City of Whispers (City of Whispers #1) (9 page)

“The coughing had stopped by then. Before I walked out
of the room she whispered again, ‘Tony, you’re going to wish you had killed
me.’ I told her I loved her and shut the door. I sat outside our bedroom the
whole night. I knew I had to take the kids and leave the next day even if it
meant leaving Sophie behind. I knew I had to find a way to get out. I hoped
maybe my neighbor’s son who worked at City Hall could help me.

 “The next morning there was rioting and we saw
on the news that the military had blown the bridges and tunnels. I knew there
was no escape. I tried to shelter John and Rebecca, but they were terrified by
what was going on outside and terrified when I yelled at them for trying to go
into our room and see their mother. I spent the day watching the news, hoping
for any kind of rescue plan for those of us who weren’t sick, or any kind of
advice besides, ‘Stay put,’ but none came. I knew I was supposed to put an “X”
on the door, but I was afraid they’d come and take Sophie away. I saw some
people in hazmat suits taking people from their homes, but I don’t know where
they took the sick. I wouldn’t put it past them to just take them right to the
fires. I didn’t want that for Sophie. I peeked in on her every once in a while,
and she was always sound asleep.

“That night was the worst night of our lives. I didn’t
want the kids to see anything, but I had to keep them close to me. I could see
the street from the living room window. I saw the looters, the vampires, and
the horrible things they did to one another. We already had the lights off
because we didn’t want to attract attention to ourselves, but I remember the
moment the power went out. The lights went out all around us and I thought,
‘This is it, it’s all over and I didn’t save my family when I had the chance.’
I had seen people killing the vampires with stakes, so I broke a leg off one of
our end tables and told the kids to wait in the kitchen. I went over to our
bedroom and slowly opened the door. Sophie was still tied up, but she was
sitting up in bed staring at me with those yellow eyes. She looked horrible,
like a monster.

“‘Tony,’ she whispered, ‘Tony, please help me.
Everything hurts, my throat, my teeth, my mouth, my skin hurts, Tony.’ I didn’t
know what to do. I wanted to put her out of her misery, but I couldn’t do it.
She still knew me. She begged me to come closer, to help her. She told me she
would feel better if she could just have a little blood, she promised she
wouldn’t hurt me. I even thought about cutting my finger and putting a little
in a glass for her, but I couldn’t bring myself to get close enough. I finally
just shut the door and went back to the kids. The whole night I swear she sat
in there calling to me in that raspy voice, like a snake hissing. I thought for
sure she would break free and kill us all, but the ropes and the bed frame
held.

“God only knows what that night did to my kids. The
next morning they were exhausted and I put them in their beds. I crept into our
bedroom where Sophie was sound asleep. She looked so bad I could barely bring
myself to get near her. I tied one of her scarves over her mouth, then tied her
feet together. I untied her hands from the bed and then tied them together too.
I wrapped her in the sheet from the bed and carried her to the door. I checked
that the coast was clear. I wasn’t sure where to take her, but I knew she
couldn’t stay in the apartment with the kids.

“I didn’t want to wander too far off and leave John
and Rebecca alone, so I finally decided to set her under a table by the
elevators in the hallway. I untied her hands and figured she could untie her
feet when she woke up at night…assuming she did wake up. I thought about
killing her right there, but I still couldn’t do it. I covered her with the
sheet again and went back in the apartment and shut the door. I think she may
have tried to get in that first night. I heard scratching at the door, but I
didn’t go check. The next morning she was gone and never came back. Sometimes I
hope she’ll come back and I can put her out of her misery, but she hasn’t yet.”

Tony stopped. He had tears in his eyes and wouldn’t
look at us.

“Tony.” I put my hand on his arm. “God forbid she
comes back while you and your kids are there.”

Scott looked horrified. “Tony, if she comes back,
you’ll what, open the door and stake her just like that?” Tony looked daggers
at him, but that didn’t stop Scott. “She’s still your wife and you love her, I
understand that, but that’s all the more reason to get out of there. You open
the door and you see your wife, vampire or not, you might hesitate, she won’t.
And then what? Your kids will be in there all alone? Are you crazy?”

I thought it was a bit harsh, but Tony needed to hear
it. If people wanted to put themselves at risk it wasn’t my concern and I
didn’t feel the need to go out on a limb when people made their own dumb
decisions, but Tony had kids to think about.

“Fine,” Tony said after a few moments, “we’ll get our
things together today and move in tomorrow.”

