Splinter · Universe

As twilight began to set in, a hunting party moved through the forests south of the Euphrates. About a dozen males – squat, powerful, low-browed and buck naked – slipped silently amongst the trees in a loose formation, crude clubs and spears held over their broad hairy shoulders. Four of them moved near the middle of the group, carrying two slaughtered deer-like animals slung on poles. Some of the others carried lesser prey, small mammals and a few speared fish. Beady eyes scanned the surrounding trees, looking for potential threats; but at the same time their attention was turned inward, towards their outlandish leader, and the two strange newcomers who walked at his side.

“Well,” Helena commented, glancing at the ambling cavemen around them. “You’ve obviously been keeping yourself busy.”

As much as she hated to admit it, Helena was actually beginning to enjoy herself.

It had been three days since her reunion with Eddie, and compared to the days before them, they’d been almost pleasant. She had proper clothes, a decent pair of boots and, most importantly, someone to keep her company on the long trek east. And as traveling companions went, she couldn’t have asked for anyone better than Eddie. True, Gabe would have been a more logical choice from a survival standpoint, but Helena was all too aware that they would have started arguing five minutes after he arrived, and wouldn’t have stopped since. And as for Lance…

She briefly envisioned being stranded in the wilderness with Lance. Her mind, body and soul all recoiled from the image.

“So…” Helena mused. “You found me with a shoe.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Eddie replied.

“And you couldn’t have brought the other one?”

“I didn’t have the other one.”

“Chill out, I’m joking.”

Eddie sighed, keeping his hand firmly over his eyes. He was sitting cross-legged on the bank of the river, facing away from the water. Somewhere behind him – indicated by a faint shuffling sound – Helena was getting dressed. She’d washed off the blood and dirt from the fight, but the smell of the nasty old sow tunic had only gotten worse with drying vampire blood, and Eddie’s arrival had brought her the first clean clothes she’d seen in days. Eddie had been sitting with his back to the water the whole time, and although it probably wasn’t necessary, had also closed his eyes. And put his hand over them.

Helena’s second night in the wild had been more comfortable than her first, though not by much. She’d come across a grove of trees a little bit away from the riverside, and found a nice patch of soft mossy earth in amongst them. Wrapping herself in the blanket and tucking the bag beneath her head, she’d managed to stretch out and sleep almost as comfortably as any camper in a sleeping bag. She’d kept the sheathed knife in easy reach under the bag, though she hadn’t seen any wildlife that looked like a threat. Not since the dog, which had clearly been more scavenger than predator. It wasn’t animals one had to worry about in this wilderness.

Helena was awake for several minutes before Hadamah noticed. She was awoken by the sound of him fussing about the small chamber, gathering bits and pieces together and muttering to himself. She watched him for a while, trying to figure him out. He wasn’t a vampire, that much was true. But Helena had always had something of a knack for spotting things of an – how could one put it – otherly nature, and there was something about the man in the black robe that wasn’t quite human either…

When he finally turned around and saw her watching him, he didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Instead he held out the small woven bag into which he’d been stuffing things and said, “Time to go.”

Helena sat up, tangled hair falling over her face. “What?”

“It’s nearly dark,” said Hadamah. “Time to get you out of the city.”

On the bright side, Helena thought, at least I get to sit down for a bit.

She clung to that thought, a tiny shred of silver lining on a giant dark cloud. A whole sky full of dark clouds, with a possibility of accurate lightning.

The girl across from her looked up, her exotic dark eyes regarding Helena with a sort of vacant bewilderment. Helena stared back and, because it was the first thing that entered her head, said, “’Sup?”

The girl blinked, and lowered her eyes again.

Running.

When Helena looked back on her time in the city of Ur, the main thing she would remember was the running. During her brief stay, she seemed to do an awful lot of it.

After leaving the slave boats at the river dock (she would always think of them as “slave boats” which was considerably less awful that what they really were) she did some of the hardest running she’d ever done. And it went on for a very long time.

