Shooter started and jumped when Damon’s eyelids fluttered and he moaned in pain. “Chief, it’s me, Shooter. You’re gonna be just fine . . . hold on, Matt here’s gonna fix you up.”
Damon’s eyes opened, squinting half shut as the rain pounded them. “Hey, Shooter, don’t shit me, man. I’ve had it . . . just make sure you get the motherfucker, okay?”
Shooter gulped and his throat worked as he tried to answer. “Sure, Chief, sure. I’ll get him, don’t worry.”
Damon inclined his head toward Matt. “And get the doc out of here.” He coughed and blood bubbled out of his mouth. “I don’t want any more innocent blood on my hands. . . .”
Shooter started to lay Damon’s head down, when a hand came up and grabbed the front of his shirt. “Shooter,” croaked Damon, his voice sounding as if his throat were full of crushed glass. “Shooter, bullets don’t work on the bastard. I put a full clip into him and nothing . . . he just kept coming. You’re gonna have to figure out some other way . . . bullets don’t work . . .” His eyes shut and his head flopped to the side as he passed out.
Matt placed his hand over the wound and applied more pressure, trying to minimize blood loss.
Oh, great, Shooter thought, bullets don’t work. Just where the fuck do I get another weapon now? I gotta think . . . the bastard’s got to have a weakness. He sat there, cradling Damon’s head while Matt worked on him, and tried to think of some way to kill the monster.
From out of the darkness up ahead, Shooter heard a low-pitched, guttural growl. The sound made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and turned his bowels to water. He gently laid Damon’s head down and covered it with his cap. Heart pounding, he picked up the Uzi and crawled into the darkness to meet the creature. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life.
Suddenly, a searchlight appeared off the ship’s bow. The Coast Guard cutter had turned the light on when no one answered their calls on the portable radios. The thousand-candlepower light outlined the creature as he jumped toward Shooter, both hands raised with his sword overhead in the strike position.
As Shooter brought the Uzi up, the thought hit him like a thunderbolt. It’s too late. I’m gonna die and the bastard’s gonna win.
The glistening blade whistled as it flashed downward, meeting the Uzi with a clang and knocking it out of Shooter’s hand.
The creature stepped forward until Shooter was lying beneath his feet, weaponless. He raised the handle of the sword with the blade pointed down at Shooter’s heart, fangs bared, snarling in triumph....
“No-o-o!” screamed Matt.
The monster hesitated and looked over at Matt, who was walking through the rain toward him, arms outstretched. “Roger, how much is your life worth?” he shouted. “Just how much carnage can you endure just to go on living?”
The vampire looked back down at Shooter, helpless beneath him, then back at Matt, before slowly lowering the sword and stepping back. He turned around and leaned on the rail, looking through the rain at the water, as if deep in thought.
Shooter reached for his Uzi, thinking, The dead vampire . . . Niemann cut his head off . . .
He aimed the Uzi and fired. The thirty rounds in its magazine exploded from the barrel in a few seconds. While firing, Shooter turned the gun on its side so that the weapon’s natural tendency to rise would make it go sideways. The bullets stitched a path of destruction from Niemann’s left shoulder across his neck and to his right shoulder, throwing his body against the rail.
The body teetered there, caught in the searchlight like some grotesque nightclub performer. The head rolled backward off the shoulders and hung there by one slender thread of tissue for a moment.
As the astonished Shooter and Matt watched, the monster’s features melted and coalesced, changing into the face of a young man again. Later, Shooter would swear the lips on the head curled into a sad smile, just before the body tumbled over the rail and into the black waters below.
Shooter leaned back and turned his face skyward, letting the rain wash the sweat and tears from his face.
Forty-five
Matt looked up from his desk to find Shooter standing in the doorway. “Shooter, come in . . . come in and sit down.”
Matt showed him to the chair in front of the desk. “How is Chief Clark?”
Shooter smiled. “Oh, he came through the surgery okay. They removed about three feet of his colon and his spleen, but the doctors don’t expect him to have any permanent problems.”
