by M. Lorrox
Balena caught Charlie’s hints, and now, she no longer waits. She flips the switch on the jammer attached to her M4, which is still aimed at Mary.
Mary’s retinal implants were overlaying the video footage from the camera high on the wall behind her, but the signal is interrupted and is replaced with static. The other data feeds that were being displayed to her are also scrambled, and for an instant, she is disoriented.
Charlie sees it. He wraps his right hand on the blade of the sword at his chest, and grabs her throat with the other. He squeezes both—her neck squishes in his grip, and the flesh on his fingertips is cut to the bone.
Mary disconnects her computer uplink, and while looking deep into Charlie’s eyes, she swallows. The strength of the small muscles in her neck push against Charlie’s hand. At the same time, with her left, flesh-and-bone hand, she jabs her fingers into Charlie’s left elbow—the elbow on the arm that is squeezing her throat.
The strike is stronger than any punch Charlie has ever received, and his left arm is sent flying away from her.
Before Charlie can blink, Mary whips that same hand into his opposite shoulder, hitting a nerve, smashing it against his bone, and severing it. Charlie’s entire arm—his right, dominant arm—goes limp.
I think I’m going to die now. “Shoot her!”
Balena doesn’t have a shot at her, unless she fires bullets through Charlie’s body. She tries to move to the side, to fire past him, while she keeps the jammer aimed at Mary.
“Very clever, Carles, but you’ve just sealed your death sentence.” With her robotic hand, she flicks the sword back with incredible speed, then spins her wrist and slices the sword into Charlie’s left side, between the ribs, aimed for his heart.
He twists away—to increase the distance the sword must travel to kill him, and in that movement, he opens a line of attack to Mary from Balena.
Mary steps an inch to the side, keeping Charlie as a bleeding-but-effective shield.
Charlie’s right arm is garbage from the severed nerve, and his left arm was sent flying from Mary’s harsh fingertip strike at his elbow. By the time he gets his left hand back to his side and wrapped around the sword, she’s cut more than two inches into his muscle and lungs.
He pulls against the blade, cutting his fingers on his left hand to the bone, and he wedges those bones between his chest and the sword. He tries to pull his fingers back, to force the sword out of him, but instead, Mary extends her hand to the side. The handle of the sword swivels away from her and Charlie while the rest of the sword pivots against Charlie’s cracking finger bones and slices deeper into him.
Balena dives to get a shot, but Mary steps another few inches to keep Charlie in the way. With her left hand, she grabs Charlie’s right shoulder and pulls him with her. Mary smiles at Charlie’s blank stare, and with another jerk of her arm, cuts the sword deeper. The tip of the Ketsueki Seishin juts out of Charlie’s back, two inches from his spine, while inside his body, the blade just nicks his still-beating heart.
His legs weaken, and he starts to fall.
Mary grabs him from below his limp arm and holds him up. She presses him against the cursed sword’s sharp blade.
The lobes of his left lungs fill with blood. He spurts blood from his mouth, then his eyes twitch, and he looks past Mary.
She takes a breath and grits her teeth, readying herself to squeeze in with both hands, to push the blade straight through his heart. At the top of her breath, an eighteen-inch-long katar pierces her flesh between the top two vertebrae of her spine. It slices through the spinal cord and flesh between these bones, the Atlas and the Axis, then continues forward. The blade rips through the back of her throat, then it extends straight between her upper and lower jaw, sticking out of her lips like a wide, dark, bloody tongue.
Her body goes limp. As Mary’s weight falls, Ghost flicks her wrist, and both sides of her blade cuts through the last of the skin that holds Mary’s body up.
Charlie’s body collapses to the ground in a bloody heap a split second before Mary’s does.
Ghost holds one blood-covered arm across her chest, but with her other, she holds the katar straight—still supporting the top of Mary’s head. Ghost flicks it to the side.
Mary’s head bounces once before the bloody bottom clings to the concrete and brings her eyes to their final view before her brain runs out of oxygen. She dies looking out over the edge of the helipad, at the evergreen beech trees on the far mountain being tickled by the wind.
