TheFamine

Allan Lacoursiere

Copyright © 2013 Allan Lacoursiere

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1492151076ISBN-13: 978-1492151074

DEDICATION

To my favourite Vampire Lady. Keep your fangs to yourself, woman!

ALSO BY ALLAN LACOURSIERE

Crystal Raven Series:Soul CatcherWiccan ApotropaicPandora’s BoxHell’s Gate

OthersChateau CliqueDeadly LegacyRathmine Five: Paranormal InvestigatorsLean StreakEco-WarriorsThe Famine

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prologue

A fiery streak hurled down from the heavens. It struck the Great Lakes Basin with an impact a hundred times the force of a nuclear blast. Early reports said the dust and flame of the meteorite strike could be seen as far away as Texas, and the sonic boom that accompanied it broke windows in a two hundred mile radius. As the inhabitants of the Earth gathered their collective breaths, a second slammed home in China somewhere along its Great Wall. The third and largest struck Eastern Europe. The disaster was complete. Those not killed in one of these three blasts, the handfuls who survived the earthquakes and tsunamis, the floods, volcanoes and the fires, began the slow process of freezing or starving to death beneath the skies of a meteor winter. Clouds of dust and ash a mile thick blanketed the skies of the earth, shutting out the sun as temperatures dropped well below zero. The Earth was dead. Mass accelerators, human scientists would have called them. A simple and economical means of killing off a planet’s population. Scoop up a space rock, sling it towards a planet and sit back and wait. Within a solar year or two, nothing dangerous would remain to prevent them from stripping the planet bare. For the Corporate Clans who ran their home planets, it was all about the bottom line, and long protracted wars were expensive.

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Eventually, the crews of the mass harvesters would take everything – water, minerals, metals. Anything of value, including the planet’s core and the gases from its atmosphere. Corporate would squeeze every Drakkar of profit from this or any other planet whose inhabitants were technologically inferior. Most of the solar system would be strip mined, every planet, moon or planetoids where their technology gave them access to its resources. The board had to justify such a costly expedition to its stockholders and those who failed were given a poison pill – their assets and families sold off to cover the losses. This expedition was already over budget, a slight miscalculation of payloads and distances by those who had put together the bid. Now they were desperate to recover these early loses before their IPO hit the markets. Security Director F’kreel looked over the reports from the bombardment and gave the slightest nod. Preliminary estimates showed a ninety per cent die off. Within three years that number would climb to one hundred per cent. With those kind of numbers he could justify sending security patrols down in three days, and depending on what they found, clear the surface for geologists in ten to fifteen days. He signed his name to the reports with only the slightest twinge of doubt. Pressure from above meant crisis and crisis was another word for opportunity. Twelve to eighteen months was the recommended waiting period. Still, these numbers were fantastic and meant bonuses in everyone’s pay packets. Yes, the surface of the planet would still be dangerous, but if anyone on this expedition wanted to die in bed they should have taken a job on one of the Home Planets, he scolded himself. Meeting objectives and quotas was all that really mattered. As the massive mother ship crept across the cold depth of space, trailing a thousand support ships, F’kreel thought about the years to come. Five miles long, one mile high, its massive armoured hull deflected asteroids like an icebreaker in the Arctic, a brooding behemoth that stalked the once blue gem in the black velvet of the heavens. Over the next hundred years as the fleet first stripped the solar system and then made the long voyage home stock in this expedition would change hands dozens of times, fortunes won and lost on the future markets as carefully crafted press releases made their way into the dispatches. He wondered if he should increase his stake, looking over the numbers one more time. He had inside information, was privy to all the decisions made on location, and could dump his stock if anything went sour. It might be worth the risk. F’kreel’s yellow cat-like eyes flicked across the command centre.

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Humanoid, eight feet in height, his skin covered with slight patches of scales he watched his crew as they worked. The distinction between his people and the species they were currently driving into extinction were merely cosmetic. Perhaps, under different market conditions the two species might have co-existed, but there was no value in organic matter. And if it had no value, it must go….

