“I missed you Craig-y, I did. And yeah, I was hungry too.”

“I took a vacation this week,” he announced. “Because I couldn’t freakin’ work anymore. All I could do was think of biting my mom. And Ginny.”

“Did you?” Danika asked. “I always liked her.”

“Yes,” Craig admitted. “She came here a few days after I killed mom, wondering why I wasn’t answering my phone. So … thanks. I killed my mom and my sister.”

“Have you talked to them since?

“No,” he admitted. “That would be a little difficult, wouldn’t it? I killed them!”

“I killed you too, right?”

Craig looked at her with anger. “You tried, but clearly you didn’t drink me dry.”

“Sure looked that way,” she said.

Understanding dawned, and a smile grew on his face. “So … maybe they’re not …”

“Maybe,” she said. “There’s a lot of blood in the human body. I thought at the time that I’d drank enough to kill you and Mila. But then I realized, maybe I hadn’t. Maybe that venom in my teeth just put you in a coma for a few hours. That’s why I came back to check on you. Maybe you should …”

He shoved her out of the way. “You’re still a bitch,” he said. “And I fuckin’ hate you.”

“Yeah, that’s not what your lips said a couple weeks ago.” Danika said. “Just remember, if anyone else finds out, they’re going to come after you. I think there’s one cardinal rule here.”

“Keep it in the family?”

“Right.”

Danika smiled as Craig slipped out of the doorway.

— 20 —

She visited three more of her ex-boyfriends that afternoon. Each of the doors were answered by a man who looked very much alive, despite her memories of their faces as she’d left them. Tongues lolling, eyes rolled back. None of them were happy with her.

She could stomach that.

The real key was … Danika was making vampires. Despite what Maggie said. Maybe it was all scientific, but there was something about her particular wurdulac change that was transferring a physique-altering gene to her victims … er … dinners!

Danika considered the ramifications of that. Not everyone was going to be happy to be a vampire. Certainly none of her boyfriends were. And while keeping their own condition secret was sort of a mandatory self-preservation strategy, sooner or later, someone was going to talk.

She needed to pull them into a fold. She needed them to wake up and have a guide.

Danika considered.

Then she pulled out her cellphone, and called Mack. He’d been her third victim, and even though she hadn’t talked to him in a year prior to sucking his blood a week ago, he was one of her favorite people.

She wasn’t surprised when he answered. Sounding angry, like Craig.

“Here’s the thing, Mack,” she said, and launched into her plan.

The idea of a pyramid scheme was not a new one. But usually, pyramids had to do with money, not food.

Danika’s idea … was all about staying alive. Secretly. That and, having your cake, while eating it too.

The talk show was the perfect opportunity for making new friends.

And what did Danika need more than friends?

“We all need to get along,” she told Mack. “More than that really … we need to like them. We need to establish a bond before we can break it!”

“Can you maybe hold a segment on beautiful lifeguards?” he asked. “After all, it is summer. And I could get really attached to lifeguards … if they’re girls. And tan.”

“And what’s in that for me?” Danika asked.

Mack had an easy answer. “Their boyfriends. You don’t think lifeguards date trolls, do you?”

— 21 —

The trick to having a houseful of live food was to keep the food fed. And in the case of a wurdulac, not to kill it when you fed.

That’s what Danika and Craig and Mack and Hannah and Sarah learned very quickly. Craig made the first mistake after befriending and sucking on a girl named Julia just a little too long. He left her comatose in the room where they had locked in their human “cattle.” But that night, instead of waking up groggy but normal, she turned. When Danika and Craig and the others woke the next morning, they found all of their food lying dead on the floor. Because, of course, the caged “human cows” all forged some pretty strong bonds thanks to their mutual situation.

Danika instituted the time clock method after that. Nobody fed unless the timer was set. They set up individual pens for the nighttime at Hannah’s house, who had a full basement that they turned into a series of holding pens. Nobody could access the basement until the timer was set. And once the timer was set, a major alarm went off five minutes later that could only be turned off once someone returned to the top of the stairs to hit a button. It meant that feeding was successfully interrupted enough to allow the cognitive aspects of each vampire to surface, at least enough to restrain its fatal instincts.

