Distant Worlds Volume 2 Read online

  For all the horrors Nolan had been witness to since his change, he had never seen anything like the sight before his eyes. It was difficult to believe that Reiner hadn’t been discovered already. His blood-thirst was clearly out of control and Nolan couldn’t believe that one vampire could possibly be responsible for so many bodies, even over a period a few weeks. There must have been enough blood in all the bodies to satisfy several of his kind.

  As if that weren’t enough, it even appeared that Reiner was beginning to eat the flesh of his victims. Only the most feral, psychotic vampires resorted to eating flesh.

  Nolan heard something moving in the room behind him. The noise was difficult to identify and the stench hanging in the air made it impossible for him to pick up any scent, but he knew it had to be Reiner. He glanced around the room looking for a place to hide, but there was nothing that could help conceal him. As the shambling sound drew closer to the doors, he reluctantly looked down at the cesspool of raw sewage. For a moment, he considered diving into the sludge and hiding among the bloated corpses, but the little sense of dignity he still had railed against the idea and he decided to stand his ground against his old friend.

  One of the doors swung open and Nolan was surprised to see not Reiner, but rather an ugly, underfed man dressed in a paramedic’s uniform stumbling through with the body of an unconscious young woman in tow behind him. The man clumsily waved a flashlight around with his free hand.

  Nolan moved quickly, crossing the length of the room with a single leap and knocking the flashlight away before it fell upon him. The man shrieked and tried to run, but he tripped over the body he behind him and tumbled down the metal steps to the stone walkway. Nolan could smell the warm blood in the girl’s body, but she was heavily drugged. Her arms bore the marks of IV punctures and her tattered garments had once been a hospital gown.

  As the strange man below began to recover from his fall, Nolan pushed the girl’s body back into the room that led to the stairwell and slammed the door shut, plunging them into utter darkness.

  “M…master? Is…is that you, master?”

  Nolan’s lip curled in disgust.

  A suckling. He hated sucklings.

  Nolan seized the pitiful thing by its scrawny neck.

  “Master, no! I’ve done as you asked! Please!”

  “Silence, slave!”

  The suckling ceased to struggle when it heard the unfamiliar voice.

  “Wh…who—?”

  “I’m your death if you don’t tell me what I want to know,” Nolan said, snarling with as much menace as he could muster. If the suckling wasn’t so terrified by his “unholy creature of the night” portrayal, he doubted he could say anything like that with a straight face.

  “Anything…”

  “Where is your master?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You lie!” Nolan hoisted the suckling off his feet and let his claws bite into the soft flesh of his neck.

  “N..no! Please, great one!”

  Nolan almost laughed. He certainly had never been called that before.

  “He comes and goes as he pleases! I don’t know where he is, I swear!”

  Nolan lowered the pathetic worm to the ground. While he knew that the suckling could very well be lying to him, he was willing to accept the explanation. After all, it was nothing more than a delivery boy. He now understood why Reiner hadn’t been spotted by anyone above as of yet. The suckling brought him all that he desired. A thought suddenly struck Nolan as he considered the number of victims strewn about the room. He pulled the suckling close enough to feel his hot breath upon its ugly face.

  “How many others?”

  The suckling stared at him with a blank expression of ignorance as it trembled in his grasp.

  “How many like you, slave?”

  “I…I don’t know, great one.”

  “Lie to me once more, slave, and I’ll break every bone in your puny little body,” Nolan said. “Now tell me how many!”

  “Only…only three of us, great one! I swear it!”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re not here. They don’t work at Mercy. They bring people for the master from other places.”

  “From where, slave?”

  “I don’t know! I swear!”

  Disgusted, Nolan threw the suckling to the ground. Now he understood why Celia was hearing about more disappearances recently. Reiner’s hunger had apparently grown too large to be satisfied by one hospital alone. That shouldn’t have surprised him since he recalled quite well Reiner’s tendencies toward addictions and excesses. The discovery only reinforced the reasons his old friend posed such a threat as his inevitable discovery would result in far too many questions and perhaps just enough answers to put every vampire in the city in danger.

  Nolan’s keen ears picked up the faint sound of something moving in the sewage pools behind him. He whirled around in time to see a clawed hand reach out from the sludge and grasp a pipe that ran along the edge of the pool. Then a hulking humanoid form pulled itself up from the stinking waste and onto the stone floor. The creature stood up slowly as foul-smelling sewage dripped from its naked body.

  “Reiner?”

  The grotesque thing regarded him with intense curiosity for a moment before it made a tenuous connection between Nolan and its increasingly blurred memories. A hideous sound escaped its lips as it made pitiful attempts at coherent speech. Nolan could make out no more than an occasional word of its babble.

  It seemed that Reiner’s sanity had at last given out under the onslaught of drugs that he had subjected his mind to for so many years. Although his accelerated metabolism lessened the physical damage of drug use, it offered little psychological protection. Nolan supposed that if Reiner were human, he would have died from an overdose some time ago.

  He prayed that some sliver of sanity remained within his old friend.

