Even the sleep of the immortal damned wasn't enough for Dryden to get more than a few hours of shut-eye. He got sleep, but it was without dreams or a feeling of restfulness upon waking. After a few hours of sitting in utter darkness, a blackness that not even his unholy vision could penetrate, he couldn't remain sedentary any longer. Somewhere out there, his girlfriend was being held hostage and he was wasting the daylight in the pitch basement of a greasy spoon, hostage himself to that sunlight. Snoring here was not heroic, just lazy. The burns weren't that bad.
He felt around the basement, trying to exercise his heightened senses, but one stimuli overwhelmed the others. He traced the faint metallic tang in the air to the machine in the center of the room, to The Betsy, but the feeling of electricity in his throat told him the coppery aromas had much more to do with the purpose of the machine than anything of which it was made. He silently caressed the tubing, slid his fingers across the needles and spikes so like the carving tools Roselyn wielded in creating her sculptures and prints. His keenness to feel every inch of this stainless steel and surgical rubber behemoth bordered on the erotic, such was his lust for the hundreds of gallons of blood it had drained in the time since its creation.
He backed away from The Betsy only with great reticence. He came to another machine, the scent of carnage in it as well, but lacking the copper. He slowly felt it, revolted at the pounds of bloodless flesh that must have been its providence. At first, he assumed its dozens of sharp teeth had been used to reduce whole cows into hamburger meat, but the aroma smelled too far from bovine, much more like sour pork and French fries. He didn't understand why he so craved human blood but why he almost vomited at the aroma of mutilated flesh. Oh well, he finally conceded, it must just be one of those vampire quirks he would have to get used to. How often would he honestly have to be around pillaged bodies?
When he came upstairs, Wick fumbled a tray of plastic tumblers on the floor. "What are you doing above ground, dead thing?" he hissed once he recovered the cups.
Dryden could see in Wick's onyx eyes that this question was not one he ought to announce to the smattering of customers in the orange vinyl booths. He approached only as far as would allow his skin to avoid the late afternoon sun's punishing rays. "I couldn't sleep anymore," he answered simply.
"And what want you from me," the larger man asked derisively, "A bedtime story? Some warmed milk?"
Dryden felt the pang for quite another warm bodily fluid, but gathered Wick was less sympathetic to his plight outside the company of his boss. "I just didn't want to lay down there being useless."
"Indeed? Then strap on an apron and help me with that table in the corner. And wash your hands first. I don't wish to know where they have been, dead thing."
The pumpkin rolled quietly down the road, stopping whenever someone came too close. Aside from a curious teenager and a dog with an overfull bladder, no one had disturbed its progress and both of those transgressors had been frightened off after the pumpkin growled, "Brrrrl! Brrrl!" several times.
The vampire pumpkin had long been a pet, sold to a clan of Penanggalan by a Gypsy who still dealt in the old magicks. They fed it well enough that it did not rot, but not so well that it would consider disobedience. Tonight was the first time it had been given a job by its mistresses and only then because their pet watermelon had met an untimely end in a pot of boiling water when sent to give recognizance on the goings-on in the Red Hook Diner. Such spying was explicitly against the agreements the Penanggalan had made, but it was difficult to trust the word of something that left its host body in a vat of vinegar to it -- little more than a head and spine -- could fly around seeking victims. Joachim knew this, which is why he only killed the watermelon as a warning and not its mistresses as punishment.
How the pumpkin could sense its surrounding was not known, even to itself. Despite its paranormal gifts, it still possessed the limitations of its nature; no sensory organs of any kind aside from an orange rind sporadically spotted with red liquid. Yet it managed to see and hear as well as its mistresses and brrrl its seeds as required to protect itself from harm. Aside from its natural camouflage as an innocuous gourd, it was able to move in the sunlight, a decided advantage amongst its kind. Though it had no way to convey this to its mistresses - brrrling only took a pumpkin so far -- it felt that it would make an excellent intelligence agent and felt grateful this was finally acknowledged.
It arrived at the farmhouse, avoided tripping the traps that dropped a cage of sharpened stakes and the enchantments meant to keep out the uninvited. These were designed for creatures that had such unfortunate appendages as arms and legs, to say nothing of heads. A pumpkin was not applicable.
In the yard of what had once been a prosperous farm, it sensed figures moving with the house. It rolled closer, brrrling happily to itself. The figures fought in the low glow of lamplight. Time is relative to plants, even demonically infused vegetables, but it felt this went on for a while as the afternoon light faded behind the Mohonk mountains.
Then one of the vampires emerged -- the male, decided the pumpkin -- from the house carrying something it could not identify easily. It smelled sulfurous and foul like animal feces, but the pumpkin had no context for what it could be.
The vampire stopped before the pumpkin, who thought better of brrrling its warning this time. Then he sensed the other vampire, the female, who said, "Can you believe that, after all the blood this field has seen, it can still grow pumpkins?"
