Darkest Heart (5 page)

Let me out! Let me out of this hellhole! I've got to feed! I'm starving!

Create PDF
files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (
http://www.novapdf.com
)

"Good."

You stupid cunt! If I starve to death, you go with me! I'm not a damned tapeworm!

"Couldn't prove it to me."

I'm getting out of here! I don't care what you say!

The Other forced her stiffened limbs to bend, levering her onto her feet. Her joints cracked like rotten timber as she moved. She staggered in the direction of the door. In her weakened condition she had difficulty seeing in the pitch black of the meat locker, forcing her to abandon her sunglasses.

Her groping hands closed on the door's interior handle. There was a sharp crackle and a flash of blue light as she was thrown halfway across the locker. She screamed and writhed like a cat hit by a car, holding her blistered, smoking hands away from her body. This was the twentieth time the Other had tried to open the door, and several of her fingers were on the verge of gangrene.

"You're not going anywhere. Not now. Not ever!"

Fuck you! Fuck you! I'll get you for this, you human-loving cow!

"What? Are you going to kill me?"

Sonja crawled back to her place in the corner. The effort started her coughing again, bringing up black, clotted blood. She wiped at her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket, nearly dislocating her lower jaw in the process.

You're falling apart. You're too weak to regenerate properly....

"You're the one who pounded your head against the fuckin' wall trying to get out."

You're the one that got us locked up in here! Don't blame me!

"I am blaming you. But not for that."

It's that fucking stupid human again! You think you can punish me for that? I didn't do anything that you hadn't already fantasized about!

"You raped him, damn you! You could have killed him!"

I didn't, though. I could have. But I didn't.

"I loved him!" Sonja's voice cracked, became a sob.

You don't love him. You love being mistaken for human. That's what you're really mad at me about.

You're upset that I ruined your little game of Let's Pretend!

"Shut up."

Make me.

Judd checked the street number of the warehouse against the address that Mal had given him. This was the place. It was one of the few remaining warehouses in the district that had not been turned into an overpriced yuppie ghetto. There was a small, hand-lettered sign posted on the front door that read Indigo Imports, and a heavy chain and double padlock wrapped about the handle. A quick check of the ground floor confirmed that all the windows were secured with burglar bars.

He rounded the side of the building and spotted the loading dock. After a few minutes of determined tugging, he succeeded in wrenching the sliding metal door open wide enough for him to slide under. The inside of the warehouse was lit only by the mid-afternoon sunlight slanting through the barred windows and the place smelled of dust and rat piss. The meat locker was on the ground floor, just where Mal said it would be. Its metal walls and door were covered in swirls of spray-painted graffiti. What looked like a huge line of cocaine marked the locker's threshold. Judd grabbed the door's handle and yanked it open.

There was a faint crackling sound and a rush of cold, foul air. He squinted into the darkness, covering his nose and breathing through his mouth.

"Sonja?"

Something moved in the deepest shadows of the freezer. He stepped in the direction of the movement.

"Sonja, it's me, baby. "

"Go away." It sounded like she was talking through a mouth full of mud. "You don't know what you're doing."

Judd took another step into the locker, his eyes finally adjusting to the gloom. He could see her now, crouching in the far corner with her knees drawn against her chest, her face turned to the wall.

"No, you're wrong, Sonja. I know exactly what I'm doing."

"I let her hurt you, Judd. I could have stopped her, but I didn't. I let her - let her - " Her voice trailed off as her shoulders began to shake. "Go away before I hurt you again."

Judd kneeled beside her. She smelled like a side of beef gone bad. Her hands were covered with blisters

Create PDF
files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (
http://www.novapdf.com
) and oozing sores, and some of her fingers jutted at odd angles, as if they had been broken without being properly set. She pulled away at his touch, pressing herself against the wall as if she could somehow squeeze between the cracks.

"Don't look at me."

"Sonja, you don't understand. I love you. I know what you are, what you're capable of - and I love you anyway."

"Even if I hurt you?"

"Especially when you hurt me."

She turned her head in his direction. Her face looked like it had been smashed, then reassembled by a well-meaning, but inept, plastic surgeon with only a blurry photograph to go by. Her eyes glowed like those of an animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming car.

"What?"

Judd leaned closer, his eyes reflecting a hunger she knew all too well. "At first when it happened, I was scared. Then, I realized I wasn't frightened anymore. I've never known anything like it before! It was incredible! I love you, Sonja! All of you! I want to be your slave forever."

She reached out and caressed his face with one of her charred hands. She had feared this would happen since the moment she first met him. The Other had transformed Judd into a vampire junkie, and turned her into his fix.

"I love you too, Judd. Kiss me."

She sat behind the wheel of the car for a long time, staring out into the dark on the other side of the windshield. Nothing had changed since the last time she'd been out here, disposing of Kitty.

She pressed her fingertips against her right cheek, and this time it held. Her fingers were healed and straight again as well. She readjusted her shades, opened the car door, and slid out from behind the wheel of the Caddy she'd bought off the lot, cash-in-hand.

Judd was in the trunk, divvied up into six garbage bags, just like Kitty. At least it'd been fast. Her hunger was so intense she drained him dry within seconds. He hadn't tried to fight when she buried her fangs in his throat, even though she hadn't the strength to trance him. Maybe part of him knew she was doing him a favor.

She dragged the bags out of the trunk and headed in the direction of the alligator calls. She'd have to leave New Orleans, maybe for good this time. Kitty might not have been missed, but Judd was another story.

Arlo was sure to mention his suspicions concerning his missing friend's weirdo new girlfriend to the authorities.