  “Reiner, listen,” Nolan said, “I’m here to help you.”

  A sinister glaze rolled across the mad vampire’s eyes. Reiner growled and his wide, fanged mouth opened wide enough for Nolan to see the bits of flesh stuck between the teeth.

  “Reiner! It’s me! It’s Nolan!”

  The filth-encrusted monster ignored his words and lunged forward with its claws. If Nolan were an ordinary man he would have been torn in half by the attack, but his superhuman reflexes allowed him to duck out of harm’s way unscathed. Reiner’s powerful lunge overextended his reach and he stumbled a few steps forward to regain his balance. Nolan sprang to his feet and kicked Reiner in the back, sending the larger vampire tumbling face first onto the stone floor.

  “Stop it, Reiner! Let me help you!”

  Reiner scrambled to his feet and spun around to locate Nolan, who was attempting to stay out of the reach of his claws. The hulking vampire lunged wildly when he located the intruder into his domain of filth. Nolan avoided the attacks with relative ease but the onslaught was unrelenting. Reiner was fully engulfed in his raging madness and he showed no signs of backing down.

  As Nolan’s mind scrambled for options, he leapt away from Reiner’s lunging claws and nearly collided with the suckling cowering at the foot of the steps. Nolan glanced down at him and noticed that a pair of unusually large hypodermic needles had fallen from his pocket onto the floor. Without thinking, he grabbed them and flung himself out of the way as Reiner dove towards him. As the wild vampire rose to his feet again, Nolan took a moment to read the labels on the needles. They were both filled with morphine, but the needles themselves seemed designed for large animals instead of humans. Knowing Reiner as well as he did, Nolan recalled that morphine was his favorite drug, especially after feeding. If the suckling was indeed a paramedic, he would have ready access to the drug and most likely had the resources needed to find needles to inject the large dosages Reiner craved.

  Nolan hoped the two needles contained enough to at least render him harmless for a while.

  As Reiner charged again, Nolan removed t
he covers from the needles and braced his feet. He waited until the mad vampire’s claws were inches from his face before he ducked to his side and slipped behind Reiner. The vampire’s skin was far too tough to be pierced by a needle and even if it could, there was little chance of hitting a vein.

  Seizing the needles tightly, Nolan stabbed them into the only vulnerable area he knew of: the eyes. He felt a touch of resistance before the tips plunged into Reiner’s bulging eyes, and he quickly injected the contents before Reiner could react and snap the needles.

  The cry that escaped his old friend’s cracked lips was the most terrifying sound Nolan had ever heard in his life.

  Reiner’s head jerked from side to side but the thick needles didn’t snap until they were already empty. Nolan jumped back as Reiner screamed in agony and collapsed. He writhed pitifully for several seconds until he slowly came to rest in a heap on the cold stone floor. At first, Nolan thought his old friend was dead, but then he heard him mumbling in a pitiful whisper.

  “M…master?” the sucking asked, calling out into the dark.

  Nolan seriously considered killing him before he remembered Reiner’s intended victim.

  “The girl outside,” Nolan said, “take her back to wherever you found her, and do not bring any one else down here ever again.”

  “But…but…the master—”

  “I’m your master now, slave! Do as I say before I lose my patience!”

  “Yes, whatever you desire, master,” the foul man said.

  The suckling stumbled around for a moment before he found the door and then left without another word. Nolan wondered for a moment what he was to do about the other sucklings under Reiner’s influence, but there was little sense concerning himself with them at the moment.

  He looked down at the mumbling heap at his feet and sighed.

  “It didn’t have to end this way, Reiner. I’m sorry.”

  He hoisted the big vampire onto his shoulder and slipped out of the hospital basement into the cold, winter night.

  Nolan paced the length of the alleyway several times before he caught Celia’s scent upon the frigid air. She slipped out of the darkness a few moments later and approached him.

  “I didn’t expect you back so soon,” she said. “Did you find Reiner or did he actually have the sense to move on?”

  Nolan gestured to a nearby dumpster.

  “See for yourself.”

  He led Celia over to the dumpster and threw back the lid to reveal Reiner’s shaking body half buried in the trash. Thin, white liquid ran from his mouth and his eyes were filled with blood.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He attacked me when I found his hiding spot under the hospital. I think all that drugged blood he loved so much finally drove him over the edge. It even looked like he was starting to eat the people he fed on. I’ve never seen anything like it, Celia…there were just so many bodies…”

  “How did he get like this?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s actually part of the bad news…”

  “Bad news?”

  “Yeah. Reiner had at least three sucklings.”

  “Oh, shit, you’re kidding me.”

  “I ran into one of them before I found him. He said there were two others like him working somewhere else. They all worked together to bring him more people to feed on. The one I found was also bringing him morphine so I took a pair of needles and injected them through his eyes. It was the only way I could have brought him down. Looks like shooting the stuff right into his brain messed him up pretty bad, though.”

  “That doesn’t matter. He was already dead anyway. Don’t worry; the chiefs will take care of it. Those sucklings could be a problem though.”

  “So what happens now?” Nolan asked.

