Resurrection is for the Unbelievers
By
Part Six
All Previous Disclaimers Appy
Razz Me: shaych3@yahoo.com
~Chapter Eleven~
Slinging cheap beer in a low rent dive bar was not Elizabeth Blaine’s idea of the perfect job, but it sure beat panhandling. Two days after leaving Kate Lockley’s hotel room, the vampire had found herself at a loss. Without money, she had no way of sheltering herself.
As a vampire, that would not have worried her because Iscariot had taken care of everything. As a human, she had shared her life with Lowell, and he had taken care of everything.
As whatever she was now, there was no one to care for her, and that was both frightening and challenging.
Clothes were easy to procure. The cash that Kate had thrown at her had gone a long way towards garbing her in an outfit that both complimented her figure and fitted her in a style that allowed her to blend into the flow of humanity that crowded Chicago’s streets.
Jeans, t-shirts and a denim jacket rounded off with a pair of decent sneakers had gotten her in the door of Sharkey’s, the bar at which she was currently employed. Her first paycheck went towards rent on the seedy dive of a motel room that she paid for by the week.
During the last six weeks, she had discovered several things about herself. Things like, she didn’t have to sleep, though she could. Sunlight didn’t burn, but she was much more comfortable outside at night. The moonlight seemed to make everything clearer and brighter. During the day, there was a slight fuzziness to the world that Elizabeth grew to dislike.
As a medical student, she had grown more and more nocturnal working at the morgue. As a vampire, the night had been her only place of safety. Now, she embraced the darkness as a familiar home. It was in the darkness where she learned one final thing about her newly made self.
Food did not have to come from the butcher’s counter at the local supermarket.
It was her third night as a bartender. The place was packed because it was a Friday and she was rushing from customer to customer. There had been no time for a break because besides being Friday, there was a wet t-shirt contest being held and the erotic ambience was ratcheting up to near orgasmic levels as the men urged the contestants to lewder and lewder behavior.
The emotions rolled over Elizabeth in ocean-sized swells and left her unable to even think about anything but delivering booze to thirsty hands. By night’s end, when she should have been starving, all she had wanted was to crawl into her bed and sleep for a week.
The next day, she had woken feeling surprisingly refreshed. That was when she had started her little experiment. Slowly at first, she tried to tap into the low lying emotions that leaked off her customers. Some, she would chat up – just like any normal bartender would. Others, she would hover around, and attempt to siphon the leakage in silence. Either way, she soon figured out how to make it work.
A steady diet of emotion, especially that which was most often found in the customers of a seedy neighborhood dive bar was not exactly healthy, but it was cheap.
It was the Monday of her third week that she found another use for her abilities.
Cutting through a park near the motel, she was set upon by a mugger. She reacted almost without thought, spinning away from his clumsy attack, grabbing him in a tight hold and pinioning his arms to his sides. Fangs bared, she bit deeply into his throat. At the last minute, instead of suckling his life’s blood, she ripped away the armor on his mind and feasted on his emotions.
Fear, deep, clawing terror pulsed into her, the feelings almost as rich as the blood she once craved. Behind that came the urgent need that had forced the man into attacking her – his own twisted addiction to crack cocaine. Elizabeth drained the mugger dry. As he passed into unconsciousness, she thought, I hope the next time you think about drugs, you get so violently ill that you never want to touch them again.
Two days later, the man found her. She had cut through the same park and he came up to her. Weeping openly, he said, “I was a junkie for years, lady. Years. I tried… hundreds of times to quit.” Clear eyed, he looked at her and said, “I haven’t had anything for two days and I feel more alive now than ever. I don’t know what you did to me lady, but thank you.” With that, he had run off.
Now, she trolled the dark places. Seeking those who would prey off the weak, she preyed instead, on them. If they were pipeheads, dope fiends and others lost to addiction, she planted within them a disgust for drugs that was so deep, it was almost instinctive.
The others – once a rapist and twice, would be murderers, she left for the cops to find. All three would find it near impossible to break the compulsions that she had left within them.
If the Chicago police wondered why three hardened criminals suddenly wanted to confess to their crimes, they never bothered to investigate it.
Yes, Elizabeth was gaining an understanding of her new life. Did she like it? Not particularly – she would have given much to return to the world in which she was just a struggling med student in love with her professor. Was she grateful for the opportunity to balance whatever scales she had broken as a vampire? Yes.
Every night she stood before her mirror, fangs bared and eyes wide open as she forced herself to remember her life as Iscariot’s pet. The memory of the screams of the dying, the cries of children ripped from the arms of weeping mothers and the helpless shouts of men as their families were slaughtered by Iscariot’s cadre of tame vampires was enough to make her realize that she had to honor whatever deity had brought her back to life.
She had amends to make.
~Chapter Twelve~
Kate was hunched over her leg, pounding on her calf muscle when the door opened. Looking up, she was greeted with the sight of Dersk, her contact with all things weird and wacky in the city of Chicago.
In his human guise, the half-demon glanced to and fro nervously and then skittered inside, closing the door behind him. As soon as it shut, he seemed to sigh as his form shifted from human to demon. Teal blue scales rippled over his body and his hair changed from bleach blonde to a shade of lime green that was almost blinding in its intensity.
Continuing to massage the cramping muscle, Kate raised one eyebrow archly and said, “What’s up?”
The half-demon’s tongue poked out as he tasted the air. Taking a scuttling step forward, he hooked his foot around a chair, pulled it out and sat with a solid whump. He ran scaly, clawed hands through his hair and sighed heavily.
“Well, detective, have you been paying attention to your front page news?” He withdrew a newspaper and tossed it onto her desk. Spread across the paper was a scattering of images and the headline, “RAPIST CONFESSES TO TWELVE SERIAL ATTACKS!”
The other eyebrow crept up to join its twin. “Well, normally I’d say that’s wonderful news, but something tells me you’re going to rain on my parade.” She sat back, glancing down occasionally to absorb the few details provided by the article.
Dersk chuckled. “That’s what I like about you Boss, you don’t poke sticks into the bush, you just hack it off at the base and be done with it. Yeah – that guy, he was major bad news until some vigilante I’ve heard whimperings about got hold of him and turned his Jones for evil into Jell-O.”
“Whimperings?” Kate smirked.
“Yeah, because by the time this bitch is done, that’s all they can do.” The half-demon pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Kate kicked an ashtray in his direction and turned on a fan. City regs said no smoking, but she knew that the more at ease her clients and by extension, her contacts, felt, the more likely they were to turn over important information.
“Do tell.”
“Ain’t much to tell, really. Just – if you mess with this bitch, you gonna get your ass whooped back to the stone age and live to wish you were a momma’s boy still suckin’ on the teat. Shit, I heard that she’s so fucking bad ass that Caruso’s boy Bizby is freaked.”
Thomas Bizby was the corpulent, slimy sidekick to Vitmar Caruso, a local Underworld honcho and powerful warlock. Bizby was his number one bullyboy. Caruso had the voice of an angel, the face of a young Adonis and the soul of a dog-kicking serial killer. He was also Kate’s lead suspect in the baby trade.
“So am I supposed to be scared of her, or want to give her a medal, because right now, I’m leaning towards the latter.”
Dersk took a long pull on his cigarette and then exhaled. As the silvery gray smoke wreathed about his head, he said, “Well I don’t know. I’ve heard only one constant from the various victims. She bites them, Boss. She’s a fucking vampire.”
%%%
Elizabeth locked the door to the bar and headed home. Tonight, she was going to patrol the shadows nearer the center of town. She had been working a steadily inward spiral, disposing of the creeps closer to home before venturing further afield.
To her mind, leaving behind the broken, emotionally torn assholes was akin to dong a public service. Kick the bad guys, then kick ‘em harder when they go down and leave the remains for the cops. It became a kind of game – how many rapists could she attract? She took to wearing clothing that made her look like bait and then waited for them to click to her presence.
She would toy with them, acting like she was terrified, and then when they least expected it, she would strike. A section of exposed flesh was all she needed, though she preferred, perhaps due to her formerly vampiric nature, the throat.
Sinking her fangs, both literal and figurative, into them filled her with a moment of pure pleasure. It was like… sex, drugs and rock-n-roll all twisted into one succulent meal on two heels. Even the incidental splash of blood became a welcome flavor, as it was almost always followed by the ambrosia of fear.
She learned to manipulate that fear, too. Using her mind, she could draw out her victim’s feelings, and even create new ones out of whole cloth. With some, she could even establish a sort of rapport, a two way feedback where she could force them to experience some of her emotions.
This is what she always did to the rapists. For them, she reserved a particular kind of hellish torment. She would take from them all the feelings they had bound up in the act and turn them inside out, leaving them fractured and spiky with painful barbs. Then she would push those newly twisted emotions back into the would-be rapist and release them, leaving the victim to deal with their new reality.
The first time she’d done it, she’d even taken the time to see if it worked. Flirting her hips in the suggestive manner that she knew set the guy off, she waited. When he went to reach for her, he suddenly screamed, clutched at his head and fell into a weeping heap.
Some would vomit. Or run screaming into the darkness. Almost all of them turned themselves in – those that didn’t, committed suicide.
Whatever happened, Elizabeth found she didn’t care. They had gotten what they deserved. A meal was a meal, and she wasn’t going to cry if the remains rotted.
The streets closer to downtown were busier than she was accustomed to. A steady trickle of humanity kept her pressed to the darkened doorways and random patches of shadow between lampposts. Along with the increased humanity came a greater surge of emotion, which put a feral smile of need on her face.
She was hungry. Licking her lips, she cast her senses adrift, searching for one like her. The sweetest prey is another hunter. It was a truism that Iscariot had once whispered to her during one of his blood rampages. On that day he had eviscerated three of his “progeny” just for kicks – forcing them to fight for their lives before spreading their innards on the walls of his castle.
Elizabeth closed her eyes. The pulse of the city around her came into sharp focus, beating like a heart in her head. Only instead of a syncopated thrum, it was an echoing babble of voices. She cocked her head, as if listening. In the cacophony she sought one special sound – that one speaker whose mental meanderings marked them as different.
“Gonna rip ‘er, I am. Rip ‘er from stem, to stern and oh yeah, gonna feel ‘em. Slick and oily, ‘m gonna squeeze and squeeze and she’ll scream and it’ll be oh, so sweet.” The thought was accompanied by a mélange of emotion that ranged from hatred to a desire so potent that the she shuddered in sympathetic need.
That was her target. Pushing away from the wall, Elizabeth began to race toward it. Over a fence, around a corner, dodging two cars and then, with a quick shimmy between a stack of crates, she found him.
The alley was lit by a single bare bulb, but it was enough to illuminate the horrific scene spread before her. Lying spread eagle on the ground was a woman, naked from the waist up and covered in a myriad of bloody stab wounds.
Above her hovered the form of a man. Lean, ropey with muscles, the attacker wore only a pair of loose fitting jeans and a t-shirt commonly referred to as a “wife-beater”. He was liberally covered in blood. A lit cigarette hung from his lips, the cherry flaring red as he casually sucked on it.
In his right hand he held a wicked looking blade. It was curved, and had a nasty barb at the tip. Blood and gore dripped from it, spattering the pavement. His other hand was busy stroking the quivering form of his victim.
She was gagged, and bound at wrists and ankles. The bindings were staked into the ground, rendering her unable to move.
All this Elizabeth took in with a glance before launching herself at the murderer.
Luck or preternatural senses made him turn just in time to see the vampire as she struck. One kick sent the knife flying. Grappling him, Elizabeth forced him into the wall. The cigarette fell into a puddle of blood and was extinguished.
“So you like to fuck with little girls, hmm?” she growled.
He grinned. “Oh baby, I like to fuck-fuck-fuck anything.” Licking his lips, he ground his hips into hers. “Come on, baby, let’s play.”
Displaying a surprising amount of strength, he twisted free of her grip and sucker punched the back of her head, slamming her forehead into the brick wall.
Elizabeth grunted, tasting copper. Spitting, she leapt for him. Connecting solidly, they went down, rolling in the dirt and grime of the alley. As they struggled, he punched her several times in the kidneys. The pummeling blows made Elizabeth dizzy with pain.
She headbutted him. He laughed and flipped her over. A screech of pain was torn from her as she came down hard on the dagger, driving the blade deep into her back. Bloodlust rose thick and heavy within her. Disregarding her preference, the vampire bared her fangs and dove for the first available patch of her victim’s flesh. Biting deep into his chest, she unleashed her senses and began to feed.
Almost instantly, she was hit by a solid wall of emotion. The sensation was akin to being kicked in the gut by a mule on steroids.
“Come on, bitch!” the man yelled. “You fight like a pussy! Biting me! Next thing you’re gonna try to scratch my eyes out!” He boxed her ears hard, sending a shaft of white hot pain coruscating through her head.
She bit harder and gagged on the gush of blood that filled her mouth. The gut punch turned into a tank that steamrolled her subconscious mind into oblivion. Pain unlike anything she had ever experienced – a hundred thousand paper cuts would have been more pleasant – washed over her.
Struggling to maintain both sanity and consciousness, Elizabeth forced the man into a feedback rapport. Sucking his twisted emotions in and turning the agony they caused into equal amounts of pain that she slammed into his brain was exhausting, and shortly, the vampire had reached the limits of her ability.
Just before she blacked out, she was gratified to see that her efforts had not been for nothing. The would-be killer had collapsed on top of her, and he was not breathing.