Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) (2 page)

My resurrection came when I
helped Wyn and Ms. Crystobal free Red from the Black Building. That
was the night when I started to become less selfish and more
selfless. That night I was no longer some centripetal girl. Helping
others helped me expand as graciously as the universe beyond the
narrow confines of my private little world.

The Locomotive Deadyards
gave me time to think about all this. It gave me time to travel
inwardly, to meditate on
who I
am
, and to allow
how I am
to wrap me up in the gift of
interior contemplation.

Time to myself was a gift.
Time without the worries and woes of the world was a gift. Yet the
gift of time for introspective examination was startlingly
wibbly-wobbly.

The heart of the Locomotive
Deadyards started to feel like a new home.

I think Red felt that way
too.

He and I instinctively
began rearranging the joint, making it livable, making it our
own.

There was already a large
tin roof over the Locomotive Deadyards. We left that alone as we
lifted the cars over our heads with super-human strength. We
arranged the cars into a fort. The design came naturally to us.
Oddly, it bore a striking resemblance to a labyrinth.

We called it, “The
Labyrinth Fort.”

Passenger cars were
passageways leading from one boxcar to another. We connected them
together, lining them up, so that there was no open space between
them. We cut out passageways and doorways between the connected
cars. We could go from one car to another the way we might go down
a hallway, or go from room to room.

We created rooms out of the
railroad cars. Each room served a different function.

Most were quite narrow and
snug.

For taller rooms, we
stacked hopper cars on top of each other, the lowest right side up,
the highest upside down, since the hoppers had no roofs.

One room was where we slept
– separately, of course.

Another room was where we
created machinery and other devices.

Another was where we made
weapons for the day when we would attack Lowen and his Sleeper
Devils.

And another room was where
I went to scream my lungs out whenever I missed the bad habits of
my girlhood. And I did miss my old habits on occasion.

And I did scream quite
loudly too.

Red and I then went a step
further and we made the Locomotive Deadyards a gauntlet of snares
and deadfalls, preparing for the day when Lowen and his Sleeper
Devils might come to attack us. We did not know if they would ever
find us, but we did not want to be caught off guard.

We had a lot of scrap. Red
and I put our heads together and we came up with all sorts of
interesting ways for defending our hiding spots in the tortuous
warrens of our Labyrinth Fort.

He made the Kharetie
version of a lightsaber. The difference was that the saber part
wasn’t light. It was sonic. And it turned out to be astoundingly
sharper than a Ginsu knife.

Me? What did I make? Why of
course my own attachable Wolverine claws.

Snickety-snick
goes my berserker rage.

I was getting used to Red.
He was getting used to me. We were beginning to enjoy one another’s
company greatly.

And one time, very briefly,
I thought I caught him smiling at me.

We made a list of all the
important components that could not be found in the Locomotive
Deadyards, things like hard drives and processors and
motherboards.

We planned a trip back to
the mansion, to look for Wyn and Ms. Crystobal, and to loot the
mansion for everything we needed.

We were Earth’s most alien
cadgers.

Red was sleeping in his
spacecraft.

He didn’t have a bed. He’s
never had one. He sleeps standing up with his legs keeping perfect
balance.

The first time I saw this,
it scared the dickens out of me!

I hadn’t been able to sleep
that night. I kept worrying about Wyn and Ms. Crystobal. My mind
would not shut down.

So I snuck from my railcar
room and I crept inside Red’s spaceship. The sight of him made me
jump, but then it made me giggle. I tried tipping him over as if he
were a cow.

His spacecraft saw me as a
threat and then launched me into the stratosphere.

Three weeks finally came
and went.

Red and I still had not
heard from Wyn or Ms. Crystobal. So we made plans to return to
Idyllville and to the mansion on the following week. A month of
waiting was long enough.

I spent that week preparing
myself for battle.

I still had the gadgets
that Wyn had given me when we freed Red from the Black
Building.

I did not know how some of
them worked. Lowen’s Sleeper Devils had broken the others when they
attacked my eighteen-wheeler. Those little doohickeys needed
repairing badly.

So it was with great
reluctance that I drank the blood of a computer engineer skilled in
both hardware and software. Even though Nell’s Blood Memories were
still nauseating me, desperate times call for desperate
pleasures.

I pierced the
engineer.

His blood was delicious.
And he walked away from the experience happier because of the
euphoric rush of my Blood Vivicanti venom.

Still, I felt wretched for
doing it.

Guilt and shame are
restless twin ghosts that never stop haunting me.

In an instant the
engineer’s Blood Memories filled me with knowledge of computer
software and hardware. His talent was now my talent. I could repair
all of Wyn’s devices. I could build anything from a circuit board
to a rocket to the moon. I could have turned the remains of Wyn’s
mansion into a super collider and discovered new
elements.

Red helped me since he had
Wyn’s Blood Memories inside him too.

He and I sat side-by-side.
We tinkered in silence.

No, I couldn’t help
noticing how his skin was creamy smooth, or how his muscles were
naturally sculpted to perfection.

