Page 61 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Wes made such a disappointed sound that even knowing it was fake, it was hard to hear and not feel sorry for him. “Ah, Babcock’s been gearing me up for this for weeks; I was hoping I’d get to see the whole process of my first sign-up for myself.”
The receptionist’s brow lifted, but she nodded. “If Babcock has been mentoring you, then I don’t see why not? You already signed the initial NDA at the end of your interview, and we will need some information from you about this vamp before we officially process him.” She looked at the gravelly-voiced agent. “You don’t mind, Myers?”
Myers huffed. “That would be easier for us anyway. Then we don’t have to put the specimen in holding overnight.”
Specimen. It made Vincent’s spine crawl in a way that not even the nastier slang for vampires could. He wasn’t a monster here; he was a rat, a numbered thing to be dissected and the pieces thrown in the trash after.
Wesley barely seemed to notice his discomfort, even as Myers replaced his blinding with a pair of cuffs that clipped just out of Vincent’s reach, but that detachment was for the best right now. He had to play the part. And contrary to everything the man had initially done to try and force Vincent here, Vincent found he trusted him in this. Even if he didn’t look like it, this was hurting Wes too.
Myers led Wesley down the hall, Wes making a show of half-dragging and half-pushing Vincent along. Vincent’s gaze caught on the security cameras in the corners, and he had to force himself to keep walking. It didn’t matter if they were on video or not. Vitalis-Barron would know their identities no matter what. They were only getting away with this if they succeeded in dismantling the company.
As Myers directed them into an elevator, the other security returned to their stations near the foyer. At least that was good—two less humans to fight their way through later. Myers held down three different elevator numbers, then tapped the alarm button with the ID card strapped to her belt. They began to descend. And kept descending.
A nauseous sensation grew in Vincent’s stomach. He leaned forward, focusing on the sound of his own breath. Wes’s thumb slid over his arm just out of Myer’s line of sight, rubbing gentle circles. The soft touch soothed him, if only a little, and the thoughtfulness of it soothed even more.
The elevator dinged four stories down, and the doors opened. The hallway walls were as stark white as the floor, the only ornamentations the metal and glass of doors and equipment. It seemed like something out of a video game: too harshly screamingevil labto be real. But then, it was likely the people who had approved this particular lab hadn’t been particularly moral themselves. Maybe the stereotypical statement of villainy was the point.
At least here the cameras vanished, and the halls seemed quiet and empty, the lights having to boot up from status mode as they progressed. That left its own weight in Vincent’s gut. Clearly Vitalis-Barron worried far more about humans breaking in than vampires breaking out. While good for him and Wes, he feared what state their vamps had to be kept in to justify it.
Myers steered Wes into the first room on their left. The small, stark chamber had two cushioned chairs on one side of a metal table, thick cuffs welded across from them. Scratches pointed towards the bindings like warning signals. Vincent stiffened, but Myers only had him deposited beside the stool on that side, barely paying attention to him as he shook and huddled away from her. She drilled Wesley on the state of Vincent’s pathetic life, jotting his answers into a tablet she’d collected from a metal rack outside the room. There wasn’t much drilling to be done.
“He’s been living in the cemetery, yeah. Babcock’s already cut off anyone that might have wondered where he’s gone. Honestly, from what we could tell, he’s got no one and nothing.” Wes shrugged at the end.
It was true. It was true, and Vincent knew it, but hearing it out loud so bluntly and totally made his jaw ache and his eyes burn. He choked back a whimper.
“We love these ones,” Myers hummed. “No clean up, just snatch and go.”
She asked about his state, the last time Wes figured he’d eaten, and whether Wes knew how long he’d been turned for. Wes made up his answers quickly after she implied they had ways of getting the information out of Vincent if he didn’t—sun-poisoning, he said,36 hours since his feeding and two years since he’d turned. Vincent hoped they didn’t have an easy way to prove him wrong. Myers brought them back out, tablet tucked beneath her arm. Vincent felt better just having Wesley’s hand returned to his arm, even with his grip so tight and his manner less than friendly.
