Within seconds she spotted movement from a lanky cypress. She fired twice. A distended body fell with a wound around the shoulder and neck, and an 93
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obese daywalker in fatigues lay permanently dead not too far from where she kneeled.
Poe cast her eyes to the other vamp sniper perched overhead and waited.
“I know you’re up there, brother,” she said calmly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
As predicted, a succession of movement shook the top branches of a nearby tree. With lightning movements, a creature jumped from tree to tree.
Maclemar nearly emptied a clip without grazing the enemy. Poe seethed.
“Hey, Welshman,” Poe said loud enough to be heard over the din of gunfire. “Don’t waste bullets
’cause they don’t grow arm hairs!”
“Right you are,” he articulated with contrition.
Poe focused on every shaking branch and wobbly tree with the barrel of her gun but did not shoot. “Go slow, Poe,” she whispered to herself.
“Don’t shoot unless you’re certain. Can’t waste bullets. The Welshman’s already used up most of
’em.”
She watched him leap to an engorged oak ten feet away and back-flip toward a eucalyptus. He was barefoot. The monkey vamp was wily. With a deep breath Poe allowed instincts to take over. He’s going to fake a right but will land on the cypress sculpted like a woodpecker, the ever reliable voice in her head told her.
Twisting her lips, Poe uttered, “I knew it.” Her prediction proved wise. But not wise enough, for the orangutan undead swung back on the branches and launched himself thirty feet to Poe’s tuckaway. A vicious sleet from heaven, his dirt-caked feet landed savagely on Poe’s chest.
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The pain, virulent and convulsive, took the fight out of the vampire killer. Her upper body burned like skinned flesh drizzled with unbleached sea salt.
Possible breast cancer in the future. With her eyes tightly shut, the squeal and whines of her animals became vague mournful sounds, overshadowed by the sobs that escaped her own lips. Let me not get cancer.
No calluses ever developed in that part of her anatomy.
Her faithful dog tried to block access to the injured Poe, and the dotted piglet stood indomitably next to the mutt who had adopted her as kin. Penny’s yellow fangs, slick from overactive saliva glands, didn’t even faze the reeking vampire with incisors triple the length of the canine’s. With scorn the vampire kicked Penny in the underbelly. The dog shot up a few feet in the air and hit the ground with a thud. Chops imitated Penny’s protective stance and was quickly given the boot as well.
“No more animal blood for me,” the predator declared to no one in particular. “From now on it’s high-grade stuff or bust. Ha, my very own farm!
Patience pays off. It don’t hurt to be loved by the sun, neither.”
Able to draw a piddling, careful breath again, Poe pried her eyes open and stared into the sneering face of the vampire with stringy, oil-matted hair.
The fucker’s a girl!
“Better stay the hell down, Julia Poe,” a sharp, twangy voice suggested while confiscating weaponry and pack from the downed vampire killer. “You’re my ticket to ride outta obscurity. After tonight I’ll be a fuckin’ master vampire. Me, Missy, the dissing girl.
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Can’t wait to see those jerks’ faces when they see who reeled in the big bad fish. Guess living on trees for 64 days straight paid off.”
The skinny vampire with bunny teeth and protracted incisors giggled like a hysterical three-year-old. She kicked Poe soundly in the shin and wrenched her pack away before launching herself on Maclemar’s boulder. Her shins didn’t hurt. Poe was used to abuse where her legs were concerned. Her chest was killing her.
“I hope I don’t get cancer,” she prayed once more to her parents.
Wheezing, Poe crossed her arms over her upper body and hugged herself. She couldn’t rise up just yet. The pinhole ducts on the corner of her eyes pumped out tears that flowed unbidden down her cheeks. A second later she heard gunshots followed by yelling.
Stand up, you! the voice in her head said with urgency. The monkey girl’s wrestling with the Welshman right now. Can’t you hear him yapping?
Poe took an excruciating gulp of air until she was satisfied that no ribs were broken. Only my boobs, she thought wryly. Biting her lower lip, she took the first step toward the fisherman that seemed a long stretch away.