“No, we’ll bring what we can today and you’ll move in
today and if we need to get more of your stuff tomorrow we’ll get it tomorrow,”
Scott said forcefully. “You can’t put this off any more.”

“I said we’ll move in tomorrow,” Tony snapped. “We’ve
been fine for this long, we’ll be fine for one more night.”

I tried to reason with him, “At least let the kids
stay with Beth. She would love to have them. It would be like a sleepover.”

“They’re my kids and I can take care of them better
than anyone. They aren’t leaving my sight. In fact, we’ll go pack now.” Tony
walked off toward John and Rebecca.

Scott’s eyes followed Tony. “I don’t like it,” he
said. “I don’t like it at all, something’s weird about this whole thing.”

“What, you mean about the wife turning into a vampire,
our own government turning its back on us, and the whole world going crazy?” I
asked. “I don’t see anything weird there.”

Scott glared. “This isn’t a joke. I don’t like the
idea of those kids staying in that apartment one night longer. If I’d known all
of this I would’ve gotten them out of there a long time ago.”

“Well what do you want to do?” I was exasperated. I
understood his point, but were we going to just kidnap John and Rebecca and
lock them in Beth’s apartment?

Scott strolled over toward Tony and the kids as they
were leaving the park. “Hey guys,” he shouted, smiling. The kids turned around.
“You don’t remember how to use that radio Paulo gave you do you?”

“Oh yes we do!” shouted Rebecca, pouting. “Well I
don’t know if John does, but I sure do.”

“I do so remember too,” John shouted eagerly.

Scott crossed his arms and pretended to be skeptical. “I
don’t know, Paulo showed you a long time ago and kids can be forgetful.”

“I remember, I do!” Rebecca exclaimed.

“Well then prove it to me tonight okay? We’re going to
play a game. We’re going to pretend we’re in World War II and you’re in a
submarine and I’m on land and you have to give me updates as to your
whereabouts so I can make sure you’re still on course.”

“Or we can play Paulo and the radio man!” John shouted
gleefully.

I raised my eyebrows. So the kids’ lives were already
being shaped by this one source of outside contact. I thought maybe we should
get them some school books or something with the next supply drop.

Tony knew what Scott was up to and he just nodded. “I
appreciate your concern, I really do. We’ll be fine.”

“We’ll be over first thing in the morning,” Scott
said.

“I know, and that’s fine.” Tony held each child by the
hand and they walked away. It sounded like John was already practicing his
imitation Colombian accent.

12

That evening, after a dinner of granola bars and a banana, I wanted some peace
and quiet, so I decided to stay by myself in my apartment and read a book. Reading by the candle
light, however, was not ideal, and I decided to add “book lamp” to my list of
requests for the next supply drop. I was just trying to decide whether I should
give up and go visit Beth and Kim or one of the guys when I heard an urgent
knocking on my door.

I assumed it was someone I knew, but one could never
be too careful, so I picked up a stake and went over to the peephole. Before I
even opened it, I heard James’s voice. “Ailis, open up, it’s James.” I looked
out the peephole just in case, and saw it was indeed James, wearing his
ridiculous dog collar.

I opened the door, and saw that he looked frantic.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s happened?”

“Goddamn Tony and those poor kids, Ailis. Rebecca just
called Paulo on the radio. She’s terrified. She said Tony left them to look for
their mom. Jesus, can you believe it? How could he just leave them there alone
like that?”

“Why wouldn’t he look for her during the day, like a
sane person?” I asked, rushing back into my apartment to get properly dressed
and grab my stakes.

“How the hell should I know? He clearly isn’t a sane
person.”

I rushed into my room to find my black pants and a
black shirt hoping they would help me stay hidden in the dark. I didn’t have
any sensible black shoes so I made a mental note to raid one of the shoe stores
first thing in the morning. I also grabbed my new “stake-pack,” as I called it.

The same day that we cleaned out my basement and Leila
disappeared, I had asked the man on the radio for a more convenient way to
carry our stakes. Something must have already been in the works because only
two days later we received our stake-packs. We could strap them to our backs
like backpacks, but the stakes were lined up and held in place by springs. When
I reached around to pull one out, another would immediately move over and take
its place. This also kept the stakes’ tips from breaking, which tended to
happen when they got jumbled together in regular backpacks.

James waited for me as I locked my door—even with the
building secure I felt I could never be too careful—and we rushed to Paulo’s
apartment where he was showing Beth how to operate the radio so she could talk
to the kids while we were on our way to their apartment. Scott was ready to go.
He was dressed in all black down to his shoes. He not only had a stake-pack,
but also the new crossbow. I made a mental note to ask for the extra crossbows
we had been promised the next time we spoke to the outside world.

