Dead Matter

20

I worked my way out of the castle and across the open courtyard, heading toward the portcullis and gates leading out. I had lost track of what time of day or night it was in the outside world, but in here it was currently night. If the torches lighting the way were fake or part of the fancy electrical wiring of the Gibson-Case Center surrounding us, I couldn’t tell. I’d find out soon enough what the real world had in store for me when I got outside.

Despite it being artificial night in here, the castle grounds were relatively quiet given the nocturnal nature of its occupants. That meant real night must be in effect out in the city with most of the vampires out enjoying a night on the town instead of cooped up in the Epcot version of rural Transylvania.

When I passed the gate hanging overhead at the castle entrance, the sound of my lone footsteps echoed out as I crossed the bridge over the fake moat. Despite knowing full well that I was in the center of Manhattan, the replication of the foreign countryside at night had me spooked. I kept my pace slow and steady to keep my nerves in check, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.

I stopped once I was off the bridge and safely on the cobblestones leading off to the exit guarded by the living statues. The spooked feeling wouldn’t let go. I looked around with caution, the surrounding forest full of shadows and trees whose limbs reminded me of the haunted forest from The Wizard of Oz. Through them, I saw a set of the familiar red exit markings and headed toward it.

Only to see the red exit lights start to move, and before I had time to react, the realization hit me. “Those aren’t exit lights,” I said, dropping to the ground as they dashed toward me. I hit the ground hard, avoiding injury by landing in my leather coat as something hit me. Eyes with blood-red irises and red-black pupils met mine as a leathery, dry-skinned creature pinned me in place. Its veins were drawn tight over its skin and they were everywhere. It hissed at me with vicious fangs showing and the stench of rot on its breath. I knew this type of monstrosity, but this time I didn’t have a grocery store arsenal to defend myself with.

For a second, fear paralyzed me into inaction, but I remembered my training and shook it off. Agents died in the field marveling at the monstrosities that attacked them. I was determined not to be one of those statistics.

I felt for my bat, but with signs of my movement, the creature dug its talonlike nails into my arms. The pain was excruciating, but thanks again to my jacket, they didn’t pierce my skin.

“You’re just as fugly a little thing as the other one was, aren’t you?” I asked it.

I don’t know if it understood me or merely sensed that I was mocking it in an effort to calm my fear, but it reared back, its mouth showing its devastating array of sharklike teeth crisscrossing back and forth in its open maw. Something fleshy fell from its mouth onto my neck and I tried not to panic. The creature let out a primal cry, but then I noticed it wasn’t focusing on me anymore.

A shadowy blur of motion blazed over me, grappling the creature and pulling it off of me. I sat up on my elbows to follow the action. Aidan Christos stood about fifteen feet away, the creature hugged tight against his chest. It tore and squirmed for its freedom, but Aidan wasn’t having any of it. After a moment or two of struggle, it broke one of its arms free and started clawing at Aidan’s face. Vain to the end, Aidan immediately let go of it and felt to see if he had been harmed. The creature dashed off into the darkness of the surrounding forest. Several other dark flashes flew around the edge of the forest as well.

I ran over to Aidan. He looked at me, panicked.

“Am I okay?” he said, still feeling around.

“Are you okay? I was pinned under that thing! You’ve at least got the ability to heal.”

Aidan’s face relaxed a little. “So I’m okay?”

“Yeah, you’re still looking like the poster boy for emo,” I said. “Now, do you mind telling me what the fuck was that thing, er, things?”

“One of us,” Aidan said, taking his time to walk a circle around us, looking, trying to pick the creatures from out of the darkness.

I looked, too. If it was out there, I couldn’t see it. “One of you?” I asked. “That thing is so not like you.”

Aidan’s eyes lit up and he turned to me. “Sorry about your arm.”

“Huh?” I asked. “There’s nothing wrong with my arm…”

Before I could say another word, Aidan lashed out and grabbed my right arm hard around the wrist. He looked overhead, searched high above, and then jumped straight up, taking me with him. It felt like my shoulder had exploded, but we were already flying through the air when one of the creatures swooped back, right where I’d been standing.

I screamed.

“I said I was sorry,” Aidan said. At the top of our flight arc, he grabbed onto one of the support beams among the rigging and lighting that helped create the false sense of night and day down below. He hoisted me up until I could grab onto one of the beams with my free arm. Aidan let go of me and I wrapped both arms against the cold steel, holding on for my life.

“Stay here,” he said, and before I could ask him just where the hell else he thought I might go, Aidan let go and dropped several hundred feet below.