  “Well, since you managed to bring Reiner in alive, or at least mostly alive, I’m sure the chiefs will want to deal with him themselves so we need to get him underground. After that I would expect they’ll send us out after those damn sucklings. Can’t have those ignorant bastards drawing attention to anyone, right?

  “But before all of that happens, we need to give you a proper welcome to your new home. It’s not every day we take in a streeter, so don’t be surprised if anyone makes a big deal out of it. I wouldn’t worry though. You’ve done enough here to prove your worth.”

  Nolan dragged Reiner out of the dumpster and tossed him to the snow covered pavement.

  “You never really answered my question, Celia.”

  “What question was that?”

  “Why me? You know as well as I do that a lot of other streeters could have found Reiner and brought him it. Why offer me a place underground to do it?”

  “You already know why, Nolan,” Celia said.

  She pressed her body against his and kissed him fiercely. All feelings of hunger and discomfort vanished as he embraced Celia in the cold, dark night.

  The Iron Face of God

  Originally published in Under a Brass Moon (Curiosity Quills Press, 2016)

  I was never a big steampunk fan, but I decided to take a stab at it for this anthology. Not having read much in the genre, I have to confess that the bulk of my research consisted of replaying the first third or so of Bioshock Infinite and watching From Hell. All things considered, I thought the results turned out pretty well. The story almost went in a radically different direction at one point, but I ended up trimming back the ambition and keeping things as straightforward as possible. Perhaps predictably, it still turned out pretty dark. No matter how hard I try, my writing always seems to take a rather macabre turn at one point or another. In the years since completing this story, I’ve fleshed out a lot of details about the city of Linton and the world around it. Hopefully I’ll come back to it at some point in the future.

  Rytha had a good start on spending the day drunk when somebody knocked at her office door.

  “Just a moment!”

  She slipped the bottle back into the desk drawer and checked her appearance in the mirror. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week, much less felt the imperious touch of a steel-toothed comb. The dark makeup she’d smeared heavily around her eyes yesterday still covered up most of the signs of sleep deprivation, but it didn’t make for the most professional look. Her wrinkled shirt and pants hardly helped matters.

  “Fuck it.”

  Rytha tried to smile when she opened the door, but the result came up a bit short of friendly. Not that it mattered much. The woman standing outside scarcely looked at her. She wore a plain-looking coat and simple leather boots. No jewelry, not even a ring or necklace, and no fancy hairdo, either.

  In other words, exactly what somebody with too much money thought would pass for “blending in” with the unwashed masses of Linton’s slums.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” the woman said, still not looking directly at her. “I’m here to see a Ms. Taldron. I was hoping she could—”

  “Got an appointment?”

  That got her attention.

  Uppity bitch.

  “Appointment? No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Rytha milked the tension for all it was worth. She considered dragging the conversation out, but she already had a bit of a headache and she’d done enough to make her point. “What’s your name?”

  The woman glanced up the staircase that led back to the alleyway above them.

  “I’d rather not divulge that information out here.”

  Rytha stuck her head out the door and looked to the top of the stairs. A big guy in a longcoat stood there, glaring down at them over his square jaw. He didn’t belong there any more than the woman did, but nobody was likely to point that out.

  Maybe she’ll be good for it, at least.

  “Come on inside. We can talk there.”

  “Wait,” the woman said, “are you—”

  Rytha extended her hand. “Rytha Taldron. Pleased to meet you, Ms.?”

  The woman took her hand. She had a much firme
r grip than Rytha expected.

  “Dacia. Dacia Vellorax.”

  Oh, shit.

  She closed the door behind them and indicated the chair. “Have a seat, Ms. Vellorax. Get you a drink?”

  “Thank you, no. I don’t drink.”

  Of course you don’t.

  “I apologize for the misunderstanding,” Vellorax said. “I didn’t expect someone with your reputation to be so… young.”

  Rytha wondered what she really meant to say. Messy? Unprofessional? Hungover? Rude? Certainly not “young,” not with all those grey hairs she stubbornly refused to dye. “Don’t worry about it. The company you keep in this business either ages you fast or keeps you young. Lucky for me, I drew the latter.”

  Vellorax responded with a fake smile and sat.

  Rytha didn’t bother tidying up her desk. No point in making a show of things now. She eased herself into her chair and waited for the wealthiest woman in the country to explain what the hell she was doing in her office.

  “I was told that you have a knack for finding people, Ms. Taldron. I’m hoping that you can help me sort out an issue involving my son.”

  Always the kids. Spoiled bastards.

  “Go on.”

  “My son and I don’t see eye to eye on most things. I won’t bore you with the details, but—”

  “Bore me. The details might be relevant.”

  Vellorax shifted in the chair. Relevant or not, she didn’t seem eager to allow Rytha even a meager glimpse into her cloistered world. “Well, I think it’s enough to say that he disapproves of my lifestyle and I of his. You must understand that my work takes up a great deal of my time, leaving little room for family. My older children understand this. They’re old enough to remember what we came from. But Weldon has always resented it, especially since his father and I parted ways.”