The Crane War
Page 37
“Sir,” Chloe acknowledged from long habit.
The noise of the new vampires was grating and repellent. Chloe had a personal aversion to anything that reeked of madness or insanity, but this time, she’d have to dive within it. She ran along the roof and leaped off the front of the hanger. She landed on the concrete apron around the front of the hanger, whirled and dashed into the building.
She was greeted like a messiah. The assembled vampires, standing wall to wall within the hanger cheered and called out her name. A group of them started a chant, “Blood Queen, Blood Queen, Blood Queen,” and continued shouting. One young man, his fangs hanging out over his full bottom lip, his eyes glassy, slapped the side of his head repeatedly, then blurred past her to the entrance of the hanger to join the mad rush to the warehouse.
Chloe blurred, turning with a single step. Her right hand snapped up, gripping one of her .50 caliber auto-pistols. She pulled the trigger, a single hyper-velocity round wreathed in blue flame shuddering through the air. It slammed through the base of the young vampire’s skull. Tearing through his brain stem and evaporating the bottom half of his face. His lifeless body pitched forward through the air, slid across the concrete in a red smear before coming to rest before the entrance of the warehouse.
Chloe shouted into the sudden silence, “Who’s in charge here?”
There was a low murmur of, “Armitage.” The murmur quickly grew in volume until her name was being shouted to the rooftop by more than two-hundred voices.
She scanned the crowd around her, and asked, “Where is the tunnel entrance?”
A finely-dressed vampire lifted his hand and pointed at a cylindrical fuel bowser. A maintenance hatch rested in an open position to the left of the entrance to the tunnels. Chloe strode toward it, the vampires before her pushing each other out of the way in their haste to make room for her.
They both loved and feared her.
She leaped to the top of the bowser, glanced down through the hatch at the ladder and the landing thirty feet below. She stilled herself, supreme ramped, and extended her senses beyond standard vampire maximums. The way into the tunnel was clear. There were no hidden trip wires, or laser grids waiting to activate.
Chloe dropped her supreme Ramp and lifted the Red Dragon from its scabbard. The magnificent blade gleamed over her black helmet. She flourished her sword and called out, “Follow me! Follow me to blood and glory! Follow me!”
She leaped down through the maintenance hatch, landing in the tunnel below. There was a short well-lit corridor in front of her. It ran into an open intersection of another corridor crossing the one she was in. She ran forward, as much to progress into the tunnel complex as to avoid the vampires leaping down to the floor behind her.
Chloe halted in the intersection. All three corridors ran for five yards and descended with stairs. Which way was the right way? A vampire shrieked behind her right shoulder, the sound jarring through her skull like an ice pick. She’d re-scabbarded the Red Dragon and simply chopped the blond-headed woman in the throat with her open hand. The blow crushed the woman’s larynx and shattered her spine. She dropped to the floor in a boneless heap.
“Shut the hell up!” Chloe snapped at the vampires crowding the corridor behind her. “I can barely think with your unholy racket in my ears!”
One of the vampires hidden at the back of the mob whined, “What’s the hold up?”
Chloe took a deep breath and let it out. If she responded to every little irritation these new vampires presented, she’d do the Order’s job for them. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened into a thin line. Many of these new vampires were little more than flesh balloons inflated by their own sense of entitlement. She hissed for silence, lifted a finger and stated, “Right. It’s a maze. We’ll have to work it out as we go, but,” she searched the back ranks for the whiny vampire without finding him, “if we’re not stupid about it we can get this done quickly.” She tapped the nearest three vampires. “Now you three are first up.” She pointed down each of the stairwells in turn. “Go, there, there and there and call back with every turn and intersection you find, keep to the right-hand side. Now run, do this at top speed.”
The three vampires vanished down the three lots of stairs. Chloe could use her perfect memory to build a full three-dimensional map of the maze with vampire runners. Within a second the first calls came back as the vampires reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Long corridor. It ends in a ‘T’ intersection,” the vampire on the left-hand side reported.
