by Logan Jacobs
“Okay, Havak,” he said hurriedly. “I think I can disable all the alarms for this level and the elevator once it comes back. Ha, I love it when a plan comes together.”
“Don’t get too happy just yet, Hann-Abel,” I said quietly as I saw what was happening on the display screen that was tapped into the security camera feed on multiple levels. It was Level Five that had drawn my attention. “We may have just gone from the frying pan and into the fire.”
“What are you talking about?” Hann-Abel asked. I pointed to the screen. “Oh, shit.”
The two of us watched in stunned silence as a horror show scene unfolded on the screen. About ten lean, sinewy, black leather skinned creatures rampaged through inmates and security guards alike on Level Five. They had razor like claws at the end of their skinny, over long arms. Their heads were smushed with upturned noses and large, oversized ears, and they had blood-red eyes. But by far the most terrifying feature were the long, pointed canine teeth that protruded from their mouths.
We watched as they sank them into the necks of those who tried to run from and drank deep of the lifeblood that poured forth. Once the husk of a body was drained of all blood, the creatures moved on to their next victim. The body that had fallen stayed still for only a moment or two before it began to shake and convulse. Its bones snapped and broke and reformed as its skin sloughed off to be replaced by black leathery skin. When the transformation was complete, what had once been a bloodless corpse was another of the creatures hungry for blood.
“Vampires,” I said quietly. “Why’d it have to be vampires?”
Chapter Thirteen
“Well that just fubared my plan all to hell,” Hann-Abel said plainly.
“You know,” I started ranting. “Is it too much to ask that our escape from a remote alien prison not have freaking vampires? Is it? No. No. I don’t think that it’s too much to ask for really.”
“Calm down, Havak,” Hann-Abel said… calmly. “I’m already working on a contingency plan. We need to get up as high as we can, as fast as we can before the vampire virus infects the lower levels.”
“So, you know what this is?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s actually not that uncommon in certain sectors of the galaxy,” Hann-Abel explained. “This being one of them. If Noor’Tun had been worth a shit he would have made sure all incoming prisoners went through a viral screen before being introduced into genpop. But he’s clearly an incompetent idiot, so… vampire virus.”
“Okay, Van Helsing, what kills these things then?” I asked and got myself back under control. “We need weapons.”
“Sunlight is the big one,” he responded as he started to flip some button on the console in front of us. “Ah, shit. Well, looks like levels one through five are almost completely overrun. There are a few pockets of resistance and a couple of guard stations that are holding out, but everything is a vampiric mess. Um, right, what kills them? Cut their heads off, or put a big enough hole where their hearts should be.”
“Hey, I have an idea,” I said, suddenly having an idea. “What if we initiated the liquidation process for the cuffs? Ninety eight percent of those things are former inmates, right?”
“Hmm,” Hann-Abel muttered as he looked at the display screens. “Not bad, Havak. That is a great idea.”
“Sweet,” I said excitedly. “How do we do that?”
“Noor’Tun,” Hann-Abel replied. “We need to get to his office. It’s on the third floor. I bet he’s barricaded himself behind his blast doors with a few guards and is just going to wait this thing out. If he was smart, he’d initiate the liquidation process himself now and save a shit ton of trouble. But, as we have deduced, he’s a moron who's probably shitting his pants right about now.”
The elevator opened up at the end of the hallway. We were close enough that I could see that it was filled with various colors of spilled alien blood.
“Come on,” Hann-Abel said, and we moved to the elevator. “I’m going to try to get us up through to at least level two.”
“Hey, we should stop off at level seven,” I said as I remembered what Zvee had said. “There is a machine shop there. I want to make us some weapons. I don’t want to try to fight a bunch of vampires with nothing but our dicks and foul language.”
“Good call,” Hann-Abel agreed and hit the Level Seven button on the control console of the elevator. “But you better make it quick. That virus is spreading exponentially.”
We rose the three floors without any fanfare and soon the elevator doors opened to a deserted hallway with flashing red lights. Whatever guards had been stationed there had clearly decided to head for the fucking hills.
