The Human-Undead War Trilogy (Book 1): Dark Intentions (32 page)

Chapter 39

Brian attempted to moisten his parched tongue and lips, but he found it difficult to conjure saliva. John’s accounts contradicted everything he knew of Barnaby, and he didn’t want to believe a word of it. Was John being genuine? Was Barnaby truly that horrible?  

John had recounted his expedition that day in 2041. He’d even confessed the reason why he’d wanted an impromptu getaway with his friends: Catherine had cheated on him twenty years prior and he’d uncovered the secret. He had gotten away to clear his mind and face the doubts, ponder what might become of their relationship, and decide what path to pursue. After the horrid events of the cavern, he’d returned home to release her from her inner turmoil by overlooking her moment of weakness. His brush with death and the supernatural had prompted him to embrace a bright future with the love of his life, flawed as she’d been. 

After muddling through his memory of the familial massacre, John had then described the horrible tortures he’d been forced to endure upon his arrival in what was then London. He had denied Barnaby’s initial attempts to erode his sanity, but he’d finally cracked and became subservient. He spoke of the warring inner voices, the borderline schizophrenia, the subconscious shift from viewing Barnaby as a vile enemy to his master. He was aware of the transition now. But Brian could ascertain by the haunted look in his eyes that he hadn’t been conscious of it when it occurred.  

Whatever Barnaby’s intentions, irreversible damage had been done. John’s spirit was crushed. His will and physical strength had been obliterated. He was nothing more than a puppet. 

“You know you’re famous, right? Like, a living deity?” Ruby said in an attempt to cheer up the brooding old man. “You’re picture is plastered in textbooks. A multi-billion dollar company even adopted your name, created a slick logo, and produces crossbows and machetes to help kill the Undead.” 

“I don’t see why,” John replied, staring off into space. “I don’t deserve any of that. I deserve to be punished. Hated. That was how Barnaby saw it, anyway. After I took something so precious away from him.” 

Something so precious.
 John had supposedly killed Barnaby’s daughter, which prompted his revenge and the Human-Undead War. But Barnaby himself had stated it was impossible for vampires to breed. It couldn’t have been a daughter by blood. 

It didn’t make any sense.  

“John,” Brian interrupted. “Did he create those monsters—those stretching creatures? 

“The jackals, yes. The mist wraiths, too.”  

“Mist wraiths?”  

“The ones that transform into mist.” 

“A vampire that can turn to mist,” Ruby said. “Could it walk through walls?” 

John nodded. “It could even walk through you. You’d hardly know it was there.” 

She glanced at Brian. “Probably wouldn’t even trip alarms.”  

Brian clenched his jaw. “Our kidnapper.” 

“Like a Frankenstein, Barnaby was, when the war stalled out a few years ago,” John droned on. “Kidnapped a group of scientists, forced them to help him create…things. Whatever he could imagine. He wanted unstoppable ugly beasts, and the scientists delivered. He thought up the wraiths, and they gave those to him too. 

“One of them scientists was military. Barnaby beat the poor guy until he revealed the location of a hidden weapons cache in New York. Killed the scientists after that, he did. Didn’t need them anymore. Then his trips to Egypt became much more frequent.”  

Brian could almost smell the koshery on Barnaby’s collar again. “What does he do in Egypt?” 

John hesitated. “I’m not quite sure, really.” 

Brian decided not to press any further. Not that Barnaby’s so-called business trips mattered. In light of the information regarding previous kidnapped scientists, Egypt, and Barnaby’s personality, Brian knew he’d been duped. Barnaby had used his charisma to lure Brian in. 

But why? Why kidnap him, offer him unlimited resources to pursue the platelet mushroom, transform him, and lie to him the entire time? Why build such an intricate ruse?  

“Are all those scars on your back from him?” Ruby asked, nonchalant. 

A deep frown wrinkled John’s features. “Yes. Even the leeches couldn’t prevent them.” 

“And this one?” she asked, touching him on his right side. She blushed as he shrank away from her. “Sorry, I saw it earlier, when you dropped the linens.” 

