Chapter 35: Crossover

"Well, it looks pretty normal." Dave said.

"Appearances…" Grey said. He pointedly looked at Dave as he said it. Dave couldn't help abusing his newfound skill. The face he wore was new, but without putting too much effort into it was just passable. Handsome drew too much attention. Despite the fact he could have imagined himself as anyone, and wearing anything, he fell back to what was familiar to him. He was close to falling into a dangerous trap, and he knew it, but for the time being he just had to worry about getting inside the house.

Grey took the lead, the sledgehammer resting on his shoulder as he walked. The doors on the first floor weren't just locked, they were somehow barricaded from the inside. Tin foil covered every window. The place had to look odd during the day, but thanks to its location in the hills the neighbors were all too far removed to notice. Besides, people who lived in the hills rarely bothered to look out their own windows, he knew that from experience. He'd made a lot of money off that back in the day- back when he had the luxury of days. He was too busy staring at the other houses higher up that he didn't notice Grey raising the sledgehammer until it was almost too late. With a yelp, Dave darted forward and caught the handle, stopping him before he could smash the glass door. Grey glared at him.

"That'll make a lot of noise," Dave whispered. "We're supposed to be stealthy about this. Besides-" he let go of the sledgehammer. "You saw what was on the tape- and what was in the café."

Grey nodded and reluctantly dropped his weapon.

"Let's try upstairs," Dave said.

There were no stairs outside, but there was a vine trellis leading to the second floor balcony. It brought back more old memories from the days just after the ban on telephoto lenses beloved by any self-respecting paparazzi. All the law meant was one had to be sneaky, and extra careful. Just because the residents were too self-absorbed to look out the window didn't mean they wouldn't notice a guy falling out of the tree outside their bedroom. On more than one occasion Dave's attempts at creative photography had ended in fleeing the property with a pack of guard dogs at his heels. He didn't even want to think of what sort of protection this place might have. The windows upstairs were also covered in tinfoil, as was the sliding glass door leading in side. To Dave's surprise, the door slid open easily.

"Holy shit," Dave gasped. Opening his mouth was a mistake. Drawing breath to speak meant breathing in the horrible rancid meat smell that filled the air. The shaky camera work of the snuff film hadn't done the place justice. The walls were papered with flesh. The rusty nails that held the swatches in place were dripping blood. Flies were everywhere, in some places so thick the walls looked black. The hardwood floors were unchanged, though the stuff oozing from the decorations had made them slick.

Dave tread carefully through the mess. No matter where he looked there was more pulsing flesh and dripping blood. He turned back, only to run into Grey, who shut the door behind them without a word. He had a point. There was no turning back until they found out who was responsible for all this. Dave turned around and forced himself to keep moving forward.

The house was eerily quiet, making every squelching footfall and drip from the nails sound thunderously loud as they moved from the bedroom to the hall. The fleshy decorations only got worse as they continued on. A chandelier composed of human arms hung in the center of the hallway. Dave kept his mouth shut as they walked, and though it was wise for Grey to do the same, his silence unnerved him. He'd barely said anything to him since he woke up. He might have suspected their encounter with the monsters the night before, but Grey had seemed pretty blasé about dealing with them at the time. If anything was bugging him, it was probably inside his own head.

The smell of blood, even mingling with the smell of rotting flesh, was getting to Dave. It made it hard to think clearly. It only got worse as they moved downstairs. If not for that, he might have noticed the thing lurking in the kitchen before it attacked. Dave shrieked in surprise as it leapt from behind the counter. He swatted blindly at the thing in a pathetic attempt to defend himself, breaking several of his brittle nails in the process.

All he succeeded in doing was pissing the creature off more. For something that consisted of nothing but a head and two arms, the thing moved surprisingly fast. It jumped at him again, its arms flailing in a wild attempt to slash him with claws that looked a hell of a lot deadlier than his own. Given at least a little warning that time, Dave punched it. His fist landed squarely in the center of the creature's malformed nose. Blood spurted from it as the bone was shattered. Without so much as a whimper, the creature fell backwards. Its arms twitched several times before it fell still. Dave stared at it, trembling fiercely. His arm was numb to the shoulder.

"Nice," Grey said, finally slipping around him. He had the sledgehammer at the ready again. All Dave could do was nod stiffly before stepping over the creature. He recognized the front door from the video, but everything was so much worse in person. If the girl in the video had any sense, she would have run as soon as she saw the walls were bleeding. But then, before his embrace he probably would have thought it was all some kind of fucked up special effects work, too.

They found two more of the monsters lying in the middle of what was intended to be a living room. Both were dead, apparently thanks to wounded inflicted from the other. Dave's eyes lingered more on the blood pooling around them than the corpses themselves.