Hann-Abel and I darted quickly down the hallway and followed the signs posted on the walls to the machine shop. I opened the door slowly and found it to be completely empty of life.
It was full of all sorts of interesting machines. My improvised weapons mod fired up, and I was drawn by instinct to a couple of devices. One was a laser lathe, sort of like the one that I had almost been killed by at Darry’s shop, and the other was a 3D printer. I loaded the printer with some metal blocks and typed in a few quick commands that I sincerely hoped would spit out the desired results.
While it was working, I rummaged through the bins of scrap metal and wood and found an eight foot length of an inch and a half dowling rod. I brought the rod over to a plasma saw and cut in into two foot-and-a-half long lengths and then cut off five more eight inch lengths. I set the two larger pieces by the printer and then took the remaining five to the lathe which I fired up and began to ground down one end of the rod into a very sharp point. Five minutes later, I had five eight inch long wooden stakes.
The printer still had a few more minutes so I found a thick, leather metal worker apron and cut it into sections that I then wrapped around my forearms and secured with space duct tape.
“I’d suggest doing the same,” I said and tossed Hann-Abel two of the cut leather pieces. “We don’t want to get bit.”
“Good call, Havak,” Hann-Abel said. “It’s a shame you are already allianced up. You’d be good in a fight.”
“Yeah, I tend not to follow orders too well,” I shot back at him with a grin.
“Fair enough,” he grinned back as he wrapped the leather greaves around his forearms. I’d noticed he’d found a compressed air, belt fed, rivet gun that he’d slung around his shoulder on a sling made from a length of twine. The guns compressed air tank was hung from a loop on his own belt.
“You didn’t happen to find another one of those did you?” I asked as I checked on the progress of the printer. It was almost done.
“Nope, just the one,” he replied with a shrug. “I did find a blowtorch.”
“Nah,” I said. “The last thing we need is a bunch of flaming vampires running around turning this into a big inferno.”
“My thoughts, too,” he echoed. “You almost done?”
Just then the printer dinged, and I pulled the two machined pieces of lightweight metal out of the bay. I slid one side of the dowling shaft into each one and then slammed them home so that the metal head wedged into the end of the dowling.
“Hand me that rivet gun real fast,” I said to Hann-Abel who obliged. I shot two rivets into each shaft just under where the metal heads were wedged in place.
Then I held them up in front of me. I’d made two pick axes that looked very similar to what ice climbers used. Each end had two seven inch solid metal pikes that came out each side of the shaft. They weren’t quite my Space Viking Axes, but they would do for now. I spun them around in each hand and then flourished them in front of my body before dropping them to my sides.
“All right,” I said with a glint in my eye. “Let’s go kill some fucking vampires.”
As if on cue, a very nervous security guard bolted into the room and pointed a scatter gun at us.
“You, you, you inmates get down on the ground now!” He shouted in a voice that cracked several times. He looked young, ine
xperienced, and scared as shit.
“Yeah, son, I don’t think we’re going to do that,” Hann-Abel said and began to slowly raise the rivet gun.
“Hey man, shit has hit the fan in a big way, right?” I blurted out and started to walk toward the kid. “You’ve lost contact with command, right?”
“Um, yeah, yeah,” he stammered. The barrel of the scatter gun waived all over the place. “It’s fuh-fuh-fucking vampires. Oh, man. We are toast. Game over, man. Game fucking over.”
“Hey, Hudson,” I shouted at him to get his attention back. “You need to calm down buddy, we’ll get you out of here, okay?”
“Wha-why?” He stuttered. “You’re vicious convicts. I should shoot you now.”
“Yeah, you could do that,” I said and sheathed the pikes in my belt and then held up my hands in front of me to show him I meant him no harm. “But then you’d have no one to help you get the hell out of here. Right?”
“Um, maybe, why should I trus--” he started to say and then a rivet appeared in the center of his forehead. He fell lifeless to the ground and the scatter gun clattered at my feet.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” I shouted as I turned on Hann-Abel.
