A Preview of My Kindle Book in the Vampire for Hire Series

                             MY ATTACK                   

A KINDLE WORLDS NOVELLA

BASED ON J.R. RAIN’S MOON DANCE

AND OTHER STORIES

 IN THE VAMPIRE FOR HIRE SERIES

                   

Auwalu Yakubu

 

 

 

 

-1-

At five o’clock in the afternoon, when Anthony and Tammy returned from school and were gone to Chuck E. Cheese’s with Mary Lou, I switched off the TV set featuring both Judge Judy and Judge Milan, took shower and hurriedly dressed in a tight brown gown and brownish shoes. It didn’t take me another minute to put on my dark sunglasses as well as wide-brimmed sun hat and hurriedly drove my Ford Windstar minivan on to the busy East Street.

            I was hurry to reach Kingsley’s house, and I knew I was late already. Kingsley had phoned and requested me to come earlier, not knowing - or maybe ignoring - the fact that the bright sunshine of the day could quickly jeopardize a vampire. In fact, I’d no option than to wait until the sun had chilled enough to let me set my foot outside. Now I wanted to reach him in the shortest possible time.

          The sunshine was still dazzling enough to make me feel jaded, despite that it was near evening. Indeed, if there was anything that could upshot my death in this peculiar life of vampirism it was the sun. My skin was scorched, somehow scraped and faded, and I’d to keep telling peoples that I’d a rare skin disorder to be able to cope up with normal life among the mortal humans on a daily basis. Occasionally, few peoples would ask directly if I weren’t a vampire, and it made me almost jump out of my skin to hear that.

          Any way, if I’d the opportunity I would wipe out the sun.

I smiled unevenly for the first time in two months at the thought of the world without the sun. Although this is the perfect condition for vampires and possibly other immortal beings, one wouldn’t need a biology lesson to know that all other creatures on earth would cease to exist once the sun vanished. This is one reason why I worshipped the sun, because life itself, if not everything in the world, depends entirely on it.

           I prayed for the sun to vanish.

          I hoped the sun would simply die out and leave vampires alone in the world.

          In fact, if not for the dreary sun I would have seen Kingsley earlier, because he was eager to see me for what he called a private discussion.

          Yet, I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I couldn’t come out in broad daylight.

          Maybe I was feeling shy.

          Maybe I was afraid.

          Or…could be anything else.

          Completely overwhelmed with thought, I forgot that I was driving the minivan until I hit the car in my front.

          Unfortunately, this paved the way for a fresh chapter that led to my further delay for nearly two hours. When I picked out my cell phone, I noted Kingsley had called me twenty-one times. I wondered what silenced the phone to that effect.

          I’ve completely smashed one of the rear lamps of the Mercedes-Benz Vaneo that I accidentally hit, and the rear side of the car was punched to an ugly shape. 

          The driver was a young, burly man in white shirt and blue snug jeans. He subsequently parked the car to the roadside and approached me, obviously looking aggrieved. Shaking his pudgy finger in my face, he began to curse me in the most disappointing manner.

          I parked my minivan and came out, sprawling my hand in time to prevent him from slapping me. Certainly I knew I’ve offended him, but I couldn’t see why I should be beaten in the first instance, without even being given a chance to explain.

Democracy didn’t permit that.

          The man suddenly attempted to slap me for the second time and succeeded. An inferno of rage furiously overwhelmed me to the extent that I punched him in the face, sending him high into the sky like a rocket.

          Oh my! I’ve quite forgotten about my superhuman strength, and I regretted the sudden action.

          Through the downward pull of gravity, the man hit the ground with a loud yelp and died instantly.

          Soon there was a large gathering of crowd all over the place, and about five men were already torturing me. I wanted to hit them too, only to realize that I would virtually kill more peoples.

          Eventually, the startling sound of approaching siren made peoples to distance themselves from the scene, such that I was left standing alone.