Ghost pulls the sword from Charlie and swallows. Fuuuuuuuckk.
Balena rushes—wincing—to his side with her last canteen of blood. She empties it into his mouth, then bites into her wrist and bleeds for him.
His eyes have closed, and he reopens them to the two warriors cradling him. “Good job.” He coughs. “Bury that sword in her heart.”
Ghost furrows her weary brow. “I think she’s dead.”
“Just do it.”
Ghost sets down her bloody katar, grabs the sword, rolls Mary’s body over with a kick to the chest, then pierces the blade straight through her heart.
Charlie sighs away a weight from his mind. “Thanks.” He closes his eyes and goes limp.
Inside Lorenzo’s villa, Steve is in the coatroom where he saw John set down the key fob to the rental SUV. The power went out shortly after he arrived there, then he heard banging outside. In the dim light glowing through the exterior door’s window, his vampire eyes pull their weight, and he finds the keys. He pockets them as the door blasts open, and a pair of Lorenzo’s security guards rush in with their pistols drawn. One aims his gun at him and shouts, “Cosa fai?”
Steve doesn’t have to act in order to look like he’s scared shitless and confused. He raises both hands and swallows.
The other steps forward. “Perché sei qui?”
Other than Steve’s eyes—which dart back and forth between the men holding guns—he doesn’t dare move.
One flicks his hand at Steve. “Idiota.” He looks at his partner. “Trovare Lorenzo, rimarrò qui.”
The other guard rushes past Steve and purposefully knocks into him. Steve’s tense muscles react slower than he anticipates, and he almost falls over. The remaining guard turns around to face the door, then he creeps toward it. Through the window, he sees a figure dressed in black running across the lawn. He turns to Steve, raising his brow to the vaulted ceiling and his finger to his mouth. “Shhh.”
He’s asking me... Steve nods and lowers his hands.
The guard takes a step away from the door, keeps his eyes trained out the window, and pulls back the hammer on his pistol.
Steve swallows.
The guard steps up onto a bench that hugs one wall, and he melts into the room’s shadows.
Qilin rushes toward what looks like a utility or side entrance to the mansion. All the lights are off, and the moonlight turns every window into a dark mirror. Thirty yards away, she watches Jambavan emerge from the door to the security outbuilding with a thin wisp of smoke trailing behind him. He turns and runs around the back of the building—away from her—and disappears into the darkness. He must be about to engage with a target...
She runs up to the mansion and hugs the outer wall as she approaches the door.
Inside, the guard stretches and leans toward the wall with the door, peering through the window at his approaching quarry.
Steve’s heart skips a beat. Shit! He’s gonna shoot...somebody. Ideas blast through his mind, but none seem like they’ll work. When a shadow draws on the door’s window and the guard holds his breath, Steve screams, “Look out!”
The guard turns to him and glares, aiming the gun at the frozen-stiff teenager. He tenses his arm and squeezes the trigger, just as the glass beside him explodes inward. As the bullet flies toward Steve’s chest, the blast from Qilin’s short, tactical shotgun sends glass and
pellets into the guard’s upper arm, chest, and neck.
She’s inside the entryway room before the guard hits the ground, and just in case he’s not dead, she clocks him with the shotgun’s pistol grip in the temple and shatters the dying man’s skull. Something moves at the far end of the room, and she raises her gun with the trigger halfway pulled before she realizes it’s Steve. “Shit, I thought... Steve?”
He’s leaned back against the wall, bleeding from his upper chest. The bullet missed his heart, but it hit his sternum, and a bone fragment sliced into his superior vena cava—a major vein that returns deoxygenated blood from the head and upper body to the heart. Instead of channeling the blood into the heart, it now spills it into his chest cavity and the hole ripped in his lungs on the right side. He’s lightheaded and fading fast.
Qilin rushes to him and lays him down, then pours blood from a hip flask into his mouth. “C’mon Steve, stay with me.”
