“Do you think they’re really cursed?” He’s staring down at what remains of his friend again. “Or do you think it’s just something in their genes? Or is it just in the nature of daylight to burn up darkness?”
“I really don’t know.” I don’t have time for his familiar questions. I know all too well that there are no answers. There’s no reason to any of this. “Listen…I’m heading north, someplace safe. I can take you if you’d like.”
Ehren looks back at me with an expressionless gaze. He purses his lips and looks up as it begins to rain softly. The sun will be up soon, despite the dark landscape around us.
“Don’t see that I have much choice. Is there pizza where you’re heading?” he asks with a smile.
I smile back at him. The poor kid copes with tragedy behind a smirk.
“I’ll make it myself,” I tell him.
“Well then, I’m in.”
The clouds are blocking the early morning light. It’s dark like the inner side of closed eyelids. The kind of dark that seems to drag on and on without end.
Ehren doesn’t speak much once we’re on the road. He just leans his seat back and sprawls out to sleep. “I’ll take a driving shift whenever you want,” he tells me. “I just need a catnap.”
The sun outshines the dark after another hour. We’re back on the road a few hours when Ehren wakes up. He rubs his eyes and sits up quickly.
“Where are we?” he asks.
I hear a sudden burst of air and look over to see the window cracked. He’s holding a pack of cigarettes and pressing one to his lips.
“Can I bum one?”
He just grins and holds out the pack. I smile and crack my window. We’re coming up on an overpass of intersecting freeways, so I pull off onto a wide median to stretch my legs.
“Do you have any idea what happened here?” I ask as I inhale deeply. “Did they give an explanation for this?”
“You living in a cave?” he asks.
“Basically, yeah. I don’t know what happened. I got caught in a frenzy when it first started, woke up on life support, and found the world gone to hell.”
He laughs for a moment. “Well, that’s just cliché. Good timing, though; you’d probably be dead otherwise.”
I just shrug and watch as his face falls and he hops onto the hood of the jeep, sitting with his legs crossed looking over the deserted freeway.
“They hit the eastern seaboard hard. We don’t know why. Government said we’re quarantined until they decide otherwise. That was a week ago, and then everything went black. I mean everything—cell, radio, television, everything. I haven’t heard anything since. We were holed up in an ocean vista over on the cape, but the fangers were raiding the beachfront in droves, taking up residence. We decided to take our chances and head west, try to make it out of quarantine if we could. The problem is that we don’t know where the quarantine starts and where it ends, and we don’t know how much of the seaboard got hit, and now I’m the only one left.”
“Shit…,” I mutter.
The ruin stretches out across the freeway, an unending sea of lost lives, dead families, and murdered lovers. The clouds are hanging low, milky iridescence and cotton. An ineffable sadness moves through me. Until now, I’ve been focused entirely on moving. I haven’t taken into account the vast amount of suffering around me. Some time ago, there were millions of people here, just living their lives. Now, all of that is gone.
“We’d better hit the road,” I say, tossing my cigarette.
Ehren nods and hops down. “You got the keys?” he asks. “I’ll drive for a while.”
“Yeah, sure. They’re in the ignition.”
It’s not until I’m the passenger seat, gazing out at passing red rocks and scorched earth that I begin to feel my small glitter of hope wane. It’s the inactivity that gives me too much time to think and worry, so I lie back and try to catch a nap.
“If you see somewhere worth holing up for the night, go ahead and pull in. We’ll need to sleep at some point.”
“You got it,” Ehren says as I close my eyes.
The sheets are wrapped tightly between the two of us. I whisper beside her, “Hi, darling.”
“Hello, Ryan…,” she replies with a confused look on her face. “What are you doing here?” she asks, slightly inching away.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re dead. You can’t be here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; of course I can.”
I see her parted lips begin to scream and the outburst reflected in her eyes as I pin her thighs beneath my own. She screams and flails as my fangs sink into her throat.
She’s still screaming as I wake, drenched in sweat, lying in the passenger seat. Ehren glances at me.
“You okay, man?” he asks.
