Sanctuary Lost

October 29, 9 p.m. Year of the Curtain+5
Cut Off, Louisiana

Francisco should have listened to his grandmother. When he left Mexico, coming to the United States looking for work, she gave him a thousand reasons he shouldn’t go, ranging from “You don’t speak English” (hardly an obstacle, as he learned) to “You’re going to get yourself killed!” As it turned out, the latter turned out to be a more valid argument.

He turned away from the back woods and up one of the tiny, shell-covered residential roads that littered Cut Off, rushing up towards LA 1 in the hopes of flagging down one of the ubiquitous police officers. He’d done his best to avoid them in the weeks he’d been down here, helping build a couple of houses as a day laborer, but after what he just saw, he was going to take any help he could get. The crew had been packing up as the daylight died, and as he was loading tools into a pickup truck, there was motion in the woods. He tried to ignore it at first, but there was soon more and more movement in the darkness, and then the darkness was moving towards him.

The things that came out of the night, the things that grabbed the others in his work crew… they were pale as snow with long fangs like razors. But they didn’t try to bite anybody – they grabbed them, pulled them into the woods, and their screams suddenly ceased. Only Francisco managed to escape the rampage, but there was only so far he could go before he had to stop and catch his breath. The things that were following him didn’t seem to require something as luxurious as stopping to catch their breath, but Francisco had to not only stop, but hide long enough not to be captured.

His grandmother probably would have called these things Diablo – devils – but he knew the American had a different word for them. Vampires. And the damnable things didn’t even sparkle.

He’d had several close calls – the things seemed able to track him like bloodhounds – and he’d noticed as he ran that there was a chilling absence of people on the streets. Cut Off was by no means a bustling metropolis, but it was the kind of community where people still knew each other by name and used the name, where neighbors shared the fish they caught with each other and the guy next door was as likely to be your cousin or brother as anybody else. It was also the place where outsiders weren’t necessarily welcomed. Oh, people were friendly, but nobody treated him like a long-lost brother. Still, he respected the closeness of the community… and the fact that there wasn’t anybody on the streets while these things ran rampant chilled him to the core.

As his feet pumped underneath him, he caught a glimpse of something that gave him a moment of hope: a cross. Francisco wasn’t as spiritual as his grandmother was, but certain lessons of his childhood had never left him, and one of those lessons was that a Christian cross always marked a place of sanctuary. He had spent a few years wandering Mexico and down into South America in his younger days, and even in those countries where he didn’t speak the language, he always found that a place with a cross was a place where he would be safe. And it didn’t hurt that, according to the American movies he’d seen, these vampires were powerless on Holy ground.

He ran up the stairs and burst into the main hall of the Church. It was empty, save for a single man in black lighting candles near the Sacristy. He ran at the man shouting, screaming, “Padre! Padre! ¡Ayúdame! ¡Ayúdame!”

“Son, calm down,” the Father said. Francisco was stunned that the man spoke perfect Spanish, but he took it as a sign that he’d found a place he could escape the monsters. “Tell me, what’s wrong?”

“The monsters… the things have been chasing me for miles now, Father.”

“Things?”

“Ugly things… big teeth… vampires, Father, vampires!”

“My son–”

“I’m not crazy, please don’t say I’m crazy. I watched them capture ten strong young men. There’s nobody walking the streets, Father, I think they’re planning to take the town.”

“Oh, my child, don’t be ridiculous.” The priest smiled at him, and his pronounced teeth appeared. “We’ve already taken the town.”

“No… no…” Francisco backed up, pleading to the air. “It’s not possible. This is a Church, a place of sanctuary!” He flailed across the altar, grabbing a Crucifix from the wall and holding it in front of him. “STAY BACK!”

“Oh, my silly child,” the priest said. “That only works on Christian vampires.”

Francisco pointed at him, panting. “But… but you’re wearing…”

The vampire laughed. “Anybody can wear a collar, son.”

Francisco was out of places to run.

Fangs For the Memories

October 29, 6 p.m. Year of the Curtain+5
Cut Off, Louisiana

With the sun setting over the mashes of southern Louisiana, the vampires began to move again, converging on a little house at the end of a terribly long and empty road that ran along Bayou Lafourche until there was no more civilization for it to trace. The house stood at the footheels of a thick, swampy wood that extended southward until it began to taste the brackish water of the Gulf of Mexico. In this area, the trees were dark, thick, and an excellent place to hide as long as your goal was just to be unseen.

The vampires began to stir once night fell, arriving in cars and trucks, one or two at a time. Each of them had, in his possession, three humans. The abductees came from all over the country – a few of them even from Mexico or Canada – but their stories were largely the same. As always, there was a large population of homeless, of vagrants, of migrants and illegals – people less likely to be reported missing if they simply disappeared. There were lots of elderly, people who lived alone, whose family didn’t check in on them often enough, and whose absence may not even be noticed until they failed to arrive at Thanksgiving dinner. There were children as well. Small and quiet, young waifs whose vanishing was simply attributed to an entirely different type of all-too-human predator. People would search for the children. But none of them would think to search here. The vampires didn’t care much that their meal was coming from the cast-offs of human society. They’d learned long ago that social status didn’t affect the flavor of the Feast at all.