His eyelids flutter as he tries to focus on her. He tries to move his right arm, but Qilin has it pinned. “Keys...pocket.”
“Good, just stay with me, we’ll get you out of here.”
-Boom!- An explosion in the security outbuilding briefly surprises Qilin, and at the same time, Jambavan takes up position outside the entryway. He flashes his head in and confirms there aren’t any targets in the room, then he makes his presence known and enters. “We’re set outside, but there were two guards that came into the house...Is he okay?”
Qilin turns to Jambavan, and the look on her face tells him that no, Steve isn’t alright. “We need the trunk.”
He nods, then tosses his batons to the side and pulls a pistol with a silencer from a holster. “Should I stay with him or start looking?”
She looks down at Steve. His eyes are closed, and his breathing is shallow. Shit! She glances behind Jambavan. “Toss that body over here, he needs blood.”
Gabriel drops Hector’s now blood-drained body then limps through the long passageway to The Plant. Hector’s all-access pass opens all the doors, and with it, Gabriel enters the main facility. Partway down a hallway, a doorway on the right leads to a stairwell, and Gabriel notes that the stairs travel down, but not up. This must be the top floor. The other helipad should be on this level, maybe I can catch up to Charlie and the others.
Farther down the long, curving hallway, Gabriel finds an area riddled with zombie-corpses. All are dead, and all have shiny arm blades jutting up into the air like frost-covered grass. Past them, Gabriel can see out through a giant hole in the wall—out to some of his team members huddled around a figure on the ground. Damn.
Gabriel looks down and decides instead of trying to find the ground, walking on corpse-chests will have to do. After a fifty-yards of limping across and balancing on cracking ribs, the zombie corpses dwindle, and flat, blood-slicked ground extends outside. There, Gabriel finds an unconscious girl in a blanket, a nearly-headless Ms. Wollstone with a samurai sword jabbed through her heart, Ghost clutching a wound on her chest and oozing blood, Balena with a torn piece of fabric wrapped around her bleeding leg—Again?—and collapsed on the ground between the knights, a pale and gravely wounded colonel.
Charlie looks up at the tall knight. Looks like you found trouble too.
Gabriel’s eyes wash over Charlie’s wounds. He bleeds from everywhere. Gabriel sighs. “How are you alive?”
Charlie can’t help but start to laugh in response, but he has a lung rendered in half, and only blood comes out of his mouth.
“You need blood.” Gabriel turns and motions to Mary’s body. “Someone help me get her body.”
Charlie shakes his head. “No. She sucks, I don’t want hers.”
Gabriel sighs and places a wrist in Charlie’s mouth. “Take some of mine then.”
“Thank you.” He bites in, then lets the blood trickle into his mouth. He swallows a tiny bit, but the effort is demanding, so he waits for his mouth to be almost filled before swallowing again. Like rain seeping into a sun-scorched earth, at first, the blood does little more than fill in gaps.
Balena notices Charlie’s pendant—a single bead of dehydrated hemoglobin strung on a fishing line and hanging from a necklace of paracord—and she reaches for it. “These are equal to a pint of blood, right? I’d say you need it.” Her fingers touch the bead, but before she can lift it, Charlie’s bleeding and skin-flapped fingers on his left hand covers hers.
He swallows blood again, and then releases Gabriel’s wrist. “No.”
Balena releases the bead, but squints in confusion. “But, sir, you’re—”
“It’s not for me...not for my life. It’s to use to save another’s.” He releases his grip on Balena, and she pulls back her now blood-covered hand.
Ghost is breathing hard, and Gabriel looks at her. “What are your injuries? Do you need blood, or can I bandage anything?”
She shakes her head. “Breastplate took the worst of it. It caught one bullet but cracked my sternum underneath—I think. Another one hit at an angle and dented the armor way in—deflected up into my shoulder... It’ll have to wait I think and get it cut out later.” Weary, she takes a breath, and with her uninjured arm, she loosely motions to Gabriel’s shoulder. “Same there? Looks like you took a couple rounds.”
