Random movements [Open]

[The Unholy]

The sun sank below the horizon, it’s last breath of the day illuminating the sky in hues of fiery reds and oranges. It seemed as if it were fighting the encroaching night but losing. Finally it’s last rays receded as the earth revolved, plunging the city of Harper Rock into its nightly bout of darkness. The streets of the city began to empty. It was as if the inhabitant knew that within the night they were no longer at the top of the food chain. For the last few years disappearances, murders and all other crimes both virtual and physical seemed to wash over the city nightly. It was an epidemic and seemed to increase as time went on no matter how many uniformed cops walked their beats, no matter how many government agents were stationed in Harper Rock, no matter how much a show of military force was brought to bear on this small bastion of humanity.

Some brave and intrepid souls still moved about on the streets, mixed in with those with nowhere to go. The irony of that situation never failed to puzzle those of a more cynical mindset. How many buildings were resting vacant in Harper Rock? No one had thought to convert one into a homeless shelter? Perhaps there was not enough money in charity for the greedy at the top who could afford it. Perhaps there was another reason too though. Perhaps people simply realized that the homeless, the disparate souls, the disenfranchised offered a buffer between them and the things that went bump in the night. Perhaps it was more a case of not having to outrun the beast chasing one, just having to outrun one’s fellow man. For that was exactly what was happening. The homeless were literally being fed to the beasts.

This was the now.

Before this gilded cage was created, before the supernal barriers between the Realm of Shadows was weakened in Harper Rock the beasts now contained to this small section of land roamed the world freely. They were immortal even then, never-aging, undying. wolves in men’s clothing. Vampires. They inhabited every country, even nation and rumors of them, myths, can be found in every civilization since the beginning of recorded history. Humans have known throughout history, small pockets of them hunted the hunters and managed to kill some of these nocturnal monsters. Mostly though they were unsuccessful. It seemed then and now the most potent enemy of the vampires has always been the vampires themselves.

There have been holy orders and not-so-holy ones that have brought their strength to bear on the vampire menace throughout the ages. They have never succeeded in wiping out vampires though. No, only the vampires themselves were able to do this.the Paladins, the Blood Thieves, they were merely inconveniences. They claimed the lives of a good number of vampires of course but it was a drop in the bucket as it was much harder to ferret the creatures out before this day of cameras and instant communication.

There were bitter rivalries that saw entire bloodlines, covens and factions wiped from the earth, their bodies blown away, so much ash in the wind. This went on for centuries, millennium. Even after the violence was reigned in and the remaining vampires found some semblance of balance and peace all it took was one spark to reignite the deaths, the killings. Hunter factions began to emerge once more.

An anti-secrecy group sprung up. Vampires had been relegated to myth, the wive’s tales and penny dreadful stories of the day when suddenly they were outed by one of their own. One refusing to follow the rules taught down through the ages. One who disregarded the safety of not just himself, but of a race. The hunters flew down upon the vampires like buzzards to a kill and a purge began that brought them to the brink of extinction.

A being named Crow gathered a few vampires by sending out visions of a place. A place far to the snowy northern reaches of the Americas. Harper Rock, Ontario, Canada, then known only as the Fort Odawa trading post. The most unlikely of places. It was said the spirits of the dead could return here and pay visits to the living by the native Odawa tribal people. It was here these few elders faced their deaths, betrayed by one of their own. A fire claiming all but one of them, the betrayer who had planned to be the sole living immortal. Again and for what seemed a final time, vampires played the largest role in their own downfall.

Of course they did not stay dead. Two centuries passed and several elders were able to return after the Necromancer Cobb weakened the barrier in an experiment.

They had learned little if nothing in the lessons locked away in the past. There was rapidly a surge in the vampiric population leading to the same problems as before. New vampires were unhappy with having to live in secrecy, they began turning people without knowing anything of their own existence and it wasn’t long before entire factions of anti-secrecy vampires and “mixed” factions, alliances of human and vampire began to appear. The barrier between the two worlds, the physical and the Realm of Shadows weakened further and more undead creatures were let loose.

The Crow entity was weakened by vampires scrambling for control over ideology and though it could be said the anti-secrecy vampires won the struggle, they only continued to hurt themselves.

A faction arose looking to curb the damage done by these secrecy violators and began hunting them down with the aid of Crownet, a system set up by the Crow entity though no longer maintained by him after the creature turned its back on vampire-kind. Some say Crow was banished.

The problems facing the vampires of Harper Rock are insurmountable and damning. It is a matter of time before they either destroy themselves, bring the wrath of the human world down upon their city or cause the Sundering which will shatter the barrier between the Physical and the Shadow Realms, wiping out all life on the planet and leaving them alone with no source of blood to drink.

It is almost assured that vampires will once again destroy themselves.

It was definitely assured that the Unholy didn’t give a ***** one way or another about any of it. She was a part of the problem, not the solution.Turned by a woman who had been asking too many questions about the former gang leader in the slums, The Unholy was completely ignorant of the history, laws, traditions, and even the powers of vampires. She was the law unto herself. She knew no better.

