There were half a dozen huge stakes along one side of the bonfire, and another half a dozen on the other side. There was a human tied to each stake, and they were all bound so tightly that they couldn’t move at all, so the only thing they could do was scream.
I couldn’t figure out why they screamed and then suddenly stopped, but I continued to let my boat drift forward as I watched. And just a few seconds later, I understood.
The humans were their fucking party favors.
Every time one of the vampires successfully crowd-surfed or won some fist-fight with another bloodsucker, they were led by a cheering crowd toward one of the human stakes. All the humans screamed like that would somehow magically keep them safe, but the winning vamp just ignored them and then simply picked whichever human they wanted.
As soon as they picked out their party favor, the fanged fucker would rip off an arm or a leg to drain all the blood out. Sometimes, they didn’t even bother to tear off a limb, and instead, they just dug their canines into an artery in the human’s neck or thigh, while the human screamed until they were too weak or too dead to continue.
It was a bleak fucking party.
I tried not to focus on the faces of all the humans that these Jersey vamps had captured, but I couldn’t help the fact that Lily’s blood made all the details of their expressions crystal clear. They all looked as terrified as they should be, and most of them looked like middle-aged suburbanites, like they had all been torn from their beds and dragged across their white picket fences down to serve as party favors to a bunch of blood-crazed vampires.
But a handful of the humans looked younger, probably around Nat’s age or maybe even a little younger. They could have been sorority sisters that had been nabbed from somewhere, and now they had to slowly watch as one after another of them was ripped to fucking shreds right in front of them.
My stomach twisted at the thought, but I just continued to let the boat drift. I hated the idea that any of these people had to suffer. Sure, I drank blood because I had to in order to survive-- and yeah, also because it was goddamn delicious-- but I never wanted to cause unnecessary pain to someone unless they fucking deserved it.
All I wanted to do was drive my boat straight toward the party, mow down all the vamps with my Daniel Defense rifle, and then rescue any humans that were still left.
But as much as I wanted to, I knew that it was too dangerous. There were way too many vamps for me to take on all by myself, especially since the great state of New York had made it so that my rifle magazine could only hold five rounds, and even my pistol could only hold seven. There was no way that I could mow down over two dozen vamps before they all rallied together and tore my head right off my body.
Besides, as I looked at the humans now, I could tell that none of them were going to survive much longer. They all had major wounds that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and every time one of them looked like they were about to feel a little stronger, the vamps chose that person as their next victim, and they opened up all their old wounds again.
I felt sick at the thought that I couldn’t even put them out of their misery. Sure, I could have tried to aim my rifle from here and shoot each human so they wouldn’t have to suffer any more, but just because my eyesight had been enhanced by Lily’s blood, that didn’t mean that my aim had been.
The shoreline was so far away that it would have been a challenge even for Natalie to hit, and she had known how to shoot ever since she was just a kid. So by the time I managed to put down a few of the humans, the vamps would all have spotted me, and they would probably all rush into their boats to come after me.
And even if they couldn’t catch me, the last thing I needed to do was draw any attention to myself. Rifle fire in the middle of the Hudson would definitely capture someone’s interest, and I wanted to keep my mission as quiet and stealthy as possible. The quieter I was able to be, the faster I should be able to return to the girls, and right now, that was all that mattered.
Even as my stomach tightened and then flipped at the scream of another sorority girl, I slowly started to accelerate Summer Breeze again. I had to clench my eyes shut for a minute to try and refocus myself, and I would have given anything to be able to stop up my ears as I passed by the partiers all around the bonfire. I had heard a lot of things since I first turned into a vampire, but I had a feeling that the screams of those girls would stay with me for a long time.
I shuddered and kept my gaze forward as I steered my sleek craft further up the Hudson. As much as I wanted to help them, I knew it was too late for them, and at the end of the day, I had to stay focused on my mission.
I had four girls of my own who needed me to come back safely to them, and I wouldn’t do anything to put them into danger. So if that meant I had to let a handful of humans die on the shore of the Hudson, then I would, because they weren’t the ones that I had promised to protect. I had promised to keep my girlfriend safe, just like I had promised to protect Erika, Catherine, and even Lily.
Right now, they were all that mattered.
A few minutes after I passed the bonfire, I glanced behind me and could still see it clearly, so I forced my gaze forward again and told myself just to not look back, no matter how many more screams I heard.
I looked forward again just as a huge yacht appeared out of the darkness up ahead. It churned the waters as it barreled down toward me, but unlike my small boat, it didn’t even bother to have its lights off. Instead, every single light was on, and that included both the docking lights, lights inside the huge multi-story cabin, and string lights that were hung up all along the railing of the yacht.
I steered Summer Breeze off to the side just in time to avoid a direct hit from the huge yacht, but most of the vampires on board barely even noticed me. They were too busy drinking from half-dead humans and dancing to their own music, and I wondered if they might be headed to the party that I’d just left behind me.
