"Hey kid!" she chirped at Shane from the door.
Shane yelped, "Ashlei?"
"Hee! 'Ashlei!' It's been a little while since anyone called me that. I go by Ash lately. More vampiry, don't you think?" She strode to the edge of Shane's bare mattress, wearing a light pink sweater and capris that may well have been stolen off a mannequin in the Gap instead of from a frightened sorority pledge at Annandale. "You gave us a scare, you know, trying to get away like that. I almost had to rip your cute little head off and ruined my ensemble."
"Is this about Eliot?" Shane asked, increasingly aware what a compromising position she was in, chained before two of the playfully sadistic undead, one of whom was her boyfriend's ex.
"Eliot?" Ash asked, confused at the reaction. She looked to her companion for the answer to this curiosity.
Seth shrugged. "I may have threatened that we had him hanging from a cage in the other room or something to that effect," he said, snickering, twirling a bloody dagger against the tip of his finger.
Ash joined in his laughter. "Jesus Christ, Shane, you believed that Dracula crap? Really? And Eliot used to go on and on about how smart you were when he dumped me for you, you spunky little bitch. Although, putting him in a cage isn't a bad idea..." she began to consider.
"Then whose blood...?" Shane began, unable to take her eyes from the blade in Seth's hand.
Ash traced her finger over the cooling pool of blood between Shane's bound legs and licked it clean. She closed her eyes and considered the taste as though a gourmand with a fine wine. "It's yours. At least, most of it is. My associate may have become a bit... rough… in chaining you up again." She smiled with too much of her gums, but a flash of pointed teeth, a set more than Shane expected. "He's very good at chaining girls. Trust me, he can make cold steel feel like silk," she purred. "But, you're not hurt anymore. Not at all. Which is a little strange, so I let him keep slicing you open. He's been very busy with that, but I think he's satisfied with how you managed to escape the first time. Satisfied but still pretty curious."
Shane shuddered and wished she could doubt any of this.
"How are you feeling, by the way?" he asked with the concern of a doctor.
She pursed her lips, but didn't see what she had to gain by her silence. They held all the card and almost knew her own hand as well. The cuffs were as tight as skin, nothing she could get out of after a dozen broken bones and copious slippery blood. She'd have to lose her hands entirely and she had never cared to establish whether she could restore from amputation. "I feel fine. A little woozy," she said.
That wide smile from Ash again, something Shane had already learned to dislike to her core. "Oh," Ash squeaked. Unlike some police officers, they exchanged a look that was wrought with true meaning, some plan that Shane could not begin to truly guess.
"Then I guess it's time for breakfast," Ash smirked.
Dryden tried to open the doors of his abandoned truck in the parking lot of the Red Hook Diner. He'd left the keys behind with the other vampires, or they'd simply taken them from him when they otherwise emptied his pockets during the period he was a less animate corpse. He pulled the door handle until he heard metal creaking and the mechanism inside snap. He cursed and kicked truck, leaving a huge dent that looked as though he'd had an accident with a cannonball. He wondered how he would explain this to his insurance company, and then wondered if vampirism allowed him to collect his life insurance.
The truck door swung open, allowing him access, if not a spare key with which to start the ignition. This was hardly an improvement over his prior lot. He rummaged through his disused glove compartment, hoping to make the most of his breaking and entering. A map of Dutchess County, his vehicle registration, a plastic ice scraper, one chiming metal ball, a vending machine prize, a half-filled bag of sunflower seed shells and an athame that Roselyn must have left. He unsheathed the blade of this final object. It was seven inches, a paltry weapon but better than nothing. He sheathed the blade again and put in it on his belt.
"Hey you!" called a gruff voice. "What the hell you think that you're doing in there?"
Dryden stepped out of the cab of the truck and showed his now empty palms to the older man, who stepped forward to examine them more thoroughly. He looked familiar, but Dryden couldn't place him in a context.
