Z Diary 4

Z diary 4 Captivity and dialogue By S. Lei Pyke Lent, week 1: I have not written in a while. The Scions of Theiss have been packing and preparing, and I have been helping them. It feels good to be needed for something other than killing. Little did I know that we would be double-crossed. We are now imprisoned. The place I am at is somewhere in the Midwest, and at an abandoned monastery. The place is entirely underground; buried decades ago by the dust bowl dust storms. The Scions have updated it. They have introduced electricity from a generator and the internet through a secure, cellular web connection. I am not told how the place maintains its electricity, but it does. Or, at least it did before they all left. They have gone and left us here. My three companions and I are all alone now. By the time the Scions return, it will be well into spring. At least they told us the terms of our imprisonment. They simply don’t trust us enough yet to take us where they are going. When they left, they turned everything off. I am guessing that this is just one of their temporary lairs, because they do not hold anything here that they consider valuable. What this place is, I have discovered, is a nearly airtight prison. They shot us in the head to render us senseless and then locked our cell doors. So much for “undead salvation.” The Scions take each year what they call the “dry wandering” as if called by some ancient decree upon their souls; they take a pilgrimage from the beginning of lent until Easter. This is the most sacred time of their lives. Where other Christian sects might fast and pray, the Scions do more than this, they make pilgrimage. They explained it to me with the fervor of a medieval Benedictine Monk, about how they forgo the hunt and they restrain the change until dawn on the day of Easter. They told me about how it symbolizes their own salvation, and their own divine calling to battle the fiends of this world as surely as Christ himself went down to the pit to break the teeth of the enemy. I am not even going to begin to tell you about the loopholes in this. I am sure you can research it for yourself. But that is the way of all cults, you see. They make high and

lofty rules for themselves and then are eternally surprised that they cannot live up to their own goals. But still they are in love with their own law to the extent that they are blind to every other possibility. What I am fairly certain of is that the god they worship is that which is like god but is not. It is something that I wish no part of, thank-you-very-much. I am not here to discuss my own faith, but it is no pack of secrets and mysteries. Suffice it to say I am not entirely comfortable about my standing with the almighty, and so I tend to avoid the issue. That we are physically dead in almost all regards puts a kink in the common mortal concept of salvation. But here in the darkness we have waited for days, unsure of what to do. The coats they left do us no good. We generate no body temperature, at least not long enough to do much, which is the real rub. They turned off all of the power when they left. Oh! They are insidious. I am actually writing this on paper I filched from the supply closet. When I get to a computer, I will have to log it. Now that they are gone, the stone walls are returning to the elements, and so are we. I am already half beside myself. I don’t want to be forgotten again. I don’t want to be left in this small space. It reminds me too much of the crate and the long years in mothballs. At least freezing solid will stop the march of endless days. Oh sure, you might think that they will be back after Easter, but that is still a month and a half of nothing but the muffled shouts of my companions through the stone walls. Lent, day 15: Thank you, God. We have been saved. We did not have to wait long for help. All of us had just begun to enter torpor when from the window came the sound of shattering glass. The place has exactly two windows, and both of them were supposed to be shatterproof. Within moments by my count, but it must have been a very long time in reality, What poked its head nervously through the door of my cell was a vampire female. She was young in appearance, a succubus type, and she was very old. I can tell. There is a lingering smell that all vampires have, and one that gets more powerful with age. We can smell it, but it seems that all other species of undead out there cannot. This one was at

least a thousand years old. I sat up. To me it felt sudden, but she moved like a shaft of light in my perception to assist me. I could not feel fear enough to jump at the speed of it. What followed was a series of blurs and jostles. Finally, something steaming hot was pressed into my hand. It was a coffee cup filled with blood. It ran into my mouth as I lifted it, and it warmed me. “Who are you?” the question flowed from my lips like molasses. The answer came in a string of unintelligible fast words—a record player playing 33 1/3’s at 75. An electric blanket cranked up to high and a few comforters were piled on. I drained my cup and it was filled again. “Madam?” came the voice again, after a long silence, finally at a speed I could comprehend. I realized that I was beginning to burn. I threw the blankets off and stood, staring into the face of the ancient vampire that had come for us. “Who are you?” I asked again. She smiled. “I am Mary of Leeds.” She introduced herself. “We know you Janice Mabrook. We could kill you for what you have done.” I backed up. “Just what did I do? Kill some all important prince of yours?” the vampire’s high pitched keening laugh pierced my skull. “No, no. That we can all understand. We do not deal with vengeance as we did when we were mortal.” “Is it because of the Scions?” Mary must have caught the hint of distain in my voice because her mouth twisted revealing one long fang. “Not really. They were an exit when you wished to leave the company of the living and nothing more. What do you think of their religion?” “It’s a lot of legalistic lies and self-deception.” Mary nodded. “Indeed. Even worse than those of us who committed fully to darkness. They are ten times the sons of hell that we will ever be. We thirst for their blood, you know, but you are innocent of their crimes.” “And are you committed to that darkness?”

