That meant it didn’t sound very good…kind of like how I sounded when singing karaoke.
“Relax,” Zack said, taking a big bite. Big mistake. It must’ve been really hot and scorched the top of his mouth because his face turned red and he almost reached out for the glass of blood. Instead, he just opted to take the pain. With a swollen tongue, he said, “It’s just garlic bread.”
The she-vamp had gotten back under control. “If you think that will hurt me, you’re mistaken,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t want to hurt you! We don’t want that, do we, guys?” Zack asked us.
“No,” Maddie said. “Not yet.”
“Last thing on our minds,” I said, going along with this ploy.
“Unlike you,” Zack said to the she-vamp, “who gets off on decapitating rookie cops, violence is not our number one goal.”
She smirked, that one broken fang protruding from her gray gums. Even now I noticed she had regenerated more. The clock was certainly ticking.
“Johnson was a good guy,” Maddie said. “He’s friends with my dad. Was friends with my dad.”
I didn’t know if this was true or not, but I went with it.
“Poor guy had a wife and a baby on the way,” I added.
“I destroy enemies,” she-Dracula said. “It is that simple. Just as I will destroy you.”
“I don’t know if you should be so confident,” Zack said.
Maddie and the she-vamp were in the middle of an epic staring contest. I didn’t think vampires needed to blink, but apparently Maddie didn’t, either. This went on for a solid thirty seconds before I spoke up.
Sitting in my chair, a steaming piece of garlic bread in my hand, I said, “Okay, she-Dracula, last chance.”
“Then away with the garlic bread,” she said.
“We can’t do that. We’re hungry,” Zack said.
“So am I, and your blood shall fill me up,” she-Dracula said.
I rolled my eyes. Suddenly, my nose started twitching. I felt a sneeze coming on. I leaned my head back and convulsively AH-CHOO’d all over my garlic bread. The gust of wind and spit from my mouth sent garlic powder from the cheese flying toward the she-vamp.
This was a total and unfortunate accident.
She writhed and screamed. Her skin bubbled as the garlic powder came into contact with her. Slowly, her face swelled, as if she’d just been stung by an entire hive of bees.
“Sorry,” I said.
“God bless you,” Zack said.
“Thanks,” I said.
The vamp’s eyes streamed tears. She rocked in her chair, muscles bulging, face swelling more and more.
I felt a little bad, honestly.
“You’ll pay for that,” the she-vamp bellowed.
“Let’s just kill her,” Zack said before I could apologize. “She isn’t gonna talk.”
He had given up.
“No,” Maddie said. “She’s close. I can feel it.”
“She’s right.” I said.
Zack picked up another piece of bread, faked like he was going to sneeze now, too. The she-vamp tensed up, expecting another blast of garlic powder. “Ah,” he said. “False alarm. But next time might not be. So tell us, what were you doing in the morgue? Why the dead bodies?”
I don’t think it was his plan to kill her. It was just his plan to wear her down.
“For the blood,” the she-vamp said.
“Bullshit.” Maddie slammed her fist down. She got no reaction. “That body had no holes in it. I’ve seen your kind feed. It’s not pretty. That wasn’t a dinner date. That was something else.”
I’d seen them feed, too, my mind going back to the poor high schooler we’d found at Lover’s Pass.
“Yeah, what was it? Were you guys trying to bang the bodies?” Zack said.
Now we all looked at him like he was crazy, even she-Dracula.
“Zack,” I whispered. “Simmer down, please.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
Vamps don’t bang. So that was out of the question. Their parts apparently didn’t work, though I’d couldn’t speak to that from experience.
“See,” I said, “I’m thinking you wanted those bodies not for you but for someone else.” I leaned forward. “Who? Doctor Blood?”
The she-vamp grinned a jagged grin.
My heart did a little stutter. I was on the right track.
“Tell us where he is,” Maddie demanded.
