By the end of the week we had evacuated Bethesda in favour of a local church. People discovered the protection of holy ground quickly, and the Church accommodated the survivors as best she could. Of course, we found out soon enough that the sanctuaries couldn’t keep out the wolves because of their mortality. It was just one more thing to guard against in a world where everything was to be feared.

A Knight’s Tale (part 10)

By Scott J Laurange
Illustration by Pamela Jaworska

He paused to let me digest (which is not to say it was going down easily, of course, but I swallowed just the same). “As to the specific occurrence of this attack, though,” he continued, “yes, we did know. But not in any [...]

A few days (and a heckuva lot of rest) later, Bredding explained what he’d done to me. I had been a rush job (which explained a lot of the bulky awkwardness of the equipment), but this had also been at the early stages of Bredding’s research into cybernetics. Don’t get me wrong—while it may not have been near as sophisticated as the current “model,” for the time it was … well, impossible. We had nothing like that available medically.

When next I came to, it was several days later. I woke to unfamiliar surroundings though the room was clearly some sort of medical facility. I was connected to an array of machines which blipped, and whirred, and flashed multi-coloured lights—all of which I could only assume meant I was still among the living. I couldn’t move my left arm, and my neck and shoulder felt like they were clamped in a vice, but my fingers responded when I tried to move them, so I figured the situation couldn’t be all bad.

Almost everyone’s seen the teeth on a vamp—a leech, I mean. Long, cluttered, and deadly. And some of us have even seen the more refined and elegant set the masters possess, which are no less deadly for being less a mouthful. But this thing, this vamp—its mouth was like looking into hell itself, row after row of fangs, ranging from an inch to a foot long—impossible to even have fit in the thing’s head, but there they were—descending toward me.

Part of me—a large part, in fact—was ready to just roll over and let it have me. But something, something beyond my ken, cried out from within me for knowledge. I needed to know what was killing me, what had killed my family, and why. Because even though I had no ability to think clearly at that time, something told me the situation was beyond the ordinary. This wasn’t like what was happening in the streets and all around. I was a special case.

Vampires? Hell, they won the day people started writing love stories about them. As if anyone today could believe love might ever grow in the heart of a leech, let alone a master vamp

I used to play paintball occasionally on the weekends, and it was like that, except the spatters that were collecting on walls and cars and windows and other people and the ground were made of blood and flesh and tiny fragments of bone, not small gobs of washable paint.

I tell you all this so you know exactly what I lost the day I came home to find Mary split open and gutted and the undead feasting on my son’s face. I tell you so you can have some hint of what the world was like before they came and took it from us. And I tell you because I want you to know that goodness does and can exist in this world. What once existed is gone, but it can still give us hope.

Everyone claims to have been there when it all went down. Wolves’ dung, I say. And thank God the Church keeps such accurate records—cuts down on the wild stories. The thirtieth anniversary of the Apocalypse comes this Friday.