There were the soldiers, who often acted as guards or escorts, but were also used in military actions like crowd control or storming vee hives. There were the security guards, who, for all intents and purposes were just like your average mall cop, only they got to carry real guns and were responsible for some very high security buildings. And then there were the agents - some like him and Frank, many others with vastly different job descriptions.
Althea stopped at the door to the room and waited, as if not sure she wanted to proceed.
Mason gestured at her badge.“Would you mind?” Mason’s badge, unlike those of SCC guards, didn’t work for every door.
Althea visibly steeled herself, swiped her badge against the reader and opened the door. As she took her first step into the room, Althea inhaled sharply and Mason realized that she’d lost a friend, or, at the very least, a co-worker today.
Mason put his hand on her arm, stopping her. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Althea looked him dead in the eyes. “He shouldn’t have gone in the room alone. He should’ve waited.”
She winced, like it hurt her to say it, but she stepped fully into the room and waited for him and Frank to follow.
Once inside, Frank let the door close. Mason knew that meant they were locked in, like the prisoners had been. There were certain rooms in this building that required a badge for entry and exit, for obvious reasons.
The dead guard was lying on the floor, head resting against the base of one of the hospital beds. His neck had been ripped open but there was very little blood – typical of a vee attack.
Frank knelt down near the body and looked up at Mason, a look of self satisfaction on his face. “No badge.”
It was true. “Well, that explains how they got out of the room. How did they get out of the restraints?”
Frank and he examined all the beds, and each one looked the same. Frank said, “Magic?”
“Yeah.” Mason replied. “Magic in the form of an assistant.”
Frank looked over at the two way mirror. “I’d love to see that footage.”
Mason was about to agree when the fire alarm went off. The blaring white lights flashing, the loud buzzing alarm, and the female announcer intently repeating that you should go was certainly effective at motivating a person to want to leave the building.
Mason had already walked out into the hall, to see if any of the guards knew what was going on, before he realized what had just happened. He’d walked out into the hall. He hadn’t been able to do that a minute ago. The doors had unlocked.
Chapter 12
The takeover of Security Central Control had taken about ten seconds. Daniel was frankly disappointed. He’d hoped for a fight. He’d wished someone would do something truly unexpected. It had been too simple. Once the guards saw the pregnant lady in the hands of the evil vampire, they’d all rolled over and played dead.
Lisa, having served her main purpose, was now huddled in a corner of the room as far away from everyone as she could get. Stephen stood over the guards. If there was one thing Stephen seemed to be good for, it was making everyone around him uncomfortable, and if being scared kept the guards in line, Daniel was happy to let him stand there gawking.
The first thing Daniel had done, after breaking in, was to have Jerome get all the weapons off the guards. Daniel had him make a neat little pile of guns near where he planned on stationing himself. Then, Jerome and Stephen had handcuffed the guards, all but one, to each other, and to a railing between the main staging area of the room and a small step up to the two offices in the back, which Daniel assumed were for the managers. Next, they had to lock the door, which was a little more complicated than it might seem, as the lock required reprogramming. Carl managed with barely a complaint.
Daniel led the one guard he had separated out over to a chair near one of the phones. He’d picked this particular guard for his looks. He was handsome and appeared to spend a long time each day making sure he looked as good as possible. Vanity was a great weakness.
Daniel handcuffed him to the chair and said, “We’re going to be needing your help. When this phone rings, as it will start doing sometime soon, we’re going to need you to convince people that everything is copacetic. Understood?”
Of course, he hadn’t. “I’m not gonna help you. None of us will.”
Daniel dug his nail into the side of the boy’s nose and ripped off a nostril. The guard screamed, of course. Daniel would have expected nothing less.
As the guard sniveled, pathetically, unable to tend his own wounds, Daniel spoke soothingly. “The bleeding will stop soon. I can’t help with the pain. I can make it a lot worse. You have another nostril. You have more nose, for that matter. And ears. Very pretty, soft ears. The list goes on and on. Now do you understand?”
The guard just barely nodded, but it was enough.
There were about 30 monitors and computer screens in the room, all multitasking with security footage and architectural layouts of the building. Each computer could control everything in this building, if the operator knew how, and Carl knew exactly how.
Carl sat down at one of the consoles. Jerome took up a position next to Daniel, watching over Carl’s shoulder. Not only was Carl, in Daniel’s estimation, a computer genius, Carl was also an engineer and, thanks to a very complicated, long term plot involving drug addiction and blackmail, Carl was an engineer who had worked on installing systems exactly like this one in other secure office buildings.
Daniel was ready to start playing. “First thing’s first. Lock the building doors so no one can get out.”
The guards were all disarmed and handcuffed to each other around a metal railing that was cemented to the ground. Still, one of them tried to play hero. “You can’t do that. People will die. There’s a fire. You’ll die too if you don’t leave soon.”
Daniel ignored him. He didn’t care if the tied up guards figured out that there was no fire. The important thing was that all the people running for the exits couldn’t know.
He said, “Show me the prison.”
