Shining in Crimson: Empire of Blood Book One (A Dystopian Vampire Novel) (8 page)

* * *

As the convict slammed into him, Peter found himself at a loss to understand just what was going on with this ordinary man. It
were
as if he had almost the same strength as a human vampire, yet his heartbeat was strong. Peter's own heart beat all the time, but never anywhere
near
the speed of a living human. So, it was easy to tell the difference in others by simply listening. What was even stranger and caught him off guard to the point of being tackled by the man was the man's breath. He could smell it from a good kilometer away. He had the blood of the ancestors on his breath. Peter realized in that split second as he hit the ground that this man must have killed an ancestor. Either way, he had done enough. Peter was not about to lose his place on the council. Not after all he had worked for.

Peter's body rocked backward from the collision with the floor. Using the momentum from the fall, he quickly lifted the man with his legs and flipped him over himself. The man smacked against the wall with a crash and fell back into the dining room table busting it to the floor with his limp body. As the man landed on the table, Peter continued into a backward somersault and landed on his feet inside the kitchen doorway. He ran forward aiming to kick the man in his side. But as he brought his foot forward, the man rolled away from him and jumped into a sideways spin back on his feet. The two stood there a moment watching each other, ready to attack.

"What are you?" Peter asked. The man only looked at him with a dark expression. Peter didn't wait for a reply. He leapt into a double somersault, busting a hole in the low ceiling, and landed behind the man. Then, he turned and put the man in a choke hold. The convict was still just as strong though and for a moment Peter seemed to forget this. He began elbowing Peter in his side and it actually caused the vampire pain. He hadn't felt this much pain in nearly a century. Peter gasped with the force of it. The man, taking advantage of Peter’s shock, stomped on his foot. All the pain in the universe throbbed from Peter's foot. He let go and knelt forward to reach for it as if his touch could heal it. The man ran forward and began scrambling around on the floor.

Peter didn't really care what the guy was doing. All he could understand was his foot felt like it had actually broken. He cried out in a high pitch that he had never heard himself make before. He vaguely noticed the man's rustling around on the floor had become more rapid. After hundreds of years without it, the pain was strong. He looked down at his foot. It finally started healing. But the healing hurt even more than the break itself. He screamed out in agony again. Then, he heard a loud yell from directly in front of him. He looked up to see the man running full force toward him, yelling ferociously, with the machete pulled back to strike. It was all he could do just to lift up his arms to stop him. But his arms didn't reach. The machete ripped through his side and then his abdomen, cutting his body in half. The last thing Peter saw before everything went dark was the lower half of his body separate from him and fall to the floor as he fell on top of it.

* * *

Hank stood holding his ribs and looking down at the two halves of vampire crumpled together on the floor. He moved forward and kicked the thing just to be sure. It seemed to be lifeless. He tried not to analyze that thought too much. The pain in his ribs grew worse, but he was pretty sure it was the vampire blood healing him. He turned in a complete circle, scanning the debris on the floor for his backpack. When he found it, he knelt down to the floor and unzipped it. Rummaging through the backpack for the thermos, he found and opened it, making the usual sour face as he forced himself to take a big gulp. Then, he closed the thermos and put it back in the bag.

A few excruciating minutes later, Hank's ribs seemed as good as new. If he had been absolutely sure the vampire who just attacked him was dead for good or there weren't possibly others coming, he would have sat in awe of his circumstances. But the need to flee electrified his every nerve. He put the backpack on, jumped through the gaping hole in the back of the house, and ran westbound. It wasn't until Hank barely missed smacking into a stop sign fast enough to end it all that he realized his ability to run had also been intensified. He looked back at the house he had run
from,
zooming in to make sure it was the right one. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen blocks he had crossed in a matter of less than a minute.

He wondered how long it would take him to make it to the edge of the city at the rate he’d just run. He was pretty sure at that speed he wouldn't need to wait for the dawn. Overwhelmed with excitement by this thought, he acted on it by breaking into another all-out run. He counted the blocks as he passed them. The wind was blowing on his body as rapidly as it had riding on Toby’s motorcycle. It was soothing to feel on his face and arms. He thought he was starting to get the hang of it when just after the 47
^th
block his right foot hit the inside edge of a pothole. He catapulted up and to the right, slamming violently into a telephone pole. He fell back down onto the sidewalk with a loud crunch. After a few minutes of not being able to move, Hank rolled himself over slowly and painfully. Evidently vampire blood could do just about anything except improve coordination.

After a while of staring up at a dim, yellow street light, Hank sat up and positioned himself against the pole that just broke his right collarbone, wrist, and knee. It was excruciating just to move, but he managed. Then he sat, waiting for the healing to finish. It was going much slower this time. Right as the pain went away, so did the feeling of power. He rose with great effort. Even though he was healed now, he still felt pretty bad. Hank tried dashing forward experimentally. His legs moved just as slowly as always. He sighed. His best guess told him there were probably only three or four more good gulps left.

Hank fought the urge to take another swig immediately. If that bastard wasn't dead or more were to show up, he would need what precious little bit he had left at his disposal. He looked back to the east. So far, no one seemed to follow him. He walked on the sidewalk at a light pace to the west, pulling the backpack in front of him and opening it. When he found one of the cans of chicken noodle soup and the can opener, he pulled them both out, opened the can, and threw the lid down on the road. Then he started walking again, taking a large swig of broth from the can. It might not have been the tastiest thing on earth, but it sure seemed so to him at the moment. When the broth was drained, he began knocking back the can so noodles and bits of chicken went into his mouth. He chewed them victoriously, grinning all the while. It sure beat the taste of vampire blood. When he gobbled the last bit, he threw down the can and retrieved the water thermos from the bag. He took several decent swigs. For a brief second, he wondered where Toby was and what he was doing. Then, he made himself forget the thought and started walking a little faster.

