Relict (Book 1): Drawing Blood Read online

  Matt quietly closed the basement door. There wasn’t a sound of protest from down below.

  He retreated into the shadows until his back was flush against the living-room wall. Matt stared up at the ceiling, imagining the silent steps the vampire was taking across the roof toward the skylight.

  Then he kept his attention fixed on the glass.

  Suddenly, the skylight shattered.

  Matt didn’t look away or flinch. He fired five shots. The first two hit the target, but the third managed to change the trajectory of the vampire’s descent. The final two slugs made sure its landing was at the far end of the living room.

  He did not take any solace in the silence. Matt’s eyes stayed fixed, and his gun was still aimed at the completely still creature lying on the living-room carpet, highlighted by a shaft of moonlight coming through the living-room window.

  The stillness was broken by the sound of a motorcycle engine. The sound was drawing closer, not growing more distant.

  Suddenly, the vampire flashed open its eyes – the pupils were enlarged and black like they were transplants from a shark. Then the creature opened its mouth, exposing elongated incisors glistening in the moonlight.

  Matt didn’t hesitate. He sprinted across the living room and leaped over the vampire just as the creature made a move to stop him.

  Beth’s living room window exploded outward.

  Matt landed on the front lawn, with thousands of pieces of glass trailing right behind him. His landing was awkward, but on two feet. He touched down, leaning forward, enabling him to roll into a somersault, which he completed only in a way that demanded that he roll into another.

  Instead he stumbled forward… and began to run. He looked behind him once, but that was only cursory. Matt was moving as fast as he could toward the sound of the motorcycle engine.

  He leaped over the hedge that ran across the front of Beth’s house. His perfect landing was highlighted by the beam from a motorcycle’s headlight.

  Jay skidded his bike to a stop.

  “I can’t believe you saw the flare…”

  As he hopped on behind him, Matt saw Jay was wearing a pair of night goggles

  “I told you to head west…”

  “Yeah, well, west runs right past the house.”

  Jay let his foot off the clutch and the motorcycle took off.

  Their motorcycle was weaving through the narrow, twisty, tree-lined road through the Morristown suburbs. It was where Matt grew up. And it was where he hoped he could eventually raise a family.

  But now all he could think about was how it was just another place for the vampires to occupy.

  “How many did you see?” Jay shouted into the wind.

  Matt responded as he ejected the spent clip from his Beretta.

  “Just one.”

  “Then maybe it wasn’t a vampire. Maybe it was just your ex-wife’s divorce lawyer. Didn’t you say he was always out for blood…?”

  Matt slammed another clip into his gun, expecting to hear Jay’s self-satisfied chuckle at his own joke, but it never came.

  Instead, Jay’s body stiffened… and then the motorcycle began to slow.

  Ahead of them was a blockade made up of several large military trucks, and a dozen figures standing in front of the vehicles.

  From their distance it was only Jay, wearing the night goggles, who could confirm what Matt suspected was before them.

  In the night scope the heat pattern of a bloodsucker registered as blue.

  “Vampires…”

  Jay released the brakes and steered the motorcycle into the surrounding woods.

  Their motorcycle was doing a "shake and rake" through the trees – bouncing on a bumpy, dirt path, with branches whipping across their heads and bodies.

  “Buddy, we can’t outrun them. So don’t try…”

  His caveat had the opposite effect on Jay.

  “Wanna bet?”

  He twisted the right handgrip and the bike picked up speed.

  Matt turned to look for any signs they were being followed.

  On his right, he saw a shadowy figure moving on a parallel course with their motorcycle. The only reason he saw the creature was the wake of bushes and trees the vampire left behind as it streaked through the woods in pursuit.

  He fired a couple of shots from his gun. Matt was surprised to see that he must have hit something, because the parallel movement through the woods suddenly stopped.

  Matt turned his attention to the other side and immediately spotted two streaking shadows cutting two paths through the woods.

  He switched his Beretta to his left hand and fired several shots, then ejected the spent clip from his gun. But before he loaded another clip, Matt noticed that the two vampires that had been trailing him… had stopped.

  It was too easy. Something was wrong.

  He tapped Jay’s shoulder and shouted, “We're being guided into a trap.”

  A dark shadow suddenly appeared in Matt's periphery vision.

  “A trap! What are…?”

  Before Jay could finish his sentence, the shadowy figure swept across Matt’s line of sight.

  And Jay was gone.

  His buddy was no longer sitting in front of him, guiding the motorcycle. Matt’s lightning-fast reflexes had saved him in the past, but as he lunged forward to grab the handle grips of the bike, the front tire of the motorcycle hit a dirt mound and the impact sent the unmanned bike skyward.

  Somehow, in midair, everything slowed down. He was able to see a dark shadow move toward him a split second before the figure collided with him.

  Then everything seemed to speed up again.

  Matt hit the ground. Pain shot through his entire body. And it took him a few seconds to see again in the dark.

