The Big Reap

18.

You wanna know the worst part about a pack of sociopathic immortal nutjobs getting the drop on you? It’s not the torture, though there was plenty of that, from the second I hopped into the scruffy, chair-bound trucker they had waiting for me, Dru and Izzie took turns cutting on me some, Kate screaming at them to stop the whole while, leastways until they gagged her. They dug cone-shaped pits out of the tender flesh of my cheeks with the rounded tip of a potato peeler, jabbed toothpicks underneath my fingernails, Dru even lopped off my left ear before a furious Grigori castigated him for doing damage to his new trophy that would not heal itself with time and did his best to mystically reattach it, all crooked and wrong.

It’s not the humiliation at being bested, either, though there was that as well; blunted somewhat by the fact that these deranged motherfuckers had hunted unseen in humanity’s midst for centuries, but stinging nonetheless.

It’s not even the growing certainty you’ll wind up frozen in a cheesy action pose in some evil fucker’s living room for all eternity right beside his startled-looking stuffed gnu, his mountain lion poised to strike, and his tacky bearskin rug.

No, more than anything, it’s the monologuing. The nonstop, mustache-twirling gabfest that you’re forced to endure before they just do the deed already. And the worry that it won’t stop once they lock you inside this body forever. That Grigori is gonna while away his lonely centuries nattering at my magic-stilled ass, and there won’t be a goddamn thing I can do to shut him up.

“I confess, Collector,” he said, “I misjudged you some when first we met. I didn’t think you’d best fair Ricou so easily, which is why you and I are forced to kill time now. The sigils inscribed in blood beneath you must be fully dry before the ritual can begin. Three hours at minimum is recommended. Five, if one has the time to spare. But it does, at least, mean Dru and Izzie get some time with you. They take such delight in pain, you see — nearly as much as they take in one another. Touching, is it not, to see such devotion across the vast expanse of time? Theirs is truly a love story for the ages.”

“Yeah, real heartwarming,” I said, spitting blood and tonguing the spot where the glistening molar in Izzie’s hand had recently resided. Izzie smiled prettily at me and held out her prize for Dru to see. Then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed it, while Dru looked upon the scene with the dopy infatuation of a teenager’s crush. In the hour and change the two of them had been cutting on me, I hadn’t heard them say a word. “Plus, they don’t seem to talk much, which I’m kinda fond of. Maybe you should try it.”

“Oh, the Lovers haven’t spoken in centuries,” Grigori told me. “They’ve no need to. The only bond they truly care to foster is between each other, and said bond is far deeper than mere human utterances could hope to express. Which is why they choose to express it in suffering.”

Dru, who’d waited patiently on deck while his blushing bride removed my molar, stepped up to the plate to take his swing. In his hand was a paring knife from the kitchen, dull orange-ish and glistening. As he approached, I wondered almost idly, thanks to shock’s kind remove, what he’d coated it with. Then, in the instant before he jabbed it handle-deep into my thigh, I caught a whiff and knew.

The fucker’d drenched the blade in Tabasco sauce.

I thrashed in agony, beet-red and screaming. Kate, gagged and wide-eyed, mirrored my movements, in her case a futile protest.

Dru removed the blade and licked it clean. Izzie clapped, coquettish, as if he’d just performed the most delightful party trick.

“Understand I derive no pleasure in your suffering,” Grigori said. “But I feel I owe them a little leisure time, having yanked them so abruptly from their home. Much as I was forced to back in Whitechapel, 1891, when their playful dismantling of several lowly streetwalkers attracted a hair too much attention from Scotland Yard. For the longest time, London was their playground, but then Simon’s precious modern science made such play far riskier as the livestock began collecting evidence and doing proper detecting rather than simply hanging whatever pauper they could get their hands on. The Ripper killings were too high-profile, I told them, and continued feasting on the delicious, fear-drenched viscera of London’s whores too risky if they both wished to evade capture. From then on, I endeavored to settle them in less civilized locales, where their avant-garde expressions of their besottedness might raise fewer hackles. Luckily, the twentieth century proved quite the extended honeymoon for them. The Armenian genocide of the First World War. The wholesale massacre of Kurds in Dersim in ’37. Poland, Russia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia during World War Two. After that, unfortunately, the whole of Europe got disappointingly civilized, but a series of bogus humanitarian aid posts on the Dark Continent made possible by my purchase of a number of respected charities allowed them to continue indulging their outré predilections without fear of reprisal — for a time, at least. Recently, they’ve spent their days feasting on the tender flesh of the young women of Juarez, Mexico, some two hundred dead and mutilated, yet no one seems to care. It’s the ideal arrangement, really. All these two have ever wanted was to be left alone to kill.”