I pulled myself up onto the crawl space among the crisscrossed bars up here, feeling a little better with something under my feet. I looked down, trying not to let the full sense of the height grab hold of me. Aidan was being charged by several of the creatures. Their feral ferocity made them dangerous, but quick thinking seemed to keep Aidan one step ahead of them as he dodged them and played one creature against another, leaving several of them in a snarling tangle of limbs as they fought among themselves.

The bars and pipes around me erupted into motion as if I were in an earthquake. I looked up thinking that maybe the supports were giving out with my added weight on it, but they looked fine to me, not that I knew a blessed thing about structural engineering. I turned my eye to the rest of the structure. One of the creatures stood along it about a hundred feet away.

And it was staring at me.

Screw this, I thought. I looked down. Aidan was swamped with the other creatures down below. Comparatively, one didn’t seem like too bad a contest for me, if I was standing on solid ground and not up here among the lights, that was.

The creature gripped on tight to the bars with its talons as it carefully made its way toward me. I pulled my eyes away from it long enough to use care unsheathing my retractable bat. The last thing I wanted to do was drop the damn thing and find myself totally unarmed up here. I locked both my legs into the beams beneath me and clicked the button on my bat.

Nothing happened. “Shit,” I said, shaking it. That vampire Gerard must have damaged it even more than I had thought back in Brandon’s chambers. Stupid vampires with their stupid preternatural strength.

I looked up and the creature was already much too close for comfort. I could already smell the stink of it from where it was.

I twisted and pulled at the bat. Deep inside it, several pieces of metal ground against one another, but as I spun it in my hands, it started to extend. A dull metal screech came from it, like pulling open an old rusty drawer. The sound seemed to incense the creature more and it roared even louder. The last chunk of the bat pulled out to its full extension and I gripped it hard with both hands.

The creature lurched forward, lowering its voice into a deep, throaty growl.

“Batter up,” I said, hiding my fear behind false bravado. As it charged, the teeth in its maw were a hideous parody of what I knew vampire fangs to look like. A rank blast of air came from it as it closed in on me.

As it leapt for me, I swung hard at its head. It connected with a meaty thunk and my bat stopped, lodged there, it seemed. The top of my bat was caught in the creature’s mouth, both keeping it from biting me and occupying its claws as it tried to pry free. The already battered metal began to tear in its mouth and I tried to pull it away. Desperate claws lashed out to knock it away, but I held it there, twisting it a little and hoping to hurt it when a new idea hatched in my brain.

“Chew your food, pretty,” I said. The backs of my legs felt on the verge of cramping, but I was damned if I was going to ease up.

With a final metallic wrenching sound, a chunk of the bat tip tore away, leaving a sharp, exposed, nasty point. I prayed that what Aidan had said was true: that the creature truly was one of his kind. I plunged the remains of the bat straight into its chest, aiming for the heart. I felt the sickening sensation of the metal piercing the soft, rotting flesh of the creature. It convulsed in pain as fresh blood shot from the wound, coating the bat and running down to my gloved hands. I pulled the bat out and swung like I was at home plate, pitching the creature off its perch. It slid off the jagged end of my bat and fell toward the ground far below.

I caught my breath as I heard it hit the ground a wet thud. The sensation of something else landing on the support beams shook through the structure and I flinched in reaction, choking my bat up into swinging position once again.

Beatriz crouched along the top of one of the beams, her hands free and making it look effortless.

“Having a little trouble?” Beatriz said, flashing me a sickly sweet smile.

“I’m holding my own,” I said, my bat still covered in a crimson web of ichor. As I decided just how I was supposed to resheath it in that state, Aidan flew up in front of me, grabbing onto the beams with ease. He looked to Beatriz.

“Everything okay up here?” he said.

Beatriz’s smile widened. “Just watching over your boy, Aide.”

“Don’t call me that, please,” he said. He checked the grounds of the castle below. “I want you to go tell Brandon we’re having a little internal-affairs problem.”

“Maybe I should stay with you,” Beatriz offered. “We don’t know how many more of those there are roaming around.”

“I’ll take care of him,” Aidan said, then looked at the bat as if seeing it for the first time. “Not that he looks like he needs protecting.”

“Oh, I do,” I said quite earnestly. I held up the bat.

“This? I got lucky. Bring Beatriz with us. There’s strength in numbers and frankly, I need as many of the good-guy vamps on me as possible.”

Aidan smiled.

“Connor told me you were funny,” Aidan said. “But I hadn’t noticed until now. As for defending yourself, you’re doing fine.”

I looked over Aidan’s shoulder at Beatriz. She was looking at Aidan for some kind of further direction, and he turned to her. “Go. Now.”

“Have it your way,” she said. “Good luck explaining this to His Worshipfulness.”

