Elijah laughed. “Matt, obviously you have not been paying attention to the women lately.”
As Matt turned and looked at Sam, she smiled and flexed her arm, showing him a sizable muscle.
“He’s right, Matt,” she said. “Since we’ve been sharing our blood, TJ and Kim and I have all gotten quite a bit stronger.” She waggled her eyebrows lasciviously. “In fact, if you want to try me out in a little wrestling match . . . ?”
He laughed and held up his hands. “Maybe later, darling, but your point is taken, my dear.”
“She was kidding, but she was also correct, Matt,” Elijah said, turning serious once again. “By my estimation, the women are just as strong physically as we are at this point, and probably much stronger than any ‘normal’ male Vampyre who hasn’t been sharing blood as we have.”
TJ gave Sam a high five and grinned maliciously, “It won’t even be close; the bastards won’t know what hit them!”
Shooter wagged his head, muttering “Women,” and moved over to the stacks of equipment. “I know about the swords and the pistols, and even the sawed-off shotguns, Elijah,” he said, nodding at a pile of short-barreled twelve-gauge gauge Beretta pump shotguns at the end of the pile of weaponry, “but what in the heck are those canisters there? They look like cans of hairspray.”
Elijah smiled. “You’re right, Shooter, and I even have the name of a popular hairspray on the label, but they’re nothing so innocuous. In fact, they’re designs of my own that I have made up for me in San Francisco.”
“But what exactly are they?” Ed asked.
“Actually, they’re miniature flamethrowers,” Elijah answered proudly. “The cans are filled with a sort of napalm mixture, kind of like jellied gasoline, that I devised a while back, and I’ve had it mixed with some Freon gas as a propellant. All you have to do is push the button on top of the can and a little diode there makes a spark and you’ve got a flamethrower effective up to about eight feet.”
“Are they dangerous to the user?” TJ asked, a doubtful expression on her face.
Elijah shrugged and gave her a lopsided grin. “Well, if you’re carrying one and it’s hit by a bullet, you can probably expect a pretty severe hotfoot, but other than that they’re as easy to use as a can of hairspray.”
“But, if we cut their heads off, do we still need to burn them?” TJ asked. “I don’t remember us having to do that up in Canada during our last confrontation.”
“No, not if the head is completely severed,” Elijah answered, “But if even a sliver of tissue remains connecting the head to the body, the enemy will be able to regenerate—eventually.”
“So, to get this straight, the only two ways to kill the bastards we’re going after is to behead them or to burn them to crispy critters?” Matt asked.
Elijah shrugged. “That’s the only two ways that are practical. Practically anything that totally destroys the body will work—immersion in acid or lye or other caustic chemicals—but decapitation and fire are the easiest to use in the field.”
“Are you sure killing them is the only way, Elijah?” TJ asked, and Sam nodded her head. Neither of the women were particularly violence prone and both hoped there was some other way to deal with the threat posed by Thantos and his minions.
Elijah looked into their eyes. “Well, girls,” he said, calling the women girls as he always did though his voice was not condescending at all. “What we’re dealing with here is a group of fanatics who want to take over the country, if not the world, in order to make it safe for them to totally subjugate Normals and use them as a food source. Do you seriously think they’ll be open to a reasoned discussion with us about the error of their ways?”
Matt looked around at the array of equipment on the floor. “So, let’s see now,” he said, stroking his chin with his lips pursed. “We’re supposed to trek all the way down to Washington, D.C., looking for Vampyres with absolutely no idea where they might be or even who they are, and all the while we’ll be carrying what looks like about twenty pounds of illegal firearms and flamethrowers.” He glanced around at his friends. “Is that it?” he asked.