“Dos i ffwcio dy hun y cont!” Maclemar cursed.
He spewed saliva threads in vehemence.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, but I know it ain’t nice,” the congo bongo girl said, smiling at the blows he was raining on her cheeks and chin. The hundred-pound girl didn’t even bother to block the punches that skinned Maclemar’s fist and left blood blush on the vampire’s face. The girl appeared as 96
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though she was sunbathing on the boulder instead of being pinned down and clouted by a large man twice her size with muscles in the right places.
“I said, ‘Go and fuck yourself, you cunt,’”
Maclemar ranted, disgruntled that his best punches had barely an effect on the vampire with a flat figure and blonde hair browned by filth and oil.
“Hang me now, Lord. I’ve just been insulted by a cute guy,” she said. She looked to the sky in exaggerated injury of pride. “What kinda language is that you’re insulting me with anyway?”
“That’d be Welsh, you slag.”
“Never heard of it, handsome,” she smiled, and her thin, colorless lips curdled Maclemar’s blood.
“Such a shocking way to behave in front of your future mama master. If I were you, I’d be kissing my ass right about now. Your future cattle status might be upped a notch.”
“Och. Sorry, no. I don’t kiss flat asses,” he said with wry grin. “I like my women to have a bit of padding, top to bottom,” he bleated. “Slatternly anorexic girls are positively a turnoff.”
The woman’s close-set eyes narrowed as she felt truly insulted at last. She obstructed his forearm diving down for a jab with one sweeping block. In a breath the vamp flipped positions with the man, effortlessly pinning his larger body. A delicate hand, thick with grime and translucent veins, captured the wrist of the sturdy fisherman who’d just disparaged her. Ill intentions on her face, the vampire forced his fist to her lips and sniffed the rusty blood like it was ice cream. And like the creamy ice cold dessert, she licked his wounds clean to the horror of the crass-tongued scholar.
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Her lengthy teeth, grimy with rot, remolded into a form more lethal and micro-sharp.
“Oh shite,” escaped from Maclemar’s suddenly dry lips.
“You don’t insult your executioner, foreigner,”
she said, her pithy knuckles landing strikes to his face and succeeding in slicing skin. “She might just kiss you to sleep and violate you for a year.”
“I’d rather,” Maclemar began, set on dying with class, “do myself in first, thanks.”
“Then get ready to die,” she said with the fire of an ugly woman who had been scorned most of her life. She grabbed an ear and yanked it back, exposing his brown, fisherman neck. Within seconds the vampire’s three-inch fang dug into Maclemar’s jugular, and she thirstily ingested the Welshman’s blood.
Poe walked into the grizzly scene in time to witness Maclemar’s green eyes roll up the sockets. A limping Penny and twitchy Chops flanked her sides.
She picked up a rock and aimed it at the vampire’s spine.
A four-pound rock was the interruption needed to stop a bloodletting, and it landed crisply on the vertebrae of the feeding vampire.
The succubus bailed her greedy teeth from Maclemar’s neck, not bothering to wipe the thick and salty juices from her mouth. The vampire was pissed like nothing els
e, and she glared noxiously at Poe who grasped another hefty rock with her hand.
“I was aiming at your skull, but I didn’t want to smash my friend’s face in,” Poe said with a perverse grin that didn’t quite reach her dark eyes. I just 98
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shared a memorable kiss with the Welshman, you bitch!
“I squashed your ass,” the dirty-nailed vampire griped. “You should be crippled on the floor.”
“Um, no. You dropkicked my boobs,” Poe corrected, her wing-tipped brows drawing closer together. The particular spot was a sore point with her. “But I guess I’m tougher than I look.”
“Don’t give me cheek, girl.” The vampire stood to full height, a half an inch taller than Poe. “I might get fifty less heads of cattle, but it would be worth it to kill you.”
“Bummer then, you future master fanger, you!”
Poe said lightly.
She kept her eyes trained at the vampire with dirty hygiene, but her peripherals followed Maclemar’s shaky trek from the boulder to a nook out of range from Poe’s granite projectile.