She did know she feared the sun, that she had some minor control over the darkness and shadows and that she was much stronger than any man she had ever met. She knew this and that is what mattered.

The two bodies of the cops behind her next to the stolen truck she was abandoning didn’t matter either. They were discarded as quickly and without any more thought than the useless vehicle. She was attractive enough from the back side that another vehicle would stop when he put out her thumb for a lift. Apparently someone had seen her jack the truck at the rest stop. She had been heading to Toronto to meet up with the leader of her former gang. In truth she had been considering sharing this new gift with him and some of his fellows. Her ex gang. Now, half an hour later, the headlights of a big rig coming in from the direction of Toronto had caught her attention. She’d always wanted to drive on of those.

“**** it.” She knew the killing of the two cops was recorded on the car’s dashboard camera but what could she do about it now? Spilled milk, over and done with. In a pair of jeans so tight they might have been painted on, a dusty black leather duster and a black cowboy hat she walked, leather boots thudding into the pavement as she went. The ease of motion though was as she wore the lightest of material. The backpack she carried in one hand was near weightless to her vampiric strength. The rig approaching though, that was fresh, that was new, exciting. She stuck her thumb out as she reached the opposite side of the road, her *** giving slightly more of a sway that usual, a promise to the driver, unspoken but heard loud and clear not with his brain, but with the other head.

The eighteen wheeler pulled off to the shoulder in front of her and the driver waited for the certain death that was approaching, sashaying her way toward his rig with no more rush than an hourly-paid union worker on a government job.

She reached up to the door as it opened for her and pulled herself up easily into the passenger seat. “This a sleeper? Got a bed?” The first words spoken between the two new acquaintances.

“Yes ma’am, sure does.” The voice has a Southern U.S. drawl to it, Long haul trucker then of course.

“Nice and dark during the day, got a good curtain?”

“”Yes ma’am, not a drop of light, total privacy.”

The Unholy smiled to the trucker. “Good. Show me how this thing works. I think big rigs are sexy as ****…”

The trucker looked her over and grinned. “Sure thing ma’am. I show you how she works, you show me a thing or two?” His eyes sought out all the differences between the genders and left nothing to the imagination about what his words meant.

“Baby, you show me how to drive this thing and I’ll show you things you’ve never thought were even real,” the vampire promised the human, with a glance down between his legs and then back up to his eyes.

An hour later the woman in the leather duster and cowboy hat was rolling down the road back toward Harper Rock, in the driver's seat of the rig. She flipped through the truckers wallet idly, flinging each card within it out the window as she went. She kept the credit cards and gas card for the truck, not that she’d use it. It didn’t seem right for the company to have to pay for a replacement though when they would eventually get the truck (and the mortal remains of their driver neatly laid out on the bed behind the seats) back. It likely had GPS so she’d have to abandon it sooner rather than later.

50 kilometres down the road she passed a cop car, now surrounded by another’s police tape ensconcing the scene. One of the dead cops was in her old truck, but hanging halfway out the passenger side. He’d tried to scramble out when she had yanked him clear in through the open driver’s side window. The Unholy knew they would find muzzle burns in three spots along his spine where she had pressed her pistol to his back and fired.

The other cop lay on the road midway between the truck and the car. His service pistol had three rounds expended and his throat was savaged as though by some large carnivore. She had come out of the vehicle and rushed him. Two rounds had struck her center mass before she had tackled him to the ground with surprising ease, and glutted herself on his blood. Her fangs had made hamburger out of the side of his throat and she had drunk the blood down greedily - as it had erupted from his ruined flesh.

Afterwards, she had walked back toward the truck, recovered her hat and gun from it and then headed away toward Toronto. Now she was returning, headed back toward Harper Rock just because that was the way the rig had been going. The Unholy believed in portents and omens She wasn’t going to pass up whatever awaited those who played their part.

The scene was left in her wake, lights flashing, radios crackling, cops whispering and muttering meant little to her. Nothing really. What mattered was the rumble of the engine of the Freight-liner as it barreled onward through the darkness retracing her steps.

There may have been something to her superstitious beliefs and random movements though. She never saw the glittering eyes of the creature watching from the darkness. It had long hated her kind and had meant to destroy her before she had commandeered the vehicle and peeled off into the night. It followed now, a silent shadow moving through the fields alongside the eighteen wheeler. It followed, waiting for it’s opportunity to strike.

[The Unholy]

The headlights cast the oncoming city border in a blueish-white sheen, chasing away the urine colored glow of streetlights and the gaudy neon glare of open signs casting blue and red illumination from shop windows. The trucks arrival in the concrete jungle brought the creature which had been following it to a skidding and snarling halt. It watched the taillights of the vehicle disappear around a corner, heading south with narrow glittering eyes.