Matt grinned. “That’s great, I’m really glad he’s going to be all right.”
“Uh, Matt, how is TJ doing?”
“Unbelievable. She seems to be well on her way to a complete recovery. Once we found the right combination of drugs and chemotherapy, we were able to kill the virus that Niemann had infected her with. Then her body was able to begin to heal itself.”
Shooter looked down at his hands for a moment, then into Matt’s eyes. “Matt, do you think she’ll be . . . I mean . . . well, will she be normal?”
Matt reached across the desk and patted him on the arm. “Shooter, we have run every test known to man on her. She is completely normal in every way, in every way!”
Shooter jumped up and shook Matt’s hand, his face beaming as if Matt had given him some priceless treasure. “God, I don’t know how we’re ever going to repay you, Matt. Can I see her now?”
“I don’t see why not. Come on, I’ll walk you up.”
As they entered the room, TJ was sitting up in bed and Sam was brushing her hair. Shooter looked dumbstruck, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
He walked in and sat on the edge of her bed. Blushing furiously, he reached over and took her hand. “TJ, you’re going to be all right.”
She looked at him for a moment with narrowed eyes. “Come here, you!” She took him by the shirt and pulled him to her.
Sam walked around the bed and took Matt by the arm. As she led him out of the room, they glanced back. Shooter and TJ were locked in a passionate embrace.
Sam looked up at Matt and smiled as the door swung shut. “That give you any ideas, sailor?”
“Why, yes, ma’am, it certainly does.”
Epilogue
Six Months Later
Shooter opened the door and entered the house without knocking. “Hey, babe,” he called out. “Where are ya?”
“I’m in here.”
He went into the kitchen and immediately embraced TJ and gave her a kiss. “Hey, easy there, big boy. If you start that we’ll never go on our picnic.”
“Speaking of which, I thought you were going to be ready when I got here.” He tried to look angry, but failed and just looked happy.
TJ pointed at the basket on the kitchen table. Sandwiches and utensils were packed around the protruding neck of a wine bottle. “I’ll have you know that I am ready . . . almost.”
“Almost? It looks like enough food for a dozen people already.”
“Look,” she said, pointing to the drain board. “I’ve got to make a few more hamburger patties. You know you and Matt will eat at least two each.” She took a beer out of the refrigerator and pitched it to him. “Here, go read the Sunday paper while I finish. We’ve still got an hour before we’re due to pick up Matt and Sam.”
“Okay . . . okay, I can take a hint.” He picked up the paper off the table and walked into the living room. He popped the top on the can and took a long drink, opening the paper to the first page.
The headlines screamed out at him: SERIAL KILLER SOUGHT IN NEW ORLEANS. He put the beer down with shaking hands and began to read how the New Orleans police were stumped and had no leads to the so-caller Ripper killer. He had killed eight women in the last six months, leaving as his signature torn and slashed throats and bodies drained of blood.
He folded the paper and rushed in to show it to TJ. He stopped abruptly when he found her with a vacant look on her face, slowly putting pieces of raw hamburger meat into her mouth, the blood running down
the sides of her face.
She looked over at him and grinned a bloodstained grin, slowly licking the blood off her lips.
Don't miss the next book in James M. Thompson's
Elijah Pike Vampire Chronicles . . .
DARK BLOOD
AN UNDENIABLE CRAVING
For two hundred years, Roger Neimann has never had to know the end that mortals face. But eternal existence comes with a price he cannot accept . . . consuming human blood. Hiding in New Orleans under an assumed identity, he desperately searches for a cure for his vampirism.
AN INSATIABLE HUNGER
Stalking the streets of New Orleans, a vicious serial killer dubbed “The Ripper” leaves his victims drained of blood. For Houston physician Matthew Carter, it is an all-too-familiar pattern—one that sends him racing to find Neimann. But he is not alone in his hunt.
A RAGING THIRST
There are those intent on using the powers of the vampire for their own evil ends. A vampire sick with disease and driven into a crazed killing frenzy that will not stop until he has taken everyone he can . . . including the woman Matt loves.
