And if Plan B didn’t work, there was always Plan C… and that was just to improvise like hell.
The Oshkosh was close enough now that I guessed even the girls could see it with their human vision, so I finally brought Rhino to a complete stop and then twisted around to look at Natalie.
“Can you see them?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” my girlfriend murmured. “They’re coming up pretty fast, but they’re holding a steady course.”
“Well, it’s not like there’s anybody else out here that they can chase down and eat,” Catherine said.
“So they’re not swerving or slowing down?” I asked. “That should make it easier for you, right?”
“We’re about to find out,” Natalie said. “Everybody go ahead and cover your ears.”
We didn’t question her and instead just put our hands over our ears to block out as much of the sound from the sniper rifle as we could. Of course, even though Rhino was put into park now, I held myself ready to shift her forward if I suddenly needed to get us out of there.
The other girls all had their eyes on Natalie, but I twisted back around to face forward, so I could keep an eye on the interstate up ahead and so I could watch what happened to the Oshkosh in the side mirror. I heard Natalie breathe in and out slowly a few times to steady her nerves, and then on her next exhale, she paused halfway through her breath and then squeezed the trigger.
The inside of my armored truck seemed to explode with the sound of the rifle shot, but I didn’t see any change in the military vehicle behind us. They didn’t even slow down, so while I knew that they had heard the shot, it must have missed them by enough distance that they didn’t seem worried at all.
“It’s okay, Nat,” I called, even though I knew she probably couldn’t hear me over the echo of the gunshot in her ears. “Just try again!”
“I’m gonna try again!” Natalie shouted. “Keep your ears plugged!”
My brunette girlfriend fired another round, paused long enough to steady herself again, and then shot a third round at the oncoming Oshkosh. None of the bullets had actually hit their target yet, but since the target was getting closer by the second, it looked like Nat’s odds were about to go up.
Or so I hoped.
And sure enough, as soon as she fired the fourth round, I heard it crash into something metal. I didn’t see any signs of damage to the military truck, so it must have ricocheted off, but that meant Natalie was getting closer to a solid hit.
I just hoped she would be able to break the glass in time.
“I’ve almost got it!” she shouted.
When she fired again, I stared closely at the side mirror and was able to see the bullet bounce off the windshield of the oncoming Oshkosh, and the same thing happened to the next round that she fired.
“I need a reload!” Natalie shouted.
Erika was already on it, so the moment that my girlfriend dropped the empty magazine, the techy girl was ready with a loaded magazine and handed it right back over.
The military truck kept getting closer, and I estimated that there were probably no more than five football fields of distance between us. I could hear all the girls’ heartbeats as they threatened to pound right out of their chests, but they all kept breathing steadily to stay focused as the Oshkosh gained on us.
I knew it was a big fucking risk to stay still and let them come to us, but it was the only way that Natalie would ever have a chance of shooting the driver, and right now, that sure as hell seemed like our best option. It was either that or just plow forward and hope that we didn’t run into anything impassable on the interstate with a truck full of fanged soldiers right behind us.
After the next couple of shots, I heard glass crack, so I looked at the side mirror again and saw that my girlfriend had managed to cluster her shots close enough together to finally fracture a hole in the glass. The hole wasn’t huge, but it was big enough for her to shoot through again.
Then again, if I had counted right, she only had two shots left before she would need another reload, and in the time it took her to reload the sniper rifle, the Oshkosh would probably be right on top of us.
“Come on, Nat,” I whispered, even as I prepared to either drive or fight for our lives.
I lost sight of her next shot, but the moment that she fired her last round, I knew exactly where it went. Actually, we all did, because almost as soon as the gun went off, the Oshkosh JLTV squealed and turned into a sharp spin.
My gorgeous girlfriend had shot the motherfucking driver.
“Fuck, yes!” I shouted, even though I knew we couldn’t fully celebrate just yet.
After all, there were still all the other assholes inside the truck to worry about.
But now, there were only about a hundred yards between us and the Oshkosh, so I had to decide if I wanted to shift into drive and try to get away from them in the time it would take for someone else to take over the driver’s position… or if I just wanted to put up a fight.
As it turned out, the fanged fuckers made up my mind for me.
Apparently, they weren’t the most patient bunch of vamps because just about the moment that the military truck stopped spinning, the doors all flung open, and half a dozen fanged soldiers jumped out and started running straight toward us.
“Shoot!” I yelled at the girls.
Catherine was the first to open fire out the second firing port in the back of Rhino, but as soon as Natalie ducked out of the way, Neko stepped up to shoot out the other port. They both used their rifles to try to penetrate the body armor of the vamps, but the soldiers were running at full vamp speed, and it sure as shit wasn’t easy to hit a moving target.
Based on the angle and speed that the soldiers were running toward us, I didn’t want to try to twist Rhino around at all so the other girls could shoot out the side. Besides, by the time I adjusted Rhino’s position, the military fuckers would already be on us.
“Line up behind Catherine and Neko,” I told Lily and Brianna. “When they run out of bullets, start shooting out the back.”
