The Vampire & the Rebel (Completed)

Part 1: Chapter 4

The leech had apparently decided the time had come to leave the bloody capital of the leeches, dragging the rest of us along like mere luggage.

Not that the monster had condescended to tell its plans to anyone insofar as I knew, which was not surprising.

Still, all the leech's obedient slaves seemed to know what was going on, almost as if the monster was a queen of an insect colony and it communicated commands silently to its drones. I would not be surprised if the idea turned out to be basically true.

The last time the leech had directly spoken to either Trisha or I was when it had informed her that she would be required to donate blood for the leech, an oxymoronic command. Theft was far from donation.

Trisha had paled, but had submitted because she'd had little choice. She had returned a few hours later, slightly shaken up with a tiny bandage on her arm, not large enough to hide fang marks. I had been confused, until one afternoon I spotted the leech mixing blood into its coffee. No doubt that was where Trisha's blood had ended up.

In that moment I had fantasized about staking the monster right through its cold dead heart and then cutting off its head for good measure before grabbing Trisha and fleeing the capital. If only it could be so easy.

Instead, I bided my time.

Now, I was travelling somewhere in a large motorized vehicle with two parallel rows of seats divided by an aisle, along with all the other slaves. Blondie was manning the wheel at the front of the vehicle while everyone else was sitting around loose, even Trisha. The leech was somewhere else entirely.

Unlike the other slaves, I had been chained to the wall of the vehicle, in shackles once more. I was conflicted. My pride urged me to be taken seriously as a threat in spite of my efforts to the contrary, but the leech's caution while on route was removing what would be a prime opportunity for my escape.

With nothing else possible, I slept as best I could sitting up with my hands restricted in front of me, so that I was ready for whatever came when I was finally released, assuming I would be eventually.

When I was not dozing, I kept my expression blank and watched the creature's slaves move around the enclosed space as if their lives were something more than pathetic captivity. Marcel, or Agro as I preferred to call him, was the screamer who had surprisingly turned out to be the leech's biggest and most aggressive suck up.

The dark man who was built like a mountain was named Dean, but I had dubbed him Rocky because he resembled a boulder.

The final one with glasses was Theo, but I called him Stump since he spent a large part of the journey hunched over his work until he resembled one.

Both Bean Sprout and Rocky seemed to be vying for Trisha's attention. It was pathetic and pointless in the world we lived in.

Sometimes, I thought the most effective strategy against the bloodsuckers would be to simply give up and die, because if all humans did that, they would die out shortly after.

The world would be left to be a paradise of nature. I scoffed. I had survived in that so-called paradise for a long time. Nature was a cruel beast who wanted to kill humanity almost as much as the vampires did.

Every little surviving creature stood upon a teetering pile of death, devouring the creatures below them. Even the most deceptively harmless little rabbit ripped and tore the life from plants, the plants that grew in soil composed of a thousand decomposed dead organisms. Hidden in the grass, between the little rabbit's jaws was an unlucky caterpillar being inadvertently chomped into unrecognizable protein goop.