“Yeah, just a dream.” I rub my eyes and pull my seat forward, sitting up and looking out. “How long was I out?”
“Just a couple hours,” he tells me. “There’s a lot more debris here. It’s been slow going, and I haven’t seen shit for shelter or food.”
“Well, we’ll keep going until we find somewhere that isn’t exposed, or I’ve got the gas cans in the back if we have to drive through the night. We’d be better off on the move than sitting somewhere, open and exposed.”
The road becomes more perilous as we pass densely populated interstate towns. The aftermath is all around us, and our path is less and less open. I half expect to see other survivors, but we never do. Signposts are bent, broken and charred. More and more pileups force us to turn back and pass through service roads. We stop off at a pawnshop and collect an arsenal, a few pistols and boxes of ammo. I don’t touch guns, but Ehren insists. We score a few long knives and machetes, pile up the back seat, and hit the road again. Blocked intersections prove a hassle, as we have to clear debris and mangled corpses.
Another fifteen miles or so, and we’ll be free to hit the back roads and rural highways to Langtree. It’s still another day’s worth of driving, but I find myself becoming more hopeful of our impending arrival.
“When we hit the open country, I think the fangs will be more scarce,” I tell Ehren, lighting up a cigarette. I breathe in and wipe my black hair from my eyes.
He nods, looking out the passenger window at the fading sun. “How can you be sure this Langtree place is secure?”
“I can’t…,” I answer honestly. “But when I woke up, that’s where the note told me to head, and that’s our best shot at regrouping and getting answers.”
“Yeah, but you don’t even know who’s waiting there. What if they’ve cleared out, or what if they’re dead?”
He’s not saying anything that hasn’t run through my head a few thousand times since I left. “I don’t know. I don’t have a backup plan. If we are on our own, we can still head north and try to make it out of quarantine.”
“Works for me,” Ehren replies. “You think this thing has really been contained? You think the quarantine’s really worked?”
“I hope so,” I say. In the back of my head, I feel a nagging doubt rise up.
“I’ve got family in Phoenix,” Ehren says, looking down and shifting sideways.
“I’m sure they’re safe,” I tell him. “The only family I have should be waiting for me at Langtree.”
When the sun goes down, it’s considerably darker on the country highway. There’s less obstruction, but I can’t help feeling uneasy, like there are massive armies of the undead surrounding us in the dark.
“You feel paranoid?” Ehren asks behind the wheel. “Because I feel really fucking paranoid. Something doesn’t feel right. It’s so goddamned dark.”
“I feel it too. I wish we could find somewhere to settle in for the night. There isn’t shit out here.”
“That’s what scares me,” he mutters, and his hands grasp the wheel harder.
The feeling continues eating at me through the night. All I can imagine are wild monsters walking the soil, stirring up dry dust. Darkness has s
uch a strange effect on the human mind. It must be in the nature of darkness to bring out the bad.
An hour passes, and we pull off on an empty gravel road to stretch our legs and down sustenance packs. Sunrise is three hours out, and we’re both exhausted. We can’t risk sleeping in the open, so we’re hoping electrolytes will give us a boost.
“Let me get this straight,” Ehren says incredulously. “You really prefer Return of the Jedi over Empire? Are you fucking nuts?”
“Oh, come on, man. Ewoks aside, Return is a perfect finale. Luke reconciles with Vader, and Vader defeats the dark side of the Force. Plus! There’s the most epic light saber fight of all time. The dark death star cavern of evil, only illuminated by the glow of two light sabers, father pitted against son. It’s the most epic tale of good against evil.”
“But Boba Fett—!” Ehren halts in midsentence and glances at me. “We’re not alone,” he says.
I nod toward the back seat and Ehren cracks the door, tossing me a machete. “No, I don’t think we are.”
I’m peering out into the woods with Ehren to my back, watching the road, grasping a large hunting knife.
A booming voice cuts through the night. “Empire is the best, you dumbass!” A massive shadow erupts from the woods, and a colossal forearm plows into me, sending me sprawling through the air back into the jeep.
