They might not have felt it, but they sure as hell would’ve seen the result. Curran would be thrilled. Just thrilled. At least I could repair my cuts now. In the old days I would have had to slap a bandage on my arm and then set the damn boat on fire to keep my blood from exposing me.
The chunks still kept falling. The deck was almost completely blue now.
Usually that phrase didn’t explode its targets, even with the added punch of my blood. Usually, it just broke bones. This had never happened before. There must not have been any bones for it to break. I would have to discuss it with my aunt during our bi-weekly phone call. She taught me this phrase and didn’t mention anything about aquatic creatures bursting. Kind of a crucial detail there.
The boats that were crossing the river reversed course and sped away from us.
If I’d known the monster would explode, I would’ve used something else. It was supposed to just quietly sink.
Scully gaped at me, still clutching the railing.
“This is your fault,” I told him and pulled a long, blue clump off my head.
He cringed.
“Don’t move and don’t say anything. I mean it. Not a word.”
He nodded frantically.
Ten minutes later we disembarked. As soon as we hit the dry land, Scully limped into the cabin, pulled away, made a sharp left turn, and headed up the river as fast as his boat could go.
“You have something in your hair,” Thomas said.
I picked another clump out. It felt limp like oyster meat. I tossed it into the river, took my canteen out of Cuddles’ saddle bag, and rinsed my hair.
“Better?”
“Some.”
I rinsed it a bit more.
“Low profile, huh?” Thomas said.
“Yep. Would you rather I had let that thing pull the boat under?”
He shook his head.
I pictured Curran’s face in my head. Hi, honey, I accidentally exploded some kind of baby kraken in the Cape Fear River in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses. Yes, I do remember that I was the one who originally insisted on the lying low thing. Yes, I do recall that you said it would never work. No, it’s not funny…
I put the cap back onto the canteen and slid it into the saddlebag. “Let’s get to the Farm while we still have some daylight left.”
4
The road was narrow but well maintained. Fields stretched on both sides, fluffy blueberry rows on the left and a wall of corn on the right. The sun was slowly but steadily rolling toward the horizon somewhere behind the corn.
That’s what you want, visiting the navigators just before dusk. Ugh.
In my mind’s eye, eleven red sparks burned like annoying little embers, five to the right and six to the left. Two vampire teams, each spark an undead piloted by a navigator. We couldn’t see them, but they were there, steadily working their way to us.
When my father had created the People, his purposes were complex and layered. He had wanted a network of information-gathering installations and access to a garrison armed with deadly weapons in every major city. Because vampires were expensive to obtain and maintain, he had needed these installations to generate income. He had also required a way to bring talented navigators under his control, train them, and indoctrinate them into a hierarchy with himself at the top of the pyramid. He had strove toward a monopoly on vampire ownership, while also devoting much of his considerable resources to research into undeath and its uses. The truth, which he readily admitted to me, despite his massive ego, was that even though he had originated vampirism, he didn’t fully comprehend the mechanism by which it worked.
The People were the answer to all those needs. Their bases performed community outreach, operated entertainment venues, apprehended loose vampires at no charge, and provided an opportunity for the terminally ill to sell their bodies to be infected with the Immortuus pathogen, which would turn them into vampires after death, for a substantial payout to their family. The population at large simply accepted the People, somehow ignoring the fact that they could unleash a horde of lethal monsters in the centers of most cities at any moment.
It was perhaps my father’s second greatest confidence scheme. He had managed to convince everyone that the People were perfectly safe, productive contributors to their local community, when a single vampire, piloted by a skilled Master of the Dead, could depopulate ten city blocks in a matter of minutes.
On the left, an undead scuttled into view. Gaunt, hairless, and smeared in purple sunblock, it moved on all fours like its body had never walked upright. It was as if something took a human, bled them dry, skinned them, stripped off all their fat, and then stretched a thick, leathery hide over the bone and muscle. A nightmare come to life. The small cross-body satchel hanging from its left shoulder somehow just made the horror of it worse.
Thomas stiffened a little.
The vamp paid us no mind. It rose to a half crouch, plucked blueberries with stiletto claws, and deposited them into the satchel.
We drew even with it.
The bloodsucker pulled a berry off, and it popped between its claws. A young female voice came from its mouth. “Damn it.”
The vamp shook its hand, flinging purple juice off, and plucked another berry.
Plop.
“Damn it.”
We rode on. Her voice faded behind us.
“Damn it. Damn it. Damn it…”
“Why use vampires?” Thomas asked quietly.
“Dexterity training. Blueberries are a good measure of control. Squeeze too hard, and they burst. Most good navigators never stop practicing. I know a Master of the Dead who knits elaborate lace socks for practice. Two vamps at a time, perfectly in sync.”
Thomas raised his eyebrows.
Another vamp emerged from the berry bushes, looking roughly the same as the one before, except its sunblock was Pepto-Bismol-pink. It set about gathering the berries, but instead of plucking them by claw, this vamp had a pair of tiny manicure scissors, and it snipped the berries one by one.
The team in the corn glided next to us, moving through the stalks just out of our view. Our lovely escort doing their best to stay hidden.
The People’s base in Atlanta, headquartered in the Casino, was an all-purpose installation, equal parts research institute, vampire stable, and money machine. Wilmington’s Farm was a different beast. It was almost entirely a military installation, conceived by my father as a training facility where promising journeymen were sent to hone their control and learn tactics and team combat. It was the People’s boot camp and a convenient reserve of the undead close enough to Atlanta to get there within a day but too far for me to exert any influence over them. They raised livestock and grew feed, and they trained future and current Masters of the Dead.
Unlike a lot of other People offices, the Farm didn’t need to interact with the general public to make its money. When the People had fractured into individual groups following my father’s exile, the Farm remained exactly as it was. Instead of being subsidized by the Golden Legion, it had simply started charging the individual People offices for its training. My father had given Barrett Shaw a job, and as far as Barrett was concerned, he would keep doing it until my father told him to stop.
I had to admire the setup. The Farm took up almost all of Eagles Island, about 3,100 acres of it sitting pretty just west of Wilmington, sectioned off from the rest of the state by the Cape Fear River in the east and the Brunswick River to the west. Pre-Shift, there was a three-point road junction in the northeast corner of the island. The junction was still there, although it was now called Vampire Highway. The half-acre buffer zone around Vampire Highway was state land. The rest was the private property of the Farm.