What do you get when you drop vampires into a noir universe?
How about a wild ride filled with doomed lovers, stone cold sociopaths,
heroin-snorting hedonistic vampires, a hardboiled PI, a secret lab conducting
experiments that would sicken Josef Mengele,
blood-splattering ultra violence and
drug dealing biker gangs. How about we just call it
BLOOD CRIMES.
The vampires in BLOOD CRIMES aren’t supernatural creatures,
but instead damaged and severely flawed individuals suffering from a virus that
emulates vampire-like powers. At the center of BLOOD CRIMES are doomed lovers, Jim and Carol. Jim’s
infected with the vampire virus, Carol isn’t. Jim
needs to kill to eat, and he and Carol travel the country finding the most dangerous
predatory scum for Jim to feed on.
In order to assuage his guilt over killing his victims, Jim
further needs to catch these predators in the act of harming Carol so he can
rescue her before killing and feeding on them. Carol has her own serious emotional
and psychological baggage and she needs this every bit as much as Jim does. Hot on their trail is PI Donald Hayes.
Hayes is smart, capable, honest; someone that Lew Archer would’ve probably
enjoyed having a few beers with. Hayes has been hired to track Jim down and is beginning to suspect that Jim is a serial killer leaving dangerous bad
guys dead in his wake. Hayes’s client is Serena—a beautiful and deadly femme fatale
vampire who leads a clan of hedonistic vampires in Manhattan,
and is not at all happy that Jim
escaped from her compound (hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?? try
Serena!). In the shadows of all this is Metcalf,
my most sociopathic creation to date. In some ways Metcalf
could almost be a twin of Victor Petrenko from Outsourced, but ultimately he’s
scarier and more cold-blooded. This cast of characters end up colliding with a
vicious drug biker gang in Cleveland
for my most violent and highest octane book climax.
This short excerpt shows Jim’s
indoctrination into Serena's world after being infected with the vampire virus:
The fever broke. Consciousness
seeped in and he became aware of where he was and what was happening to him.
God, he hurt. Especially his throat. Fuck, he was hungry.
A familiar woman’s voice, soft and
amused, commented, “The butterfly has broken free from its cocoon.”
Blinking, he craned his neck.
Serena sat naked on a chaise lounge pleasuring herself. He realized he was
naked also, and even in his pain, felt himself growing hard.
She got off the chaise lounge. She
noticed his erection and smiled thinly at him.
“The dead has risen from the ashes,
I see,” she said in that same sing-song melodic voice he had heard in the club.
He tried to tell her how much his
throat hurt, but he couldn’t get anything out other than a rasping sound. She
shushed him.
“I know, my pet. You’re so thirsty
and your throat hurts so much. Let me take care of everything.”
There was a baby’s bottle sitting
on a table nearby filled with a thick congealing red fluid. She brought it to
him and placed the nipple in his open mouth. He wanted to be repulsed at the
thought of what she was offering, but he drank from that bottle as if his life
depended on it. When he was done, he felt better, his throat less raw.
“That was blood,” he croaked out in
a low whisper.
“Yes, my pet. How very observant of
you.”
“What type?”
“What type do you think?”
At some level he wanted to gag, but
at a deeper more fundamental level, all he wanted was to drink more blood. His
wrists and ankles were still manacled. As he lay helpless, she crawled on him
so that her pubic area pressed against his mouth, then started to fellate him.
He tried not to breathe in that
sickly-sweet scent of hers.
He tried hard not to taste her.
Fuck, he wanted to throw her off
him.
More
than anything, though, he didn’t want her to stop.
He closed his eyes and tried to
imagine that it was a different woman than Serena on him. He tried to think of
his old high school girlfriend, and that he was someplace else entirely. It
didn’t work. All he could think about was Serena and that night in the SoHo nightclub. About her biting him and the intense
sickness that came afterwards. He knew he had changed. He could feel the
difference in his body. He had seen on waking that he had become leaner and
more narrow. He could feel that his head had changed shape. In his mind’s eye
he could picture what he now looked like. At some level he knew what he had
turned into. The word vampire kept
bumping through his brain. He didn’t want to think about it. He tried not to
think about it… He tried not to want Serena as much as he did…
Christ, he was hungry. Without even
realizing it he had bit the inside of her thigh. It took a lot of effort to
break the skin, and he just kept biting down harder, and it made her squirm and
suck harder on him. Finally he broke the skin. He licked up the drops of blood
that formed from her wound. A violent intense spasm wracked his body. For a
long moment he couldn’t breathe. His body became so tense he couldn’t move.