The impact knocks the wind out of me, and I look up from my knees to see a massive hulk of a creature turning on Ehren. He lunges forward with his knife and sinks it into the vampire’s chest. I begin to stand as it laughs, pulling the knife out slowly.
Ehren stares, wide-eyed, and backs up slowly. “Oh shit.”
The beast kicks forward and crushes its heel into Ehren. The blow sends him through the air, and he bounces head over heels, lying still.
“Hey bubba!” I shout, trying to draw his attention from Ehren. It works, and he turns toward me.
“Boba?” It asks, confused.
I charge forward, gripping the machete blade tightly. He swings wildly and I duck underneath, spinning to his side and taking a chunk of his ribcage with me.
He lets out a maniacal wail and charges me, this time wrapping me up in his massive arms. He has nearly squeezed the consciousness out of me when he yelps suddenly, dropping me and wheeling around to see Ehren, standing with Ehren’s blade stuck in his sternum.
“Son of a bitch!” Ehren shouts, backing away. “Are you made of steel?”
I jump on my opportunity and swing precisely into his thick neck. The first hack opens it up, and I swing again, and again, and again. Finally, the head comes loose, and the beast fades to dust.
I wipe the sweat from my brow and blink. “It’s Jedi and you know it, asshole.”
Ehren collapses beside the jeep, slamming his knife into the dirt. There’s a glint of moonlight reflected on the blade. “Where the hell did that guy come from?”
“I don’t know. Most fangs are nomadic. Maybe he was just passing through. I really don’t know. There must be more than I even imagined. I don’t know. None of this makes any damn sense.”
“Well,” I add. “Brad and Alexis will have answers. We just need to keep moving.”
We clean ourselves up and hit the road once more.
“I told you, I had a bad feeling about this highway,” Ehren says in the passenger seat, sipping on a Gatorade. “That was as shocking to me as finding out that Vader was Luke’s father.”
“Oh, for the love of God,” I say. “I’m not getting into this again.”
“Just saying,” Ehren mutters. “No one saw it coming…”
I’m so exhausted from the brawl that the road becomes a blur. Curves and hills fade into gray muck. Ehren dozes beside me, and I feel my head nod from time to time. The dark engrosses me, shuttered and dank. Ehren won’t be rested enough to drive, so I pull off into the ditch and lay back, machete resting in my lap. I’m twenty minutes into an uneasy nap when the rain begins.
In the dark, I see the flashes of lightning and the bare brown soil exposed, washed out in the downpour. Flashes of light illuminate the shallow mist and low hanging clouds. The air inside the jeep grows cooler, and the steady drops of water on the windshield serenade me.
I’m not sure how much time has passed when Ehren wakes me. We smoke a cigarette with the windows cracked, and I feel tiny drops of rain bouncing through the crack on my side.
“So, this Alexis is your fiancé?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “We aren’t getting married anytime soon or anything. She’s waiting on me to retire from this whole vampire slayer gig.”
“Why’s that? She doesn’t want to be married to Van Helsing?”
“Yeah, actually.”
“Well, what I don’t get is why she just left you at the prison by yourself. Why wouldn’t she come back to get you?”
I raise my eyebrow disapprovingly at his accusation. “Brad went to get her when shit hit the fan. He couldn’t move me. I was hurt. Alexis was on the coast. Those life support gizmos they got, they watch your levels and all that, making sure they keep you alive and feed you, hydrate you, and all that. He knows I can handle myself. I told him to get Alexis. He would have kept her at Langtree where it’s safe. He wouldn’t risk getting through this hell on earth with other people’s lives at stake.”
“Yeah, I get that.” He traces the cracked window with his finger, tossing the cigarette butt. “I’m just saying if it were me, I’d go it alone and get back to you.”
“Brad wouldn’t let her. The open road is too dangerous, and they’d have no guarantee they’d find me where he left me. And staying at Langtree where he told me to go is the only option they have.”
He nods in understanding and taps on the glove compartment. “What’s she like?” he asks.