Beatriz pushed herself off of the rigging and launched herself out across the darkness, falling into a perfect dive as she went. She twirled like an Olympic diver and hit the ground standing up.

As she ran off, I said, “I guess things like that are pretty easy to learn when there’s no fear of snapping your neck or death, what with the whole being-immortal thing.”

Aidan shrugged. “It does have its advantages,” he said.

Another sharp clatter suddenly arose farther down the lighting work, followed by a snarling hiss that had me already raising the remains of my bat. As I did so, I noticed a soft popping hiss coming off of it. I looked closer at the gnarled bat, only to discover that the smears of ichor from impaling the creature were corroding through the remaining metal. “Hey!”

The clattering of talons on the rigging grew louder and I felt the vibrations as another one of the creatures started closing in on us. I stared with concentration off into the darkness until I saw the beady redness of its eyes as it moved forward.

“You see that, right?” I whispered. “You know, given your preternatural peepers.”

Aidan gave me a look of “duh” and turned back to our approaching foe as it clawed its way along the rigging.

“We need to go,” Aidan said.

“No argument from me.” I held up the dissolving stump of metal in my hands. “I’m almost out of bat.”

Aidan looked around as he assessed our situation. “Grab on,” Aidan said. “We’re leaving.”

I looked at the bat. There was no point in trying to sheathe it now, given what little there was left to sheathe. Plus I was going to need both my hands free to hold on to Aidan if I was going to survive the trip down. Below, a small crowd had gathered on the castle grounds in a small-scale battle royale with these creatures. I let go of the bat and let it fall. I was pretty sure that the crowd below had the reflexes to dodge it. And if it clonked onto one of the creatures, or better yet, impaled it, all the better.

I reached for Aidan’s shoulder, but the creature dove for me, separating the two of us and pushing me back. Aidan shoved at its mass as it passed, and its skin brushed wet against me, far too close for comfort. Even though it was thrown off by the force of Aidan’s deflection, it corrected itself with momentum as it swung full circle farther down the rigging on one of the beams, coming back toward me with increased velocity as its sharp talons went for my face.

“Shit,” Aidan said, already in motion himself. He grabbed my arm, digging into it like a vise clamp. “Come with me.”

He jumped as the talons of the creature brushed against my skin, but gravity already had me falling with Aidan toward the castle grounds. He landed hard, using his arms to absorb the shock of me hitting the ground with him. I set my feet down, shaken but unharmed, and looked around.

The scene around us was chaos. Blurs of these creatures and some familiar faces were all around me, fighting and clawing at one another. Aidan shielded me. “Follow me,” he said and started pushing his way through the forest battlefield.

“Wait,” I said. “What the hell are these things?”

He stopped and turned back. “Does it really matter?”

“I suppose not,” I said, “but I’ve been attacked by one of them before.”

“Bull,” Aidan said. “When?”

“Several nights back. Down in SoHo by my apartment.”

“Really,” Aidan said. “That far south?”

I nodded. Aidan started off toward the castle.

“You sure you want to stick with me?” he continued.

“Half an hour ago you were willing to just walk away from us.”

“I’d still like to be able to walk out of here,” I said. “Just not in several pieces. Either way they’d seem content to tear me apart, but to keep my own brain from leaping out of my head and deserting me, I’d like to know what they are. After two separate attacks, color me curious.”

“They’re ferals,” he said. “Happy?” He headed off as if that explained everything.

Before I could ask what that meant, he was off and I was running to keep up with him, dodging the vampire good guys as well as the enemies. Thankfully, there was enough chaos going on around us that no one paid us much attention.

Aidan led me back into the castle and across the vast courtyard. I followed at a close pace even though the largest and most dangerous chunk of the action seemed to be contained just outside the castle walls. Aidan turned into one of the buildings on our left and started down a winding set of stone steps within it. I stopped at the top of them.

“Hold on,” I said. “Is a basement really the best place to be?”

Aidan pushed back his hood and looked at me with blank eyes. “What’s the problem?”

“Isn’t that a bit… constricting? Given all the fighting going on?”

“Getting a bit claustrophobic, are we?” Aidan asked.

“I’m not claustrophobic,” I said. “I just like to have room to flee; that’s all.”

“No worries,” Aidan said. “There’s plenty of room down where we’re going. Besides, it’s not a basement. They’re called catacombs.”

“Great,” I said, putting both hands out against the cold stone of the walls as I followed. “That’s so much more comforting.”

I was relieved to see that wrought-iron lanterns lit the way as we descended farther and farther, but something in the flickering of the candles inside bothered me.

“Are those electrical, too?”

“Not the most authentic touch,” Aidan said, “but yeah. Saves a lot on real candles.”