Then he started gagging.
Serena had rolled off him.
“If it was only that easy,” she
said, sighing. “We can’t feed off of infected blood, my pet.”
She waited until he stopped
gagging. Then caressing his cheek, asked, “Are you feeling better now?”
Jim
nodded, his face contorted into a tight grimace.
“Good. You can bite me all you
want. I like it. But if I bleed, don’t lick my blood. It’s not good for you.”
It didn’t take much effort on her
part to bring back his erection. And then she was back to what she’d been
doing, although with more excitement. Right before he was about to climax, he
could feel the violence of her being ripped away from him. He opened his eyes
and saw that Metcalf had a grip of
her long black hair and was pulling her off the table.
“You son of a bitch!” she swore at
him as she tried to pull free. Metcalf
let her fall to the floor.
“Me?”
Metcalf asked, grinning, although
his eyes were as dull as sand. “For Chrissakes, Serena, can’t you even show an
ounce of self control? You know full well we have an indoctrination protocol.”
“Asshole,” she spat.
She rubbed her head gingerly before
grabbing a robe lying nearby and covering herself.
Metcalf’s
eyelids lowered as he turned to her. She noticed it and moved over to the
chaise lounge. Avoiding his stare, she told him to get on with his indoctrination.
“Thank you.”
She didn’t bother to respond,
instead curled her fingers on her right hand and studied her nails. Metcalf turned his attention to Jim. He sat down on the edge of the table Jim had been manacled to, and pulled a stiletto
knife from his belt. He let Jim get
a long look at it.
“This is an incredibly sharp
knife,” Metcalf said, admiring it.
“You’d be amazed at how sharp this really is and what it could cut.”
Even though he knew what the answer
was going to be, Jim couldn’t help
himself from asking Metcalf what he
was going to do with the knife.
“Only a demonstration,” Metcalf said. He looked bored as he ran his thumb
along the edge of the blade. “If my skin were like any normal person’s my thumb
would’ve been sliced open to the bone. But it’s not. And you’ve probably
noticed you’ve changed also, am I correct?”
Without waiting for a response, Metcalf spun around and plunged the blade into Jim’s chest, and kept pushing downwards until the
knife was buried. Jim stared dumbly
at it. A low creaking noise escaped from him, then his body jerked into spasms.
His back arched as if ten thousand volts were being shot through him.
“Right through the heart,” Metcalf said. “Hurts like hell doesn’t it? If you
were normal you’d be dead now. But you’re not. And if you want the pain to
stop, you’ll figure it out.”
Jim
strained frantically against his chains. One of them snapped, and with his hand
free, he pulled the knife out of his body.
“You fucking asshole,” he forced
through clenched teeth.
Metcalf
got a laugh out of that. “Only proving a point, guy,” he said. “My demo takes a hell of a lot less time than trying
to convince you about the changes.”
Serena rolled her eyes. “My dear, Metcalf,
I think you do this little demonstration of yours because you’re a sadist. No
other reason.”
Any amusement Metcalf had been showing dried up quickly. He
glanced impatiently at Jim and
ordered him to break himself free of his other chains.
“You’ve got ten seconds to get off
that table before I repeat my demonstration.”
Jim
snapped the chain restraining his other wrist, then broke the chains attached
to his ankles. He pushed himself off the table by the time Metcalf had counted to nine, and stood wobbly for a
moment before regaining his balance.
“Why aren’t I dead?” he asked. The
searing pain that had been slicing through his chest was now more of a dull
ache. He found himself able to talk more normally again. “You stabbed me
through the heart. What the fuck have I turned into?”
“What do you think?”
Half under his breath, Jim muttered the V word.
That brought a grim smile from Metcalf. “For your information, that’s a dirty word
around here, but no, not in the classic supernatural sense. Thanks to Serena,
though, you have been infected with a virus that mimics some of those legends.”
He glared at Serena, his mouth shrinking to a small slit. Serena appeared not
to notice. She had picked up a file and was nonchalantly sharpening her
blood-red painted nails. Metcalf’s
eyes dulled as he turned back to Jim.
