by M. D. Massey
I nodded. “Then I go in guns blazing, and we blitz the son of a bitch.”
36
DIE
I switched the sword to my left hand and drew a Glock in my right, and instructed Bobby to pop the door open on my command. I nodded and he threw the door open. I sighted down the barrel through the doorway…
...and Piotr wasn’t there. A white blur flashed before me, and the gun was gone. Then, Piotr was back in the room but behind Gabby, with one pale, white, manicured hand resting on her shoulder. Behind me, I sensed Bobby coiling himself up to spring into action, so I motioned for him to stand down with one hand without breaking eye contact with the vamp. Out of habit I stared at the center of his body, because my training taught me that staring someone in the eyes in a violent confrontation was an invitation to disaster.
For one, you couldn’t watch their hands and feet well with your eyes that high, and second, skilled and experienced killers knew how to feint with their eyes. Based on what I’d heard about this bloodsucker, I decided to keep my eyes right where they were, although I could feel… something compelling me to—look up look up look up—but I resisted the urge, and then it passed. The thing let out a short humph, and then it turned to Kara and spoke.
“Kara, my love, look—our guests have arrived.” I ignored the obvious jibe and focused on finding a way to beat this thing while he jabbered on. He spread his arms wide, as if challenging me to draw with my other hand; I didn’t fall for that either. “Welcome, welcome, welcome. I’m so glad you could make it to this momentous occasion, and witness the coming of the next age. How honored you all are to witness the dawn of this bright future we’re bringing to your world.”
Like Van, his voice was melodious and almost soothing, but in his case it sounded more like the voice of a game show host or politician than an opera singer. He had an annoying habit of placing emphasis on certain words, and I wasn’t really sure whether it was part of an act, or if he really was selling some sort of undead New Age Kool-Aid.
“Oh, but it’s not your world anymore, is it? No, of course not, although I’m sure you’ll find us to be more than generous to those of your kind who get with the program, as they say.” He gestured toward Kara. “As the lovely Kara here can readily attest. Isn’t that right, love?” Kara continued typing at the keys; whether she was ignoring him or oblivious to his nattering, I couldn’t say.
I took a step closer to him, opening up some space behind me for Bobby and the rabbi to move. If I wasn’t mistaken, the rabbi was still hiding just outside the door, and I wanted to give him room to toss one of his potions or elixirs or bombs or whatever the hell he had, if it came down to that.
The vamp gestured magnanimously. “Oh yes, do come in, one and all. You simply mustn’t miss this event. It is a—well, a once in a lifetime occasion.”
I sighed, not just for effect, but because I was really tired of these undead jokers. Like, really freaking tired. I just wanted to kill this damnable thing, take Kara, and head back to the Facility and make babies for the foreseeable future. And to hell with the planet, to hell with the United States, to hell with the undead, and to hell with everyone but the two of us. I was done stepping up because no one else would. We could recruit some of Colin’s boys to take the serum, and let them do the stepping up. I’d be perfectly happy to train them and cheer from the sidelines from here on out. But, there was just one thing standing in my way.
Piotr.
“Look here, Peter,” I said, emphasizing Peter as a juvenile jab at his name. I mean, come on; nobody named their kids Peter anymore. At least, not if they didn’t want them to get beaten up. Heck, even the kid in The Hunger Games dropped the “r” off his name, because you know that punk didn’t need any more beatdowns than life was already going to hand to him. “Let’s cut the shit. I don’t see any bright new future, and certainly not for my kind. In fact, all I’ve seen since your kind arrived is death for my people.”
He tilted his head at me slightly, and placed a hand on Gabby’s shoulder once more. Both terror and disgust were plainly written on her face, and her eyes begged me to do something, but I shook my head. Not yet. I wanted to make a move so badly, though; this whole ordeal had been a lot for a teenager to take, and although she was highly resilient, she looked like she was about to crack.
“Well, Scratch—I can call you that, can’t I? I mean, really—I’ve heard so much about you.”
