All Knight Long

by John G. Hartness

  I glanced at Sabrina, who shook her head, too. “Why do I surround myself with Muggles?” I muttered, and turned to walk further up the tunnel. I stayed near the wall that separated us from Rabbit, running my fingers along it in search of anything out of place.

  We’d traveled about ten yards when I felt a breeze coming from my left. I held up a fist, and everyone stopped. Apparently. there’s a difference between working with real trained professionals and Greg, who just shops at the Army surplus store. “Cool,” I said. “That worked just like in Forrest Gump.”

  “What is it, Jimmy?” my long-suffering girlfriend asked.

  “I feel air moving. There’s something on the other side of this wall.” I pressed, pushed, and shoved on the tunnel wall everywhere I could, then hauled off and gave it a huge kick. I bounced off the wall, pinwheeling my arms to keep from landing on my ass in the muck. These tunnels weren’t active sewers, thank God, but they still got storm water, and weren’t the cleanest place I’d ever been. Honestly, they weren’t even as clean as Greg’s room, and his place had been on an EPA cleanup list for decades.

  After a couple more minutes of fumbling, I leaned against the tunnel, hanging my head in frustration, when I heard a click. The brick under my hand depressed, and a section of wall just wide enough for one person to slip through opened up. I turned sideways and stepped through into the new tunnel, noting the dry air and the change in smells. This place had the same arid feel as the tunnels near Eastland Mall.

  Something shuffled in the darkness off to my left, and I turned to see a small form dropping to the ground and a man standing over it. Sabrina followed me through the hole and turned her light in the direction I was facing. A man with longish dark hair stood over the fallen form of Rabbit, glaring at us. Something fist-sized fell from his right hand with a splat, and he charged me.

  Chapter 26

  “HOLY SHIT, THAT’S a heart!” Sean shouted from behind me, just as the man who dropped said heart slammed into me.

  “Get out of the way,” I grunted to Sean. “Go check on Rabbit.” There was probably no point in sending him and Sabrina to check on Rabbit. If that was really Rabbit’s heart the guy dropped on the floor, the pint-sized Morlock leader was deader than the Cleveland Browns’ Super Bowl hopes. Like, ever. But at least that would get the two of them somewhere marginally safe while I dealt with the current threat.

  That threat was threatening right on top of me, his beady brown eyes boring into mine. He bowled me over and rode me to the ground, raining punches on my face and shoulders. Fortunately for me, I was topped off on blood bags and at full strength, so his punches hurt, but they weren’t devastating. Having my left hand wrapped firmly around Excalibur’s hilt certainly helped, too. I went to the ground, using our combined momentum to roll back and pitch the other vampire off me.

  He landed on his feet, a pretty remarkable display of agility from a dude his size. He was several inches over six foot, and an easy two hundred twenty pounds of muscle. Compared with my six-five and one- eighty stats, a pretty solid size disparity gave the advantage to Heart- Ripper. Good thing I was dead; if I had to fight this guy while alive, he’d wipe the floor with me. But thanks to magical super-strength, I could hold my own.

  Until he drew the gun and fired three rounds at my face. That’s a pretty good equalizer, no matter the fight, because if you destroy a vampire’s head, he’s dead. So I moved. Fast. I rolled forward, drawing Excalibur as I came up and slashing the vampire from belt buckle to Adam’s apple. At least that was the plan. But plans are often waylaid, particularly when your opponent sees the blade coming and does a back handspring to get out of the way and keep his insides where they should be—inside.

  “That’s not fair. You don’t get to be bigger than me and more agile. That’s not how we write these good guy/bad guy battles,” I quipped, advancing on him with my sword held in front of me in a guard position.

  He didn’t engage in my witty banter, just raised his pistol again. Except this time, instead of shooting at me, he turned slightly to the left and fired at Sabrina and Fitzpatrick.

  “Get down!” I yelled just before he pulled the trigger, and launched myself into the path of the bullets. I caught one on Excalibur’s blade, one missed me completely, and the third shot smacked into my left shoulder. I felt a sledgehammer hit me just above the heart and I tumbled out of the air to the floor of the tunnel, kicking up a great cloud of brownish dust and hearing my sword clatter to the ground beside me.