Carl brought up images of the cells. There were maybe 50 vees locked up. Most of them were pacing in the cells, or looking out through the bars. They heard the alarms, but couldn’t go anywhere. There were only four guards in the prison at the moment, two on the far side of the door, and two in the cell arena. They all looked like they didn’t know what they should do.
When the NVIA seized a vee, they could end up in this facility, in another NVIA building, or in one of several converted prisons around the country that had been updated to hold vees. Most vees who got arrested ended up in the more traditional style prison, if they were actually taken alive. It was supposedly illegal to kill vees who did not resist arrest, but most officers and agents ignored that rule, and most courts wouldn’t punish those officers for their transgressions. Not that the prisons were much better than death. From Daniel’s understanding, a traditional vee prison was like solitary confinement all day every day, only not as nice. Vees didn’t tend to live very long in prison.
Through years of finding, bribing, and converting a small army of humans, Daniel had made sure he and Carl were brought here, to the NVIA research facility, where they performed all the testing. The humans needed lab rats, to find new ways to kill the vees, or fight them. They were all here to be poisoned, shot at, or dissected. Daniel had no idea of the body count, but the scientists who worked here could do whatever type of experiment they thought necessary in the name of finding a cure. Daniel had never heard of a vee actually being cured, of course. Nor had he ever heard of a vee leaving the research facility alive.
The world at large didn’t know about the cells, and the experiments, or they pretended not to know. Today, Daniel would change that.
“Open the cells and the main door.”
As Carl typed in the command, the guard with a hero complex started up again.
“You can’t do that. Let the guards out first. They’ll slaughter them.”
/> He was right, but he didn’t get to hear the witty response Daniel had on his lips. Stephen was at the guard’s side in a second and before the breath from his last word had stopped moving, his throat was ripped and Stephen was draining him.
The other guards, tied together, started yelling, and kicking, and pulling at their handcuffs. When Stephen was done Daniel told Stepen, “Enough.” An empty word, as Stephen was already moving away to sit down, but Daniel needed to appear in control, even if he was increasingly worried that Stephen was not controllable.
The guards were still restless so Daniel stood up and glared at them. They stopped yelling and kicking. They sat quietly watching Daniel carefully, as if waiting for the next slap from their master.
Daniel was pleased they recognized him as the leader. Still, he needed to keep absolute control. He turned to Jerome, who was standing near where Stephen sat, hungrily watching the victim’s still warm body. Daniel said, “Jerome.” Jerome turned to look at Daniel, who nodded towards the guards and added, “But don’t kill him.”
Jerome approached the bound guards and looked them over like trying to pick which of his harem wives to bring to bed tonight. The guards watched Jerome warily, each one trying to look as unappetizing as possible while keeping their eyes open to what was to come.
Jerome picked his victim, leaned over the young man, and whispered, “Don’t worry, it will be fast.”
The boy didn’t have time to cry out before Jerome began to feed, but he screamed out the moment his neck was ripped open. The noise didn’t last long. The boy was unconscious in under a minute. Daniel smiled to himself. He wasn’t a monster, after all, and was glad Jerome didn’t draw it out, didn’t make it hurt.
There was a myth that being bitten by a vee was enjoyable, some would say sexual. Daniel assumed that lie came from vampire stories written long before the world knew the reality of vampirism.
Still, vees had followers. Young men and women who wanted to experience the pleasure of the bite. Of those who were allowed to live through the experience, Daniel assumed very few wanted to try it again. Being bitten by a vee was exactly like being bitten by a human who wanted to drink your blood. Your skin was torn and ripped and then your blood was sucked from your veins. Daniel had gone through it once himself. He wouldn’t want to go through it again.
Jerome stopped while the guard was still breathing. And then he did something Daniel hadn’t anticipated. He cut open his wrist and put the bleeding wound to the guard’s mouth.
That was interesting. Perhaps he hadn’t given Jerome enough credit. Daniel wished he’d thought of that himself. If nothing else, it should liven things up in here in the next few hours.
Daniel turned back to the monitors. He’d missed much of the fun. Two of the guards in the prison were dead already. The other two looked like they were favorites of the prisoners. Daniel didn’t remember them in particular, but they were receiving a lot of special attention, and not enjoying it one bit.
“Why haven’t they left yet?” he asked Carl.
Carl flipped through monitors and then found the answer. “The exit door was still sealed. Opening now.”
As Daniel watched, the door at the end of the prison hallway swung open. No vees were in the corridor, but several looked towards the exit, as if hearing the movement of the door. The two surviving guards, if surviving could be used for their situation, were killed quickly and the vees started to file out.
Daniel watched the monitors for a moment as they cycled. A few humans here and there were moving quickly towards the exit and there were some guards roaming the halls. Most everyone seemed to be crowded in the lobby where the newly freed vees were heading, most likely drawn by the aroma.
The phone rang, interrupting the moment. Daniel turned to the guard in the chair and said, “You’re on.” Before he picked up the phone, before he gave the guard further instruction, he turned to Carl.
“Now, kill the power.”
