I fire the .357, hitting the Master in each infernal eye. The Master screams, blinded, but he is on his feet again, bearing down on Jennings, who now opens fire with his own 9 Millimeter, screaming in fury. Each bullet has been blessed, and steam hisses out of the Master’s gut with each impact, but it does not slow him down. Sensing Jennings’ close proximity, the Master lunges blindly forward, tackling Jennings. Vampire and man hit the floor rolling.
The Master takes Jennings by the chest and groin and tears him in half. Jennings’ screams echo through the warehouse interior, as flesh and internal organs fly out at us. Cartwright, distracted by his own essence slipping out of his body, sits in a yoga position, trying vainly to shove several feet of his small intestine back into a massive cavity that has sprouted from his midsection.
I run and dive onto the Master’s back, driving a Stake into his skull. The Master screams, dropping Jennings from two massive claws. He tries to slash at me, but I dodge the claw, already driving my second stake into the Master’s back.
Hanson comes around the front, driving a stake into the approximate location of the monster’s heart. Damn near hits it, too, except damn near isn’t good enough with a Master. Hanson reaches for a second stake. The Master throws me off his back and I am suddenly flying (look, Ma, no hands!), ass over tea-cups, landing ten yards on the other side of the room. I’m not hurt so much as terrified for my partner Hanson, who now faces the Master alone.
Blinded, furious, in agony, the Master slashes wildly at Hanson. But Hanson, fat loveable fool that he is, manages to sidestep every attack and even manages to drive in a second stake. The blow is fatal, hitting the Master’s heart dead on. The Master screams and pitches forward, disintegrating a second later.
I am almost beside myself with glee and don’t mind of course that Hanson will win the Christmas pool for Stake and Plug number fifty-five. He looks at me and winks, covered in goo and blood. My smile fades abruptly. Good reason.
We have both forgotten something.
The other vampires.
I’m on my feet, yelling: “Behind you!”
Hanson realizes what I’m saying a split second after my smile turns to a grimace. He turns. The three bitch-suckers descend on him en masse. Hanson doesn’t have time to scream. My .357 becomes a living, breathing Angel of Death. I fire into the throng of writhing, chewing evil. The vampires scream in pain and fury. One turns toward me, lunges. I Stake her on the fly and she screams, dissolving in mid-air.
Other Monster Vice officers come running toward Hanson and the two remaining vampires. I get there first, dragging one bitch by the hair, off of Hanson’s neck. She snaps her head toward me and spits a wad of blood into my eyes. I see only red, and she thinks she has me. She then looks down at her chest, as one of my Stakes drives deep. She dissolves and steams in my arms, and I scream in pain, as the acid-like dissolution of her demise burns through my body armor. I tear off the melting armor, praying that the corrosive blood and flesh of the vampire doesn’t beat me to the punch and eat into my arms. I beat the clock. The last vampire, the smallest, is backed into a corner by a dozen officers. The Stakes come out and I only hear screams, as the beast is impaled repeatedly.
Hanson is at my feet, his eyes meeting mine. He has been bitten, but more than that, his chest has been torn open. His heart, now almost fully exposed, beats outside of his body, a torn, bludgeoned muscle that pumps desperately. Hanson is not yet dead, but his death is a certainty.
Amazingly, he can still talk.
“Time — to move on, pardner,” he quips, coughing blood.
“Fuck you,” I say without inflection. I turn and scream out into the darkness. “Medic!”
He reaches for me with an arm partially chewed off. His hand grips my shoulder. I see that three fingers are gone.
“We — just made history tonight,” he whispers.
I know what me means. We’ve defeated a Master Vampire.
“You’re — gonna be famous,” he says, coughing again. He’s right. I am, again, the only survivor to madness.
I try to smile. I realize I am crying again.
Hanson looks sleepy. He takes one big breath, then looks at me with big, rheumy eyes that bespeak volumes of sadness. “You do it, pardner. No one else, okay?”
I nod. “Sure.”
He dies a second later. There is a smile on his lips.
