So ready or not, shit was about to go down.
After I had set up all the cones and construction barrels on the way to the armored truck, I made sure that the girls themselves were as prepared as possible. Natalie and I checked all of their weapons, and after we were sure that all their pistols were fully loaded, we checked her roommates’ rifles to ensure the same thing.
Then once their weapons were taken care of, I turned my attention to the inside of the truck itself. When I had thrown all the luggage and supplies into the back of the armored truck, I had tried to make it as comfortable as possible for the girls to ride in, but now I wanted to rearrange it, so it could act as some kind of barricade in case the worst happened.
We stacked all the heavier supplies against the walls of the truck, so only the lighter and softer bags remained in the middle for the girls to sit on. This kind of arrangement would never work if we had to actually drive the truck, but since it was really just meant as an extra layer between the girls and any vamps who might come after them, it should work.
“Alright, so here’s the plan,” I said finally. “I’m gonna get a boat, go up to Columbia, do my best to save Isaac and the two girls, and then bring them back here. Then, if I manage to do all that, we’ll find the best way out of the city, okay?”
“Aye, aye, Captain Drac,” Catherine said with a little salute. “Well, I guess it should be Count Drac, huh?”
“And we’ll just wait here?” Lily asked.
“Yeah, that’s the plan,” I said. “Erika can keep trying to get a wifi signal here, so you all can try to plan the best route out of the city, or see if you can find out anything else about the bosses who are taking over different territories and stuff.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Erika promised.
“If it gets too hot in the truck, I’d rather you open up the truck door for just a minute to air it out,” I said. “Don’t just crank it up and turn on the air. The sound would be too loud, and I don’t want it to draw any attention.”
“Yeah, it feels pretty good right now, but it might get stuffy after a while,” Lily said. “We’ll close the door real quiet when we’re done, though, and then nobody should fuckin’ know, right?”
“Exactly,” I said. “And listen, I don’t think any vamps are gonna come here and try to break into the truck, but if they do, there’s two things that I want you to do.”
“We’re listening,” Natalie said.
“One, drive like hell,” I said. “Do any of you think you could drive this thing?”
“I could do it,” Catherine said and then pointed to her long legs. “I’ve got the legs for it, see?”
“Then you can try to drive the fuck out of here and run them all over,” I said. “You can text me on Nat’s phone when you get somewhere safe, and then I’d find you when I get back.”
“What’s the second thing?” Erika asked.
“If you can’t drive or get away from them, then you use every last fucking one of your bullets,” I said. “They’ll have to break into the truck itself first, and that’ll be hard, so you just sit tight until they manage to get it open. Then you just open fire and don’t stop.”
“Got it,” Natalie said and then swallowed. “We’ll be okay, Sam. You just take care of yourself.”
“I know you’ll be okay,” I said. “And I’ll be back as soon as I can, alright?”
“Be careful,” Lily said.
“I will,” I said. “You too.”
I kissed Natalie and turned to go, but then Erika went up on her tiptoes and kissed me softly on the cheek.
“See you soon, Sam,” the black-haired girl said.
“You bet,” I said with a smile, and then I closed the truck door to leave the girls behind.
I had my Mark 23, my Daniel Defense rifle, and my Louisville slugger with me, and I had decided not to bring any other weapons. I had grabbed a few extra magazines of ammunition, but I left most of the extra ammo for the girls.
As soon as I reached the ground level, I hopped over the orange cones and moved quickly down the sidewalk. The marina office was just up ahead in the opposite direction of the wine and spirits store, and if I was going to find the keys to any of the boats anywhere, then the marina office would definitely be the place.
The marina office was a modest building that overlooked the pier and had a clear view across the river to Manhattan, but before I just broke in through the front door, I thought I should at least check to see if any other doors or windows had been left unlocked. After all, I didn’t want to make any more noise than I absolutely had to, so no vamps would be attracted to the noise and accidentally discover the four girls that I’d left in the truck.
I didn’t think they were in too much danger, or I wouldn’t have left them. This section of Brooklyn Heights seemed just about goddamn deserted, and even though the bloodsucking bosses would probably move into this area eventually, the place seemed clear right now.
For once, I was actually grateful that the vampires had organized into gangs with asshole bosses. At least it kept them busy, and at least whatever the bosses’ current plans were, they didn’t seem to involve Pier 5 or the fucking river.
I just hoped we would be able to get the fuck out of town before our plans overlapped.
The front door and windows of the marina office were locked, and so were the windows along the side, but when I circled around to the back to try the rear entrance, the door was cracked open.
“Well, that doesn’t seem quite right,” I muttered.
I gripped the Louisville slugger a little tighter in my hands and then carefully opened the back door to the office.
When no one jumped out at me right away, I stepped inside, closed the door shut behind me, and turned to let my eyes instantly adjust to the shadows inside the marina office.
As soon as I glanced around, I realized why I had only seen one stray vamp in this area so far, and that was all the way back in the parking garage. It was because there were no humans left here for the fanged fuckers to drink from.
