Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 2 - Installment: ii

CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.
        Scott found an elevator and took Carly to the ground floor. The further from the chaos, the safer she was. He knew that CDC officials would not be happy that either of them had left the sterile ward, but Scott felt confident that he was clean.

        “Are you hungry Carly?”

        “No.”

        “Good.”

        “Are you cold?”

        “No.”

        “Okay.”

        Carly was fine too. He felt certain that as Shale had gone feral so quickly that if either of them was sick too that they’d be feeling some kind of symptom by now. Feeling that his responsibility to the safety of others had been met, once again his mind turned to how to best safeguard the child and himself.

        Through a crash-door he saw that the morning twilight was breaking. The sun would soon be up. The light of the stairwell hadn’t been enough to deter Shale, but surely the intensity of daylight would. At the very least the difference in time that he would have to endure the brilliance would hamper Shale should he actually get out into the street.

        Stepping out into the rising day Scott heard the sound of approaching sirens. He set Carly down on the pavement. The November pavement was cold on his bare feet, but he’d been carrying the young girl long enough that his arm was cramping, she would have to endure for a while.

        The nearly ubiquitous winter cloud-cover had broken over-night. The dampness had held in some warmth, so it wasn’t actually frosty. They wouldn’t be out for too long he hoped. The rare burst of sunlight would keep them warm once the sun actually rose over the horizon.

        He took her hand and crossed the street and walked up to twelfth and crossed the street again before turning west and walking up towards the main entrance of the hospital. As they approached, three police cars turned onto twelfth ahead of them and pulled in front of the hospital. Clearly someone inside had got a 9-1-1 out. Other police cars followed, taking up positions at semi-regular intervals. Scott recognized the procedure. They were treating the circumstances as a hostage situation. If they knew what he did they would waste no time in storming the building. As it was, the longer they waited, the more people would get killed or hurt and possibly infected.

        “Come on, Carly.”

        He scooped her up again into his arms and ran for the trio of cars outside the Vancouver General main entrance.

        As he approached the cars he called out to the nearest policeman.

        “Officer.”

        “Sir, I’m afraid this is…” The officer trailed off as he turned around and looked at Edmond.

        “I’m sorry Lieutenant.” Being infamous had some advantages. Edmond didn’t know this officer from Adam, but clearly it was not reciprocal ignorance.

        “I’m currently a patient. As is this young lady.” He hefted Carly, emphasizing the point as if the officer wouldn’t have figured out who he was talking about from the immediate context. “We just got out of there.”

        “Yes, Sir.”

        “Who is in charge?”

        “Captain Holloman. It’s an ERT call.”

        “I need to talk to him immediately.”

#

        They had fallen back to a car behind the front line. Carly sat in the back seat, warm. Edmond had filled in the Emergency Response Captain on the situation as he knew it. A strike team was assembling at the front entrance, preparing to sweep the hospital as fast as possible. They would have preferred to wait for more men, and secure the building in stages, but Edmond had convinced Holloman that immediate action was prudent. Each exit remained covered by a group of GLE uniformed officers.

        Edmond had left out one important detail. He hadn’t told Holloman that it was Shale who was running rampant in the hospital. He knew that they couldn’t afford any sort of hesitation, conscious or otherwise, when it came to finally taking Shale down. Any police officer who knew that it was one of their own they may be forced to use dire force upon would be at risk of looking for another option. Edmond had seen Tanya Meyers feeding on her youngest child. He knew how extreme the wild drive of an infected victim was. He knew that their only safe option was to kill Shale. Even so, the suspicion of contamination would mean quarantining most or all of the building.

        “Do we have to go back?”

        “We haven’t been released, Carly. We have to. We’re not sick though. They’ll let us go soon.”

        “I don’t want to go back, Scott.” He smiled. She had never called him by name. He was amused she remembered it. She’d only been told it once, back when he first came to the Meyer’s home. 

        “Where am I going then?”

        “I don’t really know. I guess Social Services, or the Child Advocacy Ministry.”

        God. That’s a shitty place for any child to land, no matter how well meaning the institutions are.

