Andover Cold Storage was their next stop, and once again a diversion had been worked out. There was a pharmacy nearby. They'd break into it and locate more S-choline for the dart gun and hypos to build their arsenal. Once the contaminated blood was discovered, all that stood between them and the vampires was the dart gun and the hypodermic needles.
While Stroud and Lonnie placed the pods in the ice at Andover Cold Storage, Ashyer would break into the pharmacy. Stroud gave him a device for silencing the alarm before breaking the window. As the helicopter touched down in a Little League baseball field beside the cold storage plant and pharmacy, Stroud shouted a good luck to Ashyer who dashed for the pharmacy. Ashyer's black clothes were swallowed up by the dark, and he was gone.
Stroud and Lonnie Wilson began the labor of getting the first pod, the most damaged one with Pamela Carr's remains, to the freezers. But the moment they picked it up, the thing crumbled like ancient cardboard into powder. The powder dusted them, reminding Stroud of a “Devil's Egg” with its millions of spores. “Don't breathe the stuff!” Stroud shouted at Wilson who was coughing amid a cloud of it. “Get out of the bay!”
The two men jumped out, gasping for clean air, the acrid smell of the bursted pod making Stroud ill and Lonnie retch. From where he stood, Stroud watched the smoke inside the cargo bay turn to a brackish, brown cloud before it finally dissipated, allowing them back to gather up Mrs. Bradley's pod. Pam Carr had been one of the vampires and since Dolph Banaker had opened the pod, her remains were unable to withstand the decaying process brought on by the air and all the microbes it carried with it. Mrs. Bradley's remains, on the other hand, were those of a human being to begin with, and despite the fact the pod had been damaged by Dolph, the woman's body remained intact, the pod itself undamaged by the body it housed.
Once more Stroud and Lonnie moved toward the bay door and out onto the playing field. They made for the cold storage plant with their vampire evidence. Somewhere across the street Ashyer was, Stroud hoped, doing much better than they.
They'd have to break into Andover Cold Storage as well, but Stroud knew from his own experience that warehouses were relatively lax on security, depending upon what wares they housed. Cold storage places in Chicago went for cheap alarm systems which could typically be cut off from the outside by a burglar who knew what he was doing, and since Stroud had gone through training as a burglar in order to catch burglars, he knew all the tricks.
“We have to go around back,” he told Lonnie.
But as they did so, he saw a side door and something told him the side door was unlocked. On this hunch, he had Lonnie hold up as he gave the knob a jiggle. It clicked open. “Luck is changing for the better,” he commented as they made their way inside.
Above, on the roof, Banaker and twenty-eight other vampires looked on as the rats stepped into their trap. Two of Banakers people had literally exploded in air during the trip as if a timed-released bomb had been ticking inside them. The ripple effect of fear that spread through his people threatened to send them all flying off at any moment. “Now we kill him, once and for all,” he said, “with the help of the cold storage.”
Cold storage pires were the blue-collar workers, the less educated among the pires. The mausoleum was too good for their kind. At this time, the truck from the Institute carrying the recently fermented blood paks arrived in the parking lot at Andover Cold Storage, soon to be unloaded. Banaker sent word to have the unloading held until further notice. He didn't want Abe Stroud anywhere near the blood supply.
Stroud thought it odd that a door would be unlocked here, yet it was close to dawn, close to opening, and so one of the owners, or an eager-beaver employee, might be booting up the Xerox or computer in the office, “waking” the place. He and Lonnie inched forward through the dark corridor with their burden. In due time the pod would provide reasons for the nonbeliever and the authorities why a seemingly mad Dr. Abraham Stroud had touched off an explosion at the prestigious Banaker Institute. The pod was their only direct link to the bizarre, irrational facts of this, his most peculiar case. Stroud believed that if he survived this night he'd either be crucified by the authorities or lauded a hero who had put an end to an insidious enemy of the people.
