The Breaking

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  “Mr. Burkis is a long way from a buddy. As for Liam, he could be anywhere. If there was more hours in the day, I could take time to hunt them down.”

  “You won’t need to hunt them,” Steve reminded her. “They can find us whenever the hell they want.”

  “Good,” she said as she slapped the magazine into the Beretta, then chambered the first round. “I’ve still got some of that ammo dipped in the Blood Blade fragments that should put a real crimp in their day.”

  “Hopefully it’ll work better than the Nymar rounds do against Shadow Spore,” Steve said from the backseat. “Did Daniels come up with anything that works on them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then we could be walking into a whole lot of trouble by waving guns around loaded with bullets that won’t even do the job.”

  “They’ll do the job,” she assured him. “Just keep firing until their hearts are turned into paste.”

  “Any way I can talk you out of this? I know some guys that might be up for this job. They’re workin’ on some angles of their own right now, organizing the Skinners that can make a difference in this fight, but they still might be able to pitch in here.”

  “I’m not interested in working with more strangers,” Paige snapped as she turned toward Steve. “You said I needed to put this right and that’s what I want to do. I found you. Prophet is already back chasing fugitives. Those Amriany disappeared on their own. That leaves Cole, and he’s the only one that I owe a goddamn thing to anymore. We didn’t cause these problems. We didn’t create these monsters and we sure as hell didn’t set them loose. We’re doing our best, but if people can’t defend themselves every now and then, something’s bound to pick them off.”

  Rico’s features were like folds in an elephant’s hide. When they shifted, it was just to another version of ugly. Paige had known him long enough to recognize the hint of a grin hidden under all of those unattractive layers, but she wasn’t about to answer back with one of her own. Reaching around to grab the Mossberg Model 535 Tactical 12-gauge shotgun he’d stowed on the floor of the seat behind him, he said, “You might get along with these friends of mine better than you think.”

  Every other house on Kenilworth Avenue seemed to be a duplex. For each little single family home on the clean, tree-lined street, there was another that looked as if it had been built with one wall butting against a mirror. Paige’s destination was one of the duplexes just north of the intersection at Kenilworth and Norway Avenue. It was a tan run-down structure with two sets of screen doors that had taken equal amounts of abuse from owners and elements alike. By the time she, Steve, and Rico had made their way up the street to get a look at the place, the sky had dimmed to a mix of dark purples and blues. Cars rolled through the residential neighborhood, but the drivers were more concerned with getting home than taking notice of anyone ambling along the sidewalk.

  Paige had her hands stuffed into the pockets of a dark green jacket made of heavy canvas. It was baggy enough to allow her to move freely without getting snagged on the underlying layers consisting of a tactical vest over a dark gray T-shirt. The storerooms beneath Jonah Lancroft’s home in Philadelphia had provided her with plenty of Half Breed skins to use as lining for the vest that took a lot of punishment from almost anything, even if it wasn’t treated using Rico’s tanning techniques. The harness zipped around the skins, providing her with more protection than any conventional body armor.

  Striding beside her, Rico kept his arms hanging at his sides as if he was walking down an Old West boardwalk with the intention of facing his doom at sundown. His jacket was the sort of battered garment that would have been worn with pride by any self-respecting biker. Several dozen Half Breeds had died to either create or patch up that jacket over the years and it still wasn’t complete. Strips of canvas were stitched in to fill the remaining gaps, and leather cords were laced up both sides so he could expand or tighten the jacket as the occasion demanded. For the moment, it was loose enough to accommodate his shoulder holster and the bulk of extra shotgun shells stuffed into his pocket. It wasn’t long enough, however, to do much to hide the Mossberg.

  Steve carried three guns, all .45s, holstered beneath a baggy raincoat. Although he didn’t seem to handle the weapons with much expertise, he assured both Skinners that he knew how to make them sing. That was good enough for Paige, especially since he’d survived the last few weeks, when so many Skinners had been picked off by Nymar who blended into the darkness and moved faster than the now outdated variety of vampire. “How many are inside?” he asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  Looking at the front of the house, Rico glanced back and forth between both front doors at the top of a single, narrow set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. “Do you even know which side it’s on?”

  “I figured we’d each take one,” she replied. “Shouldn’t be long before we figure out which is which.”

  “Good plan,” Rico grunted.

  “Thanks.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I know.” Facing the corner where she’d parked the car, Paige casually reached for the Beretta holstered at her hip. “If you’ve got a preference, tell me now.”

  The house wasn’t much to look at, but was well-maintained. Despite the fact that the outside was weather-beaten and battered, the simple curtains in the windows were clean and drawn shut tightly enough to keep the inside tucked away and out of sight. There wasn’t a single feature to differentiate one half from the other. Even the windows on both sides were dark in the exact same way. “I’ll take the right,” he said with a shrug.

  “You’ll also take the new guy.” After glancing back and forth to make certain the sidewalk in front of the house and its closest neighbors was empty, Paige held her pistol in a two-handed grip with the barrel pointed at the ground and added, “Either of you needs help, just yell. Remember, we’re looking for any Nymar and a computer setup.”

  “I was listening during the ride over,” Steve whined. “I know what you’re looking for.”

