Gus winced. He wanted to light up the place. Instead, he pulled away from the bright lamps and fired straight out across the cavernous building, rounds punching holes in the far wall, ejected cartridges raining onto the perch.
Nora was the first one out of the indoor farm. She could feel the others pulling on her to leave; the pale light would fade from the sky soon. She grew more frantic with each step, until she was running.
The next building was surrounded by a fence covered with opaque black netting. She could see the building inside, an older structure, original to the former food-processing plant, not vast like the farmstead. A faceless, industrial-appearing building that fairly screamed “slaughterhouse.”
“Is this it?” asked Fet.
Beyond it, Nora could see a turn in the perimeter fence. “Unless… unless they changed it from the map.”
She clung to hope. This was obviously not the entrance to a retirement community or any sort of hospitable environment.
Fet stopped her. “Let me go in first,” he said. “You wait here.”
She watched him start away, the others closing around her like doubts in her mind. “No,” she said at once, and caught up with him. Her breath was short, her words coming quietly. “I’m going too.”
Fet rolled back the gate just wide enough for them to enter. The others followed to a side doorway apart from the main entrance, where the door was unlocked.
Inside, machinery hummed. A heavy odor permeated the air inside, difficult to place at first.
The metallic smell of old coins warmed in a sweaty fist. Human blood.
Nora shut down a little then. She knew what she was going to see even before she reached the first pens.
Inside rooms no larger than a handicapped restroom stall, high-backed wheelchairs were reclined beneath coiled plastic tubes dangling from longer feeder tubes overhead. Flushed clean, the tubes were meant to carry human blood into larger vessels suspended from tracks. The pens were empty now.
Farther ahead, they passed a refrigeration room where the product collected from this terrible blood drive was packed and stored. Forty-two days was the natural limit for viability, but as vampire sustenance—as pure food—maybe the window of time was shorter.
Nora imagined seniors being brought here, sitting slumped in the wheelchairs, tubes taking blood from their necks. She saw them with their eyes rolling back in their sockets, perhaps guided here by the Master’s control of their older, fragile minds.
She grew more frantic and kept moving, knowing the truth but unable to accept it. She tried calling her mother’s name, and the silence that answered was awful, leaving her own voice echoing in her ears, ringing with desperation.
They came to a wide room with walls tiled three-quarters of the way to the ceiling and multiple drains in the red-stained floor. An abattoir. Wrinkled bodies sagged on hooks, flayed skin lying like pelts piled upon the floor.
Nora gagged, but there was nothing in her stomach to come up. She gripped Fet’s arm, and he helped her stay on her feet.
Eph appeared at Fet’s side. “We have to go.”
Nora, her head buried in his chest, felt Fet nod.
Eph said, “They’ll send helicopters. Police, with regular guns.”
Fet wrapped Nora in his arm and walked her to the nearest door. Nora didn’t want to see any more. She wanted to leave this camp for good.
Outside, the dying sky glowed a jaundiced yellow. Gus climbed into the cab of a backhoe parked across the dirt roadway, near the fence. He fooled with the controls, and the engine started.
Nora felt Fet stiffen, and she looked up. A dozen or so ghostlike humans in jumpsuits stood near, having wandered over from the barracks in violation of curfew. Drawn by the machine gun fire, no doubt, and curiosity over the cause of the alarms. Or perhaps these dozen had drawn the short straws.
Gus came down from the backhoe to yell at them, berating them for being so passive and cowardly. But Nora called on him to stop.
“They’re not cowards,” she said. “They’re malnourished, they have low blood pressure, hypotension… We have to help them help themselves.”
Fet left Nora to climb into the cab of the backhoe, trying out the controls.
“Gus,” said Bruno. “I’m staying here.”
“What?” said Gus.
“I’m staying here to fuck up this sick shit. Time for a little revenge. Show them they bit the wrong motherfucker.”
Gus got it. Immediately, he understood. “You’re one fucking badass hero,
“The baddest. Badder than you.”
Gus smiled, the pride he felt for his friend choking him up. They gripped hands, pulling each other in for a tight bro-hug. Joaquin did the same.
“We’ll never forget you, man,” said Joaquin.
Bruno’s face was set angry to hide his softer emotions. He looked back at the bloodletting building. “Neither will these fuckers. I guarantee it.”
