The Fortune-teller's Revenge

Suddenly an alarm went off, flashing on the wall next to the door. Everyone froze for half a second. 

“F**k.” Mark broke the silence, needle still poised above Lucy’s skin.

The man with the mustache was the first to shake off the momentary paralysis. He stood, walking to the closet quickly, issuing orders as he went. “Follow me. Mark, bring the laptop.” He opened the door of the closet in the corner of the room.

Vincent stood, taking Lucy’s hand and leading her, shuffling behind him in his boots. The man with the mustache had vanished inside of the closet, he was far more nimble than his appearance would suggest. He quickly climbed a shelf that was built against the back wall, he paused at the top of it and peeled back the ceiling, revealing another scanner and keypad. He scanned his eye, then ripped his shirt open and scanned an anchor tattooed on his chest. He typed in a sixth digit code and the ceiling receded revealing a vertical shaft with a ladder, he climbed up quickly. In the mean time, Mark had locked the door to the room and the knob had begun to jiggle furiously. Lucy looked at Vincent. “Go.” Was all he said.

Lucy tried to climb the shelf, but the large boots slipped off the metal and she fell. 

Vincent didn’t wait for her to recover and make a second attempt. He gripped either side of her ribcage firmly and lifted her so she could grab the bottom wrung of the ladder. She climbed quickly after the mustached man. Vincent followed her and Mark shut the closet door behind them. The unsettling sound of the door being broken down outside was still loud, like thunder. Mark tucked the computer under his arm and climbed up behind Vincent. He shut the ceiling behind them and the four of them climbed until the shaft ended abruptly, followed by a ninety degree turn. The tunnel which opened before them was supported by metal buttresses every half mile, which contained charges whose remote detonators were tucked safely in the pockets of trusted vampire officials millions of miles away. As the four of them walked, Mark tried to explain the situation.

“The alarm goes off when there’s a breach in our security. It’s never happened at this location before. The alarm calls for total evacuation, except for security personnel who stay to try to contain the threat. If they are successful, everything goes back to normal. If not. . .” He took a deep breath and the silence was scarier than anything he could have said. “This tunnel surfaces four miles from the facility. There we have to go separate ways.”

The man with the mustache took over. “Your main priority will be finding shelter before sunrise. Do not draw attention to yourself. Pay in cash. The website will have an update by tomorrow night. Wait until then to do anything. Do not return to the address on file incase it has been compromised.”

Compromised. Lucy didn’t know exactly what the man with the mustache meant by that, but she knew what it meant to her. There is no such thing as home. Just like every other time before, it was torn away just when it was starting to feel real. 

Lucy was a silent tempest. Suddenly she had been thrown into the midst of a scary movie, just like the ones she had been studying all her life. Lucy loved macabre and dangerous plot twists, but not in her own life. 

After almost two hours of crawling, stopping to rest only once, Lucy could no longer feel her knees and her shins ached. They reached the exit door of the tunnel just in time. 

The man with the mustache cleared his throat, turning to the rest of the group. “I will go north. Mark, you go west, warn anyone who’s left in Bremerton. The two of you go east, you have about four and a half hours until sunrise. Good luck.” With that he scanned his tattoo, typed in a six digit code, scanned his eye and disappeared out the door. Lucy felt the rush of cool night air as the door slid closed behind him. Faintly, she remembered that the others could not. 

“The door only remains open for five seconds at a time. Since her tattoo isn’t finished you’re going to have to take her through.” Mark looked like he had something to add to that, but instead he turned, punched in the code, scanned his ankle, then his eye and vanished.

As the door slammed shut again, the reality of what he had said was beginning to sink in. 

“How are we both going to get through the door in five seconds?” Lucy asked.

Vincent scanned his tattoo, “Like a piggy back ride.” He said, without looking at her.

Lucy had received only one piggy back ride in her life, from an older boy at the orphanage, Robert. This was neither the time, nor the place to replace that memory, but Vincent was on the second digit of the code. He looked at her, read the apprehension on her face, “Just grab my shoulders. It’ll be fun. . . Hurry, we don’t have much time.”

Reluctantly, Lucy did as she was told and clung to him as the door opened for the third and final time. 

Outside the tunnel, the wind was blowing hard and the grass along the lonely highway they stood sixty feet from rippled like a fuzzy green ocean around their ankles. In the distance, to the west one could still see the outline of Mark as he walked away.

Lucy and Vincent walked in silence for a long time. In the distance, crickets chirped and stars dotted the sky. It would have been a serene and beautiful experience at any other time.

Vincent broke the silence, “How’re you holding up?”

Walking so far in borrowed boots was not fun, but Lucy hadn’t thought of it in all the commotion. “Alright.” She fibbed.

“This is route sixty-seven, we’re walking toward Fawkland, it’s about fourteen miles away, so if we keep moving we should make it there by sunrise.”

“What are we gonna’ do when we get there?” 