I was deciding to use the opportunity to slink into my car and drive away when my eyes suddenly met with police detective Sherbet’s. He was leading a team of seven armed policemen. My sixth grade sense told me that when a distress call was made to their department, he was ordered to lead his homicide unit to the scene and arrest me.

Holding a pistol in his hand, he stood abashed, unable to utter a word. He didn’t expect to see me at all.

Using my sixth grade sense again, I guessed what he was saying in his mind:

Arresting a vampire could be difficult and even dangerous, for it could end up killing anyone. There’s no need to take the bull by the horns.

He didn’t know that a shot directly made into my heart with a silver arrow or bullet would make me drop dead and never rise up again. Or… if he did something else I would die instantly. Surely, he could kill me if he knew how to, for the fact that I am a vampire.

Of course he didn’t know how to kill me, and very few peoples in the world know this. For as long as the world would exist, this would remain one of the top secrets of vampirism that mustn’t be revealed.

          May be a treacherous one - or for the better, a good one.

          Now I’ve committed murder and Sherbet’s job was to arrest me for doing so, but he knew it wouldn’t work that way. It was obvious he’d already believe I was a vampire, though he couldn’t prove it, and no jury could ever convict a vampire, though one was attempted on Fang. The consequence of this might likely be a high death toll, so it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.  

          Sherbet turned to the rest of the policemen and whispered something to them. In a bout they appeared frightened and began to move away.

          A mob of angry youths was formed on one side of the road, and stones of various sizes were been hurled towards me and hitting me in various parts of my body. Sherbet also managed to talk to them, and they ran away like cockroaches, dropping their stones in a retreat fashion.

          Did he tell them about me being a vampire?

          Perhaps a harmful and dangerous one, or one that’s good for nothing?

          At this juncture, it suddenly transpired to me to leave the place, and so I did without resistance or confrontation from anyone. Sherbet was watching when I started my minivan engine and sped away.

          Frankly, I was frustrated to have realized that Sherbet told them I was suspected to be a vampire, and I felt the desire to do something to silence him once and for all. But that might be killing him, and I didn’t want to kill intentionally. The fact that I didn’t want to kill peoples explains why I didn’t become accustomed to drinking human blood, because the more I drink it, the more I would kill peoples to get it.

          Absurd!

I also knew that the more I stick to human blood, the more difficult it would be to spare my husband and my children.

          But I did tell the poor cop I only had a skin disease, and he told me he believed it. But this is obviously the opposite of the case; the goddamn cop believed wholeheartedly in my vampirism, and has even started to spread the word.

          For the first time in my vampirism I felt an utmost desire to perform intentional killing. And the killing was going to be carried out on a cop. So easy to execute, if I really wanted to.

          A poor, stupid cop that wouldn’t keep his mouth shut.

          One who knew nothing or only too little about vampirism.

Well, he might have known little about vampires, alright, for Sherbet was such a smart cop one shouldn’t take for granted.

          Then out of the blue, a thought struck my mind.

          A petrifying thought indeed.

          Sherbet suspected my vampirism, no doubt about that. He might thereupon be struggling to dig into this phenomenon and end up knowing everything about a vampire for him to be able to fight me. That super secret of ours. He might even find out a way to kill me, especially now that he was confident I’ve started killing peoples.

          I abruptly became upset. I also became engulfed with dread.

          Can I call it killing peoples?

          Anyway, to me it was just accidental, and I didn’t ask to have a superhuman strength.  

          I didn’t even ask to be a vampire. It was all accidental.

          I examined the wounds on my forehead and other parts of my face, inflicted by the stones hurled at me at the East Street. Thick, cold blood was pouring out of them, though I didn’t feel any pain around them. I noticed that they’d already begun to heal in the ten minutes that ensued, thus confirming my immortality.

          Using a handkerchief, I wiped out the blood and hoped the wounds would heal in their usual less than thirty minutes.

          I drove through a few cities down the empty rolling hills of Bastanchury Blvd in Yorba Linda, where Kingsley lived.