He knew no policeman in Chicago or Springfield would believe a word of his story without concrete evidence, and if they must freeze Mrs. Bradley in her present condition to provide that evidence, then so be it.
Stroud stopped in his tracks. He heard, or sensed, movement in the building. He put a finger to his lips to indicate to Lonnie Wilson that something was amiss. They quietly moved on but with even more caution than when they'd entered. The building even here was cold, the temperature at or below freezing. Signs for canned goods, meat, poultry and vegetables, all surrounded in heaps of ice, lined the walls. They came on a door deep within the confines of the place where rising cold smoke seeped like water through the crevices. Stroud opened it and moved ahead, although his face and figure were suddenly lost in the gas cloud of cold that poured from this room. Inside, visibility was terrible and Stroud walked into a table upon which lay an enormous box, but the box was no box: it was a coffin. And when he bumped the table, the lid slowly began to rise.
Wilson dropped his end of the pod, making Stroud wheel around. Lonnie was struggling in the fog with something that had him by the throat. Stroud, too, dropped the pod and pressed the dart gun against the back of the creature about to rip open Lonnie's throat with its incisors. He fired into the kidney area but the creature sunk its teeth into Lonnie at the same moment, holding firm, as something hit Stroud from behind. Falling, he realized that Andover Cold Storage housed vampires. Falling, he heard and felt and saw pieces of the monster at Lonnie as it exploded from within. The bloody explosion fired the imaginations of the others whom Stroud sensed now and saw outlined amid the icy fog of the freezer. He and Lonnie were shivering unbearably and he felt his grip on the dart gun turning numb.
“We've got to get out of here, now!” shouted Stroud, feeling the awakened vampire crowd backing off, fearful, cowardly at heart. Seeing one of their number explode from within as if staked from within, made them shiver. But Stroud couldn't count on this for long. Should they suddenly all attack at once, he knew that he and Lonnie could not withstand the assault. They'd have to abandon Mrs. Bradley here and now; he could only be thankful that she was dead inside the pod and they could do no more to her.
The evidence lost to them, Stroud now turned his attention to getting Lonnie out of this place safely and efficiently. There was no telling how soon the vampires here would come charging after. They'd surprised them, awakened and stunned the vampires all at once. But once they began in earnest to file out after Stroud, he and Lonnie would become carrion for them.
They raced for the side entrance, the same way as they'd come in. It was blocked by two snarling creatures who showed their incisors, their gums discolored by squirming white worms. These two flapped and keened and spat the worms at them. Behind them the others were rushing from the freezer compartment. Stroud crashed through a glass partition that opened on the offices, and he helped Lonnie through. The vampires raced for them.
Stroud fired the reloaded dart gun catching one in the chest, and this instantly burst his heart before the others, sending them into awe, stopping them in their tracks. It was obvious none of them had ever seen such destructive power used on their kind before. Stroud literally dove through the broken glass, cutting himself as he did so, rolling to an upright position. Another vampire came in atop him, digging its talons into him. Lonnie, a hypodermic at the ready, stabbed this one and the creature began to tremble as if a minor earthquake had hold of its epicenter. In a moment it exploded all over Stroud. Again, the others were stopped cold in their tracks at the sight of one of their number so horribly and quickly disposed of. They began to hold back as Stroud, on his feet now, reloaded the dart gun and backed through the offices of Andover Cold Storage, through a conference room, through an adjacent closet a
nd duplicating room, to a back corridor that opened on another section of the warehouse. All the while, the vampire numbers were increasing as they seemed to step out of every dark corner. The temperature in the warehouse was again beginning to affect the humans badly. Stroud tried to determine a way out as they passed by whole sides of beef on hooks, his mind picturing how he and Lonnie would look alongside the beef, hung here for the vampires' pleasure. Someone, or something slapped a button and the sides of beef began to rotate, causing a deafening, screeching, metallic noise. Stroud and Wilson weaved in and around and out of the moving carcasses, knowing that, like a wheat field, they could not long hide here.
