The Vampire War

by Eric S. Brown

  Katherine smiled. “This is going to be easy.”

  “Says you,” Tonya barked as she raised the barrel of her pistol level with the head of an approaching zombie and squeezed its trigger. The bullet pierced its skull, exiting the back of its head in a spray of putrid blood, bone fragments, and brain matter. The zombie collapsed onto the pavement as Tonya took aim at another of the undead monsters.

  Selah took a deep breath, focusing her psychic energy. She made several changes to her body. Her skin became dense like leather armor to help guard against any penetration by the zombies’ claws and teeth. Adrenaline flooded her system in near-overdose amounts, boosting her speed and strength. Her muscles loosened as she found her perfect center of balance. The changes happened in the span of a few heartbeats, then she was ready. Selah shrieked a feral war cry as she charged into a mass of the oncoming zombies. Compared to her speed, the slow-moving zombies were essentially standing still. Her sword’s blade removed the head from the shoulders of the first one she reached. Her backswing severed the spine of another as she moved by it. Selah leaped into the air, whirling about to bring her blade down full force onto the top of another zombie’s skull. Bone gave way to metal in an explosion of foul blood. She jerked her blade free of the falling zombie before she’d even landed on her feet. The foot of her right leg snapped upward, catching a zombie beneath its chin. The undead monster’s head slammed backward, breaking its neck in the process. The blow may not have been fatal, but it would keep the zombie from getting up. Not even zombies could function with a broken neck.

  Katherine gave no battle cry, but she matched Selah’s fury with her skill. Instead of charging forward, the half vampire held back in case Tonya got into trouble. She let the zombies come to her and gave them hell. Katherine’s katana hacked at the zombies closing in around her. Heads and severed limbs flew as her blade cut into them. Too mindless to know they were overmatched, the zombies kept coming. Their scattered bodies filled the street around where Katherine stood, and still they came. Katherine grew bored with only using her sword and decided to get even more up close and personal with the undead monsters. She figured she was almost certainly immune to whatever contagion had infected them, if something like that was indeed the cause of their current state. Katherine doubted it, though. She sensed a lingering taint of dark magic on the hungry corpses. Magically-animated zombies didn’t spread their infection like other kinds usually did. They were simply automatons summoned up to be used as foot soldiers and weapons.

  Sheathing her sword, Katherine plunged into the undead monsters using her bare hands. A swing from one of her fists reduced the head of a zombie to blackish pulp and gore. She lifted another from the ground and ripped it in half, tossing the two pieces of the zombie’s body in different directions. Katherine head butted the next zombie coming at her, caving in its forehead with her own. Her lips parted in a wide, almost feral, grin. She had missed this. As much as she detested zombies, she felt alive tearing them apart. Fighting the good fight against the dark things of the night was her life, and right now Katherine felt truly alive for the first time since Mavet’s minions had captured her in Alaska. She relished the thrill of combat, drinking it in as another vampire would the blood of a human.

  A zombie managed to grab hold of her left arm, taking Katherine by surprise. If the undead thing had been capable of feeling surprise, it would have been, too, at the success of its action. Katherine jerked her left arm free from the zombie, tearing away its arms from its torso in the process. The zombie reeled backward, off balance. She gave it no chance to recover, delivering a high kick that sent its head bouncing along the street. Its headless form toppled toward her. Katherine effortlessly sidestepped the falling corpse, already moving to grab another zombie from behind. Her arms closed around its head and neck. With a jerk and the sharp crack of breaking bone, she ended its unnatural existence.