“Reached a landing, two sets of stairs going right and left,” the vampire on the right-hand side reported. He then asked hesitantly, “Which one should I follow?”
Chloe pressed her lips together into a thin line. A grating shriek resounded from the middle path, followed by running steps diminishing into the distance. The third vampire had fallen to the frenzy of blood lust madness. She glanced back at the vampires behind her. Their eyes were glassy, they were licking their lips, their hands clenching spasmodically with urgent need.
They reeked of a palpable madness. Something primal stirred in her gut. Her mouth grew dry with thirst. She snarled, and pushed the incipient madness away with a flash of iron-willed control. They advanced upon her, ignoring her, looking past her into the beckoning tunnels.
Chloe turned and blurred forward down the middle path. So much for strategy, she’d just have to wing it and use her best judgment. The vampires rushed after her, shrieks and wails beginning to rise from the mass of vampires as they variously lost their sanity. The fourth wave was becoming an uncontrolled mob.
Chloe frowned as she ran. In another minute the tunnels would be swarming with vampires hell bent on finding warm human blood to drink. They would care about nothing else. She pulled to a stop. The vampires rushed past her like spring-melt river water around an immovable boulder. Let them run. In their swarming, they would randomly search all the available paths. In a handful of minutes, they would cover the maze in full. She could use the sounds of their voices to draw a map of the maze within her mind.
Chloe positioned herself in the middle of the vampires and advanced with them.
All she had to do now was wait for the swarm to solve the maze for her.
* * *
The hellish 30mm cannon fire ceased and the black shadowstar drones vanished into the night sky.
The air reeked of burnt metal. The bottom half of both doors had been reduced to fragments of smoking iron littering the warehouse floor. Peter rushed into the space beneath the doors, he slung his MGL from its straps at his side and lifted the squad automatic weapon to his shoulder. He was first on the line, joined a moment later by the Blake force team and the rest of the Mirovar force team, except Anton.
A dozen vampires were less than fifty yards away. Peter opened fire with his SAW, flames leaping from the barrel. Silver, and lead hollow points speared away at them. A moment later, the rest of the Blake and Mirovar force teams opened fire. The vampires were cut to pieces, falling and stumbling to the concrete apron before the hanger.
“Cease fire!” Justin commanded.
The teams stopped firing, gray smoke rising from their weapons. No one said anything. Everyone was scanning the airport. The first rush was just a disorganized taste of the madness to come.
It began as a faint noise on the far side of the airport. The shrieks, wails and screams rapidly rose in volume as the vampires raced en masse across the open space between the hangers and the warehouse. They were covering a hundred yards every three seconds. Their origin hangers were anything from a thousand yards to a mile away. Effective firing range was five hundred yards. The vampires would be on top of them fifteen seconds later.
“Wait for it,” Justin advised calmly.
Jay offered, “Fire from the edge and swing through to the middle of the mass. They’ll bunch up as they converge on us.”
“We have two-hundred rounds each, that’s twenty seconds on full auto,” Peter stated.
Peter advised. “Use a flat trajectory with the grenades.” His Order nightglasses picked up the vampires and tracked their advance. They passed six hundred yards. A number appeared in small red numerals in the upper right-hand corner of his field of view, it read, ‘148.’ A low murmur spread through the assembled Ramp masters as their own nightglasses reported the number of oncoming vampires.
Justin spoke with deadly calm, “Hold fast.”
Jay stood next to Peter’s left. He held a squad automatic weapon to his shoulder and whispered, “For Yvette. For Francis”
The leading vampires closed past five hundred yards and into effective range.