In the cab of the truck, the vampire reached back, taking a pack of cigarettes from the deceased truck drivers' left breast pocket and the fumbling a lighter from his pants which lay on the floorboard. She shook a cigarette loose and pulled it from the pack with a fanged maw, tossing the rest of the pack onto the dashboard. Lighting the smoke she tossed the lighter into the cup-holder and took a left turn, coming up alongside a junkyard. 4, 25

She pulled the truck up to the gate and slid out from the drivers seat down to the earth below as the night time security guard stepped from the guard shack and approached her. "How can I help you ma'am?" The man was polite and dressed in the typical garb of a rent-a-cop. He had no firearm at his side but the vampire didn't doubt there was a rifle standing up along the wall inside the shack. She needed that and to ditch the monstrosity of a vehicle she had commandeered.

"Well, I need to drop this truck off in there," she said, motioning behind the guard to the junkyard beyond. "Then I need to take your rifle from you."

The guard immediately changed from a slack and curious posture to a stiffer, more aware and defensive one as the vampire spoke. Even if the words hadn't warranted alarm, the fangs visible in her mouth as she spoke would have triggered the fight or flight reaction of a prey animal in the presence of a predator. His muscles tensed and his eyes cut toward the shack where the gun rested.

"But first," she continued in an amicable tone, "I'll need to kill you so you don't run your mouth and steal the security tape in your shack there." She smiled at the end, her pointed smile and deadpan eyes reminiscent of nothing more than what one might find if perusing the channels and coming upon a program on Shark Week.

For an instant in time the two are both braced for action, terror in the eyes of the male, a hunger like fire in the eyes of the female. For a moment in time the only thing moving around them is the whirling gusts of snow.

Then all hell breaks loose.

The man bolts for the shack, for the gun, the vampire lunges forward, heavy boots striking the heavily salted pavement as the flailing guard tries in vain to outrun the oncoming predator.

The tape that would soon be destroyed showed the smaller figure of the woman leap up and seem to go for a piggyback ride momentarily on the larger form of the guard, it would appear as though time and time again she planted kiss after kiss on his neck, switching sides to avoid his head which he ducked, bobbed and threw each way to avoid each one. Her head flung back after every lunge forward and soon the truth of what was happening would show on each image burned into the tapes as the man's protestations slackened and he sank to his knees. The woman however did not stop her assault, head burying into the guards neck time and time again, shaking back and forth and wrenching away until finally the security guards head rolled free from his shoulders, landing on the pavement and rolling several feet before coming to a stop laying sideways, eyes forever frozen in a glazed over look of agony.

The female stepped back, not even panting from the exertion of the struggle, calm as can be and walked out of sight of the camera and into the shack. The tape would end there.

It would of course never be seen. The guard would be found later in the cab of the truck with the truck driver, neatly tucked away in the furthest recesses of the junkyard. The shack up from devoid of both security tape and weapon and the culprit nowhere to be found. The snowfall having covered up most of the signs of the violent struggle leaving the news to report simply on another victim of the rash of serial killers which had been plaguing Harper Rock in recent years.

The Unholy had returned home and now was stalking the streets of her old home in the slums. She was looking to begin a family.

She wanted to get the band back together again.

Hopefully this leads into siring of rogue vampires.

[The Unholy]

The nights wear on and the vampire without a name continues her existence. Wake from torpor, hunt prey, head back to the slums, hunt for drugs, weapons, money, find shelter, go into torpor. Rinse and repeat. She had slept down in the sewers more often than not, amid others of her kind recently. What had happened to chase out the tattooed men and their lackeys she did not know, though she wasn’t as grateful as others may have been. She wasn’t keen on her own kind and the wild ones were frightening in a way she loathed.

They were just like her.

In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs she had reached, on at least this topic Self-Actualization. She was Masterless, she was Wild. She was the same as any of those countless in the sewers she had slain.

The nameless vampire didn’t know Maslow. Nor did she know anything about Self-Actualization. She did know these vampires were a sub-class. She didn’t like the idea of being part of a sub-class. She had been her whole life as a native. Then the opportunity had come to scrape and fight and crawl her way to power came when she started proving she was willing to steal. She was willing to kill, just like the men.

In truth the woman hated doing what she had done, but she was driven to be more.

Looking at these creatures she felt like them… lesser.

The one in front of her turned hearing her approach and her eyes narrowed. It wasn’t moving out of her way. The nameless vampiress drew out her handgun from its leather holster. Their wasn’t much of a fight from the Wild vampire. It fell to ash on the slimy surface of the walkway with little fan fair. No doubt it would be back, wandering around again with nothing but the hunt in it’s mind. Could that happen to her?

She had seen others in the slums. They were different, civilized, at least more than the ones in the sewers. She could be like them. She just had to figure out how. She needed a purpose besides survival. She needed to live.

She wondered if any of the humans she had bitten became a vampire. She wasn’t sure if it mattered. Like her sire did to her she would likely do to others. Sire with a purpose and have it blow up in her face. The woman without a name smiles side, fangs gleaming in the dimly lit halls of the sewers. She looked up to the sanitary cover (which was anything but sanitary) above her and scaled the ladder. Her hands reached out, pushing the obstacle aside and she emerged out into Harper Rock.