Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113)

  The

  Blood

  Vivicanti

  Part 6

  The Locomotive Deadyards

  created by

  Anne Rice and Becket

  written by

  Becket

  The Blood Vivicanti

  Becket

  Copyright © 2014 Becket

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN: 1-941240-11-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941240-11-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the imagination of the creator(s) or are used fictitiously.

  Under copyright law, if you are not the copyright owner of this work, you are forbidden to reproduce, create derivative works based on this work, download, distribute copies of the work, decompile this work without Becket’s express written permission.

  Becket’s note

  In 2011, Anne Rice and I began talking about the development of a new breed of blood drinkers.

  The first ground rule was that they had to have an entirely different cosmology from her other supernatural stories.

  She and I spent many weeks emailing back and forth, sharing copious detailed notes. We had several energetic lunches and dinners, whence we discussed the foundation and framework of the story you’re about to read. We swapped ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of these new blood drinkers, ideas about the characters themselves as well as their back-stories, and more ideas about potential narrative devices.

  One of the amazing facets of Anne’s writing method is that she seems to devote almost as much time to selecting the right names for things as she does to carefully crafting the narrative. Both go hand in hand, I’ve learned from her. She’s taught me much. The right name is as important as le mot juste.

  But what name would we call our new blood drinkers?

  One day, after we’d spent weeks thinking about what to call this new breed, I came into her office as she thumped closed a Latin textbook. She beamed at me with her irresistible smile. She told me she knew what to call our blood drinkers. She had not chosen a Latin word, but had developed a new word from Latin phraseology.

  What was the new word she’d developed?

  “Vivicanti,” she said as her smile broadened.

  I loved the word instantly!

  “Our blood drinkers will be called,” Anne Rice announced: “The Blood Vivicanti.”

  Then it was my job to write the story.

  You despised our promise together when you broke our relationship. But I will remember the relationship we had when you were young. And I will make an everlasting relationship with you. Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed.

  —Ezekiel 16:59-61

  The Blood Vivicanti

  Part 6

  The Locomotive Deadyards

  The Red Man and I fled.

  We left Wyn and Ms. Crystobal behind to fend for themselves against Lowen and his army of Sleeper Devils.

  We flew through the air in the Red Man’s spaceship at supersonic speeds until we found ourselves in the middle of a deserted place, surrounded by scores of long forgotten railcars.

  The place had been called Junction Station in the Old West. The name was unofficially changed long after it became a cemetery where broken, disused, and generally forlorn trains went to die.

  Gashes to gashes, rust to rust, I thought.

  By the time we arrived, it was called the Locomotive Deadyards.

  We got out of the spaceship and we explored.

  On the first night we stayed there, we heard all sorts of strange noises, like the sound of an old ship rocking at sea. Turns out it was all those trains, groaning and creaking and snapping as they settled into decay and fossilization.

  I started calling the Red Man just, “Red.” It seemed proper.

  And he seemed to like it too, or maybe he just failed to mention that he didn’t like it.

  But then again, how could he? He didn’t have any vocal chords.

  He and I surveyed what would become our new home.

  It was an interesting transition for me. My life had begun in the house of a lower middle class family, next I’d move into the luxurious mansion of the inventor of a new race of blood drinkers, and then I ended up living with a red alien among dead trains.

  My story bore a striking resemblance to Vonnegut’s theoretical graph for the plot of Cinderella: The girl’s life begins pretty badly, it gets somewhat better, and then it plummets into utter wretchedness. The final pages outline the girl’s ascent toward a catatonia of happiness.

  My ending might be a little different.

  Beware of twists.

  Right about then, things seemed to be getting worse – or at least curiouser and curiouser.

  Like the age lines in an old oak tree, you could tell the age of the Locomotive Deadyards by the kinds of trains encircling us.

  The outer ring was composed of early 20th century trains.

  Closer to the heart the Deadyards were the older trains, such as the Lancashire Witch, the Coppernob, the Puffing Billy, the Fairy Queen, the Evening Star, the Invincta, and so on. These were mostly gothic boilers, otherwise known as 19th century steam engines.

  Their whistles still worked. Blowing them was like listening to hoots of antediluvian monsters.

  Red and I had expected Wyn and Ms. Crystobal to catch up with us the next day. But that did not happen.

  Our disappointment turned into mild concern. So we decided to wait one more day.

  It reminded me of the time I got lost in the mall. I was a preschooler. I should have stayed where I was until I was found. Instead I hid under some coats in some men’s department while someone was calling my name over the mall’s intercom.

  After a time, I wasn’t really lost. I just didn’t want to be found.