The musical chimes at the main entrance door sounded the moment I pressed what I believed was the doorbell switch in the Kingsley’s house, and the door opened almost immediately.

          Kingsley appeared in his usual tailored suit, this time around brown-colored.

          Our eyes met and we smiled to each other.

          Oh my! Could I say we were falling in love?

          Oh…what a melancholy to remember that I was still married to that stinking freak called Danny! For this I would never allow myself to be in love with Kingsley since I intended not to cheat Danny.

          It wasn’t my fault being a vampire, Danny knew so. But he distanced himself from me, refused to have any marital affair with me and chose to engage in extramarital relationships with mere commercial sex workers.

          If I could catch him with a woman, I believed I wouldn’t hesitate to wring her neck like a bird’s.

          I would send her to hell – especially one I overheard called Nancy Pearson.

          Nancy Pearson! Why shouldn’t I punish her!

          Now I could say I admire Kingsley, maybe falling in love with him, but for the fact that I was still tied to Danny.

          Danny has separated me from my two beloved children, even sent me away to live in another place. Yet, he refused to divorce me. I talked to him more than a million times about it, but he declined divorce.       

          Nevertheless, I still felt virile enough to need a man, and I needed a strong one.

Maybe I needed a man, or another creature of the night.

Finally, I decided to hide my feelings for Kingsley, as I used to, until hopefully I quit out of Danny’s way.

          “Truth is often stranger than fiction, Samantha. We’re both immortals. But nothing can stroll from the truth: you’re a vampire, I’m a werewolf. Absolutely, vampires and werewolves were believed to exist only in folklore, but they’re a grim reality. Thanks largely that some peoples are beginning to believe in our existence now, and we two are harmless to the peoples around.”

          These were the words spoken toughly by Mr. Kingsley the moment I found a seat in his foyer.

          As I gazed incisively around the house, wondering how the dwelling of a werewolf was, he went over to the cellar and picked up a bottle of brandy and a glass tumbler.

          He half-filled the tumbler, his hairy hands obviously unsteady, and impatiently sipped the brandy twice.  

          “There’s one thing that makes me interested in your affairs, Samantha,” I heard him hummed in his unique voice as he approached me at a snail's pace with the brandy bottle and tumbler in his hand.

          “I’m afraid… I want to know how you were made a vampire. Forgive me for been so far-reaching, but it may help us know each other well,” he added, now looking inquisitive. He finally settled on a leather sofa.

          The statement sent chills up my spine.

          My eyes protruded and my heart skipped a beat. Despite being a vampire for years, my body organs were functioning normally, but at times they tended to deviate from the norm once conditions were unfavorable. This man has asked me the most heart-pounding question of my life, for it hurt me gravely to have ever thought of that gloomy day when that brutal vampire attacked me and transformed me to immortality, and of course my heart was thumping.

          That foolish, abominable snowman!

          I adjusted myself as though uncomfortable in the chair and gave Kingsley a long such-and-such look.

          He sipped the brandy again and pushed it away together with the tumbler as though it was choking to him.

          Alcohol! It has since ceased to be of any effect in my body – right from day one in my vampirism. I wanted to ask Kingsley if it had any effect in the body of a werewolf, but I didn’t want to be irrelevant.

          At that moment a stink of raw meat hit my nose. Apparently, my super smelling ability was still with me as prevalently was with any vampire, and this made me to gaze everywhere around.

          On the floor near the iron door in the foyer, I saw remains of fresh fish, raw flesh of killed birds, and a lot of chicken bones and claws. These were typical of wolf food.

          I peered through the side window and had a clear view of the empty garden. There were a lot of feathers and animal fur scattered almost everywhere. Killed and preyed animals.

          My heart raced in fright. This meant that Kingsley’s most lifetimes now was in the form of wolf, and in close succession had to eat foods typical of wolves. I knew that his favorite food while in his human form was bread and honey butter, but anything like that wasn’t seen around now.

