“I’ve made an edible friend,” said the young man as he turned away from the girl whose neck he’d been nuzzling. A thin rivulet of blood trickled from a small bite on her neck, reaching her clavicle and slowly running down along the slope of the bone. He had a smile on his face, which revealed elongated white canines. His lips and teeth were red with blood
“All your friends are edible if you get hungry enough,” I replied. Then I placed the muzzle off my gun against the base of his spine and shot him.
Four days previously…
I was sitting at a table in the Water Horse Irish Pub in Franklin, New Hampshire, nursing a Guinness and making my leisurely way through a delicious plate of fish and chips. As I did so, I watched traffic passing up and down the main drag. As I sat there, I felt my phone buzz in my shirt pocket.
Because only a handful of people would know this number, I fished it out of my pocket to see who was calling. Recognizing the name, I answered the call.
“Hello?”
“Bill?”
The caller was using the name under which I had purchased the phone. It wasn’t mine, but in my line of work—I kill people for a living—it wouldn’t be a good thing to advertise myself as Ray Vincent, even up here in New England. There were a handful of Southern States who would be most interested in having a long conversation or two with me about a dead witness in a Federal drug case, a retired racist judge, and his wife, as well as a few mercenaries. There were some more up here, but my name wasn’t connected with any of them.
“Jim?” I answered back, Using the name he went by on the Dark Web.
“Yep,” he replied. We exchanged a few short pleasantries, then got down to business.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“I’ve got a friend that could use your services,” Jim explained. “If we can meet up, I can give you the details.”
“Do you remember the last place we met up?” I asked him.
There was a brief silence.
“Yes,” Jim said.
“Can you meet me there at about three?”
“I can do that,” he said. “See you then.” He broke the connection.
I checked the time on the phone; it was just a little past noon, so I had plenty of time to finish my lunch.
I decided to take the secondary roads to Concord, the state capitol, avoiding Interstate 93. I crossed the Pemigewasset River and turned left, heading alongside the river to where it joined with the Winnipesaukee River to form the Merrimack River, which had at one time been the most heavily-industrialized river in the world. The road took me through the small towns of Boscawen and Penacook, and I soon found myself in Concord (which is pronounced to sound like “conquered”, instead of “KON-cord”, as most newscasters mispronounced it.
Driving past the New Hampshire State House with its gold dome glinting in the sun, I headed on down through the business district and parked. Locking my car, I crossed the main drag and entered Gibson’s Book Store, which had been a fixture in the area since the 1960’s. I entered, and looked around the store for Jim. I spotted him sitting in a table, a copy of the new Stephen King in his hand. He gave a slight nod and indicated a chair to his right. I sat down and shook his hand.
“Been waiting long?” I asked.
He raised his hand to show me his finger holding his place just into the beginning of the book.
“Just a chapter or two,” he replied.
“So what does this friend of yours need?” I asked.
Jim glanced quickly around to make sure we weren’t being observed.
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“He’s got a daughter who’s living in New York who’s fallen in with a pretty bizarre crowd.”
“City or State” I asked.
Jim looked puzzled.
“Eh?” he said, then his face brightened. “Oh! City.”
“What kind of bizarre crowd?”
He looked around again, then answered.
“Vampires.”
I blinked at him.
“Pardon me,” I said. “I thought you said ‘vampires’.”
He nodded.
“I did.”
“So do I need to stock up on wooden stakes and crosses and garlic?” I asked, a wry grin scowling across my face. Jim chuckled and waved a hand idly in the air.
“No, no,” he said. “This is a group of people, most of them in their twenties or early thirties, who practice vampirism. They dress in black and hang out at night in a townhouse—I’ll give you all the information on the address and floorplans and so on—and they either have their teeth capped to make them like fangs, and they get girls to let them bite their necks and drink their blood.”
“So where do I come in?” I asked.
“My friend’s daughter smuggled a message out to him last week, asking him to get her out of this place,” Jim said. “She says that these freaks aren’t letting her leave, and she says that not long ago, they drank a girl dry, and she died, and she’s afraid she might be next. Are you interested?”
I reached out and shook his hand.
“It’ll be a first for me,” I admitted. “If the money’s right, I’m in.”
Aboard the Amtrak Acela—The next day
I sat back in my comfortable seat aboard the Acela, Amtrak’s “high-speed” passenger train, headed from Boston to New York. Although the fastest passenger train in the US, the train’s top speed of 150 miles per hour (its average speed was a mere 75 mph) was far below that of high-speed trains in Europe or the bullet trains in Japan and China.