  “Good. Then let’s find it.”

  Chapter Two

  Paige approached the door on the left, placed her shoulder against the wall and leaned to try and look through the window. There was a small gap between the frame and the edge of the curtain, which wasn’t enough for her to see much of anything inside other than a few lights deeper within the place. Once Rico approached his door, she stepped over and opened hers with a straight kick that slammed her heel a few inches below the knob. It gave way with the crackle of splintering wood and the creak of an old dead bolt being dislodged from its housing.

  The room was almost pitch-black, illuminated only by the scant bit of light spilling out from a short hallway that led to the back rooms. Her eyes had adjusted quickly enough to make out the blocky shapes of furniture in her path and a television set on a stand to her left. Bundles lay on the floor in a way that let her picture the homeowner casually dropping them while heading deeper into the house. Raising her Beretta to sight along the top of its barrel, she stepped over the bundles and waited for someone to answer the simultaneous break-ins. The response came in the form of one of those bundles reaching up to grab her.

  “Son of a bitch!” she snapped.

  Rather than fight the thick fingers wrapped around her ankle, Paige moved her free leg out to the side and planted it to steady her balance. She maintained a grip on the Beretta while staring down at the face of a Nymar that almost completely blended in with the shadows filling the living room. Even when the vampire opened its mouth to hiss at her, she could see only the faint reflection of dim light off fangs.

  In the months since they’d put the Skinners in the sights of every law enforcement agency in America, the Nymar had been learning to use the gifts given to them by the Shadow Spore. These included claws that could draw blood through hollow feeding tubes and tendrils directly beneath their skin that could expand in darkness and contract in light to give them natural camouflag
e both in the shadows and among humans. Because the Shadow Spore was a strain unknown to modern hunters until a few months ago, it was immune to the antidote used to kill Nymar, and didn’t trigger the itch in the Skinners’ scars that served as an early warning system.

  In the near dark, Paige couldn’t make out what the rest of the Nymar’s body was doing. When it swept her legs from beneath her and she fell to the floor, she fired two shots directly into its face. Her antidote rounds didn’t react to the vampire’s blood, but they did punch a few messy holes through its skull, which were instantly plugged by oily black tendrils. She knew that even if its brain was blown completely through the back of its head, the spore could maintain enough control to keep the body moving. It was quite a sight.

  Paige swung her back leg around to kick it in the face. Her foot pounded against the Nymar’s chin, snapping its head to one side with a sickening wet crunch. Now that her eyes had adjusted well enough to make out the vampire’s figure, she was able to slam her heel into its stomach to force the air from its lungs. It was still camouflaged too well for her to tell if the Nymar was male or female. Blackened skin was wrapped around a bare torso that had curves slight enough to be an athletic version of either gender. The impact forced the Nymar away, giving Paige a chance to jump to her feet and look down the hall toward the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Two more figures stomped out of one of the other rooms. Because of the sudden light when the door opened, Paige couldn’t tell whether they were human or if their tendrils had merely become too thin for her to see. Fortunately, they removed the guesswork by snarling at her, revealing sets of fangs extending from their upper and lower jaws. One pumped a shell into a sawed-off shotgun, while the other sighted along the top of a semiautomatic pistol.

  Dropping to one knee to present a smaller target, Paige fired. She couldn’t rely on the antidote rounds or the brute power of ballistics, so she compensated by hitting each of them with no fewer than five shots each. The extended magazine in her Beretta had three shots left, which she fired into the Nymar on the floor as it sunk its claws into her leg.

  When she tried to pull her ankle from its grasp, she only succeeded in dragging the wounded Nymar an inch or two closer. Its facial features and body structure were that of a male. The Beretta had claimed one of his eyes, along with a sizable chunk of his temple, but those wounds were already filled with tendrils resembling fresh tar that had been poured into a pothole. Paige kicked and pulled, but still couldn’t free herself before the Nymar reached out with its other hand to drag her down again. She hit the floor on her hip, and the Nymar crawled like a scurrying millipede and was able to dig into her right arm with his claws. Those sharpened nails could shred through most nonmetallic materials, but weren’t strong enough to do more than scrape against the hardened exterior of her arm.

  In the months following an injury involving an experimental substance she’d injected into herself, Paige hadn’t been able to regain full use of her arm. Through a rigid exercise routine, she improved her mobility to somewhere close to normal, but the accident had left the limb feeling like a slab of concrete wrapped in warm silk. As uncomfortable as that was for her, it was even more so to anyone who got that arm smashed into their face. After pulling it free from the vampire’s grasp, she did just that to the Nymar. Deciding not to waste any more bullets, she pulled her knee close to her body, and with her heel pointed at the Nymar’s chest, placed her other foot on top of the wooden baton holstered at the side of her boot. The upper end of that weapon was rounded, but the lower end was sharpened into a point that punched through leather with ease as she pushed it down with her foot.

