Suck

By Macaulay C. Hunter

One year after being changed into a vampire, forever fifteen-year-old Violet Johansson is leading a quiet life in the woods. But everything changes when three college students shoot her up with dead blood and throw her in the trunk of their car.

Transported to an arena, Violet learns that she has just been entered into the most extreme sport imaginable. And she isn't meant to survive it. Pursued by legions of armed hunters, she and several other vampires are on the run. The game doesn't end until they're dust.

But Violet won't be going down without a fight . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macaulay C. Hunter
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386975113

Book preview

SUCK

by Macaulay C. Hunter

Copyright 2015 Macaulay C. Hunter

Cover image courtesy of OG_vision & canstockphoto

Cover by Joleene Naylor

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

About the Author

Other Titles by Macaulay C. Hunter

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Chapter One

Violet woke up in the trunk.

Sick to her stomach as the car rumbled, she rolled over on a bed of trash. It crinkled and shifted underneath her. Candy wrappers, fake flowers, popcorn peanuts and torn ribbons of toilet paper, her eyes picked over the details easily in the darkness. Near her face was half of a plastic Easter egg, which had rolled out of a busted straw basket.

She sucked in a lungful of air to analyze it. Candy. Fuel. Perfume. Hamburger. Another perfume. Body spray. The scent of candy and hamburger were coming from the trash. She sniffed at her arms and picked up traces of the perfumes and body spray. As she used none of these products, they had to have come from the people who shot her in the back with dead blood and put her in the trunk. The masculine body spray was the strongest, concentrated under Violet’s armpits where she had been lifted.

They must have seen her going into the blood bank for a refill. There wasn’t any other way that they could have known what she was. Point taken. When Violet went into the place for the first time, the woman who ran it warned her to mix up the banks. It wasn’t smart to go to the same one over and over. Violet filed it away in her head but didn’t follow the advice, and the woman never brought it up again. It was too much of a hassle to go elsewhere when Violet didn’t know how to drive, and it took several hours and two bus changes just to get one city over. Besides, she was only going to the bank once a month. No one could possibly discern a pattern there.

Someone had, apparently. And now she was in this trunk, her stomach twisting and the trash sliding around as the car turned. The garbage annoyed her. If people were going to go to all the effort of stalking, shooting, and kidnapping her, they should have at least cleaned out the trunk first. She would have.

It was her first encounter with dead blood, and it had knocked her out entirely. Her last memory was of walking down the road with an armful of library books to return. The city of Cedar Grove was in the middle of fly-over nowhere, which was how she liked it after a childhood spent in congested San Diego. It was two miles from her cabin to the library, half of it through the woods and half through a bedroom community of picket fences and honor student bumper stickers. She’d never had grades high enough to earn one of those.

She had still been walking alongside the road in the woods when she heard a car starting up. There was nothing unusual or interesting about the sound, so she hadn’t turned. Her mind was on the books. She was making her way through the Top 100 of quality literature off a list from a magazine. Most of it was a snore-fest, but she’d stuck with the challenge for no other reason than she liked to finish what she started. As soon as she was done, however, she planned to track down a Top 100 list of trashy literature and make her way through that. The drivel was going to go a lot faster than whale hunting and windmills.

It was at that moment she noticed no car had passed on the road, yet she could still hear it rumbling behind her. She was just beginning to turn to see what was going on when it stopped and-

BOOM.

The books weren’t in the trunk with her, which meant they were scattered all over the side of the road. That annoyed her, too. Beneath her aggravation burbled fear, but this was such a nonsensical situation that it remained at an undercurrent. She wanted out of this trunk.

Pushing up onto her elbows, her head knocked into the hard surface of the lid. The dull throb in her stomach gained a friend in a sharp throb in her head. She hadn’t hit it with much force, but whoever had taken her had put iron on the other side. Laying back down in the trash, she considered. If they had just wanted to hunt and kill a vampire, she’d be dead already. But she wasn’t. They wanted something of her. Two possibilities came to mind, and both of them made her moan. She’d been taken for her venom or collected for a zoo.

She’d seen them in a zoo as a child on a school field trip. There had only been one strain in the enclosure, the kind that changed from their human shape to bat and back again. There were giant feeders attached to the wall filled with blood, to which they flew over regularly as bats for a sip, and fought with one another as humans over who got to go first. They were dumb, incredibly dumb, and couldn’t even speak. Violet was in third grade at the time, and what made the biggest impression on her was how stupid they looked. No one was home behind those eyes. For weeks after the trip, she and her classmates played vampire at recess. They affixed those same stupid looks to their faces, outstretched their arms, and flew into each other, the fence, and the chunky butt of the playground monitor who yelled at them to knock it off. Then they flew over to the water fountain in a huge flock and bitch-slapped each other over who got to go first.