The doorway leading down to the basement had plastic strips hanging from it that made Dave think of a slaughterhouse. It went well with the rest of the décor. He glanced to Grey, who nodded and took the lead down the stairs.

The basement was empty. The dirt floor made Dave think of all the urban legends of serial killers burying the bodies by the canned preserves, and after what they had seen upstairs he would not be surprised if that's exactly what was lying under the dirt. It made him hesitate to step down.

There were none of the usual things found in a normal mortal basement- no tool boxes, no junk, not even mounds to suggest the place was actually a secret graveyard. There was nothing but an old well at the center of the room and a closed pair of plywood doors on the left wall. There wasn't even a padlock on them. It felt like a trap, but Grey boldly went ahead of him like always. He probably knew better than he did.

Grey went straight for the makeshift doors and threw them open. Dave was still afraid to move from the stairs. All he could see beyond the doors was a rough tunnel sloping downwards into darkness.

"It leads to some kind of a broken pipe," Grey called back to him. "Come look."

Dave stepped forward, expecting a hand to shoot up from the dirt and grab him. There was no hand, but groan he heard from somewhere behind him made him yelp just the same. He spun around, wildly looking around from the source. Instead of zombies shambling towards him, he saw an opening under the stairs that was mostly covered by a blue plastic tarp. It would have been easy to miss if not for the noise he heard. Dave crept forward and slowly pulled back the tarp.

There was another room hidden under the stairs. It looked like someone had converted the home's former workshop into a torture chamber. There was still a tool chest in the corner, and a corkboard and workbench on the far wall, but the four metal tables arranged in a semi circle facing the door definitely weren't the former owner's. The concrete floor was on a slope to allow any spills to run into a rusty drain in the room's center. Trails of dried blood ran from each table to the drain. Dave shuddered to even think of what had happened there.

Only one of the tables was occupied. The man lying on it was held down by four metal straps that stretched across his chest, arms, and legs. He wasn't breathing, which didn't stop him from twitching now and again.

He looked downright normal compared the monstrosities upstairs, but there was still something wrong about him. His sickly gray skin was pulled too tight over his bones, and even with the straps over him his clothes looked a few sizes too big. It seemed as though the man- the Kindred, actually- had been left there to starve for weeks. Dave moved closer for a better look. The man's ears, weirdly enough, had a slight point, and his blonde hair was so long it fell in a filthy curtain over the table's edge. Boils dotted his pallid skin, and as Dave watched another blossomed on the man's face.

"Shit," Dave whispered.

The Kindred opened his eyes. They were a freakishly pale blue that were bloodshot to the iris. There was no fear or revulsion in his eyes, which helped to remind Dave he was still wearing a different face. For the poor bastard's sake he didn't drop it. He had a feeling it would only be a sign of things to come.

"Interesting," Grey said. Dave hadn't heard him come in.

Surprisingly, the Kindred on the table's eyes widened at the sight of Grey.

"Demon," the Kindred rasped, straining against his bonds. "Stay away from me!"

"Whoa, take it easy," Dave said, placing his hand on the Kindred's chest. "We're not gonna hurt you."

The only reason the Kindred stopped struggling was because the muscles in his chest suddenly seized up. Dave could feel them spasm under his fingers. He pressed a little harder in a futile attempt to force the twitching to stop. After a few seconds, the Kindred exhaled a pained sigh and went limp.

His voice was vaguely familiar, but Dave couldn't quite place it. Grey was already across the room and picking through the items scattered across the work bench. Dave kept his eyes on the Kindred. Maybe he was one of he people he'd seen at the theatre the night of the trial. That might make sense. But then how could he know his voice but not his face?

"Hey, Dave," Grey said, picking up a Polaroid from the table. "Take a look at this."

He flicked the picture over. It landed squarely on the bound Kindred's chest. The image showed the face of the man who'd confronted them in the Ocean House, the one they had left in the collapsed suite for his friends to find. The man on the table only bore a vague resemblance to him, but then it looked like he had been starved for weeks. The date on the picture was from several nights ago.

"There's a whole series of these," Grey said. "It spans almost a week."

Dave picked the Polaroid up and joined Grey at the table. There were dozens of pictures, several for each night, and as they moved from one column to the next the man looked a little worse. His skin withered and his hair grew a little bit more with each shot. It looked like his hair had grown out several inches in just a few nights.

Dave couldn't help but reach up to touch his own bald, misshapen head as he looked.

"Not much of a work in progress," Grey said. "You'd think there'd be bones sticking out in odd places by now."

"That's not it," Dave said softly. "I'm pretty sure he's Nosferatu."

The process shown in the pictures, as well as the new boil Dave had seen spring up, made him almost certain the man was the same clan as him. He turned away from the photo spread and moved back to their subject.

