Disclaimer: The author does not own any of the characters from the Twilight novels and movies, which will be barely recognizable here. He does, however, own the fuck out of this plot.
My entry from the Red Eyed Edward Contest, which took SECOND PLACE in the public vote. Y'all rock. NOTE: Minor edits have been made.
Chapter 2
He followed the Burlington-Northern rail line north, toward the Port of Seattle. He had a hunch about where his latest meal had come from.
He stepped from railroad tie to railroad tie so as not to leave a trail. He was reluctant to use the rail line, given its openness and its proximity to Interstate 5, but he didn't believe he had a choice. There was simply no other way to get where he wanted to go as quickly as this, and he needed to get there quickly.
If there were two stragglers, there were others. If he found two, someone else would find the others. Soon, someone would find the source. He only hoped the hordes didn't find it before he did.
A noise in the dense brush. An animal, or something else? He couldn't be sure. He fled from the tracks. Hid in the bushes. A minute went by. Two. Birds chirped and clouds parted and the breeze picked up and still he waited. Someone was out there. Every sense he had told him so.
"We know you're there," a voice called.
There were only four of them. They were men like him, what the humans called vampires, but beings that were much worse than the legend - and not nearly as hard to kill. He could tell by looking at these people that they were nothing like him, though. Their eyes glowed red like his rarely did, which meant they were well fed. But they were careless, allowing him to spot them before they took him down. They were spoiled and they were used to winning and they were already as good as dead.
He closed his eyes and envisioned what was about to happen. The corners of his mouth lifted into a smile. It had been too long.
He stood and revealed himself and no one said a word.
He pulled the knives from his pack and he waited.
The bald one looked at the fat one and laughed. The two in the back followed, with fake laughter. They would die first.
"Your pack," the bald one said. He held out his hand and puffed out his chest. "Now."
The bearded man said nothing. He did not move, nor breathe. The bald one nodded at the two in back. They came, one from each side, very fast.
He closed his eyes, and he waited. They were close. Closer. Closer still. Close enough that he could smell their rancid breath and he could feel the air around him get denser with their approach.
The knives whistled through the air and struck their targets with a sound not found in the natural world, a smack not unlike a hammer striking steel.
He did not wait for them to die. He opened his eyes and he spun with ferocious energy and he retrieved the knife from the neck of the man on the left. He tore off the corpse's head, retrieved the knife from the forehead of the woman on the right, and crushed her skull with his scarred and angry hands. Without pausing he leapt into the air and as his new boots hit the ground with a solid thud he put both knives into the skull of the bald man with such force that bone shattered and brain tissue squirted into the air and some of it landed on his new boots, which displeased him. He would have to remember not to kill a man like that again.
The fat man ran.
The bearded man cleaned his knives and put them away and let the fat man go. He didn't want to follow him into a trap.
N*N*N
The camp was where he suspected it would be, at the railway crossroads within the Port of Seattle. It had been a major distribution point for goods arriving from Asia in the days before the world ended. That included billions of dollars worth of food. Just as importantly, the rail hub was a stopping point for goods that would eventually be shipped to South Asia.
Afghanistan was in South Asia, so those goods included military hardware.
Could it be that some group of humans had happened upon this rail distribution hub, hunkered down with an enormous supply of food and weapons, and gone undiscovered all these years?
There was no other explanation.
The camp had been expertly camouflaged and secured. He watched from the trees a hundred yards away. There was no visible activity, but no one secures an empty camp.
The sun set over his shoulder as he watched, waiting for something to happen. He knew it would eventually; he just hoped it was before the hordes showed up. Those four vampires he'd encountered on the way here were not alone. They were too confident, too well fed, too careless to be rovers.
Behind the fence, a flashlight clicked on, then off. Someone was coming.
He crouched down low and held his breath, keeping his hands steady, open, fingers flexing, ready for the knives.
Someone was being lowered over the wall via a pulley and rope system. Brilliant. Getting people in and out like that meant they'd never have to open the gate.
It also meant, of course, that getting back in would be a slow, tedious process.
Perfect.
He watched the figure as the basket was lowered to the ground. It was a man, slightly built, dressed in black, wearing a backpack exactly like the one he now wore. That confirmed what he had suspected; the couple he'd killed the night before had come from this place.
He waited until the man was free of the camp. Waited further until the man was past him. Waited more to be sure no one else was coming. Once he was sure, he quietly stalked the man.
Why had he left the camp? Were they running low on supplies? Where was he going?
Curiosities only. None of the answers mattered.
He came up silently behind the man. Fifty yards, forty, thirty. He removed his knives slowly, inch by inch, and held them close until he was a mere ten yards away.
Pain shot through the bearded man's left shoulder, causing him to drop one knife and spin. He heard the shot as he hit the ground. Another bullet struck him in the thigh, and a third struck the ground inches from his face. He crawled away as quickly as he could, leaving the fallen knife behind. The sniper continued to rain bullets down toward him, but scored no more hits. The man he'd been following did, however. He fired indiscriminately, striking the bearded man twice in the back.
It had been a trap.