A few of the bloodsuckers glanced over the side of the yacht as they passed me, so I just smiled to show my pointed canines and gave them a little wave. As soon as they saw my teeth, they grinned back at me, and a few of the vamp girls even flashed me their tits with a laugh.
I waved again, and a few seconds later, I breathed a sigh of relief when the yacht finally passed me. I was glad that they were so busy pleasure-cruising that they didn’t give a shit about a random vamp on a small-ass boat, but even more than that, I was glad that the girls weren’t with me.
I knew that the best decision was to leave them behind in the armored truck, but this was just extra confirmation. If the girls had been with me, there was a much higher chance that one of the pleasure-cruisers-- or maybe even one of the Jersey party vamps-- would have smelled or seen the girls, and then we would have had to contend with that before I was even able to find some place to dock near Columbia.
As much as I didn’t want to let the girls out of my sight, I was glad that they were safer where they were, and I just had to trust that they would be until I got back.
When the yacht was well behind me, I accelerated Summer Breeze even more, so I wouldn’t drift off course every time I hit one of the huge waves made by the pleasure-cruisers. I kept looking to my right and to my left to keep track of my progress up the Hudson, so I could tell when I passed over the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.
I didn’t run into any more vampires or humans on the river, so it didn’t take me long to see the West Harlem Pier and the USS Baylander come into view up ahead on the right. I briefly flirted with the idea of testing to see if the old warship parked at the pier was operational, but I decided that I didn’t have time and that I ought to just stick to the plan. Since I knew that it was about a mile north of Columbia University, I would have to go the rest of the way on foot, but I hadn’t seen any other dock that was closer to the campus.
But since I was on my own, I figured that I would be fast enough to make it without too much trouble. Besides, as far as I knew, Kowalsky wasn’t on this side of the
river, so I shouldn’t be stopped by any of his goons. And if I ran into other vamps, I just hoped that they would be so busy with their own shit that they wouldn’t give a fuck about me.
I let the boat idle so I could start to drift toward the dock at the West Harlem Pier. I adjusted the steering wheel every so often, but for the most part, the boat just glided along the water toward the dock that I needed.
Now the only obstacle in my way was docking the boat itself.
I had never docked a boat, so even a small one would be a fucking challenge, but I also knew that I didn’t need it to be perfect. I just needed to get close enough to tie it off, plus close enough that I wouldn’t fall into the Hudson whenever I jumped from the boat onto the shore.
Of course, I also knew that if I really wanted to be smart about it, I would need to back the boat into the dock, so whenever I left, I could just pull out instead of having to reverse Summer Breeze first. That would make things a hell of a lot harder for me right now, but I had a feeling that I’d rather take the time to reverse now. After all, there were no other vamps in sight at the moment, but I didn’t know if the same thing would be true whenever I made it back to the boat.
“Alright, girl,” I sighed, “just work with me here, okay?”
I gave the boat just a little gas so I could start to reverse my position in the water. At least my vamp vision made it so that I didn’t have to turn on the docking lights in order to see where I was going. Instead, I kept one hand on the wheel, turned to look over my shoulder, and then slowly started to back the boat up toward the dock.
It really was just like driving a car, and since I had gotten used to driving Rhino, Summer Breeze really wasn’t all that different. If anything, she was just more responsive to everything that I did, so sometimes, she overcorrected too much with just a slight nudge of my hand.
Every so often, she lost too much momentum, so I had to give her a little bit more gas. Once, I gave her just a little bit too much, and I almost reversed right into the side of the fucking dock, but I was able to stop then drive forward again before it was too late.
After I had maneuvered her back and forth in the waves for a few minutes, I finally got close enough to reach the dock ties. I left the boat running, hurried toward the side, and then tied her up as quickly as possible.
It wasn’t a great knot, and it sure as hell wasn’t any kind of sailor’s knot, but it was strong enough to hold the boat in place unless we had some kind of crazy fucking storm in the next few hours. But right now, the sky was clear, so after I tied one more solid knot, I figured that was good enough for calm weather.
While I waited for Summer Breeze to stop rocking just a little, I powered down the boat and slipped the key into my pocket. Then once the boat was calmer, I hopped out, stumbled to catch my balance, and then moved away from the water as quickly as I could.
I wasn’t sure who I was afraid of. After all, I would have seen or heard someone if they started to approach me, but I just had this nervous knot in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t seem to shake.
Maybe it was because of the human party favors that I’d seen on the Jersey side of the river, or maybe it was the constant worry that I felt about the girls back in the parking garage.
But it could just as easily have been the thought of Lily’s blood. If it could make me see shit a mile away, that meant there was a chance that some other bloodsucker out there had found his own source of super-sight from some human that he’d drained.
Even now, someone might be watching me from a mile or more away, or someone might even be able to hear my footsteps from over a mile away. Maybe they could even hear my breathing.
It was enough to make me goddamn paranoid, but I exhaled and tried to keep a level head. Sure, there might be other vampires out there who had figured out that they needed variety, not just quantity, to really have an effective blood pool. But that didn’t mean that they would want to pick a fight with me, and it also didn’t mean that I couldn’t still beat the shit out of them.