Behind the closed door leading to the inner house from the foyer I heard the thunderous growl of something like a wolf. I fixed my eyes at the door and could make out the images of two fierce-looking, bear-like wolves scratching at the door and pouncing up and down and from side to side, obviously trying to break the door and arrive at us.

          My instinct warned me of an impending danger. Kingsley was harboring wolves, perhaps werewolves, in addition to himself been one. I knew that werewolves turn into wolves during full moon, that’s to say once every month, but there’s exception to every rule. I didn’t know what Kingsley’s and these wolves’ cases were.

In fact, I concluded that Kingsley was no more a thing to play around anymore.

          The treacherous, bloodthirsty werewolf he was!

          He looked round and stared back at me, his eyes appearing more beastly than human. Undoubtedly, he saw the remains of the wolf food I saw, and he knew I saw the wolves locked behind the door. Yet he didn’t appear bothered at all.

          “Thinking what?” he abruptly asked me, grimacing.

          I wasn’t prepared to answer this question, so I smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, but it sent a message to Kingsley that I didn’t want to respond to that particular question. The only thing was that I couldn’t evade his request about the history of my becoming a vampire. He would never let me at ease until he get the explanation, I knew him. He never gives up on things.

          So it was necessary for me to tell him my story, except that I too must know about the wolf in the room, plus whatever I ought to know about him.

          “You’ve asked an easy question, or I would rather say you’ve presented a simple request, Mr. Kingsley, but you shall promise to tell me your story too, if you want me to rip my heart out,” I highlighted.

          He chuckled and thought for a while.

          “Well, my story is a very delicate one, Mrs. Moon, but we may go over it if that’s worthwhile,” I heard him say.

          I didn’t want to make the discussion complex, but I saw a point in his remark. 

          Beside that, I knew I would turn to him the moment I was sent off to the rock by Danny. I could say I was beginning to fall in for him.

          Too bad!

          I thought there was going to be a conflation: the blend or fusing together of two variants of immortals into one, if not for that pauper Danny. I began to wonder why Danny shouldn’t divorce me, since he would no longer fool around husband and wife with me, which I now badly needed.

          Which woman wouldn’t need a man?

          Why Danny was still married to a vampire he was scared of?

          Realizing that I was pensive, I quickly discarded the thought and began to tell Kingsley my story, intending to keep it short.

          I looked pryingly at the locked up wolves, cleared my throat after looking straight into Kingsley’s probing eyes, and then looked away. I delved into my story.

          It was on the seventh of April, seven years ago. Being a federal agent, my reputation for solving complex and mysterious cases had been wholly widespread to the extent that I was sometimes asked to work on multifaceted cases overseas by governments and private individuals. On that fateful day, I was introduced by our Deputy Director in charge of crime to one FBI agent in person of Greg Lomax, who wanted to discuss with me on multiple hit and run cases that involved mass murder in the Fullerton city. I’ve heard this information several times in the news, but I didn’t expect to be involved in it in any way, given that I was stuck with other cases.

          Mr. Greg told me that the FBI was working on the case, that it wanted quick results, and that I was needed to keep way from meddling into it in the name of private investigation for anyone because the issue involved terrorism, and no individual was allowed to poke his nose into terrorism cases.

          I wondered why the FBI was preventing me from that case with an impressive publicity. Could Mr. Greg’s assertion be true? I suspected the whole issue must have been under laid by a powerful political interest. I also became suspicious.

          I knew I’ve built a considerable reputation in the field of investigations especially on criminal grounds, which also meant building an impressive number of enemies: aggrieved persons, jealous colleagues and certainly ever ready competitors. I therefore kept warning myself to be careful. Any bad turn, I believed, would land me in trouble. The Federal agent’s warning therefore didn’t come to me by surprise.

          I remained at home for the rest of that day in company of my husband Danny and two children, but with my mind occupied with thought. I considered resigning from the Federal service, but hopelessly gave up that upon remembering that voluntary resignations were delayed and sometimes turned down in the Federal service.

          After all, why should I worry myself since the Federal service itself was paying well? In the next few moments I recycled the matter in the dust bin and continued normal life.