"Mister, it's my truck. I just lost my keys and needed to get in. Here, I can go get the registration and prove it," Dryden said, moving to reenter the truck.
"No, hold it there. I recognize you, you are that young girl's fellow. The one who gets jealous easy."
Dryden looked him over again and, after a flash of surprising rage, felt only calm and recognition. "Yeah, I remember you too. You are that nosy bastard."
The man limped toward Dryden. His eyes were covered with a thin blue film, but there was something beyond that he found unnerving. The old man gasped, which only served to make him sputter and cough. "God, who the hell did this to you?" the man asked, almost to himself, reaching out to touch Dryden's burned face. "There is an agreement, damn it."
"What are you talking about?" Dryden stammered, frightened for the first time in his afterlife.
"Who made you into this? Who made you a vampire?" the man insisted again when met with Dryden's shock.
"I don't… really know. Someone named Seth or maybe a girl named Ash." The man glared at Dryden and he suddenly felt as though he'd be caught doing something embarrassing by someone he respected immensely. "Uh, I was dead for most of it and then they had me in a room for a couple of days. I don't really know the particulars. Sorry."
He sputtered and spat black phlegm on the concrete. "Good lord, did you just apologize to me?" Dryden could not be certain whether the convulsions that wracked the man's body were of laughter or pneumonia. "You are something else, kid. Something else entirely. Come inside, I'll get you something to drink."
"I'm not really thirsty," Dryden demurred, though only because he could not imagine that the man had quite the vintage he now craved.
"Eh, I think you are, fledgling," he said and smiled a gap toothed grin, though the ones that remained, sharp and lethal, gave evidence enough that he could get Dryden what he needed.
Dryden gulped down the mug of warm blood and the chubby waiter - Wick, his nametag asserted - brought him another. Both Wick and Joachim, the old man, sat across from him in a booth in the Red Hook Diner. Dryden knew they were studying him and his reactions, but also knew that he was presently too ravenous to care. He gulped and swallowed until he felt, despite appearances, that his gut was as distended as the gas filled belly of a starving Ethiopian child. Dryden smirked at this thought, then realized how horrid and alien it was and grimaced, physically pained at his callousness. All this must be part of the change and it was hardly his favorite part. His favorite part so far, he considered, was absolutely the feeling of this microwaved blood sliding down his throat, the tightness of it coursing through his veins and soothing his burns.
"Can I have another one? For the road?" Dryden asked.
Wick puffed out his chest, irritated, but began to rise. Joachim - Jo, he'd told Dryden to call him - put his hand on the large man's shoulder to keep him in his seat.
"In a minute, we just have a few things we need to square away with you. Now, you seem pretty immune to the Hunger…"
Dryden looked up from the ceramic mug he was licking clean of hemoglobin.
"Not that kind of hunger, boy. The Hunger. You get taken in by all those urges you've been keeping hidden all your life, all those things you kept buried deep to fit in the rest of society. It ain't evil, exactly, but that's for them to sort out. You don't got none of that, do you?"
Dryden shrugged.
"How many people you drank so far, since being killed?" Wick clarified.
"None," Dryden admitted.
"You wanted to?"
"No, not really. I want blood, but I don't exactly want to kill anybody."
Jo cleared his throat, the ambivalent spasms again. "You don't want to kill anybody. How about the guy that's been sleeping with your woman? You want to rip his throat out, maybe kill her in the bargain?"
The image flashed through his mind and he fought to dismiss it. "Roselyn wouldn't…"
"I been at this longer than you. I could smell him on her. You're a cuckold, boy. That sweet little thing has been getting it often and well. Better than you can give it to her, anyway."
Dryden's nostrils flared and he clenched his jaw. Jo grinned crookedly at this. "Yeah, you feel that. That lust?"
"Who is he?" Dryden growled.
"You want him dead?"
