I peeked down. The inside was completely dark, but the rancid odor emanating from it was almost overwhelming. I jerked back, jamming a hand under my nose.
If Duma tracked the Hanner Brid to this location and he was wildcatting ammunition using materials from the area, then he had to be working alongside the vampires. Even if he wasn’t employed by them, he could be a guest. I scrunched up my face, disgusted by our only option. Expressionless, Duma pointed down at the grate. It was our only path.
“Let’s make sure we give this place a solid once-over before we head down,” I whispered.
Nodding, he jumped back up to the walkway.
The sunlight filtering through the cracks between the barn’s wooden slats offered a little comfort, even though the interior remained mostly dank and dark. Unfortunately, while sunlight wouldn’t kill the vampires like it did in the movies, it could hurt them, so they should all have taken cover already. Since the barn appeared largely unused recently, I wasn’t worried about townsfolk showing up, either.
I circled clockwise around the space, checking the stalls. In the last stall, I found a scrap of bloody cloth and a necklace with a heart-shaped pendant. Inside the pendant was a tiny photo of a light-haired young man and a red-haired woman. For some reason, I stuffed the necklace into my pocket. I continued around the rest of the space but found nothing at all. Duma hopped down next to me and shook his head. We both stared at the heavy grate, and my stomach instantly soured.
Chapter 25
Standing over the grate, breathing through my mouth—which didn’t help—I contemplated using the overhead pulley system to lift the heavy metal grid. Worried it might take too long and make too much noise, I grabbed the grate, jerked it loose, and laid it aside. It wasn’t as heavy as I’d expected, but its three-foot diameter made it awkward to lift.
We did a quick roshambo for the honor of being first down the hellhole. I threw rock, and Duma threw scissors. I pumped my fist in victory, and Duma flipped me off. He rubbed at the back of his neck, glanced at me, then dropped down the hole. A moment later, he flashed the filtered red light up at me to let me know it was clear for me to follow. Yippee.
The drop was only about fifteen feet, and the soft ground below made for an easy landing. I snapped on my light to get my bearings, but the stench of rot and offal overwhelmed me to the point of disorientation. Duma grabbed my shoulder, shined his light in my face, then slapped me lightly, which finally roused my attention. I took a second to clear my head as Duma pointed his light in front of us, revealing a large tunnel. I flashed my red-tinted light over the ground, which was muddy but solid. The tunnel ahead resembled a mineshaft, complete with wooden support beams. I had no idea how long I would be able to maintain effectiveness in the quagmire, but we needed to work fast anyway.
Still feeling light-headed, I decided that anything we ran into was going to be bad, so I raised my gun to an extended combat position, ready to fire at anything that popped up. I snapped my light into a mount on the gun, took point, and began sneaking down the passage. Frankly, the red light made everything that much more unnerving, but it was the most efficient color to maintain night vision and remain covert. All I could hear was my own breathing and the occasional water drip.
After an agonizing five minutes, the tunnel stopped at a T-junction. I applied all my years of training and my considerable skill to determine which way we should take. Finally, I chose to use Gandalf’s logic: we went left because the air smelled slightly less foul in that direction. I figured that the Half Breed would be as overwhelmed by the smell as we were.
With my first step to the left, a noise that sounded like a whimper came from down the tunnel to the right. Crap.
I stopped for a second to convince myself it was the right decision, trap or not, then waved my hand at Duma in a chopping motion back down to the right. He fell in behind me, knives ready. We made it about ten feet before the whimper echoed down the tunnel again, definitely coming from somewhere right in front of us. We eventually came to a passageway leading off to our left, where the air was rife with the smell of fresh blood.
I poked my head around the corner just enough to see that it was some sort of cell with metal bars stretched across the opening. I signaled to Duma that he should keep watch, then I snuck into the doorway, which offered enough space between the cage-like door and the main passageway for me to stand unseen. I shined the red light around the tiny cell, revealing a woman curled up in a ball next to a prone figure with its arms and legs twisted at odd angles, covered by a dark, shiny substance I assumed to be blood.