“How can you sit there and say that like it doesn’t bother you?” I asked. “You and your so-called siblings were human once. How can you stomach having become such fucking monsters?”

“Let me answer that with a question of my own. Which is worse, that monsters lurk in the dark corners of Man’s existence, or that Man is such a brutal, vicious creature in his own right that he’s scarcely even noticed?”

“I’m pretty sure the answer to that is, ‘Fuck you and the giant tidal wave of evil you rode in on.’”

“Samuel, that stings. But not, I fear, as much as this ritual is going to. For you see, the sigil’s dry. It’s time to begin.”

Outside, I heard the traffic’s din build, a diesel engine revving somewhere outside the wobbly translucence of Grigori’s protective bubble — weaker, it seemed, than the one erected around his castle, but present nonetheless. It seemed strange to me, this showdown, this potential end to my life’s story, taking place inside a dime-a-dozen chain restaurant situated in a strip-mall parking lot in a bland commercial district beside a highway. It could have been anywhere in America. It felt like nowhere at all. Time was, they’d’ve had the decency to make a trophy outta my sorry undead ass inside a nice little mom-and-pop place, at least.

I glanced toward the broad expanse of tinted glass that faced the road. Saw the dim reflection of my own unfamiliar body, and across the room, Kate’s as well, while between us stood three ancient, twisted, repugnant creatures nothing like the physical forms they each projected, but somehow instantly recognizable nonetheless. I guess they could not hide their true selves from us entirely.

Beyond the glass, and the reflections, I saw the yellowy stare of headlights looking in.

“Kate,” I shouted, “avert your eyes.”

“That’s sweet,” said Grigori. “You not wanting her to see your final defeat.”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Then what?”

“It’s just, my ride’s here.”

Grigori tilted his head and regarded me with confusion. Kate’s eyes widened, and then clenched shut. She knew me well enough to listen first and ask questions later when I start spouting the crazy.

And then the big rig plowed into the restaurant in an explosion of crumbling drywall, rent metal, and shattered glass, collapsing half the fucking building, scattering the Lovers and the newborn vamps — two of whom were crushed to pulp beneath the eighteen-wheeler’s many tires — and pinning Grigori to the far wall before grinding to a hissing, ticking stop.

When Grigori slammed into the wall, his face contorted in agony and sudden fury, and his human aspect faded to nothing, revealing the knotted, ancient mass of scar tissue that was his true self. Likewise, without his efforts to maintain it, his protection spell flickered and blinked out. The driver’s side truck door opened, and out stepped a lithe, muscular black woman damn near seven feet tall — eight, if you counted her afro — a sawed-off shotgun in her hands. One of the young vamps bum-rushed her, and she unloaded, turning its head to so much pulp. Her sightless eyes blinked rheumy white against the sudden spray of blood and brain, and she called out, “Hey, Sam Thornton, are you in here?”

I laughed despite myself. “Sorry, Theresa,” I called, “no one here by that name. Guess you took out the wrong damn Pancake Palace.”

“That’s what you get, letting the blind chick drive.”

“Hey fuckers!” called a gruff voice from the street. “That eyeball-cooking mojo down yet, or is my fat ass stuck outside while you get to have fun knocking baddies’ heads together without me?”

“Sam?” Theresa, deferring to me.

“It’s down, Gio!” I shouted. “Welcome to the party, pal!”

Gio ran, screaming bloody murder, through the hole the truck left in the side of the restaurant, brandishing in one hand a makeshift cross of pencils stuck together with a wad of gum, and using the other to shield his eyes. I started to open my mouth to tell him how goddamned ridiculous he looked, his cross all droopy and lopsided, his face buried in the crook of his elbow, but at that moment, a wild-eyed newborn vamp in the unholy-hunger-warped body of a middle-aged woman pushed free of the rubble at his feet and launched itself at his throat.

I croaked a warning. Theresa swung the sawed-off toward the sound of the impending vampire strike, but she hesitated, unsure in her blindness whether the man she loved was in the shot or not.

