“Our lives are in your hands,” I told him. The boat rocked beneath us as the coastline faded away. I held onto the rail and tried not to dry heave again. Gimble shook his head. He wrote something down and showed it to me.
We can’t hide out here.
When sun goes down we’re fucked.
“You got a point,” I said. I stared across the waves, watching the sunlight dance like diamonds. “But they may not follow us over the big salt. They don’t like the water one bit.”
Gimble wrote again. Do you think they went after Marion?
“No,” I said. “I think they wanted her to go. She’s going to him. They all are.”
Sorry, Gimble wrote.
“Can you get us to the French coast? No bullshit.” I had only half-believed him when he told me the first time. I would risk anything to go after Marion. I’d have made the voyage myself in a goddamn rowboat if I had too.
I can do it, Gimble wrote. Unless something kills me first.
I showed him the automatic rifle slung across my shoulder.
“We have plenty of ammo and real sharp eyes,” I said. The boys had stocked up at an abandoned department store before we left. More guns, plenty of bullets.
I don’t trust guns. Not against vamps, Gimble wrote.
I pulled the silver blade from its sheathe. It sliced the sunlight into tiny rainbows.
Now THAT I trust, Gimble wrote.
He pulled out a sharpened iron cross that he used as stake. He’d staked hundreds of vamps with it. We all carried something like it. Gimble’s other hand scribbled with the little pencil.
That and this.
During a month at sea we saw three minor storms and ran completely out of provisions. We tried fishing, but the things we pulled out of the ocean were not fish. They weren’t quite squids or urchins either, but something like a combination of the two. They bit a few fingers off before the men stopped fishing altogether.
I sat hungry in the bow of the boat, watching the flat horizon of neverending blue. The NYC vamps never did come after us. Maybe they wanted us gone. Maybe they knew we were headed toward the master. Or maybe they knew we’d starve and die out here, and we weren’t worth the trouble of a chase. They had millions of slaves to feed on, mile after mile of underground pens. Vamps never went hungry in Drac’s world.
I thought the sea would kill us long before vamps did. The long nights were the worst. We had been used to hiding and sleeping at night — living only during the daytime. It was the key to our survival on the mainland. But out on the ocean we couldn’t sleep much. The rocking of the boat was constant, and even when it no longer made us sick, it still kept us awake. The threat of being exposed on the open water kept everybody on edge. We all knew that if we let our guard down, that’s the moment something shitty would happen. So we sailed on, bleary-eyed and hollow-bellied, day after day and night after night.
Something huge passed over us one night. It blotted out the stars and I wondered how such a massive bulk could stay aloft. It must weigh tons. A mountain of black flesh glimmered with slime, which fell across the sea like a soft rain. Men rushed for the shelter of the cabin to avoid getting that scum on their skin. Samuel, the 14-year-old, took a glob of slime right in the face. His flesh dissolved into a steaming mess as he stumbled over the railing and fell into the sea.
The leviathan’s wings made terrible winds as it passed over us. The lights of its roaming eye-clusters glowed like red moons. I thought it might swallow us whole, until I realized that we were actually beneath its notice. Just a tiny speck of metal bobbing on the ocean with a few tiny meat-morsels clinging to it. Torres wouldn’t stop screaming, even after the leviathan rose into the stars. Or maybe it flew behind the moon. I couldn’t really tell.
Mudder slugged Torres to knock him out, but when he woke up again he came at me like a rabid dog. His eyes spewed green mucous and clots of blood, his yellow teeth tore at my sleeve. Mudder shot him in the back of the head, and we tossed his twitching corpse over the rail. Jenkins said a few kind words, but we all knew Torres was better off dead than starving out here with us.
“How do you do it?” Mudder asked me. He drank from his last bottle of Tequila, drowning out the guilt of killing Torres. They had been friends. “How do you keep going? Why not just give up and die?”
“If you wanna die, then go ahead and die,” I said. “Nobody can stop you. Me, I’m gonna find Marion.”
That seemed to satisfy him. We finished off the bottle.
It’s almost time to make that final climb. The sun will be up soon, and I won’t have to hide in this crevice anymore. There isn’t much time to tell you how we came to ground south of Paris and marched on foot across the vamp-infested countryside.
We found provisions in abandoned hamlets and bombed-out villages. Nobody starved to death. The French countryside was quiet, green, and beautiful during the daytime. At night we hid in old cellars, caves, and decrepit factories, always making our way toward Switzerland, then on into Austria and Hungary.
We even met a few resistance bands in those mountains, folks hiding away from Drac’s world right in the shadow of his own kingdom. They helped us out more than once, getting us out of jams, offering us a place to stay, restocking our ammunition when we needed it. But we were outsiders who didn’t speak their language. We never stayed more than a single night with any band of survivors. Somewhere along the way we lost Gimble, along with about half our number.
As we crossed the Romanian border a patrol of military vamps ambushed us. They wore the shapes of men with black-and-crimson uniforms, but the wings of demons grew from their backs. I could tell you every bloody detail of that fight. It still replays in my head every damn night. I watched them tear out Mudder’s throat, and there was nothing I could do. I took out the vamp that killed him, but there were so many more of them. I could tell you that I killed twenty of the bastards, or even thirty. I could lie and say I was a hero that day. But I ran away. They tore the last of my friends to pieces as I slipped into a gulch and ran until the sun came up.
It was a coward’s escape. But I was too close to die now.
Too close to Marion.
Day after day I watched the towers of Castle Dracula rising from the range ahead of me. I would reach it alone, weeping for those I had abandoned. Only when I came to stand before the mountain did I realize there was no more road to follow. No way up to the master’s house. But I had come prepared for that.
For six days I’ve been climbing, and every night I write in Gimble’s notebook.
But now it’s time to leave it behind and do what I came to do.
Time for one last climb.
Time to find Marion.
I wrap the notebook in a plastic bag and stash it beneath a flat rock. A message for future generations, if there are any. A record of my existence and Marion’s. A love note for the ages. The gun is too heavy and clumsy for this part of the climb, so I leave it behind with the heavy pack. Now it’s just me, my ropes and crampons, my iron spikes. The wind screams in my face like a devil.