 “That was from a kidney transplant I had when I first met Catherine.” John stared into the moat below his dangling feet and chuckled. “The way she coddled me those days. I’ll never forget how stressed out she was over the whole ordeal. I wasn’t far down on the donor list, but you’d have thought I’d never get one with the way she fussed.” 

“Were there complications?” Ruby asked, hugging her knees to her chest.  

Brian couldn’t help but smile. Ruby was being Ruby. She’d always been good at empathizing. Though Brian’s mind wandered, he wasn’t blind to John’s emotional state. Locked away in the castle all those years, with no one to confide in. Ruby was giving John what he needed most: A friend, an eager ear. 

John chuckled again. “No, nothing of the sort. Catherine was a hypochondriac. If I got a splinter, she’d demand an ambulance. A motherly person. It’s what drew me to her in the first place. When my kidneys started to fail—hereditary, mind you—she didn’t understand the process of getting a donor and an operation. And, boy, did she freak out when she found out my blood type was rare.” 

Brian stiffened. Hairs at the nape of his neck bristled. It was too much of a coincidence. He bolted upright and hefted John up to stand beside him. The old man grunted and shrank away, heart fluttering. 

Brian embraced John’s shoulders and stared into his wide, glistening eyes. “Oh-negative?” he asked. 

“Yes.” 

Ruby gasped. 

Holy shit. 
Brian’s mind whirled. The platelet was within reach. He tried to keep his elation—and the resultant crackling eyeball energy—at bay, but rushed words tumbled from his tongue. “Will you help me?” 

“Help with what?” 

“I need you for something. Something important. You’d be a bigger hero than you already are.” 

The old man shook his head. “I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to die.” 

Brian smiled. “Precisely what I had in mind.” 

***

Brian chattered away, gushing and gabbing like a schoolgirl who was just asked to Prom by the football quarterback. It was boyishly attractive, but Ruby hadn’t been able to look at Brian the same way since the scene in the passageway. 

She’d seen a monster that night. She hadn’t been able to sleep, the image of his fist bashing in a vampire’s head too fresh. She had fallen for him, but his menacing smile when he told John he could help him die brought back the disdain she now felt toward him. 

Her mind wandered as Brian described the preparations John would soon undergo. She was bitter about being misled by Barnaby. It didn’t seem fair. John was a kind, gentle man, if but a bit misguided due to his overall treatment over the past seven years. The way he spoke of Catherine made her stomach jump as if full of butterflies.  

She looked again at Brian and tilted her head. The butterflies danced anew. 

Ruby bit her lip and quickened her pace, anxious to hear Brian’s plans for the procedure. She wanted to familiarize herself with the process to ensure John wasn’t inadvertently harmed in any way. She hoped—prayed—that Brian was right about the blood type being the final catalyst to creating the platelet mushroom. If not, they could be taking the precious life of a man who meant so much to the world.  

And she feared that Brian, in all of his glee to be one step closer to the harmonious world he envisioned, cared not about the man he might sacrifice for the sake of his own ambitions. 

***

“I don’t think you have much of a choice!” Cannopolis threw his arms in the air to punctuate his exasperation. His wheelchair rested in shade cast by the hulking covered cannon. Keith stood beside him, bedraggled but silent. 

“If they’re too weary to scale the bluffs, they have to come back through the pass, Arthur,” Strajowskie said. “If we start firing the cannon now, we risk killing our own men when Rucker Road is compromised. It’s a risk I dare not take.” He turned away and spoke over his shoulder. “And it’s not your call. It’s mine. We hold off on the cannon until Drake and his men return.”  

He was too tired and miserable from the humidity to argue any further and strode away, toward the mouth of the pass. Undecipherable epithets berated him from behind, but he didn’t turn back. So what if he had pissed off his general? It was his call, and rightfully so. He hadn’t relinquished command yet, and Cannopolis was still confined to his wheelchair.  