        “Oh.” She said, as if his answer had satisfied her curiosity. He knew that it couldn’t have meant anything to her. But it would. The next ten or twelve years of her life were more than likely going to be terrible. If she made it through growing up without getting into some manner of trouble or other, only then could she begin to really start repairing her life, if at all. It was a rare exception when a child her age was adopted into a family that could provide the attention she was going to need to get over the trauma of the last few days. And children who went through the foster-care system rarely went on to great things.

        Poor kid.

        As they sat waiting, one of the west doors to the hospital suddenly burst open. A big man in blood soaked hospital scrubs stepped back onto the concrete steps. Edmond recognized him immediately as Bishop the orderly that he’d met in the hall. In one hand Bishop had a long length of tensor bandage that led back through the door. In the other hand was a length of chrome pipe with a pronged stand at the far end, which he brandished back towards the open frame. 

        From a distance he looks rather like a gladiator with a net and trident. Mused Edmond.

        Taking another step backwards and heaving back on the tensor, the orderly hauled another ferocious looking figure through the door. It was Shale. Using the stand to keep Shale at a distance, he flung the crazed man into the access lane with the tensor. As Shale went down the stairs he gained momentum and pulled the tensor from Bishop’s hand and tumbled into a heap on the blacktop, squirming in the sunlight.

        Hopefully the orderly had got to Shale soon enough that few people had been injured. It had been nearly a half-hour since Edmond and Carly had left the building. It had clearly been an extended struggle to get Shale outside.

        Edmond heard the amplified bark of a megaphone, but over the distance with multiple echoes off surrounding buildings, the words were unintelligible. Edmond could tell that the detachment of uniforms covering the West doors had commanded the orderly to drop his remaining weapon. Adding to the audible clamor, the radio in the car crackled.

        “Southwest firedoor. Southwest firedoor. He’s got a hostage. We’ve got him.”

        Simultaneously, half the ERT team in front of the hospital began to sprint to the West end of the building, and Bishop dropped the chrome stand and raised his arms above his head.

        Edmond looked at the huge man, covered in blood.

        They think it’s him!

        Edmond fumbled for the door-handle as the chrome stand clattered down the stairs in front of the orderly. He pushed open the car door and heaved himself to his feet screaming at the officers.

        “That’s not him! The one on the ground!”

        But the megaphone was jabbering again, there was no chance they could hear him and he could only watch as Shale rose from the pavement and hurled himself at the helpless orderly, his hands by now inter-locked behind his head, leaving his front open as Shale’s fingers found the soft ingress of the Bishop’s eye-sockets.

        The big man’s body gave way and the pair crumpled to the concrete platform at the top of those three stairs to the fire exit.

        Limbs flailed on the landing. It was nearly impossible to tell which arms belonged to whom. The uniform officers, at a safe distance of about twenty yards looked on in helpless confusion.

        In moments the ERT officers cleared the corner of the building.

        The report of the automatic rifle fire reflected off the hospital’s stone walls and off of apartment buildings nearly a block away at the end of the adjacent park to the hospital.

        Edmond felt sick.

        He looked back in the car. Carly had watched the entire thing. In his haste he hadn’t been able to stop her. She stared and stared at the heap of the two dead men on the stairs as officers rushed in to where they lay.

        “Carly?”

        She didn’t answer.

        “Carly. Look at me.” He told her firmly.

        She slowly averted her gaze from the dimming chaos against the hospital’s West side. She turned and looked Scott in the eye. He could see the confused terror in her eyes, but she refused to let it show any closer to the surface. He couldn’t imagine the maelstrom of emotions inside what ought to be a fragile little girl. She didn’t seem at all fragile on the outside as she spoke back to him just as commandingly.

        “I don’t want to go back.”

        The CDC was undoubtedly about to turn the hospital into a defacto prison for god knows how long. He was certain in his mind that he and Carly were uninfected. God knew how many people inside now were, and if Shale was any indication, they were safer out here than in there by any measure. If they stayed here, they would be expected to join the quarantine, but if they were to just walk away who knew how long it would be before they even realized they were gone? Certainly long enough that anyone else’s fears of the possibility of he and Carly being infected would be significantly allayed.

        “Okay. Come on.”

        He pulled the trunk release and found them a pair of police issue rain-jackets and they walked off hand in hand into the sunny day.

