Blood Red

When he stepped into the cave, they were all waiting, most of them in a stupor, a few conscious and ready to escape if they could. The new ones were still dead. They would be until the sun had set. That was still a few hours away.

The cavern lay below sea level, a deep, dank secret place that only two living people knew about. It was one of the main reasons he had chosen Albert Miles’s house as the proper location for his experiments.

The problem had always been the same as far as he could figure: the newly risen were always rather stupid. It was hard to rise from the dead and come out of the entire situation feeling alert and perky. Not only did they lack any substantial strength, but they also looked like they’d just recently been killed. The average life expectancy of a recently reborn vampire was not very long. The ones that didn’t get killed by whomever they were attacking in the first few nights of their new lives usually didn’t make it past the first sunrise. They were delicate creatures, really, and the sun could destroy them in very little time.

So Jason had decided to experiment. He’d done well enough in Ohio, before Jonathan Crowley showed up and killed off his new prizes. After that, he decided it was time to get a little bolder in his tests.

He hid the bodies away and let them fester for a while; let them stew in their own death with just enough blood to keep them coherent and recovering from their journey back to the world. That was how they all explained it to him, the ones that had actually died: they said it was like coming back from a far darker place.

They also said they came back without their souls in a lot of cases. He wondered about that and whether or not there was any truth to the notion. Most of the time he didn’t give any consideration to the idea of a soul or a life force; it was something he’d never had to deal with.

There were different types of vampires; he knew that much for certain. There were the ones like what he had been leaving in this cave—killed as food, they would rise within a few days and continue the cycle of feeding and killing—and there were the ones who were created through the exchange of blood and other bodily secretions. The latter were far rarer to encounter. It wasn’t often that one of his kind decided to make a new Undead. He wondered if others thought of the distinction or if it was only him. Oh well, live and learn.

He knew a few others who had created Undead as opposed to merely vampires, but they seemed to find the entire affair some sort of secret, best left locked away. Jason couldn’t understand that notion. He had no shame regarding what he had created. The rest seemed to look on what they had done as a mistake of epic proportions.

Still, he supposed if he was going to experiment, he needed to cover all of the possibilities. Besides, it was only a rare few he had ever found who he felt could handle the changes in their lives.

Maggie Preston, for example, was virtually ideal for the part. What a lovely young woman. He wondered idly how angry she would be when she found out what he had done to her.

Back to business. He looked at the sickly things crawling or sleeping in the cave and smiled. Some of the braver ones had figured out how to escape around the same time they realized that breathing was not a necessity any longer. Most of them hadn’t come along that far in their thought processes.

Waking up, it seemed, took a while.

“Please, let us go.” Her name was Danielle Hopkins. He’d taken her from the campus of the university right after she’d dealt with the boy Maggie had befriended.

“Not yet, Danni. It’s not time.” He spoke as patiently as he could. That one tended to whine. She wasn’t doing well; her skin was sloughing off.

“When? Can you tell me that?”

“Maybe tomorrow night.”

“So long?” Her voice was miserable.

“Not so long, my child. Barely any time at all.”

“I’m so hungry.”

“I know. Soon, Danni. Soon.”

She slipped across the ground, her eyes wide and casting their faint silvery light. “Please, just for a short time? Just for a few hours?” Danni suddenly got a crafty look on her face. “I can tell you who has been sneaking out . . .”

Jason looked from her to where the Lister family was sleeping, pale, yes, but far better nourished than she was. They had barely decayed at all. “Oh, Danni.” He patted her pale blond hair and felt a few strands fall out at the light touch. “I already know who’s been escaping.”

He did, too. He knew by how healthy they looked. The children normally managed to figure it out first. Sometimes they even caught on to the limitations of their abilities and got back before the sun incinerated them.

Yes, he was very pleased with how this was going. There were more of them surviving and getting stronger. He rubbed the hairs off his fingertips and smiled. Danielle was crying again. She cried a great deal of the time.

“Danielle, my dear, only until tomorrow night and then you will be free.”