The V to Z Trilogy (Book 1): Caged Read online

  Carl cried, “Well, I don’t know! All I’m saying is we need to look around, figure out some options.”

  Daniel tuned out the rest of the conversation. He’d only been in the cells with these guys, and the other vees who hadn’t been brought up to this room, for a week. One week since he’d been imprisoned. Time for a change.

  The guards had let him and the other vees keep their own clothes, though they took away belts and anything shiny. They didn’t take his shoe laces though. Guess they weren’t afraid of suicides, which was a mistake, considering how ratty he felt in week old clothes. Fortunately, vees didn’t have much body odor, so the clothes didn’t stink or anything, but he was missing his fresh scented, clean wardrobe all the same.

  Daniel hadn’t been looking to make friends in here. He tried to keep to himself. Having a reputation that preceded him made that difficult.

  “Hey, terrorist vee.” This nickname was one of Carl’s gems.

  “I know you can hear me. You got a plan or something? You got a way out from some of your secret military friends?”

  Daniel sat up, as much as the restraints allowed, and fixed Carl a stare that would shut up a smarter vee.

  “I know you know something.” Carl gloated, definitely not taking the hint. “Yeah, you got something planned. You gonna share?”

  “I have told you before, I am not a terrorist. I prefer to think of myself as a pacifist.” Daniel smiled as if to imply that he’d rip Carl’s throat out if Carl tried to disagree.

  “Would you leave the vee alone?” Jerome said. “Who gives a shit if he blows up buildings? He’s in here same as us and he’s screwed same as us.”

  That wasn’t quite true. Daniel did have a plan, though the losers sharing this cell didn’t need to know that. So far, everything was going swimmingly. The hard part was the waiting, especially with the way Carl was acting.

  The fourth roommate was quiet. Daniel had always been partial to the quiet ones. He’d been quiet himself, when he was younger. The problem with the quiet ones is you couldn’t read them. Daniel knew Jerome. It had taken about five minutes to figure him out. He was a survivor, who would do what it took, but wasn’t one for leading or forging new paths.

  The quiet one, Stephen, he was still a wild card. Not that Daniel was planning on having to deal with him for very long, but you never knew how it would all play out, until the game was done, and Daniel preferred to know what cards everyone was holding.

  Daniel had always been good at planning, always been good at knowing which way the wind would blow. He was sure this little scheme would hold no surprises. Very few things surprised him anymore. In the 80 years he’d been alive, he’d grown almost bored.

  Daniel had been a 30-year-old, WASPy accountant when he was turned. Vampires were still mostly unknown at the time, at least as things of reality. He hadn’t asked to be turned, but he hadn’t fought very hard either.

  Kenneth, his maker, hadn’t seduced Daniel in the traditional way. Daniel had always been partial to females. Kenneth had offered him something he’d never found in his life – adventure; the chance to be a completely different person, a completely different thing. That was what he’d wanted more than anything. Of course, fifty years later, it was hard to feel like anything was an adventure anymore, and he hadn’t really ever become completely different. He was still himself, just with a new set of biological rules. He even looked much the same. In the past 50 years, he’d only aged, physically, about ten.

  The silence caught his attention and he looked around to see everyone watching the door. Daniel hadn’t heard the key, too lost in his thoughts, but he was at full attention now. This was important. This was the enemy. He needed to know them, and quickly.

  Two people in lab coats entered the room, one male, one female. There were security guards with them, of course, but they weren’t important. Guards everywhere were all the same – incapable of thinking for themselves. Scientists, on the other hand, were very capable of thinking up new ways to destroy. The male looked like he grew his own pot and only ate organic. He also looked nervous, even if he spoke to them in a soothing manner, like they were a room of school children.

  “We just need a sample of your blood for testing. This will only take a minute.” The male headed over to Jerome first. The guards held Jerome down while the man took his sample. Jerome didn’t fight, there was no reason. Carl, on the other hand, was working himself up.

  “When you gonna feed us? It’s been days. You can’t starve us to death. We need some blood here.”

