Chapter 8

Disorientation and vertigo made it difficult to remember what happened. For a cruel second, my brain entertained the idea that the whole vampire thing was just a bad beer induced dream.

Then the musty smell of decay and moss hit me. Vanquishing my hope and reeling me back to the unpleasant present.

Oh, right, the venom, I recalled. That giant frog monster’s weird burr tongue injected me with a foul liquid. With all these ghastly animals trying to kill me, I wondered if I ended up in Australia. My cheating wife always wanted to go there; it was too bad she wasn’t here with me now. Thinking of her getting eaten by one of those bird-rats cheered me up a little.

Turns out, I crawled halfway under the rusty fire truck. I have no recollection of doing it, but as for hiding places, it could have been worse. The disgusting dust and bone tornados from outside routinely left a few of the rooms in the fire station worse than others. At least in the motor pool, a lot of the detritus gets swept back out of the door.

By the time I extricated myself from under the vehicle, I no longer had the energy to get up. Scroll took that time to make its stupid reappearance. It took too much energy for me to flip it off, so I just whispered “screw you” with cracked lips and a lolling too large purple tongue. After failing several attempts to read it through blurry vision, I gave up and rested for a few minutes until my head cleared. The events of the last few days made it harder and harder for me to give a shit. There is a point where a man can only take so much before he must give the world back some pain, and I crossed that finish line in first place.

Gentle rain continued to pour down from the black clouds outside. The sound calmed me enough that I could relax for a time. Either the Barghest I summoned worked, or that clan of savages gave up looking for me. If they had any sense, seeing the dead—what did scroll call it a captain? Seeing the dead frog-gator should have sent them running for the hills. Not that I would expect a person who puts bone hooks in their face to have good judgement.

After the nausea faded, I felt an intense hunger take its place. The last time I had to heal from serious wounds, I’d felt the same way. It was only because I ate the heart of that Colo Colo that I replenished my strength. An instinct I could not name told me it had to do with my Ichor levels. I did not need the scroll to tell me what those levels were, either. Somehow, I just knew it was at 1.

Speaking of scroll; time to make that nuisance go away. Somehow, the infernal paper knew I had not read its contents and hovered over me until I’d done so.

I opened my eyes and tried to read the ghostly writing again. This time it worked.

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

[Tlacotin defeated +5% Legacy]

Keeping one hand on the old fire truck, I slowly rose to my feet. Picking up my monkey wrench was the next thing I did, and it immediately made me feel more secure. My limbs were still shaky though, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the venom still running through my system, the hunger, or because I was terrified.

Casting my eyes around the fire station, I suspected I knew the right answer to go with.

Around me was a scene from a horror movie. Not one of those tame first date films, like with a guy in a white mask and a knife, either. No, it was more like one of those torture flicks where the characters get maimed gruesomely, then die for no fathomable reason.

Something had scattered shredded body parts and entrails around the motor pool. Pale limbs with tribal markings and piercings had teeth marks, giving a clue to their origin and last moments. A bloody trail of viscera led out the back door of the station. I could not tell if something dragged the bodies in here or out the door, but for a spell at least, I had to consider if I had done it. Checking over my new-old clothes, I found nothing but dust and grime. So, I assumed it was not me. Thankfully.

According to the scroll, seven more of those Talcum people died. The spread of gore made the corpses appear more numerous than they were. And from where I stood in the garage, I could tell they weren’t all indoors. Wind gently blew open the back door, and I caught a peek of more body parts at the end of the trail of organs in the alleyway outside.

I knew I should feel disturbed by waking up in a room full of violently dismembered, dead savages. The changes done to me were not just physical; they had to have encompassed my psyche for this degree of dissociation. I wasn’t disgusted, nor traumatized the way I knew I should have been.

Instead, against all reason, I felt annoyed. It was a profound waste of blood. The precious drink I craved was too old to do me any good. Also, I was going to have to find somewhere else to hole up. Even if I had the proper materials to scrub the fire house down, the overwhelming amount of work required to get it clean did not incline me to do so. Especially since I knew a storm would ruin the effort.

My options didn’t look good. An insistent pain was welling in my stomach for need of sustenance. There was a chance the heart of that frog monster would give me Ichor, like the rat did, but I worried I would just make myself sick again if I ate it. Fighting more of the rats looked like a bad idea, too. I was thinking I had gotten lucky only facing one. Between the skeletons I found in the hotel, and the two searching for me in the lobby, I suspected they were a pack animal.

A movement out of the corner of my eye drew my attention back to reality.

An arm chewed nearly to being beyond recognition, rolled from a nearby corner toward my feet.

