Bitter Waters Suite
EPISODE TWO
Reasons to Believe
By.
Rodney Cannon
Chapter Zero
There had been times that the child slept as if she was one of the undead. The record had been when Crystal had been five years old she had slept for eight days and nights. Monitoring equipment had been attached to her after day two, but all that it indicated was that her life signs were strong and her brain activity was that of a dreamer and upon awakening she had described her time away as a dream. A dream that had included witnessing the deaths of two of the parents in the Shiloh project and the near escape of an S class captive. Even though were she slept and where the events described had occurred in buildings over a mile from one another Crystal had been able to describe in perfect detail everything that had occurred. She had seen it all because she had been there or at least eyes that she saw through had been. All of this had come as no surprise to those who began this project after all was say and done even the most stubborn and proud of the parents had to admit that the girl designated Zero was special in ways that would take many years to understand.
Chapter One
Nick drove her back to the compound with her riding behind him on the motorcycle. Part of him was scared of her. She was a vampire of some kind. God how easy it was to except something like that could exist once you saw it at work he thought. When her eyes narrowed like a snake and turned blood red he had come close to crying out, but even then he knew that she was still the same girl that he had been getting to know during the night. Those eyes had been horrible, but they were still her eyes. He had been able to see her intelligence and innocents in those eyes. After only two minutes on the bike worrying about her taking a bite out of him Nick allowed himself to relax and to consider her feelings. That huge bitch had proposed a deal where he got to rape Karina’s body while she raped her mind. An offer that all involved knew that it could deliver upon. The girl that he was getting to know was trembling against his back and holding him so tightly around the waist that it hurt him to breathe. That pain was a good pain, it reminded him that he was still alive and this was not a bad dream.
What if she would not be safe there? What if they were begin followed right now. How did it work with vampires, not the movie or story book kind, but the real thing? He did not know, but he was very close to someone who did and he made a difficult decision at that moment. He could maybe get out of this if he just took her back where he found her, but if he did that he knew that he would never have the courage to stay there long enough to ask her any questions.
Nick turned his motorcycle off the main road and headed down Beachers road. Just three minutes along that road and he was angling his motorcycle down a narrow dirt path that took them between two massive stone supports that had once held up two huge rod iron gates. Two years ago the town found that the gates had been stolen by scrap metal hunters and so far the county had been too busy arguing about how the gates should be replaced rather than just spending the money to replace the gates to the county cemetery.
As they passed those pillars something high in the sky screeched in rage and a cold wind fell on them and sent a cloud of trash swirling up into the air near them. Nick whipped his motorcycle to a stop facing back the way that they had come.
“A cemetery is a place of the dead. This ground is hallowed.”Karina said into his ear.
“We were being followed weren’t we?”He responded.
“Yes. It feels that way.”
“Do they know about that place where you live?”
“Probably. We have protections built in there. They cannot enter the grounds without being invited and…”
“None of you can leave without being invited? That is why you wanted me to invite you to come with me?”He said.
She slipped off the back of the motorcycle and stepped around to face him. Her eyes were rimming with tears. A girl’s secret weapon and those unspilled tears were making it hard for him to think.
“Not all of us. Number one and number eight come and go as they wish. They are different from the rest of us. Sometimes so much more human than us and other times almost like that thing we just met.”The tears began to flow. “Nicolas, I, I am nothing like that. I could never do that. That poor girl… she had no feet. It took her feet so she could not run. If it …”She broke down and fell to her knees. Nick tossed his helmet aside and slipped from his seat to kneel in front of her.
If it found Karina alone then it would have done the same thing to her. Sort of like a cruel child pulling the wings off a fly so that it could not get away from the torture that was going to be inflicted upon it.
“It is gonna be all right. I don’t know how, but we are going to get through this.”Nick whispered into her ear and kissed her for the first time. A gentle kiss on her ear. It was funny how once you got to know a girl your feelings could remain the same and expand at the same time. Nick wanted her as much as he ever had, but now he cared for her. Karina had in a few short hours become his friend. Something that he did not believe was possible. To be friends with a sexy girl had seemed like an insane waste of time to him and now here he was intimately close to her and his constant companion, boner, was nowhere in sight.
