Chapter Twenty-One

She returned to her room because there was nowhere else she felt comfortable to venture. There were so many strangers and places she wasn’t familiar with, and this was her only refuge. Sitting in bed trying to clear her mind, she overheard rattling in the air duct. At first, it sounded like a piece of gravel bouncing down the shaft and pinging downward. Then it was a steady tick-tick-tick, like the slow drag of metal against metal.

She peeked through the grates, startled and curious at once, but it was too dark to see anything. The noises didn’t cease. Whatever the source was, it wasn’t afraid to be noticed. Training her senses harder, she backed up at the sound of trickling water—so strange! The stream must’ve been ice cold, she thought. She could feel the chilly sensation blow through the grates. A soft mewl added to the strange chorus, though it was faded by distance, as if someone was calling out, but the words were indistinct. Trying to view the anomaly, she caught a glint of something wet shoot past the grates—or was it the gel of an eye peering in at her?

Horrified, she backed off. She wasn’t going to have a creature or monster sneak into her room via the duct system, and deciding this, she pushed back the bedpost and shoved the bookshelf flush against the grate, creating a barrier.

“Stay out…whatever you are.”

She kept her back to the far wall adjacent to the duct, waiting for anything else to happen. The pillowcase in her lap smelled of bleach, institutionalized clean, but the strange scent didn’t prevent her from crying into it. Overwhelmed by everything that had happened and what she imagined was going to happen soon, she muffled a wide-mouthed scream. Then, shutting her eyes tight because her body forced her to, she fell limp on top of her bed. She closed her eyes and slept.

It was then that the creature in the duct moved on to another room to invade.

 

 

Angela’s Garden was showing in theater six, and Barry Engel and Elisa Thompson were alone. They always watched movies alone. Empty theaters stirred up Elisa’s juices. Public places aroused her, period. The chance of someone spying them doing the nasty, she claimed, made any sex hot. Elisa craved sex in a public bathroom, behind the booze bar at the courtyard outside, or even during their fifteen-minute break from serving cocktails to the level-two zombies. But Barry had grown to enjoy it as well. Every time they stepped out together for a date, the promise of sex entered his mind, and more often than not, it was fulfilled.

Angela’s Garden had played for three weeks, and three weeks was far too long when nobody cared for the movie. The romantic comedy was one of the rare art-house films to flash on the silver screen here on the island. Barry knew nothing about the movie because he was fingering Elisa. It was only ten minutes into the movie, as if the lights going down was foreplay enough for her.

“We might not be alone,” she whispered, acting like a virginal teenager. “I don’t want anybody to see us. What if they tell on us? What if they kick us out? If my parents find out…”

Barry could guarantee they were alone. They were the first in the theater, and the only ones, and he’d scrutinized both entrances before the movie started. He wouldn’t ruin it for her, though, and lied. “There’s somebody up in front, but if you keep your mouth shut, we’re in the clear.”

She moaned at his reassurances. She unzipped him, enjoying the bulge in his pants. “Then get it out. Hurry.”

Elisa seized his dick. She spat on it with the vigor of a practiced harlot, stroking it.

He wrapped his arm around her back to bring her in for a kiss when her body arched up straight. “Aaaack!”

She was strangled by an invisible force. Her body was lifted inches up off the chair. Elisa’s eyes shut tight, clamped in agony. She closed her mouth, her throat visibly constricting, as if a fist were making its way up her esophagus. Her head was cranked upward, facing the ceiling.

He disbelieved his eyes and what had happened in mere seconds. Elisa’s strange paralysis shifted. And that’s when he peeked up at the ceiling and finally discovered what force had overtaken her.

“JESUS CHRIST!”

Elisa’s flesh along her face, neck and shoulders rippled. Then in one blink, the skin on the top half of her body split into hundreds of strings, as if yarn were being unwoven, and strand by strand, her flesh was sucked up to the ceiling in rivulets. Her blood soon followed, rising up like reverse rain.

The mass above them was an oil slick covered in octopus nodules. It was the size of a small body of water.

The stolen items reached the vessel, received with wet, lapping noises, the nodules like suckling mouths.

“Uhwup! Aaaagggggh!”

Her mouth was pried open by invisible hands, the force great enough to dislocate her jaw in one uncouth snap. The nodules were working, and with the sound of hundreds of guppy mouths puckering open and closed at once, it was gaining power. So much power, Elisa’s intestines were forced out of her mouth, the innards spring-ejected at high pressure in bolts and gobs.

Barry attempted to throw Elisa aside and escape, though it was awkward with his pants down. Sensing his retreat, she opened her eyes to plead to him, but they too were suctioned out and hovered up to the hungry creature, the eyes trailing tails of pink orbital tissue. Then, as if her entire body was turned inside out, she exploded in a ball of blood and bits of bone, all of which was sucked up to the ceiling.

It wasn’t too much longer before Barry endured the same harrowing demise.

 

 

Starting his workday, Robbie Cornwell entered the factory-like area. The space was occupied by thirty-five steel processing vats as large as beer fermentation units. The concrete floor and white cinder-block walls glowed with a freshly clean sheen, everything sterile. Today, he was in training, his first day on duty. His trainer was only in his early twenties, a built fellow named Alan Jacoby. They both wore a blue painter’s suit with thick black rubber gloves and matching boots as they advanced into the work space.

Alan dumped pieces of information at him as they moved deeper into the facility. “This chamber is where the blood from the cruise liner is processed. This room is strictly for the vampires’ benefit. You see, the vampire arena and their living quarters are all rigged with plastic tubing, what’s hooked up to the ceiling of their rooms. This network channels blood to their rooms at regular intervals throughout the day. Once every hour.”

Three people in the painter’s suits operated mixing machines. The vats boiled with blood, similar to tomato soup, but darker. The sight perplexed Robbie. “Why are they cooking the blood?”

His trainer appreciated the question. “The blood comes mainly from slaughterhouses. The government pays stipends for cattle, pig, sheep and goat’s blood. The blood has to go down special drains and feed into reservoirs for delivery. But first, we have to remove hair, flesh, clothing, bones, everything from the blood before serving it. The vampires prefer it that way. They get testy if the blood tastes questionable.”

They crossed into an open area where wooden crates moved via a conveyer belt. At the end of the belt, the crates were broken open. Foam peanuts and wadded-up newspapers were knee-high in some areas. Inside the strewn packaging, what looked to Robbie like large IV bags were stocked ten to a crate. The blood bags were placed on another conveyor belt and delivered to individual stations, and Alan stopped him at an empty one.

Alan handed him a box cutter. “Careful with this sucker. They’re sharpened daily. It’ll cut your thumb off as soon as it would cut off your dick. Your job is to slice open the blood bags and pour them down this steel slide. Simple.”

The steel slide was a contraption that hovered over each of the boiling vats. This was a dump site, he surmised. Nine other people were around him, slicing blood packets and pouring them down the chute. He’d make ten.

The line stopped when the conveyor belts were bare of product. A man on the line, his shirt labeled Bruce, complained to Alan. “What the hell, are we short of blood again?”

“Take a break,” Alan shot back. “Pipe down. Rest your hands. Think about your pretty girlfriend, or whoever you’re fucking these days, and calm down.”

“Does that happen a lot?” Robbie asked.

Alan was stolen from a thought by the question. “Uh, does what happen a lot?”

“Blood shortages?”

Bruce answered for Alan. “It seems like we’re short all the time, as of lately. It’s like the vampires are drinking more.”

Alan was quick to correct the man. “Or what we’re giving them just isn’t doing the trick anymore.”