For just a second, I’d thought that I wouldn’t have to kill her, but then she’d gone and pulled out a knife on me. Of course, even if she’d meant it when she asked me to rule over her territory with her, I would never have accepted her offer.
I had the girls to think about, and besides, I had no interest in staying anywhere in Manhattan, much less one big-ass courtyard in the middle of three massive buildings.
I didn’t even want to stay in the dying city longer than we had to.
But there was nothing I could do about it now. She and her partner had picked the fight with me, and I would always do whatever it took to survive and get back to the girls.
I bent down to wipe off my slugger in the grass, and when it was clean of the worst of the vamp blood and brains, I turned and headed back toward the entrance of the courtyard. I passed the skinny male vamp’s body on my way out, but I didn’t even pause. I just exhaled, fixed my gaze forward, and kept going.
When I reached the human meat-sticks tied to the lamp posts at the beginning of the courtyard, I paused so I could listen for the cop car. Its sirens were further south now, and the sound of their megaphone was faint enough that I could only barely hear the words they kept repeating.
That must mean I was in the clear.
I slowly exited the courtyard and crept back toward the street. When I reached Broadway, I glanced in both directions along the huge road, but the only movement that I saw was the police lights far to the south of me. It meant they were headed toward campus, but it wasn’t like Broadway just stopped at Columbia. They would probably just keep driving south past the university, and even if they didn’t, it was a big campus, so I would be able to avoid them.
As I let the bat dangle at my side, I started down the main road again. Every few minutes, I would pause, hide in the shadows, and double-check to make sure that there were no other signs of life or movements out on the street. Each time I stopped, I didn’t see anything, but even though that was what I wanted, it didn’t keep me from feeling nervous as hell at the deafening sound of silence in the city.
Finally, the university buildings started to appear on my left. The sidewalk didn’t have enough hiding places to suit me, so I crossed the street and stopped at the median. I stepped into the shadows of a tree, leaned my back against the trunk, and pulled out Natalie’s phone.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered.
I pulled up my girlfriend’s message thread to her brother, and I typed a text like I was Nat.
We’re here, I texted him. Where are you?
Isaac responded in record time, and I had to remind myself that I didn’t know with one hundred percent certainty that he was a vampire. Even if I thought it was hella suspicious that he dragged his heels almost every time Natalie texted him, except for now, when he thought that she and her roommates were on campus.
But if he expected me to just hand-deliver all four girls to him for his own blood pool, Isaac had another thing coming.
Finally! Isaac texted back. We’re in Butler Library. Hurry.
I thought you were hiding in a classroom? I sent back.
This time, there was no response. Isaac didn’t even try to start typing a message, but it said that he had read it.
You there? I texted again.
Still, there was no response, and this time, it didn’t even show that Isaac had opened the message.
“I guess you need time to come up with a good enough lie,” I said as I rolled my eyes.
Unless he was absolutely the worst texter in the world, Isaac was one hundred percent a fucking bloodsucker.
At least the library gave me a place to start looking. I wasn’t sure where the library was on campus, so I opened a browser on Nat’s phone and looked for a wifi signal that I could connect to without a password. I expected the university’s wifi to come up as an option, but when I didn’t see any option for Columbia, I glanced up at the campus buildings again and realized that even though it was well-past sundown, all the university buildings and street lights were dark.
Someone must have already cut power to the campus.
“Well, this is gonna be fun,” I muttered.
Since I couldn’t connect to the university’s wifi, I raised my phone a little higher until a coffee shop came up as an option on my wifi list. It must have been a hippie coffee shop, too, because it allowed me to connect right away without any kind of password.
Once I was connected to the coffee shop’s weak signal, I pulled up a map of the university, scanned it, and quickly found the Butler Library. I just needed to go a little further south, finish crossing the road, and pass one row of wide buildings before the building would come in to sight up ahead.
I hopped down from the median but moved along the tree line further down Broadway. Even though this was a major road, most of the cars were parked instead of crashed or flipped over, and I wondered if that was because no one had been able to escape from their dorms in time to get to the cars.
I also wondered if I would be able to use any of these cars as a getaway vehicle whenever I left campus. At least I knew which roads were impossible to drive down and which ones were more open now, so if I did find an escape vehicle to take, I should be able to pick a route, stick to it, and get back to the river as soon as possible.
When one of the resident halls came into view, I knew that I was close. It was Furnald Hall, so that meant all I had to do now was walk by the dorm and alongside a lecture hall, and then I should see Butler Library from there.
I went ahead and finished crossing Broadway, but the moment I set foot on the sidewalk by the dorm hall, I knew that something was off. It was still completely quiet, but I could smell fresh human blood from somewhere up ahead.
I felt my mouth salivate at the smell of it, but even though all my instincts told me to run forward and find my prey, I forced myself to move forward slowly, so I wouldn’t walk right into a trap. The moment I saw a young human man run into view, I pressed myself up against the wall of the dorm because sure, he was running towards me, but he was obviously running from something.
