The Last Vampire

by Jon F. Merz

  Isella screamed as I came off the slab. Warsaw fell back and away, his knife still jutting out of my arm. I yanked it free, aware of the spurt of blood but no longer caring. I cut the ropes at my feet away and came off the slab of stone.

  Kort was the immediate threat; he still had a knife on him. And even though I’d rocked him with a solid punch to his jaw, he’d been in enough fights before to recover quickly. He looked a bit shaky on his legs, but I couldn’t put any hope on that.

  He circled me while Warsaw ducked out of the chamber. I think Isella was still there, but she was only some sort of psychic projection anyway. I’d deal with her soon enough.

  Kort circled me, his knife held up in front of him, his other arm held like a shield before him with the outer part of his forearm facing me. Someone had taught him to protect their inner side of his arm with its arteries, so he had some degree of knowledge.

  But I doubted he’d used a knife as many times as I had.

  He feinted with a slash and turned it into a stab aimed at my head. Isella was screeching now about the need to keep me alive so she could destroy me completely, but it didn’t look as though Kort cared anymore. He just wanted me dead.

  He slashed again a few times and I parried them, taking a swipe here and there. But I wasn’t in the mood to dance; I wanted the kill shot that would put him down for the count. And when he feinted again, I saw it and waited until he fully committed himself to a strike.

  As he came in, I moved to the inside of his stabbing arm and pumped my own blade deep into his chest coming up from below, shredding the lower part of his heart as the knife sank into his chest. Even as he started to bleed out, he simply dropped to his knees looking utterly astounded that he’d been killed as easily as he had.

  I yanked my blade free and let him fall forward onto his face.

  Isella fell silent but I could feel the hatred in her eyes.

  She flew right at me and I braced for the impact, but then she simply vanished as she crashed into me. I stood there with my arms up protecting myself wondering where the hell she’d gone.

  But gone she was.

  Warsaw.

  I moved to the entrance of the chamber and risked a look around the corner. I couldn’t see any signs that anyone was still around. Had he fled? Or was he still waiting for me further down the corridor or whatever this place was?

  There was only one way to find out.

  I gripped the knife and moved out to find him.

  31

  The passage before me sloped upward at an angle and I saw steps further on carved out of the rock that surrounded us. I took them slowly, keeping my back to the cool stone wall as I did so. I wanted to be quick but if I was stupid, Warsaw would get the drop on me and probably shoot me. His arrangement with Isella wasn’t going to last probably so at this point it was down to self-preservation.

  Too bad I had no intention of preserving him.

  I came to the top of the stairs and found myself facing a door. I opened it and nearly walked into a set of steps leading up and beyond the stairs I saw the kitchen of Sam’s bar. The door had been concealed behind the stairs that led up to the penthouse. I’d missed them last night when I was intent on getting upstairs.

  It was quiet. And fully lit with sun. I frowned. I’d just seen Isella’s psychic projection downstairs in the chamber, so wherever she was, it had to have been shielded from the sun otherwise she would have been toast.

  I found Sam asleep out in the bar area and woke him up. “Where is he?”

  But Sam was groggy and not in the mood to answer questions. I left him and climbed the steps back to Warsaw’s office, betting that he’d gone there to get my weapons. As I came up the steps, a gunshot rang out and the bullet shattered the wall near my head.

  “I’ll kill you, Declan!”

  I ducked down and considered my options. If Warsaw had my guns then going up against him with a knife wasn’t exactly the smartest thing I’d ever done in my life. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. Wasn’t that the old maxim drilled into me by all of my old instructors? Always try to have the superior weapons system when you went into battle.

  Barring that, you had to improvise.

  “You know she’s going to kill you for messing up the ritual,” I called back. “I’m the last person you need to be worried about now.”

  “I’ll deal with her on my own terms,” said Warsaw. “And once I shoot you, she’ll thank me for it.”

  “Not according to what she told me. You kill me, I’ll just come back and start hunting her again.”

  “Not if we can find you first. She can kill you then and be done with it. No need to involve me.”

  I knew Isella would destroy Warsaw and write it off as a loss on her end-of-the-eon balance sheet. But sometimes, even when you present them with the absolute truth, stupid people will continue to cling to lies in the desperate hope they’re going to be proven right.

  They never are.

  I heard a floorboard creak that was closer than I’d expected it to be. Warsaw was making his approach, probably steeled by the fact that he had my guns with him. He felt he was in the better position.

  Except he was wrong. I was every bit as dangerous without my guns as I was with them. The only thing that changed was the distance. With firearms, I could kill from a longer distance. Without them, everything got up close and personal.

  I pressed myself back into the wall and took several deep breaths, letting my heart rate calm down as I tried to reach out with my mind and sense where Warsaw was. I’d used this a few times in my past but it had never really worked aside from allowing my focus to improve.

  This time, I thought I got a picture in my head of where Warsaw was. Roughly twelve feet from the top of the stairs. He had my pistol and was holding it up too high. I’d suspected he wasn’t as familiar with guns as he’d made himself out to be, preferring to rely on others to do his dirty work for him.

