?”

“The only way they would ever turn on a member would be if a member wasn’t wearing a uniform.  Then, a Hunter would be powerless against his hunger.  He would have no choice but to surrender to it, and feed.”

Gabriel’s eyes widened.

“But they have served an important purpose, important to Terzini and the others, at least,” she continued.  “They make sure no evidence is left, that the people members replace vanish completely.”  Her stomach churned at the memory of just how completely they cleared evidence from scenes.  She could hear the fevered lapping of blood and the crunching of bone that followed a feeding session resounding in her memory.  “And they guarantee no one will enter town and discover what is happening.  They are unavoidable.  Once they catch a scent, they remember it, and they’ll track it.  The uniforms are the only way I know of to keep them at bay.  That, and the fact that if they kill a member they’ll be killed, keeps order.”

“So when I saw them along the perimeter of town this morning, they were patrolling it?”

“You saw them?” Amber asked and heard the incredulity in her own voice.  She wondered how he had managed to see them and survive to tell about it.  Her hope began to climb to dangerously new levels.

“Yeah, I went with some of the men at camp.  We went up into the mountains right along the lake and watched.  The guys have these high-powered binoculars.  I was able to look across the lake and into the town on the other side, and I saw them.  The odd thing is, I felt as if they saw me, too.”

Hope leaked from her like air in a punctured balloon.  He had seen the Hunters from a distance, and she was sure they had perceived him somehow, as well.  Whether they had caught his scent in the breeze off the lake or had actually seen him with their superior vision, they knew he was near. 

“Of course, they knew you were there.  They either smelled you, or saw you,” she told him.  “And that gives you even more reason to put that uniform on.”

“How many are there?  Hunters, I mean,” he asked as he pulled his shirt over his head. 

She felt heat race up her neck to her cheeks as she watched him, shirtless, folding the shirt he had stripped off.  She turned from him to give him privacy, discomfited.

“Lord Terzini keeps twenty Hunters in each town.  But that’s not the only measure he takes to keep people from leaving.  Cars are disabled, too.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.  Each house we go to has already been surveyed and its vehicles incapacitated.  It is newer protocol added after an incident when someone had escaped in a minivan.  To date, that minivan escape has been the only one documented.”

“What about the members who’ve replaced the people of the town, you know, the houses they storm and people they kill?  What do the members do?  Don’t they patrol the town, as well or do what the person they killed did to maintain some semblance of normality?”

“They have strict orders to stay indoors, in the beginning, at least, before the entire town has been secured.  They assume the lives of those they’ve killed, minimally of course.  They don’t throw birthday parties or go to weddings or anything like that, but they pay bills and field phone calls.  Once the town has been secured, though, they are can go wherever they want.  The town is theirs.”

“Secured?” Gabriel asked.  “What do you mean by
secured
?”

Amber hesitated a moment, shrinking from the reality of what had happened, what was still happening.  The gravity of it was nauseating, her involvement, shameful.  “
Secured
is the term used when all of a town’s residents have been killed.”

Gabriel stopped moving, she could hear that he had frozen.  “Oh my
God,” he breathed before he resumed dressing.

“This is just, it’s just unbelievable, what’s happening, what Terzini is doing.  There are no
words for it.  I can’t believe what’s happening here,” Gabriel said, the distress in his voice profound.  Amber did not need to see his face to know how he was feeling.  She could hear it; hear the shock and disbelief, the horror.

“I know,” Amber agreed sadly.

“You should know.  You’ve seen it firsthand.  You’re part of it,” Gabriel said bitingly.

She did not bother fighting back.  What would be the point?  He was right.

“You’re right,” she offered weakly.

A part of her expected him to keep after her, to needle her until she became what he expected her to be: a monster

“So we are just going to ride into town unnoticed?” he said and surprised her by not pursuing the topic further.

“Kind of,” Amber said.  “But we have a short window of time, hours at best, until everyone in the town is declared dead.”

Amber glanced over her shoulder to see if Gabriel had finished dressing, and to gauge his reaction to what she had said.  She saw that his face remained stoic and that he wore the shirt she had given him.  She turned and faced him and was about to address how disgraceful her involvement in Lord Terzini’s plan truly was, only to find that he did not have on pants.  She inhaled sharply and spun back around, the sight of him in his boxer shorts coloring her face a deep garnet hue.  Beads of sweat gathered between her shoulder blades and trickled down to her lower back.  The too-hot sun blistered overhead and she wished she had a bottle of ice-cold water to both drink and dump on her head.