The gap between the vamp’s detached arm and her shoulder had lessened, but there was still a lot of space there, not to mention the protruding bone. Her wings still had holes in them. She wasn’t regenerating fast enough, I figured, and the sun was coming up in a few hours.
So I pushed the cup of blood forward. She eyed it warily.
“Here,” I said, “you look parched. This’ll help. You keep talking and there’s more where that came from.”
“I don’t take charity,” she-Dracula said.
“Not charity,” I replied. “It’s a peace offering.”
Zack chomped down on the last of the garlic bread. “Yeah,” he said.
“I will say this,” she-Dracula said. “There is no stopping what’s coming.”
“Heard that one before.” Maddie rolled her eyes. “Such a cliché.”
I sighed. We could be here all night, I figured.
As I contemplated this, I heard a thunk against the one-way glass. All of us turned our heads.
Was Octavius trying to get our attention?
Then there was another thump and this one was followed by a scream.
I shot up out of the chair, knocking the blood over. It landed on the floor, shattering the glass. A wave of red washed under the soles of our shoes.
“Ah,” she-Dracula said, “and so it begins. You wanted to know where he is, didn’t you? It looks like you just found out.”
17
Breached
The alarm wailed and the screaming grew louder.
“Shit,” Zack said. “What’s happening?”
But no one answered. We all knew, I thought.
We were under attack.
“I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,” she-Dracula said. “It won’t be pretty.”
She tilted her head back and laughed. I was about ready to put the mouth-trap back on her but didn’t. There was no time and I wasn’t staying in here.
There was too many people out there that I cared about.
I led the way to the door and buzzed.
No one answered my bell.
“We’re trapped!” Zack yelled.
“Cool it,” Maddie said. “We’re not trapped.”
She picked up her chair and launched it at the one-way mirror. The chair hit, reverberated, and bounced back. Maddie was quick and moved out of the way. But unfortunately, the table didn’t. It hit it and the vibration was enough to send the pizza to the floor. This sucked for Zack considering it was a fifty-dollar pizza, but I didn’t linger on that long. Because the chair had also knocked over the other cup of blood and this one happened to be the cup with the holy water mixed in. Zack’s vampire-killer cocktail.
The blood splashed over the she-vamp’s front. A smell of singeing hair and flesh filled the room, followed by a burst of smoke that looked like someone was playing with dry ice. Right before my eyes, the human disguise began melting away. She was full vamp now and it wasn’t a pretty sight. So much for regeneration. Behind her, the blood streaked down the white bricks and for some reason I was thinking it would take a long time of good scrubbing to get that off the wall. Really, it should’ve been the least of my worries, but in times of great stress, such as then, who knew where the mind would go?
The she-vamp, screaming, stood up. My jaw dropped and we all took a fearful step backward, toward the unbreakable one-way mirror. See, the she-vamp shouldn’t have stood up because that chair was bolted to the ground. I mean, bolted. Yet, the bolts screamed almost as loud as she-Dracula, and there she stood, heaving, skin melting and
fizzling.
I should’ve expected no less. When life starts sucking, it really sucks.
And here we were with a box of garlic dust and a UV lamp for weapons while World War III went on outside of the interrogation room.
Before I could even think about how screwed we were, the vampire charged at us. Dripping skin splashed this way and that way. Her steps were thunderous and jittery due to her broken leg.
“Watch out!” Maddie shouted then suddenly she plowed into me and I barreled into Zack, we were like falling dominos. My half-chewed piece of garlic bread flew out of my hands. Out of the box, garlic powder flew like Tinkerbell’s pixie dust in Peter Pan.
“Well shit, there went the whole fifty bucks!” Zack yelled. How that was what crossed his mind as we fell to the blood-damp, gray floor, I didn’t know.
She-Dracula screeched. I figured the garlic powder only added insult to injury. And if she somehow survived this then we’d be in for a world of pain.
Behind, at the one-way window, a dull thud gave way to an earth-shaking shatter. Glass and flayed skin rained over us, the latter ice-cold on my skin.