He glanced over at Kara, and the look he gave her inferred a level of creep that I’d only ever seen in pedophiles and serial killers in the past. I made a mental note to mar that Hollywood face, if given the chance. His gaze returned to me, and I fought the natural urge to make eye contact.
“As I was saying, I’ll concede that point to you. If there’s one thing on which we can agree, it’s that your race has been decimated over the past eight years, has it not? However, I can assure you that the last thing we want is for your kind to go extinct. Think about it: what would we do for amusement, were that to happen?”
I took another step closer to Gabby and the bloodsucker, because I knew that the rabbi was up to something; I just didn’t know what. But when it happened, I wanted to be in range and close enough to punch this asshole’s ticket. I risked a look over at Kara, hoping to get some sign that she’d noticed my presence, but she was still typing away at the terminal in front of her.
Why wouldn’t Kara look at me?
I ran through a million scenarios in my head, and finally figured she was probably under Piotr’s control. But even if she was under some sort of vampire hypnosis, letting her know I wasn’t angry couldn’t hurt. So, I gathered up my courage and did my best to tell her everything was going to be okay.
“Kara, baby, I’m here for you. Please don’t worry about anything that’s happened since this thing took you. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing I wouldn’t do for you. I’m going to get you out of here, and then we’re going to go somewhere safe. I promise.”
Her head might have sagged a bit at the sound of my voice, but maybe it was just my imagination playing tricks on me. More than anything, I wanted to kill this thing and get her out of here, but I still wasn’t close enough to Piotr to act quickly enough to hit him. He was just too damned fast, no matter how much the serum had sped my reflexes up. I took another step forward, closing more than half the distance across the room.
By this point my blood was on fire, and the instinctual rage that I felt for this thing who’d hurt my pack was overwhelming. It was taking every bit of self-control I had to resist the urge to attack. Yet I knew based on how the serum had worked up to this point that I might only get one shot, just one flash of superhuman alacrity before my body and the sickness betrayed me. I needed to make it count.
As I stepped forward, Piotr twitched a finger and nicked the side of Gabby’s neck with one of his perfectly manicured nails. “Drop the sword, please, or I’ll spill her blood all over the console.” He patted Gabby’s shoulder. “And what a waste that would be, to end this succulent young lady’s life before I’ve even had a taste.” He tsked. “So wasteful.”
I relaxed my fingers and let the katana tumble to the hard tile floor. Kara continued clicking away at the keyboard, and the glow from the room beyond the glass became brighter still. Piotr’s eyes nearly closed in apparent ecstasy as a beatific smile split his face.
“Ah, I can feel Them coming. My brethren! How they course and champ at the bit; how eager they are to cross over and experience all the carnal thrills offered in this wonderful playground that you unfortunate monkeys have called home for millennia. How its pleasures have been squandered by your kind.” His eyes opened and he tsked again at nothing in particular. “But no longer. Your kind will now serve my kind, and you will revel in your servitude.” He lifted one hand and beckoned me forward, toward the glass. “Come, Scratch. Come and see what your beloved has wrought on your kind.”
I moved forward slowly, wary of any trick or ruse that might be in play, b
ut Piotr had all but forgotten my presence, as well as that of Gabby at his side. He was staring out the glass at the scene beyond. I looked over at Kara as I approached the glass, but before I could get a glimpse of her face, the madness happening down below drew my gaze away.
As I looked out into the reactor room, I saw that we were about fifteen feet above the reactor room floor. Roughly twenty feet away at the center of the room was a pool approximately ten feet in diameter, filled with water and containing a strange apparatus that I assumed consisted of the reactor rods and mechanical controls. The blue glow was emanating from the pool, but within that glow were faint outlines and wraith-like figures that were nightmares come to life. Ghastly faces and figures bubbled up from the glowing pool, fighting and scratching and clawing at each other, each one jockeying for a position at the forefront of that mass of spirits.