Click here to get your copy.
Keep reading for a special sneak peek!
One
The body drifted deeper into the inky black waters of the Houston Ship Channel, arms and legs moving slowly in the sluggish current as if in a macabre underwater dance of death. Lights from searching ships passed close but never touched it as the grotesque shape settled slowly into the foul chemical-tainted mud of the channel’s floor.
The skin and tissues on the edges of the nearly severed neck, pushed together by the body’s position on the channel floor, slowly began to knit together. Microscopic cells, under the direction of the DNA-controlling plasmids coursing through the blood, began to migrate and reattach themselves while capillaries and blood vessels reformed and established new blood paths to supply the new tissue with life-giving sustenance.
As blood flowed into the brain, which had shut down under the onslaught of dozens of 9mm bullets, neural cells began to fire and discharge. Murky thoughts were generated, bringing to consciousness memories of the preceding few hours.
Elijah Pike, born in the early 1800s, began to wake. Flashes of barely remembered scenes flickered into being, like images from an old kinescope film being played back.
Pike dimly remembered a group of men, dressed in black SWAT-team uniforms, daring to invade his lair in the dead of night, drifting through the full moon’s shadows like ghosts as they boarded his ship.
His body jerked under the water at the recalled fury of this invasion, and his teeth gritted and gnashed at images of him slashing the interlopers with his claws and fangs, killing them and flinging their lifeless bodies aside like empty husks.
Dank water caressed his bloodless lips; they curled in a grin of satisfaction at the memory of the black man who was their leader and how his face contorted in agony and surprise when Pike ran him through with his katana, the Japanese long sword he’d had for over a hundred years.
Pike remembered standing over the last of the invaders, his blade pointed down at the man’s heart, when he heard the voice of a friend scream, ‘‘No-o-o!’’
As he slowly drifted toward the surface of the frigid water, Pike recalled hesitating and glancing at his friend and colleague, Matt Carter, who was walking through the rain toward him, arms outstretched.
‘‘Roger, how much is your life worth?’’ Matt had shouted. ‘‘Just how much carnage can you endure just to go on living?’’
Pike had lowered his sword and turned to lean on the rail of his ship, wondering the same thing. How much would I give to let go, let them kill me, and perhaps become human again, even if only in death? he’d thought.
The last thing he remembered was the sound of an automatic weapon as streams of bullets stitched across his back and neck, almost severing his head from his body before he tumbled over the rail and into the ship channel.
Pike came fully awake in the water, his body screaming for oxygen, his arms flailing and his legs kicking to drive him upward. As his face broke the surface, he gasped and grabbed a stanchion on the pier. Unmindful of the razor-sharp barnacles piercing his arms, he hung there in the water, rain still coursing down from darkened skies as he let his body finish its healing.
He floated, swaying on the current, immobile for four hours until the process was complete. The rain was lessening and the ships that had been searching for his body had long since given up and gone back to shore.
Elijah Pike, now fully alive, grabbed hold of the rotting, barnacle-encrusted timbers on the wharf and laboriously climbed to the top of the dock. The creature recalled that he was known as Roger Niemann, doctor of medicine, and was a member of the Vampyre race. He rolled onto his back on the damp concrete, coughed and choked as he inhaled dank, sulfurous air drifting inland from over the channel, and wondered not for the first time in his two hundred years if he should be glad to still be alive.
Niemann slowly looked around, checking to see if the area was clear of the numerous policemen who’d tried to kill him scant hours before.
The area seemed completely deserted, so, with a grunt of exertion and pain, Niemann rolled over onto his hands and knees, his head hanging down, still too fatigued from his ordeal to get to his feet.
He gingerly felt the still-ragged edges of his neck wound, his mind filled once again with wonder at the recuperative abilities of his Vampyre body.
After he caught his breath, still unable to stand, he scrabbled on hands and knees across the wharf until he was in the shadows of the warehouses across the street.