I keep my promise and remove the last Stake in my possession. By this time, the second unit Monster Vice officers have finished with the remaining vampire and now all stare at me. I recognize Bollino, Tippet, Clark a few others. Sirens wail outside and I hear the SWAT choppers landing on the roof.
I drive the Stake deep into Hanson’s fully exposed heart. His eyes burst open, the red horror of Take Over crimson and staring at me with hate, but I understand that this is no longer Hanson. What stares at me is something from Beyond, a force of maniacal evil that will never know the joy of murder and mayhem. Not in this body, anyway.
I stand and watch Hanson disintegrate. I am reminded that I have one final duty to perform tonight and check my watch.
One minute to midnight.
Wordlessly, I walk past my fellow officers and exit the warehouse. I pass through the throng of other Monster Vice soldiers milling about outside, and turn the corner, disappearing into an alley. All eyes are on me, a thousand questions begging to be asked from fellow colleagues. Yet they give me room and time, seeing that I need to be alone. Presumably to deal with the loss of so many comrades. A moment of silence, time to grieve.
The alley is dark, clammy, foreboding, but I am not disturbed. I unzip my trousers and take out the angry python that is my prick and begin the soulful session of jerk, jerk, jerk.
When I come, I find that I can hardly breathe.
It takes me a second to realize that I have been sobbing uncontrollably.
I have fought the good fight.
I have lost my partner and friend.
I hate Fang Detail now more than ever.
I look at the pitiful wad of spunk in my hand. I have forestalled, for one more day at least, the danger of my own embrace with vampirism. I flick off Old Faithful and put him back into the cage. I look up into the night and see the moon, staring down at me, an uncaring, unconscious ball of light — the only witness to my session of Shuck The Sausage.
It has been a bad, crazy night.
I close my eyes, hoping that when I open them, this has all been a dream.
Something moves directly behind me. I turn, my .357 out, pointed and cocked.
“Please, mister. Don’t shoot,” a voice calls out from the darkness.
“Who’s there?” I growl.
A grate moves in the shadows, then falls to the ground. It is a vent grate on the warehouse wall. A form of a female crawls out. She is limping, her arms in the air.
“Please don’t shoot me,” she says again.
My gun does not lower. The girl comes into the light, a combination luminosity from a lone street light and the moon blaring down. I see that she is around twenty five years old, black, pretty, yet disheveled. Her dress has been torn, shredded more accurately, and there is blood on her arms and legs.
“Who are you?” I ask.
The girl looks at me for a moment, her face a blank, as if the question just asked was one that applied to differential calculus. Then she brightens, nodding.
“Mona,” she said. “I’m Mona.”
My gun lowers, and her arms come down, though a hand comes up to her neck. Something is irritating her there, or causing pain.
“Are they gone?” she asks me.
I am not as sharp as I should be. “Who?”
“The vampires,” she says and I see her visibly shudder. Her neck continues to bother her, and I suddenly put together an unpleasant equation.
“Yes. They’re dead. What’s wrong with your neck?”
She begins to cry. Only one word comes out. “Bit.”
I step forward. She steps back, eyeing
me warily, or more specifically, the monster gun I still clutch. I replace the pistol, then gently take her hand away from the afflicted area on her neck. As I fear, and as she has already affirmed, she has indeed by bitten. I am immediately baffled by the very slight severity of bite; more baffled by the girl’s appearance, which aside from evidencing a bloody struggle of sorts, is not representative of a full on Tuti attack.
Something about her made the Tuti stop feeding.
“Why were you doing that?” she suddenly asked.
“I needed to see how badly you were attacked,” I answered, assuming she meant my examination of her wound.
“No, I mean the other thing,” she said.
I am again foggy. My mind is not exactly going at warp speed. She takes her hand and mimes my act of masturbation. I realize that she has been a percipient witness to my ejaculatory campaign against vampirism. I am instantly humiliated and embarrassed, depantsed on every conceivable level.
“You — saw me?” I groan.
“Didn’t mean to stare, but you don’t see a cop do that every day. Not in a back alley, anyway.”
