The Second Dark Ages Boxed Set, page 16
part #1 of The Second Dark Ages Series
“Who the hell are you?” he said gruffly. “We’re part of the Enforcers, we’re taking this person in for questioning…”
“No, you will not,” Michael said. “In fact,” Jacqueline heard a bit of noise, then a sudden CRACK, loud and moist. A neck being broken.
“What the hell!” the Were’s eyes were surprised, and then he backed up a step, and Jacqueline could see Michael’s legs.
He swung the electrified rod at Michael who merely caught it, the electricity buzzing loudly in her ears, the electricity arcing into his hand. He yanked the club out of the Were’s hand and grabbed it by the bottom.
“That tickles,” he said to the stupefied man.
“Perhaps it might be malfunctioning?” he asked. In a flash, Michael was touching the Were with it. He was blown backward to land some ten feet away.
Jacqueline could just see his feet twitching.
“Guess not,” Michael said, and the buzzing and humming stopped. He stepped back to her left, out of her vision. She heard another loud CRACK and then Michael walked into her line of vision and past the last man’s feet, and a final crack and that person’s feet stopped quivering.
Michael came back to her and bent down. Then she felt him pick her up, gently. “Let’s go, Jacqueline, I think you’ve had enough therapy for this evening.”
She felt a calmness overcome her, and her eyes closed to darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Michael made sure to walk outside of lower Manhattan. Away from all of the lights and activity, he could see. He carried Jacqueline, keeping to the darker streets. A lot of the buildings and homes seemed to have electricity, but not all of them had people.
He pushed a little fear out into the night, enough to cause people to shy away and leave the two of them alone as he considered what he knew.
Michael had noticed Jacqueline’s interest in the jewelry and stepped across to the other side of the street and watched from a corner.
The four Weres had been walking by, noticing her figure until one caught her scent and then it became business to them. Apparently, these Enforcers needed more Weres.
Michael had pulled the information out of their heads. Their jobs were to hunt other Weres and vampires.
Especially vampires. His eyes had narrowed at that. He had seen enough of what was going on. While he wasn’t very supportive of vampires that were Forsaken, who was leading them to the right path in this day and age?
Jacqueline started moaning, her eyes started fluttering, and her heartbeat changed. He stopped at the next block and laid her down on a soft patch of ground. While he waited, he looked around.
So much had changed. The buildings, in general, were in a state of neglect. Brick and concrete either broken off or cracking. More than one building had the foundation broken.
And yet others looked in good repair.
Obviously, they had people with skills to build, to mend and to design here. But the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots, from what he could tell near the airship port, seemed substantial. It was as bad as before the fall, if not worse. The large tower that rose into the night, he figured, was where the elite lived and worked.
Jacqueline lamented, “God, my head hurts.” She rolled over to her side, clutching the side of her head. “Can you just kill me now?”
“Time to get up, work yourself through it,” Michael told her, his voice calm. “Or I will be forced to give you something worse to worry about.”
Jacqueline turned to look over her shoulder at him, rolled her eyes and started pushing off the ground, knocking some of the grass off of herself while she stood. Looking around, she asked, “Where are we now?”
“A few minutes from my old home,” he answered.
“You think it still exists?” she pressed, looking to him for confirmation.
“Oh yes,” he said, “it still exists.”
The police car’s red and blue lights flashed in the dark street, the light’s colors highlighting the buildings around it. A few who lived nearby looked out of their windows and figured someone had tried unsuccessfully to break into the jewelry store.
The store’s front window was cracked.
Odd, one man thought, the police car was in front of the alley half a block from the store. He let his drapes drop back and went to sleep. Life these days was hard enough; he didn’t need to get involved in any police action.
He mumbled as he pulled the covers over his shoulders, “I ain’t heard nothin, I ain’t seen nothin … I was asleep.”
And, soon enough, he was.
Michael could hear the two heartbeats in the trees ahead of them. He had decided to take the shortcut through old Gramercy Park South, which in his day had been a private park. Now, it looked like it was near the North Wall. Michael wasn’t sure why they put up a wall, but he could see the horizontal line a few blocks from here.
“Seriously?” Jacqueline murmured low enough so that Michael could hear. “This is bullshit. Chicago isn’t this much of a pain in the ass to walk around in.” She started walking faster down the path, heading towards the two people that had moved into positions behind trees ahead of them.
Michael wasn’t convinced that Chicago was any safer. He wondered if possibly Jacqueline just knew which locations were dangerous and avoided them. He shook his head at her behavior and then stepped off the path into the shadows of the trees and disappeared.
Jacqueline was pissed. Angry that she had been attacked. Pissed she had lost her situational awareness. Pissed that she had been shocked and laying helpless in the street, requiring Michael to save her. And finally, pissed he hadn’t been there in the first place.
He could have stopped her from making a painful mistake. What had happened was a blow, both physically and to her ego.
This time, it was one guy and one girl that stepped out of the shadows. He had a gun pointed at her. “Far enough, toss me your money and any food you have.”
The girl was brandishing a knife, her eyes glittering in the moonlight.