  Three zombies threw themselves onto her at the same time, trying to overpower her and take her to the pavement. That was giving their rotting brains too much credit. It was only chance that they’d reached her together. It didn’t matter. With an upward shrug, Katherine flung all three of the undead monsters off her, and they went sprawling. She stepped on one’s head, popping it like an overripe melon before it could start to move again. A downward chop from her right hand ended a second, smashing the top of its skull inward with such force its eyes burst out of their sockets to dangle and bounce against its cheeks, still held to its body by thin strands of nerves and sinew. The third zombie was almost on its feet again as Katherine realized her focus on them had allowed several others to surround her. She snatched up the third zombie as if it were weightless, her fingers sinking into the flesh of its chest to close on the bones of its rib cage, and swung the zombie about her like a flail. Before the bones of its ribs snapped from the strain, Katherine knocked over half the zombies that had closed in on her. She launched into them with renewed fury, her eyes glowing a bright red in the night, and her fangs bared. The undead monsters never stood a chance.

  Tonya, however, was on the verge of freaking out. Her pistol cracked in rapid succession until it clicked empty. Cursing, she ejected the spent magazine and slammed another one home. The zombies were easy targets, given how slow they were, but there were so damn many of them, and they were coming in from all directions. Tonya swore that for every one she sent back to whatever hell it had crawled out of, two more took its place. Holding her pistol in a two-handed grip, she turned in a circle, careful to avoid hitting Katherine and Selah, dispatching the undead monsters as quickly as she could aim and pull the trigger. Her magazine seemed to run out even faster this time. She was already halfway through her stash of ammo as she ejected it and shoved the third one into her pistol. Tonya knew she wasn’t going to be able to hold her ground like Selah and Katherine were doing. She needed a plan. As she kept firing into the zombies’ ranks, her eyes scanned her surroundings for anything that might help her. Katherine must have noticed her doing so because she called out to her.

  “Get off the street and out of the way!” Katherine shouted. “The newbie and I can handle these things!”

  Tonya didn’t argue. Putting a bullet in the skull of any zombie that tried to block her path, she sprinted across the street toward one of the town’s stores. It was a small tourist trap shop with a glass front window and a heavy, rustic wooden door. Tonya tried the door as she reached it, twisting its knob violently—only the knob didn’t turn. The door was locked. The zombies, despite their slowness, were closing in quickly on her, and their numbers were too thick for her to fight her way through them again. Tonya was stuck where she was at the front of the store. Shaking her head, she knew what she had to do. She backed up and got a running start before hurling herself through the store’s front window. Glass shattered as her body crashed into and through it. Tonya hit the floor inside the store with a loud grunt. She’d kept a tight hold on her pistol and still clutched it as she hurled herself to her feet.

  A zombie rose up from behind the store’s counter, wearing an apron over a blood-stained flowered dress. Gray hair sprouted from its head and cracked glasses covered the zombie’s eyes. The thing that had once been a kindly-looking elderly lady lurched around the counter, moaning as it did. Tonya felt bad for the old lady as she raised the barrel of her pistol and put a round between her eyes. The impact sent the zombie staggering backward to crash into the store’s far wall with a loud thud, and its body slid down the wall to crumple up into a pile of decaying flesh that rested, unmoving, at its bottom.

  Other than the woman, the store was empty of the undead monsters, but it wouldn’t be for long. Already, several zombies were trying to climb through the store’s smashed window. Shards of broken glass crunched under the soles of Tonya’s shoes as she sprinted toward the rear of the store. There was another door there, and whether it was a back office or a way out, Tonya didn’t care—it had to lead to somewhere safer than where she was. At least that’s what she tol
d herself to keep her calm and stay focused. She looked over her shoulder at the zombies coming in through the window. There were three of them. One wore the uniform of a deputy sheriff. Another was dressed head to toe in black; some Goth teenager who had apparently found the death he’d likely romanticized most his life. The last was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve when she was turned. The sight of the young girl stung Tonya. She fought back tears, stopping long enough to end the girl’s hellish new existence with a bullet to her face.