And right now, I was a lot more concerned with what was chasing him than I was with the guy himself.
Three campus cops sprinted into view just a second later, and as soon as I saw their speed and their pointed teeth bared into animal-like grins, I knew that they were all vampires.
When the student was only two dozen paces away from me, the campus cop in the lead jumped forward and brought the human boy to the ground. Immediately, the two other vamp security cops leaped onto him too. The guy screamed and thrashed around on the ground, but after only a second of screaming, the scent of fresh blood spilled into the air as they started to rip apart his body with their teeth.
It was obviously already too late for the man.
Besides, the campus cops might be allied with the NYPD, and if I tried to intervene at all, I could have the whole Manhattan police force brought down on me. And even if they weren’t allied with the city cops, I had a feeling that these three bloodsuckers still wouldn’t appreciate another vamp trying to encroach upon their territory.
I needed to get the fuck out of there before any of them noticed me. I glanced behind me and started to move silently toward the side door into Furnald Hall. When I twisted the door handle, I thought for sure the campus cops might hear the noise, but they all looked too busy with their fresh kill to notice anything else.
Once I was inside the dorm hall, I spent what felt like five fucking minutes just to close the door again without making a sound. When I had eased it shut behind me, I turned around and glanced down the hallway.
Since the power to the university had been cut, the whole campus was dark, but inside Furnald Hall, it was even darker. Of course, I could still see just fine, thanks to Lily’s blood and my vamp vision, but it didn’t mean that it wasn’t still creepy as hell to be inside a dorm hall, at night, without power, and in the middle of a fucking vampire outbreak.
The ha
llway was littered with student bodies every direction that I looked. It was impossible to tell if they had been trying to run into the dorm hall and gotten caught by vamps anyway, or if they had been trying to run out of the dorm and gotten caught by other students who just so happened to turn into bloodsuckers.
Either way, they had all been completely drained, and some of them had even fallen on top of each other. I nudged a few of the corpses at the bottom of different piles, just to make sure they were all really dead, but every time I did, their flesh made a sound like rustling paper. I knew that meant they were just dried-up husks, so there was no point in trying to look for any survivors.
I stepped over the stacks of corpses as I moved further into the building. Since I wanted to avoid the campus cops completely, I figured I would just go to the other side of the residence hall, exit out another side door, and go on to the library from there.
At the end of the hallway, the building opened up into a huge student lounge. Huge arched windows stood on one side of the room, and the rest of the lounge was filled with couches and armchairs that looked like they belonged in some upstate hunting lodge instead of in a student dorm hall.
As I crossed over the lounge, I felt a draft of wind and realized that one of the windows had been partially broken. Based on the two student bodies that had fallen by the fractured glass, I guessed that they must have busted through the window to try to escape from the vamps in the dorm hall.
It wasn’t much of a surprise that they hadn’t made it out in time.
I started down the hallway on the other side of the lounge, but I had only made it a few steps before the whole dorm filled with a mournful wail. Even though I stopped in my tracks, I couldn’t keep the hair on the back of my neck from standing straight up, so I just waited to see if I could pinpoint the location of the creepy sound.
Someone wailed again, and it sounded further away, but when the wail repeated itself a third time, I swore it sounded like they were right behind me.
I whirled around with a tight grip on my bat, but the only things behind me were the dried-out husks of human bodies. When the shriek pierced the silence again, it sounded like it was above me, and I realized it must be coming from the second floor.
“Fuck me,” I groaned.
As much as I wanted to just keep going, leave the dorm, and get to the library, I also wanted to follow the source of the wail. There was a good chance that it was a human who needed to be put out of their misery, and they were probably so drained of blood that they couldn’t even form words anymore.
If I found them, I could at least mercy-kill them and then take the last of their blood as a little boost to myself. And even if there wasn’t enough blood to do me much good, I would still feel better if I knew that I had saved someone from a little bit of suffering.
And after the sight of all the human party favors at the beach party in New Jersey, I felt like I owed this wailing human in the dorm hall at least that much.
I followed the sound up the first flight of stairs that I found, and when I exited the staircase onto the second floor, the wail was so loud that I knew I had to be on the right floor. Now that I was on the same floor as the wail, it was even creepier than it had been downstairs, but at least it didn’t sound like it was moving around at all.
There were fewer bodies in the hallway on the second floor, but that was only because most of the corpses here were still in their bedrooms. Almost all the doors had been torn off their hinges, so now they hung lopsided off their frames or had simply been tossed aside, so the bloodsuckers had been able to run into the bedrooms and drain every last drop from the students inside.
I was sure that the wailing sound had to be from one of these students. One of the vamps must have thought they drained their victim dry, but there had been just enough blood left in them that they clung to life and now desperately needed someone to put them down.
But still, just in case it wasn’t a human victim, I didn’t call out or make any noises to let the person know that I was here to help.
As I moved across the second floor, the wailing sound was joined by a single thud from up ahead. That didn’t make me feel great about the fact that I’d decided to follow the wail up here, but I was committed now, so I just kept moving forward to try and find the source of either sound.
