Arrival of the Vampyren Read online

  Arrival of the Vampyren

  Seth Eden

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Other Books By The Author

  Join the tribe

  Synopsis

  The Vampyren invaded Earth, coming from the places between the stars. They came to slake their most brutal appetites: For blood. For sex. For conquest. Within weeks their superior strength, technology and weapons turned Earth into a fallen battleground.

  * * *

  But love can blossom in the most unlikely places.

  * * *

  Stephanie was looking for food, for safety, and for her brother when the Vampyren patrol caught her on the blown-up streets of Las Vegas.

  * * *

  Dray Fierro was one of the Vampyren, a hero who could take his pick of women to claim as his war prize. He wasn't looking for more than a woman to satisfy his needs for sex and blood.

  * * *

  Neither was prepared for what they got.

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  1

  The sound of her running footsteps was inordinately loud in the eerie silence of Las Vegas. Overnight the metropolitan city, home to three-quarter of a million people had been reduced to areas of rubble, stark in contrast to neighborhoods that remained as pristine as they had ever been. s in upscale neighborhoods watched to see which houses remained empty after dark, then raided the refrigerators and pantries.

  * * *

  There was no food shortage yet. It was early days. But lack of everything scored high on personal stress levels: shortages of working hospitals, of places where the power was on, of places to fuel a vehicle, of places where you might experience kindness.

  * * *

  Of places to feel safe.

  * * *

  Stephanie ran through desecrated sections of The Strip. Out on Las Vegas Boulevard she was anything but alone, but still her footsteps echoed in the bombed-out rubble of the street.

  * * *

  The world had changed in one twenty-four hour period in early June, right as summer temperatures skyrocketed.

  * * *

  It wasn't like the movies. The ships didn't come with warnings from geeky actors on mocked up Airforce One's, arguing that the early warning equipment showed they were coming. The studly, semi-ex-military character didn't get up half naked in the morning and pad into the kitchen only to glance out the window and drop the orange juice because the ships were hovering. And no one climbed to the top of a skyscraper to reach ecstatically for the aliens only to get blown to pieces.

  * * *

  Because the aliens were just there, horrible and undeniable and there'd been no early warning anything. They had materialized, quite literally. Because their ships moved between dimensions, through wormholes, using technology humans were light years from even understanding, let alone developing.

  * * *

  They came through in one big, cartoonish bam and started blowing up cities with what the news insisted on calling surgical strikes. Surgical because they could laser a Toyota out of a pack of traffic snarled on a New York City bridge, leaving the bridge intact and the Toyota incinerated.

  * * *

  Or they could drop bombs no different than those humans used and reduce buildings and streets and lives to rubble.

  * * *

  "It's on purpose," Davy said, her idiot little brother, twenty-three months younger than her, twenty-six and ex-military. He didn't seem to recognize he was "ex" military. At that point he had been gearing up to go join whatever group he could find to combat the aliens.

  * * *

  Aliens.

  * * *

  Vampires, the cable news shows called them, and brought in experts in triplicate to give their opinions and argue while the hosts of the new shows asked the questions everyone wanted answers to:

  * * *

  Why are they here?

  What do they want?

  How do we survive?

  * * *

  And then before they could answer, all the cable pundits and panels disappeared off the air, and the silence was shocking, and the questions were unanswered.

  * * *

  Stephanie ran.

  * * *

  There was a distribution center for a grocery system located just off the strip, a warehouse where she'd worked for two short weeks one summer before the amount of we don't stand for it sexual harassment drove her out. If she could find it she could find a way to get some of the groceries home and she could move on to panicking about the next problem.

  * * *

  Finding Davy. Because he'd vanished and cell phones were currently very useful for telling time and weighing down papers but not for much else. Calls were sporadic. Calls from her brother were non-existent.

  * * *

  Her father said it wasn't her job to take care of her brother, he was a grown man, and they needed to head into the desert where the aliens weren't because they were busy curtailing the movements of everyone in the cities. From there they could make their way to the coast, where the aliens didn't like the weather as much. Where rural people were said to be gathering as resistance, places like tiny towns on the Oregon Coast.