“Just one big one there, another few elsewhere.” Gabriel glances at the remnants of the tourist helicopter. “Looks like we’re going to have to hike down. Colonel, would you like more blood before we carry you?”
“I’ve had enough, for now. But she—” His eyes dart to July wrapped in the blanket. “—could probably use a little.”
Gabriel kneels beside July and donates some blood to her, then leaves her and finds a piece of fuselage large enough to act as a stretcher. -Clang!-
Charlie looks past the object laid next to him up to Gabriel. “I don’t need that.”
Gabriel scowls. “Listen; your injuries are severe and you need to rest—”
Charlie leans his torso forward and places the knuckles of his left fist against the ground. He pushes himself up and feels a shockwave of pain from the severed muscles that he’s attempting to use in his chest and back.
Everyone notices the change in him, and they scramble to help him up.
“Thanks.” Charlie stands and wobbles for a moment, then he dips his head and looks at his legs. “See, legs are still pretty good. The rest...is a mess...but the legs are good.”
Balena shrugs. “I’ve got two decent arms on me, so I’ll help with the stretcher. Who’ll get the other side?”
Ghost motions at Gabriel and sighs. “You took a gut shot, one in the shoulder and from that bandage on your leg, I take it you got hit there too?”
Gabriel nods.
Ghost steps forward and picks up one end of the stretcher with her uninjured arm. “You’re worse off than me, that’s for sure. Help us get her on here though, will ya?”
Charlie clears his throat. “Wait. What about Hector? Did anybody see him?”
“I killed him.” Gabriel rolls July onto the fuselage.
Ghost lifts the makeshift-stretcher with Balena, then sighs. “They said Peter took off, and—”
Charlie snarls, “I’ll just have to hunt him down later.”
Ghost swallows. “Sir? I looked for Eddy’s arms. They were incinerated.”
Charlie’s eyes stare at the blood-soaked and debris-speckled ground. “I see...”
After a few minutes, the team steps off the helipad and climbs onto the side of the mountain. They hike…very slowly…across and up to the ridge.
Pieces of the beige van’s body panels rain down over a one-hundred-yard-radius around the blast site. The van’s frame crashes into the small crater the explosion blew into the ground, and the great fireball from the blast diminishes with the burning chemicals.
In the once windowed banquets room, vampires lay on the ground, all cast
to one side—away from the windows. Smoke, dust, and pulverized glass particles cover everything and fill their lungs. Thanks to the vampire’s heightened hearing, all their ears ring and drive headaches like nails into their brains.
Sadie, Gerard, and Minnie are all in the hotel’s lobby, shocked and concerned. Sadie had just handed Gerard a bag for Minnie to take on her playdate, and she was giving Minnie a hug when the bomb was detonated. Sadie and Gerard lock gaze, and they fear the worst. As soon as the building stops shaking, they run to the banquets area where the meeting was taking place.
When they arrive, they find a large, stocky knight with an old-fashioned mustache on his hands and knees near the door. Sadie sets Minnie down and glances at the others in the room—many move, but none are rising yet. She helps the knight to his feet. “What happened?”
Coach shakes his head. “What?”
Seeing the light coming from the glassless windows, Minnie runs to the far side of the room. She bends down and tries to rouse the vampires there. “Are you okay?”
An elder blinks at the golden-haired girl who hovers like an angel above him. He gets up and helps someone next to him.
Gerard rushes to the vampires that are closest to the windows—who took the worst of the blast. He notices a widening pool of blood beneath a man. “Need some blood over here!” Gerard rolls the man over, and from what remains of the dead man’s face, he recognizes his old friend and confidant, Elder Tihomir Popov. My god. Gerard’s strength fails him, and he sets himself down.
Coach rushes to Gerard’s side while tearing his sleeve up and raising his wrist to his mouth, but he doesn’t bite down. He looks at the elder on the ground before Gerard. One of his eyes is open, while the other has been replaced by a bloody shard of metal that stretches from his cheek to his forehead. Coach places his hand on Gerard’s shoulder. “Help me check the others.”