When the elevator came into view up ahead, I immediately noticed that it was open, so I braced myself for an attack. But then I realized that the door was just stuck halfway on the tracks. One of the student corpses had fallen across the elevator threshold, so it wedged the door open, and since the power had been cut, the elevator hadn’t even tried to close itself. It looked like it had just given up completely.
The wailing sound came from further down the hallway, somewhere past the elevator, so I started to move past the open door.
“Ah, shit,” I grumbled.
I had glanced into every dorm room that I passed, just to make sure that I didn’t see any vamps inside, so I realized that I better do the same thing for the elevator. I stepped toward the half-open door and didn’t see anything, but I knew that I could only see half the elevator thanks to the body that had wedged it just halfway open.
I took another step closer to the elevator, as the wailing sound continued from further down the hallway.
I walked into the frame of the elevator to check for any signs of life. At first, I saw only dead bodies in the bottom of the elevator, but as I swiveled my gaze to the left, someone snarled in the corner, jumped up, and tackled me before I could react.
Chapter 9
My right shoulder slammed into the frame of the elevator, but it wasn’t hard enough to do anything but sting a little bit. My hands were pinned down at my sides, so immediately, I kicked my boot out and felt it collide with something hard.
As soon as I kicked forward, my opponent released his grip on me and tumbled to the floor. I kicked him again, this time in the stomach, and he scrambled back into the elevator far enough that I could finally get a good look at him.
It was a feral vamp, but even though he looked pretty starved for blood, he didn’t seem as fragile as the bloodsucker back in the parking garage had. After all, there hadn’t been a lot of force behind this fanged fucker’s attack, but he had still managed to tackle me.
I lunged forward with my bat raised, but I instantly realized that the elevator was too small for me to swing my bat effectively. Instead, I backed out as quickly as I could, and the bloodsucker followed me out just like I thought he would.
Dumbass.
This vamp had probably thought that I was a human, and he was either too blood-starved to tell that I wasn’t, or he had reached such a point of desperation that he didn’t care what I was, just as long as there was some kind of blood inside me.
His lips curled into a snarl as he followed me out into the hallway, but after just a few steps, he dropped down onto all fours and started to crawl toward me. It only took one glance at his legs to see why; his right leg was swollen close to the knee, and it looked like one of his shin bones was about ready to burst out through his skin like some kind of infesting alien.
I didn’t know if my kick had done that to him or if it was an older injury that needed blood before it could properly heal, but I didn’t really care. I just needed this fucker out of the way so I could get the hell out of here.
“Serves me right for checking the fucking elevator,” I muttered.
While I continued to back up, the feral vamp just crawled on his hands and knees toward me, and from somewhere up ahead, the wail sounded again.
I just needed to get enough distance between me and this fucker to swing my bat and finish him off, but it didn’t help that I kept getting distracted by that damn shrieking in the background. And every time I focused myself again, the back of my boot nudged itself into a stray body in the hallway, and I had to step backward carefully so that I didn’t trip over it.
The wild vamp looked like he had just started to pick up a
little steam, so I decided that this was as good a place as any to make my stand against him. I planted my feet firmly on the floor with my left foot a little out in front of my right one, and then I held the bat up to wait for the bloodsucker’s attack.
The blood-starved vampire stopped as soon as I did. His teeth were still bared like an animal, but foamy saliva had started to spill out either side of his mouth. As it dripped down his chin and onto the floor, he rubbed his hands in his own spit and then wiped them off on his face.
“Gross,” I said, even though I had a feeling this poor fucker was way past the point where he could still understand human language.
Suddenly, the feral vamp galloped toward me on all fours with a snarl that echoed all up and down the hallway. I had just enough time to notice that the wailing stopped at the same time that this fucker’s snarl started, and then I had to swing my bat before he tore into the artery in my thigh.
An improvised golf swing with my Louisville Slugger knocked him off course and sent him sprawling across the floor. One arm was twisted awkwardly underneath his back, but when I walked over to him, the fanged fucker used his one good hand to grasp the end of my bat before I could hit a home run.
It was a good distraction, so I let him hold onto it. While he tried to rip the slugger out of my hands, I raised my foot, gritted my teeth, and stomped down onto his skull.
The poor fucker was so weakened that my first kick went straight through his cranium. It wasn’t quite enough to smash all the way through his brain, but the skull bones themselves caved into the center of his head like pieces of broken pottery. One more stomp of my boot sent the bone shards into his moldy brain matter, and instantly, the vamp went totally still.
“Sorry, man,” I sighed. “It’s better for you this way, anyway.”
I wiped the sole of my boot off on the man’s pants so that I wouldn’t track bloody footprints all over the dorm. As soon as I finished cleaning up, I straightened my posture, glanced up and down the hallway, and wondered when the fuck it had gotten so quiet.
Conquering A Bloodthirsty Earth (Book 3): Vampire Lord 3 Page 11