Elijah’s grin faded and his voice sounded a bit testy when he replied. “No, that’s not it, Matt. In the first place, we’ll only have to carry the equipment when we go out hunting for a particular Vampyre, not while we’re walking around on the street; and in the second place, while it is true that we don’t know where our targets are hiding out, we do know that they must have converted some high-ranking administration officials and possibly some Congress persons. So, with our newfound ability to use our psychic powers at fairly good distances, we should be able to ferret some of them out without too much difficulty and hopefully then find out from them the identities of the other members of their group.”
“Plus our new strength will be an added asset when we find and confront them,” Sam said, glancing from Matt to Elijah. “Those fuckers won’t be expecting us women Vampyres to be stronger than they are.”
Matt blushed at the rebukes by Elijah and Sam. “I’m sorry, Elijah. I don’t mean to be a naysayer. It’s just that I’m afraid we might be taking on more than we can handle.” He paused before adding with a sour look on his face, “And it sounds to me like we’re gonna need every little advantage we can get.”
“You got that right, podnah,” Shooter added. “Us seven are going up against no telling how many unknown opponents, and, if that’s not enough of a challenge, there’s something else you haven’t thought about.”
“What’s that, sugar?” TJ asked.
“We’re gonna be going to war in the middle of Washington, D.C. What do you think the authorities are gonna do when they’re suddenly confronted with scores of headless dead bodies, especially when the medical examiner finds out that some of them are hundreds of years old?”
“Well, what about burning the bodies with Elijah’s napalm?” Kim asked.
“Same problem, darling,” Ed answered. “There isn’t enough napalm in those cans to burn the bodies to ash, so the authorities are still going to be left with a lot of dead people to investigate.”
“No,” Shooter interrupted, “not dead people, Ed, dead Vampyres, and that’s a whole other ball game.”
Sam and Matt both nodded their agreement. “Yeah,” Matt said, “that was one of the things that put us onto Elijah in Houston back when we first met. He’d killed a couple of Vampyres and burned their bodies, but the autopsy showed their flesh was over two hundred years old.”
“It does present some rather unique problems,” Sam said, her brows knitted in thought.
“Of course, a lot of the ones we end up killing will be new converts, so the age of their tissue won’t be too much of a problem,” Ed added, “but the pattern of decapitation is sure to raise some eyebrows down at police headquarters.”
“No, you guys are all right,” Elijah said, standing up and stretching his cramped muscles, a concerned expression on his face. “We should try and figure out some way to keep from inundating the Washington police with bodies, either of the headless type or the crispy critter type.”
He glanced from one to the other. “Any ideas, teammates?” he asked.
Ed’s eyes narrowed and he assumed a thoughtful expression “I’ve got an idea, Elijah. Let me work on it and I’ll let you know how it pans out.”
Immediately all of the other members of the group focused their minds on his, attempting to use their new, stronger mind-reading powers to get some inclination of just what his idea consisted of. They were met with a stone wall.
He grinned and shook his head when he felt their probes, shutting them out completely. “Uh-uh, boys and girls,” Ed said with a grin. “No fair peeking.”
With an enigmatic expression on his face, Ed got up and walked off toward the deck of the cabin, humming softly to himself.
The group followed him with their eyes, looking at each other and shrugging when they saw him pull out his cell phone and lean against the banister of the deck a
s he dialed.
“Well, since it looks like we’ll just have to wait until Ed is ready to tell us his plan, why don’t we spend our time getting as much of the vaccine ready to ship as we can and getting all of this equipment packed and ready to head to Washington?” Elijah suggested.
“How about I get on the phone and see about finding us someplace to stay?” Sam suggested.
“Good idea,” Elijah said. “Pick a large chain hotel like Howard Johnson’s or Marriott on one of the freeway loops around the outskirts of town,” he advised. “That way, the hotel personnel won’t notice our comings and goings if it’s late at night and we’ll be far enough out of the inner city traffic that if we have to leave town in a hurry we can go in any direction and get away fast.”
Shooter’s eyes narrowed. “You think we might have to cut and run?” he asked.
Elijah’s grin was grim. “I told you all this is going to be a war, and we’re going up against some of the richest and most powerful people in the free world, so anything’s possible.’