“He was a liability,” Hann-Abel shrugged without any remorse. “Thanks for keeping him occupied so I could get a good shot.”
“Fuck, Hann-Abel, he was just a kid, you didn’t have to kill him,” I said furiously.
“Havak, he was already dead,” Hann-Abel said. “It would have been cruel to give him false hope that he would survive. You and I have about a twenty percent chance of making it out alive, and we are hardened champions.”
“Yeah, yup, this is why we won’t be friends on the outside,” I grumbled and picked up the scattergun. It was empty. “Fuck.”
“Empty, right?” Hann-Abel commented. “Exactly what I suspected. We need to go.”
With a scowl I begrudgingly followed him as we made our back to the elevator. We got on and Hann-Abel put one of the keys he had taken from the guard against the control panel until a green light lit up, then he pressed the button for the top floor.
“See if this works,” he said as the elevator began to rise. I just grunted. He turned to look at me. “I’m sorry if you don’t like my methods. I’m not here to make friends, or save innocent lives, I’m here so that I can escape. So that I can continue to draw breath for another day. So that I can continue to compete. Your childish sentimentality for an adult who chose this job freely, fully understanding the dangers that came with it, is a distraction. I suggest you lock it down before it gets us both killed.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I grumbled. Angry didn’t even begin to describe how I felt at the moment. It was a mixture of guilt, frustration, and begrudging acceptance. That poor kid didn’t need to die at that moment, in that way, and I felt responsible for it. But at the same time, Hann-Abel was fucking right, and I hated it. If that guard’s gun had been loaded, and he’d raised it to shoot at us, I would have killed him without hesitation. So, maybe I did need to look at my own moral compass.
As soon as we got the hell out of this charnel house of a prison. “I know how to compartmentalize.”
“Good,” Hann-Abel said and nodded as he checked the load on his rivet gun. I noticed that he’d also stuck a long, think bladed leather working knife in his belt. It had a nine inch slightly curved blade and looked sinister and malevolent. As if leather had never been its intended purpose, and it longed to taste the salty spray of fresh blood.
Hann-Abel caught me looking at it and grinned. “Just in case it gets up close and personal. My father was a butcher back on my home world. He was an artist with a blade. I grew up watching him work. He wasn’t very happy when I didn’t go into the family profession and joined the military instead.”
“I never knew my father,” I admitted. I really didn’t know what else to say to that odd, Gangs of New York style admission.
“Lucky you,” Hann-Abel said with a small sneer. “Mine was a butcher in more than just profession.”
“You can leave the copay and make sure to schedule your next therapy session with my receptionist,” I snarked.
“Your use of humor to dispel tension is both admirable and infuriating,” he sighed.
“Yeah, you’re not the first one to ever say that,” I shrugged. “I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam. Toot toot.”
Hann-Abel was just about to ask me if I’d hit my head or was having a stroke, I knew the look well, when the elevator shuddered to a halt. The light on the console began blinking bright orange.
“Where are we?” I asked because Hann-Abel had bent over the control mechanism.
“Level Five, half way,” he said as he pulled the cover from the console and began trying to mess with the spaghetti plate of colored wires and circuit boards. “Thankfully one of my upgrades was improvised electronic manipulation.”
“Ohh, good one,” I whistled. A loud bang on the roof of the elevator drew both of our attentions. Then there was a distinctive CLACK-CLACK-CLACK of clawed feet as they walked across the outside of the elevator car. “Um, see if you can improvise the door opening please.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Hann-Abel retorted.
The clacking had stopped, and it was strangely quiet for a long moment. Then a razor clawed hand tore through the metal of the roof like it was aluminum foil, and a vampire stuck its black, leathery, bat-like face through the opening and shrieked. In the confines of the elevator it was like the sound of hell tearing open at the seams.
Once the creature had the scent of us it began to wriggle and squirm to get inside, its fanged mouth snapping open and closed frantically, long, thick, strings of saliva dripping from its maw.
