Chapter 15
ABOUT TWENTY YARDS past the memorial wall, we came to a corner. Rabbit knelt down and peeked around the corner, then pulled his head back and stood up. “It’s empty,” he said, not even bothering to whisper. “There’s a door maybe fifteen feet ahead, and there’s a sign that says Sanctuary.”
“I guess we found it,” I said, stepping past him and starting down the hall.
Greg immediately reached out and dragged me back. “Dude! Come on! You gotta check for traps and surveillance and shit like that first! What if somebody’s watching?”
I looked down at my best friend of over thirty years. “Dial it down a little, Gygax. We ain’t knocking on Tiamat’s back door. We’re walking up to a door in a tunnel under an abandoned mall in North Carolina. Besides, what kind of camera can see in pitch black? It’s not like we put off a lot of infrared.” I shook off his hand and walked around the corner.
Rabbit was right, set into the tunnel was a standard metal door, the kind you see in buildings all over the world. There was a sign on it that read “Sanctuary—Abandon All Pain, Ye Who Enter Here.” I walked up to the door and put my hand on it. From the other side I heard a low thrum, like machinery, or a lot of people talking. I put my head to the door to listen closer, but nothing came through.
“Oh well, in for a penny, and all that,” I said, turning the knob and pushing the door open. I had a fleeting hope that the sign wasn’t some modern-day “Arbeit Macht Frei” irony, and stepped through.
I immediately covered my eyes as light flooded in from the opening. Blinded, I side-stepped and ducked the attack I was certain was coming, and rammed my shoulder right into someone standing by the door.
“Ooof!” came a grunt, then, “It’s okay, calm down. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Just give your eyes a second to adjust.” A pair of hands latched on to my upper arm and steadied me, then straightened me up a little. Another pair of hands materialized in front of my face, these holding a pair of dark sunglasses. The hands slipped the shades onto my eyes, and I could see a little better. The hands in front of me belonged to a slim girl vampire turned at about twenty, while a stocky male vamp turned at around forty held my arm. I straightened myself and stepped back a step to survey my surroundings.
“Thanks,” I said, disengaging from the man on my arm. “I appreciate it.” My eyes felt pretty good, so I took off the shades, thankful for the speed of undead healing.
“Holy shit, it’s bright in here!” I heard from behind me as Greg and Rabbit came through the doors.
“It’s okay, guys,” I said. “Let them help you.”
“I’m good,” Greg said. “You let enough light into the tunnel that I covered my eyes.”
I turned to look at my partner, and almost fell over laughing. He was original, no doubt about that, but fashion-conscious wasn’t exactly a term I’d use to describe Greg Knightwood. He had a black balaclava on, of course, because what self-respecting superhero/Special Forces operative wannabe wouldn’t wear a balaclava with his tactical gear? But Greg, being both inventive and impatient, didn’t wait for his eyes to adjust to the light, he just spun the high-tech ski mask around so that his face was completely covered, cutting out most of the light. And making him look like Frosty the Blackface Snowman. I had to hand it to him, the man knew how to make an entrance.
“No ski mask, Rabbit?” I asked.
He looked at Greg feeling his way along the wall. “Nah. I’d rather be blind than look like that. So what is this place?”
“Like I know? I got here ten seconds before you did.” I turned to the man beside me. “So what is this place?” I repeated.
“Welcome to Sanctuary,” the man said. “I am Brother Ryan. This is Sister Sandra. We have welcome duty today.”
“That’s a nice way to say sentry,” I said with a wry smile. I handed Sandra back her sunglasses. “Thanks.”
“We are not guards or sentries,” the girl said. “We are the welcoming committee, if you will. It is our honor to bring you into Sanctuary and make you feel at home. You can relax. You’re safe now.” From the mild smile on her face, I could tell that she actually believed what she said. I looked her and Ryan up and down and didn’t see a weapon anywhere. They really weren’t guards, because if anything got in, these two sure weren’t going to stop anybody with ill intent.
“What exactly are you welcoming us to?” I asked. “What is this place?”
“It is nothing more or less than its name,” Sandra replied. “This is Sanctuary. It is a haven for our kind, far from the dangers of the surface world. Here we can live as we choose, without fear of the sun and its fire, without being hunted by the humans, and without the rule of false masters.”
I felt that one a little. I was pretty sure that meant me, whether she knew who I was or not. “So what? Nobody’s in charge? You’ve just got a nice little hippie commune of vampires in an abandoned subway tunnel and nobody fights? Sounds . . . even better than I heard,” I corrected mid-sentence to add in that last bit when I saw suspicion start to blossom on her round face.
Her beatific smile returned, and it looked like I dodged that bullet. “Oh no, we certainly have our arguments. But we settle them amongst ourselves. We have the same challenges as every family does, with the added challenges of needing to forage for food without running afoul of the surface leaders, the sewer-dwellers, or the humans.”
“Seems complicated,” I said. “Why not just ally yourselves with either the Morlocks or the people topside?”
