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Chapter 1
I kept looking into the big side view mirror of my armored truck for any signs of vampires behind us, but no matter how many times I checked, the interstate still looked clear. Even though it should have made me glad that none of the bloodsucking soldiers or feral assholes on the bridge had followed us, I couldn’t help but feel like something was going to appear in the mirror any second.
I was probably just still on edge from our fight to get across the Verrazzano Bridge, so I tried to tell myself to relax. Since we had only just made it across the Narrows onto Staten Island a few minutes earlier, it wasn’t like there’d been any downtime yet. We’d barely caught our breath from the fight on the bridge, so I doubted there was anything actually wrong.
But as I continued to drive forward along 278, I still kept glancing into Rhino’s big side mirrors, anyway.
“Everything okay, Sam?” my gorgeous girlfriend asked from the seat beside me.
I glanced over at Natalie and smiled. My girlfriend had her usual little line between her eyebrows that appeared whenever she was worried, and she looked at me now with her blue eyes open wide with concern. She pulled the stray pieces of her brown hair back up into her ponytail, and then she raised her eyebrows when I didn’t answer right away.
Nat could always tell when something was on my mind, and that hadn’t changed even after I’d turned into a vampire. It was just that now she could usually tell when I needed to feed, not just what I was feeling, so she helped make sure I always had plenty of blood in my system to keep me strong.
Of course, it was also to keep me from turning into a mindless bloodsucking monster like the feral horde that we had just left behind us on the Verrazzano.
Still, the feral vamp horde had come in handy. If we hadn’t been able to lead them toward the bridge, we would have never been able to make it through all the bloodsucking troops that were stationed on the Verrazzano to control movement into and out of Brooklyn.
The two forces had damn near destroyed each other, and then we’d just fought through the survivors in order to get the hell out of Brooklyn and to get away from Kowalsky and the rest of the vamps who were trying to divide New York City up into little fiefdoms.
I’d be damned if I was going to live in somebody else’s kingdom and play by their rules, not when I had only just started to figure out how powerful I could be as a vampire. But it wasn’t just that I liked being in charge of my own destiny.
It was also the fact that my six women depended on me for survival, and I would never let any other bloodsucker take them away from me.
“Sam?” Natalie repeated.
When she said my name again, the five other girls in the back of my armored truck fell silent and turned their attention toward me, too.
“Yeah, I think so,” I sighed. “We just passed Fort Wadsworth, so I’m just… I guess I just keep expecting more vamp soldiers to appear behind us and chase us across Staten Island.”
“But you don’t, um, see any… right?” Brianna asked from the back.
“No,” I said as I turned around in my seat just long enough to glance back at the curvy blonde. “Not yet, anyway.”
“So everything’s fine?” Lily asked.
“For the moment,” I replied, “but don’t let your guards down just yet. You know, just in case.”
“Are all the guns reloaded?” Natalie asked the other girls.
“Locked and loaded and ready to go!” Catherine said as she raised her shotgun like it was a shot glass. “Not that I’d mind a little bit of a break, since we did just have a whole thing on the bridge, but--”
“Yeah, everything’s reloaded,” Erika chuckled as she cut off the auburn-haired girl.
“Hey, I’m with Catherine on this one,” Brianna said. “I think we deserve a little bit of a break, too.”
“I don’t think the vamps will care whether or not we deserve a break,” Neko said, “so we might as well be prepared for the worst case scenario.”
“Ugh, you’re always thinking about the worst case scenario,” the curvy blonde sighed.
“And that’s exactly why I’m always prepared,” Neko said with a smirk.
“I appreciate that,” I told the petite Japanese girl, “but at least for right now, things seem to be clear, and that includes 278.”
“Yeah, that’s a change from Brooklyn,” Natalie said.
“I’ll fucking take it,” I said. “That shit was a goddamn nightmare.”
We hadn’t made it very far onto Staten Island, of course, but so far, it seemed a lot more empty than Brooklyn had been. The interstate in Brooklyn had been an obstacle course of abandoned car wrecks or burning eighteen-wheelers, so the fact that 278 was now actually clear in front of us felt like a little bit of a fucking miracle.
For the moment, it meant that we could drive along 278 until we got to the other side of Staten Island and were completely out of New York, or at the very least, it meant that we could drive on 278 until it became impassable at some other point later on.
But even though I was glad to finally see a clear interstate in front of me, I wondered where all the people on Staten Island were. There was no way that everyone here had been killed in their sleep by vamps when the apocalypse began, but I couldn’t understand why there weren’t more abandoned vehicles or car wrecks from people who had tried to get out of the city when all this shit started.
Maybe they just hadn’t chosen 278 as their route out of the city, but then again, maybe they’d all tried to flee but gotten caught by bloodsuckers on their way out of their homes. If that was the case, the vamps here were probably a lot more organized, and there might be even more of them than there had been in Brooklyn.
If that was the case, I just hoped that they had all moved on to some other borough after they killed off all the humans here.