     Chapter 5  CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 2 - Installment: i

CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.
        Scott Edmond was accustomed to heavy sleep. When he was drinking he slept heavy but poorly – more unconscious than asleep, and sober he found his long work hours made the short time he slept too precious to allow for light sleep.

        None the less, he wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t sleep with the vision of Tanya Meyer’s feeding on her youngest child fresh in his mind.

        He rolled over for what must have been the thousandth time since night fell. It would probably be dawn soon. Had to be dawn soon. It had been a long long day since he and Shale had begun their search of Jeremy Meyer’s likely haunts, but still Scott had only managed to get what he would guess were mere minutes of sleep.

        He had poured over the autopsy of Tanya Meyers for hours trying to make some sense of it. It was hauntingly familiar, and in so being confirmed to his satisfaction that not only was Moira Chan’s assailant Jeremy Meyers, but that Meyers had passed on whatever disease he had to his wife, and that that in turn didn’t look good for himself, Carly or Shale.

        The ME was clearly as disturbed and confused as anyone else. Tanya Meyers’ corpse had entered an ‘unusually advanced and accelerated stage of decomp’ by the time the coroner had begun his examination. Furthermore, in the course of the examination, her body had practically melted before his eyes, faster and faster as he hurried to try to glean any facts he could about the cause of her death. The immediate cause was obvious. Edmond had turned in his 9mm for ballistic examination. There would be no doubt that the four slugs that brought down Tanya Meyers had come from it. He was hiding nothing. But what was it – what in the disease – caused such rapid and unusual decomposition in the deceased?

        I’m no virologist. Yet…

        It struck Scott that he had been witness to nearly as much as the CDC knew about the disease. In a sense he was as close to a world authority as there was. For the moment, at least. If he was infected he’d learn a lot more, first hand, soon. The thought helped keep him awake.

        Carly and Shale too. Who knew how this thing was passed from carrier to carrier. If Tanya Meyers had contracted it from her husband, it was likely that her daughter could have done so as well. Edmond was concerned for the young girl. Shale had open wounds from Meyers’ attack. By Scott’s figuring it wasn’t promising for Shale, no matter what the method of transmission was.

        The seal on the door slid open, and a nurse came in.

        “You should be sleeping.” She suggested.

        “Not like I’m not trying.”

        A nurse checked on him every few hours. It hadn’t helped his intermittent light sleep.

        “I feel fine.” He told her as she made a quick check of the machines that were monitoring his vital statistics – pulse, temperature, blood pressure – on an ongoing basis.

        “That doesn’t mean you’re well.”

        “All the others couldn’t keep warm, and they were hungry all the time.”

        “ALL the others?”

        “Tanya was cold and hungry when we visited her. She had said her husband was the same. And they were sensitive to light.”

        “It’s still dark out. Are you ready for breakfast?” she asked.

        “Getting there.”

        “I see.”

        Scott breathed a heavy sigh of defeat.

        “Well, you seem fine.” She made a brief note on her metal clip-board of papers and walked out of the room.

        How long did it take for Tanya to show signs? He wondered. No matter which way this goes, I hope it goes fast. I wonder if Bev will know anything new in the morning.

#

        Scott was disturbed from his thoughts by a noise on the other side of the sealed door. A loud noise. The noise of distress. A cry of fear.

        He pulled the sticky patches from his arms and went to the door.

        Unmistakable. A scream.

        I’m quarantined.

        A crash.

        Fuck it.

        He pulled the door aside and entered the small cubicle that acted as a sterile lock. There was a brief whoosh of automated cycling as clean air replaced the suspect air from within his room. He pulled the outer door open, and stepped out into a larger room that served as a quad for the eight sealed patient rooms.

        No one was in sight. The floor was scattered with papers, and the nurses’ metal clip-board. The door of one of the other sealed rooms sat wide open.

        Scott had a sinking feeling in his gut that he knew what had happened.

        How did the disease advance so quickly in Francis?

        Next his thoughts went to the small girl. Which room was hers? Was she okay?

        One door sat between the doors to Scott’s and Shale’s rooms. It seemed as logical a place as any to start, and his logic paid off. Carly laid asleep in her bed.

        I can’t leave her alone with Francis on the rampage.

        He began pulling wired pads from her.

        “Carly, wake up.”