  The only problem was his men were dead and I wasn’t.

  “You can’t win, Declan.”

  I shook my head. The sound of his voice allowed me to confirm the image I saw in my head. He was exactly where I thought he was.

  Instead of replying, I said nothing. I wanted him closer. I still held the knife and I hefted it, feeling its balance.

  “You hear me?”

  I nodded. I heard him, all right. And now it was his time to die.

  I had options. I could roll out and throw the knife into his chest. Or I could wait for him to get even closer and then engage in hand-to-hand combat with him. The pistol would be problematic in close. If he’d had my rifle, that would have been better because there was less maneuverability with the M4. But a pistol was smaller and deadlier in close quarters.

  Beggars can’t be choosers.

  He took another step and his foot caused the floorboard closest to me to creak. I didn’t even wait, but came out and used my left hand to knock his right arm off line. The gun fired, sending the bullet into the wall closest to me.

  I kept driving into him, knocking him back into the wall. Warsaw grunted as we crashed into the wall and then he tried to reach over and elbow me in the head. I saw it coming and managed to turn my head just enough to avoid the full force of the strike. Then I kneed him in the balls and he jerked forward, running right into my knee with his head. I snapped his head back and the gun he still held started to come back up toward my face.

  I redirected it and then reversed it, fleecing the piece off of him.

  I sent a kick into the underside of his jaw and he flopped onto the floor on his back.

  “Where is she?”

  Warsaw looked up at me. “And what are you gonna do, Declan? Hunt her down? You’re even stupider than I thought.”

  “What else can I do?” I asked. “She’s got Ares. And apparently, she and I have been chasing each other for centuries.”

  “She’s invincible,” said Warsaw. “You think you can do anything to her that others haven’t al
ready tried? You’re a fool.”

  “Where is she?”

  Warsaw glanced around. “I did good here, you know. I built a home for my community. There were some good people here. Happy people.”

  “Once maybe,” I said. “But then you made a deal with the devil. And now it’s all gone to shit. No one likes you, no one respects you. And any protection you gave them was built on a lie.”

  “Fuck you, Declan.”

  “You won’t tell me where she is?”

  “Figure it out for yourself.”

  I frowned. “All right then.”

  I fired two shots into his chest, watching the bullets impact and fragment inside of his heart. Warsaw grunted and then lay back, blood spilling out of his chest to the floor beneath him. He still had a smirk on his face.

  “Good luck…you’re going to need it.”

  I watched him die and then walked down the hallway to his office. My M4 was gone, which really pissed me off. I’d left it with Ares and now it was gone. Maybe it was wherever she was. And I was assuming that was with Isella.

  The question was, where was the Source? I doubted Diablo had been built atop a system of tunnels, but the presence of the subterranean chamber I’d been kept in was intriguing. Perhaps there were other chambers like that one located in the nearby area? Possibly. But with Warsaw and Kort dead, there weren’t many people in Diablo I’d be able to count on for guidance.

  Except maybe a sleepy bartender downstairs.

  I walked back down and found Sam still snoring in the bar. “Get up.” I kicked his chair and he jumped awake.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Tell me about this area,” I said. “There’s got to be something close by that Warsaw would know about. Some place that the vampire he protected would flee to if things got hairy for her around here.”

  Sam frowned. “There’s not much. A lake to the immediate north where we draw water from.”

  “I know it.”

  “The waste area is to the south. East of here is where you came from.”

  “And west?”

  Sam shook his head. “You go much further west and it’s desert. And nuke lands.”

  I frowned. “How much?”

  “Enough to make journeying through it a real health issue unless you have to proper equipment.”

  I didn’t think Diablo had a radioactive protection shop anywhere in the town limits. “Warsaw ever go there?”

  Sam pursed his lips. “He might have once or twice. No one ever knew what it was for, but yeah, I think I remember him and Kort going there on occasion.”

  “They had protective gear?”

  Sam nodded. “Definitely. I saw them both wearing it.”

  I nodded. “Any chance you happen to know where they kept their gear?”

  32

  When the Event occurred, it might have been understandable if someone, somewhere - like say down in a nuke silo - had simply turned their keys and fired their missiles in an attempt to stop what was happening up above.

  But that never happened.

  Instead, the nuclear power plants got all fucked up and dumped a whole lot of radioactive steam into the atmosphere as well as some contaminated coolant into the water tables. It wasn’t enough to wipe out the world, such as it was, but it was enough to render certain areas as hot spots.

  Rumor was places like Area 51 and Area 52 had suffered some sort of weird meltdown which had contributed to the nuke lands in the west. Personally, I’d never known anyone who worked at either place. We’d used part of Area 51 to stage mock-ups for especially covert ops when I was with Six, but even then, we’d been restricted to a tiny portion of the place. When we flew in and out, the windows on the plane had been blacked out. It was that secure.

  But now even those places were supposedly off limits to any human that enjoyed simple things like hair and stray isotopes not fucking with their DNA.

  So I guess it made sense that Isella had apparently taken up refuge in one of those hot zones. She would have known that people - survivors especially - would avoid them at all cost.

  Well, almost all cost.

