Dark Season: The Complete Box Set (29 page)

Martin Keller

She's here. I admire her bravery, but this little charade has gone on long enough. It's time to kill them all.

Sophie

The whole house feels empty, as if no-one has been here for so long. I go straight through to Vincent
’s study, where I find his books and papers have been thrown across the room. Martin Keller has clearly been searching for something, trashing the room in a rage. Did he find what he was looking for? I hope not. I can imagine Vincent knows some pretty huge secrets, and I can only hope he kept them under lock and key.

Now that I
’m here, I don’t know what to do. I have the sword, and I have a vague idea that I’m ready to take on Martin Keller, but I also know that I can hardly just launch myself at him. Slowly, realization dawns on me: I’m completely alone down here, about to come face to face with the man who had the strength to kill Patrick. What the hell do I think I can do? I keep telling myself that as long as I'm alive, I can come up with some kind of plan, but time is clearly running out. I should have waited. I should have come up with a better plan. There was no need to come straight down here. I should have taken my time and worked out how to take on this asshole. Maybe I could have made contact with Hamish and the werewolves. Now that I'm down here and there's no sign of Martin Keller, I start wondering whether I should go back up to the forest and come up with a better approach. There's still time -

“
I’m surprised you came,” says a voice behind me.

I turn to see Martin Keller standing in the doorway, smiling confidently.

“I assume,” he continues, “that you believe you have a plan. Probably involving that sword in your hands. The truth is: you
don’t
have a plan. You can fight if you wish, but do you really think you'd stand a chance. I killed Patrick, and I didn't need an army to do it. If I could kill him, what the hell do you think's stopping me from killing you?"

"Then why haven't you?" I ask, adjusting my grip on the sword.

He smiles. "Let me make you an offer. I’m a harsh man, but I’m true to my word. I’ll kill you quickly and painlessly. You don’t know where the vampire’s body is. I can see that now. Plus, your bravery in coming to confront me is commendable. It’s Vincent I want, and you can’t save him. He’s already dead; he’s just waiting for the final moment once the poison has overcome his body. I won't torture you or play with you. I'll just kill you instantly”. He pauses. "It pleases a vampire's soul to be lenient now and again."

“
You’re not a vampire,” I say. As the words leave my mouth, I realize I probably shouldn't make him angry.

He bares his teeth, letting me see the needles he has had surgically implanted as his own version of vampire fangs.

“Still not a vampire,” I say. “You’ve still got the heart of a human”.

He smiles and pulls up a shirt sleeve, revealing a half-flesh, half-metal arm.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “You can have all the surgery you want, you still won’t have the heart of a real vampire”.

“
Not yet,” he says, "but once I get hold of the vampire’s corpse, I can sequence the DNA and complete the transformation. I’ll be the first of a new generation of pure vampires, ready to take control of the entire world. We won’t hide in the shadows like the vampires of old. We’ll become the one true dominant race”.

“
Still,” I say, “you’re not a real vampire”. I figure this guy has all the advantages, the only thing I can do is make him angry and hope I can somehow take advantage of his loss of control. It’s a big risk, but it’s all I can think of right now. I'm certainly not going to roll over and let him kill me without a fight.

He steps toward me. Part one of the plan is working: he
’s clearly angry. But part two? The part where I work out a way to take advantage of his anger? I'm not sure how
that
part’s going.

“
Is a real vampire a coward?” he asks. “Does a real vampire hide in a cave? Or does a real vampire take control? Is a real vampire strong and powerful?”

“
A real vampire is born a vampire,” I say, stepping back to get away from him. “A real vampire has vampire parents”. I’m not sure that’s true. After all, Vincent is Patrick’s father and Vincent isn’t a vampire. So I’m on really, really shaky ground.

With no warning, Keller lunges for me, grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me close to him.
“Welcome to the new paradigm,” he says. He looks down. Instinctively, I've managed to push the sword into his stomach, but there’s barely any blood coming out. He looks back up at me and smiles. “I hope you have a Plan B”.

I try to struggle free, but Keller has me held too tightly.

“The offer of mercy is rescinded,” he says. “I’ve decided to kill you in a manner that amuses me”. He smiles, displaying once again the needles embedded in his mouth. Each syringe is filled with the same dark brown liquid that he injected into Vincent. “One bite will be fatal,” he says, "but a hundred bites? An agonizing death."

So this is it. This is the moment when, if Vincent is right, I should see a way out. I have maybe a few seconds before Keller starts biting into me, but instead of coming up with a plan to get out of this, all I can do is think about everything I
’ll be leaving behind: my friends, my family, the town. At least they'll all survive. If I'd run, my mother and Todd would have been next on Keller's list of targets.

Keller leans in, opening his mouth ready to deliver an injection from his syringe-teeth. As he does so, however, his left shoulder suddenly explodes, showering me with blood. He grunts in pain and pulls away from me, turning to face the door. Because I
’m behind him, I can’t see what he’s looking at.

“
Who the hell are you?” he asks.

I lean out from behind Keller, and I can
’t believe what I see standing in the doorway. With a shocked but determined look on her face, and holding up a little pink pistol pointed straight at Keller, it's Shelley.

Keller moves toward her, but she fires at him again. And again. And finally, after a fourth shot, he drops to the ground.

Martin Keller

Pain is the body’s way of telling you that you're in danger, but when you no longer care about danger, you learn to experience pain in a completely different way. Subjected to enough pain, you start to gain strength from the incredible rush of adrenaline that surges through your body. Your enemies never realize this. They think they can kill you by causing you more and more pain. In reality, every strike against you is another boost to your adrenaline. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. For me, at least. While my mind is as clear and strong as ever, my body has gone completely insane.