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Chapter 1

The farm he had inherited from his father had been in the family since the Eighteen hundreds. It was so far north its fields were mostly rock and permafrost, the last decent crop that had come off of them fist-sized hail stones sometime in the eighties. Anyone who would continue to farm here had to be a touch mad, or stubborn, throwing good seed onto barren fields generation after generation with very little to show for it. When he had moved away to take a job in the city his neighbours had thought he was the only sensible one in the family. Now folks in these parts called to him ‘Screwy Louis’ because he lived in a bomb shelter beneath his barn and not in his house. Not because he was worried about Russian nukes or any other post-Apocalyptic scenario, but because he believed the old house was haunted. And it was. Walls didn’t just bleed, and something had left his dog a desiccated husk one night during his first week on the farm. In the first blush of his shock, he had made the mistake of telling his story in a local bar, a lurid tale of death and blood that was guaranteed to spread like the plague. For five years the whispers had followed him around the small community, his neighbours pointing, shaking their heads, or outright laughing – and he had taken it all in silence. Eventually, he had stopped coming into town, often driving a hundred miles if he needed anything, even just a loaf of bread. He dreamed of the life he had once had before the aerospace factory had shut down, when he still was a respected electrical engineer working on projects that meant something and not an outcast. At least twice a year some of the local youths threw

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paint at his barn or knocked over his mailbox, and he long since had stopped bothering to repaint the one or reattach the other. He had gone off the grid and had stopped receiving mail years ago, not even a utility bill. His water came from an artesian well and he generated his own electricity from a variety of sources, his property taxes were paid through automatic withdrawals, as was his income tax. Louis Napoleon was invisible, but he was not forgotten, not by the people from the town who had made him the butt of their jokes. Now these same people envied him his underground shelter with its fully stocked shelves, now that the world was dying and there was no place to hide from this alien invasion. And the house and its dark occupant certainly came in handy. The squad of storm troopers who had come hunting for survivors fed its thirst for blood. Alien or Human, what waited there made no distinction – blood was blood, whether it was red or blue. Those in town had fared no better than the aliens had in his empty farmhouse, dying beneath the disruptor weapons of these same aliens before they had come looking for him. Light and warmth attracted them faster than flies to a corpse, light and warmth that was the only thing that kept the survivors alive in the perpetual winter world where they all lived. Oh, he had wanted to sell the farm to finance a move back to the city, but no-one had been interested in anything other than the ten acres down by the lake. In the end he had sold it off to a developer to pay for his new home, the Bunker Under the Barn, where he lived alone. And to pay for a state of the art security system, sensors and cameras that ringed his property, warning him of any intruders who were approaching the house – not to protect it from them, but them from the house. And those alarms were blinking the lights in the bunker on and off, its rooms filling with a low and irritating buzzing sound. Some trespasser or other would soon learn a bloody lesson, Louis frowned. It was the house and the shelter it represented, he supposed, and not the legend that had attracted them. Not like the kids who made a habit of daring each other to spend a night in the haunted house, or who came here looking to raise a little hell, to torment the crazy man from Telegraph Hill. He had learned to hate kids since he had moved up here. As a Northern Ranger, a reservist in the Canadian Armed Forces, he imagined he was one of the last representatives of the government and duty bound to do something about it. And with a name like Napoleon you would think he could. As long as he got to them before they went into the house…..