  Something similar could be said for Ms. Crystobal. She felt her purpose was not ready to be found just yet. So while I was gutting out a passenger car, she was hidden in a quasi-dimensional wardrobe.

  A few more days went by. And still, Wyn and Ms. Crystobal did not come to us.

  Our mild concern became unease.

  Red started pacing back and forth like a caged tiger.

  He and I got to know one another while we waited.

  We tried communicating by making signs and writing symbols in the sand, but that only frustrated him since he was designed to communicate most efficiently through the act of drinking blood and sharing Blood Memories.

  Pragmatism on other planets is worlds away from ours.

  A few more days passed and still there was no sign of either Wyn or Ms. Crystobal.

  Our unease was quickly becoming fear.

  Red grew more and more vexed by our inability to communicate.

  One night, his vexation reached a boiling point. He grabbed me in a rush, pierced my neck with his tongue, and drank my blood.

  Yes, that did make me feel a tad violated. I would have rather consented to his Probiscus being thrust into my throat. But I let it go since I felt that I kind of deserved it.

  I had done the same to others, namely to Joe and his family, and even to Nell. I had violated them all. I had made them all my victims. So I thought it was high time that I should suffer a similar fate.

  But then again, once our venom seeps into the body, there is no greater pleasure. Sometimes we let ourselves be victims to feel better – or if not better, then perchance feel differently.

  Red was twice as tall as me. His width was longer than my length. To say that he towered over me would not describe it. His muscular, hairless, red skinned body overshadowed me like a moon.

  He could never have a voice. But if he did, he would
have spoken in a deep bass.

  It sounded something like that when he began to communicate in my mind.

  He told me all about himself through his venom and blood. He shared all of his hopes and fears.

  He told me how he had been called Silent on his planet Khariton because his creators had not wanted him to augment the Noise of the planet. He told me that he was a hunter and that he had travel through the stars in search of Lowen. And he told me through his venom that he was eager to bring Lowen back to their planet. He did not like Earth.

  I couldn’t blame him. Often this third rock from the sun does not quite feel like my mother-planet either.

  Red’s venom helped me enjoy the experience of his pierce.

  But afterward, when he took his tongue from my neck, and when his venom had coursed through my veins, we avoided each other.

  Perhaps we both needed time to think after sharing such a private experience. It was the awkwardness of intimacy. It can happen even to the best of friends.

  A week came and went.

  And still we did not hear any news from Wyn or Ms. Crystobal.

  For all we knew, they could have been vaporized by some noxious gas from Pluto.

  C'est la vie.

  Red and I were not idle, though. We spent that time learning more about ourselves through the mirror of patience and hope.

  Like the old railcars, something else had gone to the Locomotive Deadyards to die too. It was my old train of thought.

  Pun intended.

  Yes, I used to think that I wasn’t good enough, that I was happy being alone, that life could not get any better, and that other people’s lives would get better without me.

  I hadn’t realized that their lives could not get better without me in the same way that my life would never get better without them.

  Getting better would happen by intrinsic motivation.

  Extrinsic motivation was for the birds.

  Becoming a Blood Vivicanti helped me go from that old thinking to the thinking of a purely id-driven animal. I had gained the power of Greco-Roman gods, and I had abused that power no differently. I could have used my gift to become a better person. Instead I used it to escape from my inner demons.

  Drinking Nell’s black blood was hitting the rock bottom of a bad behavior. Admitting that I have a problem was my death. Trusting in the power of others was my resuscitation.

  My resurrection came when I helped Wyn and Ms. Crystobal free Red from the Black Building. That was the night when I started to become less selfish and more selfless. That night I was no longer some centripetal girl. Helping others helped me expand as graciously as the universe beyond the narrow confines of my private little world.

  The Locomotive Deadyards gave me time to think about all this. It gave me time to travel inwardly, to meditate on who I am, and to allow how I am to wrap me up in the gift of interior contemplation.

  Time to myself was a gift. Time without the worries and woes of the world was a gift. Yet the gift of time for introspective examination was startlingly wibbly-wobbly.

  The heart of the Locomotive Deadyards started to feel like a new home.

  I think Red felt that way too.

  He and I instinctively began rearranging the joint, making it livable, making it our own.

  There was already a large tin roof over the Locomotive Deadyards. We left that alone as we lifted the cars over our heads with super-human strength. We arranged the cars into a fort. The design came naturally to us. Oddly, it bore a striking resemblance to a labyrinth.

  We called it, “The Labyrinth Fort.”

  Passenger cars were passageways leading from one boxcar to another. We connected them together, lining them up, so that there was no open space between them. We cut out passageways and doorways between the connected cars. We could go from one car to another the way we might go down a hallway, or go from room to room.