“Alexander says that neither group would accept us living the way we want to live. He says the Morlocks are all dirty hooligans who would want to take away our nice things, and that the Master is a false leader who would draw us into his petty wars and get us all killed. Alexander keeps us safe here.”
I had to admit, the place was nice. While she talked, Sister Sandy walked me from the door down a wide tunnel that opened out into what must have at one time been a planned subway station. It was huge, big enough for a couple of basketball courts to fit side by side, and tall, too. There was plenty of light from warm yellow LED fixtures, and a couple dozen big tents and small outbuildings like toolsheds ringing the room. More tunnels led off from the main area, and there were at least thirty vampires roaming to and fro, carrying laundry and chatting, some just sitting at tables reading. There was a small stage at one end of the room, maybe fifteen by twenty, with folding tables set up with chairs around them. The seats were empty at the moment, but the arrangement looked like where the boss would sit during meals.
“Looks like a medieval feast hall,” I said. “The king sits up there and looks down on his subjects, I guess?”
“Oh no,” Sandra corrected me. “Alexander does sit at the front table, yes, with two or three advisors, but the rest of the table is open to whoever wants to join them, or anyone who has ideas for Alexander. I sit there at least once a week just to chat with . . .” Her voice trailed off, and a faint blush crept across her face.
“You got a little crush on King Alex?” I teased.
“No!” she said. “Alexander is way too old for me. I’m barely fifty. He’s been around since before the Civil War. No, I’m . . . friends with Jacob, one of his engineers. He’s a little younger than me, only about thirty, and turned just a couple of years ago. But he’s very smart. I think he’ll do well with us. He’s the one who figured out how to tap the gas lines and get the stoves going.”
“How long has all this been here?” Greg had caught up to us by now, along with a very subdued Rabbit.
“Two years. Ever since the murders.” Sandra’s face darkened, and I knew she didn’t want to talk about the massacre. I didn’t care, I needed to know.
“Were you here then?” I asked.
“No. I just moved to Charlotte about a year ago. I ran into some trouble with the Master in my last city, so I decided to come down here. I heard the Master was dead, and there wasn’t really anybody running things, so that sounded pretty good to me.” It sounded pretty bad to me, like I needed to hire a better PR department. Then I remembered that I didn’t have a PR department. I smiled encouragingly and waited for her to continue.
“So I was kinda hanging out, doing my own thing, when I was out hunting one night and I ran into some of the guys from here at a club. I didn’t know if I was in somebody’s territory, and if there was going to be trouble, but Ryan just came up to me at the bar, bought me a drink, and asked if I was new in town.” She laughed a little. “It was kinda like when I was alive, back when guys used to try to pick me up. So I told him I was, and he asked if I needed a place to crash, that he and his friends were part of a group that had a decent place to live that was safe in the daytime, and as long as I wasn’t planning on killing my dinner, I was welcome to come with them.”
“And that sounded good to you?” Greg asked.
“Man, yeah. I’d been on the road from Miami for three weeks, sleeping in the trunks of abandoned cars, hiding in empty storage lockers, all kinds of shit. I even spent the day huddled in the bottom of an ice machine at a Motel 6 one time! So all I had to do to get in with a bunch of vamps that would watch my back during the day was not kill somebody? I was in like Flynn, man. I don’t kill people. That’s not my thing, never has been. So I came down here with Ryan, hung out for a few days, and then I met Alexander. That’s when I knew I was in the right place.”
“What is it about Alexander that made you want to stay?” I asked. I was getting a very different vibe from her about this guy than Rabbit had given me. Rabbit made Alexander sound like bloodthirsty megalomaniac who hated me and wanted to wear my guts around his neck like a Grand Guignol version of Mr. T. But now Sandra was making him sound like Buddha, or Jesus. So I wasn’t sure if I was going to be meeting Gandhi or David Koresh.
“He’s just got a good plan, you know? We hang out down here during the day, some of us have jobs where we telecommute or do contract gigs like web design or copywriting where we don’t ever have to interact with our clients personally. Other folks who have more hands-on kind of skills work to make the whole place better for everybody. Then at night we can hunt, or play, or go out, or party. We do whatever we want, as long as we live by Alexander’s rules.”
“What are those rules, exactly?” Greg asked.
Sandra looked at him with a big smile on her face. “I hoped you’d ask. We never kill. We never drink from the same person twice. We don’t hunt every day. We don’t hunt the same part of town more than once in a week. We don’t mess with cops, firefighters, or EMTs. Anybody that’s working a job like that, we leave them alone. We don’t turn anybody—ever. That’s like the one unforgivable sin. Alexander says we’re not here to make more vampires, we’re just here to rescue the ones that are already here.”
“Sounds like paradise,” I said.
“It’s as close as anything I’ve ever found, and I’ve been looking a long time. We don’t mess with the human crap that the Masters deal with, and we don’t deal with other supernaturals, like the lycanthropes or witches, or other magical creatures. That keeps us out of politics, and keeps us safer. We just hang out, take the occasional nibble from one of the million blood donors topside, and otherwise do what we like. It’s the best place I’ve ever lived, including when I was alive.”