“Fuck you,” I said as I drew one of my pikes and swing it up in a wide arc. The pointed end sank into the vampire’s skull just as it had gotten its shoulders through the opening. It struggled for a brief second and then the red light in its undead eyes faded and clouded over. Ichorous black tar blood poured from the wound as I removed the pike and stood back, disgusted. The smell was putrid, like week old rotted hamburger seasoned with pickled herring. “Ugh, and I thought they smelled bad on the outside.”
“Almost have it…” Hann-Abel whispered, deep in concentration as he twisted two wires together and began to spark them against the edge of an exposed circuit board.
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
Three more vampires dropped onto the top of the elevator.
“Here we go,” I muttered to myself and pulled the other pike from its loop on my hip so that I had one in each hand. The body of the dead vampire disappeared back through the hole Korean horror movie quick, and I could hear the sick, wet sounds of the corpse being torn apart. Adrenaline spiked my bloodstream and I felt the comfortable tingle in my nerves and the beat of my heart hammering in my ears.
A moment later, one of the vampires jumped through the hole, its sinewy, leathery body quivering with anticipation of a fresh kill.
Little did it know that the kill would be mine.
As soon as it landed I swung my left handed pike at its head. The creatures were preternaturally fast, however, and it ducked long before the pike even got close. I’d figured as much, though, and as it ducked I swung my right hand pike up in an underhanded swing so that the tip went through the beasts chin and popped out the top of its head. I let the creature’s weight as it sank to the ground dislodge the pike for me as I readied for the next vampire to come through.
I didn’t get a chance thought because the elevator doors opened and Hann-Abel and I rushed out on to level Five.
It was a slaughterhouse.
Broken lights flashed sporadically, creating an unsettling strobe effect on the room that stretched out before us. We’d come out in the common area for this floor. It was a rectangular room maybe a hundred feet by fifty feet with various hallways stretching off from the main hub like spokes that led to the various cell blocks. All different color
s of alien blood were splattered on the wall, ceiling, and floor. Chairs and tables were overturned like a hurricane had come through the place. Torn bits of flesh and dismembered body parts were strewn about like trash.
Hann-Abel and I ran into the room and then turned back toward the elevator. He had the rivet gun in one hand and the long, thin flaying knife in the other as we set ourselves to repel the vampire attack from the open elevator doors.
We didn’t have to wait long.
The two nightmare beings burst forth as fast as shadows and came at us. I was able to get my pikes crossed in front of my face as one of the vampires crashed into me, and we hit the ground in a roll. I caught a glimpse of the one that came at Hann-Abel who stood stock still until the thing was two feet away from him which is when his right hand shot out and he pulled the trigger on the rivet gun. The steel bolt hit the vampire in the nose and blew out the back of its head in a splash of black, stringy blood.
That was all I saw, because the next thing that filled my vision was a black, fang-filled mouth five inches from my face. The creatures were crazy strong, and it was all I could do to hold it off. I’d managed to get the x created by my crossed pikes around its throat but the business bits of the pikes were behind the creatures head. Its mouth continued to get closer and closer to my face. I gathered my legs under me as much as I could and then kicked out as hard as I could with all I had. The vampire flew back and dragged its own neck through the pointed tips of my pikes. There was a horrible tearing sound and then the vampires head fell to the floor with a dull thud. It kept opening and closing its mouth until it finally realized it was dead.
I popped back on to my feet with a back kick off and came up to a crouch ready for the next attack.
To my shock Hann-Abel were all alone for the time being.
“Okay, what now?” I asked as I flung vampire gore off the ends of my pikes.
“We need to get to Noor’Tun’s sanctuary,” Hann-Abel replied. “It’s on Level Three. And if the blueprint I had a friend of mine in the central office back at Valiance City pull up the day I found out we were going to be sent to the Pitt is still correct, there is a dumbwaiter that leads from the cafeteria’s kitchen right to it. He should have some weapons, and we can activate the liquidation command from there.”