  The figure that had grabbed him in midair was underneath him. Matt tried to see the face… but everything around him was blurry…

  He reached out his hand and suddenly realized he was alone, lying on his back in the dirt.

  There were voices just a few feet away, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not turn his head to look in the direction of the voices.

  “This one is dead because of your stupidity!”

  “I protected him with my body just as we planned.”

  “This wasn’t anything like we planned!”

  There was silence and Matt wasn’t sure if what he heard was real or not.

  The ground near him shook.

  Someone dropped to their knees right next to him.

  “You stupid fuck! Wipe the blood off your lips. The last thing we want is anyone back at the camp to see how you indulged yourself in your mistake.”

  He thought he recognized the voice.

  Again Matt tried to turn his head to see who was speaking, but just as he was finally able to look toward the voice, everything grew dark.

  Then everything went to black.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MORRISTOWN COURIER

  Local Man Missing

  By Brooke Skulski

  Morristown police are concerned that Ian Haynes, 24 years old, has not been seen for the last two weeks and they are now turning to the community for help.

  “There is a real concern that something has happened to this young man,” said Morristown police Lieutenant Ralph Steedman. “We’re hoping that perhaps someone out there knows something that will help us locate him.”

  Haynes was last seen by his parents when he left their house to drive to Essex Fells to compete in a chess tournament. His parents, Bud and Elaine Haynes, have told police that their son was not the type of person who would just suddenly disappear without an explanation. “My son put off going to college when both my wife and I had health problems in the last few years,” said Bud Haynes. “He would let us know if he was just driving to the corner store to get some milk.”

  On April 21st, Ian Haynes left his parents’ house after dinner to compete in the county finals of the “Check Mate Chess Competition,” sponsored by the int
ernationally known chess organization, CMCC Worldwide. He traveled alone to Essex Fells, a short fifteen miles away, and his parents believe he was not planning on meeting anyone along the way.

  Haynes’s car, a red Honda Civic, was found just three blocks away from the Radoff Hotel, where the tournament was being held. CMCC officials told police that Haynes never checked in for the competition.

  “We were mystified when his match came and went without any word from him,” said CMCC official Winston Gaiman. “I know Ian personally and knew how much this tournament meant to him. When he did not show up, all of us feared the worse.”

  Ian Haynes attended Morristown Royal high school, where he won several academic awards as well as receiving academic scholarships to three different Ivy League schools upon graduation.

  “He graduated valedictorian in high school, participated the last few years in several local charities, and was just a few days away from beginning his first semester at Columbia University. We believe this is not a young man who would just run away to begin a new life,” said Lt. Steedman.

  The missing man’s parents have posted a $5,000 reward for any information leading to their son’s whereabouts. Anyone who might have information should contact the Morristown police department and ask to speak with Lt. Steedman

  IAN HAYNES’ JOURNAL

  I wish everything I wrote was more than just statistics.

  But that’s what you become really great at after you’ve been turned.

  Statistics.

  No notes. No calculators.

  You have a perfect recall of facts, figures, or events in a timeline.

  In fact, a timeline is our specialty.

  When all you do is… exist.

  Remembering the dates, names, achievements, failures of the living is not a problem.

  I’m like a computer that never needs to be rebooted.

  Perhaps the best way for you to understand what I have become is to stay just with the stats.

  There are over 221 “Blood” camps in “North America.”

  210 in “Europe.”

  Those working in “Asia” have got to be concerned. Only 43 camps so far.

  The latest official line from the committee is that at least seven of those camps aren’t even extracting blood from donors because everyone they test flunks the most basic redlines.

  And that’s the “Official Line!”

  Yeah, right now I’d be thinking “eternity” is not so locked in if I was stationed in one of the blood camps in Asia.

  According to Winston the “unofficial line” is everyone is scared shitless.

  Of course no mea culpa, official or unofficial, from anyone on the committee about how they obviously miscalculated about setting up blood camps so close to where all the bombs went off.

  We all saw the explosions: some of us on TV, others firsthand. What was the VC thinking? That there would still be people we could tap?

  Here’s an idea; we should have made everyone on the committee who wasted resources building those camps be the first to get off on the radioactive juice.

  I know Winston feels the same way.

  He often talks derisively about the Second Seating. He refers to them as “VireArchII,” but to me, they’re all just part of the same “Vampire committee.”

  “Watch what happens,” Winston said to me. It was just a couple weeks before we moved from the shadows to take over control of the world. “Politicians of the living will say anything to save their career; a vampire will promise anything to save his, and he has all of eternity to make good on his promise.”

  But even Winston was shocked as we pored over the official worldwide estimates of the living. Clearly the VC had drastically underestimated how many would be left standing after the takeover, and I could detect a glint of paranoia in his eyes. This was a rare sight. Over all the years I’ve known him, Winston seldom allows his existence to be influenced by fear. His favorite quote from Laski Weldon – “The living are consumed with the prospect of dying, and therefore fear informs their existence. Our kind has no such concerns, and that is what we must dwell on so we can always feel alive.”