A rumble shook the earth beneath him. He reached his left hand out to the jagged bluff wall to steady himself. Scores of the beasts plowed into the front line a hundred yards away.  

These sons-of-bitches and their sunlight immunity
.  

No, he wouldn’t allow Drake and his men to fall on Rucker Road. Not of his accord. As soon as the colonel and his Kevlar Dozen crested the bluffs or back-stepped through the pass, he would order his men to retreat to their places.  

Then they would slaughter the Undead in droves, until the last one scrambled into the pass. 

***

“Bloody Hell,” Drake muttered. Five of his Kevlar Dozen floated in pools of blood at his feet. The sun blazed down, not quite hidden behind the bluff yet. Sweat dribbled down his face, stinging his eye wound. Over the smell of cool autumn air, there lingered the enthralling scent of death and destruction and war. 

A fresh wave of vampires rolled into the ravine. Drake’s excitement surged as his shoddy traps sprang to life again. Obscure branches were trampled underfoot. Grass-woven nets triggered, snapping up handfuls of the vampires. Quick-witted victims turned to mist, reappearing and solidifying on the ground as the nets swung overhead.  

Then, just as Drake had rigged them, the nets snapped on the forward swing. The victims inside churned in midair, either too afraid or too ignorant to shift into their mist forms. 

They hit the ground and Drake’s grin widened as false patches of earth gave way. Screams erupted from the stake pits. Ash flittered in mushroom-like clouds from within the holes. Lucky vampires that had evaded the nets teetered on the edge of the revealed stake pits. 

Up and down the ravine, nets swayed and dropped. Ash and screams rent the air. Waves of the approaching vampires tumbled into the open pits, joining their dead brethren. From the bluff across from Rucker Road, archers loosed a shower of arrows. They found their marks, bringing the Undead front lines down. 

The Kevlar Seven gasped and shifted postures, both amused with the traps in the ravine and anxious to join in the fray. He couldn’t have chosen a better group: Young, ambitious, eager to maim their adversaries. Though the last wave of vampires had picked their way through the labyrinth of traps and demolished five of the Dozen, the remaining Seven were not deterred. 

Their chance to clash would come. Bodies of Undead that hadn’t disintegrated were piling up, covering many of his traps and filling the stake pits. Another hour and the ravine would be compromised. They would then have to stand and fight until a lull in the battle, or turn around and scale the bluff behind them to gain sanctuary. 

The ground quaked, pitching him several inches off the ground. He landed. Several of his Kevlar members ended up splayed on the asphalt. Above the rumblings, he heard twangs of crossbows behind him, startled gasps. Arrows fell uncomfortably close to him and his personal team. 

Uprooted trees toppled onto the never-ending sea of Undead in the ravine, squashing them before they could scream. Then dozens of the giant, hairy stretching beasts sped into view. They wrenched trees from the ground and flung their warring companions aside in disregard. The center and foremost of the beasts drew Drake’s attention. It was twice the size of the other beasts in bulk alone, and twice as tall without stretching. Its forehead was more pronounced, its hair longer, scales glowing in the high-noon sunlight.  

It reared its head to the sky and screeched. Drake and everyone in the vicinity had to clamp their weapon-laden hands over their ears to drown out the chilling sound.  

Amidst cursing and gasps, Drake shouted, “Hold Rucker Road! Do not retreat until you have my orders!” 

Soldiers milled up and down the street, passing on the orders. Drake gripped his rigged pike and Kevlar shield tighter. Undead scrambled over the pitfalls and traps and climbed onto the shoddy asphalt street. Their eyes glowed as if recharged by energy.  

Drake’s men had gotten minutes of reprieve from fighting as the Undead had fallen prey to their clever ravine traps. But they were weary and down-trodden. They had stalled wave after wave of mist vampires for eight hours. 

They couldn’t stall any longer.  

The Kevlar Seven surrounded him. The first new wave of vampires approached in blurs. Each body wavered, except for the beasts. 

Before his faithful soldiers slid their shields together, Drake scanned the battlefield with his one eye until he locked on the largest beast.