Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  Twenty minutes. Enough time for breakfast before I go up to ISAT.

  The elevator slid smoothly to a halt. Jamie set off for the dining hall, his boots clicking rapidly along the corridor floor.

  I’m not doing this on an empty stomach, he thought. It might not be Kate asking the questions. If it’s Paul Turner, I’m going to need to be at my best.

  21

  THE WAR ON DRUGS, PART TWO

  Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

  Yesterday

  Larissa spun, drawing the stake from her belt faster than the human eye could follow, and threw. It accelerated through the air in a silver blur, slamming into the head of the vampire that had seized Tim. It fell back, blood gushing from a hole in its forehead, its glowing red eyes wide and incredulous. Larissa leaped forward as Tim’s hands went to his uninjured neck, pulled the stake out of the vampire’s skull, and plunged it into its heart. Blood thumped into the warm evening air, pattering to the ground as thick crimson rain.

  Tim slowly lowered his hands and turned to face her. Larissa’s head was pounding with the scent of freshly spilled blood; she could hear her own roaring through her veins, could feel burning heat emanating from her eyes and cheeks. She was breathing heavily, but not as the result of exertion; it was something primal, the panting of an animal in the middle of a hunt. She was still capable of rational thought, still knew who she was, where she was, and what she was doing, but that information seemed dull and distant compared to the bright red immediacy of violence.

  Her squad leader glanced down at the remains of the vampire who had grabbed him, then returned his gaze to her. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said. “Try not to be so easy to sneak up on next time.”

  Tim narrowed his eyes and stared at her for a long moment. She held his gaze until he turned away and addressed the rest of the squad. “We go in the front door,” he said, his voice low. “We’re going to empty it out, room by room. Overlapping, flanking formation. Anything that moves gets destroyed.”

  “Yes, sir,” growled Larissa, as the rest of the squad voiced their agreement.

  “Okay,” said Tim. “Follow me.”

  He dropped into a low crouch, and they followed him up the driveway to the front door of the house. It was ominously quiet in the aftermath of all the shooting and screaming. Tim raised his right hand and jabbed two fingers in the direction of the door. Anna Frost, the quiet, serious Canadian special operator whose name suited her perfectly, and José Rios, the handsome, relentlessly charming Dominican who had been a recon marine sniper before his recruitment to NS9, ran forward and set themselves on either side of the door, their backs to the wall, their HK416s raised.

  “Larissa,” said Tim, his voice low. “See if anybody’s home, would you?”

  Larissa grinned and floated forward. She slid silently to the ground in front of the large, ornate wooden door, feeling her fangs pressing against her lower lip. She took a deep breath, then slammed the palms of her hands against the door. It exploded inward, the heavy wood splintering as though a bomb had been detonated against it.

  From inside the house there came screams of terror and the rattle of panicked Spanish. Larissa leaped backward, landing behind Tim. The squad leader was flanked by Jill Flaherty, the tall, powerful former NSA agent who served as his second in command, and Pete Rushton, a loud, relentlessly optimistic Californian who had served in Delta Force for almost a decade before being summoned to Nevada. Frost and Rios swung themselves around the shattered doorframe and disappeared into the house, their rifles at their shoulders.

  “Clear,” yelled Rios.

  “Go,” bellowed Tim. Flaherty and Rushton ran through the empty doorway, their weapons drawn, overlapping Frost and Rios, who had already checked the corners and exits. Tim ran forward and Larissa followed him. A second later the squad regrouped in the middle of a vast entrance hall, a tight cluster of black, bristling with weapons.

  “No welcome party,” said Rushton. “That’s just rude.”

  Larissa smiled at him, her eyes full of heat.

  “I want a fast sweep of this floor,” said Tim, ignoring his squad mate’s comment. “Room by room. No surprises.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Flaherty. She stepped forward, her MP7 in one hand, her console in the other. On its screen was an architectural blueprint of the house they were standing in. “Three rooms in the center of this level. Eighteen around the outer wall, sir.”

  “Don’t we have a satellite overhead?” asked Larissa. “There’s no time for a twenty-one-room sweep.”

  “I’ve requested sat coverage,” replied Tim. “Surveillance is telling me we’ll have overlook any minute. Until then, we’re on our own.”

  “But twenty-one—”

  “You heard me, Lieutenant Kinley,” said Tim. “We’ll just have to move quickly. Frost, take point.”

  Anna Frost nodded, and walked silently across the wide entrance lobby to where a dark wooden door stood closed. She settled her HK416 against her shoulder as the rest of the squad formed up a short distance behind her, took a deep breath, then kicked the door open, darting back behind the cover of the wall as it swung on its hinges. There was no movement inside the room, no rattle of gunfire. Frost checked over her shoulder for confirmation and saw Tim pointing a finger silently toward the open door. She nodded and stepped noiselessly into the room. As she did so, Larissa heard something, something inaudible to anyone without her supernatural hearing.

  A tiny inhalation of breath.