The Hispanic girl and the blonde immediately did what I asked, while I prepared to jump out of the truck if I needed to take the fight to them. We were pretty fucking safe as long as we stayed inside Rhino, unless the military vamps took their rifles off their shoulders and started to shoot enough rounds to penetrate my truck’s thick metal siding.
But for the moment, they seemed intent on just reaching my armored truck, and that gave the girls enough time to unleash hell on them. Most of their bullets never made it through the vamps’ body armor, but since they weren’t wearing helmets, it meant their skulls and their limbs were still vulnerable to attack.
And my girls and l were ready for them.
As the military vamps sprinted forward, the girls just kept shooting until one after another of the soldiers began to drop. The first two crumpled to the ground in a spray of blood from their throats, and the next three had bullets rip through their arms or legs to make them fall to the ground.
The last soldier made it all the way to Rhino’s back door, but Neko just shoved her gun through the firing port a little more and blasted him at point-blank range until he dropped, too.
“Stay here!” I shouted, so the girls would hear me over the ringing in their ears.
Then I pushed open the door of the armored truck, grabbed the axe from its hiding spot beside my seat, hopped down to the pavement, and darted toward the fallen bloodsuckers. I needed to make damn sure that these soldiers were going to stay down because if they were as well-fed as I was, then their bodies would spit out the bullets in a second, and they’d jump back to their feet like nothing had fucking happened.
As soon as I reached the back of my armored truck, I raised my axe above the first soldier that I reached, and I slammed it down onto his face. The blade cut through the vamp’s eyes like squishy little grapes, but I raised the axe and smashed it down again until I felt it go all the way through the nasal bones and into the s
oldier’s brains.
After I made sure that he was dead, I moved from one body to the next and did the same thing with all the rest of the bloodsuckers, until it was completely impossible for them to heal themselves. When the vamps were all dead with axe wounds through their skulls, I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that the interstate up ahead was still clear, and then I dashed back toward the Oshkosh that the soldiers had left behind them.
I checked inside the military truck, but there were no other soldiers except for the dead driver. There also wasn’t a hell of a lot that looked very helpful to us, so I guessed that when they saw us hurtle across the Verrazzano, they must have given chase before they had too much time to gather supplies other than the rifles on their backs.
When I was sure that there wasn’t anything useful in the Oshkosh JLTV, I sprinted back to rejoin the girls in my armored truck. Of course, before I climbed back up inside Rhino, I grabbed all the rifles off the soldiers’ bodies as a little something extra for our growing arsenal.
As soon as I hopped back up into the driver’s seat, I handed the rifles back to Brianna to stash with our other extra weapons, and then I shifted Rhino into drive again. I knew that we had demolished the fanged soldiers, but I still held my breath until the military truck and the dead bodies disappeared from sight behind us.
“Well, fuck, that was fun,” I finally said with a grin.
“It wasn’t boring, that’s for sure,” Natalie said, “but I think I might like a few hours without any, uh… fun.”
“Same here,” Brianna sighed. “I’m totally beat.”
“You were amazing, Nat,” I told my girlfriend. “All of you were.”
“I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of this thing,” Catherine said as she patted her rifle and adjusted her seat on one of the duffle bags in the back.
“Yeah, but none of us could have done anything if Nat hadn’t shot the driver,” Erika said. “That was really something.”
“Just imagine if I had actually set the rifle scopes myself,” my gorgeous girlfriend said with a smile. “That’s one of the first things I want to do when we stop for more than just a few minutes… well, I guess when we stop somewhere a little less populated for more than a few minutes.”
“We’ll have to go a little further before we get somewhere rural enough for you to shoot your sniper rifle again,” I laughed. “Unless we have an emergency first, of course.”
“Don’t say that out loud!” Lily hissed. “That’s like an open invitation for us to have an emergency! Can’t you at least, like, knock on wood or something?”
“Oh, good, you’re superstitious,” Neko said as she brushed her pale-pink hair out of her eyes. “This should be fun.”
While the petite Japanese girl began to tell Lily all the reasons that superstitions weren’t real, and while Lily began to defend all her different superstitions, I turned my attention back to the road in front of us. I glanced over with a smile to see that Natalie had picked her way through the luggage to join me up front again, and I let myself exhale as the sun finally disappeared completely below the horizon.
More trees started to appear on the right side of the interstate, but even though their shade only made everything seem darker, I wasn’t worried about the darkness. The girls would have a harder time if they needed to see anything during the night, but my blood-enhanced vision should keep us safe until the sun came up again.
Besides, we had enough guns and supplies that we shouldn’t have to stop any time immediately, not unless the girls really needed to pee or anything. But even that would be a quick stop, and hopefully, we wouldn’t need to do that until we were well past Staten Island.
It would be ideal if we could make it all the way to rural Pennsylvania before anybody needed to stop, but since Catherine had a bladder about the size of a pea, there was no guarantee that she would be able to wait that long.
Like most things in the vampocalypse, we would just have to deal with that whenever we had to.