“She’s tender,” I tell him, taking a drag. “She’s been pushing me to get out of this killing business. She says I need to get out while I’m still human.”
“She’s afraid you’ll get turned into one of them?”
“No, it’s not like that. She’s just afraid of the violence. She thinks being around violence for so long changes a person, chips away at them. She’s right…,” I add mournfully, thinking of the past.
“Sounds smart.” He looks at me and I nod in agreement.
“I was just getting ready to leave this behind. No more death or killing. I wanted to be an English teacher; now look at the goddamned world. Sometimes it takes the choice from us.”
“We’ll get out of this,” he says with a smile. “An English teacher? Really?”
“Yeah, I like to read. It’s always made me feel better. I figured it would be a good fit, try to do something decent for the world. I rationalize that the more a person reads—the harder it’ll be to behave like these monsters. If I keep doing this, there’ll be nothing left worth saving for the outside world. I’ll be no different from them.”
“You’re probably right about that. What does Alexis do? Is she a hunter like you?”
“No,” I say. “She’s a biologist. Big brother hired her to study them, so they could find a cure or understand how to kill them better, whatever, I don’t really know what they wanted to accomplish, housing them up like animals.
“I had just dropped off a fresh catch with Brad when all of this shit went down. We’d found a whole nest the night before, sedated them, and dropped them off. Brad and I used to hunt them on our own. We weren’t exactly acting within the boundaries of the law. One day a whole mess of government boys showed up at our front door, so to speak. They took us in and recruited us to work for them. They were paying us for live ones. Anyway, at the holding facility, we holed up in the mess hall when the riot started. They stormed us. I can’t remember most of what happened after that. I just remember waking up alone.”
I sigh and try to ward off the thoughts of my childhood, briefly imagining my brother beside me.
“Didn’t you feel weird, keeping them alive?” he asks.
“Yeah, Brad a
nd I were both curious to know what our bosses were playing at, but we needed to eat. Rounding them up was the steadiest paycheck we’ve ever had. We didn’t dig too deep. Maybe we should have. I guess we just figured we were on the human side of things, and that was enough.”
“Well, it’s nice to know you’ve got a sensitive side. You’re even kind of human. How bout’ that?” He’s teasing, but there’s truth behind his words.
“Shut up,” I laugh. “That’s enough about me—what about you? What are you doing here if your folks are in Phoenix?”
“Well, you know…” He’s looking down at his hands nervously. “I was up here for school, ended up dropping out for a girl. We were renting a nice place over on the cape.”
His eyes look over at me, damp and filled with remorse, but he carries on. “When it first hit the coast, she disappeared. I looked everywhere I could for a couple days. I was nearly killed a few times. Anyway, I came home and she was waiting for me—but she was different. I didn’t notice at first. I was so relieved to see her.”
His voice is cracking, and he pauses a moment to breathe. “I’m sorry,” he says. “She had been turned. She tried to turn me…but…I got away.” He finishes and wipes his eyes softly, looking out the window.
“I’m sorry, Ehren.”
“It’s fine,” he says.
“They killed my brother when I was a kid,” I tell him. “That’s how I got into this game.”
“Really?” he asks.
“Yeah, when I was seventeen. Some desperate loner came after us when we were out camping on our parents’ farm. It got him, but not me.”
I see the memory forming in my head as I speak. I see my arms wrapped tightly around my brother’s lifeless body.
“I’ve always tried to find answers about them,” I say. “Where did they come from? How can the world at large not know of them? How can a thing seem so human but be without a soul? Live solely for bloodsucking and murder? How is it possible to love death? How can anything relish the death of a human being?”
“We’re talking about those things out there, aren’t we?” Ehren asks. “You’ve seen their faces. There’s no humanity left in them.”
“Human beings with plenty of humanity in their souls kill all the time. So why are we so frightened by these things? Why are we so disgusted by their bloodlust? What makes them special? …I think it’s because they kill without hiding behind an ideology. It isn’t romanticized or pontificated upon. It’s just raw killing—without justification. It’s not for religion or nationalism.”