The first-class seating was three across, with in-seat food service, all of which insured me the privacy I wanted while going over the information Jim had given me. It included a series of color photographs of a modest three-story townhouse on a quiet residential street in Manhattan. The brick structure was well-kept up, almost looking as though it was washed down regularly. The windows were heavily draped with thick burgundy-colored curtains, the lower portions masked with wooden Venetian blinds that shielded the interior from view.
Only a modest metal plate with “The Exsanguinarian Society” engraved on it, fixed at eye level to the right of the massive wooden door, just above a doorbell and speaker, gave any clue to the business carried on within. There was a basement space as well, reached by a set of steps that wound down and around beneath the steps leading up to the front door.
Jim had also provided sketches showing the layout of each floor, with a dining room, drawing room and kitchen off an entry hall, with four bedrooms with baths en suite on each of the other two floors. There was nothing available for the basement.
There was also a drone photo of the roof of the building, taken in the daytime. The roof appeared to be flat, with a wooden deck laid over crushed stone. There was a small brick stairway enclosure with a door to provide entry to the roof. There was no fire escape leading down to the airshaft behind the building, which appeared to be accessible only through a door in the back of each of the two buildings that abutted the airshaft.
Not much was known about the members of the Exsanguinarian Society, not even how many they were. Their building was assessed at $40,000,000.00, so they had to have money.
Now all I needed to do was to find a way in and out, and obtain the means to hold off an unknown number of would-be vampires long enough to rescue the girl and get both of us back out again in one piece.
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Other than that, no problem.
A shopping spree
“You’re still alive?”
The little bald man—we’ll call him Bill Smith for our purposes—stood in his doorway, a broad grin spreading across his face as he recognized me. It had been a while, so I wasn’t surprised. He stepped back to let me in, and I stepped out of the narrow hallway and entered his apartment. A smell of something chicken-based wafted down the hall from his kitchen. My stomach growled.
“You hungry?” Bill asked. “I got enough for both of us.”
I shook my head.
“No, thanks,” I told him. “Smells good, though.”
We entered a small living room and I took a seat on Bill’s corduroy sofa. He slid into a chair facing a flat-screen tv that took up most of the wall across from it. He leaned forward, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.
“So what can I do ya for?” he asked.
“I’ve got an extraction job,” I told him. “I need two black body suits—one to fit me, and another for a girl about fifteen or twenty, slim build, about five-five or six.”
Bill nodded as I spoke, filing the information away in the steel trap that was his mind.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“A 9-mil with a silencer, plus enough Silvertip hollow-point ammo to load three spare clips, preferably with an illegal capacity.”
Bill nodded some more.
“I can have it for you by this time tomorrow,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. “How much?”
He named a figure. I pulled a roll of bills from my pocket and peeled off the amount he’d named, and added a few hundred, then passed it over. He took it, counted it, and shoved it into his right front pocket.
“If you think of anything else, just let me know before noon tomorrow, and I’ll have it for you when you come for the rest.”
“Will do,” I said, rising and heading for the door. “Actually, I could use a small pack on a strap to put the bodysuits in, and about fifty feet of nylon mountain climbing rope.”
Bill nodded again, filing the information away. He unlocked the door and pulled it wide, waiting for me to pass out into the hallway. As I turned to leave, he spoke.
“You specified Silvertip slugs,” he said.
I nodded. He smiled.
“What ya hunting?” he asked. “Werewolves?”
I smiled and shook my head.
“No,” I answered, turning my head to glance at him over my shoulder.
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“Vampires.”
The smile wiped off his face like he’d been slapped. He stepped back into his entry. He beckoned to me.
“Get back in here a minute,” he said.
I stepped inside and he shut the door. His brow furrowed, he squinted at me.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Sorta,” I replied.
“That bunch over on the East Side?” he asked. “Exaggeration Club, or whatever they call themselves?”
“Exsanguinarian Society,” I corrected him. “But yeah, that’s them.”
Bill looked down for a moment, then looked back up at me. He looked worried.
“I’ve heard bad things about that bunch,” he said. “You need to be careful around them. You might want to have a few other things if you’re going up against them. I’ll get them for you along with the other stuff.”
I smiled.
“A hammer and some wooden stakes?” I asked. “Some garlic and holy water?”
Bill snorted a little.
“You’ll see,” he said, and showed me to the door once again.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told him as I headed for the elevator bank.
I rode down to the ground floor and left Bill’s building. Then I walked about ten blocks over to the street where the Society’s townhouse was. I strolled by it on the other side of the street.
It sat about midway on a block of similar buildings, and from the outside, it didn’t appear that anything was going on. There was light showing through small gaps in the drapes, and one or two of the upstairs rooms appeared to be occupied, if the red-tinged light leaking through was any indication.
