Chapter 26 – Jack
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jack
Jack.
Jack.
I died and woke up like I always did—in the dark, alone, and hungry.
I wasn’t as hungry as I’d ever been before, but I was getting damn close. And while I never really dreamed much while I was dead, I knew if I had, it’d have been of blood. Vats of it. Pools big enough to swim in.
The thought darkly amused me for a moment, before I also imagined seeing Samantha’s bobbing corpse in the blood beside me.
“I’m awake, Sam.”
Figured it was better to announce that, than it was to let her hear me moving and get frightened.
“Hooray,” she said, in an entirely non-jovial tone.
“I was thinking about our conundrum before I died, though.” I started sitting up.
I’d realized we were both on hard-packed dirt after I lay down.
If she started scratching a little furrow in the ground near the gate on her side, and I started over here where the water was, and etched a decent enough slope, maybe I could get a little canal of water over to her—
“I’m not giving you blood,” she snapped.
“Different conundrum,” I said, as she struck up a light that illuminated her frown.
Her expression didn’t matter though. She was still beautiful.
And also?
Delicious looking.
I made sure to keep that off my face though, and hit my hunger with a metaphorical shoe.
“My people will be looking for me, you know.”
I nodded. “Yeah. They seem pretty tenacious.”
Whereas mine likely weren’t. If Luna had survived—a big if, considering—she was probably already hitting up a new vampire. I’d finally shaken Zach free, and as for Paco—who the fuck knew. There was a good chance he’d told the Uber driver to take him home, once he’d seen me get inside the truck.
All and all, that’d be better for him.
More in line with what he deserved.
Better for him go on and live a normal life—for a vampire—without me.
“But what I was thinking was that I’ve got my keys in my pocket still,” I said, pulling them out. “I can pop off one, toss it to you, and then I can use the others to start working on making a gully here,” I said, scratching the ground a little by way of illustration.
Sam just stared at me blankly. “What does that even matter, Jack?”
“You need water. You said it yourself.”
“I’m going to die by vampire far before I die by dehydration.”
I sighed and rocked back. “You sound awfully sure about that.”
“How long have you ever made it between feeds before?”
“Two weeks,” I said.
The light she held in her hand tinged red. “Liar.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, and shrugged. “But what about you being pure and stuff? Doesn’t that earn you points with anyone?”
She rolled her eyes at me like she was a teenager. “Bad things still happen to good people, Jack. Or have you been blind your whole life?”
“Definitely not. But—why be good, then? I mean, committing your whole life to it, and what not, if bad shit can still happen?”
“Because goodness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It has to be challenged, to count.”
“Oh,” I said grandly, putting a hand to my chest, and going on to talk as pretentiously as possible. “So I exist to be your personal trial and tribulation. I get it now. Thanks for putting everything in context for me. Good thing I don’t have any free will of my own.”
Sam made a face at that, and I practically read her mind.
“Go on, say it. I’ve heard you before, plus we’re so deep in the ground God probably can’t hear.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and then snickered.
“You say ‘fuck you,’ but at this point in my life, I just hear my middle name,” I said, and she outright laughed. “Jack Fuck You Stone is what they ought to call me,” I went on. “We get outta here and I’ll have them change the sign on Dark Ink.”
She laughed some more, and then held herself lightly. After sleeping on the ground, her entire white suit was now scuffed with dirt. “Stop trying to lull me into a false sense of security, vampire.” She tried to make it sound like a curse, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.
“Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m just trying to save myself,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, can’t you just use your powers to force choke me or something over here? Darth Vader style?”
“Since when did vampires actually need to breathe?”
“Ah. Good point.”
We were both quiet for a long while then, with only sound of the water trickling behind me.
“Jack, honestly, the most I could do to you right now is lift those keys up, and maybe gouge out one of your eyes—but you could kill me before I got to the other one. I could break all your bones—but you’d still survive it, most likely, and it’d only make you hungrier.
” She collected herself into a small ball, her chin to her knees, her arms wrapped around her shins.
I’d been forced to go to a lot of church in my youth—my parents had erroneously thought it’d make me a better person—so I’d heard all the Old Testament stuff before.
None of that had prepared me to be in a parable of sorts now with her though: her playing Job, and me, some kind of demon.
“Look, the thing is—either we work together on this probably stupid idea I had, or we just sit here until I die again and you breathe a sigh of relief.” I started working one of the keys off of my key ring, to throw it through the cage to her, where it bounced off of her sleeve. “How would you rather pass the time?”
She looked down at the piece of metal and then up at me. “As long as we agree that this idea is entirely stupid.”
“Stupid as the day is long.”
She sighed, and then she picked the key up.