  Sam helped me locate the protective gear that Warsaw and Kort had used. Fortunately, I was well-versed in its use from my time back on Six. We’d worked with NEST once or twice, which was the Nuclear Emergency Search Team. They were in charge of the recovery of nuclear materials that had been lost or stolen. They were the ones flying overhead in helicopters looking for dirty bombs and shit like that. When we’d worked with them, we had to know all the protocols for entering hot zones and coming into contact with nuclear material.

  The suits had evolved significantly since I’d last been in one. The most recent incarnation was far lighter and more adaptable than it had been - the breathing rig looked more like a simple SCUBA setup than the huge contraption I’d used before. It was apparently rechargeable thanks to a solar array atop the backpack unit. Plus, we were dealing with low levels of radiation, which meant that as long as I could complete my business quickly, I didn’t necessarily have to worry about too much exposure.

  I just hoped it wouldn’t take all that long to kill Isella.

  “You sure you want to do this?” asked Sam as I checked over my pistol and staff.

  I shrugged. “Not much choice. I have to finish this and get Ares back.”

  “Not to be too harsh, but she was just supposed to be your bait for this thing, right?”

  “Yep. That’s what she was.”

  “And now?”

  I looked at him. “Now, she’s not.” I slid the pistol into my holster and then put on the over jacket. It still had a nuke patch sewn on making me feel quite official and all. I just hoped it still worked well.

  “It’s twenty miles before you get to the outskirts of the zone. There ought to be a sign still there warning that it’s radioactive.”

  “Isella would definitely make sure the signs stayed intact. After all, that’s probably the motivating factor behind her wanting to hide out there.”

  “So radiation doesn’t kill suckers?”

  “Apparently not. If she’s hiding out in a zone, then I guess she’s immune.” I frowned. “No idea what it will do to Ares, however.”

  “Maybe she’s under some sort of protection?”

  “I don’t know how that would work. And I don’t know if radioactive isotopes obey the laws of magic or whatever it is suckers can wield.”

  Sam leaned against the wall close by and sighed. “I don’t know how you’re doing this. It’s suicide, man.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “Doesn’t mean you have to do it, either,” said Sam. “What about looking out for number one?”

  I eyed him. “Wouldn’t be a number one if everyone felt the way you do about taking a stand.”

  Sam looked away. “I’m not a fighter. Never pretended to be. Just a guy trying to eke out an existence.”

  “Not much of one if you let the bad guys win,” I said. “Besides, who is going to run Diablo now that Warsaw and Kort and their ilk have gone to meet their maker?”

  Sam grinned. “I was thinking I might give it a shot.”

  “So you do aspire to something.”

  “Maybe.” He handed me a radiation detector. “It’s rechargeable as well.”

  “Do me a favor when you take over here: don’t make any deals with suckers. I think I’ve seen enough of your town for a while and I’m not sure I want to ever have to come back.”

  Sam walked me to the main gate. There were still guards on patrol, but fewer of them. I mentioned this to Sam.

  “No one wanted to be caught up in Warsaw’s demise. Word about you got around plenty fast.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Some struck out on their own. Others banded together to head east. Word is they’re heading back the way you came.”

  I shook my head. “Ain’t nothing there but charred remains. The place I got
Ares from is no more. They head there, they’re gonna have to rebuild it before it offers any sort of protection. There are definitely fewer suckers to worry about, but they’re still out there.”

  “Not my problem,” said Sam. “There’s still people here that need some sort of guidance.”

  I looked around. I could feel the eyes on me but I didn’t care. “You told me you aren’t a fighter.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You try to run this place and someone is gonna challenge you every single day. You can’t go through life avoiding conflict just because you don’t like to fight. Find something worth fighting for. Take a stand and see it through. If nothing else, at least people will respect you. But if you always run away from shit, no one ever will. And worse, you’ll end up dead.”

  Sam took a breath and then blew it out. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that.” I stuck out my hand. “Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.”

  He shook my hand quickly and let it go. He probably didn’t want to be seen as a friend of a Mortal Maker. I couldn’t blame him.

  “Take care of yourself, Declan. And good hunting.”

  I nodded, turned, and walked out of the main gate. The path to the west lay before me and I glanced up at the sun without thinking to confirm my bearing. I took one final look back at Diablo and then set off.

  The protective gear wasn’t as heavy as it had once been. And I had plenty of water with me. I could cover the twenty miles fairly easily - perhaps as quick as five hours. It was nine in the morning when I left. That meant I could reach the outskirts of the zone around 2pm. From there, though, it was anyone’s guess as to how long it would take me to find Isella.

  I figured it had to be somewhere within reasonable distance. Isella didn’t strike me as the type that would enjoy traveling far. And if she had been using some sort of psychic projection on me back in that chamber, I thought there might be a limit to how far she could transmit herself.

  At least that was what I hoped. I wouldn’t know until I got into the zone.

  There was also the unknown to contend with. The zones were rumored to have all sorts of crazy shit in them. Mutated animals had been reported. Bugs. Word was there were even humans that lived in there. I had no idea if there was any truth to it at all.