Everywhere I looked inside the marina office, there were drained husks of human corpses, and anywhere there wasn’t a whole dried-out shell of a person, there was an arm or a leg that had been ripped off and tossed aside once it was drained of all its blood. Some of the limbs had been chewed all the way down through the muscles and stringy tendons, so I could see teeth marks on the bones themselves from the bloodsuckers who had wanted to get out every last drop, and that included the bone marrow.
I stepped over a woman’s head to move further into the office-- at least, I thought it had been a woman, but the exsanguinated husk that was left behind made her flesh look like the papery skin of a mummy, so it was hard to tell. As I walked down the back hallway and into the office itself, the body count just kept climbing, but the surprise had worn off. I just picked my way through chewed-up bones and bloodless tendons that had been torn out and tossed aside when they proved too stringy for the bloodsuckers to devour.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why the back door had been left open. A group of humans must have tried to hide in here and secured all the doors, but they hadn’t locked the back door in time.
Sure, it sucked for them, but it could have been worse. They could have been taken by Kowalsky or Grantham and kept as cattle, so really, this wasn’t such a bad way to go.
Still, I didn’t plan on going out this way myself, and I sure as hell wouldn’t let the girls go out like this. We were better prepared and better armed than all of these poor fucks, and I would do whatever it took to get us out of New York.
Just as soon as I took care of Isaac and the two girls with him.
When I started to rifle through all the drawers in the office, I didn’t expect there to be a hell of a lot of keys. After all, most boat-owners probably kept their keys in their own homes, but I trusted that enough of them would either leave their keys here for convenience, or they would have made copies of them to leave here just in case.<
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After I had searched through all the drawers for several minutes, I had just started to doubt myself when I moved on to a large cabinet behind the front desk. It was locked, but all I had to do was yank on the handle, and the lock broke easily.
And sure enough, inside the cabinet were rows and rows of fucking boat keys. Each key was labeled with the dock number of its boat, but I didn’t have time to run out to the pier, check each dock number, and then come back to grab the key to the boat that I wanted.
Instead, I grabbed all the keys to the dock numbers that started with “A” and slipped them into my right pocket. Then I grabbed all the keys to the dock numbers that started with “B” and slipped them into my left pocket, and I did the same thing for the “C” docks, only I slid those keys into one of my back pockets.
It would still take me a minute to find the right key to the right boat, but at least this way, I kept them a little bit organized for myself.
As soon as I had all the keys, I glanced around the office but didn’t see anything else useful. I’d have better luck finding something helpful on the boats themselves, since this office was mostly just a collection of paperwork and checks that didn’t mean shit now that the end of the goddamn world had arrived.
I went back out through the rear entrance and left the door cracked like I had found it. The keys jingled in my pockets when I walked, so I tucked my heavy bat into my belt and gripped my pocket as best I could. They still made just a tiny bit of noise, but it wasn’t as loud as it had been at first.
It was a quick walk across the street over to Pier 5, and when I reached the first row of docks, I glanced at the numbers and saw that they all started with “A.” Before I reached into my pocket, I looked all down the row, but I didn’t see any of the boats that had caught my attention earlier, so I moved on to the “B” row and then the “C” row before I finally saw the boat that I wanted to steal.
About a third of the way down the “C” row of the pier, there was the sleek triangular-shaped craft that I had spotted earlier with the girls. It was so small that the crafts around it looked like giants by comparison, but I could tell just from looking at it that it was a fast motherfucker, and I would have bet anything that it was quiet, too. And right now, that was all I cared about.
As I glanced up at the sky and saw that the sun was almost down to the horizon, I hurried along the “C” dock toward the sleek craft. There was a one in twelve chance that the first key I tried would be the right one, but I didn’t care if it took me to the twelfth key before the boat cranked up. I just hoped that one of these keys from the office was actually to this boat.
When I reached the boat, I saw that the name on the side of it was Summer Breeze. It certainly wasn’t the most original name I’d ever heard for a boat, but it was better than some of the names that I’d passed on the pier, like Seas the Day, Life’s a Beach, and of course, Master Baiter.
I climbed on board the Summer Breeze and went straight to the cockpit. After I pulled out all the keys in my back pocket, I started to try to fit them into the ignition one at a time. The first five keys didn’t fit the hole at all, the sixth one went in but couldn’t turn, and the seventh one slid in and almost got jammed when I tried to pull it back out.
But the eighth key-- the eighth key was the winner.
As soon as I slid it into the ignition, I could feel that it was the right key, and when I turned it, it immediately cranked the engine on with a low purr.
“Good girl, Summer,” I told the boat with a grin. “Now, let’s see what else you can do.”
I pulled out the rest of the boat keys from my pockets and tossed them all into the glovebox of the boat. I didn’t think I would need any of them, but if there was one rule of the apocalypse, it was to never throw away something when there was even a tiny chance that it might be needed later.