  The deputy and Goth boy sprang at her, their moans growing louder and their arms reaching outward. Tonya ignored them, knowing it would take them a few seconds to cross the store to where she was. Her legs pumped beneath her, and she ran for the rear door. The door was unlocked when she reached it. Yanking it open, she leaped into the small room it led into. It was indeed a private office, and the room was empty except for a single desk and chair. Pictures of loved ones, likely belonging to the elderly zombie who’d been waiting on her when she entered the store, hung on the walls. The room itself smelled old and had a faint scent of mothballs. Tonya slammed the door shut before the two zombies chasing her reached it, and locked it. She knew it wouldn’t hold them out indefinitely, but it would buy her a few precious moments, if nothing else. Tonya heard one of the zombies slam into the other side of the door as she braced herself against it.

  Only then did she notice the skeleton hanging to the side of doorway. Tonya screamed at the sight of it. It was a real skeleton, like the sort used in medical classrooms. The sight of the thing nearly gave her a heart attack. Her heart was already pounding in her chest, and her body was slicked with sweat born of both exertion and fear. Upon entering the room, her mind must not have registered the skeleton’s presence because she’d been so focused on looking about for zombies and the skeleton clearly wasn’t one. It had no brain to make it mobile like the zombies. No basic instincts to send it in search of flesh to feed on.

  The two zombies outside the small office continued to smash their bare-knuckled fists into the door, but so far it was holding, though it shook in its frame from the blows they were inflicting upon it. Tonya gasped and wondered if she’d lost her mind as the impossible happened. The skeleton picked itself up off the stand where it hung and came at her. The skeleton moved with insane speed, its mouth snapping open and closed as if it were already eating away at her. Tonya was barely able to throw herself sideways to dodge the sharp points of its bony fingers as they raked across the wood of the door where she’d stood only a fraction of a second before. Scrambling along the floor on her hands and knees, Tonya tried to put as much distance between her and the skeleton as she could, but there wasn’t much distance to get in the small room.

  The skeleton swung around to come at her again as Tonya made it to the room’s desk. She steadied her arm against it as she fired wildly at the skeleton. Her pistol cracked once, twice, three times. The first bullet missed the skeleton entirely, digging a hole in the wall behind it. Her second shot grazed the inside of its ribs as it passed through the thing’s body, accomplishing nothing more than sending a few bone chips flying. Tonya’s third shot smacked the skeleton straight on in the center of its skull, blowing a hole through the bone it met there. Despite her luck with the shot, it didn’t even slow the skeleton down. Tonya could swear she heard the thing hissing as it closed on her. That was impossible though; it had no lungs. She threw her arms up to bear the brunt of its attack as the claw-like points of its fingers slashed at her. Tonya winced and grunted at the pain as they tore through the sleeves of her jacket and raked over the flesh of her arms. She heard the door of the small room give way. Instead of the two zombies that had been pounding on it though, it was Katherine who entered the room.

  “What the hell are you…?” Katherine started, making one of her usual combat jokes, but then saw the skeleton and the dire predicament Tonya was in. The half-vampire former leader of Psi-Mechs, Inc. jumped across the room with a single bound to take hold of the skeleton by the back of its neck. Katherine flung the skeleton against the wall, shattering it. Its bones clattered to the office floor.

  “What the hell was that thing?” Katherine asked as she extended a hand to help Tonya to her feet.

  “No idea,” Tonya rasped, retrieving her pistol from the floor. Blood flowed freely from the wounds on her arms where the skeleton had savaged them. Tonya watched Katherine flinch and take a step back away from her as the smell of the blood hit the half vampire.

  Katherine looked more sick than hungry as she raised a hand over her mouth and nose.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Tonya said. “Come on! We need to get out of here before more zombies find their way in here.”

  Tonya loaded her last magazine into her pistol as she ran for the door. Katherine followed after her. As soon as they were through the door, Katherine took the lead. The bodies of the two zombies who had originally been after Tonya lay on the floor, already dealt with by the half vampire on her way in, but three more had entered the store. Katherine engaged them. There was no room to use her katana properly inside the store, so she just barreled into the undead monsters with a flurry of punches. They were on the floor, truly dead, before Tonya could even raise her pistol. Tonya had worked for and beside Katherine for a long time, but at moments like this, the half vampire’s sheer speed and power left her in awe of the woman that was Katherine Grimm.