There didn’t seem to be anyone watching me, but I kept my pace steady, only glancing out of the corner of my eyes at the building so as not to seem to be paying it any special attention. I made my way on down to the end of the block, then turned onto a cross-street and made my way to my hotel. I went up my room and was asleep within a few minutes.
Zero Hour
I stood on a parapet of a skyscraper a few blocks away from the Exsanguinarian Society’s townhouse. I was wearing my black bodysuit, the one for the girl stashed in a bag around my waist. I wet a finger and tested the wind. There was an updraft coming up from the street below.
I grabbed the ring near my shoulder, and leaned forward, letting myself fall off the ledge. At almost the same time, I pulled the ring, deploying the rectangular black parachute strapped to my back.
When I felt the chute pop open above me, I reached up for the metal rings that enabled me to navigate. The building from which I’d jumped was much taller than the three-story townhouses that were my destination. Spilling air from one side or the other, I made my way along the aerial path I’d laid out for myself on Google Earth on my phone earlier in the day.
Finally, I spotted the roof I was looking for. It was easy to spot because of the collapsible ladder I had left there the day before. Spilling air from the chute, I spiraled slowly down and landed quietly on the roof, running a few steps, and then turning to gather in the chute, bundling it in my arms. I walked quietly over to the stairway housing, placing the chute in a shady area on the far side of the housing from the door. I loosened the chute’s harness and placed it on top of the chute to weigh it down, although there wasn’t much of a breeze on the roof.
I then walked lightly over to the ladder, my crepe-soled shoes making only a slight crunching sound on the gravel. Quickly, I extended it to its full eight feet, then laid it down over the airshaft between the roof where I’d landed and the Society’s building. I had chosen to land on the roof of this building so that there would be no noise to alert anyone who might be in the rooms on the third floor that someone had landed on their roof.
Glancing over the edge, I didn’t see any light leaking out from the windows of the third floor, and hoped that meant they were unoccupied. I backed up as far as I could, then ran to the edge beside the ladder and launched myself across the airshaft, landing about a foot from the edge and rolling on my right shoulder before standing up on my feet facing the door to the stairs.
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I had gotten the ladder to use for my return trip. I didn’t know what shape the girl would be in, and was prepared to carry her if need be. I placed an ear next to the stairway door. I didn’t hear any sounds coming up through the stairwell, so I reached down and tried the doorknob. It was locked. As I was reaching for my lock picks, I heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. I flattened myself against the wall so I’d be hidden by the door as it opened.
The footsteps stopped at the top of the stairs. There was a rattle to the door; probably someone turning a latch. Then the door opened. A man stepped out onto the roof. He spotted the ladder and took a few steps forward.
“What the fuck?” he muttered under his breath. I slipped up behind him and grabbed his chin, wrenching his head sharply to the left. His neck snapped with a soft pop, and I lowered his twitching body to the roof.
He was in his late twenties or early thirties, with neatly-cut dark hair. His blue eyes were rolled back in their sockets. His mouth was open in a snarl, and I could see that his canines were longer and sharper than usual. I reached out a gripped one and pulled. With a little resistance, it came out, revealing the real tooth beneath. The long one was a cap.
He seemed dead enough to me, so I assumed he was not a real vampire. I dragged him to the edge of the roof and spilled him into the airshaft, then turned back and started down the stairs, walking as softly as I could to minimize the noise.
Easing the third-floor access door open, I stepped into a carpeted hallway. Moving as quietly as I could, I checked each of the four rooms on the floor. None of them were occupied. Going back to the stairs, I headed down to the second floor.
The layout was essentially the same as the floor above. I checked the first door on my right. The room was unoccupied, furnished almost like a hotel room, with an ornate double bed, nightstands, a dresser, and a couple of overstuffed chairs, all fitting the Victorian ambiance of the building in general. I eased the door shut and padded softly down to the next door.
This room was identical to the previous one, so I eased the door shut and crossed the hall to the third one.
That room was a mirror image of the two on the right side of the hall, but this one was occupied. There was a man sitting on the edge of the bed, his brown hair gassed straight back like Bela Lugosi. he was wearing a suit, and had his face buried at the neck of a young blonde girl, wearing a sheer white gown like something out of a Hammer film. She was looking in my direction, and from my viewpoint, I could tell two things.
She was the one I was looking for.
And she was drugged out of her mind.
I cleared my throat.
The young man turned away from the girl, and tipped his head toward her as he looked at me. His lips and canines were red with blood.
