“I remember. It was, at the time, a kind gesture. I take it you didn’t?” Clayton asked.
“Hell no! After the last battle, I had a revelation! Here laid thousands and thousands of dead vampires, and the only thing that could kill a vampire of any blood type was another vampire.”
Desiree looked at Maryl in confusion. “We all get that. So?”
“I buried all of the O negatives and O positives in a mass grave not far from here. As for the rest of your A’s and B’s? I took them down here, which was just a vast underground cave at the time. And crudely at first, had my type vampires help me with what would change vampire history.”
Clayton gasped when he looked at the machine, and the consequences sunk in. “Noooo…”
“What is it, Clayton?” Desiree asked him with uneasiness.
Maryl looked at Clayton with a twisted smile. “Tell her.”
Clayton staggered to the ground and pounded his fists against the concrete floor. Impressions of his knuckles were clearly visible. He looked up at Maryl with tears in his eyes. “Maryl… how could you do something so monstrous?”
Desiree grabbed him and hoisted him upright. She took Clayton by the shirt collar and forced him inches from her face. “Tell me what the hell is going on!”
“Look at the gray powder coming out of the machine,” he said sadly.
Desiree looked. “I see it. So what?”
“Take… take a good look at what’s going inside the cylinder!”
Desiree focused her uncanny vision across the expanse of the immense room. It was hard to see through the haze of the different colors when the powder was poured into the clear tubes and put on the conveyor belts. When she finally saw it, she stared at Maryl in shock. “Oh my god…”
Maryl looked at her nails. “I found the idea brilliant. The first part of the process is to take the skeletons of Clayton’s different blood types and crush them into a fine powder, which that grinder does all too well.” She allowed a moment of silence to let it sink in. “Now, since the bones are from your colleagues, they will easily be able to penetrate several of the orifices of your body. The nose, mouth, ears, and eyes are just a few places where the gray powder can enter.”
“Clayton, I swear I never knew how the powder was able to bypass the vampire's impenetrable skin,” Desiree said with profound sadness.
Maryl smiled amid the two grieving vampires. “Oh, it gets better!”
“What do you mean it gets better, Maryl?” Clayton said as his anger built.
“Well, think about it, Clayton. If it were just vampire powder, it wouldn’t do anything to you if you inhaled it. No, I had to come up with a compound to blend it with. I must admit that was something I played with for quite some time.”
“And what did you blend the powder with, Maryl?” Clayton asked.
“That’s only part of the question you should be asking, Clayton,” Desiree said.
“What’s the other part?” Clayton said in confusion.
She looked down at the concrete floor before looking back at him. Sadness consumed her face. “If she took a lot of time to perfect the gray powder, how many vampires did she subject them too before she perfected it?”
“Desiree did bring up a good point, Clayton. I would have to say within the two hundred years, plus or minus a decade, we’re talking in the thousands. But don’t worry, their bones were recycled to make more powder.”
Clayton had to put that disturbing thought aside; otherwise, he would try to kill Maryl. With so many guards protecting her, that was out of the question for now.
“What was the final compound?”
“Inorganic arsenic powder,” Maryl said proudly.
“What’s the difference between inorganic and organic arsenic?” (11) Clayton asked.
Maryl sighed. “Do I have to explain everything to you?”
“Yes, humor me,” Clayton advised.
“Very well. Organic arsenic is usually found in low concentrations in foods like fish, shellfish, potatoes, and rice. Inorganic arsenic is from the soil, sediment, and contaminated water. Inorganic arsenic is highly toxic. In high doses, it can cause red blood cells to burst.”
“Ah, so that’s why we bleed from our orifices,” Clayton said with sorrow as he remembered how his family suffered.
“And you mix this with the powder?” Clayton asked.
“Yes. We grind them together.”
“Why the different colors of powders?” Desiree asked.
“Because each color powder represents a different blood type of a vampire that was killed and crushed.”
“So, the gray powder has all the bones of every blood type vampire bones that were pulverized except yours and Ray’s? And the other colors of powder are of only a single blood type, so it would only affect their blood?”
Maryl slapped Clayton on the back. “Now you’re getting it.” Maryl nodded to the guards, and they were pushed back out in the large warehouse. “Now, let’s go back to the room where we came from, shall we?”
When they came to the area, Desiree looked at the table closest to them that had different types of guns. “Guns can’t hurt us, Maryl.”
Maryl grinned. “These can,” she said as she took one of the guns off the table and aimed it at Clayton.
Clayton put his hands up in surrender. “Whoa, don’t do anything stupid, Maryl!”
Maryl fired, and the bullet hit Clayton in his left shoulder. Searing pain rocketed Clayton as he fell to the ground holding his shoulder. Blood came through his clenched hand that held his shoulder.
Through wretched pain, Clayton asked, “How is a bullet able to hurt me?”
“Get him up,” Maryl said forcibly.
Her troops forced Clayton upright as Maryl walked to him.
“This gun is for close-quarter combat. The bullets are made from the bones of vampires I’ve killed too. The vampire's bones are crushed, compressed, and molded for maximum efficiency. Don’t worry, Clayton.
