“Forty-nine dollars a night for this rattrap,” she told Jim when she got back to the car.
“Sounds like a bargain.”
“Yeah, I just hope it’s not infested with bedbugs.”
Jim couldn’t help smiling. While there was a resurgence of bedbugs going on nationwide, and while this motor lodge seemed like a prime candidate to find an infestation, this was something they didn’t have to worry about. The only positive he could see about his infection was that blood-seeking insects like mosquitoes, bedbugs and lice reacted to his scent the same as dogs. If this dump did have bedbugs, they’d scatter as soon as he entered the room. Fuck, if he could only advertise he’d make a fortune clearing pests from motels and residences.
Carol brought him back to reality by mentioning how they were running low on cash.
“We’ll get some more soon.”
“We’d better. Three nights here and we’re broke.”
Jim nodded, then moved slowly as he pulled himself out of the car. Carol looked on, her hard smile turning fragile. She grabbed a suitcase-they’d been traveling light with only a couple of changes of clothing each-and walked slowly to keep pace with him so she’d be able to reach out to him in case he stumbled. She had gotten them a room on the first floor knowing he’d have trouble now with the stairs. The room did have a king-sized waterbed, but other than that it was as Jim expected; dirty, dingy, the walls concrete cinderblock, the ceiling water-stained and the furniture looking like it had been picked out of the city dump. It also had the unmistakable musty smell of a gym locker-room. Jim made it to a cheap padded wooden chair, dragged it away from the window and collapsed in it. Carol moved quickly to close the blinds. The room darkened enough to where Jim no longer felt like a fire was raging under his skin. He breathed a little easier, but now more than anything it was his hunger overwhelming him.
Carol pulled the bedspread off and kicked it away into a corner, then opened the suitcase and removed a small medical kit from her nursing school days. From inside of it she took out a rubber hose and a syringe. She wrapped the hose tightly around her upper arm, then walked over to Jim and sat in his lap while he pulled the hose even tighter and tied it. She walked back to her medical kit, sat down on the bed and flicked on her arm until she could spot a vein. She had such thin arms, and it was hard for her to locate a good vein. Once she had one, she pushed in the syringe and took a blood sample, her face a complete blank as she did this. Jim kept his eyes squeezed shut. He couldn’t risk seeing blood now, not in the state he was in. He heard her remove the plastic vial from within the syringe, then the rush of blood filling up a second vial as she took another blood sample. After a minute or so, he could hear the hose being untied, and then the door opening and closing. He was ashamed of the fact that he was salivating.
When Carol returned, she brought an ice bucket with her. On the bottom of the bucket covered with ice were her two blood samples. He’d have to wait until later to drink them-while there was far less than a pint of blood in those two samples, it would still revitalize him enough to give him the strength for what he needed to do. If he drank it now, though, it would make him want to keep feeding until he was satiated. It would be too dangerous. Carol knew this also. She placed the ice bucket in a drawer so it would be out of sight. Then she helped him out of the chair and onto the bed. While he lay flat on his back, she sidled up next to him and rested her cheek on his stomach and took hold of his arm so she could wrap it around her shoulders.
They lay together like that for several minutes before she spoke.
“Try and get some sleep, Darling,” she whispered. “In a few hours it will be dark. You’ll be able to feed then.”
He nodded, his chin moving up and down a fraction of an inch.
“It’s too bad you can’t feed on infected blood,” she said, sighing softly. “Otherwise you could just infect me and we could feed off of each other forever. How would that be?”
Again, he nodded because there was no harm in doing so. The virus changed a person’s blood chemistry, making drinking it intolerable to an infected vampire. Early on in his infection while in a half-dream-like state and without any real conscious awareness-only his hunger driving him-he had tried feeding on Serena. Only a bare taste of her blood left him as sick as a dog. Serena got a kick out of it, then explained the ropes to him while his body was wracked with dry heaves. It didn’t matter, though. Even if he could consume infected blood, he’d rather cut out his own heart than infect Carol.
Carol moved her hand lightly over Jim’s chest, trying to soothe him. “Sleep, my darling,” she whispered. “Just a few more hours…”
Chapter 2
When Metcalf left the modest three-bedroom ranch-style house he was decked out in a lightweight trench coat, Indiana Jones-style felt hat complete with rattlesnake-skin band, dark shades, chinos and racing gloves-all of which he needed to protect himself against the oppressive Southern California sun. Like every other infected vampire, his body had gone through radical changes since his infection-losing all body fat and becoming leaner, narrower, his face more angular, but even with these changes he was still massive. Six and a half feet tall and two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and tendon. A thick scar ran from his right eye to his chin, and stood out against the paleness of his skin. His shades hid the same dead pale blue eyes that he had since birth.
He moved quickly across the field that separated the house from an equally modest looking barn, his head turned down as if he were racing against hurricane gales even through the air was dead still. Although he was covered head to toe, the damn sunlight still made him nauseous.
The inside of the barn held a tractor, some standard farming tools and bales of hay. On the other side of the barn were the stables holding four beautiful golden Palominos. While the altered blood chemistry of a vampire secreted an odor that was noxious to most animals, especially dogs, horses didn’t seem to have a problem with it. Metcalf loved grooming and riding his horses. It probably seemed crazy for an infected vampire to move to Southern California and the intense sun, but for Metcalf, once he decided to split from Serena and open up operations on the West Coast, the spot proved ideal. He had access to all the transients and other such disposable people that he needed and the farm was situated in an isolated rural area seventy miles outside of Los Angeles giving him total privacy. He could still get into the city at night for the music scene or to the beach for surfing. And he had all the space he needed for riding his horses.
Metcalf took off his shades. Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness he walked to the back of the barn where he crouched so he could fit his fingers between the wall and concrete flooring. Straining, he lifted up a twelve-hundred pound slab of concrete flooring that exposed a well-lit staircase. The concrete slab had been reinforced throughout with steel to keep it from breaking apart. None of the other infected vampires at the compound had the strength to lift the slab which was the way Metcalf wanted it. He held up the flooring until he could get onto the staircase, then he lowered the concrete behind him with one hand.
The staircase led thirty feet below ground level to an eighteen thousand square foot compound that had been separated into four areas: the “cattle” pens, a research lab, Metcalf’s own private lab and living quarters for the fifteen vampires who were housed there. The cost to build the compound came to over six million dollars, but money was not an issue, not with the amounts that Serena was able to get her hands on. The owner of the construction company Metcalf had hired to do the job was later found brutally murdered, as well as his family, several months after completion of the compound, all of the bodies drained of their blood. The construction crew had been made up of illegal immigrants and all of them disappeared at the same time also, at least as far as the authorities were concerned. Of course, the police were still looking for them thinking that one or more of them might’ve had something to do with the massacre of their boss and his family, but the authorities weren’t going to find any of them. The ones that were still living were “guests” within Metcalf’s private lab, the others were long since dead and disposed of. As far as Metcalf knew, aside from Serena and her people, no one outside of the compound had any idea about its existence, and he was going to keep it that way.