Dryden began answering in the affirmative but hesitated. "I really don't. I'm pissed, but what is killing him going to prove? No, I don't want him dead. What she did hurts me. I loved that girl and this is how she repays me?"
"You are a hell of a fledgling," Jo laughed.
"So who is he?" Dryden asked again, with less insistence.
Wick shook his head slowly. "That was a test. You passed. Or failed. We are not sure. But you do not seem usual."
"What?"
Wick answered more slowly this time. "Your woman has not slept with another. He needed to get you angry. He succeeded."
Dryden recovered his composure. Being so full of warm blood made it easier to relax, easier to understand the purpose of this game. "I didn't think Rose would do that. She isn't like that."
"No, I don't suppose she would, though this new status of yours sure is going to complicate your relationship."
It was as though the blood evaporated in his veins. "Rose. They took her."
It looked to Dryden that the film over the old man's eyes grew thinner, that the darkness of the underlying eyes shone more clearly.
"Your makers have your woman? How… Byronic," Wick intoned.
"I need to get her back, they kidnapped her."
Jo looked at Wick with amusement. "Kid, she's dead. They ain't like you, they would pop her head off like a cork and drink her dry."
"No!" he said, as much to disagree with their assertion as with the secret part of himself that flared hot at the image. "They want me. They left a message for me. They won't kill her."
"Nah, they'll just use her as bait until you burst in there heroically and then they'll kill her and rend you to pieces. She is safest if you don't come for her, not yet. But you need to get downstairs now, the sun is almost up. Rest, kid."
"When you said 'breakfast,' I assumed…"
Cutting another slice of pancake, Ash giggled. "You thought we were about to bite you open?"
Clenching and unclenching her hands to keep circulation, Shane nodded. "You are evil and you do have me chained up. It seemed a fair guess."
"Open up, here comes the airplane," Ash sang, making the triangle of pancake fly through the air until Shane obliged and opened her mouth.
"Really, you know, I can feed myself," Shane insisted between bites. The shame of the thing was that the pancakes were actually rather good. Apparently, all culinary skills didn't degrade when one is solely on a liquid diet.
"My god, Eliot really didn't speak well of me if you honestly think I am that stupid. No, we are not releasing you. Swallow so you can eat more. Like bacon?"
Shane swallowed. "Bacon from pigs, right?"
Ash shrugged. "Is there any other kind?"
The evasiveness struck Shane, coupled with something she once read of cannibals referring to their main courses as "long pig" and the memory of the scent of her own burning flesh. "Is there?"
Ash cast a sideways glance. "Shane, do you really want me to answer that?"
"I'll stick with the pancakes, thanks. But really, you can keep my legs shackled. I can't get anywhere, right? It would be easier for you."
"You are serious, aren't you? You really would just stay here, knowing that we could and intended to kill you?"
Shane nodded. "You can't kill me," she bluffed. "I have nothing to worry about."
"Crazy bitch," Ash said, freeing Shane's wrists.
Dryden pictured a basement of coffins or, at least, cots. He was new to this game, but there were certain rules that one simply abided. Instead, it was a bare room, something like a furnace room, but cold. The floor was dotted with drains and everything shone with the gleam of metal. For a moment, but only a moment, he'd worried that he misjudged Jo and plainly walked into a horrible trap. Then he felt the brittle hand on his shoulder, oddly soothing in this industrial cage.
"What is all this?" Dryden asked.
"It's your sanctuary for today. Wick will run the diner."
Dryden went over to the steel apparatus in the center of the room, lifted a rubber tube with a silver prong at the end. "No, what it that?"
"That, is The Betsy. It's my pride and joy, I cobbled it together from some commercial butcher machines, some embalming equipment."
"But what is it for?" Dryden asked, already having put together the answer and asking for confirmation.
"Waste not, want not," was all Joachim would reply before curling up in a corner and falling dead asleep.
Red Hook is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is published by Cave Drawing Ink and syndicated throughout the internet.
