Failure is not an option, I want to live.
The gate slid open, and I was out of the cage in an instant. The quickest way to die in this kind of setting was to stay still. Instinct took over, there wasn’t time to think now or to formulate a real plan, it was down to survival of the fittest. The first part of this would be pure survival. One of the massive warehouse pillars came into view. I jumped the remaining twenty feet to it and landed on it about ten feet up the ground. I’d stopped being impressed by such acts long ago, but even I had to admit they were still pretty cool. I raced up the pillar, the energy in my body able to cling to it somehow. There was a time when I would have asked the question, how is this possible? Now I didn’t care how it was possible, only that it was and I could use that ability to stay alive.
Sixty feet above the warehouse floor I moved out onto one of the struts and crouched down to survey the space around me. I let my breathing settle and opened my senses to track the sounds and smells around me. Blood had been spilled already. The copper tang of it reached me even up here. Footsteps and laughter echoed from down a corridor to my right, but they were too far away to matter right now. Then I heard it. It was just a scratch, but it was enough to get me moving again.
The roll to the side saved my life as inch long claws slammed into the steel beam. The claws ripped patches of the steel free, and the beast turned to look at me. There had been a time when vampire research had been enough for the consortium. But what happened when one of the vampires broke containment? How would we be able to capture or kill them then? It seemed like anytime a scientist asked a question the world burned. Regardless of how it happened, in that moment the idea for the beasts was born, and our lives changed forever.
I braced my feet against the steel girder and launched myself backward into the open air. A sixty-foot fall was nothing if you slowed yourself down just a shade. My backflip ended, and I loosened my legs to absorb the impact. Somehow I ended up with one fist smashed into the ground as I hit. Superhero pose. I was all over that. Plus it probably looked cool to whoever was watching the film.
What didn’t work for me was the giant man sprinting down the steel beam back towards the floor. The beasts were humans, I mean if you could call something that had been altered as much as they had human. While we were eerily similar in our cybernetic makeup, we still had plenty of differences. The beasts could walk in the sun, where the sun tended to do nasty things to my skin. Their cybernetics were more powerful than ours, but they also didn’t grow in power as they aged like we did. The beasts lacked our mental acuity, and wouldn’t be able to keep up with a few of the better tricks that I had up my sleeve.
The man leaped from the pillar landing on all fours ten feet away from me. His coat was shredded and the muscles in his arms bulged through the gaps. His claws had left gouges in the concrete floor as he slid to a stop. Now he was just waiting for me to make the first move.
I loved it when the beasts made assumptions like that. He thought I jumped off the pillar because I was scared of him. It would take more than one of his kind to break me. The fact was, part of me loved putting on a show of my abilities for whoever was watching. It was my own way of breaking free. If I could separate myself from the horrors I committed by pretending I was in a vid, well then it was the perfect escape. Plus what’s the point of having amazing powers if you don’t get to flaunt them a little?
The beast had waited for as long as it could control itself. As it ran forward, I tilted my head in acknowledgment of his challenge and rushed to meet his charge. The man leaped into the air to strike from above. I slid under him and then used my abilities to halt my momentum almost instantly. Before the beast had even landed on the ground, I was crashing into him from behind. His claws sank into my legs shredding them as they wrapped around his waist. The man roared, and I wrenched his head to the side. The single pop was enough to let me know his neck was broken.
That wouldn’t be enough to keep him down for long. Even now his body was rushing to repair the damage I had caused. If he hadn’t ripped apart my thighs, I might have even let him live until the end. It would have been nice to make him someone else’s problem. Instead, I needed to heal, and that meant taking this particular player off the board.
My fangs sunk into his neck and the warm life giving liquid poured into my mouth. The first swallow repaired my legs, the next filled me with strength. It was possible this might be my last chance to feed before I got out of here. There was no way that I could risk it, I drank every last drop of him. With the beast’s life force coursing through my veins, I turned towards the sound of laughter that was still echoing from the passage to my right.
Failure was not an option, I wanted to live.
Everything inside of me screamed that I was going the wrong way, into danger instead of away from it, but there was no other option. The game was brutal. Win and you get to see the outside world, lose, and you never get to see anything again. So why was I letting myself be lured further into the warehouse? Playing the game by someone else’s plans hardly seemed conducive to staying alive.
The eerie echoing laughter filtered down the corridor again. He was far enough away that a human might not have been able to hear, but close enough for me to track the noise. The scream that followed his laughter shattered the silence left in its wake. The smell of fresh blood filtered down the passage and I started moving faster.
It was almost just pure instinct, the need to move towards blood. When I was younger, the need had been almost unbearable. It was ten years before a human could walk into a room with me and I could keep myself from attacking them. Twenty before I could sit and have a conversation with one. Now when I thought about those desires, I could shove them to the side. Controlling the impulse to kill was never easy, but it could be done. Despite that, I found myself walking faster, almost daring myself to break into a sprint towards the smell of fresh blood.
