Part 25
At first they thought the bones were just crumbled bits of concrete rolling underfoot.
The tunnel expanded into a a cistern so ancient that Donatello could see that the bricks in the walls were hand laid. Walkways lay on either side of the tunnel, running alongside the trench in the center. Even with their flashlights, they couldn't see how deep the water might have been. Completely black, the water flowed along the trench and turned a corner, then trickled out an iron grating set in the wall.
It was while trying to see the clumps in the water that Donatello's flashlight struck the edge they were walking on. Something gleamed white, and when he crouched down, he found that it wasn't concrete or stone. It was part of a human finger.
"This is where..."
He lit the rest of the walkway and found smaller bits of bones up to the corner. The water simply moved around and underneath the pile, pulling the air with it to make a breeze that had hidden the stench of death until they were right on top of it. Along the rounded curve of the tunnel, what he'd assumed was just debris was really a pile of decaying matter.
As he watched, the pile shifted slightly, and something fell with a wet plop into the water. Only because there was a glimmer of a gold tooth did Donatello make out that it was a head. The heavier parts of the corpses remained while the surface skin and rotted muscle sloughed off into the grate and vanished.
"This is..." He coughed, fighting back dry heaves as the rational side of his brain warred with disgust. "These are...how many is this? A dozen? No, they're all compressed...you can't even tell where one starts and the others—"
He choked and turned around.
"Splinter?" Raphael had lowered his flashlight, unable to keep looking. "This...you did this?"
"In part." Splinter motioned toward the far side nearest the grate. "I left the white body there, but I had dropped the head closer by. I do not see it, however."
Leonardo nodded and moved closer, kicking the larger bones into the water.
"Might've been carried by the current, swallowed up by the rest of the bodies," Leonardo said. "The vampire looked like it was pretty dead, though."
Raphael's voice was a whisper.
"...so did you."
Leonardo paused, giving a heavy sigh, then drew a sword and began nudging at the pile, lifting the parts out of the water.
"Really didn't want to have to dig through here," he muttered.
"You think it necessary?" Splinter asked.
"Unfortunately, yes." Leonardo motioned at Raphael. "He has a point. I don't feel safe letting this one rot like all the others."
He cut through a soft mass and sent part of it floating down the trench. It dragged to a stop, too heavy to keep moving, although part of it liquefied and ran off the rest of the way. The genius of this spot as a dumping ground became more obvious—only slime and unidentifiable black sludge would reach whatever water treatment plant lay farther along the tunnel. Any bones would have to crumble into pieces too small to identify as such, and the flowing water hurried the process along, even dragging the smell away through a sewer grate.
Michelangelo came closer to Splinter, staying on the side farthest from the dead.
"Who are all these?" he asked.
"It is hard to tell them apart now," Splinter said. "But if you look there, that gold tooth? And the red hair underneath him. I remember those. He brought that one with him, intending to drop the body in the storm drain. That is too close to the lair—I could not risk that he would come back with another when I was not there."
"Um..." Michelangelo pointed to a spot of color. "That bit of red...is that a knife?"
"Yes," Splinter said. "Just a pocket knife. He was using it to unstring a package here."
"A package?"
Splinter shrugged. "I did not recognize the powder inside. I left the package in the water as well."
"And...uh..."
Michelangelo ran his hand across his face. Seeing the proof of his father's killing made it harder to mentally put aside. He not compartmentalize his brother's kills when he watched him shoving corpses aside.
"...how many are there?" he whispered.
"Maybe twenty?" Leonardo said, stepping back to take a break. "It doesn't seem like any of them have completely gone. You have to remember, they decompose slow."
Punctuating his answer, the bottom body seemed to crunch inward as something inside gave way and broke. It was a trick of the flashlights, three different beams all hovering over dead hands and faces, but the pile looked like something had shifted inside of it, like something turning in a pile of leaves. The mass of bodies seemed to sigh, flattening a few inches.
closer
Leonardo stared at it, standing a little straighter, and took a small step back.
Had that...? He would have sworn that the sigh sounded too shaped, too much like a word he simply hadn't heard right the first time.
"Geez," Donatello said. "They're still releasing gases. Maybe..maybe I'll just take the arm over there. I...geez. I really wanted the skull, but...not if I have to dig through all...all that..."
Feeling as if his head were swimming, Leonardo touched the wall to steady himself. His brothers were too close, he thought. They shouldn't be so close. They needed to put distance between themselves and the dead. He wanted them to move back. In fact, he needed them to move back right now.
"This could take awhile," Leonardo said. "Don, tell me what you want from the body and I'll bring you back the pieces."
Splinter glared at him in warning. "Leonardo..."
"It's a lot," Donatello said, but he nodded once. "Let me note it down. I didn't think I was going to...I just..."