“Your guy ain’t going nowhere unless you carry him outta here. My venom will drug him like a crank toy for a year. He’ll be like the other cattle, squirting blood into a milk bottle.”
“And I was just beginning to like him,” Poe sighed with regret. “But changing the subject, are you allergic to garlic?”
The flat-chested vampire hissed. She angrily located the girl’s pack and guns by her own feet.
Satisfied that Poe was weaponless, she answered,
“I’m a goddess. Of course I’m—”
Thwack!
Quick as a cough, Poe’s left wrist released a knife slick with garlic oil. With an expert flick it embedded into the vampire’s heart. Two seconds 99
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later another four-inch blade from the right wrist pierced the same dead organ.
The vampire hunter bridged the ten yards that had separated her from the fallen body. Hair and dirt clung to her head like Christmas ornaments.
“Bye now,” she waved to the woman foaming at the mouth and twitching by her feet. “Black sludge ooze equals dead vampire, right? Well so long, slim.”
Like one who dreamed of revenge frequently, Poe kicked the woman’s head and pounced on it Bruce Lee-style and with a neck snapping twist.
“How in heaven’s name did you do that?”
Maclemar asked with fevered eyes. Poe was taken aback as she had thought the Brit had turned bovine.
“Holy!” Poe exclaimed. She darted to where Maclemar massaged his bruised neck. “I thought you turned cow already.”
“No chance of that,” he sighed tiredly, looking into Poe’s dark-lashed brown eyes. He enjoyed the feel of the girl’s toughened palm against his cheek.
Her concern touched him more than he could articulate. “Ever wonder why I have so many bite marks on my body?”
“’Cause you were the champagne fountain at vampire functions?”
“You’re astonishing,” Maclemar declared with a lazy smile. He reached out to pluck leaves from her hair. “Right you are then. I was their cocktail drink that never turned vamp or cattle however many bites.”
“Lucky you.”
“Not when I was in their service for eight years,”
he said, caressing her face with his eyes. “I’d rather 100
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have been asleep forever with an ass goiter than go through that business.”
Poe nodded and studied the fresh bite on his neck. She couldn’t take the way his gaze suddenly made her feel.
“Can you get up?”
“I think so.”
She helped him to his feet, glad when she no longer touched him. His sweat stayed in her nostrils like mint after brushing.
“Really, how did you do that?” he asked. He nodded to the vampire body.
“It’s in the wrist, I guess,” Poe shrugged, picking up her knives and wiping them on the dead vampire’s shirt.
“Did you replace your clip with a full one?” Poe peevishly asked Maclemar. The sporadic gunfire where Maple was drawing fire reminded her to get her shit together. Drinking slimy Gatorade and lollygagging over their bruises and bites was excessive to say the least.
“No,” he answered, discomfited. “Not yet.”
“If you want to die so badly, don’t replace the clip,” she said meanly. Instantly feeling guilty about her stern tone, Poe touched his arm. “Sorry. Replace the clip so we can join the others. They can use our help.”
Awkwardly Maclemar fumbled with the release and fueled Poe’s ire further when he tossed away the empty clip.
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“Hey. You don’t throw out magazines like used tissue,” she lectured, moving Chops out of the way with her foot. “Give it back to me.”
Emasculated, Maclemar bent down to pick it up and narrowly missed an arrow aimed at his heart.
“Shit! Get down! ” Poe bellowed. She tackled Maclemar behind a tree. Another arrow skimmed low on the ground, piercing the little pig cleanly in the rear flank. Chops squealed like she was getting the hack. The dog, traumatized by the murderous cries of her new friend, emitted a low whine. Being a sharper-than-average dog, Penny clamped her teeth into the pig’s fatty neck and dragged her to Poe’s feet.
Tears stung Poe’s eyes, and her jaw worked in anger. Chops was her pig now.
“Hold her down, Maclemar,” she said with haste.
With a steady hand Poe unsheathed the knife in her left wrist and cut the arrow to the quick. Wincing at the cutting screams of the piglet, Poe pulled the arrow out. She resheathed her knife and looked into Maclemar’s pained eyes.