The force of what was happening hit me like a sledgehammer. This was exactly what he wanted. It would draw the younger vampires to him, making for an easy kill. That was if he was old enough to get the kill. The trap had a certain kind of sexy logic behind it, a brutal simplicity that made it an efficient way to thin out the herd.
Sexy, where did that come from? Nothing about killing people for sport was sexy. What in the hell was wrong with me? I stopped walking and started focusing on my thoughts. This had happened to me once before, and I had no idea what triggered it or how to control it. Somehow ingesting the beast’s blood was influencing my thoughts. Could I use the thoughts of that monster to help me live through this? How had I harnessed them last time?
My breathing slowed, and I could almost see the incident like it was playing on a screen in front of me. The doctor had taken a blood sample from me. I hadn’t fed that day, so I was hungry. He leaned just a little too close, and even though I was restrained I found myself drinking from his neck. Pain coursed through my body as the support technician electrocuted me. As I was shaking memories that weren’t mine swept through my head.
When it was over, I had the access controls to the doors, and a layout of the entire facility in my head. It hadn’t taken me long to use those thoughts to try and escape. Little had I known at the time it had been a trap, a chance to try and force another latent ability out of hiding. Since that day I hadn’t been able to replicate the experience. Until now.
The beast’s memories flooded into my own. I wasn’t the only one that had been taken against their will and turned into something less than human. He had been tortured and tested just like me. The difference was when they were done with him, he got to go back to enjoying a mostly normal life. Apparently when you didn’t drink blood, you weren’t a threat to all of humanity.
The beast spent years being trained, honing the skills to kill my kind. All of that training now belonged to me. In an instant, I went from barely being able to formulate a plan to knowing exactly what I was going to do.
The laughter came again and then t
he scream. I felt my hand trailing against the wall, my fingernails leaving gouges in the stone. While they couldn’t rip through metal yet, against flesh and bone they did just fine. The lingering scratch was the only hint he would get that I was coming. I doubted it would be enough.
The tunnel opened into a large room. I let myself cling to the shadows, making it nearly impossible to detect me. There was a human strapped to a chair in the middle of a large cage. A male vampire walked around her using one of his nails to cut the flesh along her shoulder. Two younger vampires launched themselves at the cage only to be sent flying backward by electricity. As they were lying stunned on the ground as the older vampire exited the cage and broke both of the vampires’ necks. Then he hacked their heads from their shoulders and tossed them to the side.
Once he was safely back in the cage, he hit a button, and I heard the thrum of the electricity coursing through the bars. Not a strategically bad place to be except for the fact that you had to leave the cage to make a kill. That was always going to leave you vulnerable at some point. The rip in the vampire’s suit confirmed as much, but with ten dead vamps surrounding the cage, he appeared to be doing just fine.
I couldn’t stay in the tunnel. Eventually, someone else would come in, and I’d rather meet them out there. Sweeping the room for places to hide didn’t turn up many options. The room was well lit, the cage was supposed to draw you in. There were a few places to find cover, but none of them were truly sufficient.
I’m not sure what it was, but at some point we became hardwired not to look up. Ever notice how in scary movies people check the ceilings last if they even bother to check them at all. Well, next time you’re poking around the house at night don’t forget to look up. It’s a predator thing, we like to get above our prey.
The only problem with up was that there was absolutely no cover except for the massive steel beams themselves. That’s what I’d use to move as close to the cage as possible. When the vamp came out of the cage, I’d show him what death from above looked like.
Clinging up the side of a steel beam is as easy as it sounds. Sure I was stronger, so I could have done it without clinging to it, but it wasn’t anywhere near as cool, or as silent. Instead, I called on my vampire energy to somehow stick to the surface. I know, I was kind of like that kid that always likes to dress up in a spider suit and swing around the city. The only difference was, I wasn’t a spider. The Doc tried to explain it to me one time, something about being able to shift particles and creating some kind of bond between me and whatever I needed to climb.
The beam kept me screened from the man in the cage. I moved along the beam taking a chance every time I sidled around one of the vertical pillars attached to the strut I was on. About twenty feet away I stopped and looked down into the cage. There was still a part of me that felt bad for the human in that chair, but compassion got you killed just as fast as carelessness in my world.
The woman screamed again, and the vampire laughed. It was hard to listen to, and the smell of her blood would have been overwhelming if I hadn’t fed already. Two more vamps ran into the room. They charged the cage, snarling as they came. They hadn’t fed in a long time, and the smell of blood had driven them mad. The cage lit up in a brilliant white burst of light as the vampires struck it at full speed. They sailed backward electricity coursing through their bodies.
The vampire in the cage looked around the room. He didn’t look up as he scanned the area. The cage powered down, and the vampire stepped out. He ripped the first vamp’s head off and started moving towards the second. Somehow that fanger wasn’t completely unconscious. The vamp on the ground made a pitiful mulling sound as he moved towards it. Sympathy wasn’t a commodity that existed amongst our kind, so my guess was that his life expectancy was going to end quickly.