Donatello didn't want to get close to the body when it meant stepping over a dozen or more heavily decayed corpses, some of whom were coming apart, one of which might still be biting. He might have been able to treat it like any of his more disgusting samples if Leonardo and Splinter hadn't been standing there acting like their pile of dead victims was nothing.
"Tell it to me on the shellcell," Leonardo said, taking another step back. "Just go."
Donatello had taken several steps down the tunnel when he heard Splinter demand something sharply from Leonardo. And then he remembered that his brother didn't have a shellcell. That Donatello couldn't have sent his brother any notes in the first place. That he wouldn't have known what to take from the body if he couldn't examine it. That he didn't really want to go just yet.
And that meant that Leonardo was compelling them to leave.
Hurt less by the broken promise and more that he had to be afraid of his brother, Donatello's anger and fear churned together, making him nauseous. Turning, he pushed Raphael to one side and grabbed Michelangelo's arm, forcing them all to stop.
"You promised..." Donatello whispered, feeling like he might vomit. "You lying—son of a—"
"Go!"
Although he knew it was a command and he fought against it, Donatello stumbled back several feet and landed on his shell, dropping his flashlight. Raphael and Michelangelo landed beside him, and Splinter stood before them, his staff held at the ready.
At first Donatello thought Splinter meant to defend them from their brother.
Then the flashlight stopped rolling, shining a broad beam on the pile of corpses as it shifted, rolled and tipped over on itself. Three arms hung limp at one side, falling in the way of a half-revealed foot, a single leg, a face without eyes and a mouth drooped to one side. A torso that was little more than a chest heaved with gasping breaths, one of the ribs sliding free as black ichor dripped down the tearing sacs that were once lungs.
A head pushed up from behind the pile—its white skin had grown dark patches and its hair now lay matted, but the fangs were obvious even as the jaw hung open. Just above the mouth, the head had cracked open so that the decay slid in and out of its skull like rotted organs.
"Holy shit," Michelangelo breathed. "Is that...? Holy shit..."
An eye opened on the far side of the sludge, pushing out of a black palm under skeletal fingers. At the bottom of the mass of corpses, just above the water, a second eye opened. White like cataracts, they focused on nothing but rather stared upward as if in a corpse's head.
"Please," Leonardo said, glancing over his shoulder. No power was in his voice now, just fear as he begged his siblings. "Get out of here. I don't what it can do."
fool
Donatello paused, staring as the bodies swayed one way, then another, but the vampire's new body could not unroot itself from its spot. It tried to lift its bulk and revealed the tendrils pulsing beneath it, writhing like worms in heavy clumps.
"It's...it's controlling them," he said slowly. He rose up on his elbows, analyzing the way it tried to heave itself around. "It's trying to use them."
"Study later, Donny," Raphael said, helping him up and pulling him away. "Who knows how far it can reach?"
"Not far," Donatello said. "Look, it's trying to get to its arm."
They looked again. All of its tendrils ran along the water, trying to use the current to help reach the white hand lying a little closer than the rest of the body. They shuddered as the hand spasmed, the fingers stretching out to try to come that much nearer.
"I was right," Donatello said, his voice rising in scientific triumph. "Particulates...a vampire controls every part of itself individually. Probably down to the atoms. I wonder why it didn't just turn into shadows."
"...it can't," Leonardo said, creeping past the pile and sliding his sword beneath the arm, flipping it farther away. "When I got hurt, I couldn't change."
At the loss of its arm, the mouth opened and hissed.
"Oh," Raphael said, "it didn't like that."
"I wish I'd brought more test tubes with me," Donatello said as he reached into his belt. "This'll probably be the grossest sample I've ever collected."
"Dammit," Leonardo said, moving between the creature and his brothers. "Don't get close!"
"It can barely move," Donatello said. "Just keep the body out of its reach and—"
The corpses all pulled in at the middle as if the pile itself was breathing, and then a tendril of flesh and ichor sprayed out with violent force, a sharp point of bone aimed at Donatello's face. Too fast to stop, Donatello saw it as if in slow motion, the jagged edges of broken scapula sawing the air toward his eyes.
Serrated needles slashed through the bones, reducing them to splinters that fell harmlessly at Donatello's feet. A moment passed before he realized that Leonardo had revealed his fangs, facing the bloated thing in front of them with his fastest, strongest weapons.
Like this, it was easier to tell how different Leonardo had become—on all fours, his right side braced against the floor, his left side bracing the wall, and after a moment, he crept up completely on the tunnel wall, growling in constant threat. He crawled along the bricks, avoiding the pulsing veins along the ground as he neared the grotesquerie.
"Holy crap," Donatello said. "It can possess the dead bodies but there's not much left of them to control. Leo, take the head out—"
The vampire's disembodied mouth opened wide, baring its own needle teeth, and hissed again.
traitor
Leonardo flinched. The hate in hiss was palpable, spearing words through his mind. Whatever the white vampire had been before, it knew it was a monster now and it focused all of its anger and disgust at him.
