Chapter 2
Crystal
The streets were deserted. Sometimes that was deceptive. Crystal had snuck along the eerily deserted streets of Chicago before and been fooled into thinking she was home free, only to end up running for her life… not always from Vampyren, but from human men, who were no less dangerous.
That was another reason for her mercenary nature, she thought.
She explained as much to both Jet and Nina when they’d asked her why she traded with Vampyren and even chatted with them as if they were old pals.
Crystal had explained that if anyone thought human men were less likely to rape and kill you than Vampyren men, you were either an idiot or just deliberately fooling yourself.
She had no loyalties based on someone’s planet of origin.
Vampyrens were sentient and intelligent just like humans.
Their one big flaw was that they happened to drink human blood which was problematic.
But since you didn’t have to kill anyone to take their blood, she figured that was just a problem with an easy solution.
There was also the breeding issue, but she had always suspected that problem could be fixed too if everyone would just start thinking a little more pragmatically and stop being assholes.
But not everyone could be brilliant and logical, Crystal thought.
“John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” Crystal sang softly as they rolled their metal cart full of drugs down the sidewalk. “His name is my name tooo…”
“Whenever we go out!” Nina sang. She was not helping to carry things. She was supposed to be keeping an eye out, but was instead, skipping on the sidewalk, kicking empty soda pop cans. “The people always shout!”
“There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt!” Nina and Jet sang.
Crystal didn’t sing that part, earning a dirty look from her cohorts. Her ears had perked up, and she didn’t know why. She hadn’t heard anything. But sometimes her subconscious sensed things before her conscious mind did. She’d never been able to explain that, exactly.
“Stop singing,” Crystal snapped, and the two of them immediately did. They were reliable that way.
They all froze there on the sidewalk and Crystal sniffed the air and scanned the street.
She’d gotten good at detecting nearby danger.
She’d even become adept at smelling Vampyren from a few blocks away.
But then again, a lot of them smelled, not because of body odor but because they were so often covered with blood or somehow stinking of blood even if they weren’t covered in it.
She didn’t smell any Vampyren now, however. She didn’t see any danger either. She scowled at the street as if it were offending her; teasing her with some unnameable danger.
A sleepless malice, she thought. That was from something, some movie. She couldn’t remember what. She was pretty sure they had it on DVD. Oh, that was going to drive her crazy forever.
Just like that, her fears were allayed. There was nothing, and she took a deep breath before pushing the cart down the street again, Nina and Jet falling into step behind her, now softly singing their song, a little more skittish after she’d scared them like that. Sometimes they were real babies.
But they were her babies.
“Okay!” Crystal said. They’d come to the bombed-out office building with an elevator shaft.
They pushed the cart full of meds through the “entrance” which was really the entire front lobby, the glass doors having long ago been shattered, the marble-floored lobby was in shambles.
The elevator didn’t work. They were going to have to carry the meds up two flights to the main floor that served as Dr. Jack’s office.
The kids could do that. They had to do something to earn their keep.
They complained a little as Crystal stomped up the stairs ahead of them, but they did their job and on the third floor, they rolled the cart down a wide corridor to the somehow still intact glass doors that read Law Offices of Harrington & Stewart.
Sometimes, Crystal wondered what had become of the people who had once been things like lawyers or…
insurance adjusters. They were out there somewhere and if they weren’t, they had either died in the invasion, or in a breeding pit, or in a tank farm…
Well, she supposed, perhaps it wasn’t that difficult to imagine, after all.
It was more like a little exercise of the imagination to think of what might have happened to particular people.
Crystal herself had been a psychology major in college when the invasion had hit two years ago.
She didn’t have the slightest interest in any career that necessitated a psychology degree.
In fact, the idea of listening to people talk about their personal problems and demons all day sounded like a fate worse than the breeding pit, but she had been forced to pick a major by her now very dead parents so she had.
School had not been difficult. She was sharp and savvy and she knew how to game every system she ever came across.
As a result, she had swung through three years of college with a 3.
7 GPA while somehow logging an impressive number of hours on her bong (which she had named Elmer Fudd for no other reason than having been very high at the time).
