@dirge“I’m not going in there.” Imani took a drag from her cigarette and put her muddy boots up on the dashboard. “I’m going to sit here until the sun comes up. I don’t want to live anymore.”
Isaac groaned. He glanced at his watch. They had twenty minutes till sun up.
“Hiraam and Kat are inside waiting on us.”
He turned off the car.
“I hated Hiraam a hundred years ago and I hate him today. You know that.”
“I know, Imani. But it’s not like we have a whole lot of fucking options.”
She scoffed. “Here you go. Angry as always. You know, you’d think that someone could handle their fucking anger issues after a few hundred years but. Well. You’re kind of a living betrayal of that idea.”
“Eloquently spoken from a drama queen,” he murmured. Isaac rummaged through his coat pocket for a blunt. “What’s it this time? General depression? PTSD from the bloodshed? Bored with the general state of things? Let me guess. It’s just too hard now, right? Now that they’ve all gone and dropped the bioweapons on each other? Now that they’re too sick for us? Just too much work for little Miss coffeeshop revolutionary. Little Miss Make A Revolution For Fun.”
“Far more interesting to participate in their history then sit around painting all day.”
Imani tossed her cigarette out of the window and lit another. Isaac lit his blunt and stared at her smoking. So beautiful in the moonlight, her black skin was smooth and supple after their recent kill. It was this time that they’d usually go back and enjoy themselves, let out whatever violent energy that had on each other before blacking out.
“You’re not serious,” he said. “This is just-“
“You’re right.” She turned to him and he saw between the growing high that she was serious. “You’re right. I don’t want to bother. There’s hardly any of them left anymore, and the ones that are still alive are all armed and fighting. It’s too much work, Isaac.”
Isaac hit his blunt and thought it over. She was right. It was different now. He glanced up at the sinking moon. The sky had shifted from the starry blackness to a deep bruised purple. Isaac was ready to speak again, to try and change her mind, when the door to the warehouse opened. Hiraam stepped out, his hands up in that universal sign of surrender. Behind him stepped three men in camo. One held a shotgun to Hiraam’s back.
“Shit!” Isaac ducked and pulled Imani down.
“How many?” she asked.
“Three.”
“Human?”
“Didn’t see.”
Isaac opened the car door. Imani hesitated. He pulled her out of the car. They ran behind trees.
Imani sat as he scouted. His eyesight shifted to inferred. The man with the gun and his buddy flared hot red. But the third one was ice blue.
“Two humans,” he said, creeping back down. “The big one with a beard is vamp.”
“Smell pot?” the vamp asked.
They ducked below the foliage, the burning ember of the blunt smoldered just outside the open car door. Thin blue wisps caught in the darkness, a smoke bomb to a finely tuned sense of smell.
She touched Isaac, her fingertips brushed against the fine hair of his forearm, a question without words.
“I don’t see her…” he breathed.
Isaac squinted, the light breeze shifting the leaves, concealing them. The entrance to the warehouse was a yawning blue mouth, lifeless in infrared. No cold shadow twitched, no slender lifeless form moved in the tinges of dawn, no hint of Kat.
“You sizing them up for a portrait?” the scorn ran deep through Imani’s voice.
Isaac ignored the attempt at getting a rise, continuing to scan the buildings for a sign of Kat.
The vamp, his mottled complexion that of a new turn, kicked Hiraam in the back of the legs, dropping him to his knees.
“I know you’re out there, I can fucking smell you,” he called into the jungle.
The gun’s lips pressed into the back of Hiraam’s skull, forcing his head down.
Like the fading blossom of a bruise, the sky was shifting to lighter tones. Dark eyes above a thick beard darted from the tree line to the coming sun, finally coming to settle on the other two men. A slight nod of his head summoned them.
The three of them stood over Hiraam, the gun pressed hard into bone. They whispered for a moment before the vamp strode towards the loading bay doors, the pale echo of the promise of sun outlining his silhouette.
“Still feel like sitting on the side lines?”
Isaac rose in the trees, shifting his weight to his back leg as he gauged the distance. Imani watched, the coiled power of his muscles tensing as he focused on the antsy man, a quivering finger resting on the trigger.
A slow, toothed smile spread over Hiraam’s face as the burly vamp crossed the warehouse threshold, beyond the reach of the sun. He knew what was coming next.
Imani registered the falling leaves before the crack of branches. Isaac exploded away from her.
The fury coursing through him propelled Isaac between the trees, landing square in front of Hiraam. In the same instant, Hiraam spun round, his raised hands seizing the arm holding the gun. The snap of the joint bending backwards drained the colour from the human’s blood-flushed face. The second man, abandoning whatever plan had brought them there, ran towards the trees, not a thought for his friend.
Isaac found a satisfying release in sinking his teeth into the soft fleshy cheek of the gun-toting man. Until his face crinkled with the disgust at the foul blood, and spitting, he threw the man towards the floor.
The vamp charged from the warehouse to intervene. He stopped, suddenly recoiling as the soft brush of dawn scorched his skin, sending him running back to cover. Hiraam laughed, slapping Isaac on the back.
“Sickly half turns, can’t handle a little twilight”
The pale figure of Kat, a ghost in the cold, dark warehouse, dropped the remains of the eager coward at the threshold. The vamp’s mottled skin erupted in half clotted blood as she smashed his head against the concrete ground.
The sun was cresting the hills, dusting the top of the treeline. Glancing back towards the trees, Isaac switched back to infrared, searching for a cold heart in the dark.
“Imani? Quit your sulking, Kat’s inside”
The leaves, whispering with the wind, remained unperturbed.
“Imani, what the fuck? Come on!”
The light was drifting down to the ground, catching his skin, forcing him back into the shadowy warehouse.
“I told you, I’ve had enough”
It was too late to grab her. Three vampires watched from the shadows as soft curls of smoke drifted through the beams of morning sunlight.
Over the word count, somewhere around 640, established I probably could cut the paragraph about Kat killing the vamp who ran with humans, maybe even a touch of the descriptions could have fallen by the wayside, but sticking to the theme of obstinance, I liked it. So it stays.
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