  The male tried to calm him. Daniel ignored them and observed the woman. As the guards held Stephen down, and the woman drew his blood, Stephen seemed to watch her, silently, with great interest. She barely glanced at him, and seemed to nestle as close to the guard next to her as possible, as if his body heat could keep her safe.

  Daniel thought, against his better judgment, that she was beautiful, despite the frizzy hair. She had that ageless quality to her that some women had, where you couldn’t tell if she was 22 or 42. She was less nervous than the male scientist. There was something else there, something in the way she kept her eyes down. Not fear, more like guilt. He felt almost sorry for her, as today was not going to work out well for her, or any of her colleagues. Not sorry enough to change his plans, though.

  And then she was standing beside him, preparing the needle. As she leaned in to take his blood, Daniel inhaled her. It had been a long time since he’d found himself unable to contain a smile. She looked at him, worriedly, as he grinned and grinned. When she walked out the door, Daniel kept smiling. It had been too long since anything had surprised him. Daniel smiled and smiled, remembering, once again, what it felt like to be utterly surprised.

  Chapter 4

  Cate didn’t like the way that that one vampire had smelled her. She shouldn’t have let herself get so close to him, should’ve kept the guard between them. She was sure he knew. With any luck he’d be dead before he tried to say anything. That would wipe that creepy smile off his face.

  Cate immediately regretted the thought. She shuddered to think about killing them. The last time round they’d only had one to test on. Even though this was why she came to work for the NVIA instead of the many, better paying, labs who’d offered her jobs, she’d still been shaken when they’d killed him.

  His name had been Hank. She didn’t talk to him much, just enough to know he had thoughts, feelings, an expectation of a life to live. When they brought him in the room with the vaccinated pigs, he refused. Even though he must’ve been starving by that point, he wouldn’t touch them. She’d expected that. They’d all expected that. In her mind, that was the result, the proof they needed. When Hank was back in his room, she assured him they would feed him soon, and had meant it.

  Of course, she’d been wrong. Stan had James give Hank the injection of vaccinated blood. Cate felt like protesting, injecting him was unnecessary, but that wasn’t true. Cate thought she should’ve fought for the right to do the injection herself, shown she had the strength to do it. She’d known she didn’t. She didn’t have the stomach for it, even if that was part of her job.

  Hank did not die quickly. They watched from the observation deck as he screamed and screamed. She would never forget that sound. It was the second most horrible thing she’d ever heard. And, if everything went the way it was supposed to, they were going to do worse to these four. Since they couldn’t very well go around injecting every vee out there in the real world, they needed to know how the blood interacted with vees who’d bitten a vaccinated human. Like Hank, they would refuse to feed. Unlike Hank, they wouldn’t have a choice. The guards would force feed them. Cate didn’t have the stomach to watch that, either.

  This was what she wanted. If the vaccine worked, vampires would no longer be able to feed on humans. They would find another food source or go extinct trying. It would all be for the good. Still, she wouldn’t talk to them this time. She wouldn’t make the mistake of knowing anything about t
hem again.

  After Cate put her vee blood samples into storage, she and Andrew headed back towards the office. Cate let Andrew get ahead of her when she saw Lisa, her one good work friend, walking down the hall.

  Lisa looked like she’d just arrived, still carrying her bag, which would make her very late. Lisa wasn’t the type of person who was ever late, and she looked like she’d had a rough morning already. Of course, being nearly nine months pregnant, Cate was sure most of Lisa’s mornings were rough.

  “Have a doctor’s appointment this morning?”

  Lisa nearly jumped out of her skin, obviously having not noticed Cate yet.

  “You gave me a heart attack!” Lisa took a deep breath. “Don’t go sneaking up on me like that.”

  “Got it.” Cate responded, wryly. “I will no longer deploy stealth mode when walking directly up to you.”

  Lisa gave Cate the kind of smile that showed she hadn’t been listening. In fact, she looked like she had better things to be doing.

  “So, should I let you get back to work?” Cate had things to do as well.

  Lisa replied as if surprised to be in a conversation. “What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have lots of paperwork I gotta catch up on.” She looked longingly towards her desk.