He reached down and started to tug at the creature’s head. It didn’t come off as easily when the vamp was fighting back. Now was the only chance I was going to get, it wouldn’t take him much longer to kill the weakly struggling vamp. I moved across the beam as quickly as I could and then jumped across the remaining open space and the thirty feet to the floor. I slammed into the vamp using him to stop my momentum. It had the exact opposite effect on him as he went flying across the room.
Before he could recover, I was sprinting towards him. If he had any kind of real power, he wouldn’t have been knocked to the ground so easily. When I hit him, he sailed ten feet back and into one of the vertical steel beams. Dirt fell from the beam dusting him gently as he tried to stand. He must have broken something in the exchange because he wasn’t moving quickly. I ran towards him using all the momentum and putting it into my punch. At the last second, the vampire moved to the side, and my fist crashed into the beam.
The bones in my hand shattered from the impact. Only the cybernetics kept my hand from falling apart. A scream ripped from my lungs as the pain settled in. I started to turn realizing that I was at risk and my legs were swept out from under me. The floor knocked the air from my lungs, and the male vamp stood over me looking down.
He was looking in my eyes and didn’t notice that my hand was already knitting back together. If I could attack soon enough, I’d still come out on top of this situation.
“I’m impressed. That was a hell of an attack for a beta model.”
“Beta model my ass.” It wasn’t an eloquent comeback, but it would do.
The vamp reached down to grab my neck. If he thought there was a way he could take my head off while I was still living he wasn’t that bright. Him being an arrogant prick that he was, obviously thought no one else could possibly be as strong as him, and that was exactly what I was counting on.
He reached down to grab my head. I pushed ineffectively at his hands with the one I hadn’t thrown the punch with. He pinned it to my side easily enough and started to choke me with his free hand. We still needed to breathe to stay alive, sure I needed much less oxygen than a human did, but I still needed to breathe to survive. It would take about five minutes before I passed out, and this vamp couldn’t waste that kind of time if he wanted back in the cage before another vamp showed up.
He reared back fangs extended. Just as he was about to attack, I slid my fingernails across his throat. Warm blood covered me almost instantly. The hand on my throat loosened and I was able to wriggle free of his grip. He tried to stand. If he made it back to the cage and the human he would be able to feed. His wounds would heal almost instantly if he fed, and I didn’t want to have to deal with that. I kicked out sending him to the ground before flipping back up onto my feet. Circling behind him I batted his hands to the side and shoved a hand inside of the wound on his neck. My claws closed around his spine, and I pulled as hard as I could.
The crack that sounded let me know I had severed his spinal column. The vampire’s body went limp in my arms. I shook him back and forth a few times, making sure his head tore away from his body before tossing his remains aside. There was something else I had to do before I could leave. I started walking towards the cage before I realized there was still one vampire left to deal with.
His scorched body was crawling towards the entrance of the cage. The electricity must have fried his nerves completely if he still couldn’t move right. That and the fact it hadn’t fed in a while was all that would have kept him from healing enough to be a problem. The vamp didn’t notice me as I walked up behind it. A quick twist of its neck kept the vamp on the ground. It took a couple of vicious tugs, but when his head came off, it flew out of my hands, bouncing against the cage and rolling away.
Healing my hand had taken almost all of the energy I had taken in from draining the beast. There was no way to tell how many more vamps I’d have to battle before getting out of here. That meant I needed to power up and there was only one source of blood close enough to be viable.
I walked into the cage, and the woman started to whimper. My power flowed outwards calming her nerves even as I laid a hand against her cheek. Her skin was warm under my touc
h, and I stroked it softly a few times. It was a kindness for me to take her, at least that is what I told myself. None of the other vamps would have done it as gently as I was about to. She slipped away into a memory from her past, and I leaned in.
Her neck was salty from sweating in the cage. My tongue flicked out enjoying the taste. When my teeth sank into her, I flooded her thoughts with waves of pleasure. She groaned once as the intense feeling of euphoria washed over her. I felt myself smile imagining what she was feeling. It was the only kindness that I could offer. Her heart stopped beating slowly and then started to shudder. I took one last swallow and then broke our bond. The woman’s chest hitched once and then it was over.
When the alarm sounded, I didn’t know what to make of it. I hoped they weren’t sending in another pack of beasts. The last one had actually managed to do some damage to me, and if there were more than three of them, I might not make it out of here. Seriously, what was it, evil dickhead day? Wasn’t pitting us against each other enough anymore? But no, they just had to send in the dogs to try and make things more interesting.
“There are only two contestants left. You have one hour before we cleanse the facility.”
A cleanse normally meant fire and a lot of it. If you couldn’t cut off our head, then burning us to ash worked quite nicely. The older I became, the more resistant I had become to fire, to almost everything really, but even I couldn’t survive a cleanse. Not yet anyway.
Since I had been turned my skin had somehow become resistant to blades. My bones were stronger, and I was faster than before. I’d done my best to hide most of the changes from the doctors, but I wouldn’t be able to hide forever. It surprised me that the scientists hadn’t discovered anything about this from their studies on the other vampires, but maybe I was different. A freak, even amongst my own kind.
Forced Compliance (The Galactic Outlaws Book 1) Page 16