  “Wait!” she yelled.

  But she was too late.

  As Frost stepped into the room, something silver whistled out from behind the door and crashed into the side of her helmet, sending sparks flying into the air and driving her to her knees. She twisted as she buckled, pulling the trigger on her HK416 instinctively. Fire burst from the end of the barrel as the rifle thundered deafeningly in the enclosed space of the house.

  “Move!” yelled Tim Albertsson, and ran forward.

  Larissa beat him to it. She blurred through the space between where she was standing and where Frost was lying on the floor and scooped the operator easily into the air with one hand, drawing her T-Bone with the other. She pushed Frost behind her, pointed her weapon into the space behind the door, and froze.

  Slumped on the ground was a woman, no older than twenty or twenty-one. She was wearing an orange bikini, and bleeding from at least a dozen bullet wounds. Crimson covered the wall and pooled on the ground beneath her. Resting limply in one of her hands was a long machete. Her eyes were wide and staring, devoid of life.

  The rest of the special operations squad burst into the room, their weapons drawn, skidding to a halt as they followed Larissa’s gaze.

  “Christ,” said Flaherty. “What the hell is this?”

  “Anna,” said Tim, taking hold of the Canadian’s shoulders. “Are you hurt?”

  Larissa released her grip. Frost staggered slightly, but managed to stay upright.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Stupid of me. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “It’s okay,” replied Tim. “You’re all right.”

  “Sir,” said Flaherty, and Tim turned toward her. “This girl wasn’t a vampire. She’s human, sir.”

  Anna Frost pushed back her visor. “Human?” she asked, her voice unsteady.

  “Human,” confirmed Flaherty. She was crouched beside the dead girl, running the beam from her UV flashlight over her skin.

  “She’s dead?” asked Frost. “I killed her?”

  Tim turned sharply back to face her. “She attacked you, Operator. Remember that. You did your job.”

  Frost nodded, but the sickly gray-green color of her face suggested that she was far from convinced. Larissa stared helplessly at her, then heard something else, from beyond the closed door at the far end of the room. It was
a soft scratching sound, like bare feet shuffling across wooden floorboards.

  “We’re about to have company,” she whispered.

  Tim took one look at the expression on her face and ordered his squad to take cover. Rushton pulled Frost and Flaherty down behind a huge leather sofa that sat in the middle of the room, as Tim and Rios took cover behind a heavy wooden desk beneath the window. Larissa floated silently up into the air, spreading herself easily against the ceiling, and trained her T-Bone down at the closed door.

  There was a long, pregnant silence. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound, until Larissa heard a sharp intake of breath from the other side of the door a millisecond before it was kicked open.

  It slammed against the wall with a deafening crash as a stream of figures burst through the empty space, screaming and yelling and waving their hands above their heads—hands that were full of metal.

  “Freeze!” bellowed Tim Albertsson, rising up from the behind the desk, his rifle locked against his shoulder. The rest of the squad rose as one, their weapons pointed at the mass of screaming humanity, which stopped dead at the sight of the black-clad figures before them.

  Standing inside the doorway were seven women in bikinis. The oldest appeared to be in her late twenties, and several appeared to be little more than teenagers. In their hands they carried an array of kitchen knives, machetes, and other sharp pieces of household metal. One girl was carrying a garden trowel.

  “Drop the weapons!” shouted Tim Albertsson. “Drop them now!”

  The women instantly threw what they were holding to the ground; the makeshift weapons clattered against the floorboards, one of the knives digging into the wood and vibrating. They wore expressions of fear and misery on their faces, and several of them clutched at their almost naked bodies, covering their chests and crotches to the best of their ability. At the front, a tall, dark-skinned woman stared at the black figures, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. She looked as though she was about to speak when her eyes flicked to the corner of the room and what lay there. Her hands flew to her mouth, and she screamed through her fingers. She stumbled forward, until Rios yelled at her to stay still.

  “Bastardo!” she cried. “Asesino! Olivia, mi pobrecita, mi querida angel . . .”

  Her voice trailed off in a paroxysm of sobbing.

  “Tim,” said Larissa, speaking through the comms link that only their squad mates could hear. “Get hold of this. This is going to get out of hand quickly.”

  Tim nodded, then turned his attention back to the women, all of whom were now in tears, trembling and shaking and pointing at the dead girl. “Ladies,” he said, “identify yourselves.”

  The girl who had screamed stared at him with open loathing. “I am Eva,” she spat.

  “Eva,” said Tim. “Can I talk to you? Can we talk calmly?”

  “I do not talk with murderers,” said Eva. “With cowards.”

  “She attacked me,” said Frost, her voice low. “I was defending myself.”

  “With your gun and your helmet and your armor,” said Eva, looking at Frost with open contempt. “She had a piece of metal that wasn’t even sharp. How much of a threat was she to you?”