I shifted slightly in my seat. The sun was just about to go down over the horizon in front of us, but at the moment, it still shone directly into my eyes, so I just adjusted myself again until I was in a better position to keep driving forward. My vamp vision allowed me to see perfectly fine in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, but I still couldn’t just stare straight into the sun, so I’d be glad when the evening officially turned into nighttime.
The side view mirrors still showed nothing but the empty road behind us. Every now and then, we passed a single car or truck that had pulled over to the side of the road, but there were no big pile-ups and no people that we could see, so I just kept my foot on the gas and maneuvered around them.
“Well,” Natalie finally exhaled, “maybe Fort Wadsworth really isn’t a real base anymore. I feel like any soldiers there would have come after us by now, right?”
“Maybe all the soldiers were just on the Verrazzano,” Neko said with a shrug.
“Either way, that’d be good news for us,” Catherine said. “I know we were all super badass on the bridge and everything, and as much as I know we’d all like to see Sam in action again, it might be easier if we could just, you know…”
“Drive for a minute without any vamps trying to break into Rhino?” Natalie smiled. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”
A flicker of movement caught my eye from the arm
ored truck’s big side view mirror, and I instantly felt a familiar stab of worry inside my stomach. It wasn’t just that another fight with bloodsuckers would be difficult when we were all so tired from the battle on the bridge, but it was also the fact that I knew what would happen to the girls if any other vamps caught them.
Sure, they might be killed and drained of their blood right away, but that was just about the best option that they would face. It was much more likely that a few of them would be killed but that the rest would be captured and forced to be human cattle for their bloodsucking captors, so the fanged fuckers could feed from them whenever they wanted to until they had no more blood left to give.
When the movement disappeared, I hoped for half a second that it had just been a trick of the light from the setting sun in front of us, but just a moment later, something flashed again in the side mirror. I tightened my grip on the wheel and leaned over to get a better angle in the light, and this time, I finally saw the source of the movement.
“Fuck,” I muttered as my stomach tightened. “Fuck!”
“Sam, what is it?” Natalie asked. “Just tell us what to do!”
“It’s a military truck,” I said with another glance at the side view mirror. “Somebody must have followed us from Fort Wadsworth after all.”
“What do we do?” Brianna moaned.
“Not panic, for starters,” Neko said as she elbowed her friend.
“Is it just one truck?” my girlfriend demanded.
I looked at the mirror again, but as far as I could tell, there was only one truck behind us. The vehicle was still too far behind us for the girls to see, but thanks to my enhanced eyesight, I could already tell that it wasn’t a normal Humvee. It was still tan, but it looked a hell of a lot sleeker and sturdier, and the two windows on the front actually looked like two individual windows instead of one big windshield.
“I think so,” I told Natalie, and then I described the vehicle to her.
“Oh, shit!” Nat bit her lip. “That sounds like a fucking Oshkosh JLTV. They’re pretty new, but--”
“Hey!” Catherine interrupted as she tucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear. “Could you maybe translate that to English for the rest of us?”
“Yeah, I thought Oshkosh was just a brand,” Brianna said. “You know, the brand that sells denim overalls and those cute little--”
“It’s not denim,” my girlfriend said. “I think it’s an Oshkosh Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and that means it’s… well, it means it’s super badass. The military was supposed to transition from Humvees to the Oshkosh, but I thought they were still rolling them out.”
“How do you even know this stuff, Nat?” Lily asked.
“I like guns and military shit,” my gorgeous girlfriend said with a shrug, “so military vehicles kind of come with the territory.”
“It’s fucking sexy, I’ll tell you that much,” I said with a smile, but then I glanced into the side mirror to see that the Oshkosh JLTV had started to gain a little ground. “So… exactly how badass is this vehicle?”
“Well, I can’t really remember all the specs,” Natalie said, “but I’m pretty sure not a lot would happen even if we chucked a grenade at it.”
“What about the glass?” I asked. “I assume it’s bulletproof?”
“Yeah, for sure,” my girlfriend replied, “but nothing’s bulletproof forever. If you shoot enough bullets at it, you can bust through pretty much everything, as long as you shoot it with a big enough gun.”
“I wonder how many assholes are in the back of that truck,” I muttered.
“Too fucking many,” Catherine said and then adjusted her tactical vest where it had come off-centered on her chest.
“Can we outrun them?” Neko asked. “The interstate still looks clear up ahead.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how long that’ll last,” I said, “and if we run into a barrier or some kind of obstacle that we can’t get past, then they’ll catch up to us in a heartbeat, and then we’ll really be fucked.”
“Maybe we could slow down and throw enough grenades at them to actually do something?” Erika suggested. “Or slow down so they get close enough for us to shoot at them until their bulletproof glass breaks?”
“That’s a lot of bullets,” Neko said, “or a lot of grenades.”
“Plus, we’d have to get pretty close for that to work, right?” Lily asked.
“I’m afraid so,” I said as I pushed down a little harder on the gas, “and I want to keep as much distance between us as possible.”
“So, basically, we need to get rid of them in case we run into a barrier,” Catherine said, “but we can’t let them get much closer, or they might be able to shoot us, too.”