"Okay, how do we kill it?" Raphael asked. "I'd just be stabbing dead people—"
"Wait wait wait," Michelangelo said. "It said something."
"Uh, no, it hissed like a snake," Raphael said. "It's—"
The creature shifted away from Leonardo, its eyes rolling around without much control. When it sounded again, they listened despite themselves. Leonardo went rigid, listening intently, then snarled.
"I don't get how you're hearing anything outta that," Raphael said.
"It's trying," Michelangelo insisted. "If I could just hear it right—"
The hissing turned into a guttural howling, a rolling moaning gurgle that spit out bile and blood and teeth as the mouth tried to form words, tried to gasp in air through shredder lungs. Michelangelo backed away, his hand around his throat. He recognized that sound—the same kind of groan that Leonardo had made when he couldn't breathe. Existing like that had been a nightmare for his brother, who'd had some hope of his siblings bringing blood and comfort.
This creature had nothing.
"Oh god," he whispered. "Can't...can't we just kill it?"
Leonardo glanced over his shoulder, hiding his fangs behind his shell. He said nothing, and Michelangelo took a moment to realize that his brother couldn't reply. The fangs made speech impossible.
Donatello gasped. "Leo, no, behind you—"
The distraction was fleeting but all it needed. The bottom half of the vampire's head suddenly turned black as its mouth split wide—wider than its jaw as it cracked and broke. All of the corpses seemed to flesh together, only to split down the middle as a mouth as wide a person opened, lifting to reveal fangs similar to Leonardo's but each over twice as long.
The hands of every body all lifted and struck the walls, the ground, pushing all at once. Several bent backwards or slipped away from their bodies, but there was enough push to lift the pile and lunge at the four of them.
Splinter's walking stick vanished into the monster, staking one body in the back, but even as the body slid free, slime and decay sealed up the wound. Leonardo seemed to reach after the cane, blocking the thing from his brothers while also putting his hand into its mouth.
The jaws snapped shut over his arm.
His brothers moved to come around him, already drawing their weapons. Leonardo instead moved in front of the other vampire, shielding them, and forced his arm deeper into the mouth. Cracks and wet twisting rips came as the mouth opened once and closed again, taking him in deeper, all the way to the shoulder. Blood spilled over its fangs.
"Leo, dammit—"
"—out of the way—"
"Let us—"
The corpses shuddered—the mouth opened with wild hissing, but Leonardo didn't try to pull free. As the vampire tried to flinch back, Leonardo hung on and reached even deeper. The hatred and hunger radiating from the other vampire overwhelmed his head like static blurring through his thoughts.
kill your thralls kill your thralls kill your
A shriek—a terrible ripping sound like skin tearing—and then the monster was a pile of bodies again, limp and dead on the ground. The monstrous mouth sloughed down into a dozen larger pieces, and Leonardo was left holding the broken skull and lower jaw, now white again. The teeth had twisted into into smaller fangs now embedded in his hand.
"Oh my god," Donatello whispered. "Is it...still alive?"
Despite having half of its head gone, the muscle in the jaw tightened, biting harder.
"Shit shit shit," Raphael said, standing and coming behind Leonardo. "How the hell do we get that off'a ya?"
Leonardo's teeth changed back so that he looked normal again, but he still put his good hand over his mouth, leaning against the wall. His eyes closed.
"Don," he mumbled, "do you want it?"
Wincing, Donatello gave a tiny shake of his head.
"Kill it," he said. "Put it out of its misery."
The skull began to smolder, charring at the edges, glowing orange beneath the bone, turning to ash. On the far side of the tunnel, the vampire's body likewise blazed, and soon Leonardo was left holding nothing but smoke.
"That thing was inside all the other bodies," Donatello said. "Better burn the rest of it if you can."
"...yeah."
Immolating the human victims took longer. There was something about a vampire's body that lent itself to fire, eagerly fanning the flames so that the body scorched faster. Not saying anything, they watched the corpses turn into cinders and grease and chunks of bone that the water then took away.
As if there was still more to burn, the veins in Leonardo's hand began to glow red, and tiny flames licked out from skin. He watched enrapt as more blood ran down his arm, as the edges of his wounds singed and flaked away.
Michelangelo's cry was wordless as he grabbed Leonardo and forced his hand into the water. The fire didn't stop, but when he forced his brother to look at him, to meet his eyes, the burning ceased. Michelangelo held his look a moment longer, touching his face, then pulled him close and wouldn't let go.
Leonardo didn't reply, quietly resting in his little brother's arms. Warm, enveloping, Michelangelo's blood flowed just below the skin, so close to his mouth. He decided that, later in the evening, he would ask if Michelangelo would let him taste.
And afterward, he would look up the word the other vampire had screamed into his mind. Thrall. He'd never heard it before, and if the other vampire had retained enough sanity to hurl it at him like an attack, he needed to see know what it meant.