“Your phone.”She whispered after an endless time in his arms. Rocking back on her heels she pulled back from him. Her beautiful face was wet from crying. Her lovely eyes were just lovely eyes. Nick wiped at her face with his fingertips before reaching into his pocket and pulling his phone and handing it to her.
“There is a number that we are supposed to call if we are in real danger.”She told him.
“Good. The phone will give you a gps location so that we can be found.”He told her and stood up. He looked about. The lights from the motorcycle were shinning on a grave that had fresh flowers on it and for a moment he engaged in an internal debate of whether or not it would be stealing to pick a flower for Karina. He crossed to the grave and whispered “Please forgive me if this is wrong god, but I think she needs something to keep her mind off of all of this.” Then he picked a single white rose from the two dozen that had been placed there. He noted the name on the grave marker just in case guilt overwhelmed him and he felt the need to make up for having done this.
“There are problems at the compound.”Karina was saying when he walked back to where she was. “Parents who are not there will come by to pick us up soon.”
“Your parents?”He asked.
The look that she gave him suggested that there was something between Karina and her parents that she did not want to talk about. She blinked and then shook her head no. “Not my parents.”
“Here I thought that you would like this.”Nick knelt beside her and offered her the rose. She studied it without reaching for it.
“A flower?”
“Yes, it is customary to give a flower or flowers to the girl that you like.”He said.
“You like me? After all of this?”She asked.
“Yes and I am sure when you explain this to me I will see that it is not your fault.”Nick got tired of waiting for her to take the flower and breaking the stem short he slipped it into the button hole of her jackets lapel. “There, that looks good. I understand that there is a legend about wild roses and vampires?”
“Yes.”She offered her hand to him and smiled when he took it and helped her up to her feet. “The pedals from a rose can burn the skin of vampires.”To show that she was not a vampire Karina fingered the pedals of the rose and her fingers came away as perfect as they had been before. “Also if you place roses on the grave of a vampire it will grow and the thorns will pin the vampire to the earth. Only the very old and strongest of them can break free of this. Thank you Nick. It is not as powerful as the crucifix that you wear, but it is good to have.”
“I could give you the cross to wear.”Nick said.
“No. It will not work for me. You have to have faith for it to be effective. We have a chapel and I have tried to understand this relationship between mankind and the creator, but it confuses me. Doubt and confusion cancels the power that talisman possesses.””
It confused most people; Nick thought as he took his motorcycle by the bars and began to push it along. He wanted to get further from the entrance just in case something came after them before help arrived.
“Nicolas, can I give you a gift?”Karina stepped around the motorcycle to walk along side him.
“Yes.”He said.
“I do not know how to do this. I have never really kissed a boy before, well I did Andie, but I was younger and I did not like it.”Karina said and that stopped Nick cold. He was not about to say that he had never kissed a girl either. If he thought too much about it he would say something stupid or some other creature of the night would show up to wreck this moment so he moved quickly. Nick cupped her face with both hands, pulled her close, their lips less that a breath apart and waited. The kiss was her gift to his and it was a gift that he had been waiting a lifetime for. Karina’s breath was warm and sweet. Her lips touching his were warm and sweet. Her tongue the most alive thing that Nick had ever felt as it touched his and they were lost in the moment.
A moment that during the dark times to come would remind him of why it was worth it. Karina broke the kiss with a series of fleeting pecks on his lips before dipping her forehead which he happily placed a kiss upon.
He started to say something to her, but she stopped him by putting a finger to his lips, tilting her head to listen to something that she heard in the night. Closed her eyes, listened, then opened them and shook her head. “Nothing.”
“How good is your hearing? Your sight? You want to tell me what this is all about. That place you live and what happened tonight? I think I have a right to know.”Nick said.
“I guess that you do since you are part of it all from now to whenever or however it ends.”Karina took a long breath before beginning. “The day will come when the vampires will bring on a new dark age. They are going to cause civilization to crumble and feed forever upon the ashes of humanity. That was a prophecy that sparked a project over twenty years ago. The ones who joined this project were shown absolute proof that this was going to occur.”
“How could proof be given of something that happens in an unknown future?”Nick interrupted.