Oh, come now, I found myself fencing with her mentally. We butch cops always whack off in dark alleys, and at the oddest times. It’s a man-thing, dear, you wouldn’t understand.
I close my eyes, fighting for composure. Okay, she saw me Spurt-Slush Myself Silly in the dark. Big deal. There were bigger fish to fry at the moment. The girl needed treatment, and fast.
“I have to get you to a hospital,” I said, reaching for her arm. She allowed me this and walked beside me quietly for a second.
“I didn’t mean to stare,” she said. “I was just trying to hide from them and the only place I thought they’d never get me was in that vent.”
“Smart,” I say and mean it.
“You sure got here fast,” she said.
I stop, look at her. “You’re the one.”
She stares, again blankly.
“You called Monster Vice, right?”
She nods, understanding. “There’s a payphone inside.”
“What were you doing in there anyway?”
Mona looks down and begins to cry. “My husband and I got into a fight. Tonight he hit me. I left him. I ain’t going back, either.”
She sniffs, and we begin walking again. The lights from the MV contingent just outside the alley illuminate everything in sight.
“I was just wandering. It got chilly so I came into this building. The door was open, I was only planning on staying a few minutes,” she said. She looked at me with huge, tearful eyes. “Then they came.”
“Well, they’re dead now,” I say comfortingly. I do not add that my partner and best friend is also among the deceased. The thought fills me instantly with a bone chilling depression. My prick tingles from the recent bout of Bangin’ Bozo and I am sullen that my life has not turned out happier, after all is said and done.
“Pitts,” a familiar face and voice hails me from the Monster Vice Crime Scene, now an army strong. It is Captain Zelig. He walks toward me, a human mountain of muscle and scar tissue; he looks angry. Correction, he is angry. I can’t imagine why ... except that my entire platoon is now dead. Dozens of Forensic Vampire Specialists usher in and out of the warehouse, like drone ants on pre-selected missions, eyes either down on some critical piece of evidence linked to the most recent scenario of horror, or directly ahead, in search of a M.M.F.V (Mobile Monster Forensic Vehicle). On site analysis is standard operating procedure, and a good one, but tonight I wish everyone would just disappear.
“Goddamn it, Pitts,” Zelig is snarling at me, eyeballing the girl next to me for about a micro second. “I am getting very tired of losing good people on these raids.”
“No less am I,” I reply elegantly, and with as little inflection as possible. This is my seventh such raid on Tutis; up until tonight, Hanson and myself had emerged relatively unscarred. That record is now held, of course, only by myself.
Zelig looks like he wants to spit poison at me, but then takes a breath, and looks at the warehouse. Bodybags are seen; my people, good officers, solid men and women. Flushed out of existence by supernatural sewage.
“Jesus,” is all he can say.
I look to the girl. “This young lady needs DeCon, ASAP.”
Zelig nods, then whistles to two Medi-Vac Techs. The girl looks to me, her eyes frightened. I know what she is thinking.
“Don’t worry. They’ll help you. And if they can’t --”
“I don’t want to be one of them,” she says in a whisper.
I want to cry again (Dick Pitts, Prince of Homicide, Top Dog, One Time Crime busting King, now a little schoolgirl, whah, whah, whah). Must be hormonal, no doubt linked to my compulsory need to Pound the Pickle every twenty four hours.
“You won’t turn,” I say emphatically, though I do not know for sure if this is the case. I do however feel that her prognosis is pretty good; like myself, she’ll have to commit herself to the rigorous daily regimen of cherotonin flush.
She reaches for my hand and holds it tight. The Med-Techs arrive, waiting patiently for our emotional moment to play through. They then lead her away from Zelig and myself, to an M.E. Van nearby. Zelig now turns to me, his eyes red, rheumy, tired.
“You ran into a Master,” he says evenly.
“That’s right,” I reply. I look at my watch and see that it is quarter after midnight. I want to go home and drink my body weight in Jack Daniels. I want to mourn my partner. And my brother. I want to sleep.
“Mind if I get a report out of you tonight?” Zelig prompts.
“Tomorrow,” I say. I refuse to go into the office. Won’t do it, no way.