He got up and ran, two more bullets striking him in his legs as he made his way into the woods. He ran until he collapsed, maybe a half a mile into the forest, the loss of blood making him weak. He found a place to rest, under a fallen tree in a gulley, and dragged himself in. He would heal, given time.
But he wasn't sure he had any.
He cursed himself for being so stupid. If something seemed too good to be true that's because it was. His history should have taught him that, if nothing else.
Commotion came from the direction of the camp. Spotlights shown. The sound of an engine roared to life. But he couldn't move an inch, let alone crawl back out of the gully to find out what was going on.
He would have to hope that he survived long enough to heal, and escape.
N*N*N
He drifted in and out of consciousness. He couldn't be sure for how long. A few hours? A whole day? It was dark outside, but that was all he knew.
The sound of dogs barking woke him.
He checked his wounds, found that they had healed sufficiently, leaving him several new purple scars. He stood on weak legs. He would need blood soon if he expected to survive whatever was coming for him.
He had only one knife left, but quickly found his backpack and strapped it on.
The dogs were getting closer. The hunters.
He tried to run, but couldn't go more than a few dozen yards before tiring out. How many times had he been shot? He must have lost a lot of blood. Expended even more of his stored up energy healing those wounds.
If he couldn't outrun them, maybe he could ambush them. He was weak, for a vampire, but he was certainly still stronger than a small group of humans and their dogs.
He climbed the closest large tree he could find, and waited. He couldn't help but laugh inwardly about his predicament.
The legendary Lion, hiding in a tree like a wounded housecat.
He shook it off.
They were coming for him and he would deal with them or he would die. That's what mattered. So he closed his eyes and he caressed his knife with his thumb as he imagined the things he could do with it, the things he would do, all of the terrible things he had done.
The scar on his forehead itched. He focused on the knife. The blade, carved to perfection. Here it was slicing a neck, embedding itself between ribs, taking off a head, gutting and stabbing and gouging. Always there, always reliable, forever there.
He felt his heartbeat increase, and he thought of the humans. How weak most of them were, and how necessary.
At first, after "patient zero" had been discovered, they'd been scared out of their minds. They thought Dracula had arrived. They hunkered down, hid behind their walls. Debates ensued. Talk of concentration camps. Prisons. Torture. A cure.
The humans soon discovered that vampires were not as indestructible as fiction would have had them believe. They were ... alive, in a way. Their hearts beat and blood pumped through their veins and they breathed the very same air as the humans. They slept, they loved, they hated, they walked in the daylight and, if they were severely wounded, they died. No one was sure how long they might live otherwise, but evidence suggested hundreds of years, perhaps longer. Especially if they were well fed, which made them strong, stronger than any human. They healed remarkably quickly, which made them seem indestructible. But they were not.
The humans were too late, anyway. The vampires had already taken over by the time they figured out what was going on.
He had slowed his breathing now to once per minute. His heart remained calm, his blood pressure low, saving precious energy for what was coming. He focused on catching the scent of the dogs, and he appreciated the irony of a man sniffing for hunting dogs.
They were almost to him. He smelled the dogs first, of course. Then the humans, perhaps three or four of them.
He pounced and plunged his knife into the neck of the first one, a big man in combat fatigues carrying an M-16. The rifle let go a burst of gunfire as the man went down, the bearded man's lips clenched to the gaping wound on his neck.
He savored the blood. He needed it. He put the dead man's body between himself and the rest of the humans as the dogs began their attack.
He held the corpse up with one arm as he fed and tried to hold off the dogs with the knife in his other hand, all while dodging bullets from the other two humans.
He was going to lose.
He was going to die.
So he slowed time down. He held his breath. He looked out upon the scene before him and calculated distances. He gripped one dog between his fingers and crushed its throat. He picked the dead man up and he stood behind the body, using it as a shield as he advanced.
A bullet tore through the skin of his calf, but he kept going. Another grazed his scalp. Still he came. Finally, a round passed through the dead man's torso and struck the bearded man in the chest.
He sucked in a breath and kept going. He had no choice.
He threw the dead body into the air and attacked.
The closer of the two shooters had to duck out of the way, so the bearded man hit him first. A string of bullets tore into his back as he grabbed the closer human. He had his knife out, ready to plunge it into the man's neck, when another volley of gunfire took his legs out. The knife flew out of his hands and into the bushes.
He hit the ground hard.
His breathing coming in fits and starts, blood bubbling from his lips, he reached for his knife. It was just beyond his fingertips. Stretching. Almost there, a boot kicked it away.
He said nothing as two rifles bared down on him. Both weapons were cocked. Fingers on triggers. They fired almost simultaneously.
He refused to close his eyes. He slowed time and he watched his death unfold. This was it.
A streak of blackness came into view. It moved so quickly he did not know what it was. The streak flashed between him and the guns, and it screamed unlike any human could, a piercing, visceral sound that could shatter glass.
Before he knew what was happening, he saw two things: The humans standing before him were now unarmed; and the black streak was a woman, dressed head to toe in skin tight black leather with a set of loaded bandoliers strapped across her chest.
She had two fresh bullet wounds in her belly, she held the two M-16s in her hands, and she stood before him with a smirk on her face.
In the darkness, her eyes glowed the bright red of a well-fed vampire.
-30-
