Now

  “THE FALLEN GATES”

  PART ONE: NOW

  By G.M. Gabriels

  And it begins…

  My name is Summer Jones, and I am a survivor in the New World.

  I can remember the World before the ending, but my memory is washing off more and more every day. I can still picture the building next to my job and the little coffee shop on its first floor, but I cannot quite remember the color of the door or the exact words of a neon advertisement on the windows. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not. Good memories from the past keep you running, but they also keep you wondering, what if? And when questions like that suck you back into a life that will never happen again, your engine dies fast, along with your desire and ability to live.

  In short, you get screwed by reality.

  Some people didn’t want to live in the New World. They couldn’t accept the rules and the new…neighbors, so they decided to leave this World for a better one. I’m not sure if I believe that such a place exists, but people must have faith in something. I don’t really have faith in much anymore.

  Some say it wasn’t the ending but the new beginning, that we have opportunities we never had before, new abilities, and it doesn’t matter that the price we paid for it was four billion lives. For these people, this is the Brand-New World. But not for me. Nuh-uh. I lost everything I had and didn’t gain shit.

  It’s hard to trust somebody when your only job nowadays is to find a way to survive, and that new somebody can screw you over just to save themselves. I don’t blame people for wanting to take extra measures to stay alive, but I prefer to keep to myself. Safer that way. And saner.

  When the walls fell and the gates opened, creatures of amazing abilities came to our World and ripped it apart. We, as humans, weren’t ready for such an enemy…but then they rose. From the shadows of the night, they came to our rescue.

  Vampires and werewolves.

  We didn’t know that they existed. We didn’t know anything about them, but they knew everything about us. They were familiar with our new common enemy, too. And they fought. For us, or for them, I don’t know—but the fact is, they managed to close the gates so that the walls would hold…for now.

  Since then, the war has been here. We fight the enemy from another world, but we forget about the enemy within. Turns out, vampires and werewolves are a different species, not dead or diseased humans risen again. They’re just different. And they need blood to survive.

  They need us.

  How many died during the first invasion? And how many died afterward? And who will play the biggest role in the grand finale in the history of our dawn…?

  CHAPTER 1

  When shit hits the fan.

  “Summer! Summer!”

  I turned toward the voice. My little neighbor was running at me with flowers in her tiny hands. Her blonde hair couldn’t catch up with her pace and flew behind her like a bride’s long veil. I kept polishing the knife but acknowledged her presence with a nod. No need to encourage the kid when I wasn’t planning on staying longer than necessary.

  “Hey, Lily.”

  She stretched her pale hand and offered three pathetic dandelions to me. “Look, look! I picked them myself. Aren’t they pretty?”

  “Indeed, they are.” I smiled at her. She was so full of sunshine and rainbows, even my black, black soul couldn’t resist.

  She sat on the stairs next to me and put the miserable-looking flowers on her bony knees. “Is that yours?” She nodded to my hunting knife.

  I wiped it one more time, and it sparkled in the sunlight. “It is. My father gave it to me when I was a kid myself.” Not your typical gift to a ten-year-old back when the world was normal, but my father never was normal, and neither was our family—or, what was left of it.

  My mother left us the day I was born. Whether she was scared of having the responsibility of one more living creature, or something else, I still don’t know for sure. My father tried to plant an idea in my head, that I wasn’t the one to blame for her leaving, but it never worked. I put two and two together and figured out she left because of me and my ‘wrongness’. She must have seen something in me when I was a newborn child and didn’t want to carry a burden. Maybe I cried differently, or maybe a horn grew straight from my forehead at dawn and disappeared at dusk—who knows, and who cares now? Definitely not me. At least, not anymore. Hell, I’ve been weird for as long as I can remember. Not the sort of running around naked with an axe or shaking in the corner hugging my bitten knees weird, but different from others. People usually don’t stick around with me for longer than absolutely necessary. And who can blame them? When we were kids, my brother told me that I was a walking, talking disaster. And he was right.

  For as long as I can remember, everything around me has broken. Say, my father bought a sparkling new stainless-steel fridge to our beat-up house. The only new, polished thing that we couldn’t afford but needed to buy regardless. They got it delivered, installed. We turned it on, and boom! It was done. Burned down in flames.

  I got my first cell phone in the fifth grade, was so excited (like I had anybody to call besides my family), took it out of the sleek white box, and boom! Exploded right out of its package.

  That sort of weird.

  Any piece of technology I touched ran away from me or got killed. Literally. So, when the world we knew ended, I didn’t lose much in that respect. I didn’t own a cell phone, or a music player, or even a car (especially not a car—I’d be a danger to everybody). I had none of those things before, so nothing changed for me after. All the entertainment from the Old World that people knew before, like a good song, or an interesting movie, was never mine. I used to listen to music when somebody nearby was listening, or I’d watch a movie from afar if someone else was watching it, but books were really all I had left to keep me sane and entertained.

  I asked my father once what got broken when I was born. He never answered but never blamed me. Though, I blamed myself enough for all of us. I think it was our family that got broken.