“I do not know. Ask a parent and you will get told to finish your vegetables.”Karina said. “They believed and they began to engineer a response to the vampires. Hunting them down and wiping them out had been tried through the ages. That course was rejected. They decided instead to fight the vampires and what was to follow with their own children. They constructed a center of operations. They called it Shiloh, like the town nearby and I am one of the children of Shiloh. There were twenty sets of parents in the beginning and there were twenty one children born.”
“How were all of you born?”Nick asked.
She smiled at that question.
“What? Do you imagine we were grown in tanks or pods? I have seen horror movies and the answer is no. Born like every human being. We are called hybrids because of the genetic engineering that we are a product of. Each set of parents looked at DNA taken from a vampire and they took what they believed useful from that DNA and encoded it into each of us. Since each set of parents did it differently we are different. How we react to light and darkness. How we feed and even sleep. How human we are and how powerful we are. Some have been born with all of their abilities event while others of us have no idea what we are on the inside. Some will only know when they are fighting or when they have actually drunk flowing human blood.”
“So you have never…”
“Yes, that creature was telling the truth. Vampires actually rarely lie. She could see the truth that my blood would tell. The funny thing about blood is that it has memories. It records our human history.”She interrupted.
Funny how his thoughts were more about her being a blood virgin as well as an actual one since she had never kissed a boy before him. It amazed Nick that he could absorb everything that he had been told while also fantasizing about the beautiful girl at his side. Not being able to help himself under these life and death circumstances did bother him.
“This threat is not the vampires themselves?”
“Your train of thought is not a straight line is it?”Karina asked.
“I am sorry. I will try to focus.”
“To answer your question, every time that they tried to grow their numbers mankind discovered it and nearly wiped them out. This time they intend to destroy the human race’s great advantage. Civilization. Then after the fall they will pick through the wreckage.”
“They believe that twenty one children can stop this?”
“One of us.”
“What?”
“One of us. The rest of us do not matter. We were mistakes. I am a frightened little mistake.”She whispered and those words were like a slap to his face. The idea that anyone could consider Karina a mistake sickened him. The fact that she thought that way explained some of what had happened earlier.
To use the cross you needed faith. Was it possible to use whatever abilities that she possessed she needed just as much faith. The vampire with the amazing breast had no doubt in what she was or could do, but Karina was the average teenage girl in so many ways. A ball of doubts and fears. How often had he heard the most beautiful women on earth when interview talk about how they were homely or unnoticed when they were young? The pictures of those times during their lives told different stories, but in their hearts and minds they were not the goddesses they would become. The problem with that was that on the outside Karina was perfection.
“You are beautiful.”Nick said.
“That does not mean that I have value.”
“I cannot tell you that you are going to save the world.”
“Nicolas I don’t want to save the world. This is not my choice. I was never asked do you want to save the human race. Karina do you want to be a hero? I do not want to be this person. I do not want to fight anyone or anything. I am not good at fighting like number eight or one or even three. Even if I was how do you fight something like that? It looks human. Can act human, but did you feel the hatred and emptiness coming from that creature. The other ones that I saw before were wounded or bounded and even then I knew that this was going to be too much. I woke up each day for as long as I could remember frightened.”
“But you were still…”
She raised a hand to silence him and then she was turning to stare back the way that they had come. If Nick could have have seen her eyes at that moment he would have saw her pupils widen to fill the entirety of her eyes.
“She or maybe they are trying something. There is a fog rolling in from back the way we came and…”She did a slow turn. “Almost all around us except straight ahead.”
“That does not sound too bad. Misty weather cannot harm us.”Nick said and as if to say to him not so fast kid there came the sound of a wolf howling and then two more howled in response.
“We have to move fast. I could protect myself from them, but not both of us at the same time and out here in the open.”Karina stopped pushing the motorcycle and climbed on it.
“What are you doing?”Nick asked.
“You won’t be able to see in the fog. I can. I will have to steer and you will have to handle everything else.”Karina put her helmet on as if the conversation was over.
Nick wanted to protest that even under the best of circumstances that what she suggested would have been difficult, but if she was right what choice did they have? More wolves began to howl from every possible direction. Nick put his helmet on and got on behind Karina.
