After the Fall: A Vampire Chronicle (Book One) Read Free

Sighing with frustration, she stood up and walked into the living room. Teenage bickering and computer-generated sounds of warfare were coming from one of the bedrooms; the doorbell rang again.
    “Was that the door, honey?” Ron asked.
    “Now you hear it,” Alice sighed in frustration. She walked to the front of the apartment, knowing whoever was outside must be getting impatient. 
    “We’re not expecting anybody, are we?” Ron asked, puzzled.
    “You know what? I bet it’s Caroline. She forgot her key twice last week, but at least now she remembered before midnight,” Alice answered, as she unlocked the door and opened it, startled to find two strangers in the hallway. They were young and almost sickly pale, dressed all in black. Young people today.
    “Can I help you?” Alice asked.
    The guy gave a smile that wasn’t a smile. It definitely should have been a smile, but Alice had never seen anything like it before – the coldness of it sent a shiver down her spine.
    Alice gasped as the female roughly pushed her out of the way and stepped into the apartment.
                  “Yes, you can help us,” she crooned, grabbing Alice by the arms and slamming her against the wall; Alice’s cry of pain only made the man smile more. The woman leaned in close to Alice’s face, and the emptiness Alice saw in her eyes, like twin black holes, made her afraid like she had never been afraid before. The woman’s breath was hot on her face, and Alice felt sick to her stomach.
                  “We’re starving,” she hissed.
     
                  Caroline stepped off the elevator, back on her floor again. She checked her watch for the fourth time in ten minutes and cringed. She was going to be nowhere near arriving on time for the previews. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten her keys again, but at least this time she had remembered before it was the middle of the night. Maybe she could catch the next show and still make her curfew…
                  She was so lost in her thoughts that her first indication that something was wrong was when she went to knock on the apartment door and all she got was a handful of air. Finally focusing on her surroundings, she saw the door was already open. Frowning, she stepped into the apartment, and then stopped, a cold wave of anxiety and something else – fear, maybe – sweeping over her. Something wasn’t right. Even if somebody had stepped out for a moment and forgotten to shut the door, there still should have been video game sounds coming from the bedroom. The television still should have been on. Her father never shut the set off in the middle of a Yankees game. Never.
                  “Mom? Dad?”
                  Caroline took another step into the apartment, and was greeted by, despite the busy sounds of the street drifting up and in through the window, the most deafening silence she had ever known.
                  “Lauren? Katie?”
                  She took another step and tripped, barely managing to regain her balance and keep from falling. She had warned Katie that the next time she left one of her shoes out in the middle of the room, where someone could easily end up breaking their neck…
                  She bent down to retrieve the shoe that she had tripped on and found that there was a foot in it. Caroline closed her eyes and took a deep breath as a feeling of horror and profound panic began to seize her. This was her mother’s shoe, and this was her mother’s foot, and lying there, on the living room rug, was her mother.
                  “Mom?” she whispered, her voice shaking. Maybe she was sleeping. Or playing some sort of sick joke. But how would that explain the gaping hole in her mother’s throat and the pool of blood she was lying in?
                  Caroline saw it, and yet didn’t see it; she felt as if she was an