“That’s someone I love.”
Vincent didn’t have nothing after all.
They turned from one sterile corridor to another, passing dim rooms with sleeping scientific equipment, all the researchers cleared out for the evening. As they walked, Wesley slipped in a few questions about protocols and methods, which Myers answered with so little hesitation that it amazed Vincent. But then, he supposed, Wesley had just bound and delivered them a person to torture in order to get this job. Anyone willing to go to those lengths had to be pretty deeply sold on working here.
“You collect all this data on the lab tablets, right? Is that very secure?” Wes asked, “I thought all this science stuff was supposed to be pretty secretive.” From anyone else it might have sounded probing, but between Wesley’s easy smile and the nonchalance of his voice he seemed like nothing more than a good-natured jock unaware of his own ignorance.
“All of the technology on this level of the basement connects to the private server that’s only accessible from here. Nothing gets in or out. Trust me.” Myers motioned toward Vincent and winked, her smile cruel. “Our research is locked up tight.”
Wes chuckled with her, and the way the laughter crawled over Vincent’s skin took him a moment to push past, to find the man beneath the act, the one who’d lain beside him on the mausoleum roof and stared at the stars. That was the man he’d come here with. That was a man who would probably hit Myers over the head with a rock if she turned away for too long—which worried Vincent in its own way, but one that made him want to help Wesley more, not less.
“You have great timing, we’ve been running low on specimens,” Myers said, waving her badge in front of a massive, two-panel metal door. It unlocked with athunk, and it seemed even she had to put her weight into opening it.
Inside, the long white room continued to the left and right. Three rolling metal tables with straps had been lined up neatly and a lab technician at a bench-cart parceled out small samples of badly-smelling blood into little plastic pouches. Beyond them were the cells. Built into the wall, each four-foot by four-foot chamber was brightly lit, their only furnishings a little toilet system in the back corner.
There were so many—over two dozen, their glass entrances swaying in Vincent’s vision, doubling and tripling as his chest tightened. Only eight were currently occupied. Each sickly-looking vampire looked so hollowed out and twisted that they seemed more like the monsters from the myths than the humans they’d once been. It took Vincent a moment to recognize the fourth from the end, their cotton-candy hair now stringy and oily and their dark skin an ashen gray. They lay in their shirt and boxers, curled on the white floor beneath the blinding lights, an arm over their head as they breathed raggedly.
Vincent shook for real now, his pain and horror turning to anger. He’d given Babcock all the information the man had needed to designate the cotton-candy haired artist as a vampire and let Vitalis-Barron set up a story to justify their disappearance. He had participated in this torture without even knowing it. Not only had Vitalis-Barron been treating his community like disposable lab rats, but they’d made innocent people—the people most likely to be vampires themselves—complicit in the work.
“I don’t keep up with the specifics of the research,” Myers said, continuing toward one of the empty cells, “but whatever the nerds have been up to recently, these specimens aren’t lasting very long under it. We need all the new bodies we can get.”
Vincent wanted to burn the whole place to the ground.
The lab tech stopped Myers to ask if the “new specimen” had been deprived of blood long enough to start him on the feeding regimen that round.
Wes’s hand tightened around his arm and he caught the tiny pulse of his jaw just before his eyes met Vincent’s.“Leave?”he mouthed.
Everything in Vincent screamed yes, run, but he couldn’t just escape this and forget about the vampires here. He couldn’t sit in Wesley’s house knowing this lab would keep torturing their way through people like him without remorse, and that when he’d had the option to do something about it, he’d chosen to cower instead. Maybe the two of them, with no solid plan and no training, wouldn’t be able to bring down a company this size in the end. But Vincent was sure as hell not leaving here without trying to bring down something. If that meant he died as sickly and pained as the vampires he’d accidentally condemned to those cells, then so be it.