Most of the humans were tied up, drugged, or stunned into unconsciousness. Some of the older, more powerful undead managed to cast a glamour on their prey, and had them march blindly forward, as stupidly oblivious as a cow in a slaughterhouse. The Renfields were there as well, the humans who craved the opportunity to become Nosferatu themselves and had no qualms about aiding the vampires to butcher hundreds, if that was the way to prove their devotion. It was madness, of course. Even the Renfields knew many of them would be slaughtered along with the easy prey as soon as their masters lost themselves to the bloodlust. Still, there was the chance that some of them would be fortunate enough to be turned rather than consumed, and for the lonely Renfields, that chance was enough.

The Renfields were in charge of escorting the cattle, as the vampires kept their distance, even after dark. Many of them had been starving themselves in anticipation of this night, and the concentration of fresh, pumping blood threatened to consume them. They had to exercise self-control, at least a little longer.

Only one of them came near the humans, in fact, and he had a job to do. He walked among them, between the pods of sleeping meat, with a bag in his hand. Every so often, he withdrew a small, white object from his bag and placed it in the ground, covering it up and patting the soil down like a seed. And each time he did it, he smiled.

His children would sprout soon.

Very soon.

It was almost time.

A short announcement…

Hey, friends, Blake here breaking away from the narrative for a moment. It’s May and I’m a teacher, which means I’m busy as hell at work. I’m also busy as hell working on multiple writing projects right now, not to mention some cool things I have in the works over at CXPulp.com. Point is, something’s gotta give, and for the moment, that’s going to be Tales of the Curtain. Don’t worry, it’s not going away. I’ve got no intention of abandoning this little project. But for the next few weeks (at least) I’m going to have to scale back to one update a week. I’ll be back on Friday with the next installment.

Thanks for understanding!

Road Trip to Bayou Country

October 29, 10 a.m. Year of the Curtain+5
New Orleans, Louisiana

Brie managed to get Albie looking almost lifelike, for a corpse. She slathered the zombie makeup onto the dead man’s face, putting in extra scarring, gray tones to the skin, stitches along the gash that Annabell had created, and gave his hair a wild, disheveled look. It was, perhaps, her best zombie makeup job to date, which was impressive for a woman who had done so many monster movies over the years. Most importantly, anybody who looked at Albie would conclude either that he was made up like a zombie for a Halloween celebration, or he was a legitimate zombie. If they thought the former, they wouldn’t ask any more questions. If they thought the latter, they’d shoot him in the head and Brie and company would be able to pretend the whole thing was somebody else’s fault. Either way, they won.

Max and Annabell “helped” Albie into Annabell’s rental car, and she and Max took the two front seats. Kevin and Brie had to force their undead companion into a seated position and buckle him in, then Brie insisted Kevin take the seat in the middle so she could be as far from the corpse as possible. Once they were on the road, she finally managed to relax.

“Where are we taking him anyway?” she asked.

“Down south,” Kevin replied. “Bayou Country.”

“Further south than this?”

Kevin laughed. “Ah, you blue staters. It’s always the same – you think New Orleans is on the sole of the boot, that we’ve all got swamps full of alligators in our backyard, and that it’s Mardi Gras 365 days out of the year.”

“That’s a little…” her voice trailed off when she couldn’t come up with a way to finish the sentence.

“Accurate?” Kevin offered.

“Yeah, but shut up.”

He chuckled. “I like this one, Annabell. Bring her back to town.”

“Let’s see if she makes it out alive first.”

Kevin tried to give Annabell directions, but she quickly dismissed them. “I know my way around Louisiana,” she grinned.

“So why are we going to the bayous?” Brie asked.

“Several reasons,” Kevin said. “First of all, like I said, it will be a lot easier to say goodbye to our friend Albie out there.”

“Alligators are helpful with permanent goodbyes,” Annabell tossed in. “Second, we don’t know exactly where the Feast is going to be, but it isn’t likely to be in New Orleans itself.”

“Why not?”

Kevin answered. “The Feast can get pretty wild, from what I’ve heard. The vampires hav always chosen out-of-the-way towns and communities, places where it will take time for anyone to notice a town has basically been wiped off the map. In Louisiana, the most likely places to have a smorgasbord without being discovered before they leave are some of these coastal communities.”

“Yeah, and they haven’t had a Feast in the U.S. – or anywhere else in the developed world – since home television sets became common,” Annabell said. “That worries me.”

“Why?”

“Because the Curtain has been pulled back and they’re getting bold. Honestly, I’m afraid those leeches aren’t going to be worried about keeping the Feast secret much longer.”

“Well there’s a scary-ass idea,” Max said.

“I know. Which is why I’m glad for the third reason we’re going south.”