  Bullets whizzed above me as Sabrina and Fitzpatrick returned fire; then the tunnel was full of ricocheting bullet fragment. They stopped shooting after a couple of seconds, but the vampire was long gone. Sabrina rushed to my side, rolled me onto my back, and started patting me all over, looking for blood.

  “I’m good,” I croaked. I wasn’t, but I was ninety percent sure I wasn’t headed for true-death. My chest hurt like a son of a bitch, but it didn’t feel like any of the serious injuries I’d sustained in the past, just more like catching a solid punch from Greg in a sparring match. I reached over to where Excalibur lay on the ground, only to see Sean’s foot come in and sweep the sword aside.

  “You don’t need to go after him right now, Jimmy. Let’s get you healed up, then—”

  “That’s what I was doing, jackass,” I said, lurching forward and grabbing the sword by the blade. The razor-sharp steel sliced through my flesh, but the sword’s healing magic washed over me, instantly sealing the wound and going to work on the monstrous bruise in my shoulder. “It’s Excalibur, like in the legends.” Sean didn’t say anything, so I rolled over and looked up at him.

  “So?” he asked.

  “It’s King Arthur’s sword, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember something about that. Was there a lake, or a stone? Maybe an anvil?”

  I was chasing magical monsters through the sewers with a guy whose knowledge of Arthurian lore came from a Disney cartoon. This was so going to get me killed. I took a deep breath, which hurt because the sword was still healing a cracked rib. “The sword has magical healing properties. The wielder cannot be killed in battle so long as he has Excalibur. I need the sword to heal the bruising from the gunshot so I can get after this guy.” Feeling much better after only a few seconds of touching the sword, I pulled myself up into a sitting position.

  “Bruising? He got you solid in the shoulder,” Sabrina said. “There are nerves and arteries in there. It’s not like TV, Jimmy. A bullet wound in the shoulder isn’t something you can just shrug off.”

  “It is when you have a magical sword and a jacket lined with strategically placed armor plating.” I gave her my best rakish grin, which always looks more goofy than sexy, but Sabrina’s apparently into goofy.

  She leaned over to me, yanked my jacket open, and poked the bullet hole in the leather. She wiggled her finger around in there for a few seconds, then pinched the fabric and worried a mangled slug out of the hole. “You are the luckiest son of a bitch in the free world, you know that?”

  I looked her in the eyes and said, with all the sincerity in my heart, “Yeah, I do know that.” Then I kissed her on the forehead and stood up. I reached down to help Sabrina to her feet and said, “But now I’m pissed. I really like this jacket, and he shot a hole in it. So let’s go kill him.”

  “What about Rabbit?” Sean asked.

  I walked over to where the diminutive Morlock leader lay, his eyes staring up at the roof of the tunnel and a gaping hole in his chest. His heart lay on the ground next to him, a lifeless organ beginning to shrivel and decay now that the magic keeping Rabbit alive was gone. I knelt down and closed the dead man’s eyes. “Go with God, Rabbit. You were a good man at the core. Flawed, like we all are, but you had a good soul. I hope you find peace in whatever waits for you on the other side.”

  I stood up and turned to Fitzpatrick. “That’s all I can do for Rabbi
t. Except avenge him, like I’m going to avenge everyone else this son of a bitch has killed.” I turned to the passage leading deeper into the sewer and closed my eyes, shutting off one sense in a hope to kick-start the others.

  I heard nothing at first, then a very faint slapping of feet against concrete. I breathed deeply through my nose, trying to separate the vampire’s scent from everything else. The smell of blood was almost overpowering, tinged as it was with Rabbit’s essence, and the smell of Morlock City. I couldn’t get past that, no matter how I tried, then it hit me. The killer had ripped Rabbit’s heart out with his bare hands, so he was covered in Rabbit blood. I took another deep breath, this time concentrating on Rabbit’s scent, and the trail blossomed before me. I could almost see the scent, it was so strong.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and took off at a fast walk. My normal speed was so fast that Sabrina and Fitzpatrick had to jog to keep up with me, so I slowed to a snail’s pace. I didn’t want to leave them alone in the tunnels, not until I knew how many followers the bad guy had. As I walked, I ran over our fight in my mind again and again.