He hesitated, and then he added cryptically, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned by being on the outskirts of society for a couple of hundred years, it is to prepare for the absolute worst-case scenario and you’ll never be surprised when it comes to pass.”
Chapter 30
Allison Burton called her good friend, Bitsy McCormack. When she answered the phone, Allison said, “Hey, girlfriend, what’s up?”
Bitsy, who was the quintessential spoiled Washington brat, immediately began to complain.
“Oh, hi Allison. I’m just sitting here twirling my thumbs and looking at the mess in my room. The old man has said I’m grounded until I clean it up.”
Allison shuddered. She remembered the last time she spent the night at Bitsy’s she found some month-old pizza under the bed. “Yeah, well, get your ass in gear, girl,” Allison said, laughing. “Today’s Saturday and the mall is gonna be full of mall rats. I thought we could meet and have some lunch and scope out the better looking ones.”
Bitsy seemed to perk up at this. “Oh, great! The old man has always had a thing for you, Ally, so I’ll tell him you’re gonna come by and pick me up and I’ll bet he’ll let me go.”
“Sure thing, I’ll have my Secret Service agent drive us. So, I’ll be by in about an hour, okay?”
“Yeah, and Allison,” Bitsy said, her voice dropping to almost a whisper, “wear something low cut. You know how the old man likes to get an eyeful every time you come over.”
Allison grunted noncommittally and was about to hang up when Bitsy suddenly said, “Oh, wow, I almost forgot! Did you hear about Jamie and Connie after the school dance last week?”
Allison made a questioning noise and settled in to listen to Bitsy go over the latest gossip, something she loved almost more than fast food. Allison was in no hurry to get off the phone, for she fully intended during their outing to explore Bitsy’s mind to see if she was as fully committed to this Thantos guy’s scheme to take over the world.
She was pretty sure Bitsy’s dad, General Black Jack McCormack was fully supporting the plan, since Allison knew from previous conversations with her dad that McCormack was a full-on hawk and had some pretty severe political aspirations of his own.
Of course, she told herself, Bitsy wasn’t her dad, not by a long shot, and she knew they didn’t get along very well. Bitsy had once confided to her that he beat her mother, which Bitsy thought was gross and terrible. As far as Allison could tell, the two barely spoke to one another.
However, she warned herself, that could all be different now that Bitsy and her dad were both Vampyres. In fact, the last couple of times she’d seen them together, she got intense sexual vibes from both of them and she wondered if the old man was hitting on his daughter now that she’d transformed him.
Allison glanced over her shoulder, watching Michelle Meyer, the Secret Service agent assigned to protect her, sitting by the door reading a magazine.
Michelle must’ve sensed her scrutiny with her mind-reading abilities, for she turned and stared back at Allison, making no attempt to hide the probing as she tried to get inside Allison’s mind to see what she was up to.
Allison clamped her thoughts down tight, thinking, Snooty Bitch! She’d never liked Michelle, and since her transformation, her attitude hadn’t changed a bit. The broad was just a little too right wing for Allison, kind’a like Bitsy’s father.
She was going to have to be very careful in her meeting with Bitsy today. She hadn’t dared to try and read Michelle’s thoughts. The bitch was just too powerful and Allison was afraid that if she got in the agent’s mind, she’d catch on that Allison and her dad were attempting to find other Vampyres who weren’t in favor of Thantos’s scheme to rule the world.
She watched Michelle frown when she was unable to read Allison’s mind, and she gave her an innocent grin and went back to her telephone conversation with Bitsy, only half listening as her friend told her all about Jamie and Connie’s big fight after the dance.
As Bitsy talked on and on, Allison wondered briefly about how easy it was for her to shut out other Vampyre’s psychic attempts to read her mind. Allison had as long as she could remember had what she called “hunches” such as knowing the phone was going to ring seconds before it did, and even usually knowing who was calling. Perhaps, she thought to herself, she’d had some latent psychic abilities prior to her conversion to being a Vampyre. If so, then she ought to be able to safely look into Michelle’s mind without any danger.