“What’s that?”

“Whether you’re going after rats or vampires, all we’re really doing is hunting and trapping. And the swamps of Louisiana are the homes of some of the best trappers in the world.” Kevin smiled. “We’re going to pay a visit to some old friends.”

The Artist at Work

October 29, 7:20 a.m. Year of the Curtain+5
New Orleans, Louisiana

Brie was a makeup artist, specifically a monster makeup artist. That meant getting to movie and television sets early and spending hours putting layer after layer of rubber, silicon, plastic and assorted pigments, dyes, concealers and cosmetics on the faces of the people who were going to walk in front of the camera and show off how awesome they looked, and finishing the whole thing by the time that normal human beings were waking up for the day. She liked her job. But if she had a day – like today – when she didn’t necessarily have to be somewhere at a certain time, she liked to sleep late.

The telephone ringing at 8 a.m. annoyed her.

Rolling over in her hotel room bed, she flapped an arm onto the nightstand until her fingers curled around her cell phone. With her brain waking up, she recognized the ringtone – the theme from the old Universal Dracula movie – as the one she’d assigned to text messages from Annabell. She must be texting them to let them know she was in town. Through the thin hotel walls, she could hear Max’s phone buzzing too. She picked up the phone and thumbed up the text message. It was an address and two short sentences.

“Get here ASAP. Need help with corpse.”

Ah, her life was more fun since she’d met Annabell.

*   *   *

An hour, one hot shower, and two cups of coffee later, she and Max arrived at a small apartment in downtown New Orleans. It wasn’t a big place, but it had a view of the French Quarter that alone made it feel historic to Brie, and probably really expensive to boot. The apartment was decorated in a style that the pretentious snobs she’d met in LA would call “eclectic,” but which Brie more accurately recognized as “40 years of living in the same place, replacing furniture one piece at a time.” The couch (green) did not match the recliner (blue) or the settee (a sort of faded mauve), and none of it went at all with the color of the walls (a yellow that had probably been very bright and sunny when originally applied, but desperately needed to be re-done). The walls were covered with ancient family photographs, except for an enormous wooden crucifix hanging in a place of honor near the front door, and every bookshelf and table surface seemed to have books about vampires or different pieces of effluvia related to their extermination: wooden stakes (some in the process of being sharpened), bottles of what she assumed was Holy Water, and several balloons filled not with air or water, but with what looked like sand, like a stress ball. The balloons, each about the size of a nectarine, were surrounded by a light dusting of white powder.

The man who seemed to own all this was very old, and looked very pleased with himself. Annabell introduced him as “my friend Kevin.” The man who lay on Kevin’s floor, head largely removed from his body, was introduced as “one of my customers.”

“This is going to be a really long day, isn’t it?” Brie asked.

Annabell nudged the corpse on the floor with her foot. “A little while ago, this genius tried to kill Kevin downstairs in his shop. He was a Renfield, he was acting on the orders of one of the vampires that we’re trying to hunt down. I took care of it, but now we’ve got to get rid of him.”

“Before the vampires find out you killed him?” Max asked.

Kevin shook his head. “They already know, son. It’s difficult to hide things like the extermination of a Renfield from its master. I’d rather eliminate Alfie here before any traditional officers of the law arrive on my doorstep wondering why there’s such a large accumulation of flies around my window.”

Brie shook her head. “I need more coffee.”

“Okay,” Max said, “how do we get rid of it? Acid?”

“Excellent,” Kevin replied. “Do you have any?”

“Okay… chop him up into little pieces.”

Annabell laughed. “Ah, the flocks of buzzards at Kevin’s window would be the perfect Halloween decoration, wouldn’t it?”

“We need to remove him from the city,” Kevin said. “If we can get him further south, into the bayou region, there are many more options for disposal. But first, we need to get him out.”

“I’ve got a rental car.” Max dangled the keys. “We can just put him in there.”

“And how, pray tell, do we explain to the people why we’re cramming him into the trunk?”

“So we place him in the front,” Annabell said. “He’s… not… too conspicuous.”

“He’s conspicuous enough,” Kevin said.

“We could always tell people he went to a Halloween party last night and he’s still dead drunk,” Annabell said. “That big ol’ chunk out of his neck could be part of his costume.”

Kevin laughed. “My love, this is New Orleans. This isn’t nearly enough to be a costume.”

“Hmm. Kevin, can you sew up the wound? You know, to keep his head more or less attached to the rest of him?”

“Of course, Annabell. I’ve trained myself in field medicine, you know.”

“Well then, all we need to do is take the dead man and exaggerate his dead-itude. That’ll be enough to make it look like a costume.”

Brie shivered “How on Earth do we make this look like a costume?”

Annabell smiled. “Did you bring your makeup kit?”

Brie looked her in the eye. Was she serious? She was smiling – smiling way too much for her to be joking. Kevin was nodding like he’d just gone over the answers to a quiz he aced, and Max had that look on his face that meant he felt silly for not having thought of it before. Brie was used to making him have that face. She didn’t like seeing him wear it because of her.