“What, are you just going to steal from me?” she asked, her anger boiling over quickly. There was something funny about the way they only focused on her… Jacqueline turned to look behind her and noticed Michael was nowhere to be seen.
Again.
“You motherfucker,” she whispered before turning back around to face the two.
“Hey,” he snarled. “I’m talking to you!”
“Well,” she replied, “I wasn’t talking to you. I was upset with my companion that was with me.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. Both looked back down the path, but their grins suggested they thought she was lying.
The girl waved her knife. “This isn’t stealing, consider it a toll to get through our park.”
Jacqueline crossed her arms, annoyance with Michael coloring her tone. “That’s a steep toll and I have no money, nor any food. The guy I was with had both.”
“Well, I guess that leaves shooting you, or cutting you,” the girl pronounced. Jacqueline looked closer and noticed that the gleam in her eye seemed off-balance. She had naturally assumed the guy with the gun was the most immediate threat. But, sexism aside, she was now thinking crazy bitch here was the more dangerous of the two.
“You couldn’t cut me with that little knife if you tried, sister. So, screw you,” she turned and pointed at the guy. “And if you shoot me, I swear, I’ll rip your throat out.”
Crazy bitch took a step forward, waving her knife. “Big words for a little-too-stupid-to-live slut like you.”
“Dammit!” Jacqueline threw her hands up. “I. Am. Not. A. Slut!” She ignored the woman in front of her for a second and yelled into the trees, “You hear that Michael? I AM NOT A SLUT! I have been with two guys, two!” She paused and thought about her words for a second before yelling again, “NOT AT ONE TIME!” She stomped on the ground. “Just because this body is amazing doesn’t mean it’s always open for business.”
“Here,” the woman started walking towards the paranoid delusional woman “Let me cut up your pretty face and you won’t have as many problems with guys hitting on you.”
“You crazy-assed bitch,” Jacqueline spit out when the woman tried to slash her face. The second time she took a swing at her, Jacqueline pivoted and struck. She caught the wrist with the knife and bent it. The woman shrieked when a bone cracked in her wrist, and Jacqueline took her knife away. The loud BANG caused her to release the woman’s arm and roll to the side, coming up with the knife prepared to throw.
Not that there was any need to throw anything. The guy was struggling, his feet dangling off the ground, Michael holding him up by his wrist, the pistol pointing up in the air. “Now that,” Michael hissed, “would have been unfair.”
He turned in Jacqueline’s direction and raised an eyebrow. “Kill them or let them live?” he asked.
Jacqueline pressed her lips together. “She needs medical attention.” she nodded to the guy Michael was holding. “His arm is probably out of its socket.” Michael jerked up real quick, the guy screamed in pain, interrupting her response.
Michael said, “Now it is.”
Jacqueline swallowed, “So, uh, let’s take their weapons and let them go.” Michael dropped the guy, who collapsed to the ground. Reaching down he picked up the pistol and casually checked for rounds.
“Pity, only one shot left,” he commented, then put the weapon inside his coat.
“Go get medical help,” Jacqueline told them, looking from one to the other, “and don’t make this park your home, or next time I smell you both, I won’t be so stupid as to confront you. I’ll just sneak up and kill you myself.”
The guy helped the crazy girl up, and they staggered down the path, back towards the entrance that Michael and Jacqueline had used to enter the park.
Michael ignored Jacqueline’s stare and turned towards a large building on the other side of the park and pointed. “My place.”
Chicago City-State, (United States Post Apoc)
Brick Jessims was a big guy. He wasn’t stupid but not entirely smart. He went about his business, knowing that what he carried was gold in his pockets. It was getting close to dark, and he was annoyed. One of his best customers, Paul Mullins, had sent him a message that he didn’t want any more product.
Well, that wasn’t good enough. One doesn’t just quit using his product. Not without a withdrawal period. Almost everybody that ever had more than a few hits of the blood could never stop. It was a bad situation if they lost their income and couldn’t afford it anymore.
He had watched a withdrawal once, and it cured him of ever getting addicted to the product.
He needed to talk to Paul in person, probably would sell him three times the quantity he normally would because of his convulsions from the withdrawals and then he would hit Paul with a ten percent restocking and continued distribution fee.
Send a letter telling Brick to stop coming around? Fat-ass chance of that happening.
It wasn’t until he was eating over at Jerry’s bar and someone mentioned Paul getting engaged did Brick understand why Paul would try to quit. Damned females could create all sorts of problems for a man. Stop one from enjoying a night out with the guys, drinking when they wanted to, and the occasional hit of the elixir of life.
Usually, they weren’t sure why the elixir was bad. But, with it looking like blood, women really didn’t like it. Hell, he had been with a girlfriend who told him he needed to find a new business because she didn’t like the way the product smelled.
“No,” he told her, “I just need to find some new pussy,” and tossed her out of his apartment with a threat that if she ever spoke about him, he would knife her in the night.
Fortunately for him, the next guy she hooked up with killed her during an argument. His hands, and conscience, were clean.