Once my pockets were free of their extra noise and weight, I moved to the side of the boat and untied Summer Breeze from the dock. After the boat was free from the dock ties, I hurried back to the cockpit, gripped the steering wheel, and slowly started to drive the boat away from the pier.
“Okay, so it’s gotta be just like driving a car, right?” I murmured. “Just a little bigger-- and on the water.”
At least the last person who had driven Summer Breeze had reversed her into the dock, so I didn’t have to back out first. Instead, I was able to just pull forward and gradually turn the steering wheel until the nose of my sleek craft was pointed in the direction of open water.
I kept my speed as slow as I could go at first. I didn’t know how shallow the water was around the pier, but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t accelerate too quickly and fuck myself over before I even got started. Besides, it gave me a quick chance to test how sensitive the steering wheel was, and just like I thought, she responded to every touch of my hand like a goddamn dream.
My armored truck was built like a fucking tank, and it was as loud and badass as an actual rhino, but Summer Breeze was an entirely different experience. She drove like a damn sports car, like an Aston Martin or maybe a Bugatti. Every time I nudged the steering wheel, she purred and followed my direction, and whenever I accelerated even a little bit, she hummed underneath me and parted the waves before us in near-silence.
She was the perfect boat for what I hoped would be a quick in-and-out rescue mission.
By the time I got her into open water, the sun had completely disappeared behind the city skyline, and darkness started to creep over the river from the west. I still moved slowly until I had a chance to check over my shoulder and make sure that no vamps or even humans had appeared around the dock behind me, but everything was still just as empty as when I had found it.
After I was sure that no one had heard me leave, I increased the speed of my sleek craft and bounced along the choppy waves of the East River. Even when we accelerated, Summer Breeze was still as quiet as ever, so the only sound that we made was whenever we bounced a little too hard on a wave.
As I steered her in the direction of Governors Island, I almost forgot that we were in the middle of an apocalypse. For a few glorious minutes, all I thought about was the feeling of the wind in my face, the smooth steering wheel under my hands, and the spray of the water against my skin every time it kicked up from under my luxury speed boat.
Night fell even quicker over the water than I had expected, but the darkness didn’t bother me at all. My normal vamp vision would have allowed me to see just as clearly in the dark as it did in the daytime, but now that I had Lily’s blood in my system, it felt like I could see the whole goddamn city.
When I passed Governors Island, I glanced over at the land to my left and could see individual bodies scattered all along the shore. It looked like some of the humans on the island had tried to run into the water to escape, but it didn’t seem like it had done them much good.
They’d probably thought they were safe on the island, but there must have been enough fuckers there who’d gotten the vaccine, and when they’d turned, there had been nowhere for any of the other poor bastards to run away to.
I gently twisted the steering wheel and started to swing north up the Hudson River. The lights of the city were all still on, except for just a few patches of darkness here and there where the vamps must have cut the power, but I made sure that I kept the lights off on my boat.
Of course, there was still a chance that other vamps would see my boat even without its lights, but there was no reason for me to make it easier for them. And since I could see just fine, it wasn’t like I actually needed the boat’s lights to be on for me to tell where I was headed.
I had just started to feel good about my progress so far, when suddenly, I heard a single scream from up ahead. It died away almost as soon as it started, but the hairs on the back of my neck all prickled up, and just a second later, the scream sounded again, only this time, it was joined by a whole chorus of ear-splitting shrieks.
Chapter 6
A chill swe
pt down my spine at the sound of the piercing screams, and instantly, I let the boat drift to a stop in the middle of the river. Since my lights were off, I knew that no vampire would be able to see me unless they actually scanned the river for signs of movement, but I wanted to make sure that no one could see me-- at least for as long as it took me to figure out the source of all the screams.
I knew if I listened long enough, I could pinpoint their exact location, but every time the screams started again, they were cut off before I was completely sure of their source.
Well-- that wasn’t entirely true.
I had a feeling that I already knew the source of the screams, since it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the only creatures that screamed like that during a vampire apocalypse had to be humans. But even though I knew there probably wasn’t a lot I could do to help them, I thought I could at least check and see.
I understood that all vampires had to eat, just like I did, but there was also no reason for them to torture humans before they killed them. And from the sound of the screams that I heard right now, it definitely sounded like the vamps were having a little bit of fun with their prey before they finished them off.
It took two more rounds of screams before I finally found the location that they came from. My boat had continued to drift forward in the water, so just a few minutes after the screams first started, I saw light from a huge bonfire on the New Jersey side of the river up ahead.
At first, I only saw a huge crowd of vampires gathered around the fire. They were dancing and blasting loud music, and every now and then, they’d lift each other up and crowd-surf to the beat of the music. A few couples were fucking right in front of everybody else, and I guessed there might be even more who had decided to go somewhere a little more private to fuck each other’s brains out.
All in all, there were easily two dozen bloodsuckers around the bonfire, and when I looked a little closer, I realized exactly who had been screaming loud enough to be heard above the music.
Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth (Book 3): Vampire Lord 3 Page 7