“I’ve made an edible friend,” he said with a smile. A thin rivulet of blood trickled from a small bite on the girl’s neck, reaching her clavicle and slowly running down along the slope of the bone. The man turned back to the girl, resting his hand on the nightstand beside him.
“All your friends are edible if you get hungry enough,” I replied. Then I placed the muzzle off my gun against the base of his spine and shot him. He slid slowly off the bed and onto the floor. The girl sat there slack-jawed, her eyes glassy.
I reached into the pack at my waist and pulled out the bodysuit. I shoved into her hand and said, “Quick; put this on.”
She stared down at it, then her eyes slowly tracked up to me.
I knew I was getting nowhere with this. I snatched the bodysuit out of her hands, unrolled it to its full length, then slid her feet into the legs and began drawing them up her legs.
When I’d gotten the suit as far up her legs as I could with her sitting there, I looked up at her.
“Hey!” I said, giving her shoulders a shake as I did. Her focus seemed to sharpen a little. “Can you stand up finish putting this on?”
She stared at me, her brow furrowed in confusion. I didn’t have time for this. I hauled her to a standing position, draping her arms over my shoulders, grasped the hem of the bodysuit and hauled it up to her waist. Then, as quickly as I could, I hauled the nightgown over her head and pulled the suit over her arms, then zipped it up the back. I did it as much as I could without peeking.
Well, mostly….
I dropped the bloodstained nightgown on top of the vampire’s body, then scooped up the girl and carried her to the door. After taking a quick look outside to make sure the hall was empty, I headed for the stairway, turned left to head up to the roof, then stopped.
A man was standing midway up the stairs, blocking my access to the roof. He was dressed in a ruffled tuxedo shirt and black pants. He held a pistol in his right hand, covering me loosely. He smiled, his full black mustache curling. His teeth, like the other man’s, were long and sharp.
“Where do you think you’re going with my guest?’ He asked. His voice was soft and silky. He gestured with the pistol. “Why don’t you put her down and come with me?”
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I propped the girl against the wall to my left, draping her over a step so she wouldn’t fall. Then I took a step up toward him, and launched myself at him. I put both hands on his chest and gave him a shove. Losing his balance, he dropped his pistol. I took advantage of that to jump down the stairs before he could scramble after me.
The stairway on the second and third floors had walls on both sides, but as they headed to the first floor, the wall to the right went away, replaced by an ornate wooden banister.
As I reached the halfway mark, the other man landed on my back, bringing me down on my stomach. I tried to roll over as I slid, and the man on my back was thrust against the newel posts holding the banister in place. Two of them broke off. My opponent’s head struck a couple of them, stunning him.
I rolled out from under him and slid down the rest of the way, hauled myself to my feet and turned to the man on the stair, reaching for my gun. As I did, I noticed the broken newel posts that lay beside him. They had jagged edges where they had broken away from the rail as we fell.
The other man was coming to himself, shaking his head to clear it. I picked up one of the posts.
“What the hell?” I muttered, then grasped the newel post in both hands and raised it over my head, bringing it down with all my weight and plunging it into the man’s chest, right over his heart. I felt the other end of my improvised stake hit the step beneath him.
His eyes flew open wide, and his mouth gaped in a silent scream. His hands twitched toward the wooden post sticking out of his chest. They slowly relaxed as his eyes glazed in death.
I pushed myself to my feet, and was about to head back upstairs to get myself and girl out of here when I heard a sound behind and below me.
“Dan?” called a quavery voice from behind a door across the entryway from the stairs. “Was there anything there?”
A fourth man, thin, pale and dressed entirely in black, crept into the entryway, His hair was shoulder length and hung loosely around his face, and as he caught sight of me, his eyes widened and he took a step back, his mouth gaping in horror. Like the other two, his teeth were unnaturally long and pointed.
He saw the man on the stairs, the stake protruding out of his chest, and gasped.
“You killed Dan?” he said, in a weak, squeaky voice. “You killed him with a stake?! What kind of savage are you?”
“The kind that rescues kidnapped girls,” I told him.
‘We’re not real vampires, you asshole!” The man said indignantly. He reached into his mouth and pried on of canine caps loose and held it out to me on his hand, “You see?”
I looked at it for a second, then nodded.
“Well, that makes it easier,” I told him. “That means I don’t have to drive a stake through your heart, cut off your head and stuff your mouth full of garlic to kill you.”
The kid looked horrified and, his one cap removed, almost comically snaggletoothed. His knowledge of vampires obviously came mostly from movies.
“What are you talking about, you sick bastard?”