  The vampire looked familiar to me, like I’d run into him somewhere before. But with a couple of exceptions among the Stanleyville Bloods, and Greg, every vampire I’d ever fought was dead. So I hadn’t fought him, but I’d seen him. Where. . . . I wracked my brain, going over every encounter with Lilith’s men, survivors from our big fight, Tiram’s minions. No matter what I did, I came up empty. I knew I’d seen this guy, but I couldn’t come up with where. He didn’t dress like a Morlock or like one of Alexander’s people, although I barely got a look at most of them before he and I threw down, so anything was possible. I almost had myself convinced that was where I saw him when the tunnel started to lighten.

  I froze and put a hand up for Sabrina and Sean to stop. I turned to them and put my lips to Sabrina’s ear. “I’m going to scout ahead. Don’t move unless you hear gunshots. And if you hear gunshots, get the hell out of here. Don’t come after me.”

  “Kiss my ass,” my girlfriend replied without even a hint of a smile. I knew she would never run. Leaving a man behind is just not in her, but it was still my job to tell her to.

  I kissed her cheek and turned away, moving to the side of the tunnel and slipping along the wall as more and more light came from ahead. Before long, there was no point in trying to hide, since there was no cover and a row of fluorescent lights running down the center of a big open room in the tunnels. This must have been a planned subway station, like the one that Alexander made his home in, only without the doors. This was just a huge open area, close to the size of a football field.

  I saw my quarry along the right-hand wall, fiddling with the door of a cage. Inside the cage was a young woman, maybe twenty, maybe younger. She was pretty, dressed to go out, and bore all the telltale signs of a starving vampire. Her skin was drawn and paler than normal, her eyes rolled around in her head, and she flung herself at the bars of her cage, trying to batter her way free.

  I drew my Glock and sighted on the broad back of the vampire fiddling with the lock on her cage. Just as I squeezed the trigger, he dove to one side and my bullet sparked off the bars. He blurred into motion, running at me faster than a normal eye could follow.

  Good for me I haven’t had normal eyes since the 90s. I got off four shots at his center mass, but with the slightest twitch of a shoulder, he was out of the line of fire. I dropped to the floor just as he reached me, getting my face out of the way of the punch he threw, and shot him twice in the midsection at point-blank range. My silver hollowpoints tore into his torso, fragmenting as they did, carving half a dozen separate wound channels through the middle of his body.

  I expected him to collapse on top of me, his heart turned to pulp by the silver shredding bullets, but he just let out a shriek and dropped a knee on my head. I crashed the rest of the way to the floor, losing my grip on the pistol in the process. The vampire rained punches down on me, but his blood was dripping down on me even faster. I looked up at him, and by the look in his eyes, he knew how dire his situation was. He slammed one more punch down at my temple, driving my skull into the floor, then leapt off me and ran to the far side of the station.

  He pulled a small device from his pocket and pressed a button on it. I heard a metallic clank and watched him through blurry vision as he ran off down the hall. I stood up, but that last shot to the head had concussed me, and I threw up, gripping the wall and putting my other hand on Excalibur to try and heal up before going after the bastard. The sound of metal creaking filled my ears, and I looked up to see a dozen or more young people stepping out of their cages.

  Correction—I looked up to see a dozen or more young vampires stepping out of their cages. Young vampires that all shared one defining characteristic. They were seriously hungry.

  “What’s that smell?” a girl of maybe eighteen hissed. She pointed past me, and I knew before I turned my head what she was looking at.

  I looked where she pointed, and had my suspicions cruelly confirmed. Standing in the mouth of the tunnel, full of tasty blood and right in front of a dozen starving newborn vampires, were Sabrina and Sean.

  The vampires charged, the cops drew their pistols, and I slipped Excalibur from her sheath and ran to intercept. Three against fifteen, I thought. I’ve fought worse odds. Problem was, I couldn’t remember ever winning against worse odds.