"Your name is Michael, right?" he asked.

The confused look the question sparked quickly turned to suspicion.. "Who are you?"

"Um, well…" Dave glanced to Grey, who had moved on to rifling through the drawers. "We've actually already met."

He let the mask drop. Michael's eyes widened, a look of hatred and disgust creeping over his face. Dave didn't let that stop him.

"My name is David Kim," Dave said. "That's Grey. We're vampires, but I guess you already knew that."

"And now you're one too," Grey said gleefully, not looking up from his pilfering. "Welcome to the club, we have jackets."

"Come on, now's not the time to gloat," Dave said.

"You seem to be forgetting he was set on killing us before." Grey picked up something small and rectangular. Dave didn't realize it was a tape recorder until he pushed play.

A woman's cold and clinical voice filled the room. "Changes remain gradual. Signs of adverse monstrousness have yet to emerge." The frustration in her voice was palpable. "I don't understand. I used the same Nosferatu to sire it… Why, then, would this one fail? Dissection may be warranted later."

Grey popped the tape out, replacing it with another from the drawer. A different woman's voice filled the woman, her quiet pleading for mercy broken up by sobs. After a moment, the same voice from before drowned it out.

"The three trial embraces are progressing nicely. All are now barely recognizable as human. The data provided by this is invaluable to understanding this particular breed of Cainite. Once changes halt I will see if this makes them any more malleable than the Caitiff we worked with before. Having discovered the eldest male is their leader, I have decided to save him for last." She chuckled. The sound made Dave's skin crawl. "In the meantime, I think I will let him watch."

Grey turned the tape off. Dave found himself looking over the empty tables.

"This is all my fault," Michael said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I was a fool…"

"What happened?" Dave asked.

Michael blinked once, slowly and deliberately. He would not look at Dave. Instead he stared blankly at the ceiling as he spoke. His voice was hoarse, like he'd been screaming for a long time. That was probably the case.

"Why should I tell you? You could never hope to understand."

"And you could never hope to get out of here unless we came along," Grey said. "Funny how things work." He paused for a moment, as if a thought had just struck him. "It's almost like Fate."

"Fate…" Michael all but spat the word. "There's no such thing. It's all God's will. Everything… Even this is God's will." He clenched his fists, halfheartedly pulling against his bonds again. "I deserve this."

"Nobody deserves this," Dave said.

"I do," Michael said, sounding on the verge of tears.

Dave noticed there was no trace of fangs visible as he spoke. If not for the fact he didn't breathe, he might have mistaken Michael for a normal mortal. Normal mortals, on the other hand, would have mistaken him for a terminal meth addict. People might cross the street to avoid him, but they wouldn't run away screaming.

"Whatever you say, man." Dave looked to Grey, who was still rifling through the tapes. "We have to get out of here.'

"Couldn't agree more," Grey said. He reluctantly put the tape recorder back in its drawer. "Wouldn't want to end up the next research project. Or art project. Whichever."

As Grey crossed the room to retrieve his weapon, Dave set to work at unfastening Michael's restraints. He'd only gotten the first two when Grey stepped forward and held the sledgehammer out to block him. "Don't. He'll slow us down."

"We can't just leave him here!" Dave said, shoving the wooden shaft away. Grey stumbled and nearly fell against the table before regaining his balance. Dave went to work on the restraints again.

"Why do you have to be so goddamned altruistic?"

"Because I'm not as far gone as you are, Grey!"

The click of the next latch sounded incredibly loud in the silence that followed. He shouldn't have said that, especially when Grey was still holding the sledgehammer. Dave could see his knuckles go even paler as his grip tightened on the shaft.

Grey was shaking with rage, but Dave forced himself to keep going. Michael did not move, even after they were all unlocked. Dave looked up, waiting for Grey's next move. If he was going to bash his head in, then… Well, maybe he had asked for it.

Instead Grey's shoulders sagged. His expression was hard to read as he lowered the weapon. Dave thought he saw shame there, but before he could make sense of it Grey walked past him to the door.

"I didn't really mean that…" Dave said, for all the good it would do.

"No, you're right," Grey said. He wouldn't look back. "You're also going to have carry him."

That was the closest thing to a blessing he was going to get.

Dave slid his arms under Michael and picked him up. He was surprisingly light. Then again, Dave still kept underestimating his own strength.

"Leave me," Michael said. Despite his words, he didn't put up much of a struggle. He was too weak for that.

"Look, if we leave you here, they're just gonna turn you into a chair or something when this is all over. I'm pretty sure not even God had that in mind for you."

He carried Michael out into the basement. Grey was waiting for them.

He wasn't the only one waiting.