  He was a good man, my father. I remember him as the most handsome, strongest person I’d ever seen. He raised me and my brother all alone, never took a new wife or even brought a woman home. He loved us, provided for us, and died for us.

  I shook the memory off.

  Lily wrinkled her cute snub nose. “My father gets me dolls.”

  I smiled at her flushed face. “And that’s how it should be.”

  “Lily, get back here!” her mother called from the other side of the yard.

  People here didn’t know about my special ‘disability’ because there was no technology I could blow up, so they treated me like a regular outsider. Nobody trusts an outsider, and I was fine with that.

  Lily smiled at me, then suddenly bent over and kissed me on the cheek. I’m not used to being on the receiving end of a good gesture, and that simple gift from a child mentally knocked me off stable ground.

  Shake it out, Summer, go back to your shell.

  I looked around. This place was as good as any other, one- and two-story buildings with gardens all around. After the Old World ended, we ran out of food really fast and people had to learn how to grow their own produce. Whatever you grew, you ate. If you don’t grow, you’d steal. If you stole, you’d die. So, you grew. It was like we’d gone back to Neanderthal times, gathering from the same soil we all used to shit on so much before we learned how important it was.

  This village was the same as any other, that was true, but here, it seemed like progress was pushed three hundred years back instead of fifty. I heard that happened because the main gates were close by. The closer to the gates, the less technology was able to function. The gates’ magic (it’s been years, and I still haven’t fully accepted that word in my life) wiped out all techno
logy. Phones wouldn’t work, cars wouldn’t start, electricity... What was electricity again? All those useless words. I always wondered how many gates were out there, and if all of them had the same effect on human technology.

  This was the closest I had ever been to the main gates, and it would still take many long hours of walking to arrive at the area where they were rumored to be—at a place called The Crossroad. I had never seen it and would never want to, but people talk, and I have an active imagination. The Crossroad seemed to be the place where four roads began, and where our world collided with theirs when the war started. The three castles on those roads used to belong to royalty before, but now, they housed the vampires’ nest and the werewolves’ compound, and whatever lived in the third castle was a mystery to me. I didn’t know anything about the fourth road, but I was certain it existed. Around the three castles, the vampires and werewolves had built smaller castles, and villages grew around them over time. Quite a short period of time, I have to say. People said they felt safer around the supernaturals, which was nonsense to me.

  In other places, the vamps and wolves took over big buildings—like taking a pen from the table, without a fight; we were happy to give them everything in return for their protection—and fixed them up to suit their needs. Happy humans gathered around, adoration blossoming in their minds and hearts. In this way, our world became some sort of new country, with The Crossroad forming its capital.

  The Crossroad had been there probably since the beginning of time, maybe even long before us. When the gates fell, the magic from the other worlds wiped out the dome that used to shield The Crossroad with its medieval castles and powerful inhabitants from curious human eyes, and suddenly, we could see all of it at once.

  Magic. That word will always be a guillotine over my trembling head, I swear.

  I was still polishing my knife when the sound of a horn came from the tower. I looked up in shock. It was way too soon—the last calling was only a week ago! Jumping to my feet and looking around, I saw people all over the place with shining faces, like it was Christmastime, running toward the tower. Poor, silly fools…how could they be so happy to get selected? I would never understand that.

  I quickly fetched my ugly-as-fuck, poopy-brown scarf from my room and wrapped it around my hair. For reasons I could not comprehend, my hair tended to draw a lot of unnecessary attention from superior creatures. That’s why I tried to cover it everywhere I went, and only in quiet villages like this one, during simple days among other humans, would I relax a little and let my hair breathe oxygen instead of being wrapped up in a stinky wool scarf. Then, I picked up my knife from the porch, put it inside my left boot, and followed the crowd.

  Most of the villagers gathered in front of the stairs. Through their loud whispering, I could hear excitement at the possibility of being selected. Of being chosen. Chosen for what, idiots? To become food? A whore? A servant? If I ever got selected, I hoped I’d become the latter. I’d rather wash their clothes or wipe the floors than let their nearly-immortal dicks inside my very mortal vagina.

  Now, with all of the villagers—including newborn babies—here, I could see that the inhabitants of this place had almost been extinguished. Three hundred souls, maybe three-fifty. Soon, I’d have to leave this place and find another one. The less people, the more difficult to hide. Which sucked, because this village was the perfect place to gather information about them, and I was desperate for any piece—it was the only reason I’d decided to get so close to The Crossroad with its vamps and wolves in their barest, most powerful state.

  I hated having to move. It was neither safe nor fun. When you traveled from one village to another, you never knew how long it would take, and you really—like, really, really—didn’t want to spend a night on the road. The creatures out there… Man, I’d pick a civilized werewolf over them any time of day, and I’m not a fan of supernatural shit, so that’s saying a lot.

  The fire on the top of the tower was started. Black flames. Vampires. Son of a loophole, they already held a selection last week. What the hell?