She absentmindedly chewed on her thumbnail as she weighed the risks against the possible benefits from this attempt. She realized it would be best if she put all thoughts out of her mind about her and her dad’s attempts to contact others who felt as they did. She’d just think about something else when she tried to probe Michelle’s mind.
She fixed a firm picture of Joey Grayson in her mind. He was a boy at school that she thought was cute as a button, and he’d even flirted with her a time or two. All that had changed the moment she’d been transformed; she was afraid if she went out on a date with him she might have him for dinner instead of just going to dinner with him. She thought about how good his smile was as she ignored Bitsy’s voice on the phone and cast her mind out at Michelle, trying her best to “tiptoe” through it instead of stomping around willy-nilly.
At first all she got was Michelle’s emotional state, mainly boredom and frustration that she wasn’t being promoted to a higher pay grade even though she’d been the one to transform her boss, Russell Cain, into the Vampyre race.
Suddenly her thoughts came through to Allison as clear as if she’d been speaking directly to her: “That misogynist son of a bitch,” Michelle thought bitterly. “He’d rather cut off his right hand than give a woman a break.”
As Michelle’s thoughts continued in this vein, without any apparent knowledge that Allison was invading her privacy, Allison decided to dig a little deeper. She imagined she was a cat moving silently through the dark, her feet not making a sound on the grass.
This was a little tricky, as she’d never attempted to do this without the subject’s consent before. She and her dad did it all the time, but they always asked first and got each other’s permission to go after the deep thoughts that lay far beneath the surface of the mind.
Allison smiled as she moved through Michelle’s mind, being as gentle as she could. It was almost like her favorite video game—Dungeons and Dragons—that she played for hours each day. In the game, she had to navigate through miles and miles of tunnels and caves, searching for the treasure without being found out by the dragons that guarded the underground maze.
Only, she was amazed to discover, this was easier. It was as if she were invisible to Michelle and could move anywhere in the woman’s thoughts that she wanted.
She was startled to discover how bitter Michelle was, not only against her boss but also against the entire Vampyre movement. She found the agent hated Thantos with a vengeance, and that she
was terrified that her thoughts would give her away to the “madman” as Michelle thought of him. She even found some fantasy thoughts of Michelle’s where the agent imagined herself tearing Thantos’s throat out and drinking his blood until it ceased to flow.
Digging further, Allison found that Michelle really respected and admired her dad, but she thought Allison was a spoiled little bitch who didn’t deserve a father like him.
Allison grinned. Well, Michelle was right about that—she had given the agent hell on many occasions, and before her transformation, she had been a bit of a bitch. Well, in fact she’d been a lot of bitch, not a little she admitted to herself.
Allison was even more surprised to discover, after probing a little deeper, that in spite of Michelle’s opinion that she was a bitch, there was also an undercover smidgeon of respect and admiration for Allison about how well she’d coped with her mother’s death and her father’s busy work schedule. Hell, Allison realized, Michelle even sees a little of herself as a young woman in me!
She was also amazed to learn that Michelle, like her dad, was an avowed patriot, and that she was furious at the way Thantos and his cronies were leading America’s elected officials around by their noses. She got the feeling the agent would love to scuttle Thantos’s plan, if only she could think of a way to do it without getting herself killed.
After only a moment’s hesitation, Allison decided to make a move she would never have contemplated only a little while before. She was going to confront Michelle with her feelings against Thantos, though just to be on the safe side, Allison decided not to mention that her dad felt the same way.
She broke in on Bitsy’s soliloquy about her miserable dating life and told her she’d see her at lunch. After she hung up, she took a deep breath and swiveled around in her chair.
“Hey, Michelle,” she called, her voice trembling a little at the chance she was about to take. “Can we talk for a minute?”
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