          While I thought over the issue once again, I’d a credible idea. I picked up my laptop, opened Google Chrome browser and searched for Fullerton mass killings on the Google. The search engine returned thousands of results all talking about the mysterious killings going on in the Fullerton city. For almost one hour I explored vast information presented on different websites by the search engine, before finally narrowing down my research to just no more than ten sites. Although the information differed slightly in various instances from one source to another on these sites, I noted there were other things common to all of them. Among these common things was the belief that the killings were carried out by different persons but who appeared to have been interconnected, and that the police weren’t doing enough to curb the situation.

          Alright, I said to myself as I indulged into profound thought, trying to figure out the nature of the mysterious killers.

          Could they really be terrorists?

          If indeed they were terrorists, then Mr. Lomax had every reason to keep me away from the case, because I couldn’t handle several criminals alone. Terrorists are several.

          But only if they were really terrorists.

          Then I shifted my thought to the wonder of the FBI, trying to fathom the actual reason behind its action of preventing me from meddling into the case should any private individual ask me to investigate for him.

          The truth is… I was suspicious.

          In fact the situation had been so awful that I expected to be hired to work for clients on it, because that’s what happened in various occasions in the past. One marvelous thing is the gripping retainer I was offered by clients, which in fact was always several times more than what the Federal service was yielding.

I worshipped the sun, therefore I eventually prayed hard to her to prevent anyone walking to my office with bizarre pay for me to enter into the case, which the Federal service has banned me from doing.

          Anthony and Tammy returned from school in company of my sister Mary Lou. The three constituted the basis of my absolute happiness, especially at a period when Danny wasn’t around. I therefore didn’t play prank with their affairs.   

          But things sometimes didn’t go the preferred way. In the middle of the night, when Danny eased himself off me in what’s called a pure marital affair, a sudden telephone call forced me to sit up warily, though undressed.  

           Someone was distressed and needed immediate help.

          “What can I do for you?” I inquired harshly into the receiver, worried that I was disturbed at this hour of the day.

          “I apologize for the inconvenience, Mrs. Moon… I only want to book for an appointment,” the caller squeaked. At first his voice droned like a caterpillar engine, but it suddenly muffled to near silence. I believed I was only able to hear his last words due to my concentration, but one would undoubtedly find it very difficult to grab the words as they came to the end.

          I hung up the receiver with a hiss of anguish. No longer willing to entertain calls that night, I switched off the phone and went to bed, thinking of Danny’s knack in screwing woman in bed. I liked his way of doing things. Certainly, my type of man.

          The next day was normal except that I forgot the current happenings in most of the downtown Fullerton city. In fact, the city had had plenty of new uniformed faces, most of them armed, but it still didn’t remind me something terrible was cooking, until when I settled myself for breakfast in front of the television. I enjoyed the breakfast, which was tea and salmon fillet with citrus and thyme, and so did Danny and the two children; the large LED television fixed to the wall instantaneously displayed the morning news cast.

          Danny talked to me and I answered him incompletely. This made him to sense that his words had become a meaningless jumble to me as I concentrated my mind on the television more than on the conversation with him, so he kept quiet.

          Soon his eyes and the children’s were also fixed to the television. They might want to find out what was there that was drawing my attention.

          The main story in the morning news was the continued selective killings in the Fullerton city. Last night alone, according to the reports, twenty-five killings were recorded, and all the victims had their throats torn and their bodies drained of blood; yet medical specialists ascertained they didn’t know where the blood was going. The most amazing revelation was that the bloodshed not only involved humans, but a large number of animals as well, of which hundreds were recurrently recorded dead or missing every night. The news ended with a message from the Mayor of the Fullerton City Council in which he called on citizens to be vigil and stay at home in the night.

          Tammy was the first to look at me as soon as the news broadcast was finished and said awkwardly, “Mummy, where’s this happening?” Her large, clear eyes welled up with tears.