Peter dived into his Ramp. Power slammed through his limbs, the airport resolving into super-sharp clarity. The onrushing vampires became discrete individuals. He’d taken Jay’s advice and targeted an outlying vampire. He pulled the trigger. The SAW began firing, orange flame bursting from the barrel with each round. The ammunition was an even mix of silver and lead hollow-points with every fifth round a bright tracer. A stream of silvery-golden light flashed downrange toward the vampire. He started to dodge inward toward the rest of the vampires, the first few rounds whipping past him on the left. Peter adjusted his aim. The vampire ran into another vampire who attempted to fend him off with a back-handed slap. Peter’s fire ripped into them, and they fell away in a hail of silver and lead within a blood-red mist.
Peter held his finger hard on the trigger. His stream of fire joined by another eleven lines of silver and golden light. The vampires closed to four hundred yards; leaping, dodging, and zig-zagging left and right. The Mirovar and Blake force teams hunted them down, and they died and died, but not quickly enough.
The hungry shrieks and hate-filled howls cut through the night air, competing with the hammering of the light machine guns.
The vampires closed to three hundred yards.
* * *
Tamsah held his blackened twelve-inch tri-bladed knives secreted against his forearms.
The growing madness of the vampires was like a slapped face that continued to redden with pain. He’d followed on the rear edge of the seething mass. They’d begun at the hanger, following Armitage into the tunnels, but it had quickly become apparent she didn’t have a map through the maze.
Tamsah smiled quietly. If Crane and Armitage had hoped to launch a simultaneous attack on the Order position in the warehouse, that hope had foundered on the twin rocks of blood frenzy and a maze worthy of the Red Empire.
Furthermore, the vampire horde’s madness was getting worse. With Armitage’s sudden need to explore tunnels and maze levels with half-crazed servants that were as likely to run off as return, progress toward the Ramp masters had slowed down. The vampires had become frustrated, needful, willing to take risks and disobey. Always a fractious creature, their underlying alignment with chaos rose to the surface when they were in large groups. The Way of the Faithful was explicit about the nature of vampires and their propensity for insanity whenever they congregated in large numbers.
The vampire mob fragmented and flooded the tunnels. The nearby vampires blurred forward, driven by their dark instincts, their faces ripe with blood lust. They would inevitably converge on the Order force teams. Their innate hunting instincts were still fully operational, but they would be a disorganized swarm by the time they made contact with the Ramp masters of the Order.
Armitage and Crane had lost control. With the cover of the mad ones, it was now time for Tamsah to break away from the militia and find his own way forward. The truth speaker would be somewhere in front of him and she would need his protection. He slipped confidently away into the tunnels.
Mazes were like a second home for him.
* * *
The first vampire to run off within the tunnels found someone.
And died a moment later. The sound of her falling to the floor occurred as a double thud with a wet splash. For someone of Chloe’s long experience, the sound was a fingerprint of specific action. Someone had cut through the vampire with a dragon blade. Horizontally, not vertically. The two halves had landed with a brief separation in time. A vertical bisection normally resulted in simultaneous landing of the separated body halves.
She had verified this fact late in the nineteenth century.
Chloe focused her hearing, discarding the confusing miasma of screams, maniacal laughter, howls and bone-scraping screeches from the frenzied vampires surrounding her. Vampires could focus in on minute differences of sound when they chose to do so. Chloe was a master of this technique. Next to the dripping blood of the vampire corpse was a heartbeat four to five feet above the floor.
A heart that was running at a steady thirty beats a minute.
It was a heart she’d know anywhere.
Anton Slayne was in the tunnels.
As if alerted by the death of one of their number, the vampire swarm fixed its attention on the lone audible human heart.
A wave of lust flushed through her. Oh, she wanted to join in and rush blindly forward. She could seize the young man; his flesh hot, his blood hotter. She could drag him to the floor, mount his body, and sink her fangs through the warm, taut skin of his throat. His heart would throb beneath her like a wild thing in final desperation to survive. She would hold him tight with her thighs and hands, puncture the carotid artery and wrap her mouth around the wound. Muscles deep within her abdomen would flex and contract, drawing his blood in a hot rush from his body deep into hers. Her heart would sing in glorious triumph as wet satiation flooded every part of her body. She would drain him dry until every last drop of moisture had been extracted from him. With her lust fully spent, she would rise up and leave Anton an exhausted dry husk, bereft of life, but the feeding would be an act of sublime glory.