“Oh, yuck!” Zack shouted, scrabbling to the opposite wall where I could get a better look.
The garlic powder was starting to get into my sinuses. Pretty soon I was overtaken by a sneezing fit. Of all the times for that to happen…
Once I settled down, I saw the vampire had broken the window for us and now the screams and chaos of the outside were hitting my ears.
Not good.
“Let’s go!” I shouted, extending my hands for my friends. Zack and Maddie took them. I pulled them to their feet.
“You’re welcome,” Maddie said, brushing herself off.
“Thanks, Maddie,” Zack said.
“Yeah, thanks,” I added.
But Maddie had helped us so many times before I was beginning to wonder if she was sick of our thank yous and wished we’d start pulling our own damn weight.
“Where’d the she-vamp go?” Zack asked.
I approached the window, crunching shards of glass beneath my boots.
“There,” I said. I pointed. The she-vamp was our martyr. A large chunk of that seemingly-unbreakable glass burrowed itself into her neck. Now her head hung by a few arteries and nearly-severed vertebrae. Another, much harder, way to kill a vamp is decapitation. Like so.
It was gross, yeah, but I didn’t linger.
The smell of its death punched me in the nose.
“Oh, sick,” Maddie whispered. “Really sick.”
She didn’t mean sick in a good way.
“Probably better than going out with a slow death by garlic powder,” Zack said.
“Yeah, I didn’t like her much, anyway,” I said.
“She was kind of a dick, yeah?” Zack said.
I shrugged.
“Where’s Octavius?” Maddie asked.
“Shit! Look!” Zack was pointing to the door to the corridor outside. There, a bloody handprint streaked down the pale gray of the iron.
“Is that—” Maddie said.
“I think so. Let’s go,” I said. “We gotta get to the armory.”
As soon as I said this a gunshot cracked through the building followed by the barking of what sounded like a rabid dog. Which I knew wasn’t a dog at all, but a werewolf.
We pushed our way into the corridor. The air was rank with the smell of gun smoke and foul death.
There, at the end of the hall, where around the corner the front lobby was, stood a collection of supernatural creatures.
“Holy shit!” I wheezed.
A zombie shambled toward a shadowy figure on the other end. It moaned and groaned, reminding me of one of those junkies you see so often down by the Y-Bridge.
It was dark down there now, the lights in the corridor blinking on and off, dimmed. I couldn’t see who the figure was the zombie had been going for, but my stomach clenched, because whoever it was would be someone I cared about or at least liked in some way.
Behind the zombie was the hunched back of a seven-foot tall lycan, it’s blue-gray fur wet and matted with a dark blood. Whose blood it was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. There were vamps, too—three of them, all in their final stages of transformation. Their large bat wings stretched from wall to wall which was easily fifteen or twenty feet. Among the others were a ghoul, a banshee, a Cyclops so tall it had to duck its one-eyed head, a mummy, the purple wings of a succubus, and a minotaur.
The place was much too small for all this evil.
A gun went off again. In the flash of light from the muzzle, I saw Storm with his back against the wall, clutching his large Wild West gun. The zombie’s head exploded like a watermelon that had been dropped from twenty stories above.
But something happened. Something I couldn’t comprehend.
It is common knowledge that a headshot or any severing of the brain of a zombie will kill it.
Now was not the case.
The zombie’s head mostly vaporized on the spot, but a coiled blue tentacle snaked from the gore.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was frozen to the spot.
Storm squeezed the trigger again. Each shot was true. It ripped the tentacle apart and splashed him with what looked like blueberry juice.
Gross.
“Storm!” I shouted.
Now, this probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done and as soon as the words left my mouth, I wished I could take them back. Because the menagerie of supernatural monsters snapped their heads and snouts in my direction.
The wrinkled face of the banshee met mine. The old crone opened her mouth wide enough to swallow a phonebook whole and she screeched.
We all knew what that meant.