Chapter 13
Cate froze. She didn’t smell or see a fire, and she was right near the door, so there was no need to rush. Still, the flashing lights and cacophony of alarms instantly set her heart to pounding.
She pushed the gurney against a wall and turned back towards the lobby. It had been an atypical day from the start. A fire alarm just after sunset, following everything else that had happened, was extraordinary.
The guards were in motion. One was directing and another was flipping through the monitors. The third was on his walkie. Cate approached their desk.
“Any idea what’s going on?” she asked.
“Not yet, no,” said the one that seemed to be in charge. “We’re going to proceed with evacuating the building until we know more.”
Cate assumed that the front doors unlocked automatically in case of an emergency, though she hadn’t heard the click.
The guard in charge said, “You two head out and make sure all looks good. I imagine a lot more people will be down here soon.” Turning to Cate, he added, “It’ll be just a moment, ma’am.”
Cate wasn’t particularly worried about safety on the grounds outside, but the guards would want to be sure it was safe before sending everyone out into the night. The fire alarm triggering just after sunset felt like a trap to her, though she couldn’t figure out how it would ever work. There was a perimeter fence, set up to deter any vees from getting on campus. There were guard towers manned 24/7. And so far as she knew, no vee had ever broken the perimeter. Still, there was a lot of open space out there, and she didn’t like the idea of hundreds of humans standing outside at night with no solid walls to protect them.
The two guards reached the door and stopped. Cate heard one mutter to the other, “Locked.” The second guard reached over and pushed on the door, but it didn’t open.
They walked from one door to the next, trying each one in turn. All four sets of doors remained sealed tight. The guards, who probably knew more about the escaped vees than Cate did, must have guessed that there was something more going on here than locked doors, but to their credit, they didn’t show it.
People started to arrive in the lobby. One woman. Two men. More were coming down the hall. The guard behind the desk said, “If you’ll all wait here, we’ll lead you safely out of the building in a minute.”
The other two guards joined him and they conferred for a moment. One got on the phone again, while the other one went and positioned himself in front of the doors, as if to keep everyone away.
Within a few minutes, there were maybe twenty people standing around and a few minutes after that there were close to a hundred, by Cate’s best estimate. On a normal day, Cate didn’t like crowd’s much. With everyone piling up in one spot, she found herself retreating towards the far wall. There were too many people in one place and Cate felt trapped. As minutes passed and no progress was made with the doors, she backed up further, bumping into the gurney she’d left at the entrance to the hall. She pushed it a few feet in the direction of the elevators, to give herself space to move fast if she needed to. Some clawing instinct told her she might need to. She was still close enough to the exit to get out safely, if they got the doors unlocked and there really was a fire, but she felt better not being penned in.
The crowd started to sense that the guards didn’t really know what was going on and the room hummed a nervous frequency. The casual conversations of co-workers, some of whom knew each other and many who did not, turned into agitated murmurings. Cate grew more uneasy. If they didn’t open the doors soon, or make some sort of announcement, she was afraid there’d be a stampede. She backed down the hall a few feet further.
And then the lights went out. The crowd let out a collective gasp. There were red emergency lights that came on instantly, so the lobby wasn’t pitch black, but the red glow leant the room a macabre feel.
A voice called out “What’s going on?”
Another added, “Open the doors.”
One of the guards at the front responded, “We’re wo
rking on it,” but his statement was muffled by the rising sound of frightened people. One voice speaking had turned into many shouting and fear changed the crowd in the lobby into a mob.
The mob started shouting, demanding to know what was going on, yelling that they wanted to be let out. The guards started yelling back, trying to calm everyone with their not so calm response to the situation.
Cate was terrified. She’d been trapped before, had seen family members corralled in darkness, and it felt like this. She started backing down the hall, keeping her hand on the wall for support and her eyes on the action so as not to be taken by surprise, which is why she didn’t see the woman coming down the hall before knocking into her. Cate let out a short, panicked scream, before recovering her composure.
As Cate turned around, she realized she had backed into Director LaTrese, looking far calmer than Cate felt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” Cate felt almost silly for being panicked in Marisol’s relaxed presence. “You startled me.”
“What’s going on in there?” Marisol gestured towards the shouting.
Cate turned to look back toward the main entrance, and that’s when she saw it. There was a movement in the crowd, on the far side of the lobby, like a wave, or rather as if the mass of people at that end of the room had been hit with a battering ram. Even from this slight distance, she could see the pattern change.
A few people screamed in terror. Some yelled in confusion. Those on the far end of the lobby started pushing, frantically, towards the locked exit doors. The people in the middle, and by the entrance, not aware of what was going on, started pushing back and yelling. There was nowhere for them to go.
Cate could see what they couldn’t. She knew why the crowd was pushing. She could see the vees pouring into the far end of the room. She saw the humans falling, as they were pulled into the tide. As one body got dragged down, the space was filled with a vee, grabbing at the next available blood source. The crowd was being overrun by vees who left dead bodies in their wake.
The V to Z Trilogy (Book 1): Caged Page 7