“That is a loaded question.” Said Mary. “Am I not a Vampire? Am I not by my very nature, in the face of whatever philosophies and vain dogmas I choose to heed, still tied to my grave each morning?” “You tell me.” I said. “I have only killed your kind, I have never sat and shared blood with them.” I held out my cup, and it was refilled. Now that I was warm, the blood was tepid in my hands. “You seem to have no qualms about the blood.” “This is good. Why should I?” “Because my own children are usually still troubled about it even a century after their creation. It is not, as some legends say, something that we need every night, nor in large quantity as long as we have our other methods of sustenance. You have consumed more since you arrived than most of would in a month.” “You do not drink from live prey?” she looked sad. “Oh yes, when it is safe to do so. And do you know most of use would rather not kill our prey, but it dies anyway. Only the lifedrinkers savor the moment of death.” “The ones that require blood and death?” “You are studied on our breeds. Yes them. They are terrible demons, the lot of them, but we still must call them cousin.” “So, am I on trial or is this a dinner date?” I asked. “Ah, young one! So direct! No we have hunted you these past few years, but we feared to be too rash in our hunt. It has been difficult for us, trying to catch you at a vulnerable point. We feared that you would never leave the military. You risked our lives with every mission, you know. We have sought a way to bring you to us or to kill you, and here you fall right into our lairs as easily as a herd of cattle.” “You are going to kill us?” “Not any more. You left the military quite spectacularly. We saw it on the news. They displayed it of the television as a terrorist cell.” My mouth dropped open. “Ungrateful bastards! After all we did for them!” I shouted. Mary gave me a patient look.

“Of course. That is the fickle way of the living. That is why this is not an important feud any more. Now that we see that it is merely ignorance and captivity, we can fix it. You will no longer be domesticated.” “Domesticated?” “Yes of course domesticated. We know all about the West project. We even know a great deal about what went into the serum. You are a domesticated creature. A dog, just as we are wolves.” “You are not interested in the project?” “No. We have been hunting Wilkinson for decades. He is demon possessed and strong, and he is undead now, just like Meyers. Meyers made the serum that made you. Wilkinson is not interested in anything but that which will cause chaos to humanity.” “He is jeopardizing the food supply.” “To put it crudely, yes. We were pleased to have found you.” “Why are you pleased? We are nothing alike.” “So true and yet so ignorant. We had been planning to ransack that place for months. We know of the pilgrimage, and we knew that they had taken you, but we did not know to which den they went.” “They shot us and locked us up.” I said, my voice shaking. “They are smart. The government is looking for you. Extracting you from the humans will take time and blood, I suppose,” said Mary, “It always does.” “Where is everyone? I know that they are safe, but—“ “How do you know?” “I have not tried to eat you. We can tell, believe me. I can sense them nearby.” Mary nodded her head slowly. “You don’t want to separate us for long.” “They are being questioned. They were part of the military in life. You were not.” “They are being politely questioned, just as you are now being entertained.” “Cal won’t talk. He never has.” “He did not need to. He is a coward. His mind was rather easy to infiltrate. The other three of you are like stone walls. We cannot breach your minds.”

“That is not news to me. We are dead, you know. How should the dead have readable thoughts? If it helps we cannot read each other, either.” “No your senses are cruder. You smell us. You smell one another. You really are pack animals. I can see why the Scions wanted you.” She looked at me, plainly interested behind her pale mask of a face. “Meyers is not one of you. He is something else—a true ghoul.” “Is that so? I have met the Ghilan. They are very similar, but Meyers never smelled like they do. He can’t make more undead either.” “Meyers does not smell like them because none have been made in a very long time. All those you have met are ancient. They are older than we are. Meyers won’t smell like them for centuries yet, but he is completely one of them. It usually takes them about a century to develop the ability to pass on the curse to his victims.” “What nonsense.” I said. Mary lifted a thin eyebrow. “Oh indeed? You know, you three are a bundle of contradictions. Of course the ghilan are cursed. Meyers received his curse in the same way the original ghilan received theirs. He dabbled in things he should not have messed with.” “Meyers is an empirical scientist; a doctor.” “No. Not so. Science is his religion, and even now he has attached mystical things to it. He cannot tell how he made the serum because he deluded himself into forgetting the key components.” “We are not free willed folk. Wilkinson must have blocked it.” “Yes, that is our opinion as well. In that you have realized the truth. Have you never noticed that he cannot take on a horde, or that he does not share the same symptoms?” “He has been exposed to a lifetime of different serums and solutions. We still frenzy when he is attacked.” “That is because he is your father in undeath. Ghilan have a certain control over the undead that they create. Evidently, it works even when they are a different type.” “He does not control us. If anything, we control him.”

“Also not unheard of, especially when the master is a coward.” Mary stood and took my hand. Her grasp was as cold as my own. “You are safe here. We might harm you, but we will always give you enough human flesh to recover.” “That is strikingly honest.” Mary laughed and looked into my eyes. She seemed troubled by what she saw. “I like you. I think that we may get along well. Please understand that if you escape us, you will not be protected from the humans, and you will be reclaimed by the wolves. After contact with us, they will not be so forgiving.” “You mean to keep us as pets? Experiment on us?” I asked nervously. “Only if you permit it. Quite frankly, Meyers has given us plenty, though he does not know it. We have begun to free his mind of Wilkinson’s last vestige of brainwashing.” She scratched her head and backed away, not turning her back to me as she opened the door to my room. “And yes, as pets. There is no use in hiding that. You are a domesticated undead. You cannot survive on your own yet. By god girl, you have not had a day to yourself in all the days of your undead existence.” “Reanimated.” I corrected, weakly. Mary shook her head. “As you wish. There is fresh human blood and flesh in your refrigerator. We raided a highway underpass for it, so it might not be the best quality.” “I am not hungry.” Mary shrugged “We know your needs, and the frequency of it. It amuses us to have someone that can dispose of our waste.”