“That’s it for questions. Put some clothes on and follow me so we can finish
your indoctrination. I don’t have all fucking day.”
The knife wound had already scabbed
over. Only a scar the size of a quarter had been left behind. A pair of khaki
draw-string pants and a matching color tee shirt were folded next to the table.
Jim slipped them both on. They were
several sizes smaller than his normal size, and they hung loosely on him. Metcalf waited impatiently. Serena looked up from
her nails to eye the way he looked in the clothes, and licked her lips.
“Where the fuck am I?” Jim asked.
“The place you’re going to spend
the rest of your life. Just shut up and follow me.”
The windows in the room had been
painted black, as they were in the hallway Metcalf
led Jim through. From the layout, the
art deco decorations and the antique elevator that they stepped into, Jim’s thought was that this was a converted
turn-of-the-century hotel. He had to guess they were still in Manhattan.
With the windows darkened and only artificial light filtering through the
hallway and rooms, he had no sense of time. It could be midnight or noon
for all he knew. He couldn’t shake this image in his head that they were in a
large coffin.
Metcalf
had them get out at the basement level, and before too long they were stepping
into hell. Emaciated men and women sat in cages, each looking withdrawn and
defeated. The scene could’ve been snapshots from a Nazi concentration camp. Jim felt a sickening horror as he looked from face
to face. None of the captives were able to meet his eyes. Metcalf casually explained that these were the
cattle pens.
“What the fuck do you mean by
that?”
Metcalf
raised an eyebrow at his tone. “I’m giving you this one warning,” he said. “In
a few minutes I’ll be making it clear to you what will happen if you raise your
voice to me again.” He waved a hand toward the cages. “And before you act all
high and mighty, didn’t you think about where the blood came from that Serena
fed you earlier?”
Jim
shook his head.
“Bullshit.”
“No. There’s no way I could’ve imagined
something like this.”
“What did you expect then? That we
turn on our faucets and blood pours out instead of tap water? Sorry, guy, it
doesn’t work that way. But I’ll tell you what. If you’re so offended by this,
you don’t have to drink the blood we milk for you. You can starve if you want—”
“I don’t get it. Why human blood?”
Metcalf
smiled cruelly. “You want to try eating something else, you name it, sport.
Steak, pizza, chocolate, anything you want, and I’ll get it for you. We’ll see
how well you do with it. But all that’s besides the point. This isn’t why I
brought you down here.”
Metcalf
continued to the opposite end of the room where he unlocked a door and beckoned Jim
to join him, a grim smile showing as Jim
approached.
“This is my private lab. If you’re
smart this will be the only time you get a chance to see it.”
Metcalf
turned on the overhead lights. The inside of the lab was a chamber of horrors.
What at first looked like grotesque armless mannequins cut off at the waist
turned out to be living beings. Some were chained to the walls, others had
spikes driven through their shoulder pinning them to tables. A few were sliced
open as if they were in the midst of being dissected, but even these were still
alive. They all seemed to be in agony.
“I use this lab to study the limits
of our infection,” Metcalf said, his
lips pursed with amusement as he observed Jim’s
reaction to the room and its inhabitants. “It serves other purposes as you can
probably guess. There’s one thing in particular here that I’d like to show
you.”
He brought Jim
to an empty area at a lab table between two of the dissection experiments. Jim caught the eye of one of the partially dissected
vampires. It mewled softly to him before looking away.
“Any idea what this is for?” Metcalf asked.
Jim
couldn’t keep himself from nodding.
“Yeah? Let’s hear it.”
Jim
started to answer him, closed his mouth.
“Superstitious, huh?” Metcalf asked. “You’re afraid to say it? Okay, I’ll
say it for you. This spot’s reserved for the next resident here who pisses me
off.”
“It looked to me like Serena was
doing a good job of that.”
A glaze fell over Metcalf’s eyes. “She has her privileges, but you
sure as fuck don’t. If I were you I’d watch my mouth. Understand?”
Something about the way Metcalf was staring at him told Jim he was seconds away from being made one of his
experiments. As shaky as he was feeling he knew he’d have no chance against
this vampire. Maybe if he was
feeling stronger and had a knife, he’d have a shot, but not now.
“Yeah,” Jim
said, his eyes shifting downwards and away from Metcalf.
“So what did you learn here?”
“Don’t piss you off.”