  * * *

  Of course to get there they needed water and food and a car and a map that somehow magically showed where all the buildings were downed and the streets raised. Because there was a method to the alien's madness of blowing things up.

  * * *

  Aliens.

  Vampires.

  * * *

  They called themselves the Vampyren and they were from some dreadful desert planet, as far as the think tanks and scientists and news anchors could tell before they disappeared from the air.

  * * *

  They came because they could. They conquered because they liked it.

  * * *

  And because maybe beings as scary as they were could mate with human women and they intended to.

  * * *

  Which was why she ran. Because she had a gun and she'd learned to use it and the streets were mostly empty right now as the city was surrounded and what happened in the middle of it didn't much matter to the Vampyren because the human cattle couldn't escape. They were trapped there for all the reasons the aliens wanted them – sport, sex, slaves.

  * * *

  Guns didn't work especially well with them. They few aliens that medical workers had been able to autopsy before Earth lost the battle were shown to have two hearts and very healthy constitutions.

  * * *

  They were physically beautiful, both the men and the women, seven and eight feet tall, with human bodies and golden brown skin, with heavy beards on the men or swarthy blue-black stubble, with gold eyes and flowing black hair and muscles like Dwayne Johnson meets Vin Diesel meets Mr. Olympia.

  * * *

  They were stunning in their beauty and in their viciousness.

  * * *

  "They're blowing up the city on purpose," Dad said, once Davy had gone to try and figure out what half a unit could do to combat the threat.

  * * *

  "It's working," Stephanie had said. She'd been huddled miserably on the couch in the living room,
thumbing the remote but all the news had been reduced to local and reported on things everyone could figure out for themselves. She'd hoped her father wouldn't go on.

  * * *

  He had. "You said it was like a pattern and you're right. Smart conquerors know they have to put the conquered back on their feet or there's nothing won. They have to have their rewards."

  * * *

  He wasn't going to stop so she'd put in, "Us. We're the reward."

  * * *

  Her father nodded. "They have to have a workable society or they have to take care of the needs of the conquered people and it's easier to just lock it down and make it operate on its own with reduced everything --- food, shelter, utilities, water, medical care. That way it's too hard to find time and energy to revolt."

  * * *

  Her father was a professor of political science and history before the Vampyren reduced the University of Las Vegas, Nevada to ash. He was probably right.

  * * *

  It didn't matter in the least.

  * * *

  There was still food to be had. It was just on everybody's mind. After all, the invaders didn't have to worry about food production in general – as long as they had something with nutrition content to feed their captives. And they had a built-in food source for themselves in those very captives.

  * * *

  For everybody left "free," suddenly all the preppers who had hoarded canned goods sounded a lot more sane. Water was always at a premium in the desert; she (who?) wanted to find water more than anything else and then she'd take one of the trucks that had docked in the bays of Universal Grocers and Harassers Inc. At least the vile two week stint would have proven worth something after all.

  Her father would go out after she came back. They always left someone at home, armed. In case Davy came back. In case someone tried to rob them.

  * * *

  In case the Vampyren tried to drag them off to a tank farm where rumors said they hooked humans up to blood donation equipment 24/7, feeding them supplements and bleeding them till they died.

  * * *

  Or mated with them.

  * * *

  Or just plain fucking blew them up.

  * * *

  There weren’t too many ways to die anymore in the metro area. Stephanie wasn't going to be another statistic to be reported when CNN came back on the air.

  * * *

  She was going to be among the living victorious when the nightmare ended. Her, and her father, and her brother.

  * * *

  So after she found water, she'd go find her brother.

  2

  Dray Fierro adjusted the belt that held his weapons close at hand and observed the street below. The remaining high rises in the desert city that had once shined brighter than the stars at night worked well for keeping guard and watching the streets, but he was bored and restless.

  They'd been on planet Earth for ten days and subdued the majority of the humans during that time. Their technology and weaponry massively outweighed that of the humans, and their physical powerless was unmatched.