In case you don’t, I’ll let you in on the terrible truth. A banshee’s scream signified death by screaming bloody murder. You heard that scream and someone was going to die, usually a family member. Since I considered everyone in BEAST part of my family, there was no telling who would be the unlucky person.
It was probably me.
“Abe!”
Zack said from behind.
I turned, expecting to see Zack there with a machine gun, and that would’ve been the cherry on top—getting shot down by my best friend. Again.
But it wasn’t Zack with the gun. It was Maddie and it wasn’t a machine gun, but one of Storm’s modified pistols.
“Duck!” she said.
I did.
The banshee, currently screaming, its tongue lolling like a red snake, took a bullet right into that gaping, black hole of a mouth. The shriek was cut off abruptly.
Thank God, because I didn’t think my eardrums would last much longer.
Maddie pulled the trigger again.
This shot took the mummy in its torso. A spray of petrified corpse dust burst in the air, and the werewolf began sneezing. Werewolves had always seemed sensitive to pollens and dust. It must’ve been their strong sense of smell that did them in.
I army-crawled beneath Maddie’s line of fire and made my way into the armory. There, Zack was sorting through the weapons, looking for something he didn’t have to shoot, I’m assuming, and probably saving some friendly fire in the process.
He settled on a hatchet.
I picked up a sword because it was the closest weapon and our time for success, before the HQ would be overrun, was dwindling.
Three more shots went off in the hallway.
“Guys? A little help!” Maddie yelled.
We rushed out.
Somewhere, a schoolteacher was telling me not to run with sharp objects, but drastic times called for drastic measures.
In the hall now we saw that the floor was soaked with monster guts and blood. But none lay completely dead. Instead, we were looking at mutations. The werewolf with tentacles coming from its arm sockets; the vampire with bulging eyes on stalks protruding from its head like antennae; the cyclops covered in scales, dripping worm-like parasites; the minotaur with snak
es hanging from its nostrils. It was missing one of its horns, too. It looked like it had been broken off in this skirmish or maybe even another battle, but probably had head-butted a brick wall out of anger and lived to tell the tale.
Which, coincidentally, was how I’d describe life to an alien—like head-butting a brick wall and living to tell the tale.
These monsters just weren’t staying dead.
Slowly, they walked up the hallway, toward us.
“Grab the old man, too,” someone said from the lobby. My heart wrenched. Storm, I thought. If they had Storm, there was no telling what had happened to Lola and Octavius. “They’ll make excellent subjects,” this voice said. It was a voice like a serpent. I pictured the snake that had tempted Adam and Eve with the forbidden fruit. The sword in my hand felt heavier and I didn’t think I could keep going. I already felt like I’d failed—a totally normal feeling in the mind of Abraham Crowley, but one I couldn’t let hang around.
So I pushed it away as more shots burst past me, hitting the monsters with the force of a thousand Mac trucks, and yet they didn’t fall, they only gave birth to more monsters and abominations.
I was a part of BEAST after all, wasn’t I? And BEAST stood for the Bureau of Everyday Abomination Slayers and Trappers. It was my job to slay these abominations.
Once the fragility of my own mortality left my mind, I decided that was exactly what I was going to do.
I screamed at the top of my lungs and charged in the direction of the monsters. I couldn’t imagine how dumb I must’ve looked, but I figured it was better than being dead.
They, of course, were not scared of me. When one was as ugly as them, I don’t think they were scared of much of anything.
Bullets flew as Maddie squeezed that trigger like there was no tomorrow. Now if that had been Zack behind the gun, I probably would’ve second-guessed myself. Maddie, well, she was a better shot.
Tentacles came at me. It was like going through a car wash without a car. Slap, slap, slap, squish, squish, slide, squelchhhhh.
My sword moved in a blur. Thankfully Storm kept the edge sharp. I cut through the jungle of monsters. Blood and juices sprayed, landed on my lips and got in my eyes and up my nostrils. This sucked, of course, but survival was first, not just my survival but every human’s here.
Fright Squad Page 12