The trees were thick on this side of Mullins’ land. Brick knew the back way in, it wasn’t like Paul ever wanted anyone to see Brick arriving and doing the deal. He sent a message ahead that he wanted to speak with him, just to make sure he understood the situation correctly. That he would leave him alone if that was what he wanted.
He smiled, they might not want to be seen with him, but they always wanted to meet with him. He received a message that Paul would be home. Brick didn’t pay attention to the handwriting that looked more feminine than Paul’s.
He was about two hundred yards from the house when a low growl caused him to stop in his tracks and look around, his heart pumping faster.
Two glowing yellow eyes were staring at him from the darkness under the trees.
Paul was rolling around in his bed. He was sweating profusely, and hadn’t been out of his room for three days.
Kerri had promised she would help him through this, and after she had cleaned up the second time he threw up without making it to the bathroom, he had to admit she was a woman of her word.
He would have ditched his own ass if he could have.
Early that morning, Kerri had come into the room with a letter and asked him who Brick was? Paul explained the man was his blood dealer. The one who made sure he had the product he needed and the one, he promised her, he had told he was done with the blood.
She held his hand, dabbed the sweat off of his forehead and bent down, kissing him and then made sure he was comfortable.
Had he seen her eyes flash yellow? In this fevered state, he couldn’t be sure if he had even talked with her.
Later that evening, he heard the chilling howl of a wolf, not that far from the house.
In his dreams, he imagined Brick had been killed by the wolf who had howled and his fever broke.
In the morning, Kerri brought him breakfast in bed, and her smile warmed his heart.
New York City-State
The police lights continued to strobe into the alley. Three police officers and one coroner worked the scene, but it was easy to figure out what happened. Four punks had met up with someone very strong and had a fight.
Four punks had lost.
The problem, at least from Ralph Kornicki’s point of view, was these guys worked with the Enforcers. He walked over to his police vehicle and reached inside to grab the radio handset. “Control.”
A male voice came back immediately, “This is control.”
“This is Kornicki, I’m over at the call about a dead guy in the alley. Seems we don’t have one dead guy, we got four. All with broken necks.”
“Understood, do you need backup?”
“No,” he replied looking back towards the alley. “This fight happened sometime earlier. I need you to patch me through to Enforcer Control.”
“Why the hell do you want to talk with them, Kornicki? You itching to have a bad night?” the guy on the other end of the line asked.
Ralph clicked his handset. “No, but these four guys worked for them.”
Michael kicked, and the door slammed open, dust falling from the inside and a chunk of the ceiling in the living room crashed to the floor.
Jacqueline peeked into the building. “If your house is the big one down the street,” she asked. “Why are we going into this one?”
“Because,” Michael answered, working on his patience, “vampires always have multiple exits from their resting places.”
Jacqueline walked into the old, dilapidated home behind Michael and looked around. The dim light from the city street lamp barely helped her see. “I feel like something is going to jump out and bite me,” she said.
Michael continued walking around to the back of the house, causing Jacqueline to, once again, catch up. “Not much for sightseeing, are you?”
“Forgive me,” Michael said as he opened a closet that was next to the kitchen. He started tapping in the upper right-hand corner until the sound changed. Then, making a fist, he punched through the wood. Grabbing some pieces, he tossed them out behind him.
She noticed a faint light coming from inside the closet, so she stepped up and looked around the door. Her jaw dropped. “Your hand is glowing. How is your hand glowing?” She looked from his hand to his face and back again.
“Etheric energy, pulled into our dimension, released as light,” he replied as he reached into the hole and grabbed something metal that needed oil, badly. Next, he started pulling, his face actually showing some strain. The four-inch iron ring and chain came out about a foot before she heard multiple clicks.
“That was probably scientifically correct, and I didn’t understand a bit of it,” she grumped. “Why can you do these things and I’ve never heard of any Wechselbalg able to do them?”
“I practice, something you should consider doing more of,” he replied, “and because the nanocytes in vampires come from one group of Kurtherians. The ones that work in Wechselbalg to change you to a wolf, or the Pricolici form, are from a different Kurtherian group.”
Her voice got softer. “Like my father changed.”
There was a loud chunk and Michael pushed back on the wall; it slid out of the way. He turned to Jacqueline. “Your father never had the ability to change to that form in the past, that I’m aware of. His love and concern for you allowed him to attain the most dangerous form. Don’t ever doubt, Jacqueline.” He turned and reached inside, flicking a switch. Tiny red lights lit up the hall. He stood, looking at the lights for a moment. “I’m surprised. I wasn’t sure the batteries would hold this long. The LED lights don’t suck much wattage, but let’s be going,” he turned to her. “Unless rats crawling over your feet in the dark don’t bother you?” He smirked.
Jacqueline wiped a tear and pushed on Michael’s back. “Let’s go, DM.”
Michael gave her room to get inside, and then shut the door to the closet, then the secret door to his exit. He closed and locked the door.
“What’s going to stop the next person from pulling it out?” Jacqueline asked.
Michael stepped around her in the tiny hallway and answered, “Fifteen hundred pounds.”