  “Eva, look at me,” said Tim. Behind her, the rest of the women were beginning to mutter in Spanish, and he was keen to neutralize the situation. If they attacked, his squad would be in no real danger. But he knew that not all of the women would survive if his team were forced to defend themselves; possibly none of them would.

  “Why are you here, Eva?” he asked. “Why are you all here, in this house?”

  She looked at him for a long moment. “We cut,” she said, eventually.

  “Cut what?”

  “The product,” she said. “In the basement. We cut and wrap and parcel.”

  “Why are you dressed like that?” asked Larissa.

  One of the younger-looking girls spoke up. “So we not steal,” she said, her voice wavering. “They no trust us.”

  Jesus Christ, thought Larissa. How humiliating.

  “And because they like to look,” said Eva. “The men. They like to look.” Behind her, the rest of the women murmured their agreement.

  “Why are you up here on your own?” asked Tim. “Where is General Rejon?”

  “Downstairs,” replied Eva. “When the shooting start, he sent us up here. Told us to fight.”

  “Does he know who we are?” asked Tim. “Why we’re here?”

  Eva shook her head. “General thinks you are from other cartel.” She examined their uniforms. “But I am thinking not.”

  “So he sent you all up here with lumps of metal to fight with?” asked Larissa, her voice vibrating with fury. “Dressed in nothing? After he had heard with his own ears that whoever was up here had guns?”

  Eva shrugged. “It not matter if we die. There are eight of us cutters, seven now, after Olivia. We all die, tomorrow a hundred girls ask for jobs. If we say no, we will not fight, the general will kill us himself. So we fight.”

  “No you don’t,” said Tim. “You take your friend’s body and you find some clothes and you get the hell out of here as quickly as you can. Do you understand me, Eva?”

  “What we tell general tomorrow?” asked one of the women, her face a mask of worry. “How we explain?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” said Tim. “Eva, you said General Rejon is downstairs?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s dumb,” said Flaherty, frowning. “There’s only one entrance to the lower level. Next door, in the library.”

  “The general will not run,” said Eva. “He told us he will not go back to prison. He will die first.”

  “Then let’s give him what he wants,” spat Larissa. “Why are we standing around up here when they’re down there?”

  “How many of them are downstairs?” asked Tim, shooting a glance full of warning at Larissa.

  “Eleven including the general.”

  “Are you telling me the truth, Eva?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s telling the truth, sir,” said Flaherty. “We just got overlook. Twelve humans and one vampire on this level, eleven vampires downstairs.”

  “Good,” said Tim. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, great,” said Larissa. “Pity we didn’t have that information before we killed an innocent girl.”

  “Larissa?” said Tim, softly.

  “What?”

  “Shut the hell up. That’s an order.”

  Larissa stared at her squad leader for a long moment.

  It’s not his fault, she told herself. Not anyone’s fault. Bad things happen. Bad things happen.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, without dropping her gaze.

  “Thank you,” said Tim, and returned his attention to Eva. “The general and his men. What weapons do they have?”

  “Knives,” said Eva. “And guns. Many, many guns.”

  * * *

  The special operations squad stood in General Rejon’s library, facing the door that would take them down to the building’s basement level. The room was dark, with a wooden floor and ceiling-height bookshelves covering three of the walls. The fourth was dominated by a vast picture window, which looked out over the sloping gardens and grounds toward the distant front gates, a view that would normally have been idyllic, but which was now dotted with patches of spilled blood, still visible in the last of the evening light.

  Eva had led the terrified, grief-stricken cutters out of the house, two of them carrying the body of the woman named Olivia between them. They had gone without a word, although Frost had been unable to meet any of their eyes as they departed; her face was pale and drawn.

  “Anna,” said Tim. “I want you guarding this door. Anything comes up the stairs that isn’t one of us, kill it.”

  “I’m fine, sir,” she said
. “You don’t need to leave me up here.”

  “I know,” replied Tim. “But I need this door covered, and I want you to do it. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Frost. Her face wore an expression of abject misery.

  “The rest of us are going down there,” said Tim, nodding toward the door. “There are eleven vampires waiting for us, none of whom the world is going to miss. I want visors down and weapons ready. Let’s get this done and go home. José, you’re on point.”

  Rios nodded and walked across to the door. He kicked it open and leaped backward, creating separation between himself and the empty space. The satellite imagery indicated that all eleven of the vampires were in one place, a long room in the center of the basement, but it was impossible to be too careful when you were dealing with vampires.

  “Clear,” said Rios. He stepped through the door and started down the stairs toward the basement. Larissa watched as Flaherty and Rushton followed him, her stomach churning with boiling acid, her eyes burning with a heat she had never felt before.

  She was angrier than she had ever been in her life.

  The opulence of the house and its grounds, the art and the cars and the fine decorations, were an insult to the overwhelming majority of human beings, the men and women who scraped by and tried to live decent lives. The house was a palace built on death and misery, on the expendability of men and women like Olivia, who had attacked a soldier wearing only a bikini and carrying a dull machete because her employer had promised to kill her if she didn’t.