Chloe turned and slammed her gauntleted fist into the wall. The metal panel curved inward beneath her knuckles with a thunderous crack. She blinked, drawing her fangs back into her gums, and looked forward. She had her mission and she would fulfill it. She took a deep breath, let it out. Anton Slayne was by himself, and alone he posed little threat.
She could afford to wait. She remained poised to move in any direction, to take any action, to respond to any need.
Adaptability was the soul of initiative.
* * *
Peter dropped his empty multiple grenade launcher to the concrete floor.
The vampire line was filled with ragged holes. Li hosed the nearest vampires with rounds from her SAW, bright flames issued from the barrel in ragged tongues. One vampire fell backward, his head ripped apart in a splash of blood. The nearest vampires closed to within a hundred yards. She would run out of time before she ran out of ammunition. She was never going to run out of targets. The thirty-six 40mm grenades the team had fired at the vampires had killed as many as the earlier machine gun fire, but the relatively slow-moving grenades had also been easier for the vampires to dodge.
Her Order nightglasses registered eighty-one hostiles within a hundred yards.
She continued firing. Another vampire spun away in front of her, riddled with silver and lead hollow-points, his blood painting two following vampires with red splatter.
The nearest vampires closed to fifty yards, the length of an Olympic sized swimming pool. They’d be in touching distance within one and a half seconds. Li kept firing until the very last moment, another vampire taking a burst through its chest. Its face froze with shock as it fell forward, sliding across the concrete in front of the warehouse, leaving a snail trail of scarlet blood beneath the warehouse’s flood lights.
Peter dropped his gun, gray wisps of smoke rising lazily from the mouth of the barrel as it fell slowly to the floor. His hands snapped up and down, his double-bladed axes appearing in an ‘X’ in front of him.
Li let go of her SAW, it floated away from her toward the concrete in slow motion, her hands going to the handle of the Green Dragon at her
hip.
The Mirovar and Blake force teams stood as one, edged weapons ready.
The vampires hit the line of Ramp masters like a moving wall of shrieking death.
Four vampires converged on Li’s position. The closest launched itself, diving above her. She drew the Green Dragon free from its scabbard at her hip. The blade arced up and over her head from left to right as she turned a hundred and eighty degrees beneath the leaping vampire. The Green Dragon passed through the creature’s waist, a spray of blood splashing over Patrick Wichowski on her left.
She reversed the blade in her right hand, thrusting it past her right hip into the next vampire running up behind her. She twisted, reversing in a half circle to the right, dragging the blade out of the creature in a vicious draw cut. The vampire clutched its belly with both hands, bloody loops of blue and gray gut spilling past its hands. Her first two attacks had badly wounded, but not killed either vampire. Two more were rushing her from left to right. She spun, her left foot lashing out, catching the vampire on her left in the gut. He folded over her boot, and then launched through the air past Peter.
Peter’s left hand slashed horizontally backward, his axe carving through the flying vampire’s skull. The half-headless corpse slammed into the floor a moment later.
Li never saw the lifeless body land; she ran the vampire reaching for her from the right through the chest. Her draw cut slashed his heart in two and he slumped to the concrete floor at her feet.
She took a step back; whirled and struck the rising forms of the first two vampires she’d wounded. Their heads rolled from their shoulders, blood fountaining into the air from their severed necks.
“No!” Justin shouted.
Max Guerra’s head flew free from within a huddle of vampires. His brown eyes startled, his torn throat dripping thin ribbons of blood and sinew.
Li gave ground along with the rest of the combined team.
A voice called out behind her. “This way!”