“I feel like I’m in the line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride,” I said. “Didn’t realize your kind were so budget conscious.”

Aidan stopped and turned back to me, his eyes narrowed. “There’s a lot you don’t realize about us. You think the Gibson-Case Center was cheap to build? Brandon goes on and on about the price of things all the time.”

“Part of the In-My-Day crowd, I see.”

Aidan turned away. “Maybe at some point you’ll start thinking of us as something more than monsters…”

“I think I’ve seen the real monsters now,” I said, following once again. “You ready to tell me something more about them?”

The downward spiral of stairs ended and opened up into a short hallway not much wider than myself. Aidan stopped at the remains of what looked like a large wooden door. It lay in splinters, the iron bands that had held it together torn and twisted like long black claws.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he said, pushing the twisted metal out of our path. “I’m going to show you.”

I stepped through the doorway into a large cavern. Not a natural cavern, but a man-made one that looked somewhat familiar to me. An arched ceiling rose high overhead, covered in intricate tile work.

“This is a subway station,” I said.

“Correction,” Aidan offered. “This was a subway station, years ago.”

A brush of wind came from the doorway. Without making any sound, Brandon came racing down the stairs.

“Closed around 1933, if I remember it correctly,” Brandon said, walking past me to join Aidan. “It took a little mesmerism on my part to make that happen down at City Hall, but as I’m sure you can attest to, the minds in government are a bit weak in this city.”

“Where’s my brother?” Aidan asked.

“Don’t worry,” Brandon said. “He’s safe. Beatriz is escorting him down here at a more human pace.”

“What exactly is here anyway?” I asked.

“Converted and reclaimed space,” Brandon said. “Nicholas assures me it’s all the rage with the green movement. I’m sure he talked to you about that.”

“Nicholas says a lot of things,” I said. “When he got going on his whole building thing, my brain sorta tuned him out. Not to mention that I was a little distracted trying to find out just what the hell your building’s done to my girlfriend, remember?”

“Ah, yes,” Brandon said, giving a polite smile, “but of course. It appears she isn’t the only one in jeopardy around here. Please, follow us.”

I followed the two vampires as they walked farther into the area. The wall along the right side of the room was made up of tiny rooms built into it. Modern piping and power couplings ran across the tops of them. Clear doors with bars set in them were slid off to the side on all of them.

“Cells,” I said.

Aidan moved to a control panel that sat all alone against an empty stretch of wall. “Odd,” he said.

“What is?” Brandon asked.

Aidan pointed off to where we had come from. “The door to get out of the catacombs was torn open, but look at the cells. Their doors are all fine. Someone used the control panel to get them out of here. Those ferals were released. Not only that, but Simon’s been attacked by one of them outside of here. All the way down in SoHo.”

“So either someone’s been letting the ferals out,” Brandon said, “or else it’s spreading.”

“What’s spreading?” I asked. “And what exactly are these ferals? Aidan here has been having a little trouble explaining what they are to me. Care to try your hand?”

“We’re not quite sure,” Brandon said. “Perversions of what we are, I suppose. The darker and more sinister side of our people made manifest, but how, we just don’t know.”

“And you keep them down here?” I said. “Why not just, you know, kill them?”

Brandon turned to me, his face dark. “Tell me, Mr. Canderous, when you have a sick friend, is that what you do? Kill them? I hope for Connor’s sake he never takes a sick day.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“This feral state is a relatively new development among us,” he said. “We’ve been keeping these poor creatures down here in the hopes of studying them, discovering what is wrong, but to no avail so far. And whatever it is, it is spreading…”

Aidan slammed his fist against the wall, the tiles crumbling apart beneath it. “We need to find out who did this.”

I was already in motion, walking across the station floor, peeling off my gloves. I headed for the control panel. “Out of my way and I’ll tell you.” I had wondered earlier just what vampires could need salvation from; now I knew.

Aidan stepped aside. I raised my hands and put them up to the box, pushing my power into it. The electric snap of connection hit, and I started searching through the past on this object. Images of the ferals popped into my mind, leaping from their cages but in reverse like I was rewinding a film, making them look like they were happily hopping backward to be locked up. I willed myself to see the face of whoever threw the release mechanism, but it wasn’t happening. The spot itself was surrounded by a soft white glow, but there was no way to tell who or what the figure at the controls was. I pushed myself even harder into the spot but that only increased the white light and still I couldn’t make out the figure. Frustrated, I thrust all my power at it, only to find my head screaming with pain to the point where I felt myself blacking out. My last conscious thought was wondering if I’d wake up with a hell of a headache or if I’d wake up at all, what with the whole being-surrounded-by-vampires thing.