She looked down at her bag full of makeup, up at Annabell, over to the dead man on the floor.

“Oh, God, I hate you all,” she said.

Admiration

October 29, 9 a.m. Year of the Curtain+5
New Orleans, Louisiana

The sun was still up when Nathaniel found himself being awakened. He couldn’t see the sun, of course, he slept in a crypt well beneath the surface with no windows and no points of entry that would allow the entry of sunlight even at high noon. But like all of his kind, he could feel that the sun was in the sky, and knew he should not be awake, and thus he was quite cross at the young vampire called Daniel Jeffries for daring to disturb him.

“Master, please, awaken.”

“I am awakened, Daniel, I could have been staked and had garlic cloves stuffed down my throat and I would have been awakened by your caterwauling. If you do not have an earth-shatteringly important reason for waking me up in the daylight, I suggest you invent one before I rip your throat out and use it for a piece of sewer pipe.”

“That’s very… graphic, Master.”

Nathaniel sat up in his bed. Daniel, he knew, had been somewhat disturbed when he learned the ancient vampire did not sleep in a coffin, but Nathaniel simply laughed at the notion. A vampire reposes where he wishes. Daniel was of a younger breed, the Nosferatu that had been weaned on Hollywood vampires and still clung to such notions as sleeping in coffins in the “soil of your homeland.” He probably was the sort that still blanched when presented with a crucifix.

Ah, times change, Nathaniel, he reminded himself. Still, he did not relish the moment in the far-too-near future when he found himself surrounded by perpetually teenage vampire girls who thought that being bitten would be a pathway to eternal romance. All he wanted, all any true vampire wanted, was to feed.

“Tell me why you awakened me, Daniel,” he said.

“Master, it concerns the Renfield you sent to Kevin Kendall.”

“The shopkeeper?” Nathaniel had ordered his human crony, Matthew Albert, to take care of the old man permanently. It was too close to the feast to risk his perfect plan on something like a doddering human fool who had read too many books. “Albert failed in his mission?”

“Albert is dead.”

“Really? Kendall was crafty enough to slay one of my Renfields?”

“Not Kendall, Master. It was a young woman with long brown hair.”

The description was enough to make Nathaniel more alert. “The Huntress?”

“We believe so, master. Another Renfield reported that the woman entered the shop just at the time Albert was supposed to attack. She and the old man left about 20 minutes later, and the Renfield found Albert with his head nearly severed.”

“Indeed.” The Huntress was an unusual one. She set out to slay the Dark Things, which wasn’t all that unusual in the large scheme of things, but she also had no qualms about slaying her fellow humans if the situation called for it. Nathaniel admired that.

“What is your command, Master?”

“Have someone find the Huntress and Kendall. Do not engage them, but follow them. Know where they are at all times, and report back frequently.”

“Yes, Master. Anything further?”

“Yes – let me sleep, Daniel. If you wake me again before sunset for anything less than an invasion of this very vault, I’ll decapitate you, allow you to heal, and decapitate you again.”

“As always, Master, your creativity astounds me.”

“Seven centuries to ponder such punishments. Begone Daniel.”

Daniel walked away and Nathaniel returned to his position of repose. Vampires were not like humans, they never tossed and turned, unable to sleep. When the sun was in the sky, Nathaniel could grow dormant merely by closing his eyes. But this once, he lay awake for a while, thinking about the Huntress. She was crafty. She was fearless. And human or no, Nathaniel admired those qualities. Perhaps, when her time came, he would offer her a choice. Death awaited her, certainly, but what came after that death may still be negotiable.

They All Axed For You

October 29, 7 a.m. Year of the Curtain+5
New Orleans, Louisiana

The sun was already up, but Kevin Kendall hadn’t been to sleep. There wasn’t really any sort of enforcement on business hours in the French Quarter, so his doors hadn’t closed at all. Nocturnal Niceties was the best store in town for people interested in the vampire lifestyle, with a large collection of books, clothing, and jewelry in the front of the store. October was traditionally his busy season, with everyone coming in to prepare for Halloween, but this year the interest in the vampires had ticked up even higher than usual. And for once, there was more interest in the back room than the touristy crap he sold out front.

The front of the store was where he made his money. The back was where his passion lay, past the Bela Lugosi capes and black candles and the junk that sold to teenage girls who read one too many trashy novel. Once you got past the curtain of blood-red beads, you walked into a room with lower lights and a far more distinctive selection. Wooden stakes. Garlic cloves. Crucifixes of every conceivable size, from ones you wore around your neck to enormous wooden icons to adorn even the most ornate mansion, and bottles of Holy Water, officially blessed just down the street at St. Louis Cathedral. While the Vatican still didn’t recognize the existence of things like vampires, there were a few men of the cloth of Kevin’s acquaintance who’d had experiences of their own, and were more than willing to help out in the fight against them. There were other books here, too. Not mass market crap, but older texts painstakingly recreated from the originals, every crease and line on the page, on the assumption that something may turn out to be important in the heat of battle.