There were other zoos, better zoos, with more of the many blood strains on display in exhibits. But that was the only one Violet had seen until high school. It wasn’t for lack of readily accessible information: all she would have had to do was tap vampire into a search engine. But she was no more inclined to look them up than she was inchworms or dinosaurs or panda bears. Who cared? She was more into sci-fi anyway.

The car turned and a plastic egg rolled past her. She did not want to be put in a zoo, not even a wildlife preserve that gave her more room to roam. She thought of cameras flashing, and parents hoisting children up into the air to get a better view. Honey, look at the vampire girl!

She was not going to go quietly into an exhibit. And if her captors thought instead that they were taking her to a transformation party, then they’d be disappointed there as well. Those segments ran on the news now and then, horrified reporters speaking breathlessly to the camera about dumb kids getting changed into vampires on purpose to be cool. Some of those kids didn’t bother to do any research first, and just captured any old vampire they came across to do the honors. That didn’t always work out in their favor, especially since the easiest to catch was the idiotic bat strain.

The news always played it up as a dangerous new trend catching on like wildfire among today’s youth, but it wasn’t. Violet had gone to high school for almost two years. People chased their highs in other ways, drugs and booze and sex, daredevil moves on skateboards and driving like maniacs. Vampires weren’t even on the radar.

If she was headed to a party, then she was going to give them a little venom-free nibble, tell them it took hours to work, and slip out while they sat on beanbags in Mom’s basement waiting excitedly for the change. Then she would head back to Cedar Grove . . . except she couldn’t. Her cover was blown. She needed to scope out a new place to live. When she slipped out, she’d swipe everything in their wallets as restitution for this inconvenience.

She listened to the sounds outside the vehicle, but all she heard was the whirring of the tires. At this speed, they had to be on a freeway. How long she had been asleep she couldn’t say; nor could she say what direction they were going. Since her head wasn’t hurting anymore and her stomach was sorting itself out, she picked through the trash for anything that would give her an idea of where she was being taken. There was an expired college parking permit from a year ago, and everything else was pure garbage. Then she found an empty canvas bag and proceeded to stuff some of the food wrappers inside. This trunk was disgusting. There was nowhere to lay down where she wasn’t touching the trash, and a long slick of catsup was on her arm from an oozing plastic package with a torn corner.

This had to be about a transformation party. It seemed like a zoo or preserve would have an official collection vehicle for its acquisitions. They wouldn’t trap an animal in the wild and chuck it in a trunk for the ride. Unless it was an illegal backyard zoo, and this third possibility filled Violet with despair. Some people had the inexplicable desire to possess their very own tiger or bear or vampire, and she wasn’t going to be anyone’s pet.

Lying on her side, she angrily filled the bag to bursting. There was a wet spot by her feet where ice had melted within a fast food cup and drained out around the straw. Kicking the cup up to her hand, she shoved it in and tied the handles of the bag. She wasn’t anal about cleanliness, but this was just rank.

A faint smell of cigarette smoke filtered back to the trunk. The car stopped briefly and she heard a feminine squeal. There was an almost indiscernible shifting of weight in the vehicle. One, two, three . . . from the muted voices, she counted two chicks and a dude, and one was opening a window.

Violet stopped breathing to avoid the smoke. The smell always swept her straight back to that night, the night of the slumber party when everything changed for her. She’d taken one puff and coughed her lungs out. It instantly belied her story that she did it all the time. She’d just wanted Layla to think she was cool, and that was a losing battle if there ever was one. Sundance High School turned on Layla Alderante’s axis. She had the looks. She had the grades. She had the boyfriend. She had the car. She had a position on the varsity swim team and a small part dancing in a music video. She was going to graduate in June and go off to an Ivy League school. Everything she touched turned to gold. And then there was Violet Johansson, a lowly sophomore who had none of those things and moved in an entirely different circle. Mediocre grades, no sports skills or boyfriend, she had a corn-fed frame, dirty blonde hair, and a freckled face. Her own mother had once called her good peasant stock. She was the epitome of not cool, and that was never more obvious than it was when she was doubled over and hacking from one lousy puff.

The car was moving again. Now it was going much more slowly, and the road was winding. Occasionally the driver slowed and stopped for red lights or stop signs. Never did she hear the honk of a horn, a passing airplane, or any indication that there were other people in the world. She had the sinking feeling that they were indeed headed for some backyard zoo in a remote place, where she would be shoved into a big cage as a representative of the vampurin strain. If she were really unlucky, she’d be sharing space with a bat or two. Or even better, a few glaws. Fast and violent, they weren’t too much brighter than the bats. But a glaw would need a shaded enclosure to survive daylight, whereas she could be left out in the sun all day. A glaw would combust within seconds of exposure; Violet would just be blinking hard and grouchy.