Keeping his back to the wall, ever watchful for guards or policemen who might have remained on the scene, he moved toward his own warehouse fifty yards away.
As he inched his way through the darkness, he glanced back across the street. His converted freighter, the Night Runner, was still moored there, seemingly deserted, festooned with yellow crimescene tape as if decorated for some obscene celebration.
When he got to the door of his warehouse, he found it heavily bolted and chained, with more of the yellow tape stretched across it. Thankfully, the police must have thought him dead, for there was no guard left to prevent his access.
Grunting, he grabbed the padlock in his right hand and twisted. The tortured metal screamed as it parted under the force of his grip, and he sucked in his breath, worried the sound might bring unwanted visitors to his former lair.
The night remained silent except for the throaty gurgle of the ship channel, the creaking and groaning of his nearby ship as it shifted slightly on the current, and the mournful cry of a distant foghorn.
Niemann opened the door and slipped inside, his eyes seeing clearly in the almost total darkness of what had once been his only refuge.
He moved silently down the corridor, stopping once to look at the chalked outlines of the bodies he’d left behind during the final assault on his domain by the police.
He felt a momentary disgust at what he’d done, but it soon passed as he did a quick inventory and found that most of his precious possessions, acquired over two centuries of living as a Vampyre, remained untouched.
Weak from his rejuvenation, he needed to feed, but there was no time. Moving as quickly as he could manage, he gathered as many of his things as he could and began to move them across the street onto his ship.
Dawn was only a couple of hours away and he planned to be at sea before the sun came up. He needed to put as much distance as he could between Houston and himself before the authorities discovered that his ship and possessions were gone.
He chuckled to himself as he carried another load up the gangplank. ‘‘The fools will never believe I survived,’’ he whispered aloud, a habit he’d acquired after many years of solitary existence. ‘‘They’ll just put it down to common thievery along the docks, a not unusual occurrence in this area of high crime.’’
Soon he had everything he needed, including his hoard
of gold and jewels and cash he would need to set up a new life somewhere else, where the Normals still didn’t believe in the existence of his race.
After disengaging the Night Runner from the dock, he stood at the helm as he eased it down the channel toward the Gulf of Mexico and freedom. Once on the open sea, he would paint over the name and change it to something else to avoid detection by the Coast Guard once the alarm was raised.
He took a deep breath of the salty sea breeze and smiled at the cloud-covered moon, wondering what new adventures awaited him on his journey.
Two
Steve ‘‘Shooter’’ Kowolski, homicide detective on the Houston Police Department, finished packing the picnic supplies in the trunk of his ’66 Mustang convertible. Shooter, known for outlandish combinations of colors in his clothing, was dressed today in plaid madras shorts, a bright-yellow tank top, and leather sandals for a picnic trip to Herman Park. He heard a door slam and looked up as his girlfriend, TJ O’Reilly, came down the walk.
As always, the sight of her quickened Shooter’s heart rate and caused a fluttery feeling in his stomach. A confirmed womanizer and bachelor until he’d met TJ, Shooter had fallen deeply in love with the young woman; he was now entertaining thoughts of marriage and children and a life with her by his side.
TJ, a resident in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, stood five feet two inches and had tousled black hair that partially covered a pretty, gaminelike face. She and Shooter were scheduled to meet TJ’s roommate, Samantha Scott, and her boyfriend, Dr. Matt Carter, in less than an hour.
‘‘Come on, babe,’’ Shooter called as he slammed the trunk lid, ‘‘we’re gonna be late.’’
TJ, whose expression was typically open and friendly, blinked in the bright glare of Houston’s summer sun and stared at Shooter for a moment as though she wasn’t quite sure who he was. She searched in her purse and pulled out a large pair of sunglasses and put them on, covering her eyes and half her face. After a moment, her face cleared and she smiled slowly as if awakening from a dream. ‘‘OK, OK,’’ she responded with a short laugh, and jogged toward the car. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ she said as she vaulted over the door without opening it and flounced into the passenger seat. ‘‘They’ll wait for us. We’ve got the beer and burgers.’’
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