And most importantly, the light bulbs. Ultraviolet, far sharper than any commercial UV light, although that was what he had lining the ceiling. The reason his back room was so dark was because he alternated the light fixtures. Some of them were ordinary incandescent bulbs, although of a low wattage. The rest of them were black lights. None of them were strong enough to kill a vampire, but they would sting like hell. It would be like walking into a light shower of needles, the sort of thing a normal person could walk through if they so chose, but it would take a herculean effort for a bloodsucker to avoid reacting and giving himself away.

Kevin had been up all night pouring through books to locate some information for a friend. He’d heard of the Feast before, of course, but he had been horrified to learn that there was another one in the works, and that it was going to be held somewhere near New Orleans. Kevin had once been anxious to begin a life of monster-hunting, training day in and day out, keeping himself in top physical shape, and practicing his archery skills with quivers full of wooden arrows that soon splintered to pieces as he tested his aim over and over again. He’d never gotten to use any of them until just a few years ago, when vampires started to appear in his shop. It was in that brief period between the opening of the Curtain and the instillation of his black lights. But long before that, the arthritis had gripped his hands, his vision started to blur, and his hip started to ache. Kevin had topped 70 a few years ago, and although he didn’t intend to stop, he also knew he couldn’t keep going forever. It was more important than ever to find someone who could carry on for him, to take over when his time was done.

When the lights around him began to flicker, he had to seriously consider the possibility that time had arrived.

The lights in his shop died after a couple of sputters. The fans stopped spinning and the glow of the digital readout on his cash register vanished. Fortunately, like everyone in the French Quarter, he kept his door open. Sunlight fell into the shop, and although it wasn’t enough to really make the place bright, it was definitely enough to help him escape an ambush.

“This isn’t the first time one of you bloodless bastards has tried this, you know,” he said. He reached under the counter, where most shop owners kept a rifle. Kevin kept an ultraviolet wand. As he pulled it out and flipped the switch, though, nothing happened. He reached in and tightened the bulb, and still nothing happened. This one was more clever than most – he’d actually replaced his bulb with one that was burned out.

“Not bad,” he admitted out loud, “but I still don’t know what you expect to do. I’m not about to leave the sunlight, so you can’t get anywhere near me.”

That, of course, is when the arrow burst from behind the beaded curtain and struck him in the shoulder.

The pain cut into him right away, and got worse when the arrow jerked him towards the back room. He hadn’t seen the rope tied to the end when it cut through the night, but he felt it with no problem. He instinctively staggered along with it, through the beaded curtain and into the back room. He was in a much nastier place here – no windows at all, and only minimal light spilling in from the beaded curtain behind him. His brain started to race back through the night, trying to figure out when a vampire could have snuck back here and hidden himself, and how tough the thing would have to be to resist the black lights.

The monster came up to him, grabbed his wounded shoulder and flipped him over. It was dark, but Kevin was certain he could make out a smile on its face. He worked up a little saliva and spat it up into the thing’s face. It just laughed at him.

“We’ve got a Feast coming you know,” it said. The voice was familiar, someone he’d spoken to before, but he was in entirely too much pain to put the thought into deciphering it just now. “It seemed expedient to take care of any of the few mortals that might know what that means. Good-bye, Kevin.”

“Go to hell.” The beaded curtain opened up and a thin sliver of sunlight fell into the monster’s face. To Kevin’s surprise, it didn’t immediately cause his skin to bubble up, hiss, and turn into dust. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that his eyes were not the cold, dark spheres that vampires sported, but instead completely human. He was not, however, terribly surprised when an ax fell down and struck the thing in the neck.

It fell over, its death-gurgle lasting only a second, and began bleeding all over Kevin’s carefully cleaned floor. His rescuer knelt down next to him and pulled the arrow out, then immediately put pressure on the wound. “Are you okay, old-timer?”

“I’ll be fine, Annabell. You cut it a little close, didn’t you?”

“Rental car place was giving me grief when I got to the airport this morning. So who’s this winner?”

Kevin grabbed the fallen creature’s head and tilted it into the light. “I called him Albie,” he said. “He’s a regular at the shop. Well… was a regular.”

“Not a vampire, though. An axe wouldn’t have taken him out so easily. I thought it was just going to buy me a little time until I could grab some stakes or something.”

“He’s a Renfield.”

“One of those stupid wannabes that does whatever the vamps want and hope that they’ll turn them out of gratitude or something?”

“The same.”

“Why’d he turn out the lights, then?”

“Atmosphere. Stupid sons of bitches are worse about trying to make things ‘gothic’ than the real vampires are.”

“So what’s our move?”

“Well, assuming that mysterious boss of yours has a way to take care of a dead body, I think it’s time you and I started getting ready for the Feast.”

She smiled at him. “I think that can be arranged.”