“That’s impressive,” I said. And it was. The operation looked pretty good. The place was spotless, warm, well lit, and everybody walking by stopped to give a pleasant nod or a wave. And nobody was armed. That was the other big difference between this place and Morlock City. Every Morlock was packing, all the time, no matter what. I’d never seen Rabbit without at least two knives on him that I could see, and I knew full well there were probably another half dozen I couldn’t see. But if these folks were armed, they had their shit tucked away somewhere in their very clean jeans, skirts, and T-shirts.
“Can I get you something to eat? We don’t keep much blood on hand, but I’m sure I could rustle up a few bags from the canteen.” Sandra waved her hand over to a large tent in the center of the room by the picnic tables. There were several refrigerators humming away, each labeled with A, B, O, or AB.
“How do you get power down here?” Greg asked.
“Oh we have everything,” Sandra said. “A couple of the guys used to work in construction, or for utilities, and they figured out how to tap into one of the switching stations and reroute some power between meters. We’ve got cable and high-speed internet, too.”
“So what do you need money for?” I asked. “You said some people work. Why?”
“Well, we do need to buy clothes, and gas for the cars, and then there’s the Bloodmobile.”
“Wait, what?” I held up a hand. “You have a Bloodmobile?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. She pointed off to one side of the room, in the general direction of one of the side tunnels. “We have a human staff that runs a donation van, and we get about half the blood we need from donations. That’s where a lot of our money goes, into paying the humans and upkeep on the bus. And marketing. Jerri and Sol are in charge of booking the Bloodmobile, and that’s a full-time gig. Those two are what really keeps the red stuff flowing around here.”
“Impressive,” I said, and I meant it. Whoever this Alexander guy was, he was running a pretty good little gig here, and he was running it right under my nose. Part of me really hated that, but another part of me had to give him props for it.
“Well, that’s high praise coming from you, isn’t it?” A tall vampire who looked to be in his thirties said from a good twenty yards away. Then he blurred into motion and dashed right over to stand in front of me, his right hand extended. “I’m Alexander. Welcome to Sanctuary. May you and yours be safe and hale while under our protection.”
I shook his hand. “Thanks for the hospitality,” I said. “Nice place you have here. I just wish I’d known about it sooner.”
“Why, so you could levy a tax on it?” Alexander asked with a cold smile. “Don’t bother trying to pretend with me. I know who you are, Master Jimmy Black.”
I heard a gasp from beside me and knew without looking that Sandra was glaring daggers at me. “Yeah, but you can call me Jimmy. Unless you’re into the whole Master thing. It’s your call. Now, you want to talk out in the open, or would you like to take our conversation somewhere a little more private?”
“I have no secrets from my people, Master Black.” He was obviously going to run this “Master” thing into the ground and make me look like as big a douche as possible. Little did he know I didn’t need his help for that.
“Okay, then. What do you know about the murder and turning of Julia O’Connell?” Greg asked from my left elbow.
“Nothing,” Alexander said, his eyes never leaving mine. “We don’t make vampires. Ever. It’s one of the very few rules of living here.”
“Bullshit, Alex!” Rabbit said from behind Greg. “You hate me, you hate Jimmy, and you killed that girl to get back at us. She smelled like you, you son of a bitch. I know it was you!”
Alexander looked a little surprised at Rabbit’s outburst, but nothing about him looked guilty. But that wasn’t the biggest problem with Rabbit’s accusation. “No, she didn’t,” I said.
“What?” Rabbit and Greg spoke simultaneously. It was obviously time to separate them before they became any more attached at the hip.
I turned to the little vampire. “She didn’t smell like this place, Rabbit. It’s way too clean. I don’t think Alexander had anything to do with Julia’s death.”
“Well, that’s good to hear,” Alexander said. “Feel free to exit back the way you came.”
I sighed and shook my head, then turned around to Alexander. “Nah, I think we might still have a few things to chat about. Like you running a crew of vampires in my territory without my knowledge or permission.”
“Neither of which I need,” Alexander said, his voice mild but his shoulders tense. He was ready to throw down, but I was trying to keep that from happening. At least for the moment.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Alex.” I intentionally cut off the last bit of his name, just to tweak him a little. It worked, too. I could see a hint of red at the collar of his perfectly starched dress shirt. I’ll admit, part of me wanted to kick his ass because he’d found a way to live without all the BS that came with vampire society. Part of me wanted to kick his ass just because he was better-looking than me. But if I beat up everybody that was prettier than me, I’d never stop punching people. So I shoved that part of me down into a little box and tucked it away.
“You see, I am the Master of the City, whether you want to live by my rules or not. So now that I know you’re here, we’re going to have to deal with each other. Or else.”
“Or else?”
“Ask Gordon Tiram about or else. Oh wait, you can’t, he’s dead.” I smiled, an expression that dropped away with Alexander’s next words.
“In that case, Jimmy Black, I issue this as a formal challenge. I challenge you for the right to be Master of the City.”
Well shit. Didn’t see that one coming.