*Thump* *Thump* *Thump*

A sound like a drum being beaten matched the speeding of my heart. Each repetition of the noise sent the metal rolling garage doors shaking. The pounding rhythm almost made me turn and run, but some instinct I did not understand warned against it.

*Thump* *Thump* *Thump*

Baleful red eyes that didn’t so much as glow, but defy the darkness, materialized in the dark corner near the door.

*Thump* *Thump* *Thump*

Detaching itself from the gloom, a shadow took shape. A massive, hound-like creature, almost the size of a lion, came into the pale blue light of the moss. Underneath the glow, I saw a blocky skeletal face covered in swirling shadow. Its head was like an earless rottweiler, but with a mouth full of fangs so large they poked out of its snout. Equally deadly claws of bone scraped along the cement floor, sounding not too different from the eagle taloned rats. The hellhound was an absolute nightmare.

And it was wagging its tail at me.

“Duke!?” I yelped, recognizing the soul of the animal before me.

“RUFF!” said the spectral dog in a booming, echoing bark.

A notion that I must be dead for this to happen pressed into my consciousness. Duke, the goodest of good boys that ever lived, died seven years ago before I’d gone off to college. That dog had meant the world to me, and I still missed him every day. I’d always wanted to adopt another dog, but Heather had always told me “No”.

But here he was! My steps in Sahu verified it. I felt a spiritual connection from deep within my soul, tethering me to my lost companion. The ritual had called out to the netherworld for a servant, and the ever-faithful Duke had answered.

“DUKE!” I yelled, with tears streaming down my face, running over, and gripping the enormous hound around the neck. His shadowy flesh was cold, but there was a heat to his spirit that pressed on mine with contentment. From behind him, I felt the whipping wind of his human arm sized tail.

Duke licked me across the face with a maggoty looking tongue.

“Jesus buddy! Death has not improved your breath, like at all!” I laughed, pulling his skeletal head into my chest.

That wasn’t the only thing that had changed. In life, Duke had been a medium-sized mutt, a cross between a schnauzer and a dachshund. He’d looked like a wooly mammoth version of a weenie dog and was as protective as he was cute. My family used to call him the meanie weenie, because of a penchant he had for showing off his fangs while he wagged his tail.

Here he was now, a cross between Skeletor and Cujo. But I couldn't care less. All this pain, torment, and death had been worth it if I got my Duke back. It’s not like there was anything else waiting for me in the “real” world.

“I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been!” I cried. “Why did I wait so long to summon you?” Just the thought of me dying without ever having summoned Duke made my stomach fill with unease.

A sharp pain in my chest interrupted our moment. My large canines sprouted out my mouth right after, and my vision began turning red. I knew I was at zero Ichor.

“I need to eat…” I mumbled.

More energetically, I asked, “Duke, I need your help. Can you help me kill some gigantic bird-rats?”

“WOOF!” the Barghest answered, not understanding the content of my words, but loving the enthusiasm of my voice.

The two of us left the firehouse in a hurry. I could feel myself losing control. The alien consciousness that made me drink blood the first time was about to take over, and I desperately wanted to avoid that outcome. Becoming a mindless blood leech and waking up in another unknown location would only exacerbate my problems. Worse, I might even do something stupid like attack Duke-y boy.

Upon seeing the dead frogodile, I changed my plans. Laying with its belly open to the air, exactly how I left it, gave me hope I could get enough nourishment from its heart to keep my wits. The blood would be no good, but the blessing of the ghoul had let me take Ichor from the heart of a day-old creature before.

Rushing over the corpse of the frog monster, I began tearing into its body with the rusty dagger. Even with my absurd strength, the hard, leathery skin refused to part before my old blade.

“Can you help me here?” I asked Duke.

Duke cocked his skeletal head.

“Dig!” I said, pawing at the chest cavity with my hands.

“WOOF!”

My Barghest leapt on the carcass next to me, sending it rocking back and forth. In less than a minute, his bear-like paws shredded open the remains enough that I had to order him to stop.

With no precision, I reached into the hole where my instincts led me and ripped out the red-grey heart of the enormous beast. Unlike the Colo Colo, which smelled like fried onions, this smelled like a good red Thai curry.

Leaning back against the corpse, I tore into my snack with abandon. Had I been more rational, I might have tried to keep it off my new clothes. As it was, the rain was going to have to sort it out.

When I finished the last of the heart, the aching pain in my stomach died down. I could tell I recouped the final lost point of Ichor back to 1, but it was still a near thing. The organ had not been fresh.

“Well, boy, I’m still hungry,” I told Duke. “You up for helping me hunt?”

By the red glow of his eyes, I knew he was.