  Cate wanted to ask her more, see if she wanted to talk about it, but she did have to get back to work. There was a lot to get done, before the waiting started.

  “Talk to you later?” Cate squeezed Lisa’s arm.

  Lisa hugged her, pulled away and didn’t wait for any more questions before walking off down the hall. Cate would have to find out what that was about later.

  Everyone was in the office when Cate walked in. Stan looked ready to give a speech, so Cate just grabbed a stool and sat down.

  “In the pigs, this vaccine took a little over four hours. Could be the same, longer, or shorter on our human prisoners. Now we just wait.”

  Cate was taken off guard. “I’m sorry, I must’ve missed something. Did you already vaccinate the prisoners?”

  “Yes. I saw no reason to wait after we collected their baseline. I assisted James in administering the vaccine.”

  “Don’t you think we would’ve all liked to have been there? What about the director? She specifically…”

  Stan cut her off. “Marisol,” he said, as if the name carried no weight with him, “specifically requested we let her office know, which I did. And no, I didn’t think you’d need to see a bunch of prisoners be given shots. If it makes you feel better, you can be there when they feed the vees, assuming that becomes necessary.”

  Cate suspected Stan knew how much she didn’t want to be there for that. For some reason, there was a power play going on around her and she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. At least, not quickly enough to come up with a satisfactory response.

  Stan eyed her for a second, making sure she wasn’t about to interrupt again, and then continued. “On that note, as anticipated, we should prepare to be here after dark. I guess I’ll just ask, is there anyone who has a problem staying the night?”

  Chapter 5

  Standing in the hall outside the lab while Frank shot the shit with the guards, Mason saw a ghost. As she walked away down the hall, turning into an office, he caught the merest glimpse of her profile. He knew it was her. She looked exactly like he remembered her.

  More than 8000 people worked at the NVIA research facility on any given day. Mason had never suspected Cate was one of them. He’d purposely not looked her up over the years - better for him if he didn’t know where she was, if he couldn’t picture her today. Of course, he’d pictured her anyway, but never, once, had that picture involved her working for the agency.

  In college she’d been active in the vee integration movement. She’d dragged him into it, briefly. Protesting for legal rights for vees. She used to say that they were just like us, with a slight biological change.

  That was not the belief commonly held at the NVIA. From what he knew of the NVIA labs, it was certainly not the belief of her department. In school, Mason had held Cate while she cried over having to run experiments on rats. Cate working here made no sense.

  “Ready?” Frank was nudging him.

  “What?” For a moment, Mason, lost in his past, couldn’t figure out why Frank was there.

  “Ready to go sign out? I know you want to stay here all day, but I got a comfy desk to sit behind back at the office.”

  Althea was waiting to escort them back to SCC. Frank looked about ready to nudge him again.

  “Uh, yeah. Sure.” Mason muttered.

  Lost in thought while they descended the gray concrete stairwell and walked down the seemingly endless, drab, basement corridor, they were almost to the door to SCC before Mason figured out what he wanted to say.

  “Actually, before we go in there,” Mason said.

  Frank and Althea stopped walking and looked at him expectantly. Mason turned to Althea, avoiding Frank’s stare.

  “If I wanted to look someone up, is there a computer I could use? And someone who could give me access?”

  “I could do that.” Althea offered. “If this is official business, of course, anyone in security could help.”

  “Let’s just keep this between us for now,” Mason said.

  To her credit, Althea didn’t react at all. Frank just raised an eyebrow, in silent question. Mason shook his head. He didn’t have an answer.

  “What kind of access do you need?” Althea asked. “We can access a lot more in SCC, but if you just need general database stuff, we can go to the lab.”

  Mason shrugged. “I just need to look someone up in the register.”

  “Cool. Follow me, gentlemen.” As Althea headed down the hall away from SCC, she yelled back over her shoulder. “You get to keep those shiny badges for a little longer.”

  The lab was a small office, undecorated and empty except for the six cheap desks, folding chairs, and desktop computers that looked like they’d been resuscitated from the junk heap. One computer was occupied by a guard playing solitaire.