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Blossom Deerslayer carried her little sister on her back as she followed her father through the snow and brush. Tall and lean muscled, long brunette braids, brown eyes and elfin features, she wore buckskin and denim in a look that was a cross between a forest sprite or a teenage mall rat. Behind her came her mother and older brother. It had been almost three weeks since anyone in her family had fed, an old trapper whose blood was too thin to feed a family of five. Her family had a dark secret they had kept for hundreds of years – they were vampires. It was a secret that saw them moving from one small isolated community to another, searching for hunting grounds where they could hide their true nature. That was the main problem since the aliens had come – humans were now rare. Hardly anything that killed a Human would do more than hurt a vampire – only decapitation, a hawthorn stake through the heart, or by being completely consumed by flame. Entire nations of vampires were on the move, hunting the last precious drops of blood. All her life the Deerstalkers had moved every ten or fifteen years, alternating between isolated communities and larger cities in dozens of countries. When the aliens had invaded, they were living in a remote community in Northern Canada, so remote it could only be reached by sea at certain times of the year. Hunger came there quicker – first to the Humans, and then to the vampires. Dependant on the bi-annual ships to deliver much of its food, especially after years of overfishing and hunting, the small community was a week away from its next shipment when disaster struck. And then the fish began to die off, entire schools littering miles of beaches, and the thick dust clinging to the nearby forests had driven away or killed the caribou herds. With very little game or fish and no ships ever coming again the situation quickly went from desperate to hopelessness, and the people suddenly changed. Violence killed more than starvation did as neighbour turned on neighbour. Her family had fed on the dead and dying until her brother was shot in the head and did not die. Her father thought it was time to leave. They had reached the hills just ahead of the flood waters that had taken out most of the village, drowning many in their beds. No-one would feed on these humans. In the woods, it grew cold quickly. Thick clouds of dust obscured the sun, trapping its life-giving warmth outside the atmosphere. An ice dam at the top of the valley gave way, trapping a herd of caribou in a flash

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flood, the stench of their rotting corpses tainting the wind for miles. Wolves, lean and hungry, were gathered by the hundreds to pick over the carcasses while they were still fresh. Rotting and bloated, these would be eaten long after they became diseased. The famine was everywhere and spreading. The wolves gave the vampires a wide berth for now, but that would change as the game became increasingly scarce. And this held true for the vampires themselves, her father had warned them, because in time the famine would drive even them to cannibalism. Before that he and his family needed to find a safe place with a larger group, a group led by one of the ancients who still held to the old ways. The Canadian Shield was one of the most stable regions on the dying Earth. The magnitude six earthquake that ripped through it, toppling miles of trees and causing rock slides, caught many survivors by surprise. In the distance a fire burned on the remains of an oil and gas pipeline, stretching from horizon to horizon like a fiery snake. With the wind at their backs it was a distant threat. And her parents were still anxious to reach the settled Southern lands, where more humans were likely to have survives. Swift Deerstalker was only guessing – news had grown scarce after the first week, and what little had reached their isolated community had all been disastrous. The Big One had finally carried California into the sea, a tsunami had swamped Japan and hundreds of other islands, washing them clean where they did not simply sink beneath the sea, and a volcano in Europe had blown its top, carrying away several cities and towns in a river of lava. Blossom missed her room, its soft, warm bed and its privacy. For the last four years she had had a room for herself, no longer having to share with her little sister. The first night after fleeing their home, her family had slept packed into a two-man tent like sardines, waking to a coat of rime, and she thought long and hard about that room. There had been no time to take anything. Already she missed her books, over a thousand of them that she had collected over the last hundred years. And her closet with its small secret drawer where she had hidden the mementos from her life, small things like a pressed flower from her first crush, or a shell she had found when they had lived in the Barbados. It was not until that moment that she finally realized just how much her world and her life had changed. It would never be the same again. The heavy snows started three weeks into their wandering. Behind this curtain came the first of the aliens. The cold did not affect vampires until the temperature dropped low enough to freeze the blood, but