The bullets rip into my flesh, cutting blood vessels and bouncing off bone. Somewhere at the depths of the sensation, I can feel the pain. Or perhaps
‘feel’ is not the right word; I simply become aware of the pain as it rises through my body. There was a time when I was as weak as any human, when I would have screamed out as my body warned me to avoid the source of the agony. However, I have total control over my body these days. I defeated it, I overcame its natural instincts. I am the mind, and I control all. Pain is just another form of strength.

I wait. I need just a moment to recover my strength. There are still some parts of my body that are human. These are the weaknesses with which I must live, at least for now. Soon they will be gone, and the subjugation of the body will be complete. For now, I have to grant these human chunks of flesh time to recover from the injury. I am imperfect, though soon I shall overcome these imperfections. It doesn
’t matter, anyway: these pathetic humans will not escape. I killed the last vampire. Nothing can stop me.

My strength is already rising again. It's time to destroy the pathetic, weak humans. First these two, and then all the rest. There will be no room for humans when my new generation of vampires control the planet.

Sophie

Shelley slowly lowers the gun. She’s clearly in that phase where your body’s sheer adrenalin rush is forcing you to stay strong even when your mind is telling you to crumple to the floor. Trying to keep her eyes fixed on Keller, she glances at me for a moment. “You can explain all this later, okay?” she says, her voice trembling. “Just tell me one thing. Did I kill him?”

I look at Keller. He
’s clearly still alive, shuddering on the floor, absorbing the pain. His eyes are screwed tight shut, but I'm pretty sure he'll be back up in a moment. After all, the guy's built like a tank.

“
No,” I say cautiously. “He’s not dead. We should get out of here”.

I head for the door, but Keller rushes past me and pushes Shelley out of the way before turning to face us. He
’s bleeding from his shoulder and his chest, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing him down much. He looks so much more dangerous now with those gaping wounds from the bullets.

“
Two humans?” he asks, gasping for breath. “Even more pathetic than
one
human”. He’s grimacing, clearly in pain. For two pathetic humans, we’ve certainly caused him some real discomfort, and this must be annoying him. I guess he's not quite as tough as he seems. Still, he’s far from finished off. He’s blocking the door, so we can’t get out of the house, although even if we
could
get away, I'm not sure what we could do
. I’m starting to realize that this maybe isn’t the kind of confrontation you can resolve with plans and ideas; maybe it’s the kind of confrontation you can only resolve with brute force. Unfortunately, both Shelley and I are sorely lacking in that department. Her intervention might have bought us a little time, but now it looks like we're both going to die.

“
When I’ve killed you,” Keller says calmly, “I’m going to rip out your eyes and drop these bullets into the empty eye sockets”.

Shelley grabs me and pulls me out through a different door, leading me into a bare room that leads around to the hallway. With Keller still near the front door, we have no choice but to run up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms, turning to try to blockade the door with furniture. There
’s nowhere else to go, so we drag a bed across the room. It won’t hold Keller back for long - in fact, it won’t really hold him at all - but it might buy us a moment or two.

I turn to Shelley.
“What are you doing here?”

“
Sorry,” she says, "but when my best friend turns up at my window in the middle of the night asking for a gun, I tend to worry. I followed you” We both hear the sound of Keller coming up the stairs. “Kind of wish I hadn’t now,” she adds. “Who the fuck
is
that guy?”

“
I’ll tell you later,” I say, running over to the window and trying to get it open, although it seems to be nailed shut. “I thought you said you’d lost that gun?”

“
Let’s just say I owe someone a favor,” Shelley says, coming to help. “A really nasty favor, so in some ways it’d be a blessing
not
to get out of here alive”.

“
How many bullets have you got left?” I ask.

"Let's see," she says, "I had four when I came, and I fired four at the guy back there, so I guess that leaves me with none."

With the window clearly jammed shut, I turn as I hear Keller’s footsteps outside the door. I guess that little escape didn’t last long. Instead of coming in, however, he seems to pause, and then I hear him walking slowly along the upstairs corridor and into the next room. It’s kind of menacing, knowing that he’s got some kind of plan and that he seems content to take his time picking us off. All we can do is wait for him to make his next move.

“
So who is he?” Shelley asks. We’re both staring at the wall, knowing that he’s plotting something on the other side. "What going on down here, Sophie?"

“
He thinks he’s a vampire,” I say, looking around for some furniture we can use to smash the window. “He’s an idiot who got a load of plastic surgery, but he’s dangerous”.

“
Why does he think he’s a vampire?”

“
He’s very...” I search for the right word. “Impressionable”.

“
And this place?” Shelley asks, looking around the room.

“
Vampires,” I say.

“
Vampires?” Shelley asks. “Seriously?”

I nod.
“Vampires,” I say again.

We both turn as there
’s a huge crunching sound and part of the wall is smashed down. Through a cloud of dust and plaster, Keller charges into the room.

I grab Shelley
’s arm and we run out, but there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to go. I turn and look back and for a moment it’s almost as if everything is in slow motion as Keller launches himself at us, with a look of absolute hatred across his face. For the first time, I see him as not being human at all: instead, he’s like a kind of animal, not a vampire but close; a creature full of rage and anger. Just as he’s about to land straight on me, however, something dark emerges from over my shoulder and collides with Keller, knocking him back into the room.

Somehow, I instantly know what's happening.

Sure enough, as Keller fights back to try to get off the floor, he has someone on top of him, forcing him down with all the strength in the world. Straining with every sinew in his body, fighting with his last energy, it’s Patrick.