Overhead, some of the vampires took to the air and began diving down toward them. Stroud fired, bringing one down, a direct hit to the heart. Lonnie lashed out at a second that caught his forearm and tore the hypo and much of his flesh away, causing him to scream out.
“You have nowhere to hide, nowhere to go now, Stroud!” shouted Banaker from a catwalk high overhead, his form looking one moment human, one moment monstrous as he willfully controlled his appearance. “Now you are going to pay for the crimes you've committed against my race, the murder of my son, and so many other pires.”
Stroud fired the next dart at Banaker but he was not there when the dart pinged harmlessly against the metal of a crossbar on the catwalk. Then Banaker re-formed in exactly the spot he had disappeared. “Your puny weaponry only works on the feebleminded, the slow and tardy, those we'd just as soon weed out from the gene pool anyway.”
“Come on down here and fight me, then! Damn you! Damn you back to the hell from which you came! You filthy, mutant bastard!”
Banaker laughed at the outburst, and his calm and ability in dealing with Stroud gave confidence to the other pires, one of which suddenly leapt over the top of the beef all around Stroud and was atop him, digging at him with his talons, tearing with his teeth. The others raced to overwhelm Stroud at Banaker's order. “Now, now! Get him, now! All of you!”
Stroud felt the creatures all around him, crowding into the confined space he occupied, tearing at him, knowing that he was about to die here, like this, like another slab of frozen meat to be added to cold storage, no one the wiser. Lonnie, too, was being overwhelmed. Each man stabbed out at the creatures with as many hypos as they commanded, but there weren't enough! One pire would fall away, burst to death, only to be replaced by another and another, while each wound they inflicted brought on a new surge of helplessness in Stroud and Wilson. Wilson's cries were horrible and Stroud felt a pang of guilt at having gotten him into this, the final moment before death.
Suddenly a glass container burst beside them, sending up a cloud of acrid smoke in the chamber of ice and fog, turning the meat locker into a green place. The green cloud encircled the twisting torsos of the monsters at combat with the humans. Then the creatures began to drop, grasp at their nostrils and throats, gasping for air. Stroud looked around for the reason why as he stabbed yet another of the creatures with his last S-choline dart, using his hand and weight for the plunger.
Stroud grabbed hold of one of the things that'd attached itself to Wilson, but it held on with a bulldog ferocity at Wilson's neck. Wilson's eyes had rolled back in their sockets and he barely looked alive. Stroud pummeled the creature but it came loose and stumbled away not because of Stroud's beating, but because it, too, had inhaled the green gas all around them now.
Stroud himself was coughing, choking on the gas, but he felt no weakness from it. He lifted Wilson over his shoulders and looked all around for the reason for his and Wilson's salvation. He saw a Freon pipe had been smashed by a fire ax lying nearby, and in a corner he got a glimpse of Ashyer holding up a large crucifix to several creatures moving in on him. The crucifix was absolutely useless against Banaker's new breed of vampire.
Stroud realized now that Ashyer had come in on the scene, saw there was no hope, and reacted by throwing down the jar of S-choline. The liquid in the presence of the Freon had created a dry ice gas of the S-choline, a gas deadly for the pires. Some had, thus far, escaped the effects of the gas, and one now took Ashyer in its mighty grasp as if the man were a rag doll, about to take a bite from him. At a safe distance somewhere overhead, Banaker's angry voice cried out over the tumult and keening of the dying pires. “Stop Stroud! Stop the man!”
But on all sides, the vampire horde raced from the deadly gas billowing around them. Two surrounding Ashyer succumbed to the fumes, and Stroud stepped on these and used them as springboards to get to the other one, hitting it full in its powerful back, knocking it and Ashyer to the frozen, hard-packed floor. Freon caught the pire in the face, making it screech, but the S-choline cloud silenced him.
“Good work, Ashyer!” shouted Stroud, still coughing.
“We must get out,” he replied. “This way!”