Paulo turned the radio over to Beth and handed her a
walkie
talkie. “We’re going to keep ours off to avoid
making any noise. We’ll turn it on only if we absolutely need to.”

Beth nodded. “How could he just leave them there like
that? And now you have to go out there...” Her voice broke.

I tried to cheer her up a little. “Hey, I’m
vampire-resistant, remember? I didn’t even shower today. They’ll get one whiff
of me and go running.”

Beth smiled, but it looked forced. “Just be careful
okay?”

“Of course we will,” Scott said. “If we’re all ready
let’s get moving.”

It had been over a month since I had been outside at
night. I had gotten used to the emptiness and the quiet during the day, but the
night held a whole new eeriness. With the electricity out, the city was nearly
pitch dark. We had a little light from the sliver of moon above us, and for the
first time in my life I saw stars above Manhattan.
I wondered how long it had been since anyone had seen stars over Manhattan.

There was light in the distance in both the east and
west. It brought home how close we were to the outside world. It seemed that
just across the rivers, life was going on as usual...or at least more or less
as usual.

People had electricity and plenty of food. People were
safe.
That
was the United
States of America, and yet here we were, on
an island surrounded by civilization, going out in the middle of the night to
rescue a couple of kids and their dad from vampires. It made no sense. I
wondered how the people of Brooklyn, Queens, and Long
Island got to the mainland these days. They probably had a nice
ferry to bring them around the untouchables on Manhattan.

Scott, James, and Paulo had been to Tony’s apartment
when we first met him and the kids. The guys had gone to check out the
fortifications, so they knew where we were going. Fortunately, it was on the East Side. Unfortunately, it was about twenty blocks
north.

As soon as we got outside I realized we didn’t have a
plan. Should we take one of the cars and risk causing a racket and draw
attention to ourselves? I didn’t really know anything about the vampires’
hunting capabilities. How vulnerable would we be walking in a pack for an
entire mile?

We decided to risk taking a car, but agreed we would
turn the lights off. Walking would take too long, and besides, it would be
difficult to watch the kids and our own backs on the return trip, especially if
someone got injured.

We had an assortment of cars to choose from. We had
taken some more practical cars where we were able to find them for hauling
supplies and bodies. We also had the cars we took from the showrooms on Park Avenue. We kept the cars in the streets all around
Midtown and we always left the keys in them. Who was going to steal them?

On this occasion we chose a black Escalade we had
found in the street. It looked like it used to belong to a car service company.
Scott drove quickly through the streets and the rest of us rode in silence.

I couldn’t be sure, but as I looked out the window, I
thought I occasionally glimpsed pairs of eyes in the shadows, reflecting the
moonlight. I hadn’t thought about the scratches on my wrist in a couple of days
even though they were still only a week old, but I was suddenly aware of them
again, as if prompted by the eyes glowing out at me from the shadows. I thought
about the cold breath and the fangs and shivered.

It only took us a few minutes to arrive at Tony’s
building. There were several cars parked along the street near the entrance,
but we were still able to get close. Before getting out of the car, Paulo
turned on the
walkie
talkie and contacted Beth.

“Beth, are you there?”

“Yes, is everything okay?” She sounded anxious.

“Yeah, we’re fine, are you still talking to the kids?”

“Yes, they’re terrified. Tony still hasn’t come back.
Are you guys there?”

“Yeah, we’re right outside their building. Can you ask
them if they can hear anything outside their door? Tell them not to get too
close.”

There was a pause and we listened to static while Beth
must have been talking to John and Rebecca. Then she came back on, sounding
even more upset than before. “Rebecca said they heard their mother outside
before Tony went out. Tony told them to lock the door behind him and not to let
anyone in but him until the sun came up. She said they think they can still
hear people in the hallway.”

“I’m going to kill him,” James said through gritted
teeth. “I’m really going to kill him. He’s crazy, he’s putting everyone in
danger. If it weren’t for the kids I’d say he could get himself killed tonight
if that’s what he wants.”

“Look, you can tell him all that if he isn’t already
dead,” I said. I was ready to get moving. “Let’s come up with a plan. You guys
have been here before. What are we dealing with? I don’t see any fire escape,
are we going to have to go through the building?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Scott said. “They’re only on the
fourth floor, but of course it’s not like we can take the elevator. We’ll have
to take the stairwell. There are windows that let light in during the day, but
that won’t help us now. It’s going to be very dark. We may have to use
flashlights.”