Luckily, Kate — who’d freed herself of her bonds during the attack — was not similarly paralyzed. She rocketed out from beneath the semi’s trailer with such speed and grace I could scarcely believe my eyes, sailing over the lunging vampire and wrapping the length of rope that had until recently affixed her to her chair around its neck. She tucked as she landed, and rolled such that she wound up once more on her feet. The force of her roll yanked the young vamp off-course, and flipped it hard into the far wall. Kate didn’t hesitate. Dropping her rope in favor of a nearby steak knife, she pounced on the vamp, yanked back its head with a handful of gray-brown hair, and drew the knife hard across its neck. Blood gouted as flesh parted in vulgar parody of a smile, but the creature did not die, instead bucking like a bronco trying to toss a stubborn rider. Kate wouldn’t be shaken, though, she just kept sawing and sawing, gore spewing across the room like the devil’s own sprinkler, until finally, the body she rode slumped to the floor, and she rose, her smile a gleam of white amidst the spattered red, holding the woman’s fanged head up by the hair as an angler might a large-mouth bass.

I said nothing for a long second. Just stood and stared. As, for that matter, did Gio who, as the scuffle erupted inches from him, seemed to’ve abandoned both his useless pencil cross and all pretense of protecting his eyes from going melty. As our gazes met, he said, “Jesus fuck, Sam, who’s the skirt?”

“Gio…” said Theresa, like a teacher chastising a recalcitrant student.

“I mean, uh, who’s your lady-friend,” he awkwardly corrected.

“Gio, Ter,” I said, “meet Kate. Kate, meet Gio and Theresa.”

“Pleased to meetcha,” said Kate, and then. “Hey blood-breath, head’s up!” She winged the head she was holding at a vamp who’d been slinking toward the gaping hole in the restaurant wall; it caught the head, and gave the dripping severed neck a sniff before recoiling in revulsion — dead vamp blood apparently proving useless to fellow vamps. Theresa followed the sound of the head’s landing, and let loose a quick blast of her sawed-off, blowing a hole through the young vamp’s chest and leaving it, slumped and lifeless, against the wall.

“Sweetheart,” said Theresa to Kate, “You and me are gonna get along just fine.”

“Where the fuck’d you learn how to do that?” I said to Kate. “Kill vamps, I mean. The White Hats juice you up with some warrior mojo?”

She looked at me like I had two heads. Funny, since she briefly had herself, if you count the one she’d just wung across the room. “Warrior mojo? Not hardly. Fact is, when the forces of evil try to condemn your innocent ass to hell, you start to take a vested interest in your own personal safety. And as for that,” she says, nodding toward the headless mess that was, until recently, a vampire, “head or heart, Sam — that’s the rule. Vampires or zombies or whatever, it’s all the same. I swear, it’s like you’ve never seen a movie in your life.”

“You shoulda seen his face when I tried to get him to use Google,” Gio said to her.

“Great,” I replied, smiling. “The three people in the whole world I can fucking stand, and they’ve decided to gang up against me.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask to get dragged into this one,” said Kate. “These creepshows found me.”

“Us neither,” said Theresa. “In fact, this place was hard as shit to find. It’s got a freaky vibe about it, or at least it did. Even when Gio pointed me and the truck right at it and told me to just hit the gas, it was all I could do not to turn away, like it didn’t want me getting too near, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it rings a bell.”

“Sam Thornton,” Theresa said with a grin, “why can’t you ever take us someplace nice?”

“The day a Collector agrees to meet you someplace nice is a day you oughta worry,” I said.

“Uh, dude?” Gio, looking around. “Where’d your friends go?”

I looked around as well. Grigori, Drustanus, and Yseult were nowhere to be seen. The latter two, I’d lost track of in the course of Gio and Theresa’s Big Damn Rescue, but last I’d seen, Grigori had been pinned to the wall by Theresa’s semi. Now the truck sat a good foot from the wall, and Grigori was gone.

“Son of a bitch!” I said. “We cannot let those three outta here alive. If they disappear–”

“They won’t,” said Kate, peering out the gaping hole in the restaurant and into the street. “I’ve got a bead on ’em. If we get moving, we can maybe catch them before they get to where they’re headed.”

I followed Kate’s gaze. Saw the three Brethren, no longer projecting their human guises, bounding across the four-lane blacktop on all fours. Well, all threes in Drustanus’ case, since it seemed his left arm had been severed in Theresa’s attack; his stump left spatters of fresh blood bright red in a trail that snaked across the street after him. I followed the trail back inside to its source with my eyes, and saw his missing hand jutting out from beneath one set of the semis’ double-wheels, fingers curled inward like the legs of a dead spider. Wondered what was behind the worry in Kate’s tone. Then I saw the sign beside the entrance to the half-empty parking lot they were traversing, leaping parked-car to parked-car, and I feared I knew.

“Kate,” I asked, “what’s over there?”

“A school,” she answered, wiping her knife off on her pants and starting after them. “Across the street’s the middle school.”