It was time to blow town and head for Merida, maybe pay Palmer a visit and check on how he and the baby were making out. Funny how she'd forgotten about him. Of all her human companions, he was the only one she'd come closest to truly loving. Before Judd, that is.

She hurled the sacks containing her lover's remains into the water and returned to the car. She tried not to hear the noise the gators made as they fought amongst themselves.

She climbed back into the car and slammed a cassette into the Caddy's tape deck. Lard's The Last Temptation of Reid thundered through the speakers, causing the steering wheel to vibrate under her hands. She wondered when the emptiness would go away, or at least be replaced by pain. Anything would be preferable to the nothing inside her.

I don't see why you had to go and kill him like that. We could have used a renfield. They do come in handy, now and then. Besides, he was kind of cute....

"Shut up and drive."

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do.

Two can be as bad as one, It's the loneliest number since the number one.

One,

- Harry Nilsson

Create PDF
files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (
http://www.novapdf.com
)

The important thing he had to remember was, no matter what his eyes might see, he dared not trust it. He had learned that whatever he hunted might look like, it was nothing but falsehood, wrapped in illusion. It didn't matter if the mask they showed him was one of drab normalcy or that of youth and beauty, underneath its surface was nothing but horror and rot.

But most of all, he had learned to be wary of those who always smiled. They did so not because they were happy to see him, but because they were thinking about ripping out his throat. Of course, he had learned this truth the only way he could... the hard way.

The sweet little old lady tending her knitting in front of the fireplace; that saucer-eyed school child skipping down the sidewalk on her way to the playground; or the gray-flannel yuppie with his attaché case in one hand and cell phone in the other: they all could be fiends from pits far darker than any charted by Dante.

That is why he kept trophies. They reminded him that no matter how mundane such creatures might appear on the outside, on the inside they were monsters. In the end, not matter how innocuous their outward visages, when the moment of truth finally arrived they all dropped their masks and showed him their real faces.

In the years since he first dedicated himself to the eradication of the secret plague upon mankind, he had not allowed his hand to waver once, no matter how pitiful their pleas. Some of them cried; others tried to convince him he'd made a horrible mistake, whimpering and wailing for their miserable lives until it made him sick. He would have thought they would have more self-respect than that, but what could he expect from such creatures?

Their kind had robbed him of his parents, his innocence and his childhood. They had tainted him by making him a part of their nightmare world. So he made them pay for it, one by one. Yet, for all of this, he was no closer to finding the bastard who made him what he was than on the day he first left the hospital.

Their mouths are the only things that seem alive. The lips are full and red and eager, wet and trembling with anticipation, waiting for the moment when the hard and waiting fangs may be shown, like a samurai who can only sheath his sword after it has been anointed with blood. When set in pale, otherwise unremarkable faces, such raw vitality seems more appropriate of genitals. Which isn't too far from the truth, since for them to feeding is breeding. The drive to continue the species and sustain the self has been fused in an obscene parody of replication, where Thanatos is inextricably wed to Eros.

In the living world, species that destroy what they mate with are doomed to extinction, but amongst the undead such creatures are profligate. Indeed, it is only the vampire's innate selfishness that keeps their population in check. There is a certain safety in numbers - provided their fellows share the same Maker, otherwise they will battle one another to their final deaths.

These pathetic creatures pretend to be human the way alligators pretend to be logs - in order to ambush unwary prey and consume them at their leisure. They mimic human society and its foibles without fully understanding why they do so, like chimps smoking cigars or bears riding bicycles. Even the centuries-long grudge matches and guerrilla wars amongst the Ruling Class are the result of dead flesh parodying the darker passions of the living.

In truth, they all were once living beings who had known love, warmth, kindness, and all those other things that make humans what they are. But with death comes darkness, erasing all the higher emotions, and leaving only base appetite and self-interest behind. In this manner the undead are little more than sentient beasts, concerned with one thing and one thing only: continuing their existence.

On the outside, the loathsome creature was the very picture of normalcy. It dressed like any other human on the street - not too current, not too dated. It seemed no different from any of the other well-groomed, well-fed young urbanites hanging out at the bar, the only noticeable eccentricity being a four foot-long braid of blood-red hair. But since he knew what to look for, he could see it for what it truly was.

There was something about their body language that gave them away. The manner in which they moved their hands and positioned their bodies was very deliberate, almost stylized. It was hard to explain, but once he saw it, there was no mistaking it.

While recovering in the hospital, he read one of Dr. Morrissey's books on non-verbal communication between humans. It described various body postures and how they subliminally represent various

Create PDF
files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (
http://www.novapdf.com
) emotional states: passivity, dominance, aggression, fear. It was the author's contention that even the most paranoid patient could be manipulated into trusting an utter stranger, provided the proper non-verbal signals were used.

He had been of two minds about that, until he saw these creatures at work. They moved with a studied nonchalance, a deliberate ease... no motion unintended, no gesture accidental. Yet it all seemed strangely alien to them, like martial artists whose fighting stances imitate the movements of tigers, cranes or snakes.

Another means of detecting them was for him to get close enough to look into their eyes. That was dangerous, but surefire. The real trick was not letting them know he was looking, for their features restructured themselves the moment they were no longer being observed. Most humans who gained this knowledge learned it far too late to do them any good, but he had been lucky so far. If you could call what he had undergone "luck."

When they smiled, he noticed it never reached their eyes. The corners of the mouth pulled up, but it was more a nervous tic. The eyes possessed a hunger that was completely out of context with human emotion; as if something much more ancient and dangerous were looking out at the world.

His eyes had been like that; fixing him with a gaze no child should ever see, except from something locked safely behind the bars of a zoo.

* * * *