        The young girl stirred.

        “Come on, Carly. Hold on to me.”

        He pulled her up out of the bed as she sleepily put her arms around his neck.

        “Where are we going?” She mumbled.

        “We’re not safe, here Honey. Hold tight.”

        Back through the sterile lock to Carly’s room and back into the quad.

        Where’d they all go? Edmond wondered. Even on the graveyard shift there must have been just the one nurse in the ward.

        He looked around the room, only finding one exit. A long hall. The light from the quad illuminated just the first several yards of the hall, several pot lamps provided dull pools of light along the way, but the hall was otherwise dark, but for the red glow of an exit sign at the end.

        Only one way out. That’s where they went. Where they were pursued.

        Unless they were to remain trapped, it was where they had to go too.

        Keeping one eye on the hallway, Scott glanced over the counter of the nurses’ station. A metal ruler was the first thing that caught his eye. A lousy weapon, but a far cry better than bare hands – especially when one was supporting a seven year-old with one arm.

        “Hide your eyes, Carly.”

        “What’s happening?”

        “I don’t really know. But we may be in danger.”

        “Like from Mommy?”

        “Something like that.”

        “I’ve seen it before then.”

        “Just keep them closed for safety.”

        She was technically right. She’d witnessed the worst of things a person could imagine, she probably couldn’t be much more scarred than she already had been. But she could be scared. He was carrying her, and if she were to be startled it could throw his own reactions and cost them both dearly where otherwise it might not have.

        Slowly, keeping an eye on the shadows as he inched along, Scott made his way down the hall. He kept the ruler in front of him, poised to swing as necessary should Shale be hiding around a corner or behind a door.

        “Why are people getting bad?” whispered Carly in his ear.

        “They aren’t really bad. Sometimes, like your Mom, they can’t help it. They just get sick.”

        “How do they get sick?”

        “That’s why we’re here. The doctors are trying to find out.”

        He stepped to the side and went wide around the corner to the open janitor’s closet. It was too shallow to have enough shadow to hide in.

        “Are we getting sick?”

        “No. You and I are fine. You don’t feel sick do you?” He knew he was talking out of his ass, but he figured confidence was more important to the little girl than honesty at the moment. Besides, if he was wrong it wouldn’t matter for long.

        “Is the other police sick?”

        “Yes.”

        “Is he bad?”

        “I’m sorry, Carly, yes he is. But I’m going to protect you.”

        “Okay.” She tightened her arms around his shoulders and buried her face dutifully into his neck.

        They were almost to the exit. It occurred to Scott that there must be a thousand possible places to hide behind them. He glanced over his shoulder. Nothing moving between them and the light of the CDC ward. He felt a wave of confidence wash over him.

        The victims don’t seem to have a habit of laying in wait. His evidence was scant, but it all conformed. He needed something to act on, or he’d be paralyzed.

        The exit door posed another problem. He had no one to cover him as he went through. He pushed down on the handle and unlatched the door. Then raising his weapon, he toed the door open. Light poured out of the stairwell into the hall. The shift in light hurt his eyes.

        He’ll be sensitive to light. We’re home free.

        He stepped through the door.

        As he carried Carly down the stairs he heard a strange sound from below. Getting to the first landing he turned and saw a trail of blood down the last few stairs, culminating at a sprawled figure.

        It was the nurse who had checked in on him only minutes earlier. Her throat was torn open and blood pumped from the wound in the weakest of pulses imaginable. She sucked for air through her shattered wind-pipe. Jaw quivered as if she were trying to speak.

        Scott looked over her, placing himself in her line of vision. She blinked, but her horrified stare seemed passive. She was in shock and was barely aware of him, if at all.

        “I’m going to find someone.”  He told her firmly.

        Carly raised her head from his shoulder, but he firmly pushed it back down as he stepped over the body of the dying woman.

        For all practical purposes it had been a lie. Shale had caught up to her here. He had ventured into the stairwell, despite the light sensitivity – and as his eyes adjusted, Scott recognized that the lights in the stairwell were quite dim, some sort of power-conscious late-night mode for the less traveled portions of the hospital. Shale could be anywhere nearby. That would force Scott to be cautious, and that would slow him down. He would never find someone in time to save the nurse, even if it had been realistic in the first place.

