american horor grindd Chapter 225: Don't Eat Me! (Patreon)

Dracula looked at the screaming pile on the concrete. For the first time, he seemed actually confused.

He turned to Gomez.

“Is their fear a little theatrical?”

Gomez straightened his tie, pleased with the mess.

“My friend, you have to allow for ordinary nerves. To them we are the dragons in the old stories. The ones that chew the bones.”

Dracula’s brow tightened. The comparison offended him.

“I am Dracula. Not some backwoods ogre.”

Luke watched the technicians squirm. The fear was real. The target of it was off.

He took one step forward.

The man nearest him hit a new octave.

“Stay back! Don’t eat me!”

The lead technician shoved himself backward on his hands, scraping across the lot.

“Why did you monsters come here?”

“We protect people! We fight for everyone’s safety!”

The words warped with panic. Half accusation. Half courage he was trying to talk into existence.

Dracula looked more lost than before.

“Protect humanity. By hunting your own kind.”

He glanced at the two witches still bound off to the side.

“Or is this the fashionable way you people save each other now? You butcher your own and call it charity?”

“That’s what the Association told us!” another technician found enough air to shout. “They said you supernatural things eat people! We joined to protect humanity! For justice!”

Gomez laughed out loud.

Dracula looked at them the way a man looks at a room full of idiots.

Luke shook his head. He had the shape of it now.

“Maybe the Association started out trying to protect ordinary people.”

His voice stayed even. He walked into the cluster of cuffed men.

“They’re past that. They’re crazy.”

He crouched in front of the lead technician.

“You think this is justice?”

“Do you know where your energy cores come from? The metal in those machines?”

The man blinked.

“From—from the monsters that get hunted. The ones that do harm. Recycled.”

“Monsters,” Luke said. “What kind.”

“The ones that attack people. That cause disasters—” The voice got smaller.

Luke cut him off.

“I just came from a place called Hope Town.”

“There’s an elementary school there. Full of girls with talent. The Association penned them up and used pain, fear, and hate to force the power open.”

He held the man’s eyes.

“The ones who wake up get taken and trained as weapons. The ones who don’t become your materials.”

“They get turned into energy cores. Or fused into metal. Those lifeless things you roll out of this plant.”

The lot went quiet.

Dozens of technicians sat frozen. Blank faces. Disbelief.

The lead man’s mouth worked. Nothing came out.

He looked at the wrecked construction vehicles, then at the men cuffed beside him.

They had been heroes in their own heads. Guardians of civilization.

They had been the butcher’s extra hands.

“No. That’s not possible.” A younger technician muttered it. “The mentors wouldn’t lie to us.”

“Mentors?” Luke said.

“The people who recruited us. They said it was a great cause. For the future of humanity.”

Luke stood and let out a breath.

“You have two choices.”

“One. Die here for the Association that lied to you. For that great cause of yours.”

“Two. Work for me.”

He tapped his own chest.

“My lab is short-handed. Your work looks decent.”

The technicians stared at each other.

Everything they had been taught was colliding at once.

The vampire and the rest of them were monsters. Untrustworthy.

The monsters had not killed them.

The Association they had served had used children’s bones to build its version of justice and sent them out to feel proud about it.

And Luke was human.

A human who should not have been able to do what he had just done.

“Work is work,” one of them muttered.

That did it.

They were engineers. Technicians. They had a job.

Yesterday it was the Association. Today it was a different boss. The difference was not as large as it had felt a minute ago.

At least this one had said the quiet part out loud.

The lead technician was silent for a long time. He looked at Luke, then at Gomez, then at Dracula.

He set his jaw.

“Why—why should we believe you?”

Luke did not answer. He lifted the shotgun.

Gomez smiled.

“Because you are going to like the other option even less.”

Dracula made a low sound.

“Too many words for a pack of mortals.”

They looked at the gun. They looked at Dracula, who seemed ready to finish the conversation. A shiver went through the line.

The lead technician decided.

He fought his way onto his feet and bowed as low as the cuffs allowed.

“We’ll work for you. Boss.”

The others followed.

“We’ll do it!”

Luke lowered the gun and nodded at Gomez to take the cuffs off.

“Good.”

“Everything useful. Experiment data. Design sheets. All of it. Load it.”

“Yes, boss. No problem, boss.”

The order flipped a switch. The men on the ground stopped being prisoners and went back to being engineers.

“Team A—archive. Physical backups of every drive!”

“Team B—prototype weapons. Especially the energy-deflection armor files!”

“Team C—core inventory. Grade them and crate them!”

The lead technician was already on his feet, handing out work without looking up.

They unlocked each other and moved. The screaming wrecks from a minute ago might as well have been different people.

Gomez watched with interest.

“My friend, you have a gift for staff morale.”

Dracula had no use for the conversion.

“Weather vanes. No spine in any of them.”

Luke ignored both of them and walked over to the man still issuing orders.

“Name.”

“Howard.” He did not turn his head. His eyes stayed on a data slate.

“Other Association sites. Senior members. What do you know?”

Howard’s hands stopped.

He turned and looked at Luke.