  We created rooms out of the railroad cars. Each room served a different function.

  Most were quite narrow and snug.

  For taller rooms, we stacked hopper cars on top of each other, the lowest right side up, the highest upside down, since the hoppers had no roofs.

  One room was where we slept – separately, of course.

  Another room was where we created machinery and other devices.

  Another was where we made weapons for the day when we would attack Lowen and his Sleeper Devils.

  And another room was where I went to scream my lungs out whenever I missed the bad habits of my girlhood. And I did miss my old habits on occasion.

  And I did scream quite loudly too.

  Red and I then went a step further and we made the Locomotive Deadyards a gauntlet of snares and deadfalls, preparing for the day when Lowen and his Sleeper Devils might come to attack us. We did not know if they would ever find us, but we did not want to be caught off guard.

  We had a lot of scrap. Red and I put our heads together and we came up with all sorts of interesting ways for defending our hiding spots in the tortuous warrens of our Labyrinth Fort.

  He made the Kharetie version of a lightsaber. The difference was that the saber part wasn’t light. It was sonic. And it turned out to be astoundingly sharper than a Ginsu knife.

  Me? What did I make? Why of course my own attachable Wolverine claws.

  Snickety-snick goes my berserker rage.

  I was getting used to Red. He was getting used to me. We were beginning to enjoy one another’s company greatly.

  And one time, very briefly, I thought I caught him smiling at me.

  We made a list of all the important components that could not be found in the Locomotive Deadyards, things like hard drives and processors and motherboards.

  We planned a trip back to the mansion, to look for Wyn and Ms. Crystobal, and to loot the mansion for everything we needed.

  We were Earth’s most alien cadgers.

  Red was sleeping in his spacecraft.

  He didn’t have a bed. He’s never had one. He sleeps standing up with his legs keeping perfect balance.

  The first time I saw this, it scared the dickens out of me!

  I hadn’t been able to sleep that night. I kept worrying about Wyn and Ms. Crystobal. My mind would not shut down.

  So I snuck from my railcar room and I crept inside Red’s spaceship. The sight of him made me jump, but then it made me giggle. I tried tipping him over as if he were a cow.

  His spacecraft saw me as a threat and then launched me into the stratosphere.

  Three weeks finally came and went.

  Red and I still had not heard from Wyn or Ms. Crystobal. So we made plans to return to Idyllville and to the mansion on the following week. A month of waiting was long enough.

  I spent that week preparing myself for battle.

  I still had the gadgets that Wyn had given me when we freed Red from the Black Building.

  I did not know how some of them worked. Lowen’s Sleeper Devils had broken the others when they attacked my eighteen-wheeler. Those little doohickeys needed repairing badly.

  So it was with great reluctance that I drank the blood of a computer engineer skilled in both hardware and software. Even though Nell’s Blood Memories were still nauseating me, desperate times call for desperate pleasures.

  I pierced the engineer.

  His blood was delicious. And he walked away from the experience happier because of the euphoric rush of my Blood Vivicanti venom.

  Still, I felt wretched for doing it.

  Guilt and shame are restless twin ghosts that never stop haunting me.

  In an instant the engineer’s Blood Memories filled me with knowledge of computer software and hardware. His talent was now my talent. I could repair all of Wyn’s devices. I could build anything from a circuit board to a rocket to the moon. I could have turned the remains of Wyn’s mansion into a super collider and discovered new elements.

  Red helped me since he had Wyn’s Blood Memories inside him too.

  He and I sat sid
e-by-side. We tinkered in silence.

  No, I couldn’t help noticing how his skin was creamy smooth, or how his muscles were naturally sculpted to perfection.

  I mentioned before that his natural body odor is the scent of raspberries and lilacs.

  He has always been a walking barrel of Ben and Jerry’s.

  Finally one month went by.

  We still had heard no word from Wyn or Ms. Crystobal. So we hopped inside Red’s spaceship and we flew at supersonic speed to the mansion.

  Idyllville had been deserted. The Academy of the Arts, Cool Beans Coffee House, Hatters Café, every shop, every house, all empty.

  Joe and his family were gone too. That made me sad. Part of me missed them. The other part of me was tempted to swan dive into their Blood Memories.

  Escape is the worst bad habit to break.

  I suspected that Idyllville might have been evacuated because, from their point of view, Wyn’s mansion had basically become Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

  Then again, maybe the flock fled because over a thousand Sleeper Devils had poured out from the portal that Ms. Crystobal had opened. Their foul stench would have been enough to make me run for the hills too.