  The petrified wood ripped from its holster to emerge several inches past the sole of her boot. Snapping both legs forward, Paige drove the weapon into the Nymar’s chest and then twisted her feet. He screamed and tried to pull away as she stood up while keeping the weapon lodged within his breast plate. After slamming the Beretta against the Nymar’s temple, she shifted her weight so most of it drove the weapon farther down, until it hit what she guessed was either the Nymar’s backbone or the floor beneath him. Her hands flew through the motions of reloading the Beretta and pulled back the slide just in time to fire at the two Nymar who’d recovered from her first salvo.

  More gunshots thumped next door, meaning Rico and Steve were either making progress or getting hammered by superior weaponry. Either way, Paige knew she couldn’t do much about it. She lifted the boot with the shredded holster, dropped it down to force the weapon back up into its leather case, and walked toward the hallway while firing three quick shots at the Nymar, who had regrouped and moved into another room. As they recoiled, she drew the second Beretta and rushed them. Accustomed to being feared based solely on their appearance, the Nymar were surprised when she charged into the room after them and placed a gun barrel against each of their chests. She pulled her triggers several times, doing enough damage to turn their hearts into paste and send them to the floor. She would have liked to make sure they weren’t about to get up but instead continued down the hall to get a look into the rooms branching off of it.

  She entered a bedroom with two beds and a clock radio on the floor near an outlet. A particle board entertainment center bore a cheap CD player and a few selections of whiny, wannabe punk rock.A bathroom across the hall contained only a toilet, sink, tub, and a collection of threadbare towels hanging on old metal racks.

  At the end of the hall a second bedroom had been converted into an office, complete with a dusty desk and cabinets that reached up to a water-stained ceiling. A computer, printer, modem, and several notebooks lay on the desk, and beneath it were some larger components. One of those was obviously a computer tower, but the others resembled what Cole had once described to her as servers for use in setting up or maintaining Internet sites.

  The tech guys from MEG had told her how to try and squeeze what she wanted out of the equipment. Stu, who answered phones for Branch 40 and knew his way around just about any kind of electronics, had explained how to look for hidden files, search for e-mail logs, and transfer vital data onto a flash drive. Since time was a factor, Paige holstered the pistols so she could dig into her pocket for the flash drive—a thumb-sized hunk of blue plastic.

  “Come on,” she muttered while going through the series of typed commands and mouse clicks she’d memorized. Though she knew she couldn’t get everything she wanted from the computer in such a short amount of time, she hoped to get at least one piece of halfway decent information that she hadn’t already gotten from another source. As long as the fighting next door continued, she figured she could push her luck by digging a little deeper.

  “Now this is more like it,” she said while shifting her attention to the sort of information that fell more within her comfort zone. The notebooks stacked on the desk were logs of messages that needed to be sent and had been received. There were dates, names, and locations. Even if some of them had been faked or encrypted, she had plenty of gaming geeks on her speed dial who would love the chance to crack a real vampire code. In fact, she might be able to retire if she set up a bidding war at the MEG offices.

  After gathering up the books and shoving them into a plastic grocery bag she’d found on the floor, Paige checked the computer. The shooting next door had stopped. From the other half of the duplex she heard several heavy thumps and a very familiar if muffled voice. Rico was wrapping up.

  The transfer of files was done: not surprising, since she barely knew the basics about what to look for and had probably missed lots of them. A quick glance into the next room told her that only one of the Nymar was still moving. Some commotion came from outside and the cops were surely on their way. She clicked on the icon for the main computer interface, opened the Documents folder, looked at a short list of users and found one marked CP01-99. She grinned and clicked on that, having already found a reference to it in one of the sites the Nymar had created on ChatterPages.com.

  Most of the files were la
beled with gobbledygook involving random letters and nonsequential numbers. Just as Paige was about to back out to copy the entire folder to her flash drive, she found one labeled in plain English. It was called Skinner contact list.

  Her first thought was that the file was speculation on locations of people she already knew, but something in her gut forced her to tap the mouse key one more time and bring up the document. It was a list of names. Most of them were Skinners she’d either heard of or briefly talked to over the years. Some were familiar, thanks to the time she’d spent in Philadelphia helping to dole out Jonah Lancroft’s belongings to hunters who swarmed in from different parts of the country to claim their portion of the loot.

  One of those names was Bobby Ferguson, a Skinner who had decided to jump the fence and join up with Hope during the recent Nymar attacks on local police. Selina was on the list as well, a Philadelphia Skinner high on Paige’s own list of suspected traitors. After picking out one more name, Paige transferred the files to her flash drive, yanked it from the port and stuffed it into her pocket.

  “Hey, Bloodhound!” Rico shouted from the living room. “You through?”

  “Yeah.” Rather than waste her ammunition, Paige took out some aggression by stepping back and delivering a straight kick to the computer tower, which toppled over so she could bust it with her baton.

  Paige jogged down the hall, drew her pistol and popped a few more rounds into the chest of the one surviving Nymar. She knew that one was finished when the spore attached to its heart tried to suck every last bit of moisture from its host. The moment that process got rolling, the Nymar’s body started to dry up into a flaky mess of ashy skin particles, until it resembled the others she’d left behind.

  Outside, Rico and Steve were waiting for her. “What’d you find in there?” Rico asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that was the place we were after. No Cobb, though. That is, unless he was one of those idiots who tried to charge me when I walked in.”