Just as I started to settle back into my seat, something moved down toward the interstate from between all the trees. It looked like an animal, so I didn’t think anything about it, but as the animal moved toward the highway, a whole crowd of them suddenly streamed out of the trees behind the first one.
There were goats, alpacas, ponies, and some shit that I didn’t even recognize, but they were all moving like a solid unit, and they were all moving fast and straight toward the interstate in front of me.
It looked like the whole goddamn Staten Island Zoo had gotten loose.
Chapter 2
“Hold on!” I immediately slammed on the brakes so I didn’t run right into the animals.
The girls shrieked and tumbled into each other inside the back of the armored truck, but as Rhino came to a full stop, they all scrambled forward to look out the windshield. The animals kept running across the interstate, and when they came to the median, they just hopped over it and kept on going, like they were desperate to get away from something that we couldn’t see yet.
“Is that…” Brianna trailed off as she gazed over my shoulder. “Oh, I must be dead. Yep, that explains it, because otherwise…”
“Holy shit!” Catherine said. “Those are fucking alpacas! And deer with full-on unicorn horns and shit!”
“Actually, those are oryx,” Erika said. “They’re a kind of antelope from Africa, and--”
“But what the fuck are they doing here?” the auburn-haired girl demanded. “This is Staten Island, not fucking Madagascar.”
“I think they’re from the zoo,” I said. “They must have gotten out during all the chaos, and now they’re… well, I don’t know what they’re doing now.”
The animals were spread out across the entire interstate now, but they were moving fast, so they’d be out of the way in a minute. And since we’d already taken care of the vamp soldiers behind us, we weren’t in such a rush that I needed to find a way around the zoo animals on the loose.
“It’s so sad,” Lily said. “I never even thought about what had happened to all the animals when this shit started. And what about everybody’s pets?”
“They’ll be alright,” I told her. “They’re animals, so survival is kinda what they do, you know?”
I mostly just said that to make Lily feel better, since I didn’t think she really wanted to hear the truth. The truth was that vamps who were starved for blood didn’t discriminate too much between a person and an animal. When their eyes started to go bloodshot and their skin started to itch like it was just going to fall off their bodies, they would be so desperate for blood that they would jump at anything that moved.
Of course, that made me think about Hippie Hank. The poor guy had woken up one day as a vamp, accidentally drank so much blood from his dog that he killed him, and had just been really upset about the whole thing. He thought that I had dogs of my own, since I lied to him that I was getting food for my dogs instead of the girls, and he had told me over and over again to make sure I took care of them.
I wondered how he was and if he’d ever been able to make it out of Brooklyn like he had planned.
But since the idea of Hippie Hank’s poor dog wouldn’t make Lily feel any better about the situation of all the animals and pets who had been left behind in the apocalypse, I kept most of my thoughts to myself. The vampocalypse hadn’t been kind to anyone, human or animal, and as much as I hated to think about that, I had to keep focused on what I could actually do something about… and that was just to make sure that my six women stayed safe.
“We’ll just wait for them to pass,” I finally told Lily.
“Yeah, but--” the Hispanic girl started.
“Oh, fuck!” Catherine interrupted. “Look!”
We all followed where the auburn-haired girl pointed, just as a huge leopard jumped out from behind the trees and raced down the hill toward its prey. It had its choice of food, but the rest of the animals all picked up the pace and tried to sprint away eve
n faster.
As it sprinted across the highway, it was clear that the leopard hadn’t experienced any food shortages after it had escaped from the zoo, so now its powerful muscles propelled it up over the median like an Olympic hurdler. It pounced on one of the slower goats at the back of the other prey, and even though the goat kicked back against the big cat, the leopard brought it to the ground by the throat in a spray of blood across the pavement.
“I think that’s our cue to move on,” I said, but I glanced up at the trees one more time to make sure that no tigers or lions were about to burst onto the scene, too.
“You’d think after everything we’d seen that it wouldn’t be such a big deal to watch a leopard kill a goat,” Brianna sighed, “but it still seems sad.”
“Only for the goat,” Neko said. “The leopard looks like he’s having a pretty good night.”
“You know I’ve always wanted a big cat for a pet,” Catherine said. “You know, it could be like our mascot or something. I bet it would make any vamps think twice about--”
“Catherine!” Natalie cut her off. “You’re not serious, are you?”
“Ugh, well, I guess not, since that was your reaction to my idea,” the auburn-haired girl said as she crossed her arms over her chest. “It was just a thought!”
“As much as I’d like to indulge you, we definitely can’t adopt a big cat,” I laughed.
“I know,” Catherine said with a little pout. “I didn’t really mean it. I just miss having pets, that’s all.”
“Since when have you ever had a pet?” Erika demanded.
“Well, not me personally,” the auburn-haired girl replied. “I just meant that I like when other people have pets, so I can visit them and play with them and--”
“And then go home at the end of the day, so you don’t have to clean up after them?” Natalie smirked. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Vampire Lord | Book 5 | Vampire Lord 5: Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth Page 2