        The stairwell was more confined than he cared for, and if possible he’d be happier with something better to defend with than a ruler. The next floor down was better lit than the CDC ward had been, but still no-one in sight. An explanation was forthcoming practically immediately. Cries of distress from the hall to his left gave away Shale’s location.

        You can’t help them. Scott told himself. Protect Carly.

        It was true. There was no way he could do both. Carly was too much of a burden, even if overpowering an enraged Shale was likely or safe.

        The screaming was from his left. Scott went right. He ran down the hall in his bare feet and hospital issue pajamas. Running around a corner he was met face to face with an orderly coming the opposite direction. The orderly was a big man, nearly six and a half feet tall and barrel-chested, might have as easily been a wrestler, despite his size he was light on his feet and approached the corner with curious apprehension as he advanced on his toes. The ID tag clipped to his scrubs identified him as Dan Bishop.

        “What’s going on?” the big man queried Scott.

        “CDC ward patient has gone nuts. He’s killed at least one person already.”

        “Shit.” The orderly muttered as he started off towards the fracas.

        “Hey wait!” Scott hollered after him. The orderly stopped and turned.

        “He’s infectious. Protect yourself.”

        “I will.” The big man assured Scott and disappeared around the corner where Scott had come from.

     Installment ii

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 4 - Installment: i

CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.
They were the Trinity. It was said that their office predated the Holy Trinity. The Nosferatu who had held the positions had changed over the centuries.

The Mamissii, despite her African title, was the New World representative. There was no official breakdown by which the Trinity members were divided. Indeed, half a millennium ago the New World was too new to have a representative. The vampires of the New World were too few, and too young to have the strength it took to hold a position in the Trinity. Back then, for a brief time, Asia and Africa had been shut out of the Nosferatu council – a state that politically could not last.

Her real name was Mawu. She had been born to ex-slave Mawon parents in Haiti in the mid-eighteenth Century, and raised into Vodou as a Priestess – a Mamissii. Following the Slave Revolt of 1791 her first life came to an end at the hands of a nosferatu who had been living as a French lord until the revolution, which forced him into hiding. He had decided that he could make his way more easily with a Maroon ally. As it turned out, Mawu was not a wise choice. He taught her how to live as a vampire, but in order to maintain control of her, there was much he selfishly did not explain. Foolishly, he trusted her ignorance. He believed that Mawu needed him, and thus he had no fear of her. Strong of will and identity, Mawu refused to be subjugated. She had been born free and would not long accept the rule of a Sire. After learning her way over the course of several decades, Mawu struck upon opportunity and destroyed the fallen nobleman. 

Fortune was hers when unwitting of the implications she chose to finish her maker by exsanguination. Mawu correctly reckoned that if a vampire needed blood to survive that depriving one of the same would weaken them, and then they could be easily overpowered and left for the sun. She had no way of knowing that to drink a fellow vampire’s blood was to buoy your own strength with theirs. He had been an old vampire. He had witnessed the fall of Rome. He had gained great strength over the centuries, and now much of that was passed on to her at an unusually young age. Two hundred years since had done much to give her wisdom in pace with her strength.

The second member of the Trinity had chosen the title The Rose. He was a master secret-keeper. Very little was known about him and what was known was under a consistent burden of doubt. He was of European descent, but when he had last made his home there was uncertain. He spoke with a perfect English accent, and claimed his true name was John. But nosferatu had the gift of time that allowed them the patience to learn languages and refine accents down to precise regional distinctions. He could just as easily be a Johann, Jacques, Juan, Sean, Ian or Ivan or no derivative of John at all. It was said that he was over six hundred years old, and indeed that was an age that one would expect of a Trinity member, but had he been present at the Crucifixion, or conversely drank his first blood on the beaches of Normandy it would only serve as testament to his mastery of obfuscation.

Ironically, Xiang, the remaining Trinity member, was thought to be the eldest active nosferatu. 