Not that Helena was any stranger to running. She went out for a jog two or three times a week, time and weather permitting, and was capable of a fair turn of speed when appropriate. But a couple of gentle laps around Jekyll Park with cushioned soles on her feet and mellow music on her MP3 player was one thing. Charging barefoot along a stony dirt road in the dark while roped by the neck to a mob of panicked savages was a nightmare of a different colour. There were at least ten roped lines of humans, thundering along in a loose and ragged column, driven by a mob of stick-waving vampires spread out alongside them like hunting wolves. Helena was in the middle of the sixth line, and having trouble keeping up. Every time her pace slackened she was dragged forward by the captives in front or pushed by the ones behind. Her lungs were burning in the cold air and the flickering, waving light from the torches carried by the vampires didn’t do much to illuminate the rough terrain over which they ran. Several times she stumbled when her unprotected feet encountered sharp stones, but each time she barely managed to keep running. The thought of being simultaneously choked and trampled didn’t sound like anyone’s idea of a good time, and she was painfully aware that if she lost her footing she probably wouldn’t live to find it again.

Eddie opened his eyes on a cracked and mouldy plaster ceiling, and just for a second he thought everything might be alright.

It took a few moments to realize that this wasn’t his cracked and mouldy plaster ceiling, nor was he in his own bed. He was lying on a rather tattered chaise-lounge with a woolen blanket pulled over him. The room around him was oak-panelled, and smelled strongly of furniture polish and formaldehyde.

With these facts in mind the memory of the previous evening came back to him, and he remembered that everything wasn’t alright, after all.

Sinking back into the musty cushion beneath his head, he laid an arm across his face and tried to avoid waking up. His head was filled with images he’d rather forget and facts he was struggling to put into order. The conversation with Doctor Adams last night had been long, one-sided and rather baffling – a mixture of folklore, science and occultism that would have had Edward da Maestro reaching for the liquor bottle. The basic upshot, however, could be summed up in two unlikely words.

Time travel.

Eddie wasn’t sure he was ready to cope with that just yet.

“So…” Lance asked, for the third time. “Where are we going?”

Eddie awkwardly changed gears, swerving to avoid a trailer truck on the inside lane. He didn’t even try to answer the question, because he didn’t know. They were speeding north on the central motorway that bisected the city from north to south, but their actual destination was anybody’s guess. They couldn’t exactly pull up at the nearest hospital and say they had a vampire wanting treatment for silver bullet wounds – even in Sundry City, that would cause raised eyebrows and awkward questions. Eddie remembered Helena saying that there were specialist medical practicioners – mostly unlicensed – who could deal with that sort of thing, but he had no idea where to find one. There was nothing they could do for Luis at home, and taking him back to St Marvin’s was no good either. For the moment, Eddie resolved to just keep driving until he could figure something out, and hope he was driving in the right direction when he did.

 Author's note: Bit of a short one, but it's sort of the (extended) conclusion to Chapter Seven, which became a chapter unto itself. Two more chapters are written, but I'll have to find time to type them up yet. This should keep the poking sticks out of my back in the meantime.

Over by the van, Eddie peered through the haze of holy water vapour and the throng of screaming vampires, trying to get a clear view of what was going on inside the circle. He’d seen Luis go down a moment ago, riddled with bullets; now Helena had been felled by a blow from Skaro. Gabe was stuck amid a mob of screaming assailants, and Skaro was still upright and armed.

The rescue plan, it was fair to say, seemed to have gone a bit pear-shaped.

As Skaro leaned down to drag an inert Helena off the floor, Eddie grabbed the wooden stake pushed into his waistband and broke into a run. After a moment’s hesitation and a resolve-strengthening swig of beer, Lance followed him.

Three months, no less.

I've been busy as heck for the last five of those weeks, but this is no excuse.

I can report that I'm starting to schedule some regular writing time into my day, and after kicking story ideas around with Book Eater over a couple of beers on Saturday night I'm starting to get my groove back. And I have written the first chunk of Chapter Eight. Hopefully I'll have it finished, typed and posted by next weekend.

In short, don't give up this in disgust just yet. Much more is coming, I promise.

Helena slid her feet under her and managed to rise, sliding her back up the pole she was chained to until she was upright. Her gaze was fixed on Luis as he came to a halt near the circle. She glanced down at the hatbox tucked under his arm.

You didn’t.

The assembled vampires were congregating in a loose scattered crowd, watching Luis and Skaro. The latter slowly turned to face the newcomer, and smiled.