  Selah was still holding her own outside on the street. There were zombie corpses everywhere now. Dozens upon dozens of them. So many that it looked like the entire population of the town had come out to greet them. Yet there was still no end to the things. More zombies were continuing to shuffle out of the trees and lurch along the streets from both its ends in their direction.

  “Should I call Eddie in?” Tonya asked Katherine, though she was in command of the op. Old habits and all that. Seeing Katherine as she was now, it was easy to forget how broken the woman was on the inside from her captivity.

  “No.” Katherine shook her head. “We need to find our own way out of here.”

  Tonya didn’t question Katherine’s answer.

  “If we’re leaving, could you guys speed it up please?” Selah called to them. There were zombies clinging to nearly every part of the psycho-metabolist’s body. They were raking at her with their claws and their teeth, trying desperately to bite through her thickly-armored flesh.

  Katherine ran to her aid, flinging zombie after zombie away from the newbie. Selah did her part too, head butting one monster, then sinking the blade of her katana into the skull of another. When the zombies that had been on her were dealt, with Selah turned to Katherine.

  “Thanks,” the newbie said grudgingly.

  Katherine gave a cold nod in response.

  “Over there!” Tonya yelled pointing at van parked on the side of the street.

  All three of them made a run for the vehicle. Katherine and Selah lead the way, clearing a path for Tonya. The telepath leaped into the driver’s seat as the other two women stood their ground, keeping the zombies away. Tonya had no idea how to hotwire a car. She sent tendrils of telepathic energy out, searching for Hank’s mind. She found him easily and tapped into the tele-mechanic’s vast supernatural knowledge of and connection to machines. Yanking the wires she needed loose, Tonya got the van going. Its engine roared to life as she breathed a sigh of relief. Selah and Katherine abandoned their battle with the seemingly endless horde of undead and got into the van’s rear. Peeling out as Tonya floored the gas pedal, the van shot forward like a rocket taking off. The few zombies unlucky enough to be in front if it were either knocked out of its way or crushed beneath its wheels as the van sped along the street.

  “That was a damn close call,” Selah said, moving to take the passenger seat next to Tonya.

  “For you, maybe.” Katherine snorted.

  “Where are we headed?” Tonya asked before Selah could get in a comeback.

  “Anywhere but here,” Katherine ans
wered. “We’ll figure everything else out from there.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 10

  Leaving the zombies behind had been easy. The slow-moving creatures had vanished from the van’s rearview mirror half an hour ago. Tonya had driven out of town and along the road Eddie had originally deposited them on. It led up into barren hills that were nothing but woods. That was fine. The farther they stayed away from people, until they knew what they were up against, the better. Their plan of feeling out the town for evidence of supernatural activity in the area certainly hadn’t gone as they’d expected it to. Based on what they’d seen, the entire town had been wiped out and turned into undead monsters. Who was to say the nearby towns hadn’t been as well? Vampires were good at keeping things from the general public, even in the Information Age. Add to them a cult of dark mages at Mavet’s beck and call, and such a thing could indeed be hidden. At least for a while.

  Tonya pulled the van over on the side of the dirt road she’d been driving along. Selah shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat next to her. Katherine was still in the rear of the van, but as it came to stop, she moved to lean in between their seats.

  “Well ladies, what now?” Katherine asked.

  “I thought you’d taken command,” Tonya said.

  Katherine shook her head. “This is your op, Tonya not mine. That’s how my son ordered it, and I plan on honoring that as much as I can.”

  Selah grunted. “You didn’t do such a good job of that back in town.”

  “We all got out alive, didn’t we?” Katherine scowled.