  Chapter 27

  “DON’T MESS AROUND. Shoot to kill!” I shouted as the first vampire ran at me. He was big, young, and fortunately for me, stupid. He got right in front of me before he apparently realized that I held three feet of gleaming steel, and when he caught sight of it, he backpedaled faster than a politician in a debate. I didn’t hesitate, I cleaved his head from his shoulders, sending it tumbling across the floor.

  I sidestepped his falling body and moved to meet the next vamp in line. She was smarter, but also very young, and not yet sure of how her new body moved. She tried to leap over me, not interested in my blood, but desperate to get at the humans behind me. I held Excalibur up and cleaved the girl from her left shoulder to her waist, and she fell to the ground on either side of me, showering me with blood.

  Sabrina’s pistol barked, and I heard Sean firing as well, but then I was too tangled up in vampires to look at them. Three of the newborns came at me all in a rush, and I slipped on the blood-covered floor. We all went down in a heap of arms, legs, and fangs, and my sword skittered across the ground. One vamp latched on to my leg, burying her fangs in my thigh. The bite hurt, but wasn’t debilitating, because she bit me on the quad, nowhere near the femoral artery. I let her hang out down there, seeing the other two as greater threats.

  One of the other vampires, a young man with short blond stubble starting to grow back over his shaved head, had my right arm pinned to the ground and his fangs buried into it. The third vampire was a young Asian woman with pink hair, and she just kneed me in the face, then clambered over me to get at Fitzpatrick and Sabrina. I watched helplessly as she ran at the humans, unable to move under the weight of two vamps. She didn’t run far, taking three bullets in the chest from Sean before she made it six feet.

  That wouldn’t keep her down, but it would hold her off long enough for me to deal with the vamps currently trying to eat me. I punched the one on my wrist in the side of his head, then tried to gather my will. It was difficult to focus, but I managed to slam a compulsion at him and shouted, “Get off me!”

  He didn’t even flinch, just kept ripping into my wrist. I was bleeding pretty good and starting to worry about Sabrina and Sean’s ammo situation, so I snatched a silver stake from my belt and jabbed the point through the vampire’s temple. He dropped like a stone, and I repeated the process with the one on my leg. She collapsed just like her buddy, true-dead.

  I rolled over and got to my knees, then crawled to where the pink- haired girl was beginning to stir. Her eyes popped open
just as I got to her, and I put a hand on her shoulder to keep her from getting up. “I’m sorry,” I said, and staked her through the heart. She looked at me as though completely awestruck at what just happened, then died.

  I dragged myself to my feet and looked to see what kind of trouble the humans were in. The answer was one shitload. Just as I stood, Sean went down with a tiny vampire teenager on his back. The girl wrapped around him like a spider monkey, and I couldn’t get a clean shot off on my best day, not to mention covered in blood and bleeding from one hand and one leg.

  Sabrina was surrounded, with half a dozen vampires ringing her like rabid wolves. She fired her pistol twice more, then it clicked empty. The ring of vampires pulsed outward as one for just a moment before the entire mass of them dove on Sabrina for the kill.

  Fortunately, that couple of seconds of hesitation was all I needed. I sprinted to Excalibur, moving at my top vampire speed, then ran into the circle of bloodsuckers like Emmitt Smith crashing into a defensive line. I decapitated the first two vampires I reached, cutting their heads off in one big looping swing and driving through their circle to shove Sabrina out the other side.

  I carried her clear of the vampires for several feet, then deposited her on the floor and spun around to face the remaining monsters. I usually think of vampires as just normal people with allergies to sunlight and heavy dietary restrictions, but these starved newborns were absolutely monsters. They were ravenous creatures with only one thought in their minds—feeding.

  Unfortunately, these monsters all looked like young men and women out for a night on the town. They were all young, fit, and good-looking, except for the rabid look in their eyes. And they were all advancing on Sabrina. Except for the three currently feeding on Sean.

  “Are you reloaded? I’ve got to get to Fitzpatrick. He can’t have more than a couple of minutes left,” I asked over my shoulder. I had Sabrina pressed to one of the tunnel walls behind me, but there were still half a dozen hungry vampires moving in on us, and I needed to get through them all to rescue Sean.