They were stopping. Nervousness made her clutch through the remainder of the trash for a weapon. There wasn’t anything but useless junk. She breathed again to test the air and guessed that they were pulling into a gas station from the increased scent of fuel.

The car came to a sharp halt. Then doors slammed, one, two, three, and footsteps came around to the trunk. Something scratched at the side near Violet’s head and a male voice said, I hate how this thing gets stuck. Don’t get too much in there. We can’t take it in with us.

I just want a bag of chips and a drink, answered a female voice. The third pair of footsteps hadn’t paused at the trunk but gone on, the clip of her shoes revealing heels, and Violet picked up on the smell of a restroom close by. A second pair of footsteps went off in a different direction. That one was wearing sneakers.

What was Violet to do? Scream and pound and hope someone heard her? The problem was she didn’t hear or smell any other people. There was a nature smell here, beyond the odors of the gas station and her kidnappers, trees and dirt and flowers. No voices. No cars.

The guy was humming as he pumped the gas. Like it was a regular old day and there wasn’t someone in his trunk. Judging from the clomping steps that he had taken from the driver’s side, he was in boots. The female in heels who had gone to the restroom came back and said, Where’s Allie?

Getting some food, the guy said. Tell her to hurry it up. We got to be there by one or we won’t get the discount.

Hey, Allie! Hurry up! the second girl shouted. Then her voice lowered. Are you sure this one is really a vampire? Like, totally sure? She looks like a little kid.

I’m sure. Rogue guaranteed it, the guy said. Violet bristled in the darkness. She was fifteen at the change and still looked exactly the same, but she was tall for her frozen age and had had no trouble getting into R-rated movies without being accompanied by a guardian. It was her hair that was making her look young at the moment, she figured. She’d been teaching herself how to braid, and had put it up in pigtails to keep it out of her face on the walk to the library.

Do you think she’s still asleep? the girl asked.

I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything from in there, the guy replied as something clicked. The tank was full. Feet scraped on concrete as he put the nozzle back in place. A receipt printed and paper tore. The dead blood incapacitates them. I didn’t know how much to give her.

Maybe you gave her so much that you killed her. Should we look?

No. Are you crazy?

But you said she’s not the bat kind. She can’t fly away.

She could be a bunch of different things, and some could kill us in five seconds. We’re not opening it up.

Did you see those books she had? Like, why is a vampire even reading? The girl broke into high-pitched laughter.

Because she was vampurin, Violet thought resentfully. Her intelligence hadn’t diminished with the venom. She’d actually changed very little, in comparison to some other strains. Why hadn’t she listened to the woman at the blood bank? She should have just dealt with the bus changes.

I gave Allie that pamphlet, the guy was saying with a tinge of aggravation. Did you go through it? I told her to tell you to study it.

I looked at it, the girl said defensively. But it will all be gone over in orientation, that’s what it said. So I didn’t memorize it or anything. My mind glazes over at info dumps like that.

There was no love lost between these two. Violet could read that much from their tones. Have you been going to the gun range to practice? the guy asked.

Yeah, the girl replied as Violet listened in alarm. I went last weekend.

"Just once?"

So what? All you do is point and shoot, which I did for hours. I was getting pretty good at it by the end.

"You should have been practicing since you first found out about this! I’ve taken every class the range has to offer and I’ve been training in track and field, lifting weights, obstacle courses, all of that for a year! Why do you think Allie took three PE classes last term and three more this term? For fun? She told me that you were taking this seriously!"

Some of us had to study, Sid.

Sarcastically, the guy named Sid said, Well, hope you packed your art history text to club them with when they come looking for your blood.

Don’t be a jerk. I played tennis in high school and I used to shoot my brother’s BB gun at raccoons when I was little, too. And how was I supposed to pay for the gun range?

With the money we’re saving by bringing in what we got in the trunk, not that you need to save money, for God’s sake. Your family is loaded.

Yeah, well, Dad is trying to encourage me to stand on my own two feet so he cut my allowance in half.

Sid was growing infuriated. What kind of place do you think this is? This isn’t some kind of vampire play-acting like you do at Weird Fare! It’s real! Very real!

Hey, guys! The other girl, the one named Allie, was coming back from the gas station minimart. Sure you don’t want anything? It’s so much cheaper here. Soda is only fifty cents a can.

Did you know that she only went to the gun range once? Sid demanded, and