          I looked straight at Danny’s eyes. He appeared nervous and has since stopped eating. His movement was languid, and his general appearance was quite dismal. He summoned courage by hiding his inner feelings and gave the salmon a large bite. He sipped the tea and continued on the salmon, not saying a word.

          I looked at Anthony, his face obviously taut with abhorrence, and then looked back at Tammy, prepared if not say anxious to answer her question.

          “This is happening in this town, but not around here. You know Yorba Linda?”

          “Heard about it,” Anthony quickly interrupted.

          “How far is it from here?” I inquired.

          Anthony appeared to have suddenly disengaged from the conversation, had his attention drawn back to the television, but Tammy’s eyes hooded over in thought.

          “Three…five kilometers southward,” she answered, noticeably unsure of what she said.  

          “No. It’s twelve kilometers south-west,” I affirmed.

          “Yeah,” Tammy returned with a head nod, insatiable of the information.

“That’s where it’s happening. Neither around your school area, nor daddy’s place of work,” I explained, trying to steer them clear of panic.

Ten minutes later, we finished breakfast. I noticed Danny and the children’s attentions were still preoccupied with the television, lest the news about the killings would come up again.

          I encouraged Danny to prepare for his place of work, and told the children to get set for school.

          At last, I realized that Danny was reluctant to go; this must be connected with the reported situation in the town. The only thing that encouraged him to go was the fact that the carnage was consistently been carried out in the night. Besides, he knew that any day’s absence in his place of work would undoubtedly earn him a query, which apparently tends to besmirch the reputation of workers. So he dressed up and hurriedly left with the kids in the car. He was going to drop them in the school and head to his place of work at La Habra, a twelve kilometers drive north of the Fullerton. I guessed he would give the kids words of encouragement to stay calm and work as usual in the school, though he was himself set to run for his life at the slightest inducement.

          I felt lonely at last. This made me wanting to do something else. Whenever I happened to be lonely, I always lounged for something extra. So I picked a spoon and scooped up a dessert of sliced banana and pineapple into my mouth repeatedly until I could eat no more. And this was an opportunity for me to think well.

          I went round the back of the house and entered into a small, well furnished room that served as my private office. I sat in my desk chair, switched on my laptop and navigated within its programs. The laptop connected to the internet, as I hoped.

          I wanted to hook up with some of my colleagues in the FBI service and do some spying on them. It was usual for one to spy on his colleague in the FBI service, and I was desperate to do same now.  

          I logged into the very secure network of the FBI with my username and password, and after having my unique identity verified, I was able to get the proper connection. 

          Luckily, I was a Senior Investigation Officer so I’d the privilege to connect with situation chat rooms where connoisseurs were receiving coded reports directly from field officers around the world.

          The chat room I first delved was in our headquarters in Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. It was just one of the seven headquarters of the FBI in California State alone, and one of several others in the world. When I intercepted and decoded their written messages, I found that they were talking about rescue plans in Syria and other things too extraneous to me at the time. So I logged out without hesitation.

I logged into another chat room at Orange Grove Avenue, Sacramento, which is another head quarters of ours. Here I found more than ten field agents communicating with a superior officer about the Fullerton killings, but what I heard in the morning news was what was been repeatedly announced. I didn’t meddle in their dialogue but simply logged out.

          I redirected my search ray to another headquarters of ours in Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, where I successfully detected a special agent called Francis Alfred sending live report from Yorba Linda. I carefully monitored the dialogue as it ensued, recognizing it of utmost relevance to my quest.

          “After a prolonged fire by the police, the army and our agents, one suspect was identified and is being trailed by an agent,” Francis declared in the coded text.

          “What’s the suspect like?” asked the receiving officer taking part in the chat, who appeared superior in the FBI hierarchy.

          “Dropped from the sky and hid in an old castle, carrying a screaming child. Retrospectively, when we fired at them they started flying like bats. This suspect landed in front of our concealed agents after evading our fire and dragged the child into the castle."  

Okay, how do you find the story now?
Click the following link to download it now.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01JGQP3PK