They were in some cases only vaguely human, and in others, so alien as to make me nauseous to look upon them. Yet I couldn’t turn my gaze away. As I looked, I could see beyond that slowly opening doorway, past the boundaries of this reality and through the gates of Hell. There were thousands; no, tens of thousands, literally legions of those evil, twisted creatures waiting to cross over and finish the job they’d started.
With extreme effort, I tore my eyes away and looked at Piotr. “No. I won’t allow it.”
He chuckled and turned to face me. “Oh, but my good man, there’s really nothing you can do about it. If you try to stop us in here, I’ll simply kill the girl. And if you went in there,” he gestured beyond the glass, “you’d fry like an egg on a hot skillet.”
I glanced back to the scene below, just in time to finally realize what Rabbi Manny had been up to all this time. I grinned maniacally and pointed. “You’re right, I can’t do a damned thing. But he can.”
Piotr’s head turned faster than my eyes could follow as he tore his gaze from me and back to the reactor floor. Down below, Josef was wreaking havoc on the reactor equipment, ripping the machinery to shreds and forcing the control rods one by one back into the reactor’s containment structure. As he did so, the glow slowly faded, and those horrible faces and figures became less distinct with every passing second. Piotr’s palms landed on the glass partition, leaving spider-web cracks in the glass as he screamed loudly, “No, you fool!”
It was time to act. I reached behind my back and whipped forth the blade the rabbi had given me, a twelve-inch stainless steel and silver Damascus rondel. In a single burst of inhuman speed, I stabbed it under the left side of his ribcage from behind and up toward his heart. Piotr sagged slightly, then he backhanded me quicker than I could block, even when running on bullet time. I caught it on my helmet and my cranium snapped back as I rolled with it, coming up with the katana in a crouch, head swimming and vision barely focusing on the vamp just a few feet away. He was trying to reach around to pull the dagger out, but he was weakening. With each flailing movement of his arms, he dropped lower and lower toward the floor. Whatever the rabbi had put on that knife, it must have been some powerful stuff.
I began to move forward to finish him off, but Kara moved faster than me, grasping the vampire’s head between her hands and twisting in a rapid, counter-clockwise motion. His neck snapped and his body sagged; she released his head and he collapsed in a heap. Then, hiding her face from me with her lab coat she ran from the room in a blur. I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me or if it was some kind of sick joke. I turned to follow her, but staggered as the infection in my bloodstream betrayed me yet again. I stumbled against the glass, and barely held myself up as I watched the scene below.
Down below, Josef’s hands blackened and smoked as he forced the control rods deep down into the containment housing by hand. As each rod was lowered, the glow from the reactor faded, slowly but surely receding to a faint blue glow. The demonic faces howled in frustration with each moment he worked, receding back into their imprisonment in that place beyond the Veil. Soon, only darkness remained. As he was done, the great monster collapsed at the side of the pool, sitting childlike while his clothing still smoldered and steamed from the heat of the reactor.
I stumbled around and slid down the wall of glass and cinder block to the floor. As I did, Bobby rushed over with Colin on his heels. I waved them away and pointed to the vampire’s body. “Colin, put that big ginsu knife of yours to good use and make sure that thing doesn’t get back up.” Then I gestured at Gabby, who was crying silent tears with pity in her eyes. “And Bobby, please untie Gabby and see to it that she’s okay.”
Then I slowly tilted my head back, and the world grayed out as I slipped into unconscious oblivion.
37
WASTED
When I regained consciousness, I was lying on a couch inside a break room of some sort. I hurt like hell all over. I had a headache to end all headaches, and felt like I wanted to puke. My head was fuzzy, and everything had a sort of grayish cast to it. Concussion, I thought. It figures. That vamp packed a wallop. After the room stopped spinning, I sat up and glanced around. Gabby sat at the foot of the couch, and Bobby leaned against the wall across the room, munching on a stash of potato chips and peanut butter crackers he’d liberated from somewhere.
“Where’s Kara?” I asked to no one in particular.