Why You Make Your Profile Private

October 28, 9 p.m. Year of the Curtain+5
Los Angeles, California

“I still can’t believe you’re just getting there now,” Marissa said. On her cell phone, Max’s voice hummed back at her.

“That’s flying into New Orleans for you,” he said. “Apparently it’s impossible to get a direct flight here from anywhere. We had a layover in Dallas, but I’m pretty sure that if we started in Dallas, they would have sent us to Orlando first.”

She smiled. Max was avoiding the actual topic – the whole “Vampire Feast” thing that she wasn’t really wild about – but he was making her smile. She would have to take that much for now. “Just… be safe, okay baby?”

“Hey, it’ll be no more dangerous than going to work in the morning.”

“You’re a stuntman.”

“Exactly. Talk to you tomorrow.”

They broke the connection and Marissa put the phone down, trying not to let herself get chewed up with worry. Max was a big boy, he could take care of himself, and he would have that crazy Annabell chick with him too. She seemed to be the sort capable of carrying a big gun. Assuming she actually used it to cover Max and Brie, what could go wrong?

She tried to turn her attention back to Monster Muck, where the post she’d made almost a week ago about Dixon Moreno was catching fire. The feedback section had started slowly – her usual commentators chiming in and expressing their support. Then came the usual backlash – a couple of Curtain deniers or people who had already convicted Moreno in their brains jumped into the fray to call Marissa a few nasty names, none of which she hadn’t heard before and a few of which she’d even earned at one point or another. It was par for the course, really, nothing unusual.

Then something happened. Someone linked to the site on a community of legal experts who had been discussing what they called “Post-Curtain defense strategies,” and the next thing she knew she was bombarded with legal opinions about how a demonic possession defense might work, followed by retorts about why it would not, followed by DookyDude22 calling everybody’s mama a fat whore. Ah, the Internet.

But as it turned out, that was just the beginning of the snowball. Victim support groups, Moreno supporters, Doomsday prophets, pretty much any group that would have any sort of stake in this case made their way to the site and made her forums the battleground for hashing out these arguments. And as long as they remained civil, Marissa was more than happy to let it run its course. She had too much to do to police the forums herself, but she had some pretty effective moderators at her disposal. JohnnyS would be ready with the ban hammer any time someone started acting like too big of a dick, and up until then, let them drive up the traffic.

Trouble was, how did she follow this? She had her interview notes, and there was good stuff in there, but despite the confidence of her first post there was no real smoking gun. There was nothing in her sack o’ stuff that could prove Dixon was possessed at the time of the murders, only circumstantial evidence and her own gut feeling. She needed something solid.

As she pondered the situation, trying to find something she could really latch on to, she flipped open another tab, her Facebook page. She didn’t really use it much, but as a semi-public figure, she felt a responsibility to maintain one, if for no other reason than that she wanted to remain immediately available to the people she tried to think of as her fans. There was nothing of particular interest going on – she had a few replies and messages that were more or less along the same lines as the debate going on at her homepage, but nothing of real interest. Except for one flashing orange tab at the bottom.

“INSTANT MESSAGE-Gof GAMES.”

“Gof GAMES?” Clearly it wasn’t a real name, but that didn’t mean anything. Setting up a false Facebook account or just giving yourself a goofy name on the real one was the easiest thing in the world. She didn’t recognize the screenname, but that didn’t mean anything. When she got a friend request, she tended to accept anything that wasn’t a blatant spambot or flame war starter. More of the “price of fame,” she told herself. As a result, she had a larger friend count than anybody she knew, but still conversed personally with about five people, maximum. She had turned off the instant message feature some time ago, tired of getting belligerent messages from people who thought she was the Devil for running Monster Muck, but it must have been reactivated at some point. She’d turn it back off after this conversation was over, but it felt wrong to just ignore the guy. She opened the message.

Gof: Nice work on the Dixon Moreno piece.
MARISSA: Thanks. I always put as much into any article as I can.
Gof: Too bad about the Feast down in NOLA.

Marissa stopped typing. NOLA – New Orleans, Louisiana, although she hadn’t known that herself until she saw Brie Googling information about the surrounding area to validate the whole “Feast” theory. She hadn’t published anything about the Feast on the website, though, nor had she heard it discussed in any public channels. So who was this guy and what did he know about it?

MARISSA: The what?
Gof: The Feast. Y’know, that little all-you-can-eat buffet the North American vampire population is planning in Grande Isle.
MARISSA: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Gof: Bullshit. I know your boyfriend and his little makeup tart got onto the plane to New Orleans this morning.

Now she was freezing. The fact that she and Max were dating was impossible to keep quiet, and of course he and Brie were well-known to be friends since Zompocalypse Now was released. But neither of them did the Foursquare thing, neither of them promoted their whereabouts on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else. They were careful about that. There was no way anyone should have known where they were going.

MARISSA: I’m ending this conversation now, and you can consider yourself unfriended.
Gof: Don’t bother, I’m not on your list. And you won’t be able to find this account.