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tonight her father wanted to find shelter and a place to hide. Five times in the last week they had seen the alien fighters on the horizon. At night the aliens hunted, searching the frigid landscaped for heat signatures. Whatever the eye saw the sensors looked for, and in this icescape heat and light meant life. Heat, any source of heat drew the aliens, but for some reason they never saw him or his family. Their weapons may not be fatal to his family, but Swift Deerstalker knew that pain and injury could be just as deadly during these lean times and did not want to trust their safety to a hunch. He needed to keep his family healthy and safe until they found a way to survive in this new reality… Wolves howled in the distance. They had yet to learn to fear the things that came in the night. Open sleds with guns mounted fore-and-aft, they hovered just above the trees, hunting. They were here to speed up the process of extinction of this dying planet. The sled passed directly over the vampires, chasing the wolves through the forest. Time was money to the Corporations and there was always something that survived deep into the meteor winter. One to three years, the scientists recommended, and full die off would make all this unnecessary. Other planets in a system could be mined during the wait, but there was no prize richer than an inhabited planet – and early profits looked better on the reports sent back to the Home Planets. No-one ever waited… Blossom and her family were one of those things that had lived through the bombardment and were struggling to survive the first weeks of winter beneath the thick clouds of dust. The farmhouse lay ten miles from the nearest town and was surrounded by tracks of wood, rock and swamp. Two miles to the east a barren strip of ground marked the remains of an abandoned gold claim. Only fifteen acres of cleared land surrounded it, but the farmyard and equipment showed signs of recent occupation – tracks in the snow, a tractor that was not buried in a drift, freshly cut wood standing in piles near the barn. Blossom’s father thought there might even be a meal down there waiting for them. Isolated and sheltered, it was a godsend in the bleak landscape. Although they had travelled through some extremely rugged territory, they were learning that everywhere was the same in this world beneath the clouds. In the perpetual twilight day and night meant little and where they expected signs of life they found nothing. Folks, even those far from places touched by the aliens, had simply packed up and fled. Some were seeking food, others safety, and some missing loved ones – but where was safe in this age of Armageddon? This was, in the vernacular of the day, an ELE – an extinction level event

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- and even those who had been alive for hundreds and even thousands of years were staring death in the face. For Swift Deerstalker, struggling to keep his family alive, it was a bleak and depressing prospect. Where was the game his people depended on for centuries, the billions of humans that bred faster than any species on the planet? Surely some had survived. The house was neat, snug from the weather, and the plumbing was still hooked up to a well with sweet water. The surrounding fields lay fallow, whatever crops they had held harvested and either sold off or stored in the silo. Wood stood in piles in several places around the yard, some fresh cut, but the hearth had not seen a fire for a long time. Swift could not figure it out? Despite all the signs of inhabitation, the fields and cut wood, the fresh tracks in the dirt and snow, the house looked and felt abandoned. Nothing about the place made any sense and they could all smell fresh blood. Blood with an alien undercurrent that left them all feeling a little unsettled. Blood that made the hunger cramping their bellies all too immediate and hard to ignore, leaving them surly and short-tempered. Somewhere there was a meal nearby that would end all this, if only for a day or a week. Blossom and her brother were sent to hunt about the house. She had just stepped out onto the screened porch at the rear of the house when the old door slammed shut. Turning in annoyance, the first blood curdling scream from the house froze her in mid step. The cry had belonged to her little sister… A young girl was pounding on the rear door when Napoleon reached the house. The snow lay in deep drifts about the yard and wading through it had reduced his mad dash to a crawl. That was one door she did not want answered. The screams of those who had already died inside fell away even as he staggered up the rear steps. He was too late to help them. She was running now from window to window, and he sprinted to catch her before she reached the large front window. Too late. She was looking into the living room, where her sister, mother and father lay dismembered. He knew without looking that the walls would be covered in blood, more blood than could come from three fresh victims. A hundred years of blood soaking through walls of plaster and lathing, seeping from cracks that no longer could be seen through the dark crimson mass, the scream of countless victims lingering in the air, a silent echo louder than a sonic boom. He had seen it himself just one night ago. Four aliens had painted these walls blue, a puddle oozing