“I’d like you to meet your new partner,” Zelig is persistent.
I am stunned that such a thought would be forthcoming from Zelig. He and Hanson went back through the years, graduating in the same class out of LAPD at the Academy. I came in through the Marine Corps a long time ago, bypassed the Academy, went directly into Tactical, then Homicide. Hanson and Zelig had gone the mile together.
“Hanson isn’t even cold, Captain,” I reply stonily. “Can’t this wait?”
“Afraid not,” Zelig’s reply is near instantaneous. “I need coverage. Hanson would understand.”
Sure, I think. Hanson probably would. But I’m tired, and not feeling all that understanding at the moment.
“My brother was killed tonight, Zelig. Add more fun to the festivities of just five minutes ago.”
Zelig stares at me for a moment, then closes his eyes. He nods, whispers.
“Dick, I’m sorry.”
“He was Lycker-bit. We’ll talk more about it another time, okay?”
Zelig puts up a hand, nods once again. “Go home. Take some time. Be in my office at nine a.m. on Friday. Okay, buddy?”
“Okay,” I say.
Zelig stomps off, muttering, the last phrase I hear going something like this: “Goddamn vampires. When’s it gonna end?”
A Med-Vac approaches me, his face sheepish, almost embarrassed. I recognize him as one of the guys I just handed the girl Mona over to.
“Inspector Pitts,” he calls out. “Thought you’d like to know, sir.”
“Yeah?”
“The girl. She’ll be fine,” he says, genuinely happy. “We got her in time.”
I nod. The price was high enough, I thought. Eight dead officers, my partner included.
“The attack looked atypical,” I say, and the young Medic nods, as if this was the next item he had been planning to address before I beat him to the punch.
“Yeah, we saw that, too. There’s a reason. Ran a blood gas analysis on her.” He paused her for emphasis. “Kid’s got Sickle Cell. Must have left a damn nasty taste in their mouths.”
I am mildly bemused. Traditionally, vampires avoid humans with terminable blood conditions, and the fact that Mona is afflicted with Sickle Cell Anemia lends itself to a consistency in Tuti behavioral psychology. I wonder distantly if I should
develop leukemia or hypoglycemia in the near future as a remedial deterrent to potential attack. I decide against these radical vampire defenses within seconds. My life is complicated enough, what with remembering to Placate Mr. Wriggles once a day.
“Thanks,” I tell the young medic.
I turn and walk toward my sedan. I open the door, and get in, turning on the ignition. I cannot bear to look to the right, where I am accustomed to seeing Hanson, or at least hear him breathe (wheeze, was more like it, with the gut he was carrying). He will breathe and wheeze no more.
I am crying again.
Lately, it is what I do best.
That ... and survive.
CHAPTER FOUR
Though it’s been a pretty busy night thus far, and I’ve done my obligatory homage to massaging the old Trouser Mouse, my fatigue is dissipating, replaced instead by a kind of odd nervousness and disoriented high. This frustrates me, because I know in my heart that sleep is the best remedy for post-traumatic horror. My feelings are disparate, erratic, jumbled, an amalgam of sorrow, guilt, self-loathing and fear. I have survived the unsurvivable — a confrontation with a Master Vampire. Once again, I live, though others have died, horribly at that. A part of me feels invincible, my old self again, Big Dick Pitts of Homicide.
I listen to the cackle of multiple Dispatch and All Unit transmissions. My name is on every lip, in every precinct. The Big Show ended badly tonight, for both Monster Vice and Vampire alike, but Pitts again emerges unscathed. I will assume some kind of legendary status (again!), though at this point in my life and career, I will derive no joy from such acclamation. My friend and partner is dead tonight. Another victim, one of many. Hanson’s death has shattered a previously held belief system, inviolate as long as he was alive, that somehow we were both blessed - that somehow, after all “this” was over, we’d look back at our days in MV and thank whatever guardian angels watched over us that we alone would survive the carnage of the age. I am inconsolable and feel the need to drink heavily.
And this comes as no small wonder, as I am reminded that I have also lost my brother this evening. Just one of those god-awful days that never seems to end.
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