“Psst, hey,” I whispered hoarsely, trying to get the woman’s attention without waking up every vampire in the hole. Even if she didn’t speak English, I expected her at least to acknowledge me, but she didn’t.
“Hey, miss, are you okay?” I asked as loudly as I dared. Still nothing. She was either in shock, injured, or both. Or maybe deaf.
I examined the crude locking mechanism on the door. It was old and simple. Hell, it probably took one of those big old-fashioned keys with the long shaft. I sucked at picking locks, so I pulled one sword free and placed the tip against the rusted metal where it met the stone wall, roughly where I assumed the bolt engaged the strike plate. As quietly as possible, I shoved as hard and fast as I could, forcing the blade through the ancient metal with a slight screech. I froze and winced as the door swung open a fraction.
Opening the door quietly the rest of the way proved impossible. Rather than prolong the metallic screeching, which would likely make fingernails on a chalkboard sound pleasant by comparison, I simply shouldered it, ramming the door fully open. Thankfully, the resultant thud was considerably quieter. The woman never reacted.
I entered the cell and grabbed her shoulder to turn her. Doing so took considerable effort—far more than I’d expected for such a frail woman. She suddenly spun with a hiss, revealing longer, sharper teeth than she should have had, in a mouth far too wide. Up close, her skin was blotchy and sickly, as if stretched far too tightly across her skull, and clumps of her greasy hair was missing. She glared at me with milky, dead eyes and hissed again.
A lesser man would have peed his pants. Given that I was tough and had seen things that would give a devil nightmares, I snatched my hand away and hopped back. She flung herself over the body of the dead man, sobbing and mumbling incoherently. She was in the initial stages of becoming a Strigoi.
It was hard to repress the knowledge of what would happen to her. First, the parasites would infect her, then her body would begin changing, going through a physiological metamorphosis. Most of her organs and tissues would die, and others would transform completely to store blood. Teeth would break and appear to lengthen as her gums receded, her jaw would distend, and all the living tissue would begin to decay. Her hands would become clawlike as the body lost its natural fluids, making the nails look like talons. Her skin would lose its suppleness and at first become greasy, but then it would turn leathery as it dried out and would lose its ability to protect itself from sunlight. While not blind, her eyes would become nearly useless, and she would rely mostly on her sense of smell and taste like a cat or dog.
What was left would resemble a bloated corpse stuck in a constant state of decay, kept alive only through ingesting and storing fresh human blood. Along the way, some aspect of the prion-like infection would cause her bones to become denser and her rangy muscles to increase greatly in strength. The infection would warp her joints, as well, making normal human-type movement nearly impossible, until she became powerful. She might end up moving like a lizard or a monkey walking upright, or maybe even become partially lame, losing the use of one or more limbs altogether. I recalled the first time I witnessed the process, finding a comrade in a similar stage during the vampire wars while fighting with the Magyars against Simeon in 896, not far from our location. His body had become so twisted that he could only m
ove like a crab with his limbs splayed out to his sides.
“Hey, D, come on. We gotta go,” Duma whispered from outside the cell as the woman continued to sob over the corpse.
Anger welled up inside me as I thought about her transformation. The first feeding would be the worst: ravenous, sloppy, and merciless. Until the first feeding, she would retain her faculties, and she could fight it or give in willingly. Those who fight eventually succumb to the primal urge to feed, breaking the mind in the process, leaving a creature driven solely by instinct. Those who feed willingly somehow maintain a semblance of their sanity. Either way, nothing is left of the person who was, except a twisted visage that bears a superficial resemblance. Twelve hundred years ago, I locked my friend up on Csepel Island with the intention of protecting and hopefully saving him by not allowing him to feed. I unknowingly changed him into a mindless monster that I was forced to kill. The process took weeks, and the memory made me shiver.