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across the wooden floor and leaking out the front door onto the snow. It was nothing he wanted to see again. Blossom did not struggle as this stranger led her away from the house. Numb from shock, she was shivering from a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. Looking up, she found he was leading her into the barn. She was wrapped in a jacket that smelled of prey and she could feel the warmth of his blood beneath his skin, hear his pulse as his heart beat a little faster from the fear and the exercise. So near and tantalizing if only her hunger could register through her shock. Gone. Her family was gone, all dead in the blink of an eye – horribly mutilated, their heads pulled from their bodies. Not even a vampire could survive that level of trauma, not being pulled apart piece by piece. What could have done that? Suddenly, she felt alone and more frightened than any vampire had ever been in the history of her people. What evil could kill a vampire like that, beating its victims into an unrecognizable pulp? Napoleon opened the secret door to his bunker and led the girl down inside. The boys at the diner had laughed at him for not living in a perfectly good house. Now another had witnessed the evil that lived there. Maybe he should have ripped it down before any of this happened? He doubted that would have helped. Not a nail was different from the day it had been built, not a piece of board warped or crack, the paint still as fresh as they day it had been applied over a hundred years ago. Inside, he set his guest down on a couch and went back into the kitchen. There was no mistaking those long canines. They had been featured in hundreds of movies and television series for decades, and Napoleon had long since learned to believe many things others would not. From a refrigerator where he kept his blood supply against the day he might need a transfusion, he took out a litre of AB negative. Considering, he dumped the whole thing into a sauce pan and attempted to heat it up to body temperature. If he guessed wrong, if those teeth were just some kind of prosthetic now in vogue amongst some subculture of youths, he would bear the brunt of her grief and anger. But it would not be the first time he sent a woman storming from his home, too angry or too disgusted even for words. And in his heart he knew he was not wrong. His life was too full of weirdness to ever allow a normal moment. Expecting either a punch or a slap, he handed a mug of blood to the girl. Mechanically, she raised it to her lips. The blood hit her system like a tonic.

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“Not quite the way mom made it?” He questioned, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “How did you know?” Blossom husked when she found her voice. “The teeth.” “Why aren’t you scared?” She asked, curious. She hissed, showing her teeth, letting the red seep into her eyes. He jerked a thumb towards the house, “I’ve lived with that in my house for eight years. I’ve seen shit like that more than once. What’s a vampire next to something like that?” “What is it?” “A bogey, a banshee, a poltergeist or demon,” Napoleon shrugged. “Who knows? Just one more thing like aliens the government has always denied existed.” Eventually, Blossom realized, she would have to eat him, and when she did she would be all alone. It was like being friends with the last piece of chocolate cake in the world. As if sensing the direction of her thoughts, he offered, “there’s more if you want it.” She sat on the couch, sipping warm blood and snuggling beneath a blanket he had wrapped her in. It felt homey and strange all in the same breath. Almost she could picture her mom in the kitchen, her dad in the den reading – but this was the home of a mortal, someone her kind hid from and hunted. And her family was dead, butchered by that thing in the house. Her thoughts turned dark. Everything had changed since the aliens had come, and now her whole world was gone. Everything. Gone. “If you knew that thing was in the house,” she asked when she could trust her voice. “Why didn’t you move?” “No money,” Napoleon explained. “After I inherited the place I spent the last of my money to get here. No-one wants to buy this place and the fields are too rocky to rent out. If it wasn’t for the pumpkins and the worms I would have starved to death.” “But -.” She spread her arms to include the several rooms. “I sold the acreage by the lake to a developer and built this one room at a time over ten years,” he explained. “Living room, bed, bath and kitchen. A generator room, pump room and a bit of storage.” He was obviously proud of it. It was a comfortable home and well built, every corner and surface displaying real craftsmanship. It really did not matter anymore. In a couple of years, when the food ran out – or sooner if the well froze or the aliens found him – he would have had

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to move on or die. And with what the aliens were doing to the planet there might not be any place to move on to. Every day since the first asteroid had turned their world into a deep freeze he had left the short-wave on throughout the day and late into the night. At first it had been full of panicked cries as disasters swept the globe – fires, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis and tidal waves. One by one these voices fell silent, the long stretches of static seldom broken. And then the aliens had come and there followed some attempt at resistance. They listened now to the sounds of a distant battle… “Foxtrot six. Foxtrot six. I got a bogey on my tail…” Two more voices too faint to follow cut through the static and then fell silent. Every battle with the aliens followed the same pattern. A brief, sharp exchange and then silence and death. “What are we going to do?” Blossom asked. “Survive until they find us,” Napoleon shrugged.

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