Chapter 2

Shielding herself against the white-hot fire surrounding her, Lisa curled up at tight as she could. Rather, she tried to, anyway...

Lisa reached toward a face she knew and pushed as hard as she could against the expanding white fire she had pulled into the teleportation zone with her, then the white fire consumed her. As she blacked out, her shield failed and the nuclear explosion pushing her forward through the teleportation zone caught up with her. In less than an instant, what was left of her torso, head and wings were vaporized.

No longer contained by Lisa’s mind, the nuclear fire blasted out into the physical universe in the form of a great fireball and fell to earth like a small comet, creating a crater several hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep where Kentucky Lake once existed, two hundred years before. The crater slowly began to fill with water from a subterranean river.

A small, stooped figure moved in the bright sunlight. It was a man – old and hunched over and filthy. His long, ratty hair swung heavily as he waddled along. The small, wiry figure froze suddenly as though stalking something, then leaped several feet to one side, landing on all fours.

“Ahh, ahh, ahh!” The sounds of triumph came from a raspy, dry throat.

The four-inch-long roach was the first creature he’d seen in several days. He held it carefully, but firmly, in his hands, not wanting to kill it prematurely.

“Ahh, my beauty,” the raspy voice said, the sound grating against his own ears. “My gift to you, my beauty...”

Fumbling in an animal-skin pouch, dirty, cracked fingers with black and broken nails fished out a long, smooth stick, whittled thin, like a toothpick sharply pointed at one end. Delicately, lovingly, the strange, dirty man inserted the end of the stick into the roach’s back end and gently, slowly skewered the bug through the entire length of its body, carefully holding it so that it wouldn’t wriggle off in its frenzied, futile efforts to escape.

The man straightened out from his hunched-over position and held his prize up in the sunlight; glistening, maniacal eyes watching the creature’s dance of death on the end of the little stake. After several moments it quit moving.

“You, I name Hethemtima,” the man intoned, his cracked voice strong with hate and loathing, “and this little shaft is my gift...

“And this...” He bit off the head of the roach and ate it.

“And this...” He bit the creature in half and pulled the top half of its torso into his cracked and broken mouth with his blackened teeth. Once in his mouth, he pressed the inch-long morsel against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, savoring the life-giving juices that flooded his throat.

Chewing the delicacy for a moment, he swallowed, nearly passing out in ecstasy from the sensation of real food in his starved and bloated stomach.

Unceremoniously pulling the rest of his meal off the stick, he sucked it into his mouth and squished it like the other piece, sighing in deep pleasure as bug juice filled his mouth and throat. He swallowed joyfully and bellowed his pleasure out into the hot, dry wind.

A distant thunder in the sky answered his call, echoing and reverberating toward him from the parched horizon. It could have been a sonic boom, and for a brief instant, very brief, he thought it was. But the machines were all dead, now, and so were the people who would fly them.

He carefully cleaned his stick in the dirt and placed it back in his pouch, then continued his hunt. It was only a moment before he caught another one. “Ah! This little mound is full of you!” he cried out as he held the insect up in front of him. Once again, he staked the tiny creature, insuring that it suffered as much as possible at his hands.

“You, I name Elsa!” he intoned, with less of a tremor of hate. “You I will take while you still twitch in my grasp so that you may feel yourself being consumed. May this make your worthless, everlasting life worthwhile...” he cackled for a moment... “or at least, your death!”

Pulling the entire roach off the stick with his teeth, he smashed it around in his mouth with his teeth and tongue and swallowed, bit by bit, as the pieces became small enough for his parched throat to handle.

His aging body strengthened by the meal, he stood upright, straighter than he had for the last several days, and looked around, not seeing his staff.

Enraged, and closing his eyes tightly, he envisioned the object of his desire and screamed, “Staff! Where are you? Come to me...” Then it was in his hand; once again where it belonged. He gazed at the nearly two meter-long pole longingly, knowing that, someday, it would be put to the use for which he intended.

Elsa (Elisabeta, rather) had promised that, in the centuries to come, she would find him – come back to him. And this would be his gift to her for giving him his deepest desire. Once she received his gift, he would then feed on her to make certain that she would never offer that gift to any other.

Of course, it skipped his mind that there was no one else around for his Elsa to grant everlasting life, if he ever found her, that is. He was the last man on earth, and quite possibly, the last mammal living. It had been years since he’d even seen a rat. Only insects could tolerate the intense radiation that now bathed the planet.

His roiling stomach reminding him of why he needed his staff, the last man on earth turned toward the softened mound where he’d found the two roaches. This was probably a common grave – the site of a mass burial. There would be many, many roaches in here. All he had to do was dig them out.

With grim determination, Vlad Tepes shoved his staff into the earth and began searching.

‘Fire in my mind ... Mind made of fire. I could control it once ... I remember. But now it controls me ... consumes me ... can’t back up ... need to flare. Flare? Yes ... I remember ... The fire creates ... the fire consumes ... I consume myself ... and create ... anew... ‘

The muddy water in the blast crater bubbled and boiled, then blew skyward as the tiny, mind-made, mud volcano erupted steam, mud, and a live body from its depths.

‘And God formed woman from the mud in the bowels of the earth... ‘

“Like hell... (cough) ... he did!” Lisa exclaimed, trying to lift herself up out of the hot, slippery mud in which she found herself lying. “Fuck!” she cried out, frustrated and sliding down the slippery embankment yet a third time.

Exhausted and gasping for air, she looked up at the rim of the crater far above her, closed her eyes, and concentrated. Her body disappeared, then reappeared lying on the rim of the crater. “That’s more like it...” she panted, then sat up and wearily looked around. “I can teleport again!”

There was dry desert and flatlands almost to the horizon, then baked brown, rolling hills continuing on to the west. To the south, it looked the same. To the north and east, the flatlands seemed to go on forever. “Where the hell am I?” she asked no one in particular.

‘Praetor! Can you hear me?’

There was no response. At least, none that she could detect through the roar in her head. Now that she noticed it, Lisa couldn’t concentrate on anything else. It upset her to be out of touch with her Praetor. She’d always felt it in the back of her mind – watching, recording – always non-commentally interested in her activities, and now it wasn’t there. It wasn’t ... anywhere.

‘Oh, God! I’m fucking lost!’

Realizing that she wasn’t going to be able to detect any life signs while the sun was up, Lisa stood up, a little shaky in handling her new body, and began walking around the rim of the crater, trying to decide which way to go.

‘Well, at least I have legs, now ... and mind-fire to feed on... ‘

Vlad had collected and skewered almost two dozen roaches in the last hour. He skewered them so they couldn’t escape while he sought out more of the little delicacies. He hoped he didn’t find too many more – he was running out of his little whittled capture sticks. If that happened, then he would have to smash them and eat them as he caught them like an animal – a lesser form that had no use for tools or the brainpower to enjoy or understand the delicate art of...