“Lemme borrow this,” Poe said as she slid the rifle from his shoulder. “Do me a favor and stick out a body part. Then yank it back quick.” She’d once asked Morales to do the same thing when trying to pinpoint a sharp shooter at Trench’s Bonaventure Hotel.
Maclemar exposed his right arm and quickly snatched it back. No arrows came. He looked down at Poe kneeling on one knee with the rifle cocked and ready, her eyes squinting into the scope. Furious determination etched her face. Such a small person for such a large, messy world, thought the Welshman who resigned himself to undertake the ultimate 102
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sacrifice. It’s for a girl and a pig. What else could be more chivalrous? He thought right before leaping to the next tree cover.
Thwack!
A whoosh of air grazed his neck, inches from skin. Before he could finish saying, “Bloody hell,”
Poe’s index finger pulled the trigger, and she dropped the rifle.
“Penny, stay here with Chops!” she instructed.
And she was off running in a half-crouch with a gun in each hand. Maclemar, once reoriented and on his feet, followed without delay. His courage was so dented by the near miss, he could hardly keep up.
Chops’ shrill cries penetrated his spine like a shot of extra concentrated Liquid-Plumr clog remover. The furious gunshots in the background proved the saboteurs hadn’t been subdued.
Maclemar cursed the lightheadedness that kept him lagging behind Poe who had shorter limbs.
Blood loss or not, he needed to catch up with the girl.
But he ran on, keeping low on the ground and making himself small.
“She’s heading for the damn awful wailing to finish the job,” he said under his breath and shuddered at the thought. What if the injured vamp had more than one friend hiding in the bushes?
The shooter was alone, and he wasn’t a vampire.
He was human. A leech!
Maclemar wasn’t fast enough. With one knee pinning his arm and shoulder, the girl clonked the human stooge on the forehead with the rounded grip of the Walther PPK. These leeches, willing servants of vampires, pissed off Poe as much as skinhead vamps.
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OUND
“Oh does this hurt?” Poe asked with false concern as she inserted two fingers into the bleeding hole in his stomach.
“Stop! Please! Jes – jes kill me,” cried the man whose flesh looked and felt like the clammy insides of carp. His balding head, slick with sweat, shimmered like the surface of a pond in the moonlight. “It hurts so much.”
“Oh yeah. You should’ve thought of that before trying to kill your fellow humans and their pets,” she said. Her teeth grated together like a knife sharpener on rock. “What did they promise you?”
She slapped his face with hands wet from his stomach juices. “Answer the question.”
“Some respect,” he gasped. “So I wouldn’t be no lackey no more.”
“You sniff glue, lick vampire assholes to keep your neck bite-free, rape and impregnate cattle? And you want respect?”
If she could smell gastric juices and foulness emanating from his wound, in most probability so could he. She had read somewhere that dying people’s sense of smell sharpened the nearer they were to death. Blinded by a sadistic streak that hadn’t surfaced in years, Poe proceeded to yank out his intestines foot by foot like ingredients for menudo.
She was completely unfazed by the man’s terrible screams even when the little voice in her head chanted for her to stop.
All your hard work to try to Zen yourself into a decent human being amidst all this dankness is gone.
Wasted.
“Get off of him, girl!” yelled Maclemar who looked suddenly pasty even with his fisherman tan.
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“He shot my pig,” she accused, justifying the torture with a voice deep in umbrage. Poe stared the dying man in the eye. “I’m going to leave you out here with your sausage casings on display.
Something gourmet for the animals tonight!”
“Please. Please, no!” the man begged, searching an iota of compassion. He found none in Poe and mere disgust in Maclemar.
Before Poe could properly savor the look of horror in the dying man, she was roughly pushed down to the dirt by a weak and sick Maclemar.
“You’re fucking mental, you are,” he cried.
“This is wrong,” he told himself. “1984 meets Lord of the Flies!” He pointed the Beretta to the man’s head. With his eyes closed Maclemar shot the leech until he couldn’t hear the sickening screams any longer. One. Two. Three.
Dead Surround - The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles Page 9