“Luis Cobbler,” he said softly. “Our man in Sundry City.”

Luis responded with a slight nod. “Skaro.”

Skaro looked around at the assembled vampires. “Some of you might remember Luis. One of the old guard, as it were. Returned to the fold at last, eh?” He grinned, showing his fangs. “Got tired of being a shop boy?”

Luis shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. I got discounts.”

Skaro chuckled, his eyes moving to the box under Luis’ arm. “Is that what I think it is?”

Luis took the box in both hands, slowly removing the lid. “Can’t say if it’s what you think it is,” he replied. “But I’m pretty sure it’s what you’ve been looking for.” Tossing the lid aside, he reached into the box and drew out the iron helmet, raising it above his head for all to see.

Eddie had never been much good in a fight. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem – he was such an inoffensive sort that fights didn’t naturally come his way. Unfortunately he was also best friends with Lance who, with his well-meaning but blunt opinions, his complete inability to self-edit and his uninhibited appreciation of the female form – even when it was arm-in-arm with a male form twice his size – tended to be something of a fight magnet. It usually made for an eventful night down the local.

It wasn’t often that Eddie had to fight for his life, though, and he wasn’t very good at that either.

Upon seeing two hundred pounds of angry vampire screaming towards him, his first instinct was to put his hands up to fend the creature off. As he did so, he noticed that one of his hands still had Gabe’s revolver in it. This set off another instinct, born of all-night Gamebox sessions with Lance, and before he knew what was happening he’d squeezed the trigger.

Author's note: Huge apologies for taking so long to get around to this. It's been a busy couple of weeks, and then the muse went off and got drunk with Father Time. Took me while to get back into the story, but here it is at last. Enjoy.

#

 “So,” said Gabriel Pope. “This is what you guys do all day?”

Eddie Paradigm, seated on Gabe’s right, barely looked up from the dismantled piece of technology lying in bits on the coffee table before him. Gabe wasn’t sure what it had been even before Eddie had taken it apart, but from what he knew of Eddie it was a safe bet it wouldn’t be the same thing when he put it back together. “Pretty much,” he said.

“All Saturday, anyway,” said Lance Boyle, stretched out on Gabe’s left. Most of Lance’s body was completely motionless, but his thumbs were a blur on the Gamebox controller. Gabe glanced at the TV screen, where a lithe red-haired girl in what appeared to be a school uniform was employing a sword the size of an ironing board to hack an army of fire-breathing minotaurs limb from limb. A team of Japanese game designers had evidently gone to a lot of effort and expense to make her enormous breasts wobble mesmerizingly as she did so. Gabe shook himself and managed to look away.

He glanced down at the untouched beer in front of him. Not that he didn’t appreciate a cold one now and then, especially after a particularly hectic night on the hunting and slaying trail, but it was just after two and this was the sixth beer he’d been offered since breakfast. He’d half-finished the first one to be polite, but the rest would have gone to waste had Lance Boyle not been on hand to take up the slack.

“So,” he finally asked, “what do you do on Sundays?”

Lance and Eddie glanced across at each other, then went back to what they were doing.

Busy with job interviews and such, which are also sapping the motivation to write. New chapter in less than a week, though. Scout's honour.

I was never in the Scouts, but y'know.

It was getting onto lunchtime when Helena’s car pulled up outside Downwright’s. The shop was closed on weekends, though Luis usually opened up again on Sunday night. It was a clear day and the sun was bright, but the place still had a gloomy atmosphere. She parked on the road.

She was replaying the conversation with Gabe in her head as she walked to the door. She didn’t like to admit it, but he had a point. How well did she know Luis? He’d just turned up out of the blue two years ago, and had been hanging around ever since. Admittedly he’d turned up just in time to save her and Eddie from being eaten by werewolves, which had earned him a lot of trust – but then, that probably had more to do with his long-standing dislike for lycanthropes. She knew nothing about his background, apart from some vague story about being seduced and corrupted by a decrepit old vampire family in eastern Europe a couple of hundred years ago. His inability to ingest blood – aside from presenting the interesting question of what, if anything, he survived on – had made him an outcast from vampiric society, but that didn’t make him human either. And if she were completely honest, Helena had occasionally wondered – if not for his condition, would he view her as a friend or a potential meal?