I just had to take things one step at a time, and whenever I ran into any other vamps, I would deal with them however I had to, just like always.
I kept moving south, and when I had gone only fifty feet from the dock, I finally stepped over my first body. I was surprised that it had taken that long, but as soon as I stepped over the first corpse, it was like I entered a different world.
After everything that I’d seen in the last few days, the number of corpses that I passed didn’t really mean shit. But what did mean shit was the total chaos that surrounded me on every side. If Brooklyn Heights had been bad, Manhattan was somehow even worse.
We had seen the fires in Manhattan from the girls’ apartment building, and most of them seemed to have died down for the most part, but they had left behind a trail of total devastation. Every other building that I passed looked like a burnt-out shell of what it had once been, and any buildings that hadn’t burned to the ground looked like they had toppled over instead, so the streets were huge chunks of scrap metal.
Even without the collapsed buildings, the streets would still have been so full of crashed and burned out cars that I constantly had to weave back and forth to find a clear path forward. It was so much to focus on that I damn near forgot about all the corpses that I had to pick my way through.
The fires in Brooklyn Heights had made sense to me because I understood that Kowalsky wanted to control the movement of people in his territory. But I couldn’t understand why so many fires had been set in Manhattan, and I definitely couldn’t see any kind of pattern to it.
The only thing that I could figure was that it was designed to create total panic and chaos. And based on the number of smashed cars and human husks that had only been halfway pulled out of the driver’s seats before they were drained dry, I guessed that the campaign of chaos had been a success.
The NYPD were the only vampire force that I knew about in Manhattan, so if their goal had been to flush out everyone from their homes and businesses, then they had definitely accomplished it. I wondered how many humans the bloodsucking cops had in their possession, or if they planned to just take over the whole city and then take possession of all the other vamps’ ‘cattle.’
Either way, I just hoped that I wouldn’t run into any of the motherfuckers. My weapons were badass, but I didn’t want to test them out against the whole New York police department, especially since I didn’t have any kind of bulletproof vest.
Of course, even a bulletproof vest wouldn’t do any good against a bullet to the head, but eventually, I’d need to get some more gear if I was gonna go up against other well-armed vampires.
“Just remember, there’s no reason for other vamps to give a shit about you,” I muttered as I continued forward. “You’re just minding your own business, that’s all.”
Almost as soon as I had the thought, I heard sounds of a struggle up ahead, so I ducked underneath a restaurant awning as the sounds of a fight continued. I leaned out away from the wall and into the darkness ahead of me, but the scuffle must have been in an alley instead of out on the main street.
Still, since I didn’t know who or what the fuck was involved, I held myself perfectly still and waited to see if the fight would die down.
It didn’t.
Instead, three people stumbled out of a narrow alley up ahead and continued to fight under a streetlight that had halfway fallen over but still somehow managed to shine.
I pressed my back against the restaurant window again so they wouldn’t see me until I knew exactly what the situation was. All three fighters moved with such speed and strength that I immediately knew they were all vampires. But that wasn’t what concerned me.
It was the fact that two of them were cops, and they were working together to kill the third civilian vampire.
Chapter 7
This couldn’t be good.
I barely even breathed as I watched the two bloodsucking cops beat the shit out of the third vamp, but it lo
oked like I was already too late to help him. Besides, there was no guarantee that the civilian vampire was anything like my old friend Hippie Hank. This guy might be just as much of an asshole as the two cops, so I wasn’t about to intervene.
In the end, it only took about thirty more seconds before the NYPD vampires finished the civilian off. One of the cops kicked the poor fucker’s shinbone hard enough to crack it, and as soon as the civilian started to collapse, the second cop grabbed his head and popped it off like the cap of a champagne bottle.
The second cop tossed the head to the first vamp, and the first cop David Beckhamed it in my direction. Immediately, I dropped to the ground, and half a second later, the head bounced against the pavement a few yards behind me. It rolled off the sidewalk and back into the street until it finally came to rest against the flat tire of a taxi that had slammed into a streetlight.
The dead vampire’s eyes were still open, and they stared straight at me. They weren’t bloodshot or blood-starved at all, so I knew that this vamp hadn’t been feral. I just didn’t know why else the cops would have killed him, unless…
Well, unless the NYPD had decided to kill all the other vamps who weren’t a part of their crew. And even worse, they might not even be trying to recruit the other vamps. They might just kill non-cop vampires the moment they saw them.
Either way, it was bad news for me.
I stayed perfectly still on the pavement, but a second later, I heard one of the cops start to move in my direction. I hesitated just long enough to look around for a good hiding spot, and then as the footsteps came closer, I rolled across the asphalt and came to a stop underneath one of the crashed cars on the road.
I laid my head down on the ground, so I could look out and see the back of the dead vamp’s skull. As I saw the cop’s boots come into view and then move toward the lifeless head, I could feel the Louisville slugger start to slip from where I had slipped it into my belt.
Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth (Book 3): Vampire Lord 3 Page 8