"It nourishes us, I don't see why it shouldn't nourish plants as well, right?" He then kicked the pumpkin with all of his might, shattering it open and splattering its guts against the stalks of untended corn.
"So what is The Betsy--" Dryden began but halted when customers entered with the afternoon at their backs. He moved to greet them, masking the wince he gave as the sunlight streaked his skin for the third time this hour.
Dryden returned to Wick and repeated the question.
Wick barely looked up from Love in the Time of Cholera. "Your customers need their order taken, do they not?" Then, once that was finished, "And just who will serve them if not you?" At least Wick let Dryden keep the tips he earned.
The diner emptied and the sun was moment for melting below the horizon. "I've served a dozen tables, now just tell me about those machines downstairs."
Wick's dark face looked impassive as it studied Dryden. After a long moment, he placed a napkin in his novel as a bookmark, folded it shut, and slowly stood to speak.
"Those machines are a butchering system and waste removal. It is all very economical. Your kind leaves bodies they are finished with. My boss drains from them what remains. The rest is pulped or sold off piece by piece to interested parties." He scoffed and finished in a mockery of an announcer's spiel, "And we pass the savings on to you, our customers."
"That's--" but Wick did not get the pleasure of discovering then what Dryden thought of this arrangement, since something massive exploded behind the diner, blowing glass inward.
Roselyn had given up hope of finding Dryden until night fell, thought at least she knew what she was dealing with now. She was goth enough that she had a fair handle on what hurt vampires. Her father was thrilled that his heathen daughter returned home to ask whether the church was open at night and what ever happened to the small gold cross her grandmother had had given her for her Confirmation. He was so thrilled, in fact, that he didn't notice that she went to the garage to turn an old end table into four stakes using his saw and sander.
She returned then to the house to get the car keys from her father. He gave her the standard lecture about her medication to make sure she was not likely to have a seizure while driving and what she was to do if one happened anyway. She returned the standard reassurances that she wasn't stupid and wasn't a kid. For these, and because of her newfound interest in Catholic iconography, she was given access to the car.
She loaded her stakes into the trunk of the station wagon when her father popped his head into the garage, quizzically stating, "You have a call? From a boy named Eliot?"
She took the phone from her father, waving him away with further assurance that Eliot was not interested in her and was, in fact, dating that "weird girl" with whom she lived.
"El, you won't believe-"
"No, no, I think I just might believe," Eliot replied. The almost hysterical confidence in his voice silenced her. "Come get me, I know where we have to go."
She ran up to the apartment. Eliot had done a good job of cleaning up the mess that was left in Shane's abduction, so much so that she didn't recall the last time she'd actually seen their place look so clean since they moved in. All the remained on the floor was a book on vampires and the Ouija board, over which Eliot sat.
"There is a farmhouse just off of Nine, near the border of the county. That's where Shane is," he stated as she entered.
"But how do you know?"
Eliot whistled and Hugin landed on the board, pecking out the letter "I" and the word "NO." Hugin walked over to the book and pecked the title until Roselyn said, "I know it is vampires already. I have supplies in my trunk. Let's go, before nightfall."
The house was silent when they arrived. Neither one of them voiced the concern that they were in the wrong place, because it was simultaneously more terrifying and calming.
Roselyn armed Eliot with a pair of stakes and drew crosses all over his arms and neck with a marker - because why shouldn't that work if her little gold cross did? - and they split up to find a covert opening.
No sooner was she away from him than Roselyn felt the knifepoint against her throat. She backed up quickly, but the wall directly behind her offered no escape. She put her arms up to protect her face and started gasping, the world turning blue.
"Rose?" asked a distant, yet familiar, voice.
She lowered her arms enough to peek through at the dim figure. "Who are you?"
The man stepped from the shadows. He looked like someone she had known in high school but that boy was twenty pounds heavier and several inches shorter. The man in front of her now was powerfully built, a fact which was obvious even beneath his long coat. The skin was paler too, the look of someone who only saw the sun setting or rising, but rarely at noon. The eyes she could not see at they were obscured behind the serpentine lenses of goggles. These he slid up onto his forehead. He sheathed the knife and walked closer.
"Are you one of them? Have you been infected?" Noah demanded.
"Infected?"
He drew the knife again. "Are you a vampire, Rose?"
"No! Of course not."
His eyes narrowed as he cut her forearm lightly, too gingerly even to draw blood. Roselyn stood, too paralyzed by fright and confusion to muster anything like a fight. Seeing no reaction, his arms wrapped around her, even stronger than they had looked. Leaning back but not releasing her, he grinned. "You shouldn't be here. You might not believe in vampi-"
"I do. They have my friend. Somewhere in there."
His grin and all the happiness within him dropped. "Then your friend is dead. I'm real sorry for your loss. You should get out of here."
"No!" she protested, "they think she's me. They won't kill her. It's complicated."
He sighed, almost wistful. "It always was with you."
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.