  The selection was usually made once every three to four weeks, unless it was a big fight and the vamps or wolves needed our blood to heal. One human could feed a vampire for quite some time. Our bodies were created that way so our blood cells would reproduce, and that was a miracle of creation. Their bodies were different. They needed our blood to reproduce their own blood cells, and that’s why they sucked. Literally and metaphorically.

  Sometimes, after a big fight, they picked more than one person and often came back the same day for more. I understood that—it was logical. We were like a medicine for them. But I hadn’t heard of any big fight recently. (Not that we were given the chance to know everything, but people gossip, and we picked up some pieces of information here and there.) Occasionally, though, they selected humans for different purposes. The superior races were too busy fighting the war and they didn’t have time to clean up their own shit, so along came a weak, stinky human with red-blooded veins. Two rabbits in one shot.

  The huge wooden door in front of us opened with a slick movement. Not quickly, like humans would open a door. No. It was opening slow-ly and took fo-r-e-ver. Those guys just couldn’t help themselves. Their lives (or, non-lives—I’m still now sure how to categorize them) were just one big, dramatic production that everybody got to view or act in. I was fine with being on the sidelines, but those folks… They were like cats in heat, eager to step onstage and wipe their fur against the hand of a master, lick their perfect bloody fingers. That part, I couldn’t understand, nor did I accept. How could you go under the full control of a powerful creature so willingly? Nobody knew what happened to those who went up there, in their fancy castles. They never returned. Didn’t it look suspicious to anybody?

  I remember the first selection I ever attended. I was still living in our house in the countryside. I had grown up there and was planning to die there someday, too. What I never knew was that, besides my desires and plans, there were higher forces out there: bloodsuckers.

  One night, my father, my brother, and I were having a dinner of pasta with ground beef and cheese. I remember knowing it was awful before I even served it, but they ate it anyway and complimented my non-existent cooking abilities. They were lying to make me feel better. Don’t we all do that for the ones we love? My brother even asked for an extra potion, making me blush from the highest compliment he could give to a chef, and I had just stood up from the table to get it when the first bell rang. It came from the local church. That late at night, we knew there was no reception planned, so it confused us. My father went to the window and saw that everybody was leaving their houses, gathering around the church in excitement.

  People always want to be next to somebody powerful and unique. It makes our greedy rotten souls feel more meaningful. And when we got a chance to lick some superior feet, we accepted the opportunity with an orgasmic pleasure.

  My father told me that we should join them, too, so we followed the call. Four male vampires stood around on the front porch of the church while the bell continued to ring. One of the vamps explained to us that from now on, ‘the guardians of this world’ (he was referring to the supernaturals) would ring the same bell once in a while and they would hold a selection to choose humans who would be granted the opportunity to do ‘the greater good’. I didn’t understand the meaning of his words back then. The first human they chose was Angelica, a beautiful young girl with huge brown eyes and a pure, kind soul. She was my brother’s fiancée.

  She never came back from the greater good.

  A popping sound woke me up from my bitter memories. The doors were finally fully open (thanks to all the saints in all known and unknown worlds), they slowly moved upfront. Seriously, what was wrong with them?

  A tall, polished blonde in a black—of course—leather dress stepped forward. She looked around and sighed dramatically.

  “It’s getting worse and worse every time.”

  She p
ointed her pale finger with a red-painted nail (I’d have killed for a manicure, honestly—at least, I’d have killed her for one) at Greig, the village blacksmith. Funny thing, how all handymen suddenly became local rock-stars after the gates were opened and the walls had fallen.

  “You. Step forward.”

  He was about five-seven or five-eight, but when she called upon him, I swear he grew taller. Like, a freaking foot bigger. Greig had sandy, longish hair in desperate need of a cut, and a nose that had been broken so many times it didn’t even make sense to fix it anymore. Yet, he looked…interesting. Sort-of. If you’re into deeply-grounded guys, with a soft spot for heavy masculinity and a big axe in his hands, of course. I guess the blonde felt the same way.

  “What’s your name, human?”

  I saw his left hand shaking as he touched his chest, and it wasn’t a nervous shake. “Greig, Your Greatness.”

  That. Right there. I couldn’t handle it anymore and rolled my eyes—not forgetting to keep my gaze locked on the ground, of course, so that nobody would see my lack of respect. Except, this time, somebody did notice. I felt a slight kick under the ribs from the right. Controlled by instinct, I quickly looked in the direction of the person who had intruded on my stiffness.

  “Have some respect,” Lily’s mother, Rita, sizzled at me.

  The blonde vampire turned her attention to us. She made a small step, then another. This was about to become my greatest moment of humongous stupidity. Where did I sign onto the list of complete idiots?

  The vampire pointed at us. “You.”

  “Me?” Rita said in an excited voice, and she lit up like wildfire on a rainless day. She’d completely forgotten about her little girl clinging to her side; all she could see right now was a chance to be chosen by the supernatural supremacy. I felt bad for the poor kid.

  “No. You.”