  “Joe.” Althea nodded towards him.

  Joe, glancing up, smiled back. “Hey.”

  Althea jerked her head towards Mason and Frank and Joe nodded knowingly. He took about two seconds to wrap up his game before standing up. He said, “Later,” and left them alone in there.

  “You guys overwhelmed with work?” Frank joked.

  “End of day.” Althea explained. “Not much going on between now and the night shift taking over.”

  Althea sat down at a computer and logged in while Frank and Mason pulled up chairs.

  With her password entered, the home screen blinked on. Mason reached for the mouse. “May I?”

  Althea pulled it away, protectively. “No, you may not.”

  Mason considered trying to pull rank. Ultimately, he didn’t need to drive anyway, so he raised his hands in surrender.

  “Who do you want to look up?” Althea asked.

  When something looked out of place, it usually was. Mason was in the habit of finding out why. “Any chance we could look up the vees we just transferred?”

  Frank asked, “What’s up?”

  Althea pulled up a log sheet and Mason leaned in to read.

  “Daniel Trevore! Remember him?” Mason asked.

  Frank shook his head. “Should I?”

  Althea said, “No way.”

  Mason smiled, wryly. “Weird, right?”

  Frank looked at them both as if they were crazy. “What am I missing here?”

  “You know the Vee Liberation Front? Daniel Trevore is the guy started it all, way back in the day,” Mason explained.

  “He went missing around the time the NVIA was created,” Althea added. “Haven’t heard anything about him for at least ten years.”

  “Aaand?” Frank asked.

  “Aaand, we just transferred him upstairs.” Mason sat back in his chair, as if that was all he had to say, but Frank was being dense for some reason.

  F
rank asked, “So? We got him. Yay?”

  “Isn’t it kind of weird that the face of the vee liberation movement, the most famous vee our country has ever had, someone who’s been missing from the public and who we haven’t apprehended in 15 years at least, suddenly turns up here, and it’s no big deal?”

  “How could they have booked him into the prison under his own name with no one noticing?” Althea asked.

  That bothered Mason too. Someone like Daniel Trevore would have an alias, or four. Why hadn’t he used one of those? And, failing to do that, why had no one suspected anything when his name came up? His name would’ve been flagged, without a doubt.

  Mason shrugged. “I don’t know. Is there someone we could ask?”

  Althea deflated. “Yeah. That would be my boss.”

  Mason wanted to go there about as much as Althea did. Maybe, when he had more than a suspicion, maybe then he’d work his way up the ranks, risking his own. For now, there were a few more lines of investigation open.

  “We can hold off on that,” Mason said. Althea looked understandably relieved. “Let’s see what’s in that computer, what would’ve come up for the guards signing him in. And when we’re done, we can go ask Mr. Trevore what he was thinking.”

  “So,” said Frank, realization dawning, “what you’re saying is, you don’t want to go back to HQ after all?”

  Mason smiled. He loved the moment when you knew you’d caught the scent. He wasn’t sure what it was yet, but he knew it smelled.

  Chapter 6

  Cate stood alone on the observation deck. Andrew, who would be her teammate for the night, had had to hang behind to confirm his dog sitter so, for the second time today, she found herself alone in that room. This time, at least, there was something to see.

  The prisoners, the human prisoners, unlike the vees, were not restrained. Cate assumed that was because they were all volunteers. Still, no one entered the room without the armed guards, volunteers or not. Stan and James had no problem drawing blood samples and left when they were done. The guards closed the doors behind them and the prisoners went back to biding their time, something Cate assumed they all had a lot of practice at. They’d given them books, playing cards and magazines, since there was no TV. Two of the prisoners were reading. One was sleeping, but snoring loudly enough that Cate could tell he was breathing. The other three were sitting up on their cots complaining to each other while they played poker. Apparently, they weren’t happy with the way they’d been treated since being released from death row. Strange to think these men had done something to end up on death row. Strange to think they would be free soon, despite their crimes, and would be safer going about their business than most humans, if the vaccine did work.