 I groaned. “Let’s get moving then. I don’t want
to get up there and find out we’re three minutes too late because we sat here
bitching about Tony.”

Paulo told Beth we were heading in and turned off the
walkie
talkie. I peered out the back window and thought I
could see shapes standing at the end of the block. Apparently, our car had
attracted attention. The longer we sat there, the more there would be.

I pointed the shapes out to Scott, who just nodded. We
collected our things and climbed out of the car, locking it behind us. The
building door was smashed in so we didn’t need to worry about locks even though
Dwayne had been teaching James some lock-picking skills. The entry was empty,
but I dreaded the stairwell.

Scott led the way into the building. The door was
propped open with a heavy looking trashcan, as if someone had left everything
open for us, to lead us right into a trap. I looked at Scott and raised my
eyebrows questioningly. He shrugged and whispered, “We propped it open when we
were here before, maybe they just left it that way.”

The stairwell was dark and James insisted on going
first. Paulo went second, I was third, and Scott was last. I reminded Scott to
keep his eye out for those shapes I had seen at the end of the block. I was
sure that they would follow us into the building.

We each held stakes as we inched our way up the
stairs. We didn’t want to warn anything we were coming so we didn’t turn our
flashlights on at first. But Scott was right, the windows in the stairwell were
no help at night. The stairwell was too dark. Even without vampires I was
afraid I would trip and break my neck.

We made it to the second floor without incident, but
there James paused. “I just can’t see anything,” he whispered. We stood there
for a few minutes, trying to will our eyes to adjust, but it was useless.

“I’ll turn my flashlight on and try to dim it with my
hand,” Paulo said. “You just be ready to stake whatever you see.”

Paulo covered his flashlight with his hand and turned
it on. An eerie light came out from between his fingers. He uncovered the
flashlight a little more, creating a narrow beam of light that he could shine
directly in front of James or sweep quickly from side to side. If anything was
above us in the stairwell it would see us for sure, but at least we could hope
not to attract anything through the doors on each floor.

We resumed our ascent and made it to just below the
fourth floor landing without encountering anything. Then, James held up his
hand and we stopped. The door to the fourth floor was slightly ajar and a
sliver of dim light penetrated the darkness on the fourth floor landing and the
stairs just below it. I could hear the unmistakable raspy breathing. I thought
I could even catch them whispering to each other, but I couldn’t understand
what they said.

Paulo quickly shone the flashlight up the stairs and
then clicked it off. I didn’t see anything, and Scott whispered that we hadn’t
been followed, so it had to be coming from the fourth floor. James held his
finger to his lips and then got down on his hands and knees and began crawling
up the last two stairs before the landing. Paulo clutched a stake and stayed
right behind him.

James kept low to the ground and peered through the
door. At the angle it was open, he must only have been able to see the left
side of the hallway, because he shook his head and whispered, “Their apartment
is to the right.”

Even in the dim light coming through the door I could
see beads of sweat forming on his face. Paulo moved up to the door with his
stake ready, and Scott and I moved in a little closer. James poked his head
around the door and jerked it back, wide-eyed. I pointed to my eyes and pointed
to James to ask whether they had seen him. He shook his head and then held up
four fingers.

He inched back down the stairs and stood up, taking
out a stake. Four vampires wasn’t so bad. I had killed three single-handed in
our basement. I took out another stake so that I held one in each hand.

Suddenly, I heard a distant scraping sound and the
door downstairs slammed.

“Shit,” James cursed under his breath.

I pictured the shapes at the end of block and that was
enough for me. “Go
now
!” I hissed. I darted in front of James and Paulo
and out into the hallway where three females and one male turned on me, their
fangs bared.

Two of the females were closest, but the male was the
biggest, so I gave the first female a solid kick in the gut. She screeched as
she fell backward, slamming her head against the wall.

I immediately staked the second female with the stake
in my left hand and the male with the stake in my right. They were both perfect
kills. I felt the satisfying pops as my stakes went through their hearts
simultaneously. The vampires only had time to scream for a split second before
the light went out of their yellow eyes and they crumpled against the wall.

James was right behind me and took out the third
female who was closest to what I assumed was Tony’s apartment door. I turned
around so quickly I narrowly missed stabbing Paulo as he finished off the woman
I had kicked against the wall.

Scott was leaning against the stairwell door with his
feet braced. All of a sudden the door swung open so hard that Scott was pushed
against the opposite wall, but he turned around and threw his body against the
door slamming it closed again. I heard a blood-curdling scream and saw four
brown fingers curved around the door. Dark red-black blood began to ooze out of
them.