I mentioned before that his
natural body odor is the scent of raspberries and
lilacs.

He has always been a
walking barrel of Ben and Jerry’s.

Finally one month went
by.

We still had heard no word
from Wyn or Ms. Crystobal. So we hopped inside Red’s spaceship and
we flew at supersonic speed to the mansion.

Idyllville had been
deserted. The Academy of the Arts, Cool Beans Coffee House, Hatters
Café, every shop, every house, all empty.

Joe and his family were
gone too. That made me sad. Part of me missed them. The other part
of me was tempted to swan dive into their Blood
Memories.

Escape is the worst bad
habit to break.

I suspected that Idyllville
might have been evacuated because, from their point of view, Wyn’s
mansion had basically become Dr. Frankenstein’s
laboratory.

Then again, maybe the flock
fled because over a thousand Sleeper Devils had poured out from the
portal that Ms. Crystobal had opened. Their foul stench would have
been enough to make me run for the hills too.

The sleepy little village
still reeks of rotting corpses.

There was no trace of Wyn
or Ms. Crystobal in the mansion, except Wyn’s lingering
scent.

Ms. Crystobal had no scent
at all.

But the mansion was not
entirely empty. Things other than Lowen’s Sleeper Devils were
nearby, watching the place, waiting for our return.

I had never smelled their
scent before, yet one smelled oddly like Nell, though not quite
Nell at the same time, as if she had been changed yet again into
something even more horrific, the poor girl.

The power was out in the
mansion. Darkness surrounded us. But our eyes, like cat eyes, saw
perfectly well in the dark.

Red was wearing tall black
boots and black cargo pants. His muscular chest was as bare as a
barbarian’s. He was wielding his sonicsaber. It hummed with
power.

I was wearing dark clothes.
Over my shoulders was a rucksack. Strapped to my arms and my sides
were the gadgets that Wyn had made for me, although I had made a
few of them myself thanks to Red and to the engineer’s Blood
Memories.

Red led the way through the
mansion. With Wyn’s Blood Memories inside him, Red knew every nook
and cranny, as if the mansion were his own home.

He led us to the
library.

It used to look like the
library in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Now it looked like a
looter’s hovel. Wyn would have wept to see how his bookcases were
knocked over like felled trees and his books strewn everywhere like
sad leaves sodden from rain. The library’s general air was like a
fall day, gray and somber and sobering.

The passage leading to the
underground laboratory was as wide as the mouth of a dark
cave.

Red and I leaped down to
the bottom.

The last time I had been in
there was when Wyn told me the whole story about Red and the Origin
Blood.

I felt sorry for Red. He
had traveled through the loneliness of space, only to park on our
planet, get captured, be scientifically probed and tested by the
Government, become the father of a mutated race of
Kharetie-earthlings, and then get snatched back and forth between
Lowen and Wyn, like some poor child in a custody battle.

Now that he was awake, I
doubt anything like that might happen again.

Also, he was wearing
earmuffs to block any musical notes that might render him
unconscious.

Red went to one of the
computer consoles.

Wyn’s Blood Memories gave
him the ability to read and write any computer language in the
world. He could strip apart a computer and rebuild one just as
easily.

For an alien scientifically
engineered on a planet light years away, he was one of the most
talented humanoids I’d ever met.

Together he and I opened
computers and we stripped them free of the small working
parts.

We scavenged all the other
computers in Wyn’s batcave. We took as much as we could from his
mansion.

I lamented seeing my old
home now resembling a dystopian wasteland.

I had been working on one
special project that I hoped to use in the event Lowen and his
Sleeper Devils attacked us first.

I was missing one specific
part.

I remembered seeing it
first on the night Wyn made me a Blood Vivicanti. He had shown me
many of my new physical traits with a large holographic image of
myself.

That had given me a
brilliant idea.

I led Red to one of the
machines lying on the ground. The device had been cast aside. Its
outer casing had been dented.

Red opened it. We inspected
its workings.

Just above the opening,
inside the console was a label that read:

Holographic Imaging
System

Under that were more words
written with a magic marker. They read:

Wyn was here.

Noise in the woodlands
surrounding Idyllville suddenly frightened the wild life. Herds of
cows sleeping in the fields of ranches miles away stirred. I could
hear them. Coyotes and deer and birds scattered. I could taste
their fear.

Things that were not quite
Sleeper Devils were coming. I could almost see their careless
footfall. And something that was not quite Nell was leading them
towards us. I could feel her.

And anyone with half a nose
could catch their dreadful stench on the wind.

Red and I put our scavenged
parts and the holographic technology in the rucksack.

The footfall was coming
closer. These things hunting us would soon catch us.

You see: Lowen, still in
Theo’s body, had been trying to turn his Sleeper Devils into Blood
Vivicanti. Yet he could not do it without a peripheral stem cell
transplant of Red’s blood. So he was using the same procedure with
Theo’s – yes, Theo’s blood was the origin blood for his new
creation.