Danika’s “family” grew … a little at a time. Each day after the show, she held dinners with her guests, and anyone she “clicked” with, she invited on a date the next night and the next … until she felt that familiar surge in the back of her throat. She added someone to her own personal food “pen” almost every week. But she didn’t always need to feed in the pen.

— 22 —

It was a Friday night, and Danika was happy to be done with work for a couple days … but still, her belly growled. She knew she needed to feed soon. Her new hunger had certainly made her change a lot of aspects of her previously “normal” life. But now … she went to Hannah’s house after work just to see how things were going, and Mack met her at the door.

His normally dark hair looked darker. His normally pale skin looked paler. Danika felt strange, looking at him. “I want to kill you,” she said, without thinking.

“Yeah,” he said.

She could still feed on the ones she was close to, even if they were vampires. They kissed, and then, almost as one, their mouths moved. In a heartbeat, their mouths shifted, and their teeth slipped into each other’s necks. They drank from each other. The taste was rich. And deep. In seconds the sexual charge became overpowering, and they ground their hips hard against each other while sucking.

“I want to kill you too,” he whispered, between sips.

“Yes,” Danika said, and bit harder.

"JUNK" PT.3

Jonathan Maberry

— 10 —

Department of Anthropology

New York University

October 9, 11:03 a.m.

Four Days before the V-Event

“Are you the vampire guy?”

Luther Swann looked up from his laptop and smiled. It was the kind of question he got a lot, and not the worst phrasing he’d heard.

The two men standing in the doorway to his office were neither students nor fellow faculty. They were both big, dressed in off-the-rack suits that were of the timeless style that would look equally uninteresting no matter how fashion shifted. They had similar mustaches and haircuts that might have been the result of a two-for-one sale at Super Cuts.

They might have come from central casting.

Cops.

The taller of the two — a sad-faced man with dark hair that was turning a dull shade of gray — reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and produced a leather identification which he flipped open. Swann peered over his glasses at the gold badge and name card.

“Detective Schmidt,” said the man. He closed his case. “This is Detective Yanoff.”

“Okay,” said Swann, “and I guess that makes me the vampire guy. How can I help you?”

“Mind if we close the door?” asked Schmidt.

“Not at all.”

They did and accepted seats in the two worn-out swivel seats across the desk. Swann smiled encouragingly at them, but neither detective smiled back.

“Dr. Swann,” began Schmidt, “have you ever done consulting work for a police department or the district attorney’s office?”

“Like expert witness work? No. Not much call for that in my field,” admitted Swann. “Been on TV a few times. Discovery, History Channel. Shows about vampires and the supernatural. They rerun them every Halloween.”

“Yeah,” said Schmidt. “That’s how we heard of you. Detective Yanoff DVR’d a couple of them. Very interesting.”

He said it in a way that suggested that they were, in fact, not at all interesting.

“You write books, too?”

Swann nodded toward the bookshelf to his left. The top three shelves were crammed with multiple copies of the same eleven titles. The word vampire appeared in every title.

Schmidt nodded. “Yes, we have those.”

Swann leaned back in his chair. “Really?” he said. “Should I be flattered?”

Instead of answering, Schmidt asked, “Would you be willing and available for a consulting job?”

“Sure — as long as it doesn’t interfere with my class load. I can give you a copy of my schedule and — ”

“We have it,” said Yanoff. It was the first time he’d spoken.

Swann smiled. “Then sure. Is this a paid gig?”

“Yes.” Schmidt named an amount and Swann tried not to let the excitement show on his face. His books pulled in enough to keep his salary from putting him in the poverty category, but he wrote scholarly books about folklore. He had never been within long rifle shot of the bestseller list.

“That will be fine,” he said, keeping it out of his voice, too. “What will I be consulting on?”

Schmidt and Yanoff sat there and didn’t say anything.

“Let me back up and ask another question first,” said Swann. “What kind of detectives are you? Is this a theft of some kind? Holy relics, or antique books? Something like that?”