* * *

When Peter woke up, his entire abdomen screamed in absolute fury. He could feel nothing below the pain but a slight pulling. He opened his eyes to see one of his shoes taking up his entire field of vision. Still laying on the floor on top of the lower half of his body, he lifted his arm to grab hold of his right leg and move it away from him so that the shoe disappeared, revealing a debris scattered dining room on its side. He felt a strong tingle with the pull he was already feeling below his torn abdomen. He pushed hard against the floor with his right hand and rolled his top half over so that he was
laying
on his back. Then, he looked down at the huge open wound that was his bottomless torso. He could see shredded organs hanging loosely from it. It was also where he felt the pulling from.

He looked to his left and saw he was now lined up with his lower half, his feet parallel to his head, and the two open wounds parallel to each other. He pushed his fists into his chest, bending his elbows and pressing them hard against the carpeted floor. Then, using his elbows, he started to slowly scoot his body at an angle to put the two pieces of his body back together. After several rough scoots, he got close enough and the shredded organs began finding their other halves as if they were magnetically attracted to each other. Then, when all of his organs were healed, his flesh and spine did the same. He lay there a while letting his body heal itself. Once he knew he was strong enough, he leaned up and let out a shrill scream in the ancestor's tongue, calling for the help he knew he would need. It was one of the hardest things he had ever done. By calling out for help, he was giving up his seat on the vampire council. It would take a lot of work and maybe even decades to get back in. But, more than anything else, he valued living, and he had to admit to himself he had met his match. This strange human was much more than Peter had bargained for.

Peter cringed with self revulsion when he heard the sound of four ancestors returning his call from various places in the sky within a three-kilometer radius. He could hear the friction in the air from where they were flying as they began circling above the house. He rose to his feet and jumped onto the open wall where he had entered the house and then onto its roof to confirm what he heard.
Directly above him, circling round and round, were four ancestors, watching him.
Their dirty black rags rustled in the wind as they floated effortlessly on the air. Peter struggled to bury the enmity he felt for the creatures. He would never understand the reverence the others had for them. Sure they were the source of his longevity, the source of his strength and power. But even being these things, they were also aimless creatures. Like human babies, only existing, only carrying out the needed functions to survive.

Peter called out to them in their strange, screeching tongue. He described the man to them. He told them about his strength and abilities. He also told them about the blood, a subject they seemed indifferent to.
They certainly are mindless
, he thought. When he finished explaining, they each took a long taste of the air and darted west, just as Peter had expected. Even if the quickening from Simon's blood was over, having been wasted on healing Peter's severed body, Peter could still smell the convict. He decided to get back to the Stratosphere as quickly as possible and alert the others. He had no way of knowing how bad the consequences would be if this man made it across the city limits. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

Chapter 6

Simon the Zealot

S
imon looked down at his lifeless body, feeling more grief than he ever had. He knew what it meant. He, Simon James Withers, was dead.
Dead.
Simple as that.
And he hadn't woken atop a ground made of fluffy clouds at the pearly gates of heaven. There was no St. Peter waiting to take his name. Sure, a vampire named Peter took his life, but that wasn't quite the same. He merely floated above his own body.

He wondered, were the Catholics right? Was this some sort of purgatory? He floated there watching himself in misery, wishing he could kill himself, if it weren't for the fact that he’d already died. A few minutes later everything around him began to glow. After a moment or so, he could see a brilliant white glow. Then
came
a flash of red and everything changed. He felt solid again. Looking down, his body was much smaller than he expected.  It sat on what looked to be the front seat of a car. He recognized his best Sunday suit from when he was eight years old. He fingered the buttons and put his hands in the jacket pockets. He could feel the fabric. Then he put his hands up and felt his own eight year old face, just as he remembered it. He ran his hands through his hair. It was all so wonderful until...

"Now, listen honey, don't you go messin’ up that beautiful little hair of yours, ya hear? Mama spent too damn long gettin’ it just right for Sunday school," a female voice said.

Simon swallowed. Then very slowly he turned and looked.
Beside his eight-year-old body, gripping the wheel, smoking a cigarette, and dressed in a red dress that could give any preacher a cardiac arrest, sat Simon's mother.
She smiled at him with her bright red lipstick-covered lips, her curly brown hair lightly bouncing in the wind, and Simon fought back the urge to vomit. Of all the places Simon had never expected to end up when he died, this was by far the last. It might as well be hell, to end up eight years old in a car with his whore of a mother and on the way to church, no less.

A few minutes later, they pulled into the gravel lot of a small white church surrounded by wheat fields. She pulled him through the door and once again he went through the humiliation and torture of seeing all the good people of the church look at her. The women (and some of the men) looked at her with contempt. The rest of the men looked at her with lust in their hearts. His mama was causing all these poor men to sin and she didn't even care. She enjoyed it. He felt his face go scarlet as she pulled him along the aisle between the pews. He couldn't help but think of his father. It took everything he had to keep from weeping. No wonder he had left her. If only he’d taken Simon with him.