What was she dealing with here, some sort of super-hacker? Did computers even work that way?

Gof: I just thought I’d give you a heads-up. The Feast isn’t going to be what Maxie or any of your friends expected it to be. And if they make it out of there, your troubles are only beginning. The Elder is starting to wake up, and just wait until his children rear their heads.

The “Elder”? His “Children?” What the hell was this psychopath talking about?

Gof: One more thing and I’ll let you be. Dixon Moreno? Sweet lil’ Dixon? He’s going to FRYYYYYYYYY.
Gof: Sweet dreams.

She didn’t try replying again, but she did try to find “Gof Games”’s account to report him to the Facebook administrators for… what? Cyber terrorism? Bullying? Creeping her the hell out? Something like that. But when she tried, she couldn’t find any trace of him. No profile page, no wall, no nothing. And she wasn’t really surprised by that, either.

She did copy the conversation, though, and saved it.

And once she did that, she called Max again.

Trappers

October 28, 11:30 p.m. Year of the Curtain+5
Grande Isle, Louisiana

N.J. Williams was initially pissed off when his boy Newton shook him awake at 11:30. NJ was an “early to bed, early to rise” type – he’d gone to sleep at nine and needed to be up at four to go out and start checking the traps. This intrusion into his sleep wasn’t welcome at all.

“Daddy! Daddy, wake up! You gotta see this!”

N.J. rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Dammit, Number Three, are you just getting’ home?”

Number Three — Newton Williams the Third, that was – shook his head. “No, Daddy, I was back home at ten. But I was still up getting’ something to eat and before I went to bed I heard somethin’ out by the shed.”

“So what? There’s raccoons out there every night.” Newton was 16 years old, far too old to be spooked by noises by the shed. N.J. rolled over onto his side, facing away from his boy and into the spot his wife used to occupy before she ran off with that fancy-ass photographer from Houma two years ago.

“This wasn’t no raccoon, daddy.”

“A nutria, then. The traps’ll get him.”

“Ain’t no nutria either. It was bigger than that, way bigger.”

N.J. finally say up. “Well dammit, boy, don’t make me play a bunch of guessin’ games in the middle of the night. What the hell is it?”

Newton looked out the window, where they could see the side of the shed from the back porch light. It was on now, even though N.J. remembered turning it off before he went to bed. “You went outside?”

“Daddy,” Newton said, “I think you better come take a look at this.”

N.J. frowned, but he got out of bed and reached for his robe. Newton got on his nerves sometimes, but he knew his son well enough to know that if he was asking him to take a look at something, it would be something worth taking a look at. Out under the porch light, it was striking how much Newton resembled his mother – thin as a wire, with copper hair and a face full of freckles. He stood in stark contrast to N.J., who wore 275 pounds of muscle (okay, maybe some of that poundage had converted to beer weight in the last two years, but not much) and sported jet black hair and eyes. Newton would be taller than his daddy too. N.J. was only 5’7”, and although they stood eye to eye now, recently N.J. had noticed a widening gap between the cuff of Newton’s pants and the top of his shoes. The boy had one growth spurt left in him.

Newton led his father to the shed, where N.J.’s padlock hung open on the door. “Dammit, boy, what did I tell you about–”

“Daddy. Just look.” He pulled the door open.

Inside N.J. Williams’s shed, lying on his work table like it was a morgue slab, was a dead body. From the level of decay and disintegration. N.J. would guess it had been dead for months, if not years. Its remaining flesh had long since turned a mottled gray, and hung in chunks from stained, exposed bones. The body wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a black t-shirt, all of which looked far too new to have been on it when it died. N.J. would have guessed it was a boy, maybe a year or two older than Newton, but it would have just been a guess. He was no coroner. He didn’t need to be one, though, to find the broken tree branch jutting from the body’s chest indeed suspicious.

“Damn it, boy, what is all this?”

“Daddy–”

“You find a dead body and you brought it here?”

“If you just listen–”

“You should have called the police! What’s wrong with you?”

“Daddy, I didn’t find him! He attacked me when I went out in the back to see what was makin’ that noise!”

N.J. looked from the body back to his boy, and back again. “He attacked you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“What is this, son, some kind of stupid Halloween stunt.”

“No, Daddy. He didn’t look like this then, he looked… well… not ‘normal,’ not exactly, but not like this, all decayed. He looked at least alive. He had skin and hair and everything. And I saw him crouching down underneath the shed, so I yelled at him, asked him what he was doin’ here. Then he jumped out and he tried to bite me!”

“Bite you?”

“Yeah! But I kicked him and tried to run off. He tackled me from behind and he was tryin’ to hold me down, so I grabbed that ol’ tree branch an’…”

His voice trailed off and N.J.’s eyes widened in realization. “You did this to him?”

I managed to stab him in the back with it an’ he stopped movin’. I was just tryin’ to hit him, not kill him, but the branch went through way easier than you’d think. When I saw what I did, I pulled the branch out.” To verify his claim, Newton lifted the body up on one side, revealing a hole in his t-shirt.