Stroud helped Lonnie who was the weakest of the trio now. The three men found a back bay door and ran into a loading zone where men who were not men were unloading twenty-pound-bag blood paks from the Institute. Vampires who'd struggled with Stroud's trio had escaped this way, and many were tearing into the blood paks, downing fresh supplies, looking for courage and the strength that Banaker seemed to possess.
Stroud and the others stopped dead in their tracks. The vampires turned and stared at them, and for a long uneasy moment of silence the two sides sized one another up. Wilson was barely capable of standing, and both Stroud and Ashyer had sustained wounds that were openly bleeding, and enticing to the creatures. With so many gashes to his body, Stroud knew he was running on adrenaline, but he was unsure how long he could sustain his strength. The creatures, for their part, were choking and coughing, having come out of the S-choline gas. The gas would take a longer time, but now it seemed to be doing the trick, as one of them keeled over, lay cadaverlike a moment and then erupted as he stared up at his comrades.
The others looked round at one another, wondering who would be next. The fear sent them into a gulping match for who could ingest Banaker's elixir of life the fastest.
“God,” moaned Stroud, “I hope that's the right stuff.”
The vampires looked like a band of warriors who'd just stumbled onto a cache of liquor. They were jubilant at the sight of so much energy and power at their beck and call. With the rules of fair distribution gone, they tore wildly into the blood paks, swallowing hungrily.
A second vampire burst open where he stood, and then another in firecracker fashion, until the interior explosions sounded off in rhythmic succession. “Cooking good now,” said Stroud. “Let's go!”
It was just coming on light when Stroud saw those vampires who had hung closest to Banaker winging off to the south. They'd seen enough. They'd witnessed a full-scale wipeout of their kind at the blood truck from the Institute. Banaker now knew that Stroud had gotten to the blood supply and had tainted it with an antivampire agent. He most assuredly had no idea of the properties of the killing liquid in Stroud's darts and hypos, or in the gas cloud that had magically erupted around Stroud, but unlike the others who now believed Stroud was some sort of god, he knew it had to do with medicine.
Through medicine Banaker had made his great strides for the race; ironically, now medicine would wipe them out, unless...
The only clean blood paks were at the mausoleum where Banaker stocked his own personal supply, keeping it close at hand for emergencies of one sort or another. Foresight was a wonderful thing....
He'd thought for a moment of destroying Stroud's helicopter, but he shied off from this decision. He had the pod that encased the Bradley body now. He'd destroy this, but not Stroud's bloody helicopter. He wanted Stroud to follow. It was time he himself killed the bestial human who was so unlike his fellow man.
Stroud sensed the meaning of Banaker's quick retreat, and in the distance he noted the oddly shaped vampire being carried between two others, and he realized it was the pod. He sensed that the helicopter was left undamaged so that he would follow and fall into an even deeper trench
than the one they'd just climbed out of. He knew he must do so, but he felt he could no longer endanger Wilson and Ashyer.
“Into the chopper,” he ordered Ashyer who climbed in and helped get Lonnie aboard. They were being trailed by pires, but one would suddenly die from within, and this would stop the others, retarding their progress. None of them had put it together with the blood paks; they thought it the after effects of inhaling the gas fumes which continued to plume out of doors and windows at the warehouse. The sound of sirens was in the air as firefighters approached.
Stroud got in behind Ashyer and Lonnie and was about to race for the cockpit when out of nowhere a pire grabbed him and threw him across the cargo bay. Ashyer rushed at the creature with a hypodermic he'd been hording and sunk it deeply into the thing's stomach as it grasped him by the throat and lifted him off the floor. Suddenly the monster burst open in a flood of red liquid, then quickly turned to ash. Stroud didn't bother strapping in or doing flight check. He simply lifted off, several of the pires hanging onto the skids but soon dropping away, bursting in air.
They were away, safe, out of harm's grip. Even Wilson, in great pain, lifted his head and gave him a thumbs-up sign as Ashyer shouted a rousing Rebel yell totally out of character. “If only Mother could see me now,” he said.
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 25
