Chapter 1
Kiera
The pipe wouldn't come loose.
She'd been working on it for at least ten minutes, her hands becoming increasingly cold but she couldn't stop. The Chicago winter wasn't going to warm up suddenly just because she didn't have gloves to keep her hands warm, or anything that would help her force the pipe to let loose.
The house she was in had not been ransacked before her raiding party arrived. Kiera hadn't anticipated that. Usually you had to go further afield now to find food, and the fact that there was still stuff in the house worth taking meant the owners had disappeared recently.
That was creepy.
Food wasn't even what they were after today, though they'd take it.
Since the alien invaders had taken Earth, going on a year ago as February wore down, there'd grown a strange kind of unseen and unacknowledged barter system in metro areas, at least between some factions.
Prescription drugs were largely left untouched in homes where the owners had "vanished" (there were all sorts of polite euphemisms for "been killed" these days).
If you had need of something, you took it.
If you didn't, you left it, and that included everything from inhalers and Ibuprofen to – well, not heroin.
The world was pretty shitty since the Vampyren "overlords" came and people needed to find their escapes where they could.
What most people didn't need was part of the plumbing.
Kiera did, and she was about to take a big swing and whack the damn U-joint with her wrench if it didn't let loose.
She'd come here with her "little brother" Will – William, two years younger than her twenty-three, who towered over her five-two with his six-two and liked to rub it in – and her little sister, Kate, who at sixteen felt like a liability more than a partner in the raiding party.
They called themselves that. They talked like pirates and they made stupid jokes because it hurt to go into abandoned houses and homes that weren't at all abandoned but the owners were just never coming home.
"Come. The fuck. Off!" She gave in and whacked the hell out of the pipe. All it should have done was make a dull clank that would scare her but not honestly be that loud and then rattle a bit and subside.
Instead, the pipe finally loosened. "Yes!
" Still seated on the floor, she did a little cha-cha.
When the alien invaders had come, most of them six or seven or eight feet tall, all muscle and dark smoldering good looks – the men and the women – and most of them wearing full beards (the males only), at first Earth had been so shocked and so amazed, its peoples failed to notice the military aspect.
That lasted about five minutes and only happened at all because the Vampyren materialized out of thin air.
They had ships capable of wormhole transport.
They had technology capable of finding planets where the blood of those beings living on the planets was nourishing for them and the women capable of being bred by them and where they thought they'd have a reprieve from their enemies, the Lucian, if only for a couple months.
Going on a year since the Vampyren had come, now the Lucian had come to Earth as well. The two sides of the alien battle were pitched against each other and still as the frozen winter continued in North America, the two sides continued to pick at the human survivors.
"Did you get it?"
Kiera jolted under the kitchen sink and smashed her head into the underside. She said something very unfortunate and from the far side, Kate laughed.
"Didn't mean to startle you."
"Then don't sneak up on me!" She threw the wrench and she almost threw the pipe, but she'd gone through too much to get it and she needed it.
Her father needed it. The house they'd holed up in was suburban enough to almost be rural on the outskirts of Chicago.
The space vampires weren't overly enthused about rural areas, with the exception of Earth's deserts, which they usually weren't allowed to go into by their chain of command because they'd go native and just stay there.
That was what the local news programs said and apparently the Vampyren didn't find those reports important enough to censor (which generally included killing the reporters and anchors).
So give them a desert, and they went native.
Native, but no less dangerous. From what little anyone had been able to make out, they came from a desert planet and they were cold on Earth, which meant that the Chicago winter could be deadly for them.
That made them angry and they were taking it out on the urban population.
That meant that lately encounters with the Vampyren were more hazardous, if not instantly deadly, than they had been.
That wasn't the norm. The invaders did kill – for sport, for sex, strangely enough, and for the example the executions set.
But until winter had set in there was at least reasoning, however alien and horrible, behind killings.
Metro areas had been hard hit with the advent of the invaders, sections of cities taken out with precision alien weapons and just plain old-fashioned bombs.
Rural wasn't as interesting to them. The Vampyren liked to stock up.
They liked quantity over quality and they took to the metro areas where there were enough people in the population that they could turn to those alien killings: killing for sport.
For food. For sex. They drank blood. They bred with the women to produce their own young.
Their females, deadly in breeding with their own kind, bred with human men to produce food stock.
They were unstoppable.
So far.
There were resistance bands starting up. Small rebellions. Most of them were rumored and the rumors placed them in the rural communities across the country, which made it that much more mysterious that the invaders didn't find rural interesting.
Kiera did. She was determined to find one of the grassroots rebellions starting up.
But that meant getting her parents to a place where they could survive more easily on their own.
They weren't that old, only in their fifties, but with her father sick, her mother was completely distracted.
They needed to be self-sufficient before Kiera trusted going off without them.
Then it would just be the finding of a resistance cell.
She thought when she did, they'd take her in.
She'd worked hard to make herself valuable to her family and she'd be valuable to a force resisting the damned vampires.
Since the siege had begun, Kiera had learned everything an unemployed, overweight, twenty-three-year-old waitress could do wasn't enough to make a difference in the new world.
So she learned. Feeling a little like the character from Terminator 2, she learned from men who crossed her path, rarely trading anything she wasn't willing to give.
More often people needed practical things, physical belongings that could be traded for some lessons in starting an older car with a balky carburetor or replacing an alternator.
She knew how to work with the plumbing because of a man on the run who'd needed nothing more than shelter for two nights until the party of Vampyren chasing him had given up and gone away.
That was when they learned about perfumes and confusing the Vampyren sense of smell. That was something she and her family kept to themselves because it would instantly cause all fragrances to become the hottest trade item. They'd become hard to find.
It didn't take a lot of scent to throw off the space vampire senses.
In fact, too much scent was a dead giveaway, no unpleasant pun intended, she thought, as she stood at the sink she'd just savaged, looking out into the backyard of someone who was never going to come back and see how their garden fared in the spring.
To throw off a chasing Vampyren, it took just the amount of scent that Kiera herself found unpleasant and then the vampires couldn't tell one human from the next and their code of ethics – fortunately stupid for the sake of humans – was that if they lost track of somebody in the hunt, having started chasing the human for sport or because the human had run – they couldn't replace one human for another.
If the runner escaped, the runner escaped.
Which was fine unless the Vampyren caught up to them again, so keeping a signature scent of Not me, not the human you're looking for was important.
Keeping her family safe was important also, so Kiera had kept that information to herself and her family when they needed it, and since coming to this home, had already confiscated all the bottles of disgusting perfume, cologne, body spray and aftershave that she could find.
Today's raiding party consisted of Kate the Willful, William the Tall, Dave the Destroyer – William's best friend and in Kiera's opinion, Dave the Dweeb – and Kevin, the third of their triad.
Kiera's best friends Amanda, a short, curvy brunette whose automatic laugh had been silenced by the advent of the invaders, and her other best friend Sarra, perpetually nearsighted and nervous.
They'd also come with a new couple she didn't quite trust and hadn't wanted to invite.
The group of friends called themselves by cheesy pirate names and tried to make a game of it, pirate speak and all, but nobody really found it fun or funny. It was more whistling past the graveyard and they all knew it.
Everyone was pretending to put on a brave face for everyone else in case it caught on.