“We don’t know. No one’s seen her since she took off,” Gabby replied sullenly.
I nodded, even though it made my head pound to do so. “And the rabbi and Colin?”
“They decided to bring the settlers over here, for safety’s sake. They should be back any minute.”
“What about the golem?”
Bobby spoke up from across the room. “Hasn’t moved since that stunt he pulled. The rabbi says he’ll be radioactive for a while. Not safe to be around anyone living. So, he’s keeping him in the reactor room for now.” He munched on some chips and sprayed crumbs as he continued. “Plus, he said he wanted Josef to keep an eye on the area, to make sure nothing got through.”
I grunted something unintelligible in reply, and sat there collecting what little thoughts I could gather while suffering the aftereffects of a grade 3 concussion. I took a deep breath and whispered as I held my head in my hands. “Gabby.”
“Yeah Scratch.”
“Is Kara—one of Them?”
Her voice was so soft I could barely hear it, despite the deathly silence of the building. “Yes.”
She wrapped her small arms around my shoulders, and I wept until I had nothing left.
I slept until the next day, when I awoke to the sound of Janie and Nadine bitching and griping at each other from outside the break room where I’d crashed the night before. Apparently, Nadine was of the opinion that I hadn’t roused my happy ass early enough to satisfy her expectations. My head still pounded from the stunning blow that Piotr had given me, and if the way my face throbbed was any indication, I probably looked as bad as I felt.
The good news was that the general feeling of fuzziness had passed. Concussions were like that; your brain would go on autopilot for a time, while it tried to fix whatever had short circuited the connections that normally allowed you to walk, speak and think coherently. Then, hours later you’d get what boxers called “your wake-up call,” and suddenly the world was brighter and you could do simple math and think rationally again.
Of course, I knew that you weren’t supposed to go to sleep after suffering a head injury; I just didn’t care much after the revelations of the previous evening. We’d found out that there were perhaps tens of thousands of Them trying to come across the Veil; that there was a race of super-vampires that could move like Speedy Gonzales and who hit like the Hulk; and, oh yeah, my girlfriend had been turned into a vampire. No biggie.
As I reflected on the events of the past day, and Nadine’s shrill voice bounced around the room and drove nails in my skull, I felt every single ache, pain, bump, and bruise from every fight and scrape I’d been in over the past few weeks. Something inside me just snapped. I jumped up and stormed ou
t of the room, slamming the door against the wall with a crash and rudely interrupting whatever conversation they’d been having before I busted in.
Nadine turned and looked at me, only momentarily shocked by my sudden appearance. And just as she cracked those nasty, puckered, smoker’s mouth lips to complain, I shouted with menace in my voice.
“Just one more word, Nadine—one more ever-loving word from that disgusting open sore you call a mouth, and I will personally hogtie you and leave you here to get eaten by the shamblers when we head for freedom!”
She took a step back with one hand on her chest, stunned. Then she gathered herself and glared at me as she took in a short breath.
“Not one more word!” I said with menace in my voice.
She tucked tail and ran from the room.
Janie just stood there with a hand over her mouth, trying to avoid laughing and doing a piss-poor job of it. “Well Scratch, I—”
I cut her off, knuckling my forehead as I spoke at a whisper. “You too, Janie. I’m just not in the mood today.” She looked as though she might say something, then she turned up her nose and walked off, head held high and in no particular hurry. She reminded me of my mother; nothing could rattle that woman, and she’d been nigh on unflappable, just like Janie.
Gabby walked into the hall from an adjacent room, shaking her head. “Well, I think that straightened them out.” She grabbed my arm and gently pulled me down the hall. “C’mon, viejo. I have something that should cheer you up a bit.”
She led the way and I followed without resistance, fully worn down and spent from all that we’d been through over the previous days and nights. Gabby walked me into another room, where the smell of coffee—real, honest to God coffee—quickly perked me up and gave me a reason to live, if only for a few more minutes.