“That’s about the sum of it,” I said. “Any other ideas?”
“What about one of the sniper rifles we took from the armory at Fort Hamilton?” Brianna asked, and then she reached down into one of the gun bags and lifted up one of the rifles.
“Don’t tell me that you’ve been holding out on me,” I said with a grin. “Are you a secret sniper badass or something?”
“Oh, not me!” the curvy blonde replied. “I meant maybe Natalie could, uh… snipe them? Is that the right term for it?”
“I’m pretty sure you can just say ‘shoot,’ and we’ll know what you mean,” Neko said as she rolled her eyes at her friend.
“I don’t think I can,” my girlfriend said. “Normally, yeah, I could definitely give it a try. Or at least, I could if Sam stopped the car, since I’m definitely not good enough to shoot a sniper rifle from a moving vehicle.”
“You mean not yet,” Erika said with a smile.
“No, I mean it!” Natalie said. “I don’t think it’s possible to use a scope out of the gun port.”
“Um, what does that mean?” Lily asked.
“The scope sits too high on the rifle, and the port is too small,” Natalie answered.
“We’ll have to use the iron sights,” I said with another glance at the Oshkosh behind us.
It hadn’t gained any ground yet, so that made me think that it might have reached its maximum speed. There was still plenty of interstate between us, but it was hard to feel too hopeful about that when I had no idea what the interstate looked like further along. And even though the fanged fuckers in the truck might eventually give up the chase, they were hunters, so there was no guarantee that they would ever give up unless we forced them to.
“Okay, I’ll take the scope off,” Natalie said, and she began to remove the mounted scope.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “I’m gonna stop Rhino in just a minute, and then I want you to shoot out one of the firing ports and try to break the glass, so you can hit the driver.”
“Fuck, Sam,” my gorgeous girlfriend murmured. “I really don’t know if I can hit that shot.”
“Just do your best, okay?” I replied. “But I want the rest of you to be ready to shoot, too. If Nat can’t get the driver, I’ll try to outrun them again, but in the meantime, the rest of you will need to shoot enough to slow them down, okay?”
“Won’t they, uh… try to shoot back?” Lily asked.
“Not if they want us to still be in one piece so they can drain us dry later,” Catherine said.
“That’s comforting,” Brianna huffed.
“Well, I guess the sun is in their eyes,” Natalie said with a glance out the windshield at the fading light, “and it will be like that for at least a couple more minutes, so that gives me a little bit of an advantage.”
“Then go ahead and get set up in the back,” I told her, “and I’ll tell you when I’m about to slow down.”
My girlfriend handed the sniper rifle over to Catherine so she could climb out of the front of the armored truck and into the back again. The other girls helped make a space for her at the back door of Rhino, and Lily and Erika even helped set up a few of the duffle bags for her to prop the rifle up on when she shot it.
While Natalie got set up ne
xt to one of the firing ports in the back of the truck, Neko distributed guns to the rest of the girls so they would all be armed and prepared for whatever was about to happen. Everyone still had their tactical vests on from the fight on the bridge, so that wasn’t an issue, and I knew that I could regenerate from just about any wound that I received, just as long as it didn’t blow my brains out the back of my skull or just blow my head clean off.
“How’s it going back there, Nat?” I called.
“As good as it can be,” my girlfriend said from where she knelt beside the firing port in the back of the armored truck.
Natalie had the big sniper rifle propped up on the duffle bags with the butt of the rifle pressed into her shoulder. She had opened the port itself so she could point the weapon out the back, and she held her face down close to the rifle so she could try to use the iron sights as best she could.
“Then I’m gonna slow down now,” I said. “Erika, why don’t you stay with Nat and help her? Everybody else can take positions at other firing ports, okay?”
“You got it, Spike,” Catherine said with a little salute. “Should we be on both sides and at the back?”
“Split up between the right side and the other port at the back beside Nat,” I told her. “You’ll have to shoot in shifts, if it comes to that, and I’m pretty sure you’ll only shoot out the back, but I want at least two sides of Rhino to be covered.”
While Erika got set up beside Natalie to help her with the sniper rifle, Catherine and Neko lined up at the second firing port in the back of the truck. That only left Lily and Brianna, so they positioned themselves beside the port on the right side of the vehicle.
Once the girls were all in position, I slowed down gradually, so I wouldn’t throw them all off balance and more importantly, so I wouldn’t upset the delicate balance of the luggage in the back of Rhino. I didn’t want anything to fuck up my girlfriend’s stance at the firing port, but the whole time I slowed down, I still kept one eye on the side mirror.
As I brought the armored truck to a stop, the Oshkosh JLTV gained ground, but it was still pretty far away. Sure, it would catch up to us pretty quickly, but I hoped that Natalie could slow it down, if nothing else. And if she wasn’t able to break the bulletproof glass with her sniper rounds, then we would just have to go to Plan B and have all the girls open fire until something happened.
Vampire Lord | Book 5 | Vampire Lord 5: Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth Page 1