“When I pulled it out, though, he sat up like he ain’t never been hurt at all, an’ he jumped at me again. That’s when I did this.” He lay the corpse back again and pointed to where the branch now protruded from the body’s chest. “After that I just sat there for a minute, kinda stunned, and then the body started to change. It rotted right there, Daddy, while I was watching it, and it finally turned to that.”

N.J. couldn’t believe it. This… thing had tied to bite his son, his boy, and now it lay here, dead from a broken tree branch? A piece of… wood… driven into…

N.J. walked to the thing’s head and forced its mouth open with his fingers. Situated in the top row of teeth, jutting out proud as a peacock, where two yellow, pointy fangs.

He looked up at his son and realized for the first time how stunned the boy really way. The boy’s eyes were red, bloodshot, and his hand was up over his mouth.

“Daddy?” he whispered. “Am I gonna be in trouble?”

N.J. shook his head. “Naw, Number Tree. You done good. You done real good.”

Security

October 28, 12 p.m. Year of the Curtain+5
Los Angeles, California

Max wondered, and wondered intently, just how Annabell planned to outfit them for what was going to happen in New Orleans. He’d started to amass his own collection of weapons, including stakes, knives, a handgun, and a few specially-made (and highly expensive) silver bullets, but he knew there was no way he was getting any of that stuff onto an airplane. As tight as airport security became after 9/11, once the Curtain was pulled aside, it got even worse. There were mandatory x-rays for all luggage (checked or carry on), random patdowns and body density scans (a metal detector wouldn’t find a wooden stake, after all), and automatic physical inspections of any bag or parcel that weighed more than 50 pounds. None of this was even a tacit admission that the things that turned up in the Year of the Curtain were real – it was just a reaction to more loony toons showing up at airports trying to smuggle through umbrellas with hidden swords and squirt guns full of Holy Water.

Max remembered when getting to an airport two hours before a flight was adequate. Now if you weren’t there four hours early, you may still be able to get on the plane, but odds were your checked luggage would not. The cultural upshot, he decided, was that as people spent more time sitting around airports and waiting in line, eBook and e-reader sales had gone through the roof.

Max and Brie were at the already-crowded gate some two and a half hours before their flight, he reading Dave Barry’s latest book, while she continued to pour over some ancient texts about vampires. Annabell had taken an earlier flight, cryptically saying she had a “stop to make” and would meet them in New Orleans tomorrow morning.

“So how did you get the little woman to agree to this?” Brie asked.

“Marissa? She wasn’t thrilled that I’m going to the Booze and Strip Club Capital of the South to help kill vampires, but she seems to understand that this is a business trip.”

“I wish I understood.” Brie put her Kindle town and looked up at him. “Do you ever wonder why we’re doing this, Max?”

“What, why we’re riding off to get ourselves killed?”

“Exactly. I mean… I know how we got dragged in, and I know we did okay when we took on those zombies, but we didn’t have a choice then. That happened all around us, it was fight or die. Why are we still looking for trouble now? Why can’t we just be like everyone else who survives a Curtain encounter and just get on with our lives?”

He didn’t answer for a moment, but he was just choosing his words carefully. This whole topic was something he’d given extensive thought to in the last year.

“Remember after it happened, Brie? All those people dead, and the movie studio started to whip out those incredibly stupid stories to try to spin it into something else? How we got fired for talking to the press about it?”

“Of course.”

“That’s how it started for me. We looked into the eyes of Hell and now Ned Mason and the rest of the Climax Studios muckety mucks wanted to make us look crazy. So at first, I just wanted to prove them wrong.”

“But we’ve done that. The studio will never admit it, but most people believe they’re covering something up now. Even people who don’t believe in the Curtain still think the studio is hiding something.”

“Right, but… Things kept happening. Even when people believed us, people were getting hurt. Dying.” He grinned. “Remember Tim and Casey?”

“How could I forget?” Tim Ferris and Casey King were former Anaheim PD detectives, and they’d put themselves on the line with Max and the others when the undead struck Climax Studios. Brie knew that Max had gained a sort of hero worship of the two of them, especially Ferris, and she found herself wishing (not for the first time) that they were with them now.

“They saved us. Maybe saved the whole city. It seems to me the thing to do is… I don’t know… pay it forward.”

“Why us?”

“Because it’s gotta be somebody, or we all lose. And because most people will just say, ‘Why us?’ and go back to their chat rooms and blogs and never make a real difference. If it’s gotta be somebody, Brie, than it may as well be me.”

“Or us?”

“Doesn’t have you be you, you know that.”

She audibly sighed, exaggerating to break the gravity of the moment. “Yeah, but if it’s just you, you’ll get yourself killed and there’ll be no one to stroke my gargantuan and extremely needy ego.”

“There is that.”

“That there is.”

“Shall we, then?”

“Let’s. Let’s go kill something that’s already dead.”