In fact, learning not just to survive but make a tidy business out of bartering shit had given her a sense of purpose for the first time in her life.
Although… she did miss the weed. It was easier to find smack and Oxy than weed.
She wasn’t going to fuck around with opioids.
As shitty as life was, it was still life, after all.
It was still fun to sit around and get buzzed with Jet and Nina though sometimes she wished they were up for sharing themselves, sexually speaking.
They were tragically monogamous and in the meantime…
it had been a while for Crystal. The only sex on offer lately was not sex, but assault.
And that didn’t count. Apparently, nobody wanted to ask anymore, human or vamp.
Nobody had ever succeeded in trying with her, but she’d had to use her taser more than once.
The only decent lay in the last couple of years had been another trader who came through town some months ago.
He had a big dick and a talented tongue.
She still thought about him when she jerked off.
There was a guard behind the glass double doors of Dr. Jack’s makeshift hospital.
Crystal was used to that. She was not used to them wearing a DIY uniform.
The guard was wiry and pale and holding an AK and he pushed open the glass door to talk to them.
Crystal bounced on her toes, looking over his shoulder at the office floor beyond where she saw Dr. Jack in a Star Wars t-shirt and baggy jeans giving a little girl stitches atop a folding table.
“You got business?” The guard said, nodding at them, but she saw his eyes stray to the boxes of meds on the cart.
“We got meds!” Crystal shouted loud enough for Dr. Jack to hear.
She saw his head jerk toward her. Dr. Jack was hot and a widower and, tragically, very gay.
His husband died in the first sweep of the invasion.
Dr. Jack still wore a picture of Robert in a locket around his neck.
Crystal pretended that it was corny because it was easier to dismiss it than feel sad.
Thinking of Jack’s Robert made her think of her dead parents and her dead friends and her dead ex-boyfriend from U of I at Champaign-Urbana.
She didn’t want to think about any of that, thank you very much.
But she still wished she had some weed.
“Let them in!” Jack called out. Jack was black and handsome as hell. He had a beard growing in just now and not a bit of hair on his head, and he was jacked because when he wasn’t looking after patients, he was working out. She was pretty sure he almost never slept.
The guard opened the door with a flourish and Crystal held her head up as they pushed the cart inside, feeling like some important visiting dignitary.
Jack was finishing up the little girl’s stitches, but he kept glancing over to look at the treasure trove being rolled inside. “Holy shit…”
“Bad words!” The little girl said.
Dr. Jack snorted, spreading a bandage along the girl’s arm and said, “Fuck that. Okay, don’t let this get wet, Marla.
Your mommy’s waiting over there, see?” He pointed to a plastic chair by a glassed-in office where a haggard-looking woman was sitting with an IV in her arm.
“Go find mommy.” She nodded and bounced off and Dr. Jack straightened up and clapped his hands together. “Crys!”
“Jack!” Crys said, reflexively digging out a cigarette.
“Oh, don’t smoke in here,” Jack said, aware it was a losing battle. “C’mon, man.”
Crystal ignored him and lit up, smirking as she gestured toward the cart bearing treasure. “Relax. I come bearing gifts.”
“Holy shit,” Jack said, his eyes growing large. “Is that Cipro?”
“Two cases,” Crystal said proudly. “I got Penicillin, Amoxicillin, I got Naloxone—"
“No way!” Jack said. He threw his arms around Crystal, nearly burning himself with the cigarette. “Angel!”
Crystal flushed and pretended she didn’t, squirming out of his embrace even though it was the most action she’d gotten in a while. “Yeah, whatever. Next time I get an arm torn off or something, I expect to get a spot at the front of the line.”
“Sure sure,” Jack said, marveling as he ripped open the boxes and pawed through their contents. There were other medical supplies too, all the things that Mickey’d had no idea what to do with, anyway. “Syringes, oh thank God…”
“Hey, Jack,” Crystal said, her curiosity taking over. She nodded at the guard now back at his post behind the glass door. “What’s with the uniform on your security? The thing looks patched together from Goodwill? That guy pretending he’s a cop now or what?”
“He is a cop,” Jack said simply, studying the label on a bottle of Cipro.