“Like he said: find shelter, a hotel, hopefully. Rest.”

The way Vincent talked calmed her down. Nothing scared him, it gave him the appearance of being in absolute control, in spite of the fact that they were walking through a field, miles away from his home and everything he cared about.

There was a pause, Lucy hated the silence. It reminded her of where they were. “Sorry about all of this.” She said finally.

He looked at her, “All of what?”

“This whole catastrophe. I know you probably think it’s just a coincidence, but it’s not. I’m cursed. . .” She said, with a hint of pride in her voice. She looked down at her feet and added, less energetically. “I know, I’m Catholic and I’m not supposed to believe in curses, but I’m pretty sure I’m cursed. Fer real.”

“Cursed?” Vincent looked amused.

“Yes, I was born to a kind-hearted contortionist in a traveling circus, but I pulled off the fortune-teller’s wig and she put a gypsy hex on me so I would have bad luck for the rest of my life. My mother gave me up after the caravan went up in flames.” She smiled, looking out at the horizon and allowing her voice to fill up with the grandeur of the narrative. “I just feel like if you hadn’t met me you would still be at home, enjoying your life.”

He laughed derisively, “Enjoying my life? I was hiding in a bush waiting for death or sunset. I had no friends. . . No family.” He looked at her, frankly. “Bad things happen to vampires. It’s not your fault. We live within a society that hates us blindly, who greatly outnumber us and have every tool they need to destroy us at their disposal.” He stopped, “Everything will be fine.”

They walked in silence for a few more steps, until something occurred to Lucy. “What were you doing out in the daylight, anyway?”

Vincent laughed again and shook his head, “I was buying groceries. . . I had a crush on the checkout girl, she doesn’t work nights.”

“Seriously?” Lucy looked at him sideways.

“Yea,” He looked down, buried his hands in his pockets.

“Dumbass.” She laughed, punching him in the shoulder with her tiny fist.

“The last two hundred years have been really lonely, okay?” He said, fading into a serious tone.

Heavy silence fell as Lucy pondered this statement. It was like halfway through saying it he had realized how sad it really was. Lucy thought about how lonely she had been all her life, but that was only fourteen years. 

The next few hours, as they walked, were mainly respectful silence. They passed gatherings of deer who stared at them as they went by. Lucy tried to focus on the simple task of walking, tried not to think about all the questions she had, but couldn’t answer, all the mysteries surrounding them, her rapidly growing hunger, or all the suspicious noises she kept hearing in the brush.

“Hey, what name did you end up choosing?” Vincent asked, brightly and suddenly as they passed a tire which had been abandoned on the side of the road.

“Oh,” Lucy hadn’t even realized it hadn’t come up. “Delilah.” 

“Delilah. Hm, pretty. How did you pick it?”

Up ahead she could see the silhouettes of a few houses, this was her first glimpse of Fawkland. “I dunno’, just seemed appropriate I guess. She’s devious, you know?”

Vincent smiled, “I see.” He took his phone out of his pocket and consulted the luminous screen. “We should pick up the pace.”

Vincent adopted a brisk speed and Delilah tried her best to keep up. “What happens if we don’t find shelter before sunrise?”

His face hardened. “Nothing. Keep moving.”

“No, seriously, what? Do we get vaporized and shrivel into dust or something?”

Vincent said nothing, eyes forward, walking in grim, hurried silence.

Within the next half hour they were walking between the first buildings on main street. It was immediately apparent to them that Fawkland was not the sort of town where they would be able to find a hotel. The sky was rapidly changing from midnight blue to toasted mango, threatening them with the imminent sunrise. They passed a library, a cafe, a convenience store and one ugly little house after another. Delilah was nervous, she watched the houses go by, they were old and rundown, but they were clearly occupied, cars in the driveways, trash on the curb, lawn chairs on the porches, there was no hope of even temporary shelter behind their darkened windows. She watched Vincent, saw his eyes scan either side of the street, searching for for sale signs or garden sheds or storm shelters. As the minutes slipped away his search became more desperate, eyes darting back and forth from one house to another and back. He checked his phone, walked even faster. 

The leaning wooden shed, when they finally laid eyes on it, gleamed like a marble temple in the dim half-light of early morning. Without exchanging a single word, they ran to it, stopping only once they were in its long shadow. Vincent opened the door and held it for Delilah, who stepped inside without hesitation. When the door was shut the two of them experienced a rare moment of complete safety which neither one took for granted.

Vincent sighed, reclining on a pile of plastic jugs of pesticides and bags of soil and mulch. There was barely room to stand in the little shed, so Delilah had settled on top of a coiled garden hose. It was only then, in the darkness of this shed, that the two of them allowed themselves to feel the heaviness of exhaustion which they had been fighting the entire time they walked. 

Delilah tried to stay awake. There was a tautness in Vincent’s posture which made her think he had something that he wanted to say. Eventually, though, the pull was too strong and she surrendered, drifting into a silent, dreamless sleep.