By ‘active nosferatu’ it was meant that it was accepted that many vampires, when weakened beyond their ability to otherwise save themselves and replenish their blood, would claw their way to safety beneath the earth, in hopes that someday enough blood would be spilled in that place to revive them. It was a desperate gamble. Given enough time, it was inevitable that blood would fall where they lay. But would it be enough? It was just as likely that they would be uncovered and turn to dust in the sun before any excavator had the opportunity to glean that they were anything but a small pocket in the earth. Or, they might fall victim to geology – ground to pieces by the earths plates, burned to ash by rising lava – though naturally that took eons to occur.

It was accepted by all nosferatu who had learned their way in the world in their undead life that beneath their feet lay ancient vampires, hidden away from time.

It was also thought that it may be possible that a vampire might, after many centuries become so strong with age that they were truly immortal, divested of all weakness including that primary characteristic of the seemingly endless lust: hunger for blood. And perhaps it was possible that such a creature, freed from all needs might also lose all desire for dominion and once again walk among men in the sun. It was the panacea to their curse that all nosferatu dreampt of.

After over three thousand years Xiang still lusted for blood. He was a miracle among nosferatu. His first life had ended when he was still a child, during the Shang Dynasty. Child vampires were typically seen as the nosferatu equivalent of invalids. Being small vessels, they exhausted their blood supplies fast and their powers grew slowly as power relied on blood. The more blood, the more there was to distill the power. And furthermore their small size, gave them a proportionate disadvantage in strength.

Child vampires’ accelerated thirst for blood meant that they were vicious. They fed with wantonness which disturbed other vampires as it was dangerous to all. The trail of death they left behind was harder to hide than a vampire with greater discretion would leave. They were feared for the danger they meant to all of their kind, and thus were prime targets for other nosferatu to destroy with predjudice.

Xiang was not only the oldest active nosferatu, but had done so as a child vampire. As such he was full of pride. When he had ascended to the Trinity he had refused to choose a title. He was Xiang. He was notorious. He needed no other name.

#

The Trinity dictated the course of all Nosferatu in the world. It was a position of honour and of danger. Trinity members could step down if they so desired, but they rarely did. It was far more common that an ambitious up and comer would destroy a Trinity member and ascend to their place. Not one of the three currently reigning the nosferatu had filled an empty seat. Each had taken theirs violently.

With the gift of a life without death came great patience. The three of them had not all met together in over two decades.

“It is ready.” The Rose informed them with vain assurance.

“It will happen here, then.” Xiang agreed. “It is time.”

“It has been long since our kind were thought of as anything but myth.” Mused The Mamissii. “I barely remember it.”

“You barely lived in it.”

“Indeed.” She conceded.

“But it is growing more dangerous for us to stay hidden much longer. Man is getting too strong.” The Rose. “They are many and we have great numbers to feed upon, but it is time to cull the herd and take control.”

“They are very many. Individually they are weak, but there is strength in numbers. I’m afraid they will overpower us if they know we are among them.” Argued the Mamissii.

Xiang leapt, standing upon the chair he sat in. “That is why we must assemble. We will take them slowly here, in this city. Before they realize we are here they will be over-run. Then with Vancouver as our stronghold we will enslave them all.”

“What is to stop them from turning their weaponry upon us? The light of the sun is captured in one of their nuclear weapons. If we are all in one place…” She continued to press.

The Rose stepped in. “It is taken care of. I assure

You, I already have that well in hand.”

     Chapter 2   CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 3 - Installment: i

CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.
 

        Naked.

        Freezing.

#

        I could go back in the house. I’ve got clothes there. No. She could be there. She could be waiting for me. Playing with me.

        There are houses close. Well, not too close. But close. I can be there in ten minutes, maybe less.

        Christ, I’m naked. I can’t knock on a stranger’s door naked. What would they think?

I could… How far am I from the University? I could stick to the bushes. That’ll be easy once I get to the endowment lands, and I’m practically at Kerrisdale, even that won’t be too bad this late.

        Fuck, it’s cold. No clouds, all the heat of the day is escaping. It’d take me at least ninety minutes without trying to stay covered. Could I get hypothermia?

       What if I collapse from the shivers in Pacific Spirit Park? No-one would find me until at least mid-morning, if I was on a trail. Could I die of exposure in that time? Probably. It’s fucking cold.

        Even if I did get back to Rez, how would I get into the building? My keys are in my stuff and that’s back at the house – Christ, the police are going to find it. What am I going to tell them?