The woman was gone—her mind was shattered, and she was well on her way to full-fledged vampirism. I did the most merciful thing I could and removed her head. The body flailed on the stone floor, spraying blood as it writhed until I pinned her to the ground with a sword through her back. Her severed head came to rest next to the dead man’s broken body, and despite the anguish and terror frozen on his face and the monstrousness that ravaged the woman’s, they were familiar. The locket I found upstairs. This was them.
I pulled the sword free from the now-quiet body and headed out. The creatures had likely infected her and placed her in the cell with the man as her first feed. She may have resisted for days while the man, probably desperate to save them both, ultimately died gruesomely at her hands.
I’d burn them all if I could.
I dropped the locket next to them and emerged, shaking my head in disgust as I returned my sword to its sheath on my back. I left the cell and continued down the path we’d chosen initially. Duma fell in silently behind me, predictably not the least bit inquisitive about what I’d found. I pulled the SCAR back to an extended combat position and crept slowly down the tunnel.
The farther we traveled down the passage, the clearer the air became, driven by a light, fresh breeze that filled the tunnel. The air wasn’t clean, but rather a lot less foul and stale. Along with the idea of what happened to that poor couple, the air focused my drive to a laser-like intensity. We continued for several dozen yards before I finally noticed that the passageway lacked support beams. While the walls were still rough-hewn, they were cleaner and more refined. The floor was smoother, level, and less muddy, too.
After about a hundred yards, the tunnel made an abrupt right turn, where an elaborate, heavy wooden door was set in the wall at the corner. And it was ajar.
Duma grabbed my shoulder, stopping me, then pushed past me to approach the door. He sniffed the air like a dog then placed a few fingers on the door and shoved. The door swung open silently, revealing a small room partially lit by a smoldering fire in a container that resembled a big gumbo pot in the corner.
I followed Duma in, turning around to make sure our six was clear. No one was present, but someone had been maybe moments ago. The glowing embers gave off enough illumination that I could tell the room was comfortably furnished, with a narrow bed along one wall and a wooden table and chairs along another. Everything from axes and swords to modern rifles and explosives hung on the walls, covering every square inch of space, sitting in racks and on shelves. A heavily modified sniper rifle caught my eye. Next to it, on a shelf, were a few dozen racks of wildcatted .338 Lapua Magnum rounds, along with several metal ingots, smelting tools, scales, and a press to make them. This space was definitely used by the Hanner Brid.
I continued to explore the room, but when I got to the table, I stopped dead. The entire surface was covered with maps, photos, schematics, and design plans for buildings, trains, cars, equipment—all kinds of things. Some of the photos were of people, and most of those had been dog-eared.
I quickly began sorting through them and found an incredibly detailed geological survey and satellite photos of Kholat Syakhl in Russia, maps of Vanuatu, a thermal satellite image of Mount Gharat, and even a schedule of movements of several Third Order members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Future dates and times were written on detailed maps of the railroad system in North Korea, as well as schematics for a special train. Paperclips held a series of maps and photos of Sirte and a few other cities in Libya to a list of names. A handful were circled. I also found intricate blueprints of the Tishreen Palace in Syria showing underground passages leading into the structure.
“D,” Duma whispered behind me. He was standing next to the giant pot filled with burning embers, holding up a charred piece of partially melted duct tape—likely the stuff used by the Hanner Brid to bind his wounds back in Libya. Reaching for the duct tape, I sensed another presence, then out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed something long and skinny emerge through the barely open doorway: the barrel of a gun. I heard two tinks then felt a light impact to my rib cage. The barrel began to shift toward Duma, and I lurched, taking another shot cleanly to the back while another other went through the deltoid of my left shoulder. I crashed into Duma, knocking him down, but Duma’s speed and reflexes allowed him to catch me so that we didn’t end up on the ground in a heap.
The blow to my shoulder, while painful, wasn’t that bad, but by the time I gathered my wits and got moving, all hell was breaking loose down the tunnel. Screeching, shrieking, and slapping on the stone walls echoed throughout the shaft system, followed by the raucous and primordial sound of the entire mine coming to life.