  I have had the benefit of his wisdom for a relatively short period of time. And his depth of knowledge has been vital to my new life. His words are often chosen from those of our kind who he has shared the shadows with for nearly a thousand years. “Wise are the ones who have seen what lies on the road ahead. But the wisest are those who can also look into your eyes and understand where you’ve been.”

  My master is one of the wisest of our kind. What Winston has taught me continues to inform all my actions, even if at times I don’t always understand what lies behind the long history that underlines each of the words.

  I was not surprised when the committee requested that he serve as commander of the Coagulation Concentration Camp. CCC for short. All the Blood Camps have some sort of reference to blood in their official designation. It was probably meant to refute a myth about vampires – that they have no sense of humor.

  However, to draw a complete picture of the situation, it should be mentioned that the official designation of the camp in any of the VireArchII rankings of the Blood Camps would report the camp as CCC197. The number attached to the camp letters was assigned based on the original population of the living it had enrolled when the donation center received its first prisoners.

  Perhaps the myth of no humor amongst our kind first took flight as the living noticed our preoccupation with… details.

  “Nothing is too small to escape notice, as long as it is moving,” is a common phrase amongst our kind.

  You are alive.

  We exist.

  But if it does not move, it will escape our notice.

  As it should.

  My brethren speak of the distinct sound of the breaking of the skin of the living.

  Then they subdivide their impressions depending on the age, race, and gender of those they feed on.

  There are many subdivisions… within divisions… within categories, within general subject matter.

  Embracing what I have become means discovering that the passage of time has changed.

  After the discovery, the process of learning to deal with how time has changed is what one must embrace as well.

  Winston recounted all the significant efforts of our kind who had ambitiously attempted to make the most of the one advantage that we have over the living. And though most of the stories lacked… a conclusion, all have become beacons for me as I walk this long path with the reassurance that others have gone before me.

  I have found that my existence is best spent observing the world around me and then logging my findings.

  What I eventually will do with these observations is not important.

  Small observations. Statistics of course. Small deductions, if possible.

  What is essential is to record them. Observe and record, and…

  And that is all.

  This existence mandate has evolved over time. And it is not something I have ever shared with my brethren.

  Some would be appalled to hear of my efforts. What is the point? What is to be gained?

  The answer to their veiled questions would probably only succeed in condemning me further in their eyes…

  “What if I am indeed wasting my time on such pursuits? ‘Time’ is the only aspect of our lives where the cup runneth over.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Matt woke up in the back of a military transport truck: not alone, but surrounded by at least two dozen men and women.

  None of them was Jay.

  His whole body ached. When he tried to sit up, a whole new level of pain kicked in and he shut his eyes.

  When he opened them again, a short, pudgy, balding, middle-aged man was in his face.

  “I thought you might sleep through the entire trip.”

  Matt tried to look away, but the pudgy, balding man simply took a few steps to his left and was right back in his grill.


  “My name is Michael Leahy. You can call me ‘Bunny.’ That’s what everyone called me at the law firm. At least they used to.”

  The last thing Matt wanted to do was “bond” with anyone. Certainly there was no advantage to investing in someone that looked like he would die in the first few hours of captivity.

  And his military experience taught him to be wary of anyone who made a dramatic overture to become friends. There was always the chance that he was a plant from the other side.

  Matt grabbed ahold of the safety net lining the walls of the truck and this time he was able to pull himself up so that he was standing.

  “I know what you must be thinking, but trust me, ‘Bunny’ was a term of affection, nothing more.”

  Matt just stared at him, hoping his fixed gaze would back the man off. It didn’t work. Bunny just kept talking.

  “I know you’re still trying to get your feet planted, but I wanted to be the first to speak to you, perhaps influence the way you’ll be thinking once you start thinking clearly.”

  Once again Matt attempted to look past the lawyer. It was the only way to get some clues as to what happened after he and Jay were ambushed in the woods.

  “I had the brilliant idea of you becoming our team leader. Think about it. If you decide to go for it, you can count on me seconding the motion. Two reasons I believe this is the right move – number one, look around... do you see any other candidates? Number two, I figure with all those dog tags hanging around your neck, you’re the one with the most experience.”

  The dog tags around his neck were from all of the men and women who had died under his watch as an Army Ranger serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was a translator in Kabul who nicknamed Matt “the rapper” because of all the chains of metal hanging around his neck.

  When Matt heard Bunny say, “dog tags,” it prompted him to look down. Instantly he spotted the new addition to his collection. He read the name… Jay Granville.

  Jay was dead.

  The mystery of how his dog tags were now around Matt’s neck is what prevented him from simply starting to cry. And his concern that Jay was really dead.