        You’re going to have to tell them something. What? The truth? Yeah, that’ll go over like a… I don’t know. A leaden dirigible. Something like that. Imagine the Hindenburg made completely of lead. Wouldn’t have had that blowing up problem, they’d still be trying to figure out how to get their damned lead zeppelin off the… oh. Led Zeppelin. Never put that together before. Stupid fucking name for a stupid fucking band. Can’t figure out why Dad still listens to that classic rock shit. Dad!

        Well, duh.

        Go to that house up there. Call Dad. That’ll give me time to figure out what to tell the police. Maybe get back to the house before someone finds Ruthven – Kevin, what do I call him now? That knife has my fingerprints on it. Shit. Everything has my god-damned fingerprints on it… well, not the snapped necks. That’s the vampire’s problem. Somehow I doubt she’s concerned.

        What if she’s following me? Just using me to lead her to someone else. No. That’s just dumb. There are people all over the place. She could find them easily enough on her own. Why on earth did she leave me go? Makes no sense.

        Okay, what do I tell Dad? He is going to spaz out. If I turn up naked on the edge of Marpole everything he ever thought about me needing protection is going to be totally validated  I’ll be lucky if I ever breathe unfiltered air ever again. Shit.

        For that matter, what do I tell whoever owns that house? God, I hope they’re good people.

        Ha! There’s one for ya. How bad could they be? I just saw my boyfriend and a bunch of his friends slaughtered like feed animals. No. They were feed animals. And I killed Kevin. Well… did I? She killed Ruthven, I killed Kevin? Something like that.

        Anyway, they could be psycho-rapists and still be a step up. Hey, if they’re rapists, at least I’d still lose my virginity tonight!

        Okay, that wasn’t funny.

        They’re probably decent peeps, from here the house looks nice… not that that makes a difference to what kinda folks they are. 

        So, what do I tell them? I don’t have to tell them what happened. I don’t have to tell them anything. I just have to get them to let Me call Dad. Doesn’t matter what else they think… but they can’t call the police. Period. I am not ready to explain. I can say anything to them. Dad, I can probably get by with an ‘I’m not ready to talk about it yet’ until tomorrow. The police… there is no way around it. Someone is going to have to explain that mess eventually. Soon. What do I tell the police? It has to be the same thing I tell Dad.

        Jennifer and her adjutants – whoever they were in real life (Fucking poser Goths too self-obsessed to accept the ease that a ‘normal’ life provides those who aren’t hung up on image. Ironic, that.) – would be reported missing soon. Perhaps a day at the outside before someone expects one of them to be somewhere that they aren’t. Less time before someone notices that they aren’t answering their cell-phones. Chances are someone knew the group were going somewhere together – possibly even knew where. Fuck. How the hell do I divorce myself from that? 

        Blame it all on Kevin? Say I alone managed to save myself from his insane rampage? Not far from the truth. You might be able to massage that into a perpetuable lie. ‘Perpetuable?’ Is that even a word? I know what I mean. Besides, it’s not like they’ll think the truth is the truth. And there’s no other witnesses. I could chalk up any forensic questions to the chaos of the moment.

        Okay, there we go. The beginnings of a story. Feign a bit of amnesiac shock to buy more time.

        Still, what do I tell the people in this house to keep the police out of the equation for a few more hours at least? Not a clue. Fuck it. I’m naked. If they aren’t more concerned about that at first, something is definitely wrong.

        I’m not staying out here any longer to figure it out. Too cold. I can hardly feel my toes.

        When in doubt, stick to amnesiac shock and demand they call Dad and not the police. Even be a bit crazy about it. Look what happened back there. People fall in and do stupid things when faced with demanding psychos.

        Okay, here we go…

        Wow. Elaborate door chime. Christ, I’m probably waking someone up…

        Nothing. Ring again.

        Okay, footsteps. Oh. Not very pleased sounding footsteps. I woke someone up.

        I should I try and cover myself behind the plants.

        And here they are…

#

        “Who is there?”

        “Please. I need some help.”

        “I can’t see you. I’m not opening the door unless I can see you. Step out of the… Oh My God!”

#

        Must be more blood than I realized. 

     Chapter 4     CLICK HERE for an explanation of the non-linearity of chapter numbers.