“After him!” I screamed at Duma. “That was the prick!”
He bolted into the darkness and back up the passage we’d come down, but I stopped long enough to grab a few things off the table, along with the modified sniper rifle and a handful of the special .338 Lapua Magnum shells. I shoved the shells into one of the pockets on my vest, jammed the papers under the vest, then swung the rifle over my shoulder and took off after Duma. The burning pain in my shoulder helped me focus as I ran.
I scrambled down the passageway as fast as I could go, pulling my swords. A cacophony of gruff noises grew rapidly from every direction as I approached the path that led out of the catacombs. I couldn’t see Duma, but I knew I wouldn’t hear him or even catch up to him unless something happened.
Frantic, I practically ran past the entryway, but managed to make the sudden turn. Smashing my left shoulder into the rock wall to stop my momentum, I rounded the corner. When my cuirass dug into the back of my arm upon impact, my vision narrowed for a moment.
From very close behind, I could hear chaotic scrabbling and slapping footfalls on rock. Unwilling to slow down to see what was behind me, I kept running. Once past the first wooden beam supports, I got an idea. I began dragging my swords along the rock walls at about chest level, trailing sparks as I went, slicing through the wooden supports every few yards or so. After I cut through four of them without caving in the shaft, I decided I had to do something more drastic. Not to mention crazy.
At the next set of support beams, I stopped, hacked through the side supports, then sliced through the cross-member overhead. Gnomes must have dug the damn mines, because nothing happened. In panicked frustration, I rammed one sword into the rock ceiling above the beam and began using it as a pry bar.
The first few Strigoi scrambled at me like roaches running from light. Several of the unnaturally pale-skinned and hairless creatures skittered across the ground while one ran along a wall and another on the ceiling like freakish four-legged insects. That has to be hell on a manicure. They came to an abrupt halt just outside of my sword’s reach, twisting their heads around like dogs hearing a sharp sound, trying to understand what I was up to, but smart enough to know the weapon could do them harm. They were definitely not the mindless rabble of the vampire world.
Fortunately, they weren’t the cognoscenti, either.
I could feel the rock start to give way when an unearthly howl erupted from down the tunnel as a pair of Strigoi came bounding up in a mad rush, running over those that had stopped outside my range. These are the mindless rabble.
I used my free sword to stab at the first one, sticking the blade into its ashen, distorted face, instantly causing it to retreat clumsily and noisily, disrupting the momentum of the second one. I swung backhanded across the tunnel to catch the waylaid one across its chest and bloated abdomen. The contents of its blood-pouch, located where its stomach used to be, spewed everywhere while it fell to the ground, twisting and writhing like a fish on land.
It gave me enough time for one final overhead heave. A few bowling-ball-sized rocks fell from the ceiling, causing the original rank of vampires to jump back. I jerked hard on the sword to wrench it free then turned and ran. I made it only a few yards before the entire roof of the shaft began falling in larger and larger chunks, while smaller rocks pelted me as I ran. Behind me, the shockwave grew as the entire tunnel began to collapse on itself with a deafening roar, which drowned out the high-pitched shrieking of the Strigoi. I covered my head with my arms and swords and kept running, assuming Duma was on the heels of the damned Demon Fae sonofabitch.
At the entrance grate, I jumped and barely landed on my feet at the rear of the barn, facing a gaping hole in what used to be the back wall of the structure. A crowd of people stood gawking through it, surprised by my sudden appearance. Behind me, one of the Strigoi managed to escape the cave-in, scrabbling out of the hole as the floor above the tunnel and part of the upper walkway around the barn connected to the hayloft collapsed. I squared off, swords in hand, ready to attack the vampire before it could gain its footing, but the creature forgot about me the instant it encountered the sunlight flooding in through the breach in the barn’s rear wall. The scared Strigoi skittered backward into one of the stalls, wailing like an injured child. The barn began creaking and rumbling as if a freight train were running through it.
Chaos Unbound (The Metis Files Book 2) Page 21