  Now Dray stood watching the street from the roof of a casino, waiting for the next incident. The armed insurgencies were growing more rare in the cities, moving outward to the countryside where it was hard to find food and water but where the humans had more room to operate and to come together to try and overthrow their new masters.

  They had no idea they were following the same pattern as all the peoples conquered by the Vampyren. The ships would appear out of nowhere in the sky, using wormhole technology to move unseen. By the time the people on the planets knew they were no longer alone it was almost always too late.

  The Vampyren had only lost one planet ever, one that distantly circled their own star. They'd held out until the Lucians came, the beasts that followed the Vampyren from planet to planet, battling them for control of whatever resources the Vampyren had found. It was an old feud and on that planet, the Vampyren had cut their losses and fled.

  Not here. Dray smiled fiercely, looking down at the street. A pair of soldiers had apprehended a group of human males and were dragging them at gunpoint through the streets. They'd either be conscripted into the guard to work along with the invaders of their planet, or thrown into the tank farms to be used as fuel, or into a harem, to mate with the Vampyren females.

  Vampyren males didn't mate with their own kind. Not soldiers or royalty, not anyone important who needed to stay alive. Sex, yes, and he felt a stirring at the thought of it. Vampyren females were inventive and lithe and experimental and very, very enthusiastic about sex.

  Vampyren females who were mating triggered hormones that had never been controlled. Without the hormones, they couldn't breed.

  With the hormones they bred, conceived one hundred percent of the time, and dismembered and consumed their mate pretty close to one hundred percent of the time. Even warriors were afraid of the females and those warriors who had actually accepted a challenge and walked away from a mating were considered heroes.

  He ought to know. He had the scars to prove it. The female was pregnant, too, and carrying a litter – two boys, it seemed.

  When Dray came off guard duty and back onto the streets to patrol, any human females he found were, by right, war prizes.

  He could take his pick.

  He stirred again, thinking about it, and licked his lips.

  Human females tasted so sweet.

  3

  Jackpot!

  * * *

  Universal Grocers had just made up for those miserable two weeks she'd worked among the perverse assholes.

  * * *

  The delivery trucks were backed into the bays so all she had to do was load one up and drive it out.

  * * *

  Well, maybe not quite that simple. Stephanie was hopeful but she wasn't stupid. There was the raising of the metal door that rolled up and down with the punch of a green or red button. Provided there was electricity.

  * * *

  And the fact that if it was a standard shift, she'd be stalling every other block, though given the IQ of the assholes who'd worked there, probably automatic.

  * * *

  In her mind, Davy said, Wait, didn't you just insult yourself, too? You can't drive stick either.

  * * *

  And I'm trying to rescue you, why? She responded to her imaginary brother.

  * * *

  Truth was, she didn't know that she was. Davy could get all wrapped up in whatever he was doing and forget to call home when conditions were good. When conditions were all space vampires all the time and he'd gone from ex-military and liking to play military games on his phone to living one with his old army buddies? Who know when he'd even remember he had a family that might be worried about him?

  "Damn brothers."

  * * *

  She had no idea why she had the grocery distribution warehouse to herself but it was time to stop gloating and get moving.

  * * *

  The heat of the Nevada summer day increased as afternoon moved toward evening. The hottest part of the desert day was always in the evening when the sun beat down the hardest. (not true) She was pouring sweat as she packed the truck with water, then with canned foods, and finally with more perishable items they could eat first.

  * * *

  She had to be losing even more weight in this heat inside the warehouse. Before the aliens invaded she'd been carrying a lot of what her dad charitably called baby fat (at twenty-six? she kept asking) and what her brother called –

  * * *

  Yeah, whatever, Davy.

  * * *

  If he could see her now. In the weeks since the aliens invaded she'd been running, learning to shoot, lifting weights, learning martial arts, and everything done with limited food which was more from fear than necessity and with the heat and the fear.

  * * *

  She was pretty fucking buff, too. Great diet and workout program, this invasion thing.

 
* * *

  She'd rather still have that puppy fat.