For answer, I shot him through the heart. The Silvertip hollow-point slug probably made as big a mess of his heart as the stake would, but was quicker and quieter. The slug was silver-colored, but not a real silver bullet; but that was all right. He wasn’t a real vampire, either. As he clattered down the stairs into the basement, I made a quick sweep through the ground floor. It was deserted. I must have caught them on a slow night.
There was no sound from the basement, and I didn’t bother to check, just closed the door. Then I dragged a heavy wooden stand with a high mirror on it to block it shut. That would buy me a few minutes, and make enough noise to warn me. Not to mention the seven years of bad luck if they broke that mirror.
I moved to the front door, and ventured a quick look out into the street. Not a creature was stirring, as they say. I closed and locked the door, throwing the deadbolt and latch as I did so, then I padded back up the stairs.
The girl was just about where I’d left her. She was still pretty much out of it, which would come in handy during the next few minutes. The last thing I needed going across that ladder was a hysterical woman writhing around on my back.
I scooped her up and flung her over my left shoulder in a fireman’s carry and quickly made my way up the roof. I locked the door and shut it, then walked quickly over to the ladder. I took the girl off my shoulder, and switched her to drape over my back. I pulled zip-tie cuffs out of my bag and bound her wrists together in front of me so she wouldn’t fall off, then knelt down and started across the ladder on my hands and knees.
I was two-thirds of the way across the airshaft when my luck ran out.
The girl began to stir on my back, muttering under her breath. Then I felt her stiffen and heard sharp gasp. I kept going, trying to prepare myself for what I’d have to do if she fell off.
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“What the fuck?” she asked breathlessly as I put my hands on the gravel rooftop.
“Hold still!” I hissed, “If you don’t, we’ll both die!”
“What is this?” she said, more loudly. “Who are you and what are you doing?’
“I’m Luke Skywalker, and I’m here to rescue you.”
That puzzled her long enough for me to get us off the ladder and onto the roof. I stood up, moved her around in front of me and lowered her feet to the ground, pulling my head free from her arms.
She looked across the airshaft to the Society building. Pulling a pair of snips from my bag, I cut the zip-ties free and tossed them into the airshaft. Then she looked up at me.
“Who are you really?” she asked.
“Your father sent me,” I said. “You smuggled a letter out. And he hired me to come and get you. And here we are.”
She rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had been, then gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“Thank you.”
I took her hand and pulled her toward the stairway.
“We better get out of here before someone realizes you’re gone.”
She nodded and followed me. I tried the door, and found that it was locked. It was the work of only a few seconds to pick the lock, then we made our way down the stairs and into an entryway remarkably like the one at the
Exsanguinarian Society.
Opening the front door, I stepped outside, looked quickly up and down the deserted street, then motioned for the girl to follow me. As she stepped down onto the stoop, I fished a small flashlight out of my pack and blinked it twice down the street.
There was an answering blink of fog lights from a dark car parked up the street from our position. Taking the girl’s hand, I led her down the steps and walked up to the black C-class Mercedes sedan that had returned my signal.
As we approached, the rear passenger-side door opened and a tall man in a gray suit stepped out. His hair and mustache were both immaculately trimmed, and the girl flung herself into his arms. Looking over her shoulder, then man nodded, then thanked me gruffly.
The front passenger-side window buzzed down, and the driver handed me a package wrapped in brown paper. It was about the size of a large shoebox. I took it and tucked it under one arm. As I turned back to the man and his daughter, the window buzzed back up.
“I believe the amount will be satisfactory,” the man said, “It’s as we agreed, with a little extra included. Did you clean the nest out?”
“There were four of them in there,” I told him. “Those were taken care of. I didn’t see or hear anything else.”
The man nodded.
“I’ll take care of that,” he said. “Thank you again for my daughter’s life.” He ushered her into the back of the car and climbed in after her, then glanced at me once more and shut the door.
As the car pulled away from the curb, I saw a medallion near the rear license plate, identifying the car as belonging to the New York Commissioner of Police. I turned and began walking back to my hotel to pack and prepare to catch the next Acela to Boston.
A few days later
I entered my cabin, deep in the woods near Grafton, New Hampshire, carrying two reusable bags of food and supplies and a copy of the New York Times. Buried deep in the local news section was a story about an NYPD investigation of a bizarre group of would-be vampires who had been luring young girls to their townhouse to drink their blood and exploit them sexually.
In a raid on the group’s townhouse, four members of the group had been killed by police, and some very interesting things had been unearthed in the cellar, things which would solve a number of missing persons cases.
A search of the building had also unearthed records of the group’s membership lists, and efforts were underway to round those persons up, some of whom included prominent names in